Bertrand Russell Quotes

Democratic nation states remain far more capable of managing the circuit of coercion, taxation and legitimation than any transnational bodies.

I've always made it clear that I do not believe that global government is either necessary or feasible.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

The United States influences government and life everywhere else.

World politics is not a kindergarten.

Very near the heart of all foreign affairs is the relationship between policy and military power.

For social movements seeking to shape the governance of the world economy, all roads still lead to the state.

There is, however, much to be said for the division of this great area [the Ruhr valley], as at present, rather than its union under a single state which would have, in war and peace, a practical monopoly of iron and steel on the Continent.

Where the Government is weak, military sway prevails.

The other thing that really I regretted not being able to do was to push effectively for the reform of the Security Council. Because the world was changing, and is changing very fast, and I felt the UN was holding on to old arrangements. Most governments felt that it has such a narrow power base, based on the results of the second world war.

All share in the government of the world was denied for centuries to perhaps the ablest, certainly the most tenacious race that had ever lived in it

In my generation, this was not the first occasion when the strong had attacked the weak.Communism was acting in Korea just as Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese had acted ten, fifteen, and twenty years earlier. I felt certain that if South Korea was allowed to fall, Communist leaders would be emboldened to override nations closer to our own shores.

Where mass opinion dominates the government, there is a morbid derangement of the true functions of power. The derangement brings about the enfeeblement, verging on paralysis, of the capacity to govern. This breakdown in the constitutional order is the cause of the precipitate and catastrophic decline of Western society. It may, if it cannot be arrested and reversed, bring about the fall of the West.

A great deal of world politics is a fundamental struggle, but it is also a struggle that has to be waged intelligently.

Everyone knows that the Zionist regime is a tool in the hands of the United States and British governments.

The provocations by Russia need to be met with American strength.

We have a lot of friends, but not among the governments - the friends are in the peoples. And in the last instance the peoples will be the rulers of those states.

We had a world dominated by the Soviet Union on the one hand, and the Americans on the other hand. They called it the Cold War. But it wasn't cold. I am someone who comes from the third world. In the third world, the cold war wasn't cold. Millions had been killed. It was a proxy war.

In the corporeal world, international law is whatever the United States and Great Britain say it is.

This foreign policy stuff is a little frustrating.

We need to be much more far thinking in this new 21st century era of - of nation state failures and conflict. It's not just about getting rid of a single dictator. It is about understanding the secondary and third consequences that fall next.

The events in Crimea themselves have nothing to do with what happened in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and other regions. In my opinion, when the world becomes unipolar, or when someone tries to make it so, then this one pole has the illusion that all issues can be settled through power. And only when there is a balance of power does the desire to negotiate appears.

I'll be honest, there have been times when I've listened to the rhetoric in Europe where an easy equivalent somehow between the United States and Russia and between how our governments operate versus other governments operate, where those distinctions aren't made.

You cannot have democratic accountability in anything bigger than a nation state.

The economic sanctions are absolutely going to hurt Russia's economy. They're hurting some of his key inner sanctum. But they are not affecting his political standing. And it's hard to see how they would do so at least, in the short term.