Quotes on Foreign Policy

But if we are to be told by a foreign Power . . . what we shall do, and what we shall not do, we have Independence yet to seek, and have contended hitherto for very little.

It is the madness of folly, to expect mercy from those who have refused to do justice; and even mercy, where conquest is the object, is only a trick of war; the cunning of the fox is as murderous as the violence of the wolf.

The great error of nearly all studies of war... has been to consider war as an episode in foreign policies, when it is an act of interior politics.

Human rights is the soul of our foreign policy, because human rights is the very soul of our sense of nationhood.

America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.

The American foreign policy trauma of the sixties and seventies was caused by applying valid principles to unsuitable conditions.

Most foreign policies that history has marked highly, in whatever country, have been originated by leaders who were opposed by experts.

No foreign policy - no matter how ingenious - has any chance of success if it is born in the minds of a few and carried in the hearts of none.

Domestic policy can only defeat us; foreign policy can kill us.

Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none.

The major western democracies are moving towards corporatism. Democracy has become a business plan, with a bottom line for every human activity, every dream, every decency, every hope. The main parliamentary parties are now devoted to the same economic policies - socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor - and the same foreign policy of servility to endless war. This is not democracy. It is to politics what McDonalds is to food.

Foreign policy is really domestic policy with its hat on.