Home > Author > Richard Holbrooke
1 " The negotiations were simultaneously cerebral and physical, abstract and personal, something like a combination of chess and mountain climbing. "
― Richard Holbrooke , To End a War
2 " Know something about something. Don't just present your wonderful self to the world. Constantly amass knowledge and offer it around. "
― Richard Holbrooke
3 " People hated to take their disagreements to the President; it was as though a failure to agree somehow reflected badly on each of them, and consensus, rather than clarity, was often the highest goal of the process. "
4 " The two Presidents sat opposite each other, while Christopher and I sat side by side on a couch between them; Hill and Galbraith also participated. Their greeting was far warmer than their performance for the press; Milosevic jovially hailed Tudjman as “Franjo.” Tudjman called Milosevic “Slobo. "
5 " In diplomacy, as in life itself, one often learns more from failures than from successes. Triumphs will seem, in retrospect, to be foreordained, a series of brilliant actions and decisions that may in fact have been lucky or inadvertent, whereas failures illuminate paths and pitfalls to be avoided. "
6 " I told him that the framework he had proposed in his tour of Europe was fine, with an important exception: I could support neither his proposal to give the Serbs a wider corridor of land at Posavina nor the suggestion that we abandon Gorazde. Both of these ideas had been part of an attempt to create “more viable borders” for the Federation by trading Muslim enclaves for Serb concessions elsewhere. The Pentagon insisted it would not defend enclaves and slivers of land if called upon later to implement a peace agreement. Nonetheless, I told Tony that the United States could not be party to such a proposal. “This would create another forty thousand or more refugees,” I said, “and we cannot be a party to that, especially after Srebrenica.” Tony asked if it was not true that Izetbegovic had once told me he knew that all three eastern enclaves were not viable and would have to be given up. Izetbegovic had, in fact, made such a statement to me in Sarajevo in January, but that was long before the loss and horrors of Srebrenica and Zepa. “A trade is no longer possible,” I said. “After Srebrenica, we cannot propose such a thing. "
7 " Bosnia is a country,” he said with a dry laugh, “where every boy grows up with the dream that someday he will own his own checkpoint. "
