Statesmanship Quotes

Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia – the fruits of his genius for statesmanship – and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milošević.

There's a point, you know, where treachery is so complete and unashamed that it becomes statesmanship.

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.

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.

Why is it that all men who have become outstanding in philosophy, statesmanship, poetry or the arts are melancholic,

A leader must lead. Where others see obstacles, he must see opportunities. When others see problems, he must see possibilities ... Civilization is not built on a negation but on an affirmation- an affirmation of the bright and promising possibilities that the future holds for those who are enterprising enough to pursue them.

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.

Gods be good, why would any man ever want to be king? When everyone was shouting King in the North, King in the North, I told myself ... swore to myself ... that I would be a good king, as honorable as Father, strong, just, loyal to my friends and brave when I faced my enemies ... now I can't even tell one from the other.

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

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

Diplomacy's primary law: LEAVE ROOM FOR NEGOTIATION.

Statesmanship is developed in the hard knocks of general experience, private and public.

The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils.

you couldn’t get a politician to even read the legislation they were voting on. So much of politics had become gamesmanship. Leadership and statesmanship had died many years before.

With us, our Priests are Administrators of all Business, Art, and Science; Directors of Trade, Commerce, Generalship, Architecture, Engineering, Education, Statesmanship, Legislature, Morality, Theology; doing nothing themselves, they are the Causes of everything worth doing, that is done by others.

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.

There’s a point, you know, where treachery is so complete and unashamed that it becomes statesmanship.

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.

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.

Here was another peculiar Trump attribute: an inability to see his actions the way most others saw them. Or to fully appreciate how people expected him to behave. The notion of the presidency as an institutional and political concept, with an emphasis on ritual and propriety and semiotic messaging—statesmanship—was quite beyond him.

(Patrick Henry) He understood that the home was the foundation of a stable society and that the authority a man "exercised within the larger society was rooted in the authority exercised at home." Thus ... the training ground for all sound leadership is the family.

To recall a voter’s name is statesmanship. To forget it is oblivion.

On Lincoln: "A profound common sense is the best genius for statesmanship.

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

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.

Party animosity was concealed under a veil of studied courtesy.

Help yourself with the state! It's on democracy!

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.

Foreign policy is in danger of turning into a subdivision of domestic politics instead of an exercise in shaping the future. If the major countries conduct their policies in this manner internally, their relations on the international stage will suffer concomitant distortions. The search for perspective may well be replaced by a hardening of differences, statesmanship by posturing.

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

So many of the professional foreign policy establishment, and so many of their hangers-on among the lumpen academics and journalists, had become worried by the frenzy and paranoia of the Nixonian Vietnam policy that consensus itself was threatened. Ordinary intra-mural and extra-mural leaking, to such duly constituted bodies as Congress, was getting out of hand. It was Kissinger who inaugurated the second front or home front of the war; illegally wiretapping the telephones even of his own staff and of his journalistic clientele. (I still love to picture the face of Henry Brandon when he found out what his hero had done to his telephone.) This war against the enemy within was the genesis of Watergate; a nexus of high crime and misdemeanour for which Kissinger himself, as Isaacson wittily points out, largely evaded blame by taking to his ‘shuttle’ and staying airborne. Incredibly, he contrived to argue in public with some success that if it were not for democratic distempers like the impeachment process his own selfless, necessary statesmanship would have been easier to carry out. This is true, but not in the way that he got newspapers like Rees-Mogg’s Times to accept.

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.

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.

The eternal sea of politics is best left to politicians.

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.

in statesmanship, too great a preoccupation to avoid the errors of the past makes it likely that you will fall into the errors of the present.

Right in itself is powerless; in nature, it is Might that rules. To enlist might on the side of right, so that by means of it right may rule, is the problem of statesmanship.

[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.

the business of statesmanship is to invent new terms for institutions which under their old names have become odious to the public.

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

The nature of these challenges was not singular to the 1930s. 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. The interwar years’ toxic mixture of facile pacifism, geopolitical imbalance, and allied disunity allowed these forces a free hand.

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?

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.

The first principle of his policy was that the various peoples of his empire should be left free in their religious worship and beliefs, for he fully understood the first principle of statesmanship—that religion is stronger than the state.

Vital art comes always from a cross between art and life: art being of one sex only, and quite sterile by itself. Such a cross is always possible; for though the artist may not have the capacity to bring his art into contact with the higher life of his time; fermenting in its religion, its philosophy, its science, and its statesmanship (perhaps indeed their may not be any statesmanship going), he can at least bring it into contact with the obvious life and common passions of the streets.

Under the attempt to perform the impossible there sets in a general disintegration. When legislation fails, those who look upon it as a sovereign remedy simply cry out for more legislation. A sound and wise statesmanship which recognizes and attempts to abide by its limitations will undoubtedly find itself displaced by that type of public official who promises much, talks much, legislates much, expends much, but accomplishes little. The deliberate, sound judgement of the country is likely to find it has been superseded by a popular whim.

In the midst of this display of statesmanship, eloquence, cleverness, and exalted ambition, Alcibiades live d a life full of prodigious luxury, drunkenness, debauchery, and insolence. He was effeminate in his dress and would walk through the market-place trailing his long purple robes, and he spent extravagantly. He had the decks of his trireme scut away to allow him to sleep more comfortably, and his bedding was slung on cords, rather than spread on the hard planks. He had a golden shield made for him, which was emblazoned not with any ancestral device, but with the figure of Eros armed with a thunderbolt. The leading men of Athens watched all this with disgust and indignation and they were deeply disturbed by his contemptuous and lawless behavior, which seemed to them monstrous and suggested the habits of the tyrant. The people's feelings towards him have been very aptly expressed by Aristophanes in the line: "They long for him, they hate him, they cannot do without him..." The fact was that his voluntary donations, the public shows he supported, his unrivaled munificence to the state, the fame of his ancestry, the power of his oratory and his physical strength and beauty... all combined to make the Athenians forgive him everything else, and they were constantly finding euphemisms for his lapses and putting them down to youthful high spirits and honorable ambition.

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.

He was the most persuasive speaker, less for his words than character behind them. He made every listener feel he had done his best to master every aspect of this question, who has been driven by logic to arrive at certain conclusions, and who is disguising from us no argument on either side.

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.

From Hitler he might have learned that angry demonstrations unnerve well-conducted people and that in statesmanship the advantage always lies with the unprincipled, the brutal, and the insane. Hitler could at will convulse himself with rage and, when he had gained his ends, be coolly correct to his staff, all in a matter of moments

The foremost duty, therefore, of the rulers of the State should be to make sure that the laws and institutions, the general character and administration of the commonwealth, shall be such as of themselves to realize public well-being and private prosperity. This is the proper scope of wise statesmanship and is the work of the rulers. Now

The challenge was that it was harder to be subtle than strident.

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.

In a democracy government is the God.

State first, subject second, statesman last.

A policy paralysis can warrant a permanent illness to a functioning state.

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. The interwar years’ toxic mixture of facile pacifism, geopolitical imbalance, and allied disunity allowed these forces a free hand.

Politics look very simple to the outsider whether he is a businessman or a soldier – it is only when you get into it that all the angles and hard work become apparent. James Forrestal

The wheels of our cultural “moral compass” run on the racist belief that women are somehow less privileged than males – and therefore many women don’t ever belong to even the sense of belonging.

Compassion is not just an emotion; it is a feeling that triggers a response. Compassion marries empathy and action. It also requires respect for those who will come after us—a commitment to stewardship.

The first principle of the exploitive mind is to divide and conquer. And surely there has never been a people more ominously and painfully divided than we are—both against each other and within ourselves. Once the revolution of exploitation is under way, statesmanship and craftsmanship are gradually replaced by salesmanship. Its stock in trade in politics is to sell despotism and avarice as freedom and democracy.

By the summer of 1791, after his victories in his skirmishes with Jefferson and Madison over public credit, assumption, and a central bank, Hamilton had attained the summit of his power. Such stellar success might have bred an intoxicating sense of invincibility. But his vigorous reign had also made him the enfant terrible of the early republic, and a substantial minority of the country was mobilized against him. This should have made him especially watchful of his reputation. Instead, in one of history’s most mystifying cases of bad judgment, he entered into a sordid affair with a married woman named Maria Reynolds that, if it did not blacken his name forever, certainly sullied it. From the lofty heights of statesmanship, Hamilton fell back into something reminiscent of the squalid world of his West Indian boyhood. Philadelphia

There is no generally effective technique for assimilating the shadow. It is more like diplomacy or statesmanship and it is always an individual matter. First one has to accept and take seriously the existence of the shadow. Second, one has to become aware of its qualities and intentions. This happens through conscientious attention to moods, fantasies and impulses. Third, a long process of negotiation is unavoidable.

There is no generally effective technique for assimilating the shadow. It is more like diplomacy or statesmanship and it is always an individual matter. First one has to accept and take seriously the existence of the shadow. Second, one has to become aware of its qualities and intentions. This happens through conscientious attention to moods, fantasies and impulses. Third, a long process of negotiation is unavoidable.

The difference between a Statesman and a Politician is that a Statesman is versed in the history behind the policies, thus rooted deep into bedrock beliefs that are not easily swayed by party politics or financial gain.

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: pornography, online predation, more pornography. The lowbrow press stopped there. To be fair, the highbrow press was also interested in Internet legal issues (the regulation of pornography, the regulation of online predation) and constitutional questions (the First Amendment protection of Internet pornography). Reporters were also asking questions about the social effect of the network (including, among other things, the threats posed by pornography and online predators).

it does not matter whether the actual leader is called King or Minister or party-leader, or even (as in the case of Cecil Rhodes) that he has no defined relation to the State. The nobility which managed Roman politics in the period of the three Punic Wars had, from the point of view of constitutional law, no existence whatever. The leader’s responsibility is always to a minority that possesses the instincts of statesmanship and represents the rest of the nation in the struggle of history.

Side by side with the limitless possibilities opened up by the new technologies, reflection about international order must include the internal dangers of societies driven by mass consensus, deprived of the context and foresight needed on terms compatible with their historical character. In every other era, this has been considered the essence of leadership; in our own, it risks being reduced to a series of slogans designed to capture immediate short-term approbation. Foreign policy is in danger of turning into a subdivision of domestic politics instead of an exercise in shaping the future. If the major countries conduct their policies in this manner internally, their relations on the international stage will suffer concomitant distortions. The search for perspective may well be replaced by a hardening of differences, statesmanship by posturing. As diplomacy is transformed into gestures geared toward passions, the search for equilibrium risks giving way to a testing of limits.

When my children enter college I trust that education will open to them many paths toward the understanding of life. “May my son study history,” said Napoleon at St. Helena, “for it is the only true philosophy, and the only true psychology.” Psychology is largely a theory of human behavior, philosophy is too often an ideal of human behavior, and history is occasionally a record of human behavior. We cannot trust all the historians, for sometimes, like Akbar’s, they were engaged by their heroes and gave them all the virtues and the victories. But no man is educated, or fit for statesmanship, who cannot see his time in the perspective of the past. Every lad and lass should begin, in high school, an orderly recapitulation of the pageant of history; not, as we used to do, with Greece and Rome, which were the old age of the ancient world, but with Mesopotamia and Egypt and Crete, from which civilization flowed over into Greece and Rome, and through them to Northern Europe and ourselves.

He protested. "Wealth," he said, "is no sort of power at all unless you make it one. If it is so in your world it is so by inadvertency. Wealth is a State-made thing, a convention, the most artificial of powers. You can, by subtle statesmanship, contrive what it shall buy and what it shall not. In your world it would seem you have made leisure, movement, any sort of freedom, life itself, _purchaseable_. The more fools you! A poor working man with you is a man in discomfort and fear. No wonder your rich have power.

[T]here cannot be a more certain symptom of the approaching ruin of a State than when a firm adherence to party is fixed upon as the only test of merit, and all the qualifications requisite to a right discharge of every employment, are reduced to that single standard.

We think deterrence works. The problem is that, notwithstanding the confident claims of countless theorists, including those reviewed here, we do not really know why nuclear bombs have not been dropped since 1945, or at the very least, we cannot prove our theories and instincts. Was it good statesmanship? Was Kenneth Waltz right, and nuclear weapons really are the great stabilizers? Or perhaps it was just luck? As is often said about the inadvisability of testing nuclear deterrence failures, we have never run the experiment, and we hope we never will.

If you cannot drop a wrong problem, then the first time you meet one you will be stuck with it for the rest of your career. Einstein was tremendously creative in his early years, but once he began, in midlife, the search for a unified theory, he spent the rest of his life on it and had about nothing to show for all the effort. I have seen this many times while watching how science is done. It is most likely to happen to the very creative people; their previous successes convince them they can solve any problem, but there are other reasons besides overconfidence why, in many fields, sterility sets in with advancing age. Managing a creative career is not an easy task, or else it would often be done. In mathematics, theoretical physics, and astrophysics, age seems to be a handicap (all characterized by high, raw creativity), while in music composition, literature, and statesmanship, age and experience seem to be an asset. As valued by Bell Telephone Laboratories in the late 1970s, the first 15 years of my career included all they listed, and for my second 15 years they listed nothing I was very closely associated with! Yes, in my areas the really great things are generally done while the person is young, much as in athletics, and in old age you can turn to coaching (teaching), as I have done. Of course, I do not know your field of expertise to say what effect age will have, but I suspect really great things will be realized fairly young, though it may take years to get them into practice. My advice is if you want to do significant things, now is the time to start thinking (if you have not already done so) and not wait until it is the proper moment—which may never arrive!

But once it was conceded that Kissinger operated from a Realpolitik framework with intellectual, even moral principles of its own that were larger than himself or his personal advantage, then difficult questions about which decisions best served American interests or humanitarian ends were open to debate. Judgment calls weren’t the same as the perpetration of crimes (although some Realpolitikers were sure to recall Talleyrand’s words upon hearing of the murder of the Duc D’Enghien: “It was worse than a crime, it was a blunder”). Because Kissinger’s leftist critics didn’t accept Realism as a legitimate basis for foreign policy, they didn’t see any need to debate matters of judgment. What was more, locked in their partisan cocoons, they had trouble acknowledging that policymakers frequently made those judgment calls in a fog of ambiguity, in which outcomes could not be predicted and the ethics of a situation could point in several directions at once. “Statesmanship,” Kissinger said, “needs to be judged by the management of ambiguities, not absolutes.” But what the left craved, what they insisted on, was moral certainty in an uncertain world, or what Kissinger, in a combative mood, called “a nihilistic perfectionism.

In real life, the political and strategic games used by politicians and statesmen are in fact social games - requiring social intelligence as well as technical mastery of information. The skills of the orator, cultivated by ancient statesmen like Cicero and Demosthenes, or by modern statesmen like Benjamin Disraeli and Abraham Lincoln, require emotional maturity and the talent of seeing events through the eyes of others. A great statesman sets aside his own egoism. He takes a more objective view. In this way, he avoids the errors that attend a purely egoistic standpoint. The explanation which Kierkegaard offered, which is none too flattering, is that people no longer desire a great king, a heroic liberator or an authoritative religion. They don’t want strict rules or high standards. That is because they want an easy time of it. They want a soft existence which can only be guaranteed by eschewing the great and heroic, the true and the noble. This is the moral perspective of high politics and of true statesmanship. Only those who reach this fifth stage can transform world calamity into world regeneration.

Men are not content with a simple life: they are acquisitive, ambitious, competitive, and jealous; they soon tire of what they have, and pine for what they have not; and they seldom desire anything unless it belongs to others. The result is the encroachment of one group upon the territory of another, the rivalry of groups for the resources of the soil, and then war. Trade and finance develop, and bring new class-divisions. "Any ordinary city is in fact two cities, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich, each at war with the other; and in either division there are smaller ones - you would make a great mistake if you treated them as single states". A mercantile bourgeoisie arises, whose members seek social position through wealth and conspicuous consumption: "they will spend large sums of money on their wives". These changes in the distribution of wealth produce political changes: as the wealth of the merchant over-reaches that of the land-owner, aristocracy gives way to a plutocratic oligarchy - wealthy traders and bankers rule the state. Then statesmanship, which is the coordination of social forces and the adjustment of policy to growth, is replaced by politics, which is the strategy of parts and the lust of the spoils of office. Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principle. Aristocracy ruins itself by limiting too narrowly the circle within which power is confined; oligarchy ruins itself by the incautious scramble for immediate wealth. In rather case the end is revolution. When revolution comes it may seem to arise from little causes and petty whims, but though it may spring from slight occasions it is the precipitate result of grave and accumulated wrongs; when a body is weakened by neglected ills, the merest exposure may bring serious disease. Then democracy comes: the poor overcome their opponents, slaughtering some and banishing the rest; and give to the people an equal share of freedom and power. But even democracy ruins itself by excess – of democracy. Its basic principle is the equal right of all to hold office and determine public policy. This is at first glance a delightful arrangement; it becomes disastrous because the people are not properly equipped by education to select the best rulers and the wisest courses. As to the people they have no understanding, and only repeat what their rulers are pleased to tell them; to get a doctrine accepted or rejected it is only necessary to have it praised or ridiculed in a popular play (a hit, no doubt, at Aristophanes, whose comedies attacked almost every new idea). Mob-rule is a rough sea for the ship of state to ride; every wind of oratory stirs up the waters and deflects the course. The upshot of such a democracy is tyranny or autocracy; the crowd so loves flattery, it is so “hungry for honey” that at last the wiliest and most unscrupulous flatterer, calling himself the “protected of the people” rises to supreme power. (Consider the history of Rome). The more Plato thinks of it, the more astounded he is at the folly of leaving to mob caprice and gullibility the selection of political officials – not to speak of leaving it to those shady and wealth-serving strategists who pull the oligarchic wires behind the democratic stage. Plato complains that whereas in simpler matters – like shoe-making – we think only a specially-trained person will server our purpose, in politics we presume that every one who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state.

The mantle of a great power (was) inescapable. Was it better to extend diplomatic recognition to an unattractive regime and thereby hope to achieve a measure of political stability – or to refuse to recognize the regime on principle, thus emboldening its opponents and running the risk of losing both American investors' money and the lives of American investment in the widening civil war which might follow? Was it preferable to intervene militarily to protect American interests and bring stability and freedom – or rather to maintain the purity of neutrality and avoid a potential quagmire, but run the risk of appearing weak, and leave the outcome to be determined by forces beyond one's control?

The despotism of public opinion, the tyranny of majorities, the absence of intellectual freedom which seemed to him to degrade administration and bring statesmanship, learning, and literature to the level of the lowest, are no longer considered. The violence of party spirit has been mitigated, and the judgment of the wise is not subordinated to the prejudices of the ignorant. Other dangers have come.

Winston Churchill, who apart from his statesmanship also wrote and painted prolifically, famously defined success as arising from “the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.

Furthermore, a serious distortion of statesmanship occurs. Year by year, the statesman's time is increasingly devoted to an growing subset of misfits and neurotics, supposedly "oppressed" by an unfair social system which must be rectified. Little by little, the "oppressed" become the state's chief preoccupation, eclipsing the traditional tasks of statesmanship. The system no longer justifies itself in religious or historical terms, but on egalitarian grounds, in terms of "fairness" or "social justice." What actually happens, overall, is that greater and greater demands are placed upon the productive citizen to provide for the unproductive.

… the South is the land of Washington, who made our Nation – of Jefferson, who shaped its direction – and of Robert E. Lee who, after gallant failure, urged those who had followed him in bravery to reunite America in purpose and courage.” --President John F. Kennedy

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

I would rather contend with an honest asshole than a duplicitous diplomat.

There have been few people on earth so upright and single minded, so faithful in the discharge of their duties towards God and man, so elevated in aim, so dignified in character. The enlightened, independent, firm, God-fearing spirit of the French Protestants has blended its influence with that of the Puritan to form our national character and to establish those civil and religious institutions by which we are distinguished and blessed above all peoples." So skilled were they in the arts, such a spirit of economy and thrift characterized them, such loyalty had they to the principles of our national life, such sane and tolerant views in religious matters, such uprightness and excel lence and nobility of character, such high and command ing genius in statesmanship, that their presence, even though they formed but a small body as to numbers and were so assimilated as to sink their identity in the com mon body, exerted a moulding and ennobling influence upon the entire fabric of our national life. Deserving of high honour are Puritan and Pilgrim. Let orator and historian continue to sound their praises. But side by side with them, sharers in their sufferings, partakers of their perils, distinguished helpers in their great labours, stimulating and inspiring, stood a smaller company whose life and deeds and spirit were also important factors in giving this land those institutions of civil and religious liberty by means of which she is steadily ful filling her high mission and successfully working out her great destiny. BOOK ONE

There have been few people on earth so upright and single minded, so faithful in the discharge of their duties towards God and man, so elevated in aim, so dignified in character. The enlightened, independent, firm, God-fearing spirit of the French Protestants has blended its influence with that of the Puritan to form our national character and to establish those civil and religious institutions by which we are distinguished and blessed above all peoples." So skilled were they in the arts, such a spirit of economy and thrift characterized them, such loyalty had they to the principles of our national life, such sane and tolerant views in religious matters, such uprightness and excel lence and nobility of character, such high and command ing genius in statesmanship, that their presence, even though they formed but a small body as to numbers and were so assimilated as to sink their identity in the com mon body, exerted a moulding and ennobling influence upon the entire fabric of our national life. Deserving of high honour are Puritan and Pilgrim. Let orator and historian continue to sound their praises. But side by side with them, sharers in their sufferings, partakers of their perils, distinguished helpers in their great labours, stimulating and inspiring, stood a smaller company whose life and deeds and spirit were also important factors in giving this land those institutions of civil and religious liberty by means of which she is steadily ful filling her high mission and successfully working out her great destiny.

Prudence is the foundation of all true statesmanship; in its political application, prudence is the application of principles to particular circumstances.

As the Head of a woman's college she must, thought Harriet, have had a distasteful task; for she looked as though the word 'compromise' had been omitted from her vocabulary; and all statesmanship is compromise.

Keynes endorses another key principle of Burke’s: that the happiness or utility which governments should aim to maximize is short run not long run. This is a consequence of accepting the Moore-Burke criterion of ‘moral risk’ – ‘Burke ever held, and held rightly, that it can seldom be right… to sacrifice a present benefit for a doubtful advantage in the future.’ The concept of moral risk was a guiding principle in Keynes’s own statesmanship. It inoculated him equally against Communism and the sacrificial thinking implicit in much of orthodox economics.

Keynes’s third act of statesmanship was to negotiate the American loan in September-December 1945. He estimated that Britain’s deficit on current account would total nearly $7bn over the first three post-war years. Keynes went to Washington in September 1945 to seek a grant of $5bn ‘without strings’. He returned, three months and several famous rows later, with a loan of $3.75bn conditional on a commitment to make sterling convertible into other currencies a year after the loan agreement was ratified. It was probably the most humiliating experience of his life.

Moral reform is the most difficult and delicate branch of statesmanship; few rulers have dared to attempt it; most rulers have left it to hypocrites and saints.

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 the day. —Theodore Roosevelt in 1906

the thoughts that were no longer repressed—in the history of the past and the Utopian speculation on the future; in noble theology, capable statesmanship, and science at once brilliant and profound; in the voyage of discovery, and the change of the swan-like merchantman into a very fire-drake of war for the defence of the threatened shores; in the first brave speech of the Puritan in Elizabeth's Parliament, the first murmurs of the voice of liberty, soon to thunder throughout the land; in the naturalizing of foreign genius by translation, and the invention, or at least adoption, of a new and transcendent rhythm; in the song, in the epic, in the drama.

When the republic was founded at the close of the eighteenth century, its people hoped that, sundered from the passions, false ideas, and feudal vestiges of the Old World, and given a rich empty continent to exploit, it might escape serious disaster. Hardships and vicissitudes would be plentiful enough; they would be needed, indeed, to sharpen America’s mind and toughen its spirit. But such terrible calamities as had almost overwhelmed one older country after another — these it might totally escape. Those who took this view were too optimistic. Twice in a century and a half terrible calamities came; twice a failure of statesmanship if not of national character cost the country far more than it could afford to pay. The Civil War and the Second World War should have been avoidable. Because the people and leaders of the United States did not act with determination and sagacity in solving the problems of slavery, sectional irritation, and a right adjustment of races, part of the country was half ruined for generations, and all of it set back by decades. The subsequent failure to consolidate the victory won in the First World War — the refusal to help set up a system of collective security and to play a manly, farsighted part in the world community — imperilled the very existence of the republic. Only a colossal effort and the sacrifice of a vast part of the national wealth saved it. Such errors can in time be largely retrieved. But they cannot be forgotten or forgiven, and their lessons should be driven home.

In this slipshod age, we need object lessons in language and thought. – Edith Wharton on an address by John Hay

This isn't about your reputation. Our job right now is to make sure that there to ARE future historians.

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

The Country Ambassador versus the Country Manager Some companies experiment with an interesting profile: a country chairperson who is a weak overlay over the business and largely plays an ambassadorial role. However, statesmanship and ambassadors are best left to the realm of diplomacy. These roles are a legacy of an era that no longer exists. GE tried the model over the past decade with limited success and finally abandoned it. A ceremonial role, with no accountability for the business and the responsibility only for engaging government, industry associations, and other CEOs, is usually not effective. Everyone—employees, customers, business partners, government officials—will quickly see this role for what it is and dismiss the person as lightweight. This does disservice to the incumbent and the role. The ambassadorial country manager who smells opportunity, but is powerless to act, can become intensely frustrated. Increasingly, the connections among strategy and execution, business, reputation, and regulation are tightening, so an artificial separation of these functions is suboptimal. Bringing accountability for these together in a single leader is vital for growing competent and well-rounded business leaders, who are capable of even being the CEO someday. If the business does require wise counsel, access, and influence and a senior public face, a strong advisory board headed by an iconic leader who serves as a nonexecutive chairperson may be a more prudent approach. We followed this model at Microsoft India with considerable success; the approach is gaining popularity at companies like Coca-Cola, Schneider Electric, and JCB.

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.

He cultivated ideological fuzziness.