Joseph Stalin Quotes
A sincere diplomat is like dry water or wooden iron.
Joseph Stalin, 1879-1953, Russian Premier, 1913
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Kennan was talking about the Russians, but the same principle seems to hold with any autocratic government and in some cases even democracies. However, the tradition of secret diplomacy with no transparency is established even in many democracies. Great Britain and France, for example conduct most of their diplomacy in secret as do less democratic governments and tyrannies. They expect us to keep negotiations confidential, which causes American diplomats to be torn between the American view of transparency and the tradition of confidentiality.
The ambassador had been instructed to threaten a breakage of diplomatic relations. Eban observed how illogical and counter-productive that would be.
The Secretary argued for a preemptive war against the Soviet Union.
1st Earl Baldwin of Bewdley. Baldwin, a moralistic prig, and others including the rest of the Royal Family, pressured the King to give up Simpson, but the King instead abdicated and married Simpson who had been divorced and remarried when she began her affair with King Edward VIII.
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was a Georgian revolutionary and the ruler of the Soviet Union from 1927 until 1953. He served as both General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1922–1952) and Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union (1941–1953). Despite initially governing the country as part of a collective leadership, he ultimately consolidated power to become the Soviet Union's de facto dictator by the 1930s. A communist ideologically committed to the Leninist interpretation of Marxism, Stalin formalized these ideas as Marxism–Leninism while his own policies are known as Stalinism.
