Famous quotes containing the words diplomatic, historians and/or start:
“An alliance is like a chain. It is not made stronger by adding weak links to it. A great power like the United States gains no advantage and it loses prestige by offering, indeed peddling, its alliances to all and sundry. An alliance should be hard diplomatic currency, valuable and hard to get, and not inflationary paper from the mimeograph machine in the State Department.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“Nations without a past are contradictions in terms. What makes a nation is the past, what justifies one nation against others is the past, and historians are the people who produce it.”
—Eric J. Hobsbawm (b. 1917)
“Melancholy and sadness are the start of doubt ... doubt is the beginning of despair; despair is the cruel beginning of the differing degrees of wickedness.”
—Isidore Ducasse, Comte de Lautréamont (1846–1870)