Diplomat's Dictionary Daily Quotable

Diplomat's Dictionary Daily Quotable:

Facts:
"Of all public servants, the diplomatist and the general alone must, if they are to succeed, have a grasp of actual facts. Politicians, lawyers, administrators, financiers even, can pass their lives in a mist of fictions and go down to posterity as great men.
    But the general who fails to perceive the facts that surround him will inevitably pay the penalty in defeat.  The facts with which the diplomatist has to deal are less specialized and immediate, more subtle, indeterminate, and diverse than those which confront the general; they are facts the perception of which requires an all-around intelligence; and thus, while it is possible for a great soldier to be a stupid man, a diplomatist who is stupid must be a failure."
                                                                    -Lytton Strachey (Victorian British Writer and Critic)

Finance: "Finance, when coordinated with policy, becomes a weapon of diplomacy."

-Victor Wellesley (1944)

'When coordinated with policy' being the operative phrase...we've been pumping cash into corrupt governments or doling it out haphazardly which has been to our detriment across the globe in many circumstances.
                                                               

Flattery: "Diplomats must have no delusions of grandeur, but they should know how to induce them in others."