Richard Holbrooke Quotes.
You will never catch up with the spread of AIDS no matter how much money, no matter how many antiretrovirals are put into the system, unless you stop its growth. And the only way to stop its growth is prevention.
I think history is continuous. It doesn’t begin or end on Pearl Harbor Day or the day Lyndon Johnson withdraws from the presidency or on 9/11. You have to learn from the past but not be imprisoned by it. You need to take counsel of history but never be imprisoned by it.
Our enemy is Al Qaeda and its allies, people who have publicly said they wish to attack the United States again, people who have publicly called on nuclear physicists and engineers to help them gain access to nuclear weapons, which, as the whole world knows, Pakistan has.
I’m not a wide-eyed imperialist who wants to see Americans manning outposts all over the world. Not outposts to freedom in the cold war cliche, but islands of stability and seas of ethnic strife. That is not what anyone should feel comfortable seeing Americans doing.
We should not be surprised that democracy is imperfect even in Western countries.
In short, you can’t let the deadline define the mission. The mission has to define the duration.
Know something about something. Don’t just present your wonderful self to the world. Constantly amass knowledge and offer it around.
I still believe in the possibility of the United States, with all its will and all its strength, and I don’t just mean military, persevering against any challenge. I still believe in that.
People in uniform are not sacrosanct. They don’t have all the answers. The use of force is a political decision at its core, in terms of its objectives; then the military, as the experts, must be brought in to tell you how to do it.
The World War II generation believed the United States could do anything – anything… And Vietnam was a shattering experience for everyone.
The controlled chaos is one way to get creativity. The intensity of it, the physical rush, the intimacy created the kind of dialogue that leads to synergy…
In diplomacy, as in life itself, one often learns more from failures than from successes. Triumphs will seem, in retrospect, to be foreordained, a series of brilliant actions and decisions that may in fact have been lucky or inadvertent, whereas failures illuminate paths and pitfalls to be avoided.
The United Nations is an indispensable but deeply flawed organization. It is valuable to the United States, and the United States is invaluable to it. We need to reform it.
A peace deal requires agreements, and you don’t make agreements with your friends, you make agreements with your enemies.
Nothing generates more heat in the government than the question of who is chosen to participate in important meetings.
Elections are rarely perfect.
It’s an improvisation on a theme. You know where you want to go, but you don’t know how to get there. It’s not linear.
The male elites that run most countries are exceedingly uncomfortable with the subject of AIDS because it’s a sexually transmitted disease.
I think Americans understand that in Afghanistan, unlike in Iraq and Vietnam, we are fighting an enemy allied with the people who attacked us on 9/11.
The United States supports the reintegration of people who have fought with the Taliban into Afghan society provided they: one, renounce al Qaeda, two, lay down their arms and renounce violence, and three, participate in the public political life of the country in accordance with the constitution.
If a country denies it has AIDS, that country will inevitably become an even greater victim.
Diplomacy is like jazz: endless variations on a theme.
