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In foreign policy, as in medicine, leaders must “first do no harm.”

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Source: "Obama the Pragmatist", Project Syndicate (June 10, 2014).
Source quality: Precise citation Points to a specific work with a page, chapter, date or similar locator, so you can look it up.

More by Joseph Nye

When words are both descriptive and prescriptive, thyey become political words used in struggles for power.

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Some say precipitating events are like buses - they come along every ten minutes.

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Power conversion is the capacity to convert potential power, as measured by resources, to realized power, as measured by the changed behavior of others.

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Systems can create consequences not intended by any other of their constituent actors.

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The cure to misunderstanding history is to read more, not less.

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No one can tell the whole story of anything.

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The world at the beginning of the twenty-first century is a strange cocktail of continuity and change. Some aspects of international politics have not changed since Thucydides.

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Humans sometimes make surprising choices, and human history is full of uncertainties.

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Cooperation is difficult in the absence of communication.

Understanding International Conflicts: An Introduction to Theory and History (2006)

The new world will not be neat, and you will have to live with that.

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Power, like love, is easier to experience than to define or measure.

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The territorial state has not always existed in the past, so it need not necessarily exist in the future.

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The best hope for the future is to ask what is being determined as well as who determines it.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Joseph Nye (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.