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As a journalist, I try to avoid talking to American diplomats, because I am stunned again and again by just how little grasp they have of what people are really feeling in a country. Especially CIA guys. Maybe they're just really good at playing stupid, but I don't think so.

Diplomats are just as essential to starting a war as soldiers are for finishing it... You take diplomacy out of war, and the thing would fall flat in a week.

Diplomats are useful only in fair weather. As soon as it rains they drown in every drop.

The military can buy our diplomats some time.

It's a necessary quality of a diplomat or a politician that he will compromise. Uncompromising politicians or diplomats get you into the most terrible trouble.

The patience of the American public with dilatory diplomatic delays will be very limited.

We are not diplomats but prophets, and our message is not a compromise but an ultimatum.

It is fortunate that diplomats have long noses since they usually cannot see beyond them.

I think it's fair to say that diplomacy today requires much more of that if you're the United States of America than it did 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago.

We always have hoped that American diplomacy deploys itself in dialogue and persuasion rather than by ultimatums. That is the path we want in international relations.