I do believe that in order to be a successful negotiator that as a diplomat, you have to be able to put yourself into the other person’s shoes. Unless you can understand what is motivating them, you are never going to be able to figure out how to solve a particular problem.

The people of the world genuinely want peace. Some day the leaders of the world are going to have to give in and give it to them.

If you want what you’re saying heard, then take your time and say it so that the listener will actually hear it. You might save somebody’s life. Your own, first.

Anyone who says he can see through women is missing a lot.

Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood or appreciated.

The capability of negotiating… is something that means you not only have to understand fully what you believe and what your national interests are but in order to be a really good negotiator, you have to try to figure out what the other person on the other side of the table has in mind.

It’s very hard for our parents who see us enter a world that they can’t imagine.

An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.

Well, the thing that I learned as a diplomat is that human relations ultimately make a huge difference.

Certainly I’ll never be able to put myself in the situation that people growing up in the less developed countries are in. I’ve gotten a bit of a sense of it by being out there and meeting people and talking with them.

Intellectuals solve problems, geniuses prevent them.

Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.

We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.

I often advocate that we look at many sides of an issue, walk in someone else’s shoes, and identify and reject false choices.

The best way to resolve any problem in the human world is for all sides to sit down and talk.

It ain’t those parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.

I have a collective sense of suffering.

Never elated when someone’s oppressed, never dejected when another one’s blessed.

If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.

Any woman who understands the problems of running a home will be nearer to understanding the problems of running a country.

Solutions are not the answer.

A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as that of his fellow men, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help.

We have an obligation to help people that cannot help themselves. The mentally retarded, the physically retarded, et cetera.

So long as you have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being.

It’s a near miracle that nuclear war has so far been avoided.

But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.

We should not give up and we should not allow the problem to defeat us.

I had a lot of trouble with engineers, because their whole background is learning from a functional point of view, and then learning how to perform that function.

I’m very sensitive. I remember, as a kid at school, if someone in the classroom was sad or angry, it could have a great impact on me.

We learn martial arts as helping weakness. You never fight for people to get hurt. You’re always helping people.

Occasionally I’ve seen children become heavy-handed and insensitive when dealing with their aging parents, and it only caused resentment and hard feelings.

Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight.

There are horrible people who, instead of solving a problem, tangle it up and make it harder to solve for anyone who wants to deal with it. Whoever does not know how to hit the nail on the head should be asked not to hit it at all.

Necessity never made a good bargain.

Most damage that others do us is out of fear, humiliation and pain. Those feelings occur in all of us, not just in those of us who profess a certain religious or racial devotion.

It’s presumptuous to say you know how somebody feels.

To know what you know and what you do not know, that is true knowledge.

Being a good listener is absolutely critical to being a good leader; you have to listen to the people who are on the front line.

If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.

A person is a person because he recognizes others as persons.

When we value correct principles, we have truth – a knowledge of things as they are.

You can’t have it all all at once. Over my lifespan, I think I have had it all, but in given periods in time, things were rough. And if you have a caring life partner, you help the other person when that person needs it.

God never gives someone a gift they are not capable of receiving. If he gives us the gift of Christmas, it is because we all have the ability to understand and receive it.

The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost the power of reason.

Don’t tell your problems to people: eighty percent don’t care; and the other twenty percent are glad you have them.

Never hold discussions with the monkey when the organ grinder is in the room.

For 2,500 years, India has never invaded anybody.

I think that technology is always invented for historical reasons, to solve a historical problem. But they very soon reveal themselves to be capable of doing things that aren’t historical that nobody had ever thought of doing before.

Do not do unto others as you expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.

There are folks who now know black families – like the Johnsons on ‚Black-ish‘ or the folks on ‚Modern Family.‘ They become part of who you are. You share their pains. You understand their fears. They make you laugh, and they change how you see the world.

Love is the ability and willingness to allow those that you care for to be what they choose for themselves without any insistence that they satisfy you.

All partisan movements add to the fullness of our understanding of society as a whole. They never detract; or, in any case, one must not allow them to do so. Experience adds to experience.

If you’re doing a biography, you try to stay as accurate as possible to reality. But you really don’t know what was going on in the person’s mind. You just know what was going on in the minds of people around him.

If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.

Sometimes it’s a form of love just to talk to somebody that you have nothing in common with and still be fascinated by their presence.

It’s not a slam at you when people are rude, it’s a slam at the people they’ve met before.

We’re not trying to make you less of a man. We just want you to love us as deeply and as wholesomely and as fully as we love you.

I would go to the deeps a hundred times to cheer a downcast spirit. It is good for me to have been afflicted, that I might know how to speak a word in season to one that is weary.

Throughout my career, I fed off the fuel of people not being able to understand me.

Don’t find fault, find a remedy.

I don’t join the New Atheists. So, for example, I wouldn’t have the arrogance to lecture some mother who hopes to see her dying child in Heaven – that’s none of my business, ultimately. I won’t lecture her on the philosophy of science.