Important Quotes of International Relations

Important Quotes of International Relations

“The glorious thing about the human race is that it does change the world—constantly. It is the human being’s capacity for struggling against being overwhelmed which is remarkable and exhilarating.”

—Lorraine Hansberry, American author

The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.

—Sydney J. Harris, American political journalist

The belief that one’s own view of reality is the only reality is the most dangerous of all delusions.

—Paul Watzlawick, Austrian psychologist

The world is at a critical juncture, and so are you . . . Go ahead and make your plans . . . and don’t stop learning. But be open to the detours that lead to new discoveries.

—Kofi Annan, former UN secretary-general

“He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.”

—Leonardo da Vinci, artist

Critical reflection on practice is a requirement of the relationship between theory and practice. Otherwise theory becomes simply “blah, blah, blah,” and practice, pure activism.

—Paulo Freire, Brazilian pedagogical theorist

It’s important that we take a hard clear look . . . not at some simple world, either of universal goodwill or universal hostility, but the complex, changing, and sometimes dangerous world that really exists.

—Jimmy Carter, U.S. president

When I was working in Washington and helping formulate American foreign policies, I found myself borrowing from all three types of thinking: realism, liberalism, and constructivism. I found them all helpful, though in different ways and in different circumstances.

—Joseph S. Nye, international relations scholar and U.S. policy maker

If you tell people the world is complicated, you’re not doing your job as a social scientist. They already know it’s complicated. Your job is to distill it, simplify it, and give them a sense of what is the single [cause], or what are the couple of powerful causes that explain this powerful phenomenon.

—Samuel Huntington, political scientist

“Decisions and actions in the international arena can be understood, predicted, and manipulated

only insofar as the factors influencing the decision can be identified and isolated.”

—Arnold Wolfers, political scientist

In the episodic and visual comprehension of our foreign policy, there is serious danger that the larger significance of developments will be lost in a kaleidoscope of unrelated events. Continuities will be obscured, causal factors unidentified.

—George W. Ball, former U.S. undersecretary of state

It is doubtful that decision makers hear arguments on the merits and weigh them judiciously before choosing a course of action.

—Daniel Kahneman and Jonathan Renshon, decision-making theorists

Nothing comes to my desk that is perfectly solvable. Any given decision you make you’ll wind up with a 30 to 40 percent chance that it isn’t going to work. You have to own that and feel comfortable with the way you made the decision.

—Barack Obama, U.S. president

“By virtue of the great resources they command, Great Powers, and, even more, superpowers,

have special rights and special responsibilities … even though their great power may tempt

them to overreach and neglect their duties.”

—Robert Jervis, political scientist

Good leadership in this century may or may not be transformational, but it will most certainly require a careful understanding of the context of change.

—Joseph S. Nye, international relations scholar and U.S. policy maker

The United States should take the lead in running the world in the way that the world ought to be run.

—Harry S Truman, U.S. president

Challenge and opportunity always come together—under certain conditions one could be transformed into the other.

—Hu Jintao, former Chinese president

“A global human society based on poverty for many and prosperity for a few, characterized by

islands of wealth surrounded by a sea of poverty, is unsustainable.”

—Thabo Mbeki, former president of South Africa

I hate imperialism. I detest colonialism. And I fear the consequences of their last bitter struggle for life. We are determined, that our nation, and the world as a whole, shall not be the play thing of one small corner of the world.

—Sukarno, former president of Indonesia

A multipolar world cannot exist without recognizing the status and participation of developing countries.

—Li Peng, former Chinese premier

“A novel redistribution of power among states, markets, and civil society is underway, ending the steady accumulation of power in the hands of states that began with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.”

—Jessica T. Mathews, international relations scholar

The quest for international security involves the unconditional surrender by every nation, in a certain measure, of its liberty of action, its sovereignty that is to say, and it is clear beyond all doubt that no other road can lead to such security.

—Albert Einstein, Nobel Prize–winning physicist

The world’s 190-plus states now co-exist with a larger number of powerful non sovereign and at least partly (and often largely) independent actors, ranging from corporations to non-government organizations (NGOs), from terrorist groups to drug cartels.… The near monopoly of power once enjoyed by sovereign entities is being eroded.

—Richard N. Haass, Foreign Relations Council president

Even the weak become strong when they are united.

—Friedrich Schiller, German philosopher

“To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years. To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day.”

—Sir Winston Churchill, British prime minister

Only the dead have seen the end of war.

—George Santayana, Spanish-American philosopher

Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.

—Albert Einstein, Nobel Prize–winning physicist

“The adversaries of the world are not in conflict because they are armed. They are armed because

they are in conflict and have not yet learned peaceful ways to resolve their conflicting interests.”

—Richard M. Nixon, U.S. president

We have not eternal allies and we have not perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual and those interests it is our duty to follow.

—Lord Palmerston, British prime minister

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.

—Martin Luther King Jr., American civil rights activist

Warfare is not a question of brute strength, but rather of winning and losing friends.

—Count Diego Sarmiento Gondomar, Spanish ambassador to London in 1618

Those who scoff at “balance-of-power diplomacy” should recognize that the alternative  to a balance of power is an imbalance of power—and history shows us that nothing so drastically escalates the danger of war as such an imbalance.

—Richard M. Nixon, U.S. president

“Today the real test of power is not capacity to make war but capacity to prevent it.”

—Anne O’Hare McCormick, American journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner

There are only two forces in the world, the sword and the spirit. In the long run the sword will always be conquered by the spirit.

—Napoleon Bonaparte, former French emperor

Law is the essential foundation of stability and order both within societies and in international relations.

—J. William Fulbright, former U.S. senator

The quest for international security involves the unconditional surrender by every nation, in a certain measure, of its liberty of action, its sovereignty that is to say, and it is clear beyond all doubt that no other road can lead to such security.

—Albert Einstein, Nobel Prize-winning physicist

“It has been said that arguing against globalization is like arguing against the laws of gravity.”

—Kofi Annan, former UN secretary-general

Financial markets are like the mirror of mankind, revealing every hour of each working day the way we value ourselves and the resources of the world around us.

—Niall Ferguson, British historian

The importance of money flows from it being a link between the present and the future.

—John Maynard Keynes, British economist

The architecture of the international finance system must be reformed to reduce the susceptibility to crises. The ultimate key is not economics or finance, but politics—the art of developing support for strong policy.

—Robert Rubin, former U.S. secretary of the treasury

For the great difference between an ordinary casino where you can go into or stay away from, and the global casino of high finance, is that in the latter all of us are involuntarily engaged in the days’ play.

—Susan Strange, economist and international relations scholar

“Globalization has changed us into a company that searches the world, not just to sell or tosource, but to find intellectual capital—the world’s best talents and greatest ideas.”

—Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric

We must ensure that the global market is embedded in broadly shared values and practices that reflect global social needs, and that all the world’s people share the benefits of globalization.

—Kofi Annan, former secretary-general of the United Nations

“In the globalized world that is ours, maybe we are moving towards a global village, but that global village brings in a lot of different people, a lot of different ideas, lots of different backgrounds, lots of different aspirations.”

—Lakhdar Brahimi, UN envoy and adviser

Global interdependence today means that economic disasters in developing countries could create a backlash on developed countries.

—Atal Bihari Vajpayee, former prime minister of India

Once you have glimpsed the world as it might be, as it ought to be, as it’s going to be (however that vision appears to you), it is impossible to live compliant and complacent anymore in the world as it is.

—Victoria Safford, Unitarian minister

A relationship exists between the health of individuals within a state and that state’s national

security. A population’s health is of utmost importance to the state’s ability to survive.

—Jeremy Youde, global health expert

People from all over the world will draw knowledge and inspiration from the same technology platform, but different cultures will flourish on it. It is the same soil, but different trees will grow. The next phase of globalization is going to be more globalization—more and more local content made global.

—Thomas L. Friedman, international journalist

“To deny people their human rights is to challenge their very humanity.”

—Nelson Mandela, former president of South Africa

Every human life is precious . . . it is not just about our criminal justice system, which we also want to be proportionate and restorative; it is about the type of society that we want to build—a society that values every person, and one that doesn’t give up on its people.

—Laurence Lien, member of Parliament of Singapore

Poverty is the worst form of violence.

—Mahatma Gandhi, Indian nationalist leader

Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights or keep them.

—Franklin Delano Roosevelt, U.S. president

If you are neutral in a situation of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.

—Archbishop Desmund Tutu, Nobel Prize winner

“To waste, to destroy our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.”

—Theodore Roosevelt, U.S. president

Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s needs, but not every man’s greed.

—Mohandas Gandhi, Indian peace activist

Future prosperity and stability means rethinking how we exploit the planet’s natural assets.

—Ban Ki-moon, UN secretary-general

Our entire planet, its land and water areas, the Earth’s surface and its subsoil provide today the arena for a worldwide economy, the dependence of whose various parts upon each other has become indissoluble.

—Leon Trotsky, Russian communist theoretician

“All of us are going to spend the rest of our lives in the future. Therefore, if we want to be practical, we must focus our attention on the trends and ideas that are shaping the future. What will these changes mean for you, your family, your career, your community and your investments?”

—Tim Mack, futurist

Those caught up in revolutionary change rarely understand its ultimate significance.

—Boutros Boutros-Ghali, former UN secretary-general

It is today we must create the world of the future.

—Eleanor Roosevelt. U.S. first lady

Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.

—John F. Kennedy, U.S. president

If our image of the future were different, the decisions of today would be different. [An inspiring vision] will impel us to action. But if there is no commonly held image of what is worth striving for, society will lack both motivation and direction.

—Willis Harman, policy analyst