George Washington Quotes

Uncritical American boosterism - automatic endorsement of every government action - is myopic and self-defeating.

PATRIOT, n. One to whom the interests of a part seem superior to those of the whole. The dupe of statesmen and the tool of conquerors.

Passionate attachment to another nation produces a variety of evils... the illusion of common interests where no real common interests exist; adopting the enmities of the other; and participation in the quarrels and wars of the other without any justification. Still another evil is that such a passionate attachment gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens the facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country.

Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.

A public official must feel that he is a servant of the people. This is true of all public officials but perhaps in a special sense true of the Secretary of State, for our party lines stop at the water’s edge.

Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong.

I’ll lie as much as the next guy when my country’s interests are involved—if I have a chance of being believed..

The English people would never consent to go to war for a cause in which England was not manifestly interested.

All you have to do is anesthetize the masses by telling them they’re an elite, that they’ve got a mission, that they’re making history, that they’re fulfilling their destiny and fighting for a better world — and they swallow it like lambs — even when a guttersnipe says it.

What is modernity? Is it defending foreign interests, or defending interests of our country?

There are no people in the world who are so slow to develop hostile feelings against a foreign country as the Americans, and no people who, once estranged, are more difficult to win back.

Politics stops at the water's edge

Israel's interest is all I care about.

For any country - and that includes Mexico and the U.S. - having good, robust relationships with crucial allies and neighbors, that's putting your country first.

The only real diplomacy ever performed by a diplomat is in deceiving their own people after their dumbness has got them into a war.

Whenever I hear people utter anti-German sentiments, I say: You can't blame Germany for defending its own interests.

This is real. This is the real mad man theory. We have to be irrational and vindictive, so people don't know what we're up to. This is not [Donald] Trump and [Steve] Bannon, it's from the [Bill] Clinton era.

Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification.

Anybody who sides with Canada internationally in a debate between the U.S. and Canada, say, Belgium, is somebody whose opinion we shouldn't care about in the first place.

My job is not to represent the world. My job is to represent the United States of America.

I would give something to know for whose sake precisely those deeds were really done which report says were done for the fatherland.

If there's one thing I learned from Rodrick, it's to set people's expectations real low so you end up surprising them by practically doing nothing at all.

As secretary of state it's been an enormous honor to represent this great country that I love so much - I have really seen that our great strengths are in the ability of people to reach their potential here.

Yet the arts of Severus cannot be justified by the most ample privileges of state reason. He promised only to betray; he flattered only to ruin; and however he might occasionally bind himself by oaths and treaties, his conscience, obsequious to his interest, always released him from the inconvenient obligation.

I would love to be able to get along with Russia. Now, you've had a lot of presidents that haven't taken that tack. Look where we are now. Look where we are now. So, if I can - now, I love to negotiate things, I do it really well, and all that stuff. But - but it's possible I won't be able to get along with Putin. Maybe it is. But I want to just tell you, the false reporting by the media, by you people, the false, horrible, fake reporting makes it much harder to make a deal with Russia.