Townsend Harris Quotes

Our system will prevail but it must be tested by talk and trade.

Maintaining a positive working relationship with Mexico's leadership will also be crucial to increasing communication and trade. I plan to personally maintain those relationships.

I think the job of the first single is kind of like being a diplomat for a country.

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.

He who plays advisor is no longer ambassador.

A diplomat is a man who thinks twice before he says nothing.

How have relations with Iran and Belarus benefited Venezuela? We are interested in countries that have democracies, that respect human rights, that we have an affinity with. What affinity do we have with Iran?

Diplomacy in a sense is the opposite of writing. You have to disperse yourself so much: the lady who comes in crying because she's had a fight with the secretary; exports and imports; students in trouble; thumbtacks for the embassy.

I'm an ambassador 24 hours a day.

I believe in free trade. I don't support regulating trade prices between different regions. Our point of view is we don't want trade barriers between different countries.

When the ambassadors of other foreign countries come to Japan to make treaties, they can be told that such and such a treaty has been made with the ambassador of the United States, and they will rest satisfied with this.

Ambassadors are, by definition, foreign bodies.

Our policy is to deepen the relations with all the countries in the world - monarchies, kingdoms, large powers - we want to respect all differences and have our relationships based on mutual respect.

It is in all our interests that the arteries of global trade are kept free, open and running.

Turkey can be a bridge to regimes and actions the United States can't reach. Turkey can talk to people the United States can't talk to.

It is probable that England will look favorably upon the independence of the Philippines, for it will open their ports to her and afford greater freedom to her commerce.

Military officers from different countries, when they meet each other, tend to sort of fall in love, become mutual admiration societies, at the expense of realities.

Diplomats make it their business to conceal the facts, and politicians violently denounce the politicians of other countries.

No nation was ever ruined by trade.

Well, the thing that I learned as a diplomat is that human relations ultimately make a huge difference.

I might be an ambassador.

Foreign policy is effectively the assertion of many individual countries intersecting on the global marketplace. And you have to figure out how to get your interest served in a way that meets the interests and needs of these other folks.

Traditionally, diplomacy was done in an environment of information scarcity. Ambassadors would send back telegrams to foreign ministries, comfortable in the knowledge that their views of a country would be the only source of information the minister would see.

We ... are willing that you send unto us your ships and vessels, when and as often as they may have passage with good assurance on our part to see them harmless and if you send one of your Majesty's counsel to treat with us whereby your country's merchants may with all kinds of wares, and where they will make their market in our dominions, they should have their free mart with all kinds of wares to come and go at their pleasure, without any let, damage or impediment.