Top 1200 Foreign Service Quotes & Sayings

When you think of the sacrifices our firefighters make, think about the service of soldiers in foreign lands and listen to their lives, you have to be careful that whatever you do, don't cast a shadow on what these great people do.

From my experience as Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, if a congressperson is identified as a potential target by a foreign intelligence service, that individual is notified.

The humanitarian would, of course, have us meddle in foreign affairs as part of his program of world service.

What is more important is that Foreign Service Officers understand business, about the needs of U.S. business and how to help U.S. companies make the right connections abroad.

I began writing when I was still in the British Foreign Service, and it was then understood that even if you wrote about butterfly collecting, you used another name.

'Daughters of Britannia' is a fascinating book, not least because it shines a light on a very dark corner of Foreign Office dealings. Diplomatic spouses are the Aunt Sallys of the foreign service: responsible for nearly everything, recognised for almost nothing.

Foreign policy can mean several things, not only foreign policy in the narrow sense. It can cover foreign policy, relations with the developing world, and enlargement as well.

Foreign trade is not a replacement for foreign aid, of course, but foreign aid to a country that doesn't also engage in significant amounts of foreign trade is more likely to end up in the pockets of dictators and cronies.

FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell has said that several foreign dignitaries personally spoke to him about creating a new Internet user fee to subsidize an international universal service fund at the expense of traditional end users.

I think it's a violation of user privacy to continue storing email addresses if you tell users your service is shutting down. I sign up for a service, and if you're no longer providing that service, why should you keep my information?

Service standards keep rising. As competitors render better and better service, customers become more demanding. Their expectations grow. When every company's service is shoddy, doing a few things well can earn you a reputation as the customer's savior. But when a competitor emerges from the pack as a service leader, you have to do a lot of things right. Suddenly achieving service leadership costs more and takes longer. It may even be impossible if the competition has too much of a head start. The longer you wait, the harder it is to produce outstanding service.

While I'm on foreign soil, I - I just don't feel that I should be speaking about differences with regards to myself and President Obama on foreign policy, either foreign policy of the past, or for foreign policy prescriptions.

I grew up thinking that I would be an ambassador secret agent. From age 14 to right before I graduated college, I was really interested in the foreign service and the United Nations. I learned to speak French, Turkish, and all these things.

Yes, America's vast foreign service and intelligence organs may disagree with that assessment. And some of Israel's most senior intelligence figures regard Iran as dangerous, but rational. But in Netanyahu's view, diplomacy has had its moment.

My mum is Palestinian and my dad is British but worked all his life from the European Union for their Foreign Action Service. So I was born in Hammersmith but moved away when I was one. That's when dad joined the European Commission.

On Foreign Secretary Robin Cook: If a man cannot keep a measly affair secret, what is he doing in charge of the Intelligence Service?

I would replace most foreign aid with a tax credit for businesses to invest. I think U.S. bureaucrats giving foreign bureaucrats money is a guaranteed failure. And we've had about 50 years' experience at failing with foreign aid.

Having spent years in academia - at Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, Oxford University and Harvard Law School - I encountered a wide range of worldviews.

In the hands of a determined Secretary, the Foreign Service can be a splendid instrument, staffed by knowledgeable, discreet, and energetic individuals. They do require constant vigilance lest the convictions that led them into a penurious career tempt them to preempt decision-making.

We have to be cognizant of the fact that they've had foreign fighters coming to volunteer for them, foreign money, foreign weapons, so we have to make this the top priority.

When I was younger, my father was in the Foreign Service and we lived in Nigeria, Panama, and London, but for the most part I grew up in the South and D.C. I got the travel bug as a little person and I've bounced around a lot.

This is the problem with foreign policy - talking about foreign policy in a political context. Politics is binary. People win and lose elections. Legislation passes or doesn't pass. And in foreign policy often what you're doing is nuance and you're trying to prevent something worse from happening. It doesn't translate well into a political environment.

There's something about the Foreign Service that takes the guts out of people.

But foreign should not be defined in geographical terms. Then it would have no meaning except territorial or tribal patriotism. To me that alone is foreign which is foreign to truth, foreign to Atman.

In Ehrenfeld, we were all jammed together. All the fathers were foreign-born - Welsh, Irish, Polish, Sicilian. We were so jammed together, we picked up each other's accents. And we spoke some broken English. When I got into the service, people used to think I was from a foreign country.

The State Department desperately needs to be vigorously harnessed. It has too big a role to play in the formulation of foreign policy, and foreign policy is too important to be left up to foreign service officers.

God welcomes genuine service, and that is the service of a soul that offers the bare and simple sacrifice of truth; but from false service, the mere display of material wealth, He turns away.

You are also asked to take an oath, and that's the oath of service. The oath of service is not to secrecy, but to the Constitution - to protect it against all enemies, foreign and domestic. That's the oath that I kept, that James Clapper and former NSA director Keith Alexander did not. You raise your hand and you take the oath in your class when you are on board. All government officials are made to do it who work for the intelligence agencies - at least, that's where I took the oath.

First of all, we have infrastructure as a service, which Amazon has; we have platform as a service, which Microsoft has; we have software as a service; we have applications. Nobody has everything except us. We also have data as a service.

Getting service right is more than just a nice to do; it's a must do. American consumers are willing to spend more with companies that provide outstanding service - ultimately, great service can drive sales and customer loyalty.

You talk about the [armed] service teaches you how to depend on each other, the service makes you aware of the common good and strips that down. Guys who go into service get to have that. But that's a high price to pay in this day and time with going into service.

A service of worship is primarily a service to God. When we realize this and act upon it, we make it a service to men.

Hillary Clinton is pretty much what we would call a foreign-policy realist, someone who thinks the purpose of American foreign policy should be to adjust the foreign policies of other countries, work closely with traditional allies in Europe and Asia towards that end.

The [Donald] Trump folks chose not to keep [Dan Fried] on. He was actually - I said he was actually the third-most senior diplomat in the foreign service.

Khadi service, village service and Harijan service are one in reality, though three in name.

Loyal and substansial Catholic service on the battlefield undermined one of the most longstanding objections to emancipation: namely, that since Catholics owed religious allegiance to a foreign authority in the person of the Pope, their political and patriotic allegiance must necessarily be suspect.

When I was small, I thought I was just cooler than my mom because of how foreign she is. She's really foreign. You'd think it would kill her to get store-bought snacks, she's that foreign.

There was an intervention of the foreign states in the Russian Far East, Archangel of the West border of Russia. The foreign troops were participating in the attempts to stamp out the revolution. It's not just propaganda, because there are mounds of documents in the archives relating to these events and to the foreign espionage cases.

The Lindsey Graham via foreign policy is going to beat Rand Paul's libertarian view of foreign policy. It will beat Barack Obama's view of foreign policy. It will beat Hillary Clinton's view of foreign policy.

You try various things when you're growing up. I was an attache in the Foreign Service for a while and then I drove a bulldozer, but neither of those panned out for me so it had to be stand-up.

If you do some wonderful service and if you tell people what you did in a boastful way, it nullifies the credit of your service, may not be in the eternal platform, but in your conscious condition you will not be able to reap the benefits of that service.

We wouldn't turn over our customs service or our border patrol to a foreign government. We shouldn't turn over the ports of the United States, either.

My father was a Foreign Service officer, a diplomat and an Arabist who spent virtually all his career in the Near East, as it was called in the State Department. So I spent most of my childhood among the Israelis and the Arabs of Palestine, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

We should care that a foreign power can murder anyone on British soil with impunity. Allowing it to happen means that we cannot protect foreign agents who have rendered us service, thereby discouraging future double agents our security services might recruit.

As a lawyer, as a former prosecutor, and as a son and grandson of foreign-service officers who tried to represent American democracy in foreign and dangerous places, the idea that this crowd of crooked fossil-fuel types is able to take over and run our democracy like we are a banana republic - I find that repellent.

Now there is a cultural change under way in the Foreign Service.

Exposing the activities of a foreign intelligence service renders them ineffective, since it removes plausible deniability, which is the hallmark of covert intelligence operations.

Hillary Clinton and her husband set up a private foundation called the Clinton Foundation. While she was secretary of state, the Clinton foundation accepted tens of millions of dollars from foreign governments and foreign donors. Now y'all need to know out there, this is basic stuff, foreign donors and certainly foreign governments cannot participate in the American political process.

Service is the highest spiritual discipline. Prayer and meditation, or knowledge of scripture and Vedanta (holy scriptures of India), cannot help you reach the goal as quickly as service can. Service has a double effect, it extinguishes the ego and gives bliss.

Why are we, as a nation so obsessed with foreign things? Is it a legacy of our colonial years? We want foreign television sets. We want foreign shirts. We want foreign technology. Why this obsession with everything imported?

Actually, if you look at the essence of ISIS, how it came about, it's the product of foreign invasion. Foreign invasion in Iraq led to removal of Saddam Hussein, and we're not unhappy with that, but the point is that foreign presence in any territory has created dynamics. And you cannot avoid those dynamics.

Any Ambassador or Foreign Service Officer who has his or her head screwed on right knows that the U.S. position in the world is far more dependent on our ability to compete in world markets.

With foreign officials come foreign merchants, and with foreign merchants come foreign soldiers. They will usurp our authority and influence to begin with, and in the course of time, our guests will have become our hosts.

If America is addicted to foreign money and foreign oil, then China is addicted to foreign supplies of just about every commodity known to man - save highly polluting coal.

In 1939, Fitzroy Maclean, a gangly Highland aristocrat in his early 30s, was serving as a British diplomat in the U.S.S.R. Disgusted by the Soviet show trials, he quit the Foreign Service and would go on to serve with Tito's partisans fighting the Germans in Yugoslavia.

You see, the Foreign Service of the United States has grown so unbelievably in the last twenty years, and the requirements for admission are so high, and yet an awful lot of the work, I'd say fully 50-percent of the work in the Foreign Service abroad, is really routine work. All this is something that no one has licked.... You get a certain amount of discontent. It's bad for morale.

Having conducted counterintelligence investigations, I can attest that not everything a foreign intelligence service does is necessarily illegal.

Angelic happiness is in service, from service, and according to service.

The aim of a foreign intelligence service is to find and convince individuals to help them achieve intelligence objectives.

But, Christ, there's a difference between exotic and foreign, isn't there? Exotic means you know how to use your foreignness, or you make yourself a little foreign in order to appear exotic. Real foreign is a little scary, believe me.