International Policy Quotes

Trilateralists look forward to a pseudo postnational age in which social, economic, and political values originating in the trilatleral regions are transformed into universal values. Expanding networks of like-minded governmental officials, businessmen, and technocrats - elite products of Western civilization - are to carry out national and international policy formation. Functionally specific institutions with 'more technical focus, and lesser public awareness' [italics mine] are best suited for addressing international issues in the trilateral model. Trilateralists call this decision making process 'piecemeal functionalism.' No comprehensive blueprints would be proposed and debated, but bit and bit the overall trilateral design would take shape. Its 'functional' components are to be adopted in more or less piecemeal fashion, lessening the chance people will grasp the overall scheme and organize resistance. ~ Holly Sklar

Getting enough energy to satisfy the needs of the developing world without bringing on an eco-disaster is not going to be easy. It will require a marriage of science and technology with good international policy, something that is always hard to bring off. We need to get it right this time. ~ Burton Richter

The United States had a long bipartisan tradition of negotiating with even its worst enemies, from John Kennedy
'Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate
to Richard Nixon's opening with China, to Ronald Reagan's famous 'walk in the woods' with MIkhail Gorbachev. Obama's position was firmly in line with longstanding diplomatic practice. George W. Bush's post-9/11 policy
'You are either for us or against us'
was the exception, and a bad one. It removed subtlety from international affairs. ~ Mark Bowden

Maybe we ought to consider a Golden Rule in foreign policy: Don't do to other nations what we don't want happening to us. We endlessly bomb these countries and then we wonder why they get upset with us? ~ Ron Paul

International cooperation, multilateralism is indispensable. ~ Hans Blix

Knowing policy does help make the gossip more understandable. ~ Tabitha Soren

By keeping labor supply down, immigration policy tends to keep wages high. Let us underline this basic principle: Limitation of the supply of any grade of labor relative to all other productive factors can be expected to raise its wage rate; and increase in supply will, other things being equal, tend to depress wage rates. ~ Paul Samuelson

No one can repair your self-esteem for you. Your spouse cannot fix it. Your parents cannot fix it. Your boss cannot fix it. No amount of success or beauty enhancements can fix it. You have to fix it by changing the way you see yourself. You have to choose to see yourself accurately, to see life as a classroom, and commit to the policy that you have the same value no matter how you perform. It is time to claim the power to do this and not let anyone take your self-esteem from you again. ~ Kimberly Giles

Sonia Gandhi and her son play an important part in all of this. Their job is to run the Department of Compassion and Charisma and to win elections. They are allowed to make (and also to take credit for) decisions which appear progressive but are actually tactical and symbolic, meant to take the edge off popular anger and allow the big ship to keep on rolling. (The best example of this is the rally that was organised for Rahul Gandhi to claim victory for the cancellation of Vedanta's permission to mine Niyamgiri for bauxite - a battle that the Dongria Kondh tribe and a coalition of activists, local as well as international, have been fighting for years. At the rally, Rahul Gandhi announced that he was "a soldier for the tribal people". He didn't mention that the economic policies of his party are predicated on the mass displacement of tribal people. Or that every other bauxite "giri" - hill - in the neighbourhood was having the hell mined out of it, while this "soldier for the tribal people" looked away. Rahul Gandhi may be a decent man. But for him to go around talking about the two Indias - the "Rich India" and the "Poor India" - as though the party he represents has nothing to do with it, is an insult to everybody's intelligence, including his own.)

The division of labour between politicians who have a mass base and win elections, and those who actually run the country but either do not need to (judges and bureaucrats) or have been freed of the constraint of winn ~ Arundhati Roy

Success looks like you sitting here pretty confident that an armed brigade isn't going to come pouring in here and blow your head off. Which I don't think is your major concern. Therefore, the United States' foreign policy is successful. ~ George Friedman

I never had a policy; I have just tried to do my very best each and every day. ~ Abraham Lincoln

The main concept is that of an international solidarity expressed in practice through worldwide division of labor: free trade is the principal point in the program of internationalism. ~ Christian Lous Lange

It has always been my view that terrorism is not spawned by the poverty of money; it is spawned by the poverty of dignity. Humiliation is the most underestimated force in international relations and in human relations. It is when people or nations are humiliated that they really lash out and engage in extreme violence. ~ Thomas L. Friedman

After researching, reviewing, considering, and contemplating with continued attention; I have concluded that the beast is among us. ~ A.K. Kuykendall

The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups. ~ Henry Hazlitt

I suppose that if we in intelligence were one day given three wishes, they would be to know everything, to be believed when we spoke, and in such a way to exercise an influence to the good in the matter of policy. ~ Sherman Kent

There does exist and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the radical Right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so. I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for 20 years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960s, to examine its papers and secret record. ~ Carroll Quigley

I used to work at this store called Music Plus in San Clemente, California, when I was growing up, and then they became Blockbuster Music, and, like, you had to get a haircut to work there, and at the time I had some pretty long hair. So after that policy was imposed, I knew that was going to be my last summer working there. ~ Jorge Garcia

To allow the policy question of same-sex marriage to be considered and resolved by a select, patrician, highly unrepresentative panel of nine is to violate a principle even more fundamental than no taxation without representation: no social transformation without representation. ~ Antonin Scalia

Will the emerging Europe become an active participant in the construction of a new international order, or will it consume itself on its own internal issues? ~ Henry Kissinger

The Senkaku Islands are an integral part of Japanese territory based on international law as well as in the context of our history. ~ Shinzo Abe

Expressing the thoughts of my comrades, I suggested, among other means, the organization of an international information service on inventories, on production, and on the needs of the various countries for raw materials. ~ Leon Jouhaux

If you know a country's geography, you can understand and predict its foreign policy. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte

Create the impression of endless willingness to compromise and you almost invite deadlines. That's the challenge we now have in North Korea and have had in North Korea for 10 years. In this sense, diplomacy and foreign policy and other elements of political activity have to be closely linked and have to be understood by the negotiators ~ Henry A. Kissinger

Busy people begrudge the days being short.
I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids. ~ Stanley Kubrick

So, I'm lying on the couch and Laura walks in and I say, 'Free at last,' and she says 'You're free all right, you're free to do the dishes.' So I say, 'You're talking to the former president, baby,' and she said, 'consider this your new domestic policy agenda.' ~ George W. Bush

I think the next president needs to lead on cultural issues and experience, particularly on foreign policy. ~ Sam Brownback

The spirit of International Geneva is not only a catchword. It stands for Switzerland's commitment to advance international cooperation and dialogue - and we make every effort to ensure that the dynamics of the Geneva spirit are real. ~ Didier Burkhalter

I consider myself to be as informed on American foreign policy as anyone in America. ~ Joe Biden

Wisdom and policy dictate that we must do as destiny demands and keep peace with the irresistible march of events. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte

Hillary Clinton has gotten every foreign policy challenge wrong. ~ Carly Fiorina

Forecasting by bureaucrats tends to be used for anxiety relief rather than for adequate policy making. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The question is what will Mitt Romney do as president if his policy is simply to be hands off and let the government be made so small it can be drowned in a bathtub. In the 21st century global economy, no state alone has the ability to compete against China. ~ Jennifer Granholm

You know, there was a time at the beginning of the 50's when this nuclear threat hung over the world, but the attitude of the West was like granite and the West did not yield. Today, this nuclear threat still hangs on both sides, but the West has chosen the wrong path of making concessions. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

About 2500 years ago Aeschylus, the Greek playwright, wrote, He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God. These remarkable photos and the stories that accompany them should be on billboards from sea to shining sea, so the pain and suffering they represent might fall drop by drop upon the American psyche and against our will, by the awful grace of God, wisdom might come to these United States and her foreign policy. ~ Gioconda Belli

observes the veteran international pollster Craig Charney, that while the Internet "improves the ability to connect, it is no substitute for political organizations, culture, or leadership - and spontaneous movements tend to be weakest in all of these." Many Arab Awakening efforts ultimately failed because they could not build an organization and politics that could translate their progressive ideas into a governing majority. ~ Thomas L. Friedman

Negotiation is not a policy. It's a technique. It's something you use when it's to your advantage, and something that you don't use when it's not to your advantage. ~ John Bolton

There is no debate in the scientific community ... We need [Congress] to change things, not to deny what's happening. ~ Bill Nye