Hjalmar Branting Quotes

The League is dead; long live the United Nations.

The United Nations is really the League of Nations 2.0

Just think of what Woodrow Wilson stood for: he stood for world government. He wanted an early United Nations, League of Nations. But it was the conservatives, Republicans, that stood up against him.

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

Without the U. N., world politics is inconceivable.

…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.

The United Nations’ founders understood that decisions affecting war and peace should happen only by consensus, and with America’s consent the veto by Security Council permanent members was enshrined in the United Nations Charter. The profound wisdom of this has underpinned the stability of international relations for decades.

The League of Nations seemed to us the embryo of a future international organization; and for the struggle against the internationales, whether Socialistic or Communist, it offered the best possible instrument. It was a great blow to us when the United States refused to become a party to these hopes.

The League of Nations is the greatest humbug in history. They cannot even protect a little nation like Armenia. They do nothing but pass useless resolutions.

I worked at the United Nations.

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

The U.N. is biggest platform for all nations. But slowly, its significance, effect, dignity, and use is being reduced. We should worry that we don't meet the same fate as League of Nations. Their descent was caused as they were not ready for reform. We shouldn't repeat that mistake.

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

The key to U.N. reform is giving Americans a clearer picture of what the U.N. is and what it isn't, what it can be and what it can't be.

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

Now, the United Nations is an organization that I believe was founded with good intentions. As a matter of fact, a prominent Tennessean named Cordell Hull was very involved with it.

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.

All in all, the League of Nations is not inevitably bound, as some maintain from time to time, to degenerate into an impotent appendage of first one, then another of the competing great powers.

There are big issues, like the reform of the Security Council. These kinds of questions are something the President of the General Assembly must keep his eye on.

The utter incompetence of the U.N. is literally incomprehensible.

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.

We would have to invent the U.N. if we did not have it, which is not an original thought.

Of course the UN brings in a lot of moral authority.

The European organisation contemplated could not oppose any ethnic group, on other continents or in Europe itself, outside of the League of Nations, any more than it could oppose the League of Nations.