Richard Holbrooke War Quotations

I'm not a wide-eyed imperialist who wants to see Americans manning outposts all over the world. Not outposts to freedom in the cold war cliche, but islands of stability and seas of ethnic strife. That is not what anyone should feel comfortable seeing Americans doing.

By the way, if you do your job on behalf of your country, you have meetings where you put your position forward strongly, and the other side does the same thing. And I've had plenty of meetings in my career that really were heated, people yelling at each other.

The Security Council has taken a critical step toward helping Congo and the region come to the peace that it so desperately needs,

This place has been a mess for a long time, but a different kind of mess. The war was messy, the decade that preceded the war was messy, the history back to 1912 was messy ... and the task is immense,

The World War II generation believed the United States could do anything - anything... And Vietnam was a shattering experience for everyone.

World War I was not inevitable, as many historians say. It could have been avoided, and it was a diplomatically botched negotiation.

one of the worst of the people in the region -- a racist, a separatist, a war criminal ...

We hope to bring the parties back to the negotiating table, ... but the hope to avoid war is very small.

A rough kind of justice has ended his life in a padded cell after his crimes were exposed and witnesses came forward including his own associates and that, I think, had a powerful effect.

I think it's very important for all Americans, whether they opposed the war or supported to it, whether they are liberals or conservatives, Republicans, Democrat or independents, to be able to say with pride we won -- to embrace the victory -- even as we begin to discuss the very difficult decisions that lie ahead,

I think it's quite clear that his nationalism contributed to the wars in the Balkans,