Noam Chomsky Quotes

In international affairs, you never threaten things you're not prepared to do.

If you treat China like a foe, surely she will become one.

When a rising power confronts a ruling power, bad things usually happen.... This is what happens when an extablished entity faces an upstart.... To avoid a disasterous clash like war, both parties have to make an adjustment, but the ruling power has to make more painful adjustments.

Our adversaries must see diplomacy as their best option because war with the United States will force them to bear enormous costs.

I have always said that a conference was held for one reason only, to give everybody a chance to get sore at everybody else. Sometimes it takes two or three conferences to scare up a war, but generally one will do it.

Only professional diplomats, inveterate idiots and women view diplomacy as a long-term substitute for war.

Appeasement only makes the aggressor more aggressive.

Maybe we ought to consider a Golden Rule in foreign policy: Don't do to other nations what we don't want happening to us. We endlessly bomb these countries and then we wonder why they get upset with us?

We have treated our most serious adversaries, such as Iran and North Korea, in the most juvenile manner - by giving them the silent treatment. In so doing, we have weakened, not strengthened, our bargaining position and our leadership.

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

Any confrontation, such as a verbal one with the United States, would be harmful for everybody.

Appeasement was never a very clever policy, and it should not be our option today.

Certainly, the Bush Administration will rely in the first instance on its friends, since it would be both illogical and counterproductive to reward its adversaries.

I've been arguing this for months. This is not our war. This is not a war we should be in. Australia's better spending its time negotiating with North Korea.

The United States is not a nation to which peace is a necessity.

You can do a lot with diplomacy, but with diplomacy backed up by force you can get a lot more done

Power alone is respected and ... in order to gain peace, the United States has no alternative but to wield it

Great powers engage.

Cooperation requires a certain degree of trust between states. The threshold of trust required for cooperation depends on a set of variables including a state's relative power and costs of conflict…. conflict between trustworthy states is possible, when we see conflict it is a sign that one or both of the states are likely to be untrustworthy.

The United States sits down with her enemies because they have some semblance of power.

The management of a balance of power is a permanent undertaking, not an exertion that has a foreseeable end.

No American President should ever take any option off the table.

International negotiation has a nasty tendency to remind its practitioners that the laws of gravity affect them, too, and that international life is a two-way street in which one may have to give in order to get.

Repel force by force

There are two things that are very expensive in international relations: promises when they succeed and threats when they fail