Eleanor Roosevelt Quotes

I don't know that there is much the United States can do except work with the international community.

I don’t talk to countries that exhibit bad behavior.

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

International policy does not aim at exploiting local, specific conditions to widen zones of influence and create difficulties for another country. The goal of international policy is to insure universal fulfillment of the "Declaration of the Rights of Man" and to prevent a sharpening of international tensions and a strengthening of militarist and nationalist tendencies.

People think that it only takes an American decision to solve this or that problem [in foreign affairs].

When Barack Obama was running for president, he committed to leading the United Nations and other countries towards a common global goal. Obama believed that he could speak to allies and dictators directly and charm them into seeing the error of their ways.

I'm a career diplomat. I spent 30 years as a diplomat, out of which seven years as foreign minister. I've always believed in the United Nations as a centre of multilateralism and multilateral diplomacy.

The U.N. can be very frustrating and at times impotent, but it can also be a valuable forum for discussion and resolution of world problems. We should not walk away from it just because it's failed to live up to its promise.

Legislation that would withhold funding for the United Nations is fundamentally flawed in concept and practice, sets us back, is self-defeating, and doesn't work.

Probably the most useful thing I can do as secretary of state is to assist the president in adapting and renewing the transnational institutions that were created after World War II.

Unilateral preemption should not in any way be the model for how we conduct international relations.

It is one thing to be against unilateralism and against nonhumanitarian interventionism - but it is quite another thing to be against humanitarian interventionism.

Foreign policy is effectively the assertion of many individual countries intersecting on the global marketplace. And you have to figure out how to get your interest served in a way that meets the interests and needs of these other folks.

Surely, God on high has not refused to give us enough wisdom to find ways to bring us an improvement in relations between the two great nations on earth.

Americans tend to go for it all. In international politics you can’t have it all. You have to compromise.

When it comes to international negotiations it cannot all be kept confidential and secret. There must be a way of preparing publics for what is being negotiated.

Everybody likes to go to Geneva. I used to do it for the Law of the Sea conferences and you'd find those potentates from down in Africa, you know, rather than eating each other, they'd just come up and get a good square meal in Geneva

Foreign Policy has to be less foreign.

... assertive multilateralism.

If governments do not want to work with the U.N. and the international organizations, there is a limit to what you can do. And there is also a limit to patience.

Multilateralism may be little more than a polite way of camouflaging what is in practice unilateralism with allies.

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

There is no way that any major international problem anywhere in the world can be solved efficiently with the United States sitting on the sideline.

Unilateral preemption should not in any way be the model for how we conduct international relations... It brings us into very dangerous territory and it could be used and abused by any other country. We need to continue to base our security on multilateralism, and on the Security Council.

Between countries -- regardless of whether they are democratic or authoritarian -- there will need to be an explanation, either for publics or for powerful constituencies