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International Relations Quotes

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International Relations Quotes

“This was my time at the MUN; not just a symbol of international cooperation, but a dark and mysterious nexus of conspiracy and intrigue. Indeed, a place where the forces of chaos and order collide in an endless struggle for dominance. But let's not kid ourselves, behind the facade of diplomatic protocols and bureaucratic banalities lurks a dark underbelly. A shadow world of secret meetings and covert operations, where the true rulers of the world pull the strings of fate like puppeteers in a grand cosmic theater. Here, in the labyrinthine corridors and dimly lit backrooms, the fate of nations is not decided by the will of the people, but by the whims of those who dwell in the shadows.”

BureaucracyUnited NationsDiplomacyInternational RelationsUnPolticsInternational PoliticsChaos And OrderMunConspiracy And Intrigue
Author:Ryan Gelpke
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“In other words, each side could arm itself with whatever ideological slogans fulfilled its own domestic necessities, so long as it did not let them interfere with the need for cooperation against the Soviet danger. Ideology would be relegated to domestic management; it took a leave from foreign policy. The ideological armistice was, of course, valid only so long as objectives remained compatible.”

PoliticsChinaUsaSoviet UnionInternational RelationsDomestic Politics
Book:On China
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“The temptation of what is sometimes called realism—the belief that nations are solely motivated by a struggle for power, that they have eternal interests and permanent geopolitical orientations—is as strong as that of isolationism, and can be equally misleading, not least because it appeals to the indifferent. If nations never change, then of course we don’t need to exert the effort to make them change. If nations have permanent orientations, then all we need to do is discover what those are and get used to them. If nothing else, the Ukraine war showed us that nations are not pieces in a game of Risk. Their behavior can be altered by acts of cowardice or bravery, by wise leaders and cruel ones, and above all by good ideas and bad ones. Their interactions are not inevitable; their alliances and enmities are not permanent. There was no coalition to aid Ukraine until February 2022, and then there was. That coalition then made what had appeared to be the inevitable, rapid conquest of Ukraine impossible. By the same token, a different kind of Russian leader, with a different set of ideas, could now end the war quickly.”

RealismInternational RelationsIsolationismRusso Ukrainian War
Book:Autocracy, Inc.
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“We’ve started and won two atomic wars since 2022! Is it because we’re having so much fun at home we’ve forgotten the world? Is it because we’re so rich and the rest of the world’s so poor and we just don’t care if they are? I’ve heard rumors; the world is starving, but we’re well fed. Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we’re hated so much? I’ve heard the rumors about hate, too, once in a long while, over the years. Do you know why? I don’t, that’s sure!”

HateFunWealthPovertyDiplomacyInternational RelationsWarsPoor NationsWealthy Nations
Book:Fahrenheit 451
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“Among all the methods, non-violence is most successful, and I strongly believe that only non-violence can set the true mood of peace and harmony among the nuclear nations. Our experiments with non-violence should be more wide, more engaging and more humble.”

PeaceNonviolenceInternational RelationsNon ViolenceDisarmamentNuclear WarNuclear ProliferationNuclear Free WorldExperiments With Nonviolence
Book:Nuclear Weapons Free World - Peace on the Earth
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“More broadly, it is vital for leaders to work across international boundaries to minimize the number of people who feel the need to leave their home countries in the first place. That requires building healthy democracies, fostering peace, and generating prosperity from the ground up. However, success in that endeavor demands a way of looking at the world that recognizes the humanity we share with one another, and the interests that nations have in common. Those who are content to look inward, and who see no higher purpose than to shield themselves from the different, the new, and the unknown, will be of no help.”

PeaceDemocracyProsperityImmigrationImmigrantsInternational RelationsMigrationRefugeesMigrants
Book:Fascism: A Warning
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“This is the great new problem of mankind. We have inherited a large house, a great “world house” in which we have to live together—black and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Muslim and Hindu—a family unduly separated in ideas, culture and interest, who, because we can never again live apart, must learn somehow to live with each other in peace. However deeply American Negroes are caught in the struggle to be at last at home in our homeland of the United States, we cannot ignore the larger world house in which we are also dwellers. Equality with whites will not solve the problems of either whites or Negroes if it means equality in a world society stricken by poverty and in a universe doomed to extinction by war.”

AmericaPeaceCommunityEqualityBrotherhoodWorld PeaceAfrican AmericansBlacksInternational RelationsWorld Community
Book:Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?
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“Peace is expensive, and so are human rights and civil liberties; they have a price, and we the peoples have not yet offered to pay it. Instead we are trying to furnish our globe with these precious ornaments the cheap way, holding our sovereignty cautiously in one fist while extending the other hand in a gesture of co-operation. In the long run this will prove the hard way, the violent way.”

PeaceUnityHuman RightsCooperationSovereigntyInternational RelationsCivil Liberties
Book:The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters
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“We have evidence all around us in our daily analytic practice and in contemporary world history that this earth-shaking archetypal event is taking place here and now. It has already started. It is manifesting itself in international relations; in the breakdown of the social structures of Western civilization; in political, ethnic, and religious groupings; as well as within the psyches of individuals- the momentous event of the coming of the self into conscious realization.”

WorldWellsSelfEarthPoliticalIndividualSocialGrowthReligiousPracticeEventsAcceptanceCivilizationConsciousEvidenceRelationStructureWesternInternationalContemporaryRealizationManifestWorld HistoryHere And NowShakingInternational RelationsBreakdownWestern CivilizationAnalyticsSocial StructurePsych
Author:Edward F Edinger
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“What is... disturbing to me is that many of these pro-Israeli lawmakers sit on the House International Relations Committee despite the obvious conflict of interest that their emotional attachments to Israel cause... The Israeli occupation of all territories must end, including Congress.”

EndsHouseCausesInterestEmotionalConflictRelationIncludingInternationalCongressObviousIsraelDespiteAttachmentOccupationTerritoryCommitteesDisturbingIsraeliInternational RelationsLawmakersConflict Of InterestIsraeli Occupation
Author:Cynthia McKinney
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“A war not only arises, but derives its nature , from the political ideas, the moral sentiments, and the international relations obtaining at the moment when it breaks out. This amounts to saying:;: try and know why and with the help of what you are going to act; then you will find out how to act.”

KnowsTryingIdeasWarMomentsHelpingPoliticalMoralBreakAmountRelationInternationalAriseSentimentsInternational RelationsBreak OutObtaining
Book:Precepts and Judgments
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“I'm a historian by training and by conviction. And so the thing that has throughout informed my thinking about international relations is history. I think, for example, the reason that I was perhaps able to see sooner than some others that the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe was decaying--if not disintegrating--was that I came to it through history and through Germany, rather than through Sovietology and through Moscow. And therefore the starting point was that no empire in history has lasted forever, and this one won't either.”

IfsThinkingReasonAbleForeverExampleTrainingEuropeRelationStartingInternationalConvictionGermanyEmpiresHistorianSovietEasternInternational RelationsStarting PointMoscowEastern Europe
Author:Timothy Garton Ash
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“Vitality springs from diversity -- which makes for real progress so long as there is mutual toleration, based on the recognition that worse may come from an attempt to suppress differences than from acceptance of them. For this reason, the kind of peace that makes progress possible is best assured by the mutual checks created by a balance of forces-alike in the sphere of internal politics and of international relations.”

KindMayLongRealReasonPoliticsForcePeaceDifferencesJusticePowerProgressAcceptanceBalanceDiversitySpringRelationIndependenceInternationalToleranceChecksRecognitionInternalsMutualSpheresIndividualismAssuredVitalityInternational RelationsToleration
Book:Why Don't We Learn from History?
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“Some international relations scholars would posit that interest in zombies is an indirect attempt to get a cognitive grip on what U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously referred to as the "unknown knowns" in international security. Perhaps, however, there also exists a genuine but publicly unacknowledged fear of the dead rising from the grave and feasting upon the entrails of the living.”

InterestKnownSecurityRelationInternationalDefenseGravesGenuineRisingScholarSecretaryNational SecurityZombieInternational RelationsCognitiveIndirectFeasting
Author:Daniel Drezner
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“Now, for the moment, we are safe. The only kind of international violence that worries most people in the developed countries is terrorism: from imminent heart attack to a bad case of hangnail in fifteen years flat. We are very lucky people--but we need to use the time we have been granted wisely, because total war is only sleeping. All the major states are still organized for war, and all that is needed for the world to slide back into a nuclear confrontation is a twist of the kaleidoscope that shifts international relations into a new pattern of rival alliances.”

PeopleWorldNeedsYearsHeartKindHas BeensStillsWarCountryStatesMomentsUseSleepCasesWorryViolenceNeededLuckySafeMajorsRelationInternationalPatternsTerrorismNuclearGrantedOrganizedFlatsFifteenTwistsRivalsSlidesAlliancesConfrontationInternational RelationsTotal WarFifteen YearsHeart AttackKaleidoscopeDeveloped Country
Author:Gwynne Dyer
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“According to the first image of international relations, the locus of the important causes of war is found in the nature and behavior of man. Wars result from selfishness, from misdirected aggressive impulses, from stupidity.”

MenFirstsImportantWarFoundCausesResultsBehaviorRelationInternationalStupiditySelfishnessImpulseAggressiveInternational RelationsCauses Of War
Book:Man, the State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis
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“These two opposed forms of social organization, the modern state and the market, have evolved together through recent centuries, and their mutual interactions have become increasingly crucial to the character and dynamics of international relations in our world.”

WorldTwoStatesCharacterTogetherFormSocialModernCenturyOrganizationRelationInternationalMutualOur WorldCrucialInteractionInternational RelationsDynamicsSocial Organization
Book:The Political Economy of International Relations
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“In no other field has the world yet paid so dearly for the abandonment of nineteenth-century liberalism as in the field where the retreat began: in international relations. Yet only a small part of the lesson which experience ought to have taught us has been learned.”

WorldHas BeensCenturyFieldsTaughtOughtLessonsRelationPaidInternationalLiberalismRetreatAbandonmentInternational RelationsNineteenth CenturyTaught UsSmall Parts
Author:Friedrich August von Hayek
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“John Marks Templeton has achieved exemplary success in both business and philanthropy. For Looking Forward he has assembled a diverse and remarkable group of experts in their fields-including the environment, medicine, the physical sciences, religion, the family, and international relations-and contributed two stellar pieces as well. Together these essays dispel fashionable pessimism and show how the world can progress-and is progressing-toward a better future.”

WorldWellsTwoShowsTogetherEnvironmentPiecesProgressGroupsFieldsMarkRelationMedicineIncludingInternationalExpertsRemarkablePessimismDiversePhilanthropyEssaysLooking ForwardFashionableInternational RelationsBetter FutureScience ReligionPhysical ScienceExemplaryStellar
Author:Rupert Murdoch
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“There is a close tie of affection between sovereigns and their subjects; and as chaste wives should have no eyes but for their husbands, so faithful liegemen should keep their regards at home and not look after foreign crowns. For my part I like not for my sheep to wear a stranger's mark nor to dance after a foreigner's whistle.”

ShouldLooksHomeEyeWifeSubjectsHusbandShould HaveMarkRelationRegardAffectionStrangerFaithfulTiesPatriotismSheepCrownsMonarchyForeignersInternational RelationsChaste
Author:Elizabeth I
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“If you cloned JFK and Abraham Lincoln and made them president it wouldn't matter. Our system is just too corrupt and too broken. I think that science is corrupt and broken. I think health and nutrition. I think the economic systems, the international relations, the environment, everything, the engines of everything are broken.”

IfsThinkingMadeMatterPresidentEnvironmentEconomicBrokenRelationInternationalEnginesNutritionInternational RelationsAbrahamEconomic SystemsHealth And Nutrition
Author:Rainn Wilson
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“The peace conference must not adjourn without the establishment of some ordered system of international government, backed by power enough to give authority to its decrees.Unless a league something like this results at our peace conference, we shall merely drop back into armed hostility and international anarchy. The war will have been fought in vain.”

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Author:Virginia Gildersleeve
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“A man of true honor protects the unwritten word which binds his conscience more scrupulously, if possible, than he does the bond a breach of which subjects him to legal liabilities, and the United States, in aiming to maintain itself as one of the most enlightened nations, would do its citizens gross injustice if it applied to its international relations any other than a high standard of honor and morality.”

IfsMenDoeStatesNationsUnitedUnited StatesSubjectsCitizensHonorMoralityProtectStandardsConscienceRelationInjusticeInternationalEnlightenedGrossInternational RelationsWritten WordLiabilityHigh StandardsBreachUnwritten
Author:Grover Cleveland
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“Leadership from the Oval Office - and sustained, effective use of the bully pulpit - is essential to getting the American people off their too-pampered butts and into meeting successfully the long-haul challenges of fixing major problems in the very fabric of our republic's life, both domestically and in our international relations.”

PeopleLongUseProblemChallengesEssentialsOfficeMajorsRelationMeetingsInternationalRepublicFabricBullyInternational RelationsFixingPulpitHaulOvalMajor ProblemsLong HaulPampered
Author:Lawrence Wilkerson
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