David E. Sanger Quotes

In most cases, cables are marked secret not because the U.S. requires it but because those speaking to us - the foreign leaders across the table - do. They are not keeping secrets from us, but from two other groups: their enemies and their subjects.

When the ambassadors of other foreign countries come to Japan to make treaties, they can be told that such and such a treaty has been made with the ambassador of the United States, and they will rest satisfied with this.

Richard Holbrooke is known for many things, but I will remember him as an impressive, sometimes even intimidating diplomat who understood the value of culture in diplomacy.

Traditionally, diplomacy was done in an environment of information scarcity. Ambassadors would send back telegrams to foreign ministries, comfortable in the knowledge that their views of a country would be the only source of information the minister would see.

I talk a great deal to prior Secretaries of State about policy issues.

I am neither frustrated nor planning anything other than being the best Secretary of State I could be.

Diplomacy is the police in grand costume.

When we're trying to solve difficult national issues its sometimes necessary to talk to adversaries as well as friends. Historians have a word for this: diplomacy.

I meet with ambassadors from all countries in my role as a member of Congress, and you always have better relationships with those you actually personally get along with. That matters. So if there is chemistry between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, maybe that can bode for something.

Diplomacy is unfashionable in the world of knee-jerk reaction and the dogmatic sound bite on television.

Diplomacy is the velvet glove that cloaks the fist of power.

Lawyers do not mix with diplomacy.

If I could have anything right now, it would be the ability to continue as secretary of state.

Diplomats were invented simply to waste time.

The world of high-stakes international diplomacy can be rough and tumble, but it's more often than not a procession of suits and summits, protocol sessions and photo ops.

Diplomacy is not an end in itself if it does not advance U.S. interests.

Oh, you know. I am secretary of state. My trips aren't successful. I just talk to people.

I loved being Secretary of State, that's probably evident to everyone who watched me.

Diplomats make it their business to conceal the facts, and politicians violently denounce the politicians of other countries.

And we ought to work our diplomacy first and I think it's a reason it's going to respond increasingly to our diplomacy particularly with the president's direct involvement in the peace process, and I think that's extraordinarily important.

My father had been in the German Diplomatic Service, and although he had been in the United States since World War II and out of diplomacy, it was something that was very much talked about in the family. So when I went to college, it was always my intention to try to get into the Foreign Service.

My diplomatic position will not consist of going and kneeling down in front of George Bush.

Our public dealings with the Russians can hardly lead to any clear and satisfactory results unless they are preceded by preparatory discussions of the most secret and delicate nature.

I shall have to depend upon you for taking care of these matters of foreign affairs, of which I know so little, and with which I reckon you are familiar.

You can’t outsource diplomacy. You can’t do it unless you do it.