Foreign Affairs Quotes

“If it's wrong when they do it, it's wrong when we do it.”
― Noam Chomsky

“...foreign policy is a matter of costs and benefits, not theology.”
― Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World

“كلما شعرت بالفشل تذكرت وزراء الخارجية العرب .. عندها أشعر بأنني رائع و ناجح جدا !”
― أحمد خالد توفيق, تويتات من العصور الوسطى

“Americans, being a moral people, want their foreign policy to reflect the values we espouse as a nation. But Americans, being a practical people, also want their foreign policy to be effective.”
― George Shultz

“He had conquered murder only to be faced with war. There were no laws for that.”
― T.H. White, The Candle in the Wind

“International peacebuilders will need to act in novel ways that are likely to challenge deeply entrenched cultural norms and jeopardize numerous organizational interests. They will have to learn how to support grassroots conflict-resolution efforts. They will have to integrate bottom-up and top-down strategies to fully address the local, national, and international sources of tensions.”
― Severine Autesserre, The Trouble with the Congo: Local Violence and the Failure of International Peacebuilding

“Louella remarked that when foreign nations had intercourse with this country they knew they had been intercoursed.”
― Jack Woodford, The Autobiography of Jack Woodford

“I should have paid greater attention to my mentor in graduate school, Samuel Huntington, who once explained that Americans never recognize that, in the developing world, the key is not the kind of government — communist, capitalist, democratic, dictatorial — but the degree of government. That absence of government is what we are watching these days, from Libya to Iraq to Syria.

(“Why they still hate us, 13 years later,” Washington Post, 09/05/2014)”
― Fareed Zakaria

“a foreign affair juxtaposed with a stateside
and domestically approved romantic fancy
is mysteriously attractive due to circumstances knowing
it will only be parlayed into a memory”
― Tom Waits, The Early Years: The Lyrics, 1971-1983

“The truck takes off again on Jalan 15 Oktober, in a cloud of dust, papers and tatters. A half-naked boy, coming out of nowhere, waves at us as if nothing had happened. For a moment, it almost feels like life could go on, just as it always does. But that’s not the case. There’s no time for life here anymore.”
― Marco Lupis, Il male inutile: Dal Kosovo a Timor Est, dal Chiapas a Bali, le testimonianze di un reporter di guerra

“The Americans gave it a name, PTSD — Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I had heard about it before: it was something that had to do with army men coming back from the frontline, veterans who had been under a lot of stress. Or survivors of terrorist attacks, bombings, massacres, or big accidents. What I didn’t know was that journalists were also considered a category ‘at risk,’ particularly the ones who had covered conflict or reported in war zones crisis zones. All those who had witnessed episodes of violence, killings, traumatic events, and who had learnt to work and live coping with the anxiety from nearby fighting and constant danger. I saw many of my colleagues devastated — broken — by what they had seen, which often I had seen too. Some never managed to really go back to their normal lives and once, after a crisis that had hit them harder than the many others, decided they had had enough. Among many terrible news came those of the suicide of Stephanie Vaessen’s husband and cameraman — him and Stephanie were two of the people I had shared the tragic days in East Timor with.
No worries though. I was doing just fine, as I’d tell myself. At the end of the day, I genuinely believed it: I never really took as many risks as many of the colleagues I had met or shared the most traumatic experiences in the field with, hence I had probably been exposed to a lot less stress. (...)”
― Marco Lupis, Il male inutile: Dal Kosovo a Timor Est, dal Chiapas a Bali, le testimonianze di un reporter di guerra

“India will resist a hierarchical order in Asia and a world dominated by China.”
― Shyam Saran, How China Sees India and the World

“Do let me entreat you to say nothing that can be taken hold of by those anxious to foment trouble between ourselves and any foreign power, or who delight in giving the impression that as a nation we are walking about with a chip on our shoulder. We are too big a people to be able to be careless in what we say.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“Trump assimilated this decades-long conservative tradition not through studying such figures but through instinct and campaign-trail improvisation. Like Chambers, Burnham, and Buchanan, outsiders enamored of power, Trump relishes iconoclasm and rupture, seeks to upend the status quo, and loathes liberal elites and foreign-policy experts. Trump may seem an unlikely heir to these men and the movements they shaped, which were shot through with Christian moralism and at times with elitism. But he has cannily and successfully cast himself not as a refined exemplar of Western cultural and civilizational virtues but as their toughest defender from enemies without and within.”
― Michael Kimmage