Polly Leiton Quotes

They put aside the talk of peace and instead acted for peace.

We have to develop preventive diplomacy.

It is far easier and more effective - and not just in terms of cost - to prevent conventional conflicts than to intervene after an eruption of violence.

I don't want to force the peacekeeping nations to feel like I'm pushing them out.

We will not have peace by afterthought.

The only foreign policy advice I heard from China was when they said to Sudan, 'Don't go back to war.' That's all they said. They didn't push anything else.

You know that we are not in the regime-change game. We are against interference in domestic conflicts.

Making peace, I have found, is much harder than making war.

We're not going to baby sit a civil war.

I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq. Those who want to come and help are welcome. Those who come to interfere and destroy are not.

It is our duty to persuade the nations of the world, in whatever way that we can, to settle their differences in some other way. (Other than war)

It is my sacred moral and juridical duty to try to diminish international tensions wherever I can.

A strong neutral is the trustee for civilization in a shell-shocked world.

Governments interfere in the affairs of each other, when they conceive their own peace is endangered.

I was hired to stop the killing.

Surely diplomacy is needed when there is conflict, not when there is harmony.

If the world is to keep the peace, then we must keep the peace with dictatorships as well as popular governments.

Peacemaking and peacekeeping should run in parallel.

Only external authority—the United Nations—can bring about the necessary arrangements to prevent both communities from killing one another.

The greatest honor history can bestow is the title of peacemaker.

The making of peace is a continuing process that must go on from day to day, from year to year, so long as our civilization shall last.

There is no such thing as a conflict that cannot be ended.

An attitude of letting the rest of the world stew in their own juice, is rather a dangerous one, that perhaps in our own interest we may have to take the initiative and have sufficient interest in other people's affairs to really want to help them remain at peace.

… the financial cost of a [military] strike isn’t a reason to acquiesce in mass murder in Syria.

There is a middle ground between sitting on our hands and sending in the marines.