Miroslav Lajcak Quotes

There was an implicit conviction that the UN would be stronger than the sum of its constituent member-states.

When people say the U.N. is useless, I ask the question, which U.N. are we talking about? We have the U.N. that is a secretariat led by the secretary general, and we have a U.N. made up of member states who give us our mandate.

The liberal vision of America is that it should be less arrogant, less unilateral, more internationalist. In Obama's view, America would subsume itself under a fuzzy internationalism in which the international community, which I think is a fiction, governs itself through the U.N.

The U.N. guards the vital principles entrenched in its charter, notably the sovereign equality of states and the inadmissibility of interference in their internal affairs. It is precisely because the U.N. is the chief guardian of both these sacrosanct principles that it alone is allowed to approve derogations from them.

As the highest ranking American official in the United Nations organization, I came to understand thoroughly that the national constitutional processes of the member states define the status of territories under their sovereignty.

The attractive idea that we can now have a parliament of man with authority to control the conduct of nations by legislation or an international police force with power to enforce national conformity to rules of right conduct is a counsel of perfection.

The equality among all members of the League, which is provided in the statutes giving each state only one vote, cannot of course abolish the actual material inequality of the powers concerned.

The international body must have the institutions and powers it needs to do what it is created to do; in other words it must be boldly and openly set up as a super-state on a level above the national sovereignties, and that, in turn, means that the Member States must have accepted in advance as much limitation and subordination of their particular sovereignties as this superior sovereign power requires.

World government is a premature concept at this stage. We are moving more and more into supernational arrangements, but it is too early still.

In order to ensure prompt and effective action by the United Nations, its Members confer on the Security Council primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security, and agree that in carrying out its duties under this responsibility the Security Council acts on their behalf.

International institutions like the UN can only be as effective as its members allow it to be.

The whole basis of the United Nations is the right of all nations - great or small - to have weight, to have a vote, to be attended to be a part of the twentieth century.

The United Nations’ founders understood that decisions affecting war and peace should happen only by consensus, and with America’s consent the veto by Security Council permanent members was enshrined in the United Nations Charter. The profound wisdom of this has underpinned the stability of international relations for decades.

It's the right and also the responsibility of member states to express their views. And my role as the present of the General Assembly is not to comment on this. I'm here to protect and respect the rules.

There is simply no limitation on the realistic power of the U.N. over us.

As New Zealanders, we've been in on the United Nations from the very beginning, played a role in the drafting of the charter - it means a lot to us that those processes are followed.

In the euphoria after the Cold War, there was a misplaced notion that the UN could solve every problem anywhere.

I also believe that member states of the United Nations should live up their obligations to pay their dues.

Now, the United Nations is an organization that I believe was founded with good intentions. As a matter of fact, a prominent Tennessean named Cordell Hull was very involved with it.

Consider in 1945, when the United Nations was first formed, there were something like fifty-one original member countries. Now the United Nations is made up of 193 nations, but it follows the same structure in which five nations control it. It's an anti-democratic structure.

There is no such thing as the United Nations.

The United Nations is designed to make possible lasting freedom and independence for all its members.

All countries, big or small, strong or weak, are equal members of the United Nations.

The nations must be organized internationally and induced to enter into partnership, subordinating in some measure national sovereignty to worldwide institutions and obligations.

It is a commonplace that the League of Nations is not yet-what its most enthusiastic protagonists intended it to be.