John Major Quotes

I don't think it's the job of the United States to build democracies from whole cloth. That's Wilsonianism to me of the most crazy kind.

Neoconservatives habitually overstate America’s ability to export democracy.

No idea holds greater sway in the minds of educated Americans that the belief that it is possible to democratize governments anytime and anywhere under any circumstances .

We cannot impose democracy where it has no constituency.

American interests dictate that we teach other peoples to govern themselves.

Promoting democracy is one goal of U. S. foreign policy dating back at least 100 years. But it has always been one goal of many, often negated and outweighed by other competing interests.

It seems strange to the rest of the world, but we Americans can't seem to stop talking about how other countries should be democratic like we are.

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.

But, if you believe we should go around the world overturning regimes to make little United States, I don't agree with that, because I don't think we're capable of doing that.

Obama is cutting back on the idea that we're going to have Jeffersonian democracy in Pakistan or anywhere else.

In the past, the West had tried to export one formula of democracy which should fit to the rest of the world, and they discovered that this doesn't work.

We have become a crusader state or a missionary democracy. I think the two are interchangeable.

It is culturally condescension to say that some countries are not ready for democracy.

Only idiots would believe that the U.S. is a democratic country seeking democracy in other countries

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

Perhaps we have already intervened too much in the affairs of other peoples.

Being a minority in a supergovernment [world government], the political, economic, and social control of our own country would ultimately pass from our own hands, and all the assurances of our fundamental institutions would be lost.

The American preoccupation with promoting democracy abroad fits into a larger liberal view about the sources of a stable, legitimate, secure, and prosperous international order.

I think democracy is a universal idea and I think letting people rule themselves happens to be something that serves America and America’s interests.

The best American internationalists reject the idea that their nation holds a global copyright that gives it a mandate to churn out replicas dotting the world.

Our country is being bled daily in an effort to create a democracy in a place where it never existed.

People the world over now see democracy promotion as a dishonest, dangerous cover for the protection of U. S. power and influence.

We have no constitutional authority to police the world or involve ourselves in nation building, in making the world safe for our style of democracy. Our founders advised against it and the early presidents followed that advice.

The concepts of "democracy promotion" and "transformational diplomacy" pursued by the George W. Bush Administration conditioned interstate relations on altering any system of government that did not match Washington's understanding of democracy.

We've gone too far in thinking we can re-create an American democratic paradise in the Middle East.