Napoleon Bonaparte
Military Leader, Emperor
"If you know a country's geography, you can understand and predict its foreign policy."
Foreign Policy quotes
Foreign Policy
84 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
James M. Cain
Novelist
"Writing a novel is like working on foreign policy. There are problems to be solved. It's not all inspirational."
George Washington
Military Leader, Politician
"But if we are to be told by a foreign Power . . . what we shall do, and what we shall not do, we have Independence yet to seek, and have contended hitherto for very little."
Paul Ryan
Politician
"I don't subscribe to relativism, whether it's in political philosophy, foreign policy or in life."
John F. Kennedy
Politician
"Domestic policy can only defeat us; foreign policy can kill us."
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside foreign policy — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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Foreign Policy quotes (page 1 of 5)
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"No Western government has ever played the long-term in terms of foreign policy."
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"The only concern which I have today is that we have a policy, a foreign policy, which enables us to avoid a catastrophe; which, if one understands it properly, is indescribable."
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"The thing that strikes me, from looking at the names so far in the Donald Trump's Cabinet on the foreign policy side, is the one thing that unites them - and that's General James Mattis at the Pentagon, Mike Pompeo at the CIA, even Mitt Romney to become secretary of state - they're all very, very hawkish on Iran."
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"I'm not supposed to know anything about foreign policy. Just thought I'd throw that out."
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"I think, on the foreign policy side, that there is a need for disruption. We've had three administrations follow a pretty consistent policy toward North Korea, and it really hasn't gotten us anywhere."
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"Fear is not the basis for foreign policy."
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"I am ... willing to make it clear that American foreign policy must uphold the sanctity of international treaties. That is the cornerstone on which all relations between nations must rest."
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"Nations do not distrust each other because they are armed. They are armed because they distrust each other."
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"There was a degree of interventionism in American foreign policy, the notion that we must be the superpower and we have to intervene everywhere, that I think makes no sense."
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"Enemies in War, in Peace Friends."
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"We wish the happiness and prosperity of every nation."
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"Robert Kagan said the neocons couldn't get a better president than Hillary Clinton, who would enforce the neocon foreign policy. No one's questioned it."
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"If there is one instance in which a foreign policy I pursued met with unambiguous failure, it was my policy on German reunification."
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"Frankly, I do not know how to effect a permanency in American foreign policy."
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"America's foreign policy lacks the backbone to do the right thing in Afghanistan - which is leave."
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