Diplomatic Quotes for Navigating the Maze of Relations

Diplomacy is the strategic practice of negotiating and communicating between different entities to reach agreements, resolve conflicts, and foster cooperation. It involves skilled negotiation, effective communication, and cultural sensitivity. Diplomats represent their governments or organizations, striving to protect and promote their interests while adhering to international law. Diplomatic efforts span various issues, from trade to security and human rights, and can occur through bilateral or multilateral channels, as well as international organizations. Ultimately, diplomacy aims to prevent conflicts, maintain stability, and address global challenges through peaceful means, contributing to a more interconnected and harmonious world.

Diplomacy Quotes

1. “Diplomacy is the art of saying ‘Nice doggie’ until you can find a rock.”
— Will Rogers

2. “Diplomacy is listening to what the other guy needs. Preserving your own position, but listening to the other guy. You have to develop relationships with other people so when the tough times come, you can work together.”
— Colin Powell

3. “War is failure of diplomacy.”
— John Dingell

4. “Diplomacy in general does not resolve conflicts. Wars end not due to peace processes, but due to one side giving up.”
— Daniel Pipes

5. “Diplomacy is to do and say the nastiest things in the nicest way.”
— Isaac Goldberg

6. “A constructive approach to diplomacy doesn’t mean relinquishing one’s rights. It means engaging with one’s counterparts, on the basis of equal footing and mutual respect, to address shared concerns and achieve shared objectives.”
— Hassan Rouhani

7. “While we need to provide leadership and stability to the world, we should do that through diplomacy.”
— Kevin de Leon

8. “The safety of the republic being the supreme law, and Texas having offered us the key to the safety of our country from all foreign intrigues and diplomacy, I say accept the key… and bolt the door at once.”
— Andrew Jackson

9. “You learn, just as you learn good manners, how to approach things with a certain amount of diplomacy.”
— Robert MacNeil

10. “There are no military solutions – dialogue and diplomacy are the only guarantee of lasting peace.”
— Martin McGuinness

11. “Public diplomacy was an effective Cold War weapon.”
— Antony Blinken

12. “The soft power of science has the potential to reshape global diplomacy.”
— Ahmed Zewail

13. “In the world of diplomacy, some things are better left unsaid.”
— Lincoln Chafee

14. “War is tragedy. The great war stories are tragedies. It’s the failure of diplomacy. ‘War and Peace,’ ‘A Farewell to Arms,’ ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls.’ Those are some of the greatest tragedies.”
— David Mamet

15. “Measuring success in cultural diplomacy – the use of education, creative expression in any form, or people-to-people exchange to increase understanding across regions, cultures, or peoples – is challenging. How does one quantify changes in attitude, abandoning stereotypes, or feeling empathy as a result of a performance, a film, a book?”
— Cynthia P. Schneider

16. “The director can be a dictator, but it’s not wise to be. You have to choose the days to be a dictator and the days to deal with diplomacy and democracy. Every great leader should know that, even a dictator. Tyrants get overthrown.”
— Rza

17. “When people think of digital diplomacy, they think of government tweeting. It is not what it is. That is public diplomacy.”
— Jared Cohen

18. “Preemption is the right of any nation in order to preserve its National Security; however, preemptive war is a tactic, not a strategy. When used as a strategy preemption dilutes diplomacy, creates an atmosphere of distrust, and promotes regional instability.”
— Ellen Tauscher

19. “There is no diplomacy like candor.”
— E. V. Lucas

20. “Diplomacy has always involved dinners with ruling elites, backroom deals and clandestine meetings. Now, in the digital age, the reports of all those parties and patrician chats can be collected in one enormous database. And once collected in digital form, it becomes very easy for them to be shared.”
— Heather Brooke

21. “Nobody’s ever said that pins are a tool of diplomacy.”
— Madeleine Albright

22. “Our diplomacy and development budget is not just about reducing spending and finding efficiencies. We need a frank conversation about what we stand for as that ‘shining city on a hill.’ And that conversation begins by acknowledging that we can’t do it on the cheap.”
— Colin Powell

23. “Though no one wants war, Congress needed to give the President the authority he needs to protect America while encouraging the use of diplomacy and negotiations to try and arrive at a peaceful solution to this problem.”
— Allen Boyd

24. “Diplomacy is like jazz: endless variations on a theme.”
— Richard Holbrooke

25. “Certainly the international community is putting a lot of pressure on Iran and making clear that its nuclear program must stop. If it stops with the sanctions, the combinations of sanctions, diplomacy, other pressures, I, as the prime minister of Israel, will be the happiest person in the world.
— Benjamin Netanyahu

26. “Humanitarian missions are little different from any other public enterprise, diplomacy included, which is susceptible of misinterpretation by the public, hence ultimately of failure.”
— Alvin Adams

27. “The war we are fighting today against terrorism is a multifaceted fight. We have to use every tool in our toolkit to wage this war – diplomacy, finance, intelligence, law enforcement, and of course, military power – and we are developing new tools as we go along.”
— Richard Armitage

28. “Take the diplomacy out of war and the thing would fall flat in a week.”
— Will Rogers

29. “The facts on the ground always drive 90% of the reality of diplomacy.”
— Jake Auchincloss

30. “Nature is not simply a technical or economical resource, and human beings are not mere numbers. To suggest that one can somehow align all the squabbling institutions of science, environmental management, government and diplomacy in an alliance of convenience to regulate the global climate seems to me optimistic.”
— James Buchan

31. “In a world of complex threats, our security and leadership depends on all elements of our power – including strong and principled diplomacy.”
— Barack Obama

32. “Diplomacy, n. is the art of letting somebody else have your way.”
— David Frost

33. “To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy.”
— Will Durant

34. “Diplomacy: the art of restraining power.”
— Henry Kissinger

35. “Successful diplomacy is an alignment of objectives and means.”
— Dennis Ross

36. “All war represents a failure of diplomacy.”
— Tony Benn

37. “Part of diplomacy is to open different definitions of self-interest.”
— Hillary Clinton

38. “Diplomacy is essential if we are to find peaceful resolutions in times of tension.”
— Ed Davey

39. “Diplomacy is fundamentally working with people, bringing people together to deal with difficult issues.”
— John Roos

40. “Leadership and punching above your weight doesn’t necessarily always have to mean gunboat diplomacy and bombing other countries into the stone age. It can actually mean leading by example, and helping other countries.”
— Clive Lewis

41. “Diplomacy can and will matter; little is inevitable in international relations.”
— Richard N. Haass

42. “Architecture is a negotiated art, and it’s highly political, and if you want to make buildings, there is diplomacy required.”
— Thom Mayne

43. “Tact and diplomacy are fine in international relations, in politics, perhaps even in business; in science only one thing matters, and that is the facts.”
— Hans Eysenck

44. “Quiet diplomacy is far more effective than public posturing.”
— Atal Bihari Vajpayee

45. “Americans, like many citizens of rich countries, take for granted the legal and regulatory system, the public schools, health care and social security for the elderly, roads, defense and diplomacy, and heavy investments by the state in research, particularly in medicine.”
— Angus Deaton

46. “Diplomats are just as essential to starting a war as soldiers are for finishing it… You take diplomacy out of war, and the thing would fall flat in a week.”
— Will Rogers

47. “We think it will be shortly afterwards, but it seems a terrible thing to gamble with such big stakes in diplomacy without having your master card in your hand.”
— Henry L. Stimson

48. “Globalization, far from putting an end to power diplomacy between States, has, on the contrary, intensified it.”
— Omar Bongo

49. “If you don’t want war, then you had better be an advocate for diplomacy with muscle.”
— Richard Grenell

50. “There are few ironclad rules of diplomacy but to one there is no exception. When an official reports that talks were useful, it can safely be concluded that nothing was accomplished.”
— John Kenneth Galbraith

51. “When I came to office, in terms of diplomacy and national security, as well as the economy, Japan was in a very severe situation.”
— Shinzo Abe

52. “Iran has little capacity to deploy force. Its strategic doctrines are defensive, designed to deter invasion long enough for diplomacy to set it.”
— Noam Chomsky

53. “I believe in much more diplomacy, not less.”
— Valerie Plame

54. “Humor, humility, and, of course, honesty, all are qualities that work in public and cultural diplomacy.”
— Cynthia P. Schneider

55. “The Chinese are really good at diplomacy – and even at making their interlocutors feel very uncomfortable.”
— Zbigniew Brzezinski

56. “I know full well how important women are in diplomacy and development. I grew up with seven sisters.”
— Ronan Farrow

57. “I think it’s fair to say that diplomacy today requires much more of that if you’re the United States of America than it did 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago.”
— Hillary Clinton

58. “At the State Department, where I oversaw our human rights diplomacy, I often confronted dictatorships like China about their censorship of the Internet, which they justified by claiming they were merely filtering out lies. Our government cannot and should not take that path.”
— Tom Malinowski

59. “We have practiced diplomacy since the very beginning of the nation. Sometimes it has not worked, and we’ve had to go to war. I always believe you should try to find peace and reconciliation before conflict. That has been the approach I’ve taken.”
— Colin Powell

60. “Diplomacy is not an end in itself if it does not advance U.S. interests.”
— John Bolton