Samantha Power Quotes

The U.S and England are not worthy of security council membership. Those who want good relations with the Iranian people should bow and surrender to its right and might.

If there are countries in the world who are willing to flout sanctions, it doesn’t matter if we have sanctions or not.

American foreign policy must be fashioned by the United States, not the United Nations.

The United States does not feel any need to consult with anybody … except when it suits them.

My work at the United Nations discomforted some members of the U.S. government, which exercises its power beyond collective understandings and international law.

U.N. Security Council resolutions are only as effective as their enforcement.

There's been a deliberate and systematic effort to convey to countries around the world, friends and foes, that if they cross the United States there's a price to pay.

In the United States, there is a broadly shared view that the U.N. is one of many potential instruments to advance U.S. issues, and we have to decide whether a particular issue is best done through the U.N. or best done through some other mechanism.

The United States prefers that Iraq meet its obligations voluntarily, yet we are prepared for the alternative.

The U.N. is much more than the case of Iraq.

Legislation that would withhold funding for the United Nations is fundamentally flawed in concept and practice, sets us back, is self-defeating, and doesn't work.

Probably the most useful thing I can do as secretary of state is to assist the president in adapting and renewing the transnational institutions that were created after World War II.

I don't know that there is much the United States can do except work with the international community.

Well, there's been plenty of ultimatums, and one thing that we better be very clear is that we can't continue to have the kind of defiance of the United Nations, the defiance of the international community that we've had.

If the United States leads a multinational force into Iraq without United Nations backing, Canada should fight beside its neighbour. We've gone from being a middle power to a muddle power on this one.

I think that all countries that participate in multilateral institutions see the institutions as a way of advancing what they view as their national interests and they see in many cases multi-lateral institution as the best way to do that.

I don’t talk to countries that exhibit bad behavior.

Where is the evidence that Washington's world view sways the multitude of nations? To enlist support for its wars in Korea, Vietnam and in the Gulf, the United States had to resort to a lot of bribery and threats. At the United Nations, the US has, with noteworthy regularity, been on the minority side in voting on resolutions.

No country can dictate its laws to the world.

If the savior of man would revisit and declare himself for a League of Nations, I would be opposed to it.

There is no way that any major international problem anywhere in the world can be solved efficiently with the United States sitting on the sideline.

…though the American government did much to encourage the organs of the League, the fact that it stood aside, sharing neither the rights nor the duties of the League powers, was a fatal handicap to joint action.

We’re not the world’s policeman. Nor the world’s judge, jury and executioner.

The United Nations is a means. It is not an end for American foreign policy.

History asks of us that we never act unilaterally, never alone, but only within the alliances of NATO, the United Nations and the European Union as it is clearly specified in international law