International Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax, and nerve gas, and nuclear weapons for over a decade. This is a regime that has already used poison gas to murder thousands of its own citizens — leaving the bodies of mothers huddled over their dead children. This is a regime that agreed to international inspections — then kicked out the inspectors. This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world.

The International War Crimes Tribunal, located at The Hague. When it was established by the United Nations Security Council in 1993, the tribunal was widely viewed as little more that a public relations device. It got off to a slow start (...) During our negotiations, the tribunal emerged as a valuable instrument of policy that allowed us, for example, to bar Karadzic and all other indicted war criminals from public office. Yet no mechanism existed for the arrest of indicted war criminals.

Richard Holbrooke

Every year the international finance system kills more people than the Second World War. But at least Hitler was mad, you know.

Ken Livingstone

If this government wants to be fair dinkum, then it must stop kowtowing to financial markets, international organisations, world bankers, investment companies and big business people. The Howard government must become visionary and be prepared to act, even at the risk of making mistakes.

My own position is somewhere in between. I am not sure that the economic arguments for an early step toward real union are very compelling. I have deep feelings, however, about the political necessity of creating in Western Europe an international framework which would bridge national sovereignties to such a degree as to give a different aspect to the German question by providing a home for the German people other than the national home and thus lifting German horizons beyond those national limits with which the Germans have shown themselves so incapable of coping.

George F. Kennan

There is no lack of diagnoses of the manifold ills that beset the international order, coherent and even convincing diagnoses by foremost think tanks, universities and outstanding individual researchers all over the world. Obstacles to an improved world order are evident, but remedies do not materialize. Is it because the real power no longer resides in States and Governments but rather in the economy, the intelligence community, the military-industrial and financial-industrial complexes, which are neither democratic nor transparent and operate impervious to reasons other than power or profit? The answers are complex and require further research, which may contribute to future reports on the vast menu of General Assembly resolution 67/175.

Alfred de Zayas

Four years ago a large part of the civilised world laboured under certain biological fallacies which may, in a sense, be held responsible for the extent and duration of the present conflict. These fallacies, which were the foundation of pacifism and other pernicious forms of social and political radicalism, dealt with the capacity of man to evolve mentally beyond his former state of subservience to primate instinct and pugnacity, and to conduct his affairs and international or interracial relations on a basis of reason and good-will. That belief in such capability is unscientific and childishly naive, is beside the question.

H. P. Lovecraft

Ultimately... the hierarchy of prestige in an international system rests on economic and military power.

Effective foreign policymaking requires an understanding of not only international and transnational systems, but also the intricacies of domestic politics in multiple countries. It also demands recognition of just how little is known about building nations, particularly after revolutions – a process that should be viewed in terms of decades, not years.

International big business may conduct its operations with scraps of paper, but the ink it uses is human blood!

Formerly admired almost universally as the preeminent champion of human rights, the United States now has become one of the foremost targets of respected international organizations concerned about these basic principles of democratic life. Some of our actions are similar to those of abusive regimes that we have historically condemned.

I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing.

What is at at stake now is the peace of the world. What we are striving for is a new international order based upon broad and universal principles of right and justice, — no mere peace of shreds and patches.

I am tied by a very solid friendship to President Senghor. He is a statesman of international standing and a remarkable administrator, a master of the French language and an authentic poet. I spoke to him at length about the "negritude" which is a genuine doctrine of cultural synthesis. It echoed profoundly in me since, throughout my life, I have delved ceaselessly back to the deepest and most ancient roots of my own country.

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi

There are signs that the system of collective security established in San Francisco nearly 50 years ago [at the founding of the UN] is finally beginning to work as conceived... We are on the way to achieving a workable international system.

Boutros Boutros-Ghali

I is here standing outside the United Nations of Benetton. Which is where representatives from the three corners of the world come to end wars, international drug trafficking, and everything else that is a bit of a laugh.

Sacha Baron Cohen

Consumer debt is the lifeblood of our economy. All modern nation states are built on deficit spending. Debt has come to be the central issue of international politics. But nobody seems to know exactly what it is, or how to think about it.

Law is the essential foundation of stability and order both within societies and in international relations.

J. William Fulbright

Trotskyism is not a new movement, a new doctrine, but the restoration, the revival of genuine Marxism as it was expounded and practiced in the Russian revolution and in the early days of the Communist International.

James P. Cannon

The existence of such an [international Islamic] army rules out the superpowers' interference in disputes among Muslim countries.

The idea of comparative advantage—with its implication that trade between two nations normally raises the real incomes of both—is, like evolution via natural selection, a concept that seems simple and compelling to those who understand it. Yet anyone who becomes involved in discussions of international trade beyond the narrow circle of academic economists quickly realizes that it must be, in some sense, a very difficult concept indeed.

There is no such thing as gratitude in international politics.

Arnold J. Toynbee

International language of the forthcoming generations will be solely and by necessity only a language of art.

Ludoviko Lazaro Zamenhof

There are already people who are world class in India, for example C. N. R. Rao (who has worked mainly in solid-state and structural chemistry). He is an example of how you can do first rate international work within India. So I would say to Indians — you have it within you to do this (in India).

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

The Charter of the United Nations expresses the noblest aspirations of man: abjuration of force in the settlement of disputes between states; the assurance of human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion; the safeguarding of international peace and security.