136 Quotes by Richard Holbrooke

A world without the United Nations or with a paralyzed United Nations would be far more costly to all of us and far more dangerous to peace and stability.

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.

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.

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.

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.

MEMRI allows an audience far beyond the Arabic-speaking world to observe the wide variety of Arab voices speaking through the media, schoolbooks, and pulpits to their own people. What one hears is often astonishing, sometimes frightening, and always important. Most importantly, it includes the newly-emerging liberal voices of reform and hope, as well as disturbing echoes of ancient hatreds. Without the valuable research of MEMRI, the non-Arabic speaking world would not have this indispensable window.

We are at the brink...time is very short.