Jamie Zawinski Quotes

We've had administrations where our State Department was an outpost of the British Foreign Office for altogether too long.

The most fundamental purpose of government is defense, not empire.

The United States' administrations... must recognize that Iran is a big power. Having said that, we consider ourselves to be a human force and a cultural power and hence a friend of other nations. We have never sought to dominate others or to violate the rights of any other country.

When in the course of European diplomacy it becomes necessary for one people to let another dissolve the political bands which have connected them with a third, and to assume among the powers of the earth the desperate and unequal station to which the will of an International Congress condemns them, a decent respect to the cannon of their protectors requires that they should say nothing about the causes which compel them to accept the situation.

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.

I don’t care a damn about New Guinea. And I am not afraid of German colonization, but I don’t like being cheeked by Bismarck.

It doesn’t matter if we don’t consider ourselves an empire. Others see us as impinging on their lives, their way of life.

All foreign policy is the intervention of one nation's domestic politics into another nation's domestic politics.

The Algerines, in particular, would never acknowledge the flag of the United States, unless it were made for their interests to do so.

America’s military bases around the world are centers of stability in unstable regions.

The war is going to end because we're gonna have such a political and financial havoc here with the devaluation of our dollar, because we just can't keep affording it. This is usually how empires end, by spending too much money maintaining their empire. We're in 130 countries, we have 700 bases around the world, and it's going to come to an end. I want it to come to an end more gracefully and peacefully, follow the constitution, and follow a more sensible foreign policy.

It looks like the so-called "winners" of the Cold War are determined to have it all, and reshape the world into a place that could better serve their interests alone.

Divide et impera must be the motto of every nation that either hates or fears us.

Alternatively, suppose Qaddafi winds up hanging from a lamppost in his favorite party dress. If you're a Third World dictator, what lessons would you draw? Qaddafi was the thug who came in from the cold, the one who (in the wake of Saddam's fall) renounced his nuclear program and was supposedly rehabilitated in the chancelleries of the West. He was a strong partner in the war on terrorism, according to U.S. diplomats. And what did Washington do? They overthrew him anyway.

American official policy is that Egypt is an ally of the United States.

Historically, we were always complaining about others interfering in our domestic and national issues.

Judge candidly what a wretched figure the American empire will exhibit in the eye of other nations, without a power to array and support a military force for its own protection.

To call the American role in the world imperial was, for many who did so, a way of asserting that the United States was misusing its power beyond its borders and, in so doing, subverting its founding political principles within them.

When the Egyptians decide something, probably it is not appropriate for the U.S. When the Americans decide something, this, of course, is not appropriate for Egypt.

Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role.

Without the Empire we should be tossed like a cork in the cross current of world politics. It is at once our sword and our shield.

Everybody pursues their national interests. The only one who gets blamed for it is the United States.

American influence in the world is certainly considerable, but the United States does not control, directly or indirectly, the politics and economics of other societies, as empires have always done, save for a few special cases that turn out to be the exceptions that prove the rule.

America is interested in re-arranging the region as it sees fit.

In the 1980s, the U.S. Army invaded two Caribbean countries, Grenada and Panama, to depose leaders who had defied Washington.