Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes

The artificial separation of politics and culture is nowhere more pronounced than in the discourse of foreign policy and international affairs.

The amount of military force necessary to provide reassurance depends on how dangerous people think the world is. And that I think ultimately depends upon the kinds of government that hold sway in major countries.

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

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.

To call the American role in the world imperial was, for many who did so, a way of asserting that the United States was misusing its power beyond its borders and, in so doing, subverting its founding political principles within them.

Much of our national debate proceeds as if China and America were locked in a zero-sum game in which one's loss is precisely the other's gain.

The people who tend to raise antiwar slogans will do so generally when it's American or British interests involved.

Nations, great nations have limitations. All nations have limitations. Even great powers have limitations.

I often heard Latvians compare Russia and America. Latvians find both countries and their leaders possessed of the same mysterious confidence.

The international community lies at the center of the Obama foreign policy. Unfortunately, it is a fiction. There is no such thing. Different countries have different histories, geographies, necessities, and interests. There's no natural, inherent, or enduring international community.

Every nation whose affairs betray a want of wisdom and stability may calculate on every loss which can be sustained from the more systematic policy of its wiser neighbors.

American influence is not what it used to be.

Foreign policy is about choosing from nasty options.

Every government is in some respects a problem for every other government.

A big country has to be careful. It's so easy for a big country to give offense.

The simple fact about alliances is that different nations have their own interests.

A few years in the age of nations is nothing.

Russia doesn’t like it when it is humiliated, when it is pressured.

All foreign policy is the intervention of one nation's domestic politics into another nation's domestic politics.

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.

At a period like the present, when momentous changes are occurring and every hour is preparing new and great events in the political world, when a spirit of war is prevalent in almost every nation with whose affairs the interests of the United States have any connection, unsafe and precarious would be our situation were we to neglect the means of maintaining our just rights.

Our foreign policy reflects the perceptions of our political elite about what we want.

Conquest or superiority among other powers is not or ought not ever to be the object of republican systems.

Washington believes in Zero-Sum politics.

Once nations get emotional, their relationships can change at bewildering speed.