No one starts a war--or rather, no one in his sense ought to do so--without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by the war and how he intends to conduct it.

Carl Von Clausewitz

The UN was not created to take mankind to heaven, but to save humanity from hell.

 Dag Hammarskjöld

Virtue and ambition, unfortunately, seldom lodge together.

Michel de Montaigne

The real objective must always be the good life for all the people.  International machinery will mean something to the common man throughout the world only when it is translated into terms that he can understand: peace, bread, housing, clothing, education, good health, and above all, the right to walk with dignity on the world's great boulevards.

Ralph J. Bunche, Mont Tremblant, Canada (1942)

During his later years he has often said—and many a man has had, and will have, to say the same—that he had learned these people too late.

Sir Richard Francis Burton, Mission to Gelele, King of Dahome

Athenians: Aim at what is feasible, holding in view the real sentiments of us both; since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must....

Melians: As we think, at any rate, it is expedient —we speak as we are obliged, since you enjoin us to let right alone and talk only of interest— that you should not destroy what is our common protection, the privilege of being allowed in danger to invoke what is fair and right, and even to profit by arguments not strictly valid if they can be got to pass current....

Athenians:  Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can.....  It is certain that those who do not yield to their equals, who keep terms with their superiors, and are moderate towards their inferiors, on the whole succeed best.

  Thucydides (Book Five), The History of the Peloponnesian War

There can never be any solid friendship between individuals, or union between communities that is worth the name , unless the parties be persuaded of each other's honesty, and be generally congenial the one to the other; since from difference in feeling springs also difference in conduct.

 Thucydides (Chapter IV), The History of the Peloponnesian War