Strobe Talbott Quotes

Life for rent means that my life isn't really my own, I only rented it for a while, but if I don't manage to buy it, to own it, then nothing of what I think is mine is really mine.

The country is the people.

Again, it occurred to me how weird it was to be permanent in a place that to everyone else was only temporary. Like I could never be sure if they were the ones who weren't real, or if I was.

The public doesn’t have to be hostile to the rich. ‘Robbing the rich to help the poor’ will only drive the rich away to other countries along with their money. As a matter of fact, their wealth should be respected. All wealth in China belongs to the country.

It is of major importance for the future of our country that through his defence and the fact he died without being convicted, Milosevic had managed to defend national and state interest.

Life is full of temporary situations, ultimately ending in a permanent solution.

Here is one optimists reason for believing unity will prevail ... within the next hundred years ... nationhood as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority. A phrase briefly fashionable in the mid-20th century -- citizen of the world -- will have assumed real meaning by the end of the 21st. All countries are basically social arrangements, accommodations to changing circumstances. No matter how permanent and even sacred they may seem at any one time, in fact they are all artificial and temporary.

Concepts of well-being for countries, for peoples and for individuals are changing. In such a world, to argue for rules that never change would be to deny the reality found in scientific knowledge and reasoned judgment.

Woman, I tell you, is a microcosm; and rightly to rule her, requires as great talents as to govern a state.

All the States but our own are sensible that knowlege is power.

It is the facts that matter, not the proofs. Physics can progress without the proofs, but we can't go on without the facts ... if the facts are right, then the proofs are a matter of playing around with the algebra correctly.

We're going to take out seven countries in 5 years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.

We tend to look at countries in terms of failed states and functioning states, which is rather simplistic.

Death is nothing to us, it matters not one jot, since the nature of the mind is understood to be mortal.

To call the State an organism shows a diseased tendency to make a fetish of words.

I've introduced legislation to say, "For right now, let's stop it," from about 34 countries.

I reflected on the fact that no matter how good I aspired to be, I was never going to achieve perfection

As I said, the matter of the Pan African Parliament was raised with us by other African countries who said we should host.

Education is still, in spite of private education, a state matter.

And he will manage the cure best who has foreseen what is to happen from the present state of matters.

In many countries there are particular places to which devils more especially resort. In Prussia there is an infinite number of evil spirits.

Even the longest con was never more than an assortment of moments that were in themselves very very short.

Everyone can err, but Stalin considered that he never erred, that he was always right. He never acknowledged to anyone that he made any mistake, large or small, despite the fact that he made not a few mistakes in the matter of theory and in his practical activity.

The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.

Man's wretched state, That floures so fresh at morne, and fades at evening late.