Private Discussions Quotes

There is an intimacy and trust that is needed between leaders, between their assistants and advisers. Usually, you have the real substance behind closed doors; and the press conferences, you have niceties, nice photo ops.

You can't negotiate in public. People won't make concessions in public. They will do that in private. Like sausage making, you have to do it behind closed doors.

Quiet diplomacy is far more effective than public posturing.

Secrecy was the pretext by which the most important issues were settled by the prince and a few of his confidants.

The best way to give these negotiations a chance, is to keep them private.

My goal is to be the tough negotiator but... not to air differences through press releases.

It creates community when you talk about private things and you can find other people that have the same things.

I will not comment on or confirm what are alleged to be stolen State Department cables. But I can say that the United States deeply regrets the disclosure of any information that was intended to be confidential, including private discussions between counterparts or our diplomats' personal assessments and observations.

There are things that are not spoken about in polite society. Very quickly in most conversations you'll reach a moment where someone goes, 'Oh, that's a bit heavy,' or 'Eew, disgusting.' And literature is a place where that stuff goes; where people whisper to each other across books, the writer to the reader. I think that stops you feeling lonely – in the deeper sense, lonely.

What is said in public [regarding ongoing political negotiations] is often very different than what is said in private.

Politics, they all - talked to the insiders.

Trump is an outsider; maybe you don't know. So he is sitting in a room: he is talking business, he is talking politics - in a private room, it's a different persona. When he's out on the stage, he is talking about the kinds of things he's talking about himself; he's projecting an image that's for that purpose.

... people get confidential at midnight.

I have spoken to Chinese leaders occasionally on human rights, but I've always done it in private.

...dusk is the time when men whisper of matters about which they remain silent in the full light of the sun.

I do love to eavesdrop. It's inspirational, not only for subject matter but for actual dialogue, the way people talk.

I speak to lots of coaches, but those are private conversations.

Another reason commissions are able to produce consensus—perhaps the rarest of Washington commodities—is the simple opportunity they provide for intense private deliberations.

I promise you that when the circumstances arise where I have a difference on policy or on presentation, I have - I can tell you in my heart, I know - I would have no hesitation, were I privileged to be vice president, to walk into the president's office, close the door, and share my heart.