Statesmanship Quotes

The last degree of honesty has always been, and is still considered incompatible with statesmanship. To hunger and thirst after righteousness has been naturally, as it were, supposed a disqualification for affairs ... ~ Harriet Martineau

Nine-nine of every hundred among you probably desire peace, while the balance may hold war a condition to be preferred; but what can be the mental norm of statesmanship where such a minority conquer the peace-lovers? ~ Eden Phillpotts

If you look at it closely, every individual is a separate entity, state and culture. The macro state is a federation of citizens who accept to live under the same law. ~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

The people of the two nations [French and English] must be brought into mutual dependence by the supply of each other's wants. There is no other way of counteracting the antagonism of language and race. It is God's own method of producing an entente cordiale, and no other plan is worth a farthing. ~ Richard Cobden

The opposition is indispensable. A good statesman, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opposition than from his fervent supporters. ~ Walter Lippmann

Once the revolution of exploitation is under way, statesmanship and craftsmanship are gradually replaced by salesmanship. ~ Wendell Berry

Diplomacy's primary law: LEAVE ROOM FOR NEGOTIATION. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

The reality is that the American people have no desire for an empire. This is not to say that they don't want the benefits, both economic and strategic. It simply means that they don't want to pay the price. Economically, Americans want the growth potential of open markets but not the pains. Politically, they want to have an enormous influence, but not the resentment of the world. Military, they want to be protected from dangers but not to bear the burdens of long-term strategy. ~ George Friedman

In statesmanship there are predicaments from which it is impossible to escape without some wrongdoing. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte

Compromise makes a good umbrella, but a poor roof; it is temporary expedient, often wise in party politics, almost sure to be unwise in statesmanship. ~ James Russell Lowell

Honest statesmanship is the wise employment of individual meanness for the public good. ~ Abraham Lincoln

It is wise statesmanship which suggests that in time of peace we must prepare for war, and it is no less a wise benevolence that makes preparation in the hour of peace for assuaging the ills that are sure to accompany war. ~ Clara Barton

The legislator must be in advance of his age.
Across the mind of the statesman flash ever and anon the brilliant, though partial, intimations of future events ... Something which is more than fore-sight and less than prophetic knowledge marks the statesman a peculiar being among his contemporaries. ~ Woodrow Wilson

Statesmanship is developed in the hard knocks of general experience, private and public. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

Statesmen should remember that they have been elected to persuade and to lead, and not just to accept as fixed the momentary moods and pernicious prejudices of the public. ~ Stanley Hoffmann

Statesmen have to bend to the collective will of their peoples or be broken. ~ Woodrow Wilson

The frenzy of nations is the statesmanship of fate. ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

[One] of the fundamental principles of statesmanship: to persuade radicals that change must be gradual in order to be permanent, and to persuade conservatives that change must be. ~ Will Durant

The difference between being an elder statesman And posing successfully as an elder statesman Is practically negligible. ~ T. S. Eliot

He has conferred on the practice of vacillation the aura of statesmanship. ~ Kenneth Baker

To craftsmanship we shall add statesmanship in the capitol of peace. ~ Warren R. Austin

The art of statesmanship is to foresee the inevitable and to expedite its occurrence. ~ Charles Maurice De Talleyrand

The author defines professionalism as exemplified by his subjects in their mutual unwillingness to take expected opposition personally. They would not allow grudges to get in the way of more important business. ~ Chris Matthews

The challenge of statesmanship is to have the vision to dream of a better, safer world and the courage, persistence, and patience to turn that dream into reality. ~ Ronald Reagan

To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman. ~ George Santayana

When everybody has got money they cut taxes, and when they're broke they raise them. That's statesmanship of the highest order. ~ Will Rogers

Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of today. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

And, consequently, the art of propaganda or public information becomes one of the most powerful forms of directive statesmanship. ~ John Grierson

No man is educated for statesmanship who cannot see his time from the perspective of the past. ~ Will Durant

The statesman cannot govern without stability of belief, true or false. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Statesman create; ordinary leaders consume. The ordinary leader is satisfied with ameliorating the environment, not transforming it; a statesman must be a visionary and an educator. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

You can always get the truth from an American statesman after he has turned seventy, or given up all hope of the Presidency. ~ Wendell Phillips

He had been around politicians for a long time, and he was prepared for some outburst. ~ Stephen L. Carter

To befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business & corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

Americans talked about voters the same way Russians talked about Stalin. They had to be obeyed. ~ Ken Follett

Where the conditions to which material progress... are most fully realized... where wealth is greatest... we find the deepest poverty, the sharpest struggle for existence, and the most enforced idleness... Material progress does not merely fail to relieve poverty - it actually produces it... This association of progress with poverty is the great enigma of our times. It is the central fact from which spring industrial, social, and political difficulties that perplex the world and with which statesmanship and philanthropy and education grapple in vain. ~ Henry George (Progress And Poverty, 1884)

It is sound statesmanship to add two battleships every time our neighbour adds one and two stories to our skyscrapers every time he piles a new one on top of his to threaten our light. There is no limit to this soundness but the sky. ~ Mark Twain

In statesmanship get formalities right, never mind about the moralities. ~ Mark Twain

Since the debt limit simply accommodates debt that has already been incurred, raising it should, in theory, be perfunctory. But politicians have found it a useful shibboleth for showing their fealty fiscal discipline, even as they vote to ratify the debts their previous actions have a beginning the country to pay. The symbol of railing against debt has proven politically beneficial, even if not substantively meaningful. ~ Thomas E. Mann

He had become, through a combination of heritage and character, a keeper of the national conscience. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Politics is an art and not a science, and what is required for its mastery is not the rationality of the engineer but the wisdom and the moral strength of the statesman ~ Hans J. Morgenthau

A disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman. ~ Edmund Burke

Seward would inspire a cow with statesmanship if she understood our language. ~ Henry Adams

Men who think in lifetimes are of little use to statesmanship. ~ H.G.Wells

To recall a voter's name is statesmanship. To forget it is oblivion. ~ Dale Carnegie

The challenge was that it was harder to be subtle than strident. ~ Nancy Gibbs; Michael Duffy

The facts of nature cannot in the long run be violated. Penetrating and seeping through everything like water, they will undermine any system that fails to take account of them, and sooner or later they will bring about its downfall. But an authority wise enough in its statesmanship to give sufficient free play to nature - of which spirit is a part - need fear no premature decline. ~ Carl Jung

Political parties are on the hunt to search and destroy each other, as though we were involved in some kind of enemy combat, rather than the work of statesmanship. ~ John Lewis

Aristotle is the last Greek philosopher who faces the world cheerfully; after him, all have, in one form or another, a philosophy of retreat. The world is bad; let us learn to be independent of it. External goods are precarious; they are the gift of fortune, not the reward of our own efforts. Only subjective goods - virtue, or contentment through resignation - are secure, and these alone, therefore, will be valued by the wise man. Diogenes personally was a man full of vigour, but his doctrine, like all those of the Hellenistic age, was one to appeal to weary men, in whom disappointment had destroyed natural zest. And it was certainly not a doctrine calculated to promote art or science or statesmanship, or any useful activity except one of protest against powerful evil. ~ Anonymous

Idealism is frequently another word for self-righteousness, a disease that can only be corrected by a profound understanding power in its complete sense. ~ George Friedman

Given an area of law that legislators were happy to hand over to the affected industries and a technology that was both unfamiliar and threatening, the prospects for legislative insight were poor. Lawmakers were assured by lobbyists
a) that this was business as usual, that no dramatic changes were being made by the Green or White papers; or
b) that the technology presented a terrible menace to the American cultural industries, but that prompt and statesmanlike action would save the day; or
c) that layers of new property rights, new private enforcers of those rights, and technological control and surveillance measures were all needed in order to benefit consumers, who would now be able to "purchase culture by the sip rather than by the glass" in a pervasively monitored digital environment.
In practice, somewhat confusingly, these three arguments would often be combined. Legislators' statements seemed to suggest that this was a routine Armageddon in which firm, decisive statesmanship was needed to preserve the digital status quo in a profoundly transformative and proconsumer way. Reading the congressional debates was likely to give one conceptual whiplash.
To make things worse, the press was - in 1995, at least - clueless about these issues. It was not that the newspapers were ignoring the Internet. They were paying attention - obsessive attention in some cases. But as far as the mainstream press was concerned, the story line on the Internet was sex: po ~ James Boyle

I would like to thank President Goodluck Jonathan for his display of statesmanship in setting a precedent for us that has now made our people proud to be Nigerians wherever they are. ~ Muhammadu Buhari

The idea that the object of constitutions is not to confirm the predominance of any interest, but to prevent it; to preserve with equal care the independence of labour and the security of property; to make the rich safe against envy, and the poor against oppression, marks the highest level attained by the statesmanship of Greece. ~ Lord Acton

The great task of statesmanship is to apply past lessons to new situations, to draw correct analogies to understand and act upon present forces, to recognise the need for change ... ~ Malcolm Fraser

Social movements are at once the symptoms and the instruments of progress. Ignore them and statesmanship is irrelevant; fail to use them and it is weak. ~ Walter Lippmann

Great statesmen seem to direct and rule by a sort of power to put themselves in the place of the nation over which they are set, and may thus be said to possess the souls of poets at the same time they display the coarser sense and the more vulgar sagacity of practical men of business. ~ Woodrow Wilson

The chief element in the art of statesmanship under modern conditions is the ability to elucidate the confused and clamorous interests which converge upon the seat of government. It is an ability to penetrate from the na?ve self-interest of each group to its permanent and real interest. Statesmanship consists in giving the people not what they want but what they will learn to want. ~ Walter Lippmann

The kind of president we need has little to do with ideology and more to do with a willingness to wield power to moral ends. ~ George Friedman

Religion begins by offering magical aid to harassed and bewildered men; it culminates by giving to a people that unity of morals and belief which seems so favorable to statesmanship and art; it ends by fighting suicidally in the lost cause of the past. For ~ Will Durant

I consider even a victorious war as an evil, from which statesmanship must endeavor to spare nations. ~ Otto Von Bismarck

It is seldom that statesmen have the option of choosing between a good and an evil. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

There is usually a moment in the life of a new president when he begins to see himself not as an aspirant desperate to win but as a statesman above the squalor and sweat of actual vote getting. Rising men do not like to be reminded of the smell of the stables; dignitaries dislike recollections of the dust through which they have come. ~ Jon Meacham

Party animosity was concealed under a veil of studied courtesy. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

For statesmanship is a science and an art; one must have lived for it and been long prepared. Only a philosopher-king is fit to guide a nation. "Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and wisdom and political leadership meet in the same man, ... cities will never cease from ill, nor the human race" (473). This is the key-stone of the arch of Plato's thought. ~ Will Durant

presidents, when not outright telling lies, feel obliged to shade the truth most of the time. This is called politics; when a president lies successfully, he is called a statesman. ~ Gore Vidal

The President is also captured in a well-worn TV news clip, making a boilerplate response to a question on terrorism and then asking the reporters to watch his drive. Well, that's what you get if you catch the President on a golf course. If Eisenhower had done this, as he often did, it would have been presented as calm statesmanship. If Clinton had done it, as he often did, it would have shown his charm. ~ Christopher Hitchens

I am a Conservative to preserve all that is good in our constitution, a Radical to remove all that is bad. I seek to preserve property and to respect order, and I equally decry the appeal to the passions of the many or the prejudices of the few. ~ Benjamin Disraeli

I see good ideas on the Republican side as well as the Democratic side. You have to return civility and statesmanship to governance. If you don't do that, it doesn't matter what portfolio of issue you're pushing, nothing is going to get done. ~ Richard Carmona

If, in 2008, I could have not been in equities, I wouldn't have been in equities. If I could have not bet on the Seahawks in the Super Bowl, I wouldn't have bet on the Seahawks. Life and statesmanship are not lived with the benefit of hindsight. ~ Bret Stephens

In every era, humanity produces demonic individuals and seductive ideas of repression. The task of statesmanship is to prevent their rise to power and sustain an international order capable of deterring them if they do achieve it. ~ Henry Kissinger

Almost all empires were created by force, but none can be sustained by it. Universal rule, to last, needs to translate force into obligation. Otherwise, the energies of the rulers will be exhausted in maintaining their dominance at the expense of their ability to shape the future, which is the ultimate task of statesmanship. Empires persist if repression gives way to consensus. So ~ Henry Kissinger

Stern men with empires in their brains. ~ James Russell Lowell

If you wish to preserve your secret, wrap it up in frankness. ~ Alexander Smith

Emotion is always the enemy of wise statesmanship. ~ Stephen Kinzer

War can be prevented only by broad-minded statesmanship - a statesmanship that understands how to enlist people's interests in a leading cause. ~ Ellen Key

It is within your power at this very moment not only to consumate an act of enlightened statesmanship, but, as the instrument of the Almighty, to restore to freedom a race of men. ~ Robert Dale Owen

He cultivated ideological fuzziness. ~ H.W. Brands

True statesmanship is the art of changing a nation from what it is into what it ought to be. ~ William Rounseville Alger

Hence a certain tension between religion and society marks the higher stages of every civilization. Religion begins by offering magical aid to harassed and bewildered men; it culminates by giving to a people that unity of morals and belief which seems so favorable to statesmanship and art; it ends by fighting suicidally in the lost cause of the past. ~ Will Durant

Statistical science is indispensable to modern statesmanship. In legislation as in physical science it is beginning to be understood that we can control terrestrial forces only by obeying their laws. The legislator must formulate in his statutes not only the national will, but also those great laws of social life revealed by statistics. ~ James A. Garfield