Mary Robinson Quotes

One of the main lessons I have learned the last five years as Secretary-General is that the United Nations cannot function properly without the support of the business community and civil society. We need to have tripartite support - the governments, the business communities and the civil society.

These are challenging times at home and around the world. We will have to work together in a bipartisan spirit and with our international partners if we are going to achieve progress and peace now and for future generations.

Global challenges require collective responses.

To make progress we have to build a multi-stakeholder process, harnessing the appropriate energies.

All depend upon the engagement of as many people as possible on all levels, from civil society to national leaders, to advocate for the kind of national and international commitments, legislation, and public/ private partnerships that can make the difference.

So the president set out the policy guidance and said it had to take place in a multilateral fashion so that other countries in the region could be invested in the success of this process.

As Scots - like everyone else - we live in an increasingly inter-connected world that demands shared solutions to shared problems. Walking away from others have never been our way. Walking with others has been our heritage and still represents our best future.

We cannot wait for governments to do it all. Globalization operates on Internet time. Governments tend to be slow moving by nature, because they have to build political support for every step.

Individual scientists cannot do much on their own. Heads of nations, corporates, and economic giants should recognise the criticality of it.

International cooperation, multilateralism is indispensable.

If we really wish to put an end to our ongoing international and social problems we must eventually declare Earth and all of its resources as the common heritage of all the world's people.

More than ever before in human history, we share a common destiny. We can master it only if we face it together. And that, my friends, is why we have the United Nations.

Community action is as valuable a principle on the international level as it has been domestically.

I will do everything in my power to ensure that our United Nations can live up to its name, and be truly united; so that we can live up to the hopes that so many people around the world place in this institution, which is unique in the annals of human history.

Peace and security of our planet must be based on the collective action of all nations, not a few, however powerful they may be.

Globalisation makes it clear that social responsibility is required not only of governments, but of companies and individuals. All sources must interact in order to reach the MDGs.

Progress is only possible if the United States and its allies work together.

In a situation where many national leaders do the same thing and look out for national interests, and with an issue like global warming, you're likely to get no solution, so I think you have to have some kind of ethical trump on some of those issues.

The life of states cannot, any more than the life of individuals, be conditioned by the force and the will of a unit, however powerful, but by the consensus of a group, which must one day include all states.

Today's message to Baghdad is very clear: the UN Security Council resolution expresses the unity and determination of the entire international community to assume its collective responsibility.

You can’t go it alone even if you are the world’s only superpower.

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

Americans of all ages, all stations of life, and all types of disposition are forever forming associations... In democratic countries knowledge of how to combine is the mother of all other forms of knowledge; on its progress depends that of all the others.

It is simply not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally by individual nation-states, however powerful. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the imperatives of global environmental cooperation.

International institutions like the UN can only be as effective as its members allow it to be.