International Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Von Hayek was wrong. In strong and vibrant democracies, a generous social-welfare state is not a road to serfdom but rather to fairness, economic equality and international competitiveness.

Russia and India both have a geopolitical interest in a peaceful and stable Asia, which would be relieved of outward pressure and would not harbour and suffer from extremists.... Russia and India must do their best so that international community's efforts in Afghanistan were not futile.

Atal Bihari Vajpayee

Hearing him speak is so fun, reassuring I dare say. You can say all you like about Sihanouk: that he's an atrocious liar, a madman, a fraud, a swashbuckler, an international blot. You may think that, but you cannot deny how in this age in which the political arena seems to generate only dull, obtuse and boring characters with no imagination, he's a kind of miracle.

Given the profits he and Pharaoh must have made, one might call Joseph the first international arbitrageur.

Benoît Mandelbrot

The International Islamic Front for Jihad against the U.S. and Israel has, by the grace of God, issued a crystal-clear fatwah calling on the Islamic nation to carry on jihad aimed at liberating holy sites. The nation of Muhammad has responded to this appeal. If the instigation for jihad against the Jews and the Americans in order to liberate al-Aksa Mosque and the Holy Ka'aba is considered a crime, then let history be a witness that I am a criminal. Our job is to instigate and, by the grace of God, we did that, and certain people responded to this instigation.

Osama bin Laden

The ignoring of differences is the most fatal mistake in politics or industry or international life: every difference that is swept up into a bigger conception feeds and enriches society; every difference which is ignored feeds on society and eventually corrupts it.

Mary Parker Follett

Hunting for elusive dark matter is now a multibillion dollar international scientific industry.

More terrorists are given training and sanctuary in the United States than anywhere on earth. They include mass murderers, torturers, former and future tyrants and assorted international criminals. This is virtually unknown to the American public, thanks to the freest media on earth.

After analyzing the sanctions against our space industry, I suggest that the USA bring their astronauts to the International Space Station using a trampoline.

The international community invested much effort and hope in the Reformists, but they're pre-screened, pre-approved loyal opposition. More and more of their supporters are realizing it's futile to promote change from within because Iran's paramilitary mafia still occupy the top of the pyramid. Khamenei controls every apparatus of state: legislature, politics, information and military.

I started [in 1921] to write on the foundations of an approach to international trade theory that was to some extent new and for which I received the inspiration during a stroll on [the popular promenade] Unter den Linden in Berlin in 1920.

Girls have to get much more interested in public matters, in international matters, and [they must] affirm themselves by making frank, open, honest commitments in the area of the protection of women's rights, in the area of politics and in all other sectors. Sometimes when women are questioned on this or that subject, we are less informed than the boys.

Catherine Samba-Panza

Under a socialist system every nation will be the supreme arbiter of its own destinies, national and international; will be forced into no alliance against its will, but will have its independence guaranteed and its freedom respected by the enlightened self-interest of the socialist democracy of the world.

It is mutual fear and distrust that mostly generate world tensions and these can be traced in no small measure, like other root causes of worsening world conditions, to different people's conflicting and often intolerant, value-belief differences... Whereas in the past science did little, if anything, to remedy this situation and in some ways made things worse, our reformed "macro-determinist" science that includes consciousness and subjective values... provides common universal ethical foundations on which all nations could work to build a World Government or at least a World Security System to help control nuclear developments and other global threats that require international collaboration.

Roger Wolcott Sperry

A standard international language should not only be simple, regular, and logical, but also rich and creative.

But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Military people have a heavy investment in rules against torture, not only because we want to protect our own POWs from reciprocal brutalities, as a former general counsel for the Department of the Navy explains here, but also because war is so terrible that it desperately requires any limits anyone can agree on, any gesture toward dignity, any mitigation suggesting civilized scruple. There isn't even persuasive evidence that torture makes its victims tell their secrets, instead of saying whatever we want to hear. From an international leader in the cause of human rights and democratic values, the U.S. has turned into an unaccountable bully.

Early in April, an international community of sustainability theorists and practitioners gathered in New York City at a special High Level Meeting at the United Nations... the larger purpose of the meeting was to articulate the elements of a new economic paradigm, and to issue a call to world leaders to adopt its fundamental precepts.

What is patriotism but love of the good things we ate in our childhood? I have said elsewhere that the loyalty to Uncle Sam is the loyalty to doughnuts and ham and sweet potatoes and the loyalty to the German Vaterland is the loyalty to Pfannkuchen and Christmas Stollen. As for international understanding, I feel that macaroni has done more for our appreciation of Italy than Mussolini... in food, as in death, we feel the essential brotherhood of mankind.

We humans who art on Earth, humanity is special, our kingdom has come. Do what we innately know to be right, on Earth because that's all there is. Share the bread we have, try not to screw up. When others screw up, understand. We can't have everything that tempts us (Unless we work in international finance). Deliver ourselves from evil because this is it. The Earth, the power to do right, and the glory that will come if we do is ours, now and forever. Hu-man.

Marcus Brigstocke

Faith in armed might paralyzes international action.

No more thrilling challenge confronts the people of this generation than that inherent in the crusade to abolish war and to create adequate international organization.

The [president] is right to point to an international [jihadist] movement aimed at the collapse of the United States. He has gone after that threat in the right way and with great energy and vigor, and I applaud the fact that he has taken it on very seriously and has not considered it just a criminal action but instead a war action, which requires a military … response.

I'll wire the International Federation of American Homing Pigeon Fanciers and give them the number stamped on the bird's leg ring.

The US — its bankrupt mortgage institutions nationalised and its gigantic war machine effectively funded by foreign borrowing — is in steep decline. With its financial system in the worst mess since the 1930s, the west's ability to shape events is dwindling by the day. Sermonising about "law-based international relations" is laughable after Iraq, and at bottom not much more than nostalgia for a vanished hegemony.