There are few ironclad rules of diplomacy but to one there is no exception. When an official reports that talks were useful, it can safely be concluded that nothing was accomplished.

Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.

You will find that [the] State [Department] is the kind of organisation which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly too.

There's no question that in my lifetime, the contrast between what I called private affluence and public squalor has become very much greater.

Financial capacity and political perspicacity are inversely correlated. Long-run salvation by men of business has never been highly regarded if it means disturbance of orderly life and convenience in the present. So inaction will be advocated in the present even though it means deep trouble in the future. Here, at least equally with Communism, lies the threat to Capitalism. It is what causes men who know that things are going quite wrong to say that things are fundamentally sound.

Any consideration of the life and larger social existence of the modern corporate man begins and also largely ends with the effect of one all-embracing force. That is organization - the highly structured assemblage of men, and now some women, of which he is a part. It is to this, at the expense of family, friends, sex, recreation and sometimes health and effective control of alcoholic intake, that he is expected to devote his energies.

It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.