When I was in college, I became interested in various aspects of foreign policy and international relations. Even as a kid, I was interested in what I call, loosely speaking, forbidden knowledge.
~Barry Eisler
~~
Domestic policy can only defeat us; foreign policy can kill us.
~John F Kennedy
Foreign policy is really domestic policy with its hat on.
~Hubert H Humphrey
Foreign policy is inseparable from domestic policy now. Is terrorism foreign policy or domestic policy? It's both. It's the same with crime, with the economy, climate change.
~David Miliband
Climate change and dependence on foreign oil are problems that won't go away on their own. Tabling plans to deal with them doesn't make it easier for companies to plan and invest; it makes it harder.
~Christina Romer
Here is my first principle of foreign policy: good government at home.
~William E Gladstone
~~
If any individual who objects to government policy can take it in their own hands to publicly disclose classified information, then we will never be able to keep our people safe or conduct foreign policy.
~Barack Obama
One of the foremost activities of the NSA's FAD, or Foreign Affairs Division, is to pressure or incentivize EU member states to change their laws to enable mass surveillance.
~Edward Snowden
An Anarchist is anyone who denies the necessity and legitimacy of government; the question of his methods of attacking it is foreign to the definition.
~Benjamin Tucker
~~
Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition ... or caprice?
~George Washington
The only foreign policy advice I heard from China was when they said to Sudan, 'Don't go back to war.' That's all they said. They didn't push anything else.
~Emmanuel Jal
~~
How can you respect a religion that forces women into polygamous marriages, mutilates their genitals, forbids them to drive cars and subjects them to the humiliation of 'instant' divorce? In fact, none of these practices are Islamic at all. Anyone wishing to understand Islam must first separate the religion from the cultural norms and style of a society.
~Ruqaiyyah Waris Maqsood
The truth is that just as the 'West' is not a homogenous
entity with one view on foreign and domestic policy, nor
are Muslims.
~Maajid Nawaz
The artificial separation of politics and culture is nowhere
more pronounced than in the discourse of foreign policy
and international affairs.
~Ellen Willis
In international relations, in foreign policy, a great deal
has to do with historical circumstances, a great deal
has to do with the sense and perception of people.
~Salman Khurshid
The art of good foreign policy is to understand and to take into consideration the values of a society, to realize them at the outer limit of the possible.
~Henry Kissinger
~~
Everyone in the Middle East pretty much wants to come and be an American citizen, but pretty much everybody is angry with the U. S. foreign policy.
~Mohamed ElBaradei
You know, Arabs are critical of United States foreign policy, but they also associate the U.S. with democratic principles and opportunity.
~Jehane Noujaim
Guys like Bin Laden have been responsible for injuring and maiming and murdering more Muslims than any foreign imperial power has in the last hundred years.
~Irshad Manji
~~
In the United States, you might say every county has got its own separate system. There's not even one kind of ballot that you use all over the United States. We require that in a foreign country.
~Jimmy Carter
If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightly consider it an act of war.
~Glenn T Seaborg
Many American pundits and foreign policy experts love to depict themselves as crusaders for human rights, but it almost always takes the form of condemning other governments, never their own.
~Glenn Greenwald
~
If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I never would lay down my arms never never never!
~William Pitt
Throwing stones is the birthright and duty of anyone subject to foreign rule. Throwing stones is an action as well as a metaphor of resistance.
~Amira Hass
If I were an innocent individual, flown to a foreign country and held for several years and tortured, I'd become a terrorist, too. I'd go to war against the U.S.
~Jesse Ventura
~~
When the child has reached manhood he is thoroughly saturated with the belief that he is chosen by the Lord himself to defend his country against the attack or invasion of any foreigner.
~Emma Goldman
A foreign war is a lot milder than a civil war.
~Michel de Montaigne
Civil war? What does that mean? Is there
any foreign war? Isn't every war fought
between men, between brothers?
~Victor Hugo
There is neither a foreign war nor a civil war;
there is only just and unjust war.
~Victor Hugo
War is in truth a disease in which the juices that serve health and maintenance are used for the sole purpose of nourishing something foreign, something at odds with nature.
~Goethe
~
I can understand why mankind hasn't given up war. During a war you get to drive tanks through the sides of buildings and shoot foreigners - two things that are usually frowned on during peacetime.
~P J O'Rourke
Angry men with pointy things sent to secure a foreign city are pretty much alike anywhere. That's what I've heard. So far nothing's convinced me different.
~Sherwood Smith
As we've seen, deploying large armies abroad won't always be our best offense. Countries typically don't want foreign soldiers in their cities and towns.
~John O Brennan
A standing army is like a standing member. It's an excellent assurance of domestic tranquility, but a dangerous temptation to foreign adventure.
~Elbridge Gerry
~
We attacked a foreign people and treated them like rebels. As you know, it's all right to treat barbarians barbarically. It's the desire to be barbaric that makes governments call their enemies barbarians.
~Bertolt Brecht
In modern political society it is probably a fact that national leadership can heighten foreign crises to the point where war becomes almost inevitable and public approval, at least for a time, automatic.
~Arthur Ekirch
We're in an illusion about what our role is in world politics and foreign affairs, and our policies are killing and destroying and doing a lot of things that we are not aware of.
~Talib Kweli
There are a lot of children in Afghanistan, but little childhood.
~Khaled Hosseini
~~
Congress has shortchanged not only foreign aid but foreign policy. A mistaken notion that diplomats are unimportant and hence undeserving of support grips conservative legislators, especially.
~Anthony Lewis
Foreign aid is not something the vast majority of Americans support, but definitely not conservatives.
~Rand Paul
~
Foreign aid goes from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.
~Rand Paul
Foreign aid breeds kleptocracies, or governments of thieves.
~James Bovard
That is not respecting our democracy, using the State Department as a concierge for foreign donations, not really respecting our American democracy.
~Kellyanne Conway
By pouring money and goods into devastated regions, foreign aid workers sometimes compound the disruption and debauch the survivors.
~James Buchan
None of what we [as country] have done is credited. None of the good works. Our foreign affairs budget, foreign aid budget, none of it is ever thanked.
~Rush Limbaugh
~
Hope nothing from foreign governments. They will never be really willing to aid you until you have shown that you are strong enough to conquer without them.
~Giuseppe Mazzini
The sad thing is, our foreign policy WILL change eventually, as Rome's did, when all budgetary and monetary tricks to fund it are exhausted.
~Ron Paul
~
We do foreign assistance for altruistic reasons, certainly for humanitarian reasons, of course. But the main reason we do foreign assistance is we do it in the American national interest.
~Roger Wicker
Foreign aid is important. If it's done right, it spreads America's influence around the world in a positive way.
~Marco Rubio
Foreign aid is a method by which the United States maintains a position of influence and control around the world.
~John F Kennedy
Foreign aid must be viewed as an investment, not an expense.
~Kay Granger
I have said it before but it bears repeating: Aid is not a gift. The United States provides foreign assistance because it serves OUR interests.
~Howard Berman
Foreign Assistance is not an end in itself. The purpose of aid must be to create the conditions where it is no longer needed.
~Barack Obama
~~
Every damn President since I can remember has been so in love with foreign policy that they're just like a schoolboy with a new girl.
~Cleveland Amory
Issues of foreign policy have a place in every election for President.
~Barbra Streisand
Presidents are not only the country's principal policy chief, shaping the nation's domestic and foreign agendas, but also the most visible example of our values.
~Robert Dallek
You don't have to be foreign policy expert to succeed as president, but you have to have ice water for blood.
~George Packer
~
Separation of powers is a problem for foreign policy.
~Condoleezza Rice
In foreign affairs, the president can do what he wants unless Congress says no. In domestic policy, the president can't do anything unless Congress says yes.
~Bill Vaughan
If there's a major foreign policy event, the President gets on TV, the Congress doesn't.
~Nate Silver
The point is that in any country, including the United States, maybe in the United States even more often than in any other country, foreign policy is used for internal political struggle.
~Vladimir Putin
In foreign policy, there are times when speaking with one voice - and it doesn't have to be mine - allows us to engage better on issues, and enables us to do things more effectively.
~Catherine Ashton
When it comes to foreign policy, it is important to remember that politics stops at the water's edge.
~Hillary Clinton
Direct access to sea is an essential part of foreign policy.
~Carlos Mesa
~
Our vulnerability to Russia or any other foreign power is directly related to how divided, partisan, dysfunctional our political process is. That's the thing that makes us vulnerable.
~Barack Obama
If we were strong, self-respecting and not susceptible to frightfulness, the foreign rulers would have been powerless for mischief.
~Mahatma Gandhi
Unless your government is respectable, foreigners will invade your rights; and to maintain tranquility, it must be respectable - even to observe neutrality, you must have a strong government.
~Alexander Hamilton
A popular government wields a moral force, which is infinitely superior to the physical force that the foreign government could summon to its assistance.
~Mahatma Gandhi
America united with a handful of troops, or without a single soldier, exhibits a more forbidding posture to foreign ambition than America disunited, with a hundred thousand veterans ready for combat.
~James Madison
~~
The Council on Foreign Relations is the American branch of a society which originated in England ... [and] ... believes national boundaries should be obliterated and one-world rule established.
~Carroll Quigley
Transforming the European Union into a single State with one army, one constitution and one foreign policy is the critical challenge of the age.
~Joschka Fischer
There are certainly major differences between Poland's policies and those of the old EU countries. Debates are going on in Brussels over a shared foreign policy and even a shared foreign minister.
~Lech Kaczynski
I wonder how the foreign policies of the United States would look if we wiped out the national boundaries of the world, at least in our minds, and thought of all children everywhere as our own.
~Howard Zinn
The people I see on bicycles look like organic-gardening zealots who advocate federal regulation of bedtime and want American foreign policy to be dictated by UNICEF. These people should be confined.
~P J O'Rourke
My general plan would be to make the States one as to everything connected with foreign nations and several as to everything purely domestic.
~Thomas Jefferson
~~
To increase aid to the Pakistan government when religious freedom is not upheld is tantamount to an anti-Christian foreign policy.
~Keith O'Brien
A significant fraction of evangelical voters appear more likely to ignore the candidates' specific economic and foreign policy platforms in favor of concerns about gay marriage or abortion.
~Lawrence M Krauss
American foreign policy and military might have opened an opportunity for the Gospel in the land of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
~Charles Stanley
And I say that Your Highnesses ought not to consent that any foreigner does business or sets foot here, except Christian Catholics, since this was the end and the beginning of the enterprise, that it should be for the enhancement and glory of the Christian religion, nor should anyone who is not a good Christian come to these parts.
~Christopher Columbus
Religious freedom, often referred to as the first freedom, is of central import to the American experiment. As such it should feature prominently in U.S. foreign policy.
~Frank Wolf
The only concern which I have today is that we have a policy, a foreign policy, which enables us to avoid a catastrophe; which, if one understands it properly, is indescribable.
~Erich Fromm
Armageddon is not a foreign policy.
~Madeleine Albright
...foreign policy is a matter of costs
and benefits, not theology.
~Fareed Zakaria
~~
Foreign policy is like human relations, only people know less about each other.
~Joe Biden
It is my view that we cannot conduct foreign policy at the extremes.
Joe Biden
~~
Foreign policy deals across time as well as space.
~William Pfaff
In foreign policy you have to wait twenty-five years to see how it comes out.
~James Reston
In foreign policy, even if you hold high office, you can't be sure what the effects will be of the things you do.
~Anne-Marie Slaughter
I'm confident that America's foreign policy rebalance to the region will endure beyond my presidency because it's in the national interest of the United States.
~Barack Obama
Frankly, I do not know how to effect a permanency in American foreign policy.
~Franklin D Roosevelt
It is like our foreign policy has attention deficit disorder.
~Tim Ryan
No Western government has ever played the long-term in terms of foreign policy.
~Damian Lewis
I think, there is a possibility - I would say it's more than that - that we will come to a view of foreign policy going forward that learns from the past but doesn't get captured by it.
~Tony Blair
Let the ancient serve the present, let the foreign serve the national; by developing that which has been accomplished one creates something that is new.
~Mao Zedong
Preserve the past to prepare the future, we take to our beds at night to be rested for the toils of a new day.
~author unknown
I'm sorry that I can't snap my fingers and undo 50 years of bad American foreign policy.
~Harry Browne
~~
If any foreign minister begins to defend to the death a 'peace conference', you can be sure his government has already placed its orders for new battleships and airplanes.
~Joseph Stalin
When American presidents prepare for foreign wars, they lie.
~Robert Higgs
Watching foreign affairs is sometimes like watching a magician; the eye is drawn to the hand performing the dramatic flourishes, leaving the other hand - the one doing the important job - unnoticed.
~David K Shipler
In the United States today, the Declaration of Independence hangs on schoolroom walls, but foreign policy follows Machiavelli.
~Howard Zinn
Don't use that foreign word 'ideals.' We have that excellent native word 'lies.'
~Henrik Ibsen
~~
The American foreign policy trauma of the sixties and seventies was caused by applying valid principles to unsuitable conditions.
~Henry Kissinger
A country that demands moral perfection in its foreign policy will achieve neither perfection nor security
~Henry A Kissinger
Highfalutin moral principles are impossible guides to foreign policy. At worst, they reflect hypocrisy; at best, extreme naivete.
~Charles Krauthammer
Foreign policy is an explicitly amoral enterprise.
~Samantha Power
I don't like Assad at all, but Assad is killing ISIS. Russia is killing ISIS. And Iran is killing ISIS. And those three have now lined up because of our weak foreign policy.
~Donald Trump
~
Realism in foreign policy means careful consideration of all aspects pertinent to the issue, before taking a decision. This is the only way you can move from where you are to someplace else.
~Henry Kissinger
I have always thought that foreign-policy idealism has to be tempered with realism.
~William Hague
American foreign policy is now one huge big mystery. Simply put, the administration is trying to lead the world with a feel-good foreign policy.
~Tom DeLay
Every foreign policy of every major nation involves reason, common sense, carrots and sticks. You can't have all carrots and no sticks.
~Fred Thompson
The president laid out his vision for foreign policy in a way that we hadn't heard before. And it could be summed up, I think, in two words - realistic idealism.
~Barack Obama
~
It is never easy to define what is moral, particularly in foreign policy. But at the risk of being simplistic, it appears to me that a foreign policy that is morally right protects human rights everywhere.
~Arthur Goldberg
I think that it's always appropriate for Americans and for American foreign policy to make clear why we feel that self-government is most compatible with peace, the well-being of people, and human dignity.
~Jeane Kirkpatrick
~
Let me remind you all that the first task of American foreign policy is to reduce threats to the United States.
~Michael Mandelbaum
President Obama benefits from the shared experience and wisdom of top national security and foreign policy advisers, many of them career professionals.
~Chris Matthews
The purpose of U.S. foreign policy is protecting the security of Americans, not crusading for goodness abroad.
~Don Feder
I don't subscribe to relativism, whether it's in political philosophy, foreign policy or in life.
~Paul Ryan
Most foreign policies that history has marked highly, in whatever country, have been originated by leaders who were opposed by experts.
~Henry A Kissinger
No modern nation has ever constructed a foreign policy that was acceptable to its intellectuals.
~Irving Kristol
A foreign policy aimed at the achievement of total security is the one thing I can think of that is entirely capable of bringing this country to a point where it will have no security at all.
~George F Kennan
Above all, we shall wage no more unilateral, ill-planned, ill-considered, and ill-prepared invasions of foreign countries that pose no actual threat to our security.
~Theodore C Sorensen
~~
Never in these long years have we offered any other prayer but this: Lord, grant to our people peace at home, and grant and preserve to them peace from the foreign foe!
~Adolf Hitler
Ultraliberalism today translates into a whimpering isolationism in foreign policy, a mulish obstructionism in domestic policy.
~Spiro T Agnew
I am proposing a new foreign policy focused on advancing America's core national interests - so important - promoting regional stability, and producing and easing the tensions within our very troubled world.
~Donald Trump
I really think [the Bush Administration]'s foreign policy agenda is to spread irony through the world.
~Jon Stewart
~~
The Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
The Silver Rule: Do unto others as they do unto you
The Iron Rule: Do unto others before they do unto you.
~author unknown
Abroad, our most important policy is to support our troops and continue forward-thinking foreign policy in the war on terror - keeping our enemies on the run and hitting them before they hit us.
~Christopher Bond
The doctrine of preemption has a long and distinguished history in the history of American foreign policy.
~John Lewis Gaddis
~~
Without [the settlements] the IDF (Israeli Defense Force) [Israeli Defense Force] would be a foreign army ruling a foreign population.
~Moshe Dayan
I am aware how almost impossible it is in this country to carry out a foreign policy not approved by the Jews.
~John Foster Dulles
I know the power of the Israeli lobby and the other lobbies, but we need a foreign policy that puts our own country first.
~Pat Buchanan
I would not rule out going to Israel because I disapprove of the foreign policy any more than I would refuse to play in the UK because I disapprove of Tony Blair's foreign policy.
~Roger Waters
~~
Soviet Union foreign policy is a puzzle inside
a riddle wrapped in an enigma, and the key is
Russian nationalism.
~Winston Churchill
It's Russia some people would like to get rid of.
They are still afraid of our nuclear deterrent.
We have our own foreign policy whether they
like it or not.
~Vladimir Putin
In the modern world, those who are weak will get unambiguous advice from foreign visitors which way to go and what policy course to pursue.
~Vladimir Putin
The reputation of those countries which cater to the foreign policy interests of other states at the expense of their own national interests will go down regardless of how they explain their actions.
~Vladimir Putin
I do think Russian foreign policy is very savvy. There's a need for great caution because the Russians are able to discreetly blackmail countries.
~Vaclav Havel
The Conservative Party has one overriding concern in foreign policy, and that is the growth of Communist power and influence in the world, and the dangers it can bring for all of us.
~Reginald Maudling
~
Foreign influence is truly the Grecian horse to a republic. We cannot be too careful to exclude its influence.
~Alexander Hamilton
History and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government.
~George Washington
Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition...or caprice?
~George Washington
~~
America is no longer the melting pot it used to be. It has now become a tossed salad of foreigners that arrive to our shores wanting to keep their culture and forcing our acceptance.
~Jay Severin
Gore said foreigners are not worried about 'what the terrorist networks are going to do, but about what we're going to do.' Good. They should be worried. They hate us? We hate them. Americans don't want to make Islamic fanatics love us. We want to make them die. There's nothing like horrendous physical pain to quell anger. Japanese Kamikazes pilots hated us once, too. A couple of well-aimed nuclear weapons got their attention. Now they are gentle little lambs.
~Ann Coulter
Canada has become trouble recently...
It’s always the worst Americans who go there...
We could have taken them over so easy. But I
only want the western part, with the ski areas,
the cowboys, and the right wingers. They’re
the only good parts of Canada.
~Ann Coulter
Do not allow Democrats anywhere near foreign
policy. Not even to keep them away from domestic
policy. It's a mistake to ask those who don't even
like democracy to defend it.
~Ann Coulter
~
I see little hope for a peaceful world until men are excluded from the realm of foreign policy altogether and all decisions concerning international relations are reserved for women, preferably married ones.
~W H Auden
The reason I made women's issues central to American foreign policy, was not because I was a feminist, but because we know that societies are more stable if women are politically and economically empowered.
~Madeleine Albright
~
The Daily Mail can't say 'asylum-seeker' without saying 'foreign criminal' in the same sentence. I'm sure it's practically editorial policy.
~Chris Cleave
[The pamphlet] was very patriotic. That is, it talked about killing foreigners.
~Terry Pratchett
~
It's time to cut off visas for foreign baseball players and return our national pastime to Americans.
~Phyllis Schlafly
I have only been here since 1996 but between 1966 and 1996 England had thirty years without foreign players and didn't win any more competitions in that time.
~Arsene Wenger
~
If the world were a bar, America would currently be the angry drunk waving around a loaded gun. Yeah, the other people in the bar may be afraid of him, but they sure as hell don't respect him.
~Wil Wheaton
Well, I've been reading a lot about the fifty years since the Second World War, about Western foreign policy and all that. I try not to let it get to me, but sometimes I just think that there's no hope.
~Thom Yorke
Neville Chamberlain looked at foreign affairs through the wrong end of a municipal drainpipe.
~Winston Churchill
A nation with a goofy foreign policy needs a very serious policy of defense.
~P J O'Rourke
~~
We need American foreign policy that tells the world very clearly that it is bad to be our enemy and good to be our friend.
~Marco Rubio
Words summarize the American philosophy of life: Live and let live; Let's make a deal. Eight words summarize American foreign policy: We're better than you; Do it our way.
~Gary North
A bully's universe: US foreign policy operates upon the premise that American men and matériel should be capable of reaching and controlling all corners of the world.
~Ilana Mercer
There was a degree of interventionism in American foreign policy, the notion that we must be the superpower and we have to intervene everywhere, that I think makes no sense.
~Barney Frank
The sad thing is, our foreign policy WILL change eventually, as Rome's did, when all budgetary and monetary tricks to fund it are exhausted.
~Ron Paul
~
I think that Benjamin Franklin felt very strongly in foreign policy in this world, that you needed to at least show some humility, especially when you were strong.
~Walter Isaacson
I had long ago learned that when you are the giant, alien visitor to a remote and foreign culture it is sort of your job to become an object of ridicule. It's the least you can do, really, as a polite guest.
~Elizabeth Gilbert
~~
Our foreign policy has made a wreck of this planet. I'm always in Africa... And when I go to these places I see American policy written on the walls of oppression everywhere.
~Harry Belafonte
With a foreign policy appropriately rooted in some sense of humanitarian decency, the Central African crisis will not be easily ignored by American policymakers. It screams for remedy.
~Michael Johns
I believe that when it comes to major foreign policy issues, many prefer to have black people seen and not heard.
~Cynthia McKinney
~
The civil war in Rwanda and other ethnic massacres were an integral part of US foreign policy, carefully staged in accordance with precise strategic and economic objectives.
~Michel Chossudovsky
It is naturally only a coincidence that all too often, American foreign-policy objectives dovetail nicely with the economic objectives of multinational corporations.
~Charley Reese
Any Ambassador or Foreign Service Officer who has his or her head screwed on right knows that the U.S. position in the world is far more dependent on our ability to compete in world markets.
~Lawrence Eagleburger
It is U.S. workers who lose out when employers cannot get the high-tech graduates they need to compete with foreign companies in the 21st century economy.
~Christopher Bond
We need foreign skills to stay competitive.
~Hassanal Bolkiah
~
In my experience, those for whom war is lucrative are rarely satisfied. For them, war is opportunity, not hardship or sorrow. After all, it is rarely their sons who lie in unmarked graves on foreign soil.
~C S Harris
A modern gentleman [rich person] is necessarily the enemy of his country. Even in war he does not fight to defend it, but to prevent his power of preying on it from passing to a foreigner.
~George Bernard Shaw
I can honestly say I've never sold any arms to a repressive foreign regime while reassuring everyone at home that the weapons will be used for nice things.
~Jo Brand
War is a sociological safety valve that cleverly diverts popular hatred for the ruling classes into a happy occasion to mutilate or kill foreign enemies.
~Ernest Becker
Whatever it is that the government does, sensible Americans would prefer that the government does it to somebody else. This is the idea behind foreign policy.
~P J O'Rourke
~
We were told that we were attacked on 9/11 because the terrorists hate our freedoms and democracy ... not for the real reason: because the Arab Muslims who attacked us hate our Middle Eastern foreign policy.
~Cindy Sheehan
If U.S. foreign policy results in massive death and destruction abroad, we cannot feign innocence when some of that destruction is returned.
~Ward Churchill
Maybe we ought to consider a Golden Rule in foreign policy: Don't do to other nations what we don't want happening to us. We endlessly bomb these countries and then we wonder why they get upset with us?
~Ron Paul
There's nothing wrong with being a Conservative and coming up with a Conservative believe in foreign policy where we have a strong national defense and we don't go to war so carelessly.
~Ron Paul
My view of foreign policy is that we need to be careful and circumspect about United States intervention in any foreign nation.
~Michele Bachmann
I think most Americans are ready for waging peace and not just brutalizing our foreign policy which is boomeranging against us.
~Ralph Nader
~~
Foreign policy is all about a universe of bad decisions, imperfect decisions; every situation is different. The dynamics, the atmospherics, the people, the pressures, the geopolitical realities shift.
~Chuck Hagel
The very phrase 'foreign affairs' makes an Englishman convinced that I am about to treat of subjects with which he has no concern.
~Benjamin Disraeli
One reason the United States finds itself at the edge of a foreign policy disaster is its underinformed citizenry, a key weakness in democracy.
~Stefan Halper
Many Americans have no idea of what has been the foreign policy of their country. If you don't know about something, you can't understand what is going on.
~Mick Jagger
No foreign policy - no matter how ingenious - has any chance of success if it is born in the minds of a few and carried in the hearts of none.
~Henry Kissinger
No foreign policy will stick unless the American people are behind it. And unless Congress understands it, the American people aren't going to understand it.
~W Averell Harriman
I can't talk about foreign policy like anyone who's spent their life reading and learning foreign policy. But as a citizen in a democracy, it's very important that I participate in that.
~Ron Silver
Americans need to understand the significance of having their civil liberties dismantled. It doesn't just affect terrorists and foreigners, it affects us all.
~Bianca Jagger
~~
Some foreign states will act against a dictatorship only to gain their own economic, political, or military control over the country.
~Gene Sharp
Where in the Constitution does it say that because we don't like a foreign country's leader, we should go in and topple the dictator?
~Gary Johnson
Our national determination to keep free of foreign wars and foreign entanglements cannot prevent us from feeling deep concern when ideals and principles that we have cherished are challenged.
~Franklin D Roosevelt
A president cannot sit on his hands and be seen as passive in the face of ruthless action by a foreign dictator.
~Robert Dallek
~~
Foreign policy will require a strategic agility that, whenever possible, gets ahead of problems, strengthens U.S. security and alliances, and promotes American interests and credibility.
~Chuck Hagel
That intelligence capability is enormously important to the United States, to our conduct of foreign policy, to defense matters, to economic matters. And I am a strong supporter of it.
~Dick Cheney
Mistakes, after all, are endemic to foreign and military policy given the unpredictability of events and the difficulty of securing reliable information in a place like Iraq.
~Eric Alterman
It is an ambassador's duty to stand up for his nation's foreign policy in any era and under any government whatsoever. Ambassadors are, in the full meaning of the term, titled spies.
~Napoleon Bonaparte
Even when I was at CIA, I'd go to visit foreign leaders and I'd say, 'You know, I'm not a diplomat. I'm just an old CIA guy'... I said, 'If I wanted to be diplomatic, I'd have been a diplomat.'
~Robert M Gates
Foreigners who speak Arabic in the Middle East are often assumed to be working for the C.I.A. or Israel's intelligence agency, the Mossad.
~Richard Engel
MINISTER, n. An agent of a higher power with a lower responsibility. In diplomacy, an officer sent into a foreign country as the visible embodiment of his sovereign's hostility.
~Ambrose Bierce
~~
U.S. foreign policy is Manichaean. It's like a Hollywood movie. You have to know who has the white hat and who has the black hat and then go against the black hat.
~Carlos Fuentes
If there is one lesson for U.S. foreign policy from the past 10 years, it is surely that military intervention can seem simple but is in fact a complex affair with the potential for unintended consequences.
~Fareed Zakaria
An increasingly multipolar world requires an entirely different kind of U.S. foreign policy: far from being unilateralist, it necessitates a complex form of power-sharing on both a global and regional basis.
~Martin Jacques
~
I haven't got the time to sit here arguing with someone whose idea of a coherent foreign policy is what comes up in Google when you type in peace!
~Tony Blair
The most important thing I learned
as a foreign correspondent in about 80
countries is that it takes a very shallow
knowledge of history to think that there
are solutions to most problems.
~Robert D Kaplan
Look, I think the notion that there's a
dogma or doctrine of foreign policy
that gives you a textbook recipe for
how to react to all situations is really nonsense.
~Paul Wolfowitz
I don't much believe in bumper sticker characterizations of foreign policy.
~John Bolton
This is the devilish thing about foreign affairs: they are foreign and will not always conform to our whim.
~James Reston
~~
Foreign policy should not be justified through making oneself feel good, but through results that have tangible consequences.
~Zbigniew Brzezinski
The purpose of foreign policy is not to provide an outlet for our own sentiments of hope or indignation; it is to shape real events in a real world.
~John F Kennedy
American foreign policy must be more than the management of crisis. It must have a great and guiding goal: to turn this time of American influence into generations of democratic peace.
~George W Bush
~. .~
Foreign Policy Quotes
Foreign Policy Quotes
Past wisdom in partnership with current names and thinking
Past wisdom in partnership with
current names and thinking
