Andrew Young Quotes

The real duties of an ambassador are to enter into or follow negotiations between his own government and that of the country to which he is accredited.

I won't let any ambassador have a say about my foreign travels.

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

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

Ambassadors are the eyes and ears of states.

We are coming to realise that foreign operations in today's world call for a total diplomacy ... Ambassadors can no longer be content with wining and dining, reporting, analysing and cautiously predicting.

An ambassador is not simply an agent; he is also a spectacle.

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

It was the view of the people in the Department of State that the handling of Yemen affairs from Aden was too much of a burden on the then Consul, so an additional officer was named to the American Consulate at Aden to handle Yemeni affairs. I was designated for that task.

My diplomatic position will not consist of going and kneeling down in front of George Bush.

For 22 years, Bandar bin Sultan was Saudi Arabia's influential, irrepressible ambassador in Washington.

You can’t outsource diplomacy. You can’t do it unless you do it.

If you operate any kind of major diplomacy, you must run some risk.

Nothing he [a Foreign Secretary] can say can do very much good, and almost anything he may say may do a great deal of harm. Anything he says that is not obvious is dangerous; whatever is not trite is risky. He is forever poised between the cliche and the indiscretion.

The term “public diplomacy” is often a euphemism for propaganda.

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.

There is no way to expect one ambassador to cover all of the U.S. government's priority issues, and certainly there are a plethora of U.N. meetings that drag on with an unlimited number of speakers and no time limits.

[On George H.W. Bush:] By 1990 I had learned that I had to defer to him in conversation and not to stint the praise. If that was what was necessary to secure Britain's interests and influence, I had no hesitation in eating a little humble pie.

I was working with a number of African heads of state. And after their initial surprise, I think many of them just treated me as they would anybody else. They had to deal with me as a representative of the United States of America, and the United States of America was too important to be dismissed or ignored on any grounds.

In most cases, cables are marked secret not because the U.S. requires it but because those speaking to us - the foreign leaders across the table - do. They are not keeping secrets from us, but from two other groups: their enemies and their subjects.

Diplomats were invented simply to waste time.

(A Foreign Secretary) is forever poised between the cliche and the indiscretion.

I'm simply saying that there are advantages in sending a skilled diplomat who can always say, 'I'll get back to you on that, Mr. Minister'.

We always have hoped that American diplomacy deploys itself in dialogue and persuasion rather than by ultimatums. That is the path we want in international relations.

Diplomats are just as essential to starting a war as soldiers are for finishing it... You take diplomacy out of war, and the thing would fall flat in a week.