John Dryden Quotes

Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace! – but there is no peace.

Peace: A period of cheating between two periods of fighting.

I know what Hitler is up to. He thinks he has outsmarted me, but actually it is I who have outsmarted him.

Has France absolutely decided to refuse us all succor, and thus become the victim of England and the laughingstock of Europe? ... We offer France in return for secret assistance a treaty of commerce which will secure to her for a certain number of years after the peace all the benefits with which for a century we have enriched England

This is not a peace. It is an armistice for 20 years.

… a visceral fear of appeasement has led to entirely avoidable disasters

Many men cry Peace! Peace! but they refuse to do the things that make for peace.

It would be the greatest mistake, certainly, to think that concessions mean peace. Nothing of the kind. Concessions are nothing but a new form of war.

Diplomacy is a disguised war, in which states seek to gain by barter and intrigue, by the cleverness of arts, the objectives which they would have to gain more clumsily by means of war.

I think anything is better than war. The extent to which one can negotiate with fanatics, I have no idea. I don't know.

Peace by persuasion has a pleasant sound, but I think we should not be able to work it. We should have to tame the human race first, and history seems to show that that cannot be done.

Some people are saying there's going to be a third World War. I hope not. I really think this is a time that people can start to mend things by negotiations, dealings. We know about dealings, don't we? We have brilliant lawyers. Why don't we have brilliant lawyers standing up and working for peace?

Wars are to be undertaken in order that it may be possible to live in peace without molestation.

Is war an inevitable outcome of competing interests in a complex society? In other words, would war be the same even if human nature were very different? There are mathematical models of large groups working together that lead to conflict on a reliable basis. So there's a whole other view of war that is not psychological at all.

Without some dissimulation no business can be carried on at all.

No deal means a greater chance of more war in the Middle East.

Peace is not sought in order to provoke war, but war is waged in order to attain peace.

Arms alone are not enough to keep the peace. It must be kept by men.

Ask for peace first, and you will clearly see your next step.

Peace demands more, not less, from a people. Peace lacks the clarity of purpose and the cadence of war. War is scripted: peace is improvisation.

Conflicts often stem from a couple of leaders on both sides that are badly brought up. They'd rather go to war than compromise. And in business, you're competing with other companies all the time, but you don't end up going to war with each other.

In every war at some point in time, you do sit down and negotiate.

I'd like to think that the best bunker buster is a diplomat.

Diplomacy, of course, is a subtle and nuanced craft, so much so that it's said that when the most wily diplomat of the nineteenth-century passed away, other diplomats asked, on reports of his death, "What do you suppose the old fox meant by that?