We have no eternal allies and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual and those interests it is our duty to follow (Viscount Palmerston)
There is only thing that is worse than fighting with allies, that is fighting without them (Winston Churchill)
We must hang together, or we will surely hang separately (Benjamin Franklin)
Les traités, vous voyez, sont comme les jeunes filles et les roses: ça dure ce que ça dure! (Charles de Gaulle)
Power
Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short (Thomas Hobbes)
Macht ist jede Chance, innerhalb einer sozialen Beziehung den eigenen Willen auch gegen Widerstreben durchzusetzen (Max Weber)
International politics, like all politics, is a struggle for power (Hans Morgenthau)
It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both (Niccolo Machiavelli)
The strong do as they please, the weak suffer as they must (Delian dialogue)
Si vis pacem, parabellum (attributed to Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus)
Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun (Mao Tse-tung)
Strategy & Diplomacy
The art of statesmanship is to foresee the inevitable and expedite its occurrence (variably attributed to Talleyrand and Bismarck)
Politics is the art of the possible (Otto von Bismarck)
Strategy is the process whereby political will is translated into military action (Andrew Wilson)
Man makes his own history, but he does not make it out of the whole cloth; he does not make it out of the condition chosen by himself, but out of such as he finds close at hand (Karl Marx)
Events, dear boy, events (Harold Macmillan, responding to the question what a PM most fears)
Don’t interrupt your enemy when he is making mistakes (Napoleon)
Divide et impera (Philip of Macedonia)
War & Peace
Der Krieg ist also ein Akt der Gewalt, um den Gegner zur Erfüllung unseres Willens zu zwingen
(Carl von Clausewitz)
Der Krieg ist eine bloße Fortsetzung der Politik mit anderen Mitteln (Carl von Clausewitz)
La guerre, c’est une chose trop grave pour la confier aux militaires (Georges Clemenceau)
Il est plus facile de faire la guerre que la paix (Georges Clemenceau)
You know, you never beat us on the battlefield. Response: That may be so, but it is also irrelevant (Colonel Harry Summers speaking to Vietnamese official during peace negotiations)
The purpose of war is to make a better peace (Basil Liddell-Hart)
I have no way to defend my territory but to extend it (Catherine the Great)
Cognition, affection & (self-) deception
Pleikus are like streetcars; if you miss one, another will come along shortly (McGeorge Bundy, referring to justifications for war, Pleiku is a town in Vietnam where a US helicopter came under Vietcong attack)
The first casualty when war comes is truth (Hiram Johnson)
On ne ment jamais tant qu’avant les élections, pendant la guerre et après la chasse (Georges Clemenceau)
Outrage is not an ineffective emotion in advancing the national interest (Ryan Haas)
La politique ce n’est qu’une certain façon d’agiter les peuples avant de s’en servir (Talleyrand)
Well, Lyndon, they may be every bit as intelligent as you say, but I’d feel a whole lot better if just one of them had run for sheriff once (House Speaker Sam Rayburn (D-TX) to LBJ after LBJ extolled the brilliance of the members of JFK s cabinet aka the “best and the brightest”)
Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we dislike (Oscar Wilde)
I have heard that hard work never killed anyone. But I say why take the chance? (Ronald Reagan)