Quotes About Foreign Affairs

#1. I don't think you lose anything by hallucinating. It's cheaper than airfare, the destinations more interesting, and I'd rather have a mutant squid on my window than the State Department trying to do foreign affairs.

Fred Reed

#2. The United States has made serious mistakes in the conduct of its foreign affairs, which have had unfortunate repercussions long after the decisions were taken.

Nelson Mandela

#3. When the San Francisco Democrats treat foreign affairs as an afterthought, as they did, they behaved less like a dove or a hawk than like an ostrich - convinced it could shut out the world by hiding its head in the sand.

Jeane Kirkpatrick

#4. To study foreign affairs without putting ourselves into others' shoes is to deal in illusion and to prepare students for a lifelong misunderstanding of our place in the world.

Paul Gagnon

#5. We have the responsibility to ensure that our first impulse in foreign affairs is one of bipartisanship.

Richard Lugar

#6. People are always asking me in interviews, 'What do you think of foreign affairs?' I just say, 'I've had a few.'

Dolly Parton

#7. Almost everything Truman did in foreign affairs I approve of.

Stephen Ambrose

#8. Nixon had some large achievements in foreign affairs. They will be remembered. But a president probably gets remembered for one thing, and Watergate will head the Nixon list, I suspect.

Bob Woodward

#9. The very phrase 'foreign affairs' makes an Englishman convinced that I am about to treat of subjects with which he has no concern.

Benjamin Disraeli

#10. Waiting for me in Stockholm will be a personal assistant - Katrina from the Ministry for Foreign Affairs - as well the secretary of the Swedish Academy. They'll help us with our things and take us to our hotel. From the moment I arrive, I'll always be together with the other two laureates.

Ada Yonath

#11. I fully, fully concede that Secretary Hillary Clinton, who was secretary of State for four years, has more experience - hat is not arguable - in foreign affairs.

Bernie Sanders

#12. At the beginning, because the lives of the hostages were at stake, then during this silent period we have taken several measures like not accepting the ultimatum of the terrorists threatening to kill our foreign affairs minister.

Alberto Fujimori

#13. It's simply not true that Donald Trump has no experience in foreign affairs. Hell, two of his foreign affairs resulted in marriages!

Michael R. Burch

#14. I am confident my Hindutva face will be an asset when dealing with foreign affairs with other nations.

Narendra Modi

#15. I've always had a weakness for foreign affairs.

Mae West

#16. The issue of war or peace is an issue that concerns not only experts on Foreign Affairs but every citizen of the United States.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#17. Most vagabonds i knowed don't ever want to find the culprit that remains the object of their long relentless quest. The obsession's in the chasing and not the apprehending, the pursuit you see and never the arrest" - Tom Waits "Foreign Affairs

Tom Waits

#18. The humanitarian would, of course, have us meddle in foreign affairs as part of his program of world service.

Irving Babbitt

#19. Ronald Reagan in foreign affairs, I think, was someone who had certain, very general ideas, general propositions by which he lives: To combat communism, to build up the American military power to assure our national security against any conceivable threat.

Robert Dallek

#20. None of what we [as country] have done is credited. None of the good works. Our foreign affairs budget, foreign aid budget, none of it is ever thanked.

Rush Limbaugh

#21. To divine the course of world events, you'd do as well to probe the entrails of dead animals. Better still, ask your hairstylist. She will be at least as insightful and probably more entertaining a prophet than anyone you can read in Foreign Affairs or the op-ed page of the Washington Post.

Andrew Bacevich

#22. The de facto censorship which leaves so many Americans functionally illiterate about the history of US foreign affairs may be all the more effective because it is not official, heavy-handed or conspiratorial, but woven artlessly into the fabric of education and media. No conspiracy is needed.

William Blum

#23. Prince Felipe is the best ambassador for Spain: I have already told Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo, minister of foreign affairs, that the prince should travel to the U.S. more often.

James Costos

#24. This is the devilish thing about foreign affairs: they are foreign and will not always conform to our whim.

James Reston

#25. Even to an outsider like myself, not only in the theatre was such disunity evident, but in much else in government Spain. Alvarez del Vayo, Socialist Minister of Foreign Affairs, once asked, Why is it Spain's people are so great, but her leaders so small?

Langston Hughes

#26. My politics are very centrist and sometimes, especially when it comes to foreign affairs, lean to the right.

Peter Landesman

#27. We have been using foreign affairs ministries to address security issues, but this practice is outdated. It's time to assign the handling of regional security to national organizations and expert institutions.

Enrique Pena Nieto

#28. It would be the irony of fate if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs.

Woodrow Wilson

#29. I argue that even as the war is framed in certain ways to control and heighten affect in relation to the differential grievability of lives, so war has come to frame ways of thinking multiculturalism and debates on sexual freedom, issues largely considered separate from foreign affairs.

Judith Butler

#30. We're in an illusion about what our role is in world politics and foreign affairs, and our policies are killing and destroying and doing a lot of things that we are not aware of.

Talib Kweli

#31. In foreign affairs we must make up our minds that, whether we wish it or not, we are a great people and must play a great part in the world. It is not open to us to choose whether we will play that great part or not. We have to play it. All we can decide is whether we shall play it well or ill.

Theodore Roosevelt

#32. Neville Chamberlain looked at foreign affairs through the wrong end of a municipal drainpipe.

Winston Churchill

#33. Nowhere have women been more excluded from decision-making than in the military and foreign affairs. When it comes to the military and questions of nuclear disarmament, the gender gap becomes the gender gulf.

Eleanor Smeal

#34. In foreign affairs, the president can do what he wants unless Congress says no. In domestic policy, the president can't do anything unless Congress says yes.

Bill Vaughan

#35. If the estimate of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs is correct, then Russia has lost the cold war in western Europe.

Walter Lippmann

#36. The limitations imposed by democratic political practices makes it difficult to conduct our foreign affairs in the national interest.

Dean Acheson

#37. Flemming Axmark, and Preben Hansen. The Royal Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Copenhagen: Nordisk

Nete Schmidt

#38. Power must be used, but it must be tempered by soul-searching and the recognition of our human capacity for error. That is the maxim that should inform our approach to every challenge, from reforming state government to engaging in foreign affairs.

Eliot Spitzer

#39. Watching foreign affairs is sometimes like watching a magician; the eye is drawn to the hand performing the dramatic flourishes, leaving the other hand - the one doing the important job - unnoticed.

David K. Shipler

#40. One of the foremost activities of the NSA's FAD, or Foreign Affairs Division, is to pressure or incentivize EU member states to change their laws to enable mass surveillance.

Edward Snowden

#41. As Minister of Foreign Affairs. I will work on deepening Haiti's links with its traditional partners from the North and the South, while exploring all the opportunities for economic, cultural, scientific and technological cooperation that may benefit my country.

Laurent Lamothe

#42. Our best presidents have really combined domestic leadership with heroic achievements in foreign affairs or war.

Allan Lichtman

#43. I don't believe I'll ever get credit for anything I do in foreign affairs, no matter how successful it is, because I didn't go to Harvard.

Lyndon B. Johnson

#44. For years now, long before I became House majority leader, I have been passionate about foreign affairs because I believe that anyone who leads in Washington must appreciate the significance of America's role in providing for global security and prosperity.

Kevin McCarthy

#45. Americans are inclined to see the world and foreign affairs in black and white.

Richard Kerry

#46. I think he's informing himself, reaching out and getting ideas and information and advice. I haven't the slightest doubt that internally taking shape in that marvelous brain of his is a philosophy of foreign affairs. But it would be premature to say that one is fully formed.

Theodore C. Sorensen

#47. Europe has never had a single or unified voice in world affairs: a common foreign policy. It has often appeared to be rudderless and unable to make quick decisions when faced with economic crises, presenting instead an image of division and hopelessness.

Klaus Schwab

#48. Affairs of state tend to drive most presidents toward the center on both foreign and domestic policy, no matter where on the political spectrum they begin, and especially so in the areas of intelligence and law enforcement.

David K. Shipler

#49. He had conquered murder only to be faced with war. There were no laws for that.

T.H. White

#50. Multi-lateralism's dilemma: that the inclusion of more actors increases the legitimacy of a process or organization at the same time as it decreases its efficiency and utility.

Richard N. Haass

#51. Some reasonable term ought to be allowed to enable aliens to get rid of foreign and acquire American attachments; to learn the principles and imbibe the spirit of our government; and to admit of a probability at least, of their feeling a real interest in our affairs.

Alexander Hamilton

#52. Foreign policy isn't something that is great and big, it's common sense and humanity as it applies to my affairs and yours.

Ernest Bevin

#53. Americans, being a moral people, want their foreign policy to reflect the values we espouse as a nation. But Americans, being a practical people, also want their foreign policy to be effective.

George Shultz

#54. Foreign policy is a matter of costs and benefits, not theology.

Fareed Zakaria

#55. If it's wrong when they do it, it's wrong when we do it.

Noam Chomsky

#56. Refuting the false promises requires philosophic understanding of economic interventionism, central banking, and the deeply flawed foreign policy of meddling in the affairs of other nations.

Ron Paul

#57. A foreign affair juxtaposed with a stateside
and domestically approved romantic fancy
is mysteriously attractive due to circumstances knowing
it will only be parlayed into a memory

Tom Waits

#58. The artificial separation of politics and culture is nowhere more pronounced than in the discourse of foreign policy and international affairs.

Ellen Willis

#59. Louella remarked that when foreign nations had intercourse with this country they knew they had been intercoursed.

Jack Woodford

#60. During the election campaign of 2000, it was generally thought that then-governor Bush didn't know much about foreign policy or national security affairs, and that Colin Powell would lead on that front, while the president's main concern would be domestic.

Elliott Abrams

#61. My father is an economist who specialized in foreign food policy, and my mother worked for AID, a branch of the State Department, so food in regards to world affairs was talked about a lot.

Jennifer Gilmore

#62. In fact, our monthly trade deficit figure is so huge it equals the entire annual budget of our Department of Veterans Affairs. Veterans fought to make us free from foreign tyranny, but the new tyranny is taking a different form.

Marcy Kaptur