Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess Salisbury Quotes

Foreign Policy has to be less foreign.

Foreign policy is the most constraining form of policy-making

Foreign policy is like plumbing. You never notice it till it breaks and then all hell breaks loose.

Even allies don’t share every single interest that you have. That’s a law of nature in the international system. They will tell you most of what you need to know but there may be some things that they don’t tell you that you need to know in order to formulate your policy as wisely as you can.

When I became secretary of state, I felt one of my primary jobs was building relationships around the world.

I'm a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy.

Obama's foreign policy is strangely self-centered, focused on himself and the United States rather than on the conduct and needs of the nations the United States allies with, engages with, or must confront.

Unilateral preemption should not in any way be the model for how we conduct international relations.

There are legitimate, even powerful arguments, to be made against the Bush administration's foreign policy. But those arguments are complicated, hard to explain, and, in the end, not all that sensational.

Clinton saw himself much more as the steward of alliances and of consensus that moved in the right direction. He didn't see himself as someone who could change the overall thrust, I think, of global policy.

The State Department desperately needs to be vigorously harnessed. It has too big a role to play in the formulation of foreign policy, and foreign policy is too important to be left up to foreign service officers.

It is like our foreign policy has attention deficit disorder.

I don’t talk to countries that exhibit bad behavior.

The U.S and England are not worthy of security council membership. Those who want good relations with the Iranian people should bow and surrender to its right and might.

Never in all the long years of strife and struggle has a parliamentary conduct of international affairs been successful.

Ninety percent of foreign policy is reacting to whatever's happening out there.

Foreign policy is too important to be left up to foreign service officers.

The United States may have to abandon its policy of avoiding entangling alliances.

You cannot have individual foreign policy. You cannot have celebrity foreign policy.

The diplomatic relations upon which our present system of international comity is based are being encountered by new forces and combinations which are fast rendering them impotent and antiquated

The main thing that endears the United Nations to member governments, and so enables it to survive, is its proven capacity to fail, and to be seen to fail. If there is something you are expected to do, but don't want to do, or even have done for you, you can safely appeal to the UN in the comfortable certainty that it will let you down.

I don’t think that we should ever apply our military power unilaterally…. If we cannot persuade like-minded, friendly nations of the wisdom of our policy, then maybe we should rethink the policy.

U. S. Foreign Policy is usually largely reactive.

Foreign policy should be strategic, not tactical.

Never for a moment, have the responsible and instructed statesmen in charge of the foreign affairs of the United States failed to consider themselves bound to insist upon this policy .... Almost every President and Secretary of State has re-stated the doctrine with vigor and emphasis in the discussion of the diplomatic affairs of his day.