Adolfo Perez Esquivel Quotes

The League of Nations seemed to us the embryo of a future international organization; and for the struggle against the internationales, whether Socialistic or Communist, it offered the best possible instrument. It was a great blow to us when the United States refused to become a party to these hopes.

The United Nations is an indispensable but deeply flawed organization. It is valuable to the United States, and the United States is invaluable to it. We need to reform it.

It may surprise people to know that I advocate the reform of the United Nations, not its abolishment.

Now, the United Nations is an organization that I believe was founded with good intentions. As a matter of fact, a prominent Tennessean named Cordell Hull was very involved with it.

Of course what is talked about in the U.N. General Assembly is very important. Officials, the leaders of nations, appear there to speak of the most important topics - what they perceive to be the most important topics.

It is a commonplace that the League of Nations is not yet-what its most enthusiastic protagonists intended it to be.

The League is dead; long live the United Nations.

Multilateralism is the democracy of international society.

The United Nations is a failed institution in its current form.

World government is a premature concept at this stage. We are moving more and more into supernational arrangements, but it is too early still.

I thought that the United Nations is a creature of the five super-powers who were given veto powers. I don't like veto powers at all.

There was an implicit conviction that the UN would be stronger than the sum of its constituent member-states.

There is an ongoing debate about the reform of the U.N. system.

The key to U.N. reform is giving Americans a clearer picture of what the U.N. is and what it isn't, what it can be and what it can't be.

The U.N. is much more than the case of Iraq.

In the euphoria after the Cold War, there was a misplaced notion that the UN could solve every problem anywhere.

The problem with the United Nations is that while democracy within nations is the best available form of government, democracy among nations can be a moral disaster - especially if some nations are not democracies.

What we need now is a Treaty of the World not a Treaty of Rome.

There is no such thing as the United Nations.

There are big issues, like the reform of the Security Council. These kinds of questions are something the President of the General Assembly must keep his eye on.

The utter incompetence of the U.N. is literally incomprehensible.

We have actively sought and are actively seeking to make the United Nations an effective instrument of international cooperation.

The logic of collective security is flawless, provided it can be made to work under the conditions prevailing on the international scene... The odds, however, are strongly against such a possibility.

Just think of what Woodrow Wilson stood for: he stood for world government. He wanted an early United Nations, League of Nations. But it was the conservatives, Republicans, that stood up against him.

But I would say if the Security Council is only relevant if it agrees with the United States, then we have come a long way in a direction that I do not like very much.