Vacillation and inconsistency are as incompatible with successful diplomacy as they are with the national dignity.
The verdict on Prince Metternich will soon be out: An excellent diplomat and a bad politician.
Diplomacy, of course, is a subtle and nuanced craft, so much so that it's said that when the most wily diplomat of the nineteenth-century passed away, other diplomats asked, on reports of his death, "What do you suppose the old fox meant by that?
A really good diplomat does not go in for victories, even when he wins them.
Want to accomplish something, any-damn-thing? Sharpen your political skills!
I am made Hand of the King which gives me an enormous amount of power, which I use quite ruthlessly - but skilfully - and Dame Diana Rigg joins us [playing political mastermind the Queen of Thorns] and we have a couple of really good sparring moments.
Kissinger projects a strong impression of a man at home in the world and on top of his brief. But there are a number of occasions when it suits him to pose as a sort of Candide: naive, and ill-prepared for and easily unhorsed by events. No doubt this pose costs him something in point of self-esteem. It is a pose, furthermore, which he often adopts at precisely the time when the record shows him to be knowledgeable, and when knowledge or foreknowledge would also confront him with charges of responsibility or complicity.
Americans, who are naive and inexperienced, are up against centuries of diplomatic skill and finesse.
Earl of Stockton
The art of politics is learning to walk with your back to the wall, your elbows high, and a smile on your face. It's a survival game played under the glare of lights.
Men like M. de Talleyrand are like sharp instruments with which it is dangerous to play.
Bismarck's genius, as well as his great flaw, was the same as that of another outstanding nineteenth-century politician of the German-speaking world, Prince Clemens Metternich. Both men were artificers, able to hold off the future by building a fragile present out of pieces of the past.
It was a defeat, resorting to crude threats in a game of subtlety, but sometimes one must sacrifice a battle to win the war.
The art of diplomacy is to take an opportunity and turn it into something.
In order to get big things done, sometimes, presidents have to be deft at moving the pea around under the shells.
With their charm and legendary sense of humor, the British directly or indirectly paved the way for a large number of European compromises.
It may be objected, that I am now recommending dissimulation to you; I both own and justify it. It has been long said: Qui nescitdissimular nescit regnare: I go still farther, and say, that without some dissimulation, no business can be carried on at all.
You have to speak diplomatically. I don't.
