Ban Ki-moon Quotes

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

People are finding it harder and harder to relate to foreign policy.

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.

Sometimes everyone is foreign minister.

International policy does not aim at exploiting local, specific conditions to widen zones of influence and create difficulties for another country. The goal of international policy is to insure universal fulfillment of the "Declaration of the Rights of Man" and to prevent a sharpening of international tensions and a strengthening of militarist and nationalist tendencies.

My father was a Foreign Service officer, a diplomat and an Arabist who spent virtually all his career in the Near East, as it was called in the State Department. So I spent most of my childhood among the Israelis and the Arabs of Palestine, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

I said it was my feeling that the American people would struggle for peace, and that has since been underscored by the President of these United States.

As a world leader, America must be prepared to confront any challenge.

The U.N. is one of many competitors in a marketplace of global problem solving.

The U.N. can be very frustrating and at times impotent, but it can also be a valuable forum for discussion and resolution of world problems. We should not walk away from it just because it's failed to live up to its promise.

So far as it depends on the course of this government, our relations of good will and friendship will be sedulously cultivated with all nations.

Look at what President Kennedy managed to achieve during the Cuban missile crisis. If Bush had been president in 1962, do you think he would have avoided a nuclear war?

Well, Mr Obama inherited probably the biggest inventory of problems, certainly foreign policy problems, than any American president ever has. I think the entire inventory of problems that he inherited is probably as big overall as any president, certainly since Franklin Roosevelt and maybe, in some cases, worse.

Diplomats make it their business to conceal the facts, and politicians violently denounce the politicians of other countries.

Foreign policy is like human relations, only people know less about each other.

We encourage China to engage as a good global citizen and we are clear-eyed about where differences do lie.

Obama is thoroughly mixed up with all these things he's got. He's got to solve Libya. He's got to solve Afghanistan. He's everywhere. And this nation, I don't know why it's not showing the leadership and capacity to attend different issues at the same time.

If there is one lesson for U.S. foreign policy from the past 10 years, it is surely that military intervention can seem simple but is in fact a complex affair with the potential for unintended consequences.

Because when I have been busy at the United Nations during crises, it has meant working day and night.

In these days of intimate relations, of economic stress and of intense desire to protect national interests and advance national opportunity, the treatment of questions which, from a legal standpoint, are domestic, often seriously affects international relations. The principle, each nation for itself to the full extent of its powers, is the principle of war, not of peace.

The United Nations Security Council is there to protect the interest of the Americans and the British.

... assertive multilateralism.

You do not build a foreign policy based on one man.

Ninety percent of foreign policy is reacting to whatever's happening out there.

There is a limitation upon the ability of the U. S. to solve these problems [of foreign policy].