Richard Holbrooke Quotes

27 quotes in 494 categories

• MEMRI allows an audience far beyond the Arabic-speaking world to observe the wide variety of Arab voices speaking through the media, schoolbooks, and pulpits to…
• A world without the United Nations or with a paralyzed United Nations would be far more costly to all of us and far more dangerous…
• Bureaucracies have a natural tendency not to cooperate, coordinate or consolidate with each other. They won't cooperate with each other - unless they are forced…
• I think history is continuous. It doesn't begin or end on Pearl Harbor Day or the day Lyndon Johnson withdraws from the presidency or on…
• Know something about something. Don’t just present your wonderful self to the world. Constantly amass knowledge and offer it around.
• In diplomacy, as in life itself, one often learns more from failures than from successes. Triumphs will seem, in retrospect, to be foreordained, a series…
• There is a split between Muslims who want to practice their faith in peace and tolerance with other religions and other people, and these extreme,…
• I still believe in the possibility of the United States, with all its will and all its strength, and I don't just mean military, persevering…
• Our enemy is Al Qaeda and its allies, people who have publicly said they wish to attack the United States again, people who have publicly…
• United Nations peacekeepers are going all over the world spreading AIDS even while they're trying to bring peace. What a supreme irony.
• The World War II generation believed the United States could do anything - anything... And Vietnam was a shattering experience for everyone.
• The controlled chaos is one way to get creativity. The intensity of it, the physical rush, the intimacy created the kind of dialogue that leads…
• It is essential that the foreign forces who have invaded and occupy large parts of the Congo halt their offensive action
• You have to test your hypothesis against other theories. Certainty in the face of complex situations is very dangerous.
• Nothing generates more heat in the government than the question of who is chosen to participate in important meetings.
• World War I was not inevitable, as many historians say. It could have been avoided, and it was a diplomatically botched negotiation.
• Diplomacy is like jazz: endless variations on a theme.
• As countries grapple with modernization, people who are left behind tend to hold firmer and firmer to their view of the evil of modernity.
• If a country denies it has AIDS, that country will inevitably become an even greater victim.
• You will never catch up with the spread of AIDS no matter how much money, no matter how many antiretrovirals are put into the system,…

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