George H. W. Bush Quotes

In order to ensure prompt and effective action by the United Nations, its Members confer on the Security Council primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security, and agree that in carrying out its duties under this responsibility the Security Council acts on their behalf.

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.

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

We need a relevant and efficient United Nations.

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

The U.N. is capable of endless process and mindless psychobabble, but as far as getting the job done on the ground, I just don't see them doing it.

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.

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.

The U.N. bureaucracy has grown to elephantine proportions. Now that the Cold War is over, we are asking that elephant to do gymnastics.

It is a commonplace that the League of Nations is not yet-what its most enthusiastic protagonists intended it to be.

Attempts to settle crises by unilateral sanctions outside the framework of U.N. Security Council decisions threaten international peace and stability. Such attempts are counterproductive and contradict the norms and principles of international law.

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.

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

The United Nations remains our most important global actor. These days we are continuously reminded of the enormous responsibility of the Security Council to uphold international peace and stability.

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

The U.N.'s impartiality allows it to negotiate and operate in some of the toughest places in the world. And time and again, studies have shown that U.N. peacekeeping is far more effective and done with far less money than what any government can do on its own.

The United Nations was not set up to be a reformatory. It was assumed that you would be good before you got in and not that being in would make you good.

I look forward to strengthening the U.S.-U.N. partnership and working closely with Secretary of State Kerry towards our shared goals of peace, development, and human rights.

The United Nations system is still the best instrument for making the world less fragile.

The League is dead; long live the United Nations.

Out of these troubled times … a new world order may emerge.

When the big powers are in agreement, the U. N. performs. When they aren't, the U. N. is paralyzed.

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

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