Quotes about Negotiation

You are never persuasive when you're abrasive.

Imagine if you were asked by your country to be an ambassador to an enemy nation. You would probably have to learn a new language and adapt to some customs and cultural differences in order to be polite and accomplish your mission. As an ambassador you would not be able to isolate yourself from the enemy. To fulfill your mission, you would have to have contact and relate to them.

You need to suspend your reaction when you feel like striking back, to listen when you feel like talking back, to ask questions when you feel like telling your opponent the answers, to bridge your differences when you feel like pushing for your way, and to educate when you feel like escalating. Breakthrough

Politics are very much like war. We may even have to use poison gas at times.

Those who can win a war well can rarely make a good peace and those who could make a good peace would never have won the war.

Diplomats are just as essential to starting a war as soldiers are for finishing it... You take diplomacy out of war, and the thing would fall flat in a week.

My position has always been, along with many other people, that any differences be resolved in a nonviolent way.

I once heard one of his colleagues describe my father as "the kind of guy who could tell you to go to hell and you'd look forward to the trip.

Wars aren't won with guns; they're won with checkbooks.

Sanctions alone could not stop Iran's nuclear program. But they did help bring Iran to the negotiating table.

People ask, 'How do you work with the other side?' Well, I start by not saying bad things about them.

I had come here with my three questions. The first: How did the history of Christian antisemitism contribute to the Holocaust? The second: How did the Church abet, or oppose, the Holocaust as it unfolded? And the third: How does the Church today negotiate that layered past, both the deep past of antisemitism and the recent past of the Holocaust? With Edith Stein, that.