Jeffrey Sachs Quotes

When America rejected the League, she had deliberately chosen to rest solely upon treaties with the sanction of public opinion alone…

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 Nations is an indispensable but deeply flawed organization. It is valuable to the United States, and the United States is invaluable to it. We need to reform it.

There is a movement to get an international criminal court in the world, voted for by hundreds of states-but with the noticeable absence of the United States of America.

The interests of the United States are better served by demanding reform and seeing that reform takes place than by removing our influence from the UN.

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

We shouldn't discuss the world of tomorrow in terms of becoming a balance to the United States. The real issue is whether the United States will define herself as part of the U.N. system-or not.

On big issues like war in Iraq, but in many other issues they simply must be multilateral. There's no other way around. You have the instances like the global warming convention, the Kyoto protocol, when the U.S. went its own way.

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

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

I have always seen the United States as a force of good. And I have learned that there is the idealistic part about what we can do at the U.N. and there is a doable part. And I have learned what is more doable.

The United Nations has become a place where many countries seek to achieve a lynching of the United States by resolution.

I think the American people, understandably, have sort of lost faith in the United Nations.

I look forward to strengthening the U.S.-U.N. partnership and working closely with Secretary of State Kerry towards our shared goals of peace, development, and human rights.

Just as the United States doesn't like others to take charge, other countries also don't like the United States to play a dominant role in the United Nations.

Ever since 1954, when the United States did not sign the Geneva accords but instead started down the road of unilateral military action in South Vietnam, we have become a provocateur of military conflict in Southeast Asia and marched in the opposite direction from fulfilling our obligations under the United Nations Charter.

When did the American people decide that U. S. foreign policy should be conducted through the United Nations.

Preserve U. S. sovereignty and freedom of action by marginalizing the United Nations.

The best thing that most Americans can say about the UN is that it is ineffectual. That’s the best thing.

… unless the United Nations stops becoming simply a debating society for anti-American rhetoric, I'm going to show them the door.

…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.

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

The League of Nations seemed to us the embryo of a future international organization; and for the struggle against the internationales, whether Socialistic or Communist, it offered the best possible instrument. It was a great blow to us when the United States refused to become a party to these hopes.

China, as a major nation of the world, as one of five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, and as a member of the U.N. Council on Human Rights, should be contributing to peace for humankind and progress toward human rights.

I think the United States, whether you have a Democratic president or whether you have a Republican president, is bound by international law, whether some senators like it or not.