Charles H. Percy Quotes

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

Clearly, for France in her present position, intelligent activity consists of practicing a policy of entente with Germany in order to survive

Multilateralism may be little more than a polite way of camouflaging what is in practice unilateralism with allies.

No Secretary of State can give constant personal care to more than a few problems among the global abundance.

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

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

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.

In short, I will never allow partisanship to undermine our national security when the lives of countless people lay in the balance. If that earns me enemies in Washington or at the State Department, then so be it.

One political party must behave goodly with another political party, whatever is possible within the political jurisdiction.

I spent eight years at the U.N., so I understand that U.S. ambassadors have a lot of issues to cover.

We are a party which believes that we work in the national interest, not just to please my opposition.

The Obama administration kind of shows how you can use diplomacy to bring the most important countries together and get the whole world on board.

I think you know what's new about this the Democrat Party not liking the Russians. That's a first. The Democrat Party not liking the idea the Soviet Union back together.

A divided government doesn't have to be a death blow to foreign policy.

We have to get back to a government where leaders are willing to talk across party lines and do not have absolute politics as the goal.

We will ensure the interests of both the East and the West in Belarus. Don't try to rip us apart; don't try to make us collide with Russia or with the West.

We always have to remember that we, the Italians, have always cooperated with the U.S., and with Reagan and Carter and Nixon and Clinton, Bush and Obama. And Trump, Trump is the American-elected president. So, cooperation is there.

I've yet to see an example of somebody standing up to Donald Trump and suggesting policy initiatives and him embracing them yet. It's not happening at scale.

I've never done any cross-party stuff. I've no interest in sitting down discussing pensions or whatever with Tories.

I've always been interested in foreign relations. It's my belief that study of history should be our preparation for understanding the present rather than an escape from it.

In terms of our foreign policy, that's where we made a mistake after 9/11. Everyone's going, "Why, why, why," and there wasn't any investigation or learning from any of what we had been doing up to that time that had set us up.

I think China will do nothing to obstruct it, and they probably will go along with it.

No modern nation has ever constructed a foreign policy that was acceptable to its intellectuals

American national security and American economic interests, of course - every president, every secretary of state - that is the primary goal. As you are in this job and in the work, you begin to see, though, that in the long run, both American economic interests and American national security are better served when there are other decent countries in the world who are both your allies and even when your adversaries are acting more decently.