37 International Quotes

If Algeria introduced a resolution declaring that the earth was flat and that Israel had flattened it, it would pass by a vote of 164 to 13 with 26 abstentions.

Sporting chivalrous contest helps knit the bonds of peace between nations. Therefore may the Olympic flame never expire.

I think the word of the United States has been as good as gold in its international dealings and its agreements.

Harmony, liberal intercourse with all nations, are recommended by policy, humanity, and interest.

I could buy myself paper, a pen, a pencil and a brush and could create pictures whenever and wherever I wanted. ... That evening, in the spring of 1947, on the embankment of the Seine in Paris, at the age of thirty, I saw that it was possible to live and work in the world, and that I could participate in the exchange of ideas that was taking place all around, bound to no country.

I have made almost as many films in England as I have in America. I will come back to England again and again.

I am making this trip to Africa because Washington is an international city, just like Tokyo, Nigeria or Israel. As mayor, I am an international symbol. Can you deny that to Africa?

Working together, we can build a world in which the rule of law - not the rule of force - governs relations between states. A world in which leaders respect the rights of their people, and nations seek peace, not destruction or domination. And neither we nor anyone else should live in fear ever again.

The United States is the most powerful technically advanced country in the world to-day. Its influence on the shaping of international relations is absolutely incalculable. But America is a large country and its people have so far not shown much interest in great international problems, among which the problem of disarmament occupies first place today. This must be changed, if only in the essential interests of the Americans. The last war has shown that there are no longer any barriers between the continents and that the destinies of all countries are closely interwoven. The people of this country must realize that they have a great responsibility in the sphere of international politics. The part of passive spectator is unworthy of this country and is bound in the end to lead to disaster all round.

It is easier to hate an enemy with much good in him than one who is all bad. We cannot hate those we despise. The Japanese had an advantage over us in that they admired us more than we admired them. They could hate us more fervently than we could hate them. The Americans are poor haters in international affairs because of their innate feeling of superiority over all foreigners. An American's hatred for a fellow American (for Hoover or Roosevelt) is far more virulent than any antipathy he can work up against foreigners. It is of interest that the backward South shows more xenophobia than the rest of the country. Should Americans begin to hate foreigners wholeheartedly, it will be an indication that they have lost confidence in their own way of life.

I really think Canada should get over to Iraq as quickly as possible. There's a huge need for front-line medical professionals. There's a huge need for policing. And there's a huge need for infrastructure rebuilding.

The Commonwealth is a mere club, but it has become like an 'Animal Farm' where some members are more equal than others. How can Blair claim to regulate and direct events and still say all of us are equals?

the establishment of international and regional organisations for the promotion and protection of human rights would be encouraged in Tibet.

Gad, sir, Lord Beaverbrook is right! A conference should be held at once for the U. S. A. to pay back the money Europe owes her.

To Poland's President Aleksander Kwasniewski: I want to thank you for your leadership on that issue, Mr Prime Minister. (10 February 2005) [62]

'The sections of the Bill dealing with amnesty were not plucked out of thin air. They have been taken from legislation adopted and successfully used elsewhere. The principles of amnesty are well known and accepted internationally. We have done the research on this.' (14 June 2005)

I doubt whether the public has fully grasped the change which has come over the nature of modern wealth. If the nature of that change were grasped by our publics, we should be much nearer to accepting the international organizations necessary for the defense of welfare and of civilization than we are. As it is, we are in danger of being diverted to the discussion of schemes for a vast rearrangement of frontiers in defiance of national feeling - for the boundaries of the national and the economic unit do not conveniently coincide - before which the difficulties of a Disarmament Conference would pale into insignificance.

President Ronald Reagan will be remembered in the hearts of all Latvians as a fighter for freedom, liberty, and justice worldwide.

The times when the centre of gravity of political development and the crystallising agent of capitalist contradictions lay on the European continent, are long gone by. To-day Europe is only a link in the tangled chain of international connections and contradictions.

I'd like to get rid of landmines. I did participate in getting rid of laser blinding weapons. And I was part of the team that put together the agreement that got rid of laser blinding weapons. I'd like to get rid of nuclear weapons. But I can't agree with those who say that force has no place in international affairs. It simply does for this country. And I would like to work to make it so that it doesn't. But the truth is, for now it does. And so, I can't go against giving our men and women in uniform the appropriate weapons they need to fight, to fight effectively to succeed on the battlefield, and to minimize their own casualties.

So I see my research focusing on international problems of social and racial equality. And I think it will help inform a lot of the positions I take regarding domestic strategy issues.

If the resources of different nations are treated as exclusive properties of these nations as wholes, if international economic relations, instead of being relations between individuals, become increasingly relations between whole nations organized as trading bodies, they inevitably become the source of friction and envy between whole nations. It is one of the most fatal illusions that, by substituting negotiations between states or organized groups for competition for markets or for raw materials, international friction would be reduced. This would merely put a contest of force in the place of what can only metaphorically be called the 'struggle' of competition and would transfer to powerful and armed states, subject to no superior law, the rivalries which between individuals had to be decided without recourse to force. Economic transactions between national bodies who are at the same time the supreme judges of their own behavior, who bow to no superior law, and whose representatives cannot be bound by any considerations but the immediate interest of their respective nations, must end in clashes of power.

The nationality question has been a subject of various writings; an honoring controversy over the claim to the founder of our current world view is conducted between Poles and Germans, but as already mentioned nothing certain can be determined concerning the nationality of Copernicus' parents; the father seems to have been of Slavic birth, the mother German; he was born in a city whose municipal authorities and educated inhabitants were Germans, but which at the time of his birth was under Polish rule; he studied at the Polish capital, Krakau, then in Italy, and lived out his days as a canon in Frauenburg; he wrote Latin and German. In science, he is a man who belongs to no single nation, whose labors and strivings belong to the whole world, and in C. we do not honor the Pole nor the German, but the man of free spirit, the great astronomer, the father of the new astronomy, the originator of the true Weltanschauung (world view).

In September [2002] the government announced the national security strategy. That is not completely without precedent, but it is quite new as a formulation of state policy. What is stated is that we are tearing the entire system of the international law to shreds, the end of UN charter, and that we are going to carry out an aggressive war - which we will call 'preventive' - and at any time we choose, and that we will rule the world by force. In addition, we will assure that there is never any challenge to our domination because we are so overwhelmingly powerful in military force that we will simply crush any potential challenge. That caused shudders around the world, including the foreign policy elite at home which was appalled by this. It is not that things like that haven't been heard in the past. Of course they had, but it had never been formulated as an official national policy. I suspect you will have to go back to Hitler to find an analogy to that. Now, when you propose new norms in the international behavior and new policies you have to illustrate it, you have to get people to understand that you mean it. Also you have to have what a Harvard historian called an 'exemplary war', a war of example, which shows that we really mean what we say. And we have to choose the right target. The target has to have several properties. First it has to be completely defenseless. No one would attack anybody who might be able to defend themselves, that would be not prudent. Iraq meets that perfectly... And secondly, it has to be important. So there will be no point invading Burundi, for example. It has to be a country worthwhile controlling, owning, and Iraq has that property too.

I think that we could agree on what kind of a world we would all want to build. it would be a world of independent nations, moving toward international community, each of which protected and respected the basic human freedoms. It would be a world which demanded of each government that it accept its responsibility to insure social justice. It would be a world of constantly accelerating economic progress - not material welfare as an end in itself, but as a means to liberate the capacity of every human being to pursue his talents and to pursue his hopes. It would, in short, be a world that we would be proud to have built.

The art of government has grown from its seeds in the tiny city-states of Greece to become the political mode of half the world. So let us dream of a world in which all states, great and small, work together for the peaceful flowering of the republic of man.

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, to be a part of the twentieth century.

Whose life would be on my hands as the commander-in-chief because I, unilaterally, went beyond the international law, went beyond the stated mission, and said we're going to show our macho? We're going into Baghdad. We're going to be an occupying power - America in an Arab land - with no allies at our side. It would have been disastrous. We don't gain the size of our victory by how many innocent kids running away - even though they're bad guys - that we can slaughter. ... We're American soldiers; we don't do business that way.

There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe - and there never will be under a Ford administration... The United States does not concede that those countries are under the domination of the Soviet Union.

We need a new approach to national security. A bold, progressive internationalism that stands in stark contrast to the too often belligerent and myopic unilateralism of the Bush Administration.

'When have you ever heard the United States take the blame for anything? This is no different.'

If I am asked, by credible organizations, to mediate, I will consider that very seriously. But a situation of this nature does not need an individual, it needs an organization like the United Nations to mediate. We must understand the seriousness of this situation. The United States has made serious mistakes in the conduct of its foreign affairs, which have had unfortunate repercussions long after the decisions were taken.

You will notice that France, Germany Russia, China are against this decision. It is clearly a decision that is motivated by George W. Bush's desire to please the arms and oil industries in the United States of America. If you look at those factors, you'll see that an individual like myself, a man who has lost power and influence, can never be a suitable mediator.

The ocean is not wide enough to hold all the sympathy that is streaming from the Old World to the New.