James G. Stavridis Quotes

In the 21st century, we can't create security by building walls.

There will never be peace unless we have open borders. But that does not mean open on our side and you continue to hit me on the other.

We could only solve our problems by cooperating with other countries. It would have been paradoxical not to cooperate. And therefore we needed to put an end to the Iron Curtain, to change the nature of international relations, to rid them of ideological confrontation, and particularly to end the arms race.

We face a world where borders matter less and less.

lot of the uneasiness among Mexican leaders is because of the unknowns. Well those are to be determined and to be discussed and to be negotiated. At the end of the day, our neighborss aren't going anywhere and neigher are we, and we need to find ways to make it work.

I don't see any possibility of peace if there won't be open borders between us and our neighbors.

I believe that our national security lies not just in protecting our borders, but in bridging divides.

We don't want an America that is closed to the world. What we want is a world that is open to America.

International politics is no longer a zero-sum game but a multi-dimensional arena where cooperation and competition often occur simultaneously. Gone is the age of blood feuds. World leaders are expected to lead in turning threats into opportunities.

The Berlin Wall wasn't the only barrier to fall after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Traditional barriers to the flow of money, trade, people and ideas also fell.

To contrast national solidarity and international cooperation as two opposites seems foolish to me.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States and China are more likely to view each other as competitors if not adversaries. But the die has not been cast. The best possible outcome is a new understanding that when they cannot cooperate, they will coexist and allow all countries in the Pacific to grow and thrive.

Singapore is an international city, and it would be a grave mistake to close our doors.

One of the elements in the film that really fascinated me was not to look at the world in bi-polar terms of us vs them or east vs west, which was a by-product of the Cold War.

Our civilization is now in the transition stage between the age of warring empires and a new age of world unity and peace.

There's a policy now of opening the doors to the outside world.

Here we encounter two conflicting concepts with which we must come to grips in our time: the idea of national solidarity and the idea of international cooperation.

The world, whether we like it or not, will become more and more borderless.

We need to be more careful, but more compassionate. We must strike, not deal with terrorists, but to broaden our understanding of the world outside our borders.

If you look at the history of technology over a couple hundred years, it's all about time compression and making the globe smaller. It's had positive effects, all the ones that we know. So we're much less likely to have the kind of terrible misunderstandings that led to World War I, for example.

I don't believe that economic and cultural interaction automatically brings greater peace and understanding, although it may help in that regard.

The progress of freedom depends more upon the maintenance of peace, the spread of commerce and the diffusion of education, then upon the labors of cabinets and foreign offices.

One of the greatest gifts that our founders bestowed upon us is open borders … the founders gave us one of the largest free trade zones that man has ever seen.

If the whole of the 20th century has taught us anything, it has taught us that borders must be respected.

Wherever people are free, foreign and domestic policy are inseparable.