Margaret Thatcher Quotes

The nations of Europe constitute a federative league, a commonwealth of nations which, though it has no central head, is so intimate and elaborate as to subject the action, and sometimes even the internal affairs, of each to surveillance and intervention on the part of all the others.

The nations must be organized internationally and induced to enter into partnership, subordinating in some measure national sovereignty to worldwide institutions and obligations.

If the U.N. didn't exist, we'd be inventing it right now.

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

Our concept is not that America should operate alone or by itself in world affairs or in military affairs.

The international body must have the institutions and powers it needs to do what it is created to do; in other words it must be boldly and openly set up as a super-state on a level above the national sovereignties, and that, in turn, means that the Member States must have accepted in advance as much limitation and subordination of their particular sovereignties as this superior sovereign power requires.

Multilateralism is the democracy of international society.

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

You don’t do foreign policy unilaterally. Foreign policy is a team sport.

…though the American government did much to encourage the organs of the League, the fact that it stood aside, sharing neither the rights nor the duties of the League powers, was a fatal handicap to joint action.

When America rejected the League, she had deliberately chosen to rest solely upon treaties with the sanction of public opinion alone…

The whole basis of the United Nations is the right of all nations - great or small - to have weight, to have a vote, to be attended to be a part of the twentieth century.

Genuine association of interest on the part of the great powers must precede the transformation of the united nations military alliance into a political society of nations.

I'm not a multilateralist against anybody. I'm a multilateralist because I believe in a multilateral order.

There is, and there will be, an increasing demand for a principled global security provider, for a superpower that believes in multilateralism and cooperation.

It is not the Soviet Union or indeed any other big Powers who need the United Nations for their protection. It is all the others. In this sense, the Organization is first of all their Organization and I deeply believe in the wisdom with which they will be able to use it and guide it. I shall remain in my post during the term of my office as a servant of the Organization in the interests of all those other nations, as long as they wish me to do so.

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

The sublimated idealism of the Enlightenment, the spirit of the League of Nations and of the United Nations Charter have not proved strong enough to control the aggressive dynamism of nationalism.

The United Nations' greatest fear is that average Americans will no longer tolerate these international scandals and demand that America withdraw from the international organization.

To contrast national solidarity and international cooperation as two opposites seems foolish to me.

As we have seen, the wireless and the airplane have made the world so small and nations so dependent on each other that the only alternative to war is the United States of the World.

I have concluded that the U.N. can do a few things well.

Our alliances should be understood as a means to expand our influence, not as a constraint on our power. The expansion of democracy and freedom in the world should be a shared interest and value with all nations.

Like Canada, we very much wanted the United Nations to be a relevant and effective body. But once those efforts failed, we no longer saw things from a multilateral perspective. For us, now, it is much more basic than that. It is about family.

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