Jean Monnet Quotes

There are a lot of very brilliant people who believe that the nation-state is fast becoming a relic of the past.

Here we encounter two conflicting concepts with which we must come to grips in our time: the idea of national solidarity and the idea of international cooperation.

World government will come, but we do not know the date.

We shall have world government whether or not we like it. The only question is whether World government will be achieved by conquest or consent.

The entire planet is drawn to Indian culture and soft power. The global community looks to us for solutions to international problems - whether terrorism, money laundering or climate change. In a globalised world, our responsibilities are also global.

Our mission in this new century is clear. For good or ill, we live in an interdependent world. We can't escape each other. Therefore, we have to spend our lives building a global community of shared responsibilities, shared values, shared benefits.

In today's world, the elites are growing even more comfortable with one another across national lines, yet at the same time, less comfortable with low-income people who share their nationality. How we create those bonds of community that are truly global as well as national is one of our generation's great challenges.

The current nation-state model is the product of thousands of years of political, social, and cultural evolution. I mean, it was only recently - in, like, the last few decades - that people have tried to create an organizing principle larger than the nation-state.

The 21st century is significantly different from the 20th century. The old models will not hold anymore. More and more, we are one people on Earth. We need to share our problems.

I'd like to see the argument made for greater worldwide federalism, not just the European Union.

No self-respecting country - especially one with our clout and proud history - should sign up to a proposal that surrenders the power to veto our foreign and trade policy to another entity.

Let's forget a little about the 19th century and start looking at the 21st century.

Every state aspiring to be part of the free world, able to decide its own destiny, deserves its chance. They may, in a not too distant future, contribute to all of us in ways we cannot imagine today.

Whether the borders that divide us are picket fences or national boundaries, we are all neighbors in a global community.

What happened to us in September, 2001, is a microcosmic but painful and powerful example of the fact we live in an inter-dependent world that is not yet an integrated global community.

Country [China] needs to continue opening up and keep connecting. It needs to realize that the world has become one. The old concept of isolation, the idea that you can solve your problems on your own does not work anymore - neither in cultural, economic, nor political terms.

Everything has changed and we're all living in one city now. What happens somewhere affects things everywhere, so I have to be careful and whatever stories I work on, I want them to have redeeming moral values.

A truly global economy, as opposed to the multinational economy of the recent past, will require concessions of national power ... that seemed impossible a few years ago and which even now we can but partly imagine.

We must offer the world leadership designed to advance the goal of universal progress and enduring peace.

If we are to avoid that catastrophe [a nuclear World War III], a system of world order — preferably a system of world government — is mandatory. The proud nations someday will see the light and, for the common good and their own survival, yield up their precious sovereignty, just as America's thirteen colonies did two centuries ago. When we finally come to our senses and establish a world executive and parliament of nations, thanks to the Nuremburg precedent we will already have in place the fundamentals for the third branch of government, the judiciary.

Within the next hundred years...nationhood as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority... National sovereignty wasn't such a great idea after all.

It is clear that the international community has no other universal organisation of the likes of the United Nations.

However fragmented the world, however intense the national rivalries, it is an inexorable fact that we become more interdependent every day. I believe that national sovereignties will shrink in the face of universal interdependence. The sea, the great unifier, is man's only hope. Now, as never before, the old phrase has a literal meaning: We are all in the same boat.

Nations are in effect ceding portions of their sovereignty to the international community and beginning to create a new system of international environmental governance.

Wizard's Seventh Rule Life is the future, not the past.