Alliances Quotes

Almost all modern governments are highly conscious of what journalism calls 'world opinion.' For sound reasons, mostly of an economic nature, they cannot afford to be condemned in the United Nations, they do not like to be visited by Human Rights Commissions or Freedom of the Press Committees; their need of foreign investment, foreign loans, foreign markets, satisfactory trade relationships, and so on, requires that they be members in more or less good standing of a larger community of interests. Often, too, they are members of military alliances. Consequently, they must maintain some appearance of stability, in order to assure the other members of the community or of the alliance that contracts will continue to be honored, that treaties will be upheld, that loans will be repaid with interest, that investments will continue to produce profits and be safe. "Protracted internal war threatens all of this ... no ally wishes to treat with a government that is on the point of eviction. ~ Sebastian Marshall

An understanding is perhaps better than an alliance, which may stereotype arrangements which cannot be regarded as permanent in view of the changing circumstances from day to day. ~ Edward Grey

The present predicaments of Africa are often not a matter of personal choice: they arise from a historical situation. Their solutions are not so much a matter of personal decision as that of a fundamental social transformation of the structures of our societies starting with a real break with imperialism and its internal ruling allies. Imperialism and its comprador alliances in Africa can never develop the continent. ~ Ngugi Wa Thiongo

Russia should recognize the freedom of countries, such as Ukraine, to choose their alliances. ~ Anders Fogh Rasmussen

Let us be under no illusion. The Jewish spirit, which was responsible for the alliance of large-scale capital with Marxism and was the driving force behind so many anti-Spanish revolutionary agreements, will not be got rid of in a day. ~ Francisco Franco

Once, I was afraid of these walls, frightened by such beauty. But I see the cracks now. It's like the day of the bombing, when I realized Silvers were not invincible. Then it was an explosion - now a few bullets have shattered diamondglass, revealing fear and paranoia beneath. Silvers fleeing from Reds - lions running from mice. The king and queen oppose each other, the court has their own alliances, and Cal - the perfect prince, the good soldier - is a torturous, terrible enemy. Anyone can betray anyone. ~ Victoria Aveyard

- I've missed your company these long days. -
What are you even doing here? You stayed away so long, I thought you weren't coming.
- You missed me, and now are piqued. Know that I was obtaining something that guarantees my success with you. -
More coercion?
- A gift for you. That's why I've allowed the mortal leeway and refrained from a slaying. Because you're about to be mine. -
His confidence unsettled me. Good to know you were worried about your wife alone out on the road. You let me make the journey by myself. And face the twins! Though you knew how much they would hate me.
- I felt confident that you and six other Arcana, one of the largest alliances yet, could take out a pair of insignificant carnates. To guard you on your way, I bade Lark to dispatch the wolf. - ~ Kresley Cole

Using the Japan-U.S. alliance as a basis, it is important that we maintain and develop cooperative relations with our neighboring countries such as China, South Korea, and Russia. ~ Junichiro Koizumi

America must always be the world's paramount military power, but we can magnify our power through alliances. ~ John F. Kerry

Boards of directors are allowed to work together, so are banks and investors and corporations in alliances with one another and with powerful states. That's just fine. It's just the poor who aren't supposed to cooperate. ~ Noam Chomsky

One usually dies because one is alone, or because one has got into something over one's head. One often dies because one does not have the right alliances, because one is not given support. In Sicily the Mafia kills the servants of the State that the State has not been able to protect. ~ Giovanni Falcone

Aggression in bears can be and often is a stepping stone to friendship. Friendship and alliances frequently develop by repeated interactions, with initial aggression that lessens over time. ~ Benjamin Kilham

The best military policy is to attack strategies; the next to attack alliances; the next to attack soldiers. ~ Sun Tzu

I've often wondered what alliances and affinities might arise without those badges of right and left. For example, the recent American militia movements were patriarchal, nostalgic, nationalist, gun-happy, and full of weird fantasies about the UN, but they had something in common with us: they prized the local and feared its erasure by the transnational. The guys drilling with guns might've been too weird to be our allies, but they were just the frothy foam on a big wave of alienation, suspicion and fear from people watching their livelihoods and their communities go down the tubes. ~ Rebecca Solnit

Food is about agriculture, about ecology, about man's relationship with nature, about the climate, about nation-building, cultural struggles, friends and enemies, alliances, wars, religion. It is about memory and tradition and, at times, even about sex. ~ Mark Kurlansky

They may fight with us, but they don't fight for us. ~ Christopher Paolini

Let me tell you a secret, Caitlin. We're still in the cave. It's just bigger, and we wear nicer clothes. We make alliances and try to be civil, we save the weak instead of leaving them out in the cold to die ... ~ Greg Iles

A spot whereon the founders lived and died
Seemed once more dear than life; ancestral trees,
Or gardens rich in memory glorified
Marriages, alliances, and families,
And every bride's ambition satisfied. ~ William Butler Yeats

I think an alliance with Stalin's Russia is rotten. ~ Ezra Pound

You cannot lead an alliance if you say you're going alone. ~ George W. Bush

Long-range missiles with hybrid thermonuclear and necromantic payloads. Grafted and crossbred infantry divisions. Strategic alliances with folkloric, extraplanar, and subterranean entities. Field deployment of weaponized paleofauna. Large-scale saturation of target areas with invasive fungal and floral xeno organisms. Megadeaths and mega-undeaths. This is the Cold War now. An American president must be found who, whatever his other qualifications, is prepared to maintain our competitiveness in this area. I'm afraid that that person is you. ~ Austin Grossman

Our ancestors had fought and murdered one another, married and forged alliances, founded countries. At their best - but only for selfish reasons - they patronized art, literature, and music. But their worlds had to be overthrown by revolutions, because there was room in them only for themselves. ~ Andrei Codrescu

I think the gay - the gay/straight alliances in the school are very useful as far as creating understanding among kids and so kids aren't necessarily so stigmatized or demonized for being who they really are. ~ Jeanne Phillips

Any alliance whose purpose is not the intention to wage war is senseless and useless. ~ Adolf Hitler

Moscow has been helping the Northern Alliance because the Taliban was openly supported by Pakistan, .. until last week, Pakistani servicemen had taken part in war operations on the Taliban side. ~ Sergei Ivanov

Some empathy must be learned and then imagined, by perceiving the suffering of others and translating it into one's own experience of suffering and thereby suffering a little with then. Empathy can be a story you tell yourself about what it must be like to be that other person; but its lack can also arrive from narrative, about why the sufferer deserved it, or why that person or those people have nothing to do with you. Whole societies can be taught to deaden feeling, to dissociate from their marginal and minority members, just as people can and do erase the humanity of those close to them.
Empathy makes you imagine the sensation of the torture, of the hunger, of the loss. You make that person into yourself, you inscribe their suffering on your own body or heart or mind, and then you respond to their suffering as though it were your own. Identification, we say, to mean that I extend solidarity to you, and who and what you identify with builds your own identity. Physical pain defines the physical boundaries of the self but these identifications define a larger self, a map of affections and alliances, and the limits of this psychic self are nothing more or less than the limits of love. Which is to say love enlarges; it annexes affectionately; at its utmost it dissolves all boundaries. ~ Rebecca Solnit

The company you keep determines how others view you. Identify with mediocrity and you will be labeled sub par. Collaborate with questionable people and your reputation becomes suspect. Guilt by association can end a career, hurt your business and cost you friends. Choose alliances wisely or you may be condemned for someone else's sins. ~ Carlos Wallace

at the city level, support for community control didn't have much to do with teaching and learning. It was about money, political alliances, and power. ~ Dana Goldstein

When Socrates, after being relieved of his irons, felt the relish of the itching that their weight had caused in his legs, he rejoiced to consider the close alliance between pain and pleasure. ~ Michel De Montaigne

But wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things; so that picturesque language is at once a commanding certificate that he who employs it, is a man in alliance with truth and God. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Trying to rebuild Afghanistan on the cheap has left the country in the hands of warlords and an impotent Northern Alliance puppet regime that runs Kabul and nothing else. ~ Ted Rall

Fairy tales are about trouble, about getting into and out of it, and trouble seems to be a necessary stage on the route to becoming. All the magic and glass mountains and pearls the size of houses and princesses beautiful as the day and talking birds and part-time serpents are distractions from the core of most of the stories, the struggle to survive against adversaries, to find your place in the world, and to come into your own.

Fairy tales are almost always the stories of the powerless, of youngest sons, abandoned children, orphans, of humans transformed into birds and beasts or otherwise enchanted away from their own lives and selves. Even princesses are chattels to be disowned by fathers, punished by step-mothers, or claimed by princes, though they often assert themselves in between and are rarely as passive as the cartoon versions. Fairy tales are children's stories not in wh they were made for but in their focus on the early stages of life, when others have power over you and you have power over no one.

In them, power is rarely the right tool for survival anyway. Rather the powerless thrive on alliances, often in the form of reciprocated acts of kindness -- from beehives that were not raided, birds that were not killed but set free or fed, old women who were saluted with respect. Kindness sewn among the meek is harvested in crisis...

In Hans Christian Andersen's retelling of the old Nordic tale that begins with a stepmother, "The Wild Sw ~ Rebecca Solnit

Only the following items should be considered to be grave faults: not respecting another's rights; allowing oneself to be paralyzed by fear; feeling guilty; believing that one does not deserve the good or ill that happens in one's life; being a coward. We will love our enemies, but not make alliances with them. They were placed in our path in order to test our sword, and we should, out of respect for them, struggle against them. We will choose our enemies. ~ Paulo Coelho

The Obama administration has vastly expanded the use of armed drones and concentrated a great deal of diplomatic effort on building and maintaining alliances that share information about terrorists, provide access to get near them, and then strike against them. ~ Elliott Abrams

Segregation laws were proposed as part of a deliberate effort to drive a wedge between poor whites and African Americans. These discriminatory barriers were designed to encourage lower-class whites to retain a sense of superiority over blacks, making it far less likely that they would sustain interracial political alliances aimed at toppling the white elite. ~ Michelle Alexander

NDA not only stands for National Democratic Alliance but is also the National Development Alliance. ~ Narendra Modi

Alliances are useful in some situations. In others, they are absolutely vital. But ~ Timothy Zahn

Alliances and international organizations should be understood as opportunities for leadership and a means to expand our influence, not as constraints on our power. ~ Chuck Hagel

In the future, 'the networked' will sometimes form alliances with the Silicon Valley companies against Congress, but sometimes we are going to want and need to target our campaigns for change at the companies themselves. ~ Rebecca MacKinnon

Civic flattery - or a political culture that allows people to appear to engage in civic discourse without ever having their opinions, or even their claims of fact, seriously challenged - is ultimately more damaging to democracy than civic enmity. When we incorporate civic flattery into our personal relationships, we get shallow, insincere friendships. When we use it as the basis for political alliances, we get echo chambers. And when a skilled political manipulator flatters a large portion of the population in an attempt to acquire and consolidate power, we get perhaps the most dangerous test that a democratic society can ever face: the emergence of a demagogue. ~ Michael Austin

But in its de facto alliance with Caesar, Christianity connives directly in the murder of Creation. For in these days, Caesar is no longer a mere destroyer of armies, cities, and nations. He is a contradicter of the fundamental miracle of life. ~ Wendell Berry

For any alliance to work, the focus must remain on solving specific problems. ~ Mal Fletcher

The dirty alliance between religious preachers and possessors of power brought the boon of prisons, gallows, knouts and above all such theories for the mankind. ~ Bhagat Singh

It is our policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world. ~ George Washington

I know that our country is strongest when we lead the world, when we lead strong alliances. And that's the way Eisenhower and Reagan and Kennedy and others did it. ~ John F. Kerry

I hate the prostitution of the name of friendship to signify modish and worldly alliances. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I find, that, in general, alliances based on friendship are the only things that last. Not alliances based on words and letters. ~ Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

That alliance may be said to have a double tie, where the minds are united as well as the body; and the union will have all its strength when both the links are in perfection together. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

Skill at creating, exploiting, and exiting crucial alliances beats ownership of fixed assets ~ Tom Peters

Finally we are a nation with some conscience. It means alliances are extremely important when they're based on a national interest. We have to have the ability to sustain our presence within those alliances. ~ Malcolm Wallop

Commerce with all nations, alliance with none, should be our motto. ~ Thomas Jefferson

That generation really has to fight for a new political language, social movements, and alliances with students from other countries. They have to convince labor, parents, and the general public that the fight over higher education is a fight that benefits everyone in a sustainable democracy and not just faculty and students. ~ Henry Giroux

He that is once "born of God shall overcome the world," and the prince of this world too, by the power of God in him. Holiness is no solitary, neglected thing; it hath stronger confederacies, greater alliances, than sin and wickedness. It is in league with God and the universe; the whole creation smiles upon it; there is something of God in it, and therefore it must needs be a victorious and triumphant thing. ~ Ralph Cudworth

I know that military alliances and armament have been the reliance for peace for centuries, but they do not produce peace; and when war comes, as it inevitably does under such conditions, these armaments and alliances but intensify and broaden the conflict. ~ Frank B. Kellogg

Hanging a banner from the front of the Bureau of Indian Affairs building that proclaimed it to be the "Native American Embassy," hundreds of protesters hailing from seventy-five Indigenous nations entered the building to sit in. BIA personnel, at the time largely non-Indigenous, fled, and the capitol police chain-locked the doors announcing that the Indigenous protesters were illegally occupying the building. The protesters stayed for six days, enough time for them to read damning federal documents that revealed gross mismanagement of the federal trust responsibility, which they boxed up and took with them. The Trail of Broken Treaties solidified Indigenous alliances, and the "20-Point Position Paper,"14 the work mainly of Hank Adams, provided a template for the affinity of hundreds of Native organizations. Five years later, in 1977, the document would be presented to the United Nations, forming the basis for the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. ~ Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Well, we definitely need a strong and clear and assertive America. That's for sure. But you've always got to build alliances. And so it's very important that we are able to build those alliances. And where we don't do what in a way to extremists want us to do, which is to make this into a battle between the West and Islam - it's not. This isn't a clash between civilizations. It's about whether the values of tolerance and respect for difference prevail. ~ Tony Blair

These three ladies disliked and distrusted one another as heartily as the First Triumvirate of Rome, and their close alliance was probably for the same reason. ~ Margaret Mitchell

Knocknaree wood was the real thing, and it was more intricate and more secretive than I had remembered. It had its own order, its own fierce battles and alliances. I was an intruder here, now, and I had a deep prickling sense that my presence had instantly been marked and that the wood was watching me, with an equivocal collected gaze, not yet accepting or rejecting; reserving judgement. ~ Tana French

The twenty first century will require a re-affirmation and re-definition of our alliances and international organisations. ~ Chuck Hagel

She died a few days later, and her death buried once and for all the intrigues between the Precious Wife, the Gracious Wife, and all the Imperial favorites. Rivalries and alliances, loathing and attraction had been dissolved. Their existence had been a pointless tragedy, just as the talent of one prodigious poetess had been. ~ Shan Sa

I don't know enough about hip-hop, though I've heard some great hip-hop. I just did a thing with Qwest Love - we did a performance together in Memphis at the Folk Alliance Festival, and we had a great jam and a conversation. ~ Bela Fleck

While one can love an irresponsible friend or a person with character flaws, alliances are built on respect, the responsibilities which arise out of that and knowing that together we can be stronger. ~ Gisela Hausmann

We all cultivated critique--we were dogmatic in our alliances, self-righteous in our beliefs. But the broader Mission dyke culture we called queer, so much of it was about loyalty at any cost. Loyalty could mean safety but it could also mean reenacting high school popularity contests and taking on the victors' roles. High school was only a few years in the past for most of us, even if we might have been scandalized if anyone had mentioned that. Accountability only occurred when people would get in dramatic fights, and it was more about whose team was stronger or more popular than about what actually happened. ~ Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

Marriage is a public declaration of
a man and a woman that they have
formed a secret alliance, with the
intention to belong to, and share with
each other, a mystical estate; mystical
exactly in the sense that the real
experience cannot be communicated to
others, nor explained even to oneself
on rational grounds. ~ Katherine Anne Porter

Now the only sure basis of an alliance is for each party to be equally afraid of the other ~ Thucydides

Excluded from all fellowship at meals, excluded from all sacrifices, excluded from instruction and from matrimonial alliances, abject and excluded from all religious duties, let them wander over ,this earth. ~ Guru Nanak

She is double body-cradled and sung to and rocked, all three women fuck the night into dawn, trading powers and alliances, surrendering or annihilating without attention to origin or plan. There is blood from more than one body. Mouths attack and retreat. Bruises rise like bomb blasts. Hands and fingers disappear into tunnels and caves. There ~ Lidia Yuknavitch

The Idea enters the brain from the outside. It rearranges the furniture to make it more to its liking. It finds other Ideas already in residence, and picks fights or forms alliances. The alliances build new structures, to defend themselves against intruders. ~ Bernard Beckett

More broadly, strategic alliances are more difficult to manage and coordinate than single ventures; the potential for misunderstanding and disagreement, particularly between partners from different cultures, is great. Certainly many such alliances are short lived. ~ Peter Dicken

I have been working, as emergency relief coordinator, on an international scale, very hard to build a wider alliance of partners in assistance efforts. ~ Jan Egeland

Clinton saw himself much more as the steward of alliances and of consensus that moved in the right direction. He didn't see himself as someone who could change the overall thrust, I think, of global policy. ~ Barton Gellman

The U.S. always needs an enemy. It comes and goes. Today it is Islam. According to this plan or ideology of the born-again Christians who formed an alliance with Zionism, Islam is the monster. ~ Walid Jumblatt

We took out the safe haven in Afghanistan, but now there is, undoubtedly, a larger safe haven and we must rise to this occasion in collaboration and with alliances to confront it, and invest in the future much better human intelligence so we know what the next steps are. ~ Martin O'Malley

A crease of disquiet snakes across his brow. 'Your father plays with fire to gather them together like that. They are too clever. They form alliances. They develop - ambitions.'
He looks so solemn I wish to soothe his fears. 'You worry too much, I am sure,' I say lightly. 'After all, they are still rooted in the ground, are they not? They cannot pull themselves up and march around wrecking havoc, like an invading army.'
'Maybe,' he says, though he sounds unsure. 'I have never met their like before; that is all. It disturbs me.' He gestures around. 'And not only me. The forests, the fields, the moss that grows on the rocks - none of them are happy about that garden. Nature would have kept those plants safely apart, scattered over the continents, separated by oceans. But your father has summoned them from the corners of the earth and locked them together, side by side, hidden behind walls, where they can grow in secret. It is wrong, Jessamine - I fear it is dangerous - ~ Maryrose Wood

Sheep can befriend a hungry wolf only for briefly. ~ Jim Butcher

If Yugoslavia is to exist, it can exist only as an alliance, a confederation of independent states. ~ Franjo Tudjman

It would not be like this. It would be a systematic campaign moving southward towards Ios, building on the support he had from the kyroi factions. He would not be stealing out of camp at night to spin mad plans, to dress in unfamiliar clothes and forge alliances with rogue clans, or to fight alongside pony-riding warriors, capturing bandits improbably in the mountains.
It would not be like this again. ~ C.S. Pacat

It is important not to allow ever wider coalition-building to become an end in itself. As we saw in the Gulf War of 1990, international pressures, particularly those exerted from within an alliance, can result in the failure to follow actions through and so leave future problems unresolved. ~ Margaret Thatcher

Miriva refused to believe that human decency should be a privilege given only to a small few, and when she complained to her mother that she did not want to be a broodmare for the sake of alliances between the villages, her mother slapped her and sent her to the fields to pick mehazi beans ~ Ash Gray

And all women wanted something. Ines felt strongly that women were rarely friends with one another unless they could get something out of it. Female friendships were like strategic alliances: Each party had to bring something to the table in order to maintain equity. ~ Cristina Alger

An alliance with France was enlisted in the war for independence from Britain, then loosened in the aftermath, as France undertook revolution and embarked on a European crusade in which the United States had no direct interest. When President Washington, in his 1796 Farewell Address - delivered in the midst of the French revolutionary wars - counseled that the United States "steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world" and instead "safely trust to temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies," he was issuing not so much a moral pronouncement as a canny judgment about how to exploit America's comparative advantage: the United States, a fledgling power safe behind oceans, did not have the need or the resources to embroil itself in continental controversies over the balance of power. ~ Henry Kissinger

This alliance with Honeywell is a significant step in our strategy to provide remanufacturing services to other companies. We are pleased to build on our relationship with Honeywell through our world-class remanufacturing capabilities. ~ Steve Fisher

The old saying is wrong, you know--a common enemy does not a friendship make. You can only ever be as good as the people you are willing to fight beside. [...] Alliances made from convenience only ever weaken a cause. ~ James Islington

What I like about organizing things that way is that each story gets nearly full reign over its own space, but all of them are hung on a single string - the loosely-reined voice mentioned above. Thus the collection jogs away from suzerainty and past federation toward, I guess, alliance. Or maybe call each story a separate house on a single street? Or it's all a line of dive bars on some wharf front? What the hell, let's call reading the collection a pub crawl, but with words. ~ Roy Kesey

Bears, it turns out, are a lot like humans. They form alliances with strangers, they make calculations about relative costs and benefits, they lay down rules and punish those who break them. They trade based on a clear system of reciprocity. They communicate using equal parts emotion, intention, and dependence on context-a combination that is essential for communication between strangers and in fact forms the basis for language. ~ Benjamin Kilham

I've never been on one of these shows where you have to make alliances and be a team player. ~ Judy Gold

Good poetry does undoubtedly tend to form the soul and character; it tends to beget a love of beauty and of truth in alliance together, it suggests, however indirectly, high and noble principles of action, and it inspires the emotion so helpful in making principles operative. ~ Matthew Arnold

Code-sharing, alliances, and connections are all about "how do we screw the poor customer for more money?" ~ Michael O'Leary

The moment contained all her best hopes and desires. She needed and wanted very little: to be able to gaze upon his face every day for the rest of her life. The place did not matter, nor the conventions of church vows or family alliances or noble ties. He was her love, completely and utterly.

As he sank down into her, Meghan gave a little sigh like a moan of surrender but it was not that. It was a sigh of peace, of completion, of a joining that made whole her world. ~ Laura Parker

Community means engaging constructively with like-minded nations to build strong, sustaining institutions and alliances - and bringing emerging powers into this community so future conflict becomes less likely. ~ Joe Lieberman

There are solutions that are proper, but they require the painstaking and difficult work of building alliances and also being prepared to analyze the problem realistically. And exactly the same thing is going on my side of the Atlantic as is going on your side of the Atlantic. ~ Tony Blair

Revolutionary constituencies always involve a tacit alliance between the least alienated and the most oppressed. ~ David Graeber

But the idols of the Market Place are the most troublesome of all: idols which have crept into the understanding through their alliances with words and names. For men believe that their reason governs words. But words turn and twist the understanding. This it is that has rendered philosophy and the sciences inactive. Words are mostly cut to the common fashion and draw the distinctions which are most obvious to the common understanding. Whenever an understanding of greater acuteness or more diligent observation would alter those lines to suit the true distinctions of nature, words complain. ~ Francis Bacon

To be an ally is a formal military alliance. And we have a formal military alliance in NATO. But we are partners with other countries all across the world. And they're - they will be a partner. ~ Joe Biden

The first goal is for the clinician to find the patient, and the patient to find the clinician, as both are required for a real alliance. ~ Leston Havens

My Selection wasn't a farce, but it wasn't that far off. My father chose all the
contestants by hand, picking young women with political alliances, influential families, or enough
charm to make the entire country worship the ground they walked on. He knew he had to make it
varied enough to seem legit, so there were three Fives thrown into the mix but nothing below that.
The Fives were meant to be little more than throwaways to keep anyone from being suspicious."
I realized my mouth was gaping open and shut it immediately. "Mom?"
"Was meant to be gone almost immediately. Truth be told, she barely made it past my father 's
attempts to sway my opinion or remove her himself. And look at her now." His whole face changed.
"Though it was hard for me to imagine, she is even more beloved as queen than my mother. She has
made four beautiful, intelligent, strong children. And she has been the source of every happiness in
my life. ~ Kiera Cass

The thing that is always so surprising about plays written in another century is how remarkably elastic they are. When you listen to the way in which Shakespeare attacks relationships, for example, even though the words may start off sounding foreign, in actuality they are so accessible, the motivations so clear, the resonances so contemporary. When you put it in a modern context - we could well be in a place with someone like Gaddafi or Mubarak - it becomes apparent how Richard III resonates with that type of personality, with media and manipulation, alliances and petty jealousies. ~ Kevin Spacey

I invoke the other's protection, the other's return: let the other appear, take me away, like a mother who comes looking for her child, from this worldly brilliance, from this social infatuation, let the other restore to me "the religious intimacy, the gravity" of the lover's world. (X once told me that love had protected him against worldliness: coteries, ambitions, advancements, interferences, alliances, secessions, roles, powers: love had made him into a social catastrophe, to his delight.) ~ Roland Barthes

Our alliances should be understood as a means to expand our influence, not as a constraint on our power. The expansion of democracy and freedom in the world should be a shared interest and value with all nations. ~ Chuck Hagel

I believe that this president [George W. Bush], regrettably, rushed us into a war, made decisions about foreign policy, pushed alliances away. And, as a result, America is now bearing this extraordinary burden where we are not as safe as we ought to be. ~ John F. Kerry