Kingman Brewster Jr. Quotes

In the world of diplomacy, some things are better left unsaid.

To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy.

Ambassadors are the eyes and ears of states.

I have to be as much diplomat as a photographer.

Ambassador: In diplomacy, an officer sent into a foreign country as the visible embodiment of his sovereign's hostility.

You'd make a great Secretary of State because State Department personnel don't answer questions completely either.

A pupil of diplomacy has to learn three things: to speak French, to speak nothing, and to speak falsehood.

If we start seeing one ambassador I don’t know how we’re going to avoid seeing the other 113 …. I don’t see what mileage we get in seeing 80 African ambassadors.

A diplomat is one that says something that is equally misunderstood by both sides, and never clear to either.

It is an ambassador's duty to stand up for his nation's foreign policy in any era and under any government whatsoever. Ambassadors are, in the full meaning of the term, titled spies.

Diplomats were invented simply to waste time.

Throughout history, ambassadors have always been symbolic incarnations of the sovereignty of their nations and the dignity of their leaders.

The old diplomat liked to move with deliberation, in secret, following well-established traditions and working through what he loved to describe as "the usual channels". To him, the open debate carried on, not by professional diplomats, but by politicians and statesmen having little regard for the use of the technical phraseology of diplomacy and intent merely on reaching results which would make diplomacy unnecessary, was offensive to all his instincts.

Let him (the king) also appoint an ambassador who is versed in all sciences, who understands hints, expressions of the face and gestures, who is honest, skilful, and of noble family. Such an ambassador is commended to a king who is loyal, honest, skilful, possessing a good memory, who knows the proper place and time for action, who is handsome, fearless, and eloquent. For the ambassador alone makes kings' allies and separates allies; the ambassador transacts that business by which kings are disunited or not.

The limits of diplomacy must be acknowledged.

I go back to Washington every year to see the President and I get my orders directly from him—not from those pipsqueaks [at the State Department.]

When in the course of European diplomacy it becomes necessary for one people to let another dissolve the political bands which have connected them with a third, and to assume among the powers of the earth the desperate and unequal station to which the will of an International Congress condemns them, a decent respect to the cannon of their protectors requires that they should say nothing about the causes which compel them to accept the situation.

There isn't any rule in diplomacy that can't be broken.... There are times when diplomatic principles should be violated, but when you violate them you ought to know you're violating them.

How I have been deceived! I was expecting a diplomatic mission, but you have brought me a quarrel! By virtue of your testimonials I have received you as an ambassador, but I have found you instead a challenger … you give me the impression of having studied many books, but not yet of having graduated to the books of Princes, rather remaining ignorant of the dealings between Kings.

When the President picks up the phone and calls the Prime Minister, what does it mean to be an ambassador?

An ambassador from America! Good heavens what a sound!

Ambassadors form an exception to the general case of foreigners resident in the country, and they are exempted absolutely from all allegiance, and from all responsibility to the laws of the country to which they are deputed …. A foreign minister and those strictly belonging to the embassy are in general exempt from the criminal jurisdiction of the country to which they go

The job of a diplomat is to be the eyes and the ears of the country he or she is representing.

The Republics of Colombia, of Mexico, and of Central America have already deputed plenipotentiaries to … a meeting, and they have invited the United States to be also represented there by their ministers. The invitation has been accepted, and ministers on the part of the United States will be commissioned to attend at those deliberations, and to take part in them so far as may be compatible with that neutrality from which it is neither our intention nor the desire of the other American States that we should depart.

I'm convinced there's a small room in the attic of the Foreign Office where future diplomats are taught to stammer