Will Rogers Quotes

The [foreign] policy of the United States is modeled on interventionism and aggression. It is logical that we should always be very suspicious.

The American nation cannot reach across the planet and pick the leadership of other countries.

We Americans have no commission from God to police the world.

Historically, we were always complaining about others interfering in our domestic and national issues.

The U.S. has intervened more often in more countries farther from its own shores than has any power in modern history.

But, if you believe we should go around the world overturning regimes to make little United States, I don't agree with that, because I don't think we're capable of doing that.

I don't consider Americans bullies, but I do consider the American government bullying.

I can't stress enough how strongly I am against any state intervention in a sovereign nation's affairs.

I love living in Vermont and I love living in New York. Does my love for Vermont give us the right to rain bombs down on Tripoli? Of course not. There are exceptional qualities about the United States. But it doesn't give us the right to impose our will on other cultures when they often don't want it.

The statesmen still say that we should not interfere in the internal affairs of other nations and yet it is not possible any longer not to interfere, even when we do not mean to do so.

Our foreign policy has made a wreck of this planet. I'm always in Africa... And when I go to these places I see American policy written on the walls of oppression everywhere.

Also, people are not often aware of the way the United States' policies influence what happens in places like Haiti or El Salvador or Nicaragua. Or in Columbia right now.

To call the American role in the world imperial was, for many who did so, a way of asserting that the United States was misusing its power beyond its borders and, in so doing, subverting its founding political principles within them.

I wish Obama would focus on governing the United States and would forget his country's imperialist pretensions.

The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes.

I saw no reason why other nations should tell Central Americans how to solve their problems.

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.

People make mistakes. And one of the mistakes that the United States consistently made was that it could intervene and somehow adjust people's governments, especially in the Middle East.

It kind of scares me, the notion that we're going to be injecting ourselves into other countries' affairs when they're not posing a threat to our security. I wouldn't be telling Israel what to do.

I'm tired of the U.S. getting involved in every country's individual disputes.

A democracy is severely restricted in its use of armed forces as a weapon of peacetime foreign policy. It cannot manipulate them tactically on any extensive scale for the accomplishment of measures short of war.

I don’t think America wants democracies in the Middle East. They wouldn’t be nearly as friendly to us

[America] well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standards of freedom …. She might become the dictatress of the world. She would no longer be the ruler of her own spirit.

The United States has the right to use its friendly offices in discouragement of any movement on the part of neighboring states which may tend to disturb the balance of power between them.

Perhaps we have already intervened too much in the affairs of other peoples.