Masha Gessen Quotes

Not a single story on 'BBC World News' is any different from the British foreign policy.

To avoid entangling alliances has been a maxim of our policy ever since the days of Washington, and its wisdom no one will attempt to dispute.

The predominant yardstick of your government is not human rights but national interests.

The shortcomings of America's political leaders do not stop at our borders.

Venezuelan interests are to be defended by Venezuela. The U.S. should defend the interests of the U.S. Where are the U.S. people, where are the intellectuals, who could put limits on their government?

We are aware that in 2005 our efforts to preserve the stability and prestige of the Republic of Bulgaria in the area of foreign policy, and our efforts to attain fully our strategic goals will be mostly contingent upon the way we address our domestic priorities.

President Obama, like every other leader on Earth, is still going to be looking out for national and economic interests. States don't cease to be states overnight just because they get a great visionary as their new president.

Events that get covered in the U.S. one way are not very important elsewhere or are given a completely different slant, and one needs to have a kind of comparative way of thinking in order to arrive at a judgment that is not completely provincial, that doesn't end up ratifying one's own national perspective and hence, one's own national agendas.

I think that the president of Iran has the authority wherever which - where - wherever the national interests of the country are involved and, when it is necessary and expedient and required to speak and talk with others in order to promote the rights of its nation, that the president can take that initiative.

Silicon Valley is constantly saying that the government is irrelevant and powerless. But that's because most people there have never seen it get serious.

Nothing in the constitutions of Western states requires them to get involved in every foreign conflict.

Every government is in some respects a problem for every other government.

The Secretary of State has always stood as much alone as the historian. Required to look far ahead and around him, he measures forces unknown to party managers, and has found Congress more or less hostile since Congress first sat.

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

It is important that we get our people back, but your greater responsibility is to protect the honor and dignity of our country and its foreign policy interests.

We have a tendency in America to deal with foreign affairs on a day by day basis. We are so saturated with facts that we do no look at a longer, broader picture.

You cannot let America’s destiny be determined by a bunch of foreign journalists.

The Constitution is an invitation to struggle for the privilege of directing American foreign policy.

Foreign policy begins with domestic policy.

The main challenge for American foreign policy in many places is not to influence relations between states but rather to influence events within states.

All foreign policy is the intervention of one nation's domestic politics into another nation's domestic politics.

As the power of the populace increases, the wisdom of its statesmen, who concern themselves with external affairs, decreases proportionately.

You cannot have individual foreign policy. You cannot have celebrity foreign policy.

The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology

There are plenty who think a union should not speak out, fight for or criticize the foreign policy of our government; that it should be a matter of our government, right or wrong, in matters of foreign policy. We have never adhered to that belief. And we shouldn’t.