A Quote by C. Northcote Parkinson
The basic quality for the diplomat is not intelligence but loyalty.
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If loyalty is, and always has been, perceived as obsolete, why do we continue to praise it? Because loyalty is essential to the most basic things that make life livable. Without loyalty there can be no love. Without loyalty there can be no family. Without loyalty there can be no friendship. Without loyalty there can be no commitment to community or country. And without those things, there can be no society.
There's a reason you can learn from everything: you have basic wisdom, basic intelligence, and basic goodness.
For me, luxury is intelligence and quality. I don't see a lot of intelligence and quality in luxury when it's used to make fast, big money.
The basic social contract is that citizens agree to follow the law, pay their taxes, and devote their love and loyalty to their country, and in exchange, the nation commits to preserve and protect and serve their interests, safeguard their freedom, and return to them in kind their first allegiance and loyalty.
True loyalty is that quality of service that grows under adversity and expands in defeat. Any street urchin can shout applause in victory, but it takes character to stand fast in defeat. One is noise - the other, loyalty.
I was going to study at the Sorbonne and become a diplomat. Being a diplomat comes in handy when you are dealing with record companies.
My dad is an ambassador. My brother is a diplomat. I doubt that I could be doing anything else other than being a diplomat if I weren't in showbiz. It's in the genes!
It's a necessary quality of a diplomat or a politician that he will compromise. Uncompromising politicians or diplomats get you into the most terrible trouble.
The highest spiritual quality, the noblest property of mind a man can have, is this of loyalty ... a man with no loyalty in him, with no sense of love or reverence or devotion due to something outside and above his poor daily life, with its pains and pleasures, profits and losses, is as evil a case as man can be.
Loyalty to the family must be merged into loyalty to the community, loyalty to the community into loyalty to the nation, and loyalty to the nation into loyalty to mankind. The citizen of the future must be a citizen of the world.
You have to be reminded of a basic fact: intelligence belongs to the watching consciousness; memory belongs to the mind. Memory is one thing - memory is not intelligence. But the whole of humanity has been deceived for centuries and told indirectly that the memory is intelligence. Your schools, your colleges, your universities are not trying to find your intelligence; they are trying to find out who is capable of memorizing more. And now we know perfectly well that memory is a mechanical thing. A computer can have memory, but a computer cannot have intelligence.
Even when I was at CIA, I'd go to visit foreign leaders and I'd say, 'You know, I'm not a diplomat. I'm just an old CIA guy'... I said, 'If I wanted to be diplomatic, I'd have been a diplomat.'
I think loyalty to the country, loyalty to the United States is important. I mean it depends on how you define loyalty.
Loyalty is my favorite quality in a 'bestie.'
I'm a career diplomat. I spent 30 years as a diplomat, out of which seven years as foreign minister. I've always believed in the United Nations as a centre of multilateralism and multilateral diplomacy.
Wasn't it? Is loyalty still a commendable quality when it is misdirected?
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