Donald Sassoon Quotes

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

Foreign policy is important.

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.

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

Foreign policy begins with domestic policy.

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

Congress cannot and should not run foreign policy.

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.

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.

English [foreign] policy is to float lazily downstream, occasionally putting out a diplomatic boat-hook to avoid collisions.

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.

Americans must step back and realize that an effective foreign policy is very difficult to devise, and we must present a united front to make it work.

Foreign policy is about the execution of ideas as much as their formulation.

Under Clinton, the defiance of world order has become so extreme as to be of concern even to hawkish policy analysts.

It's important that all around the globe that the United States is pursuing the most effective foreign policy possible.

Whoever wants peace among nations must seek to limit the state and its influence most strictly.

There are nearly 200 countries and a population of over 6 billion in today's world. International affairs should be addressed by all countries through consultations rather than monopolised by a few powers.

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

All in all, the League of Nations is not inevitably bound, as some maintain from time to time, to degenerate into an impotent appendage of first one, then another of the competing great powers.

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

Foreign policy is really domestic policy with its hat on.

Foreign policy is effectively the assertion of many individual countries intersecting on the global marketplace. And you have to figure out how to get your interest served in a way that meets the interests and needs of these other folks.

The next president needs to know foreign policy and not learn it on the job.

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.

The United Nations has become a place where many countries seek to achieve a lynching of the United States by resolution.