Quotes About Statecraft

#1. From visible habits we make inferences as to the invisible attributes of the soul. Therefore, statecraft is soulcraft.

George F. Will

#2. We are too small and our statecraft is too feeble to be seen by a spacecraft between the Earth and the Moon. From this vantage point, our obsession with nationalism is nowhere in evidence.

Carl Sagan

#3. Study history, study history. In history lies all the secrets of statecraft.

Winston S. Churchill

#4. I say statecraft is soulcraft. Just as all education is moral education because learning conditions conduct, most legislation is moral legislations because it conditions the action and the thought of the nation in broad and important spheres in life.

George Will

#5. Finally, we were notorious enough to give our enemies pause.

Geraldine Brooks

#6. A great state is a well-blended mash of something of all the people and all of none of the people. The liquor of statecraft is distilled from the mash you got.

Zora Neale Hurston

#7. Deceit is a tool of statecraft," Irulan agreed.
"There are limits to power, as those who put their hopes in a constitution always discover," Paul said.

Frank Herbert

#8. For leaders, wars are filled with guesses.

John Ferling

#9. If men understood domestic economy half as well as women do, then their political economy and their entire consequent statecraft would not be the futil muddle which it is.

James Stephens

#10. No one sits, as you do, so close to a king, who does not begin to grasp how the levers of power work, and the cost of the oil that must grease them.

Geraldine Brooks

#11. He who is firmly seated in authority soon learns to think security, and not progress, the highest lesson in statecraft.

James Russell Lowell

#12. The American president had allowed the old order to topple without a viable alternative in place, a reckless act with no precedent in modern statecraft. And for some reason he had chosen this moment in time to throw Israel to the wolves.

Daniel Silva

#13. He is able to put aside personal feelings and see the broad strokes. Experience counts in these things.

Geraldine Brooks

#14. Though the general principles of statecraft have survived the rise and fall of empires, every increase in knowledge has brought about changes in the political, economic, and social structure.

John Boyd Orr

#15. Statecraft and kingship were not for the faint of heart

Sharon Kay Penman

#16. For, although one may be very strong in armed forces, yet in entering a province one has always need of the goodwill of the natives.

Niccolo Machiavelli

#17. A western audience might not appreciate 'Chanakya's Chant' because of its dependence on history and ancient statecraft. My book is a modern-day thriller that draws on a bedrock of history. My primary object is to entertain, not educate.

Ashwin Sanghi

#18. That is what I hate about ruling and royalty, Simon. It is living, breathing people with whom a prince plays the games of statecraft.

Tad Williams

#19. If soldiering did not interest him, the soldiers themselves were another matter. He loved to sit with the men and draw out their first-hand stories of past campaigns.

Geraldine Brooks

#20. Under (Lyndon) Johnson, the Senate functions like a Greek tragedy. All the action takes place offstage, before the play begins. Nothing is left for the participants but the enactment of their prescribed roles.

Bobby Baker

#21. Initial uniformity can be deceiving, warns the author, because parties arrive at that state from so many different motives which will be exposed over time.

Donald R. Hickey

#22. Power and fear," he said. "The tools of statecraft.

Frank Herbert

#23. Zealous statesmen perhaps did more mischief than anything in the Galaxy--with the possible exception of procrastinating soldiers. That could indicate the fundamental difference between statecraft and war.

H. Beam Piper

#24. Princes give rewards with their own hands,
But death or punishment by the hands of other.

John Webster

#25. The feelings of politicians are rarely transparent.

John Ferling

#26. When learning was monopolized by the monks in the Middle Ages, people specialized only in warfare and statecraft. And even these were not altogether free from the scholastic influence.

Ameen Rihani

#27. Confronted by menace or what is perceived as menace, governments will usually attempt to smash it, rarely to examine it, understand it, and drefine it.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#28. The triviality of the current scene usually put her off, but now she supposed that the politics of the moment always looked petty and stupid; only later did it take on the look of respectable statecraft, of immutable History.

Kim Stanley Robinson

#29. In statecraft, as in medicine, words are sometimes the most powerful drugs we can use. The power of propaganda should never be discounted,

Ashwin Sanghi

#30. He was always acting, always enveloping himself in artificiality, perhaps to conceal the volcano within.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#31. We need a dramatically expanded use of statecraft.

Newt Gingrich

#32. No less than war or statecraft, the history of Economics has its heroic ages.

Aldous Huxley

#33. Pointing out the possible, and expensive, entanglements that could come with widespread commercial enterprise, the author calculates the Great Britain was at war half the time between 1689 and 1783.

John Ferling

#34. A sense of messianic purpose makes the national interest almost indistinguishable from the political interests of the president.

Ron Suskind

#35. In government, our chief executives have been lawyers. The great majority of our cabinets and congresses are and have been men trained in the law. They have provided the leadership and the statecraft and the store of strength when it was needed.

Robert Kennedy

#36. The aspiration to such uniformity and order alerts us to the fact that modern statecraft is largely a project of internal colonization, often glossed, as it is in its imperial rhetoric, as a 'civilizing mission'.

James C. Scott