Peter Singer Quotes

If we are going to lead the world, we have to know where it is.

Americans in general, I think, don't understand the weight and gravity of foreign policy and how to engage the world at large.

World Affairs Councils are great organizations. They help keep people throughout our country alive to important developments in world affairs and underscore that, in the country, we stay engaged and we are part of the world.

At the time it seriously troubled me, but in drafting me as Marshall Plan Administrator, President Truman did as great a favor for me as one man can do for another. It opened my eyes to many things of which I was totally unaware and it was the beginning of my real education.

Unfortunately, the real focus in this country has not been on the rest of the world. It's been on our own issues and our own problems. Fair enough. But it means that our simple hopes that everything will just work out abroad aren't really coming to pass.

I think that America's recovery of a global strategic view is an absolutely essential element of our foreign policy.

I do believe American leadership in the world matters, that we can't just disengage from the world.

I've always been interested in foreign relations. It's my belief that study of history should be our preparation for understanding the present rather than an escape from it.

An isolationist America is no bloody use to anyone.

The most important thing I learned as a foreign correspondent in about 80 countries is that it takes a very shallow knowledge of history to think that there are solutions to most problems.

Whatever one thinks of President George W. Bush and his unilateralist crew, most of the people laughing at us do not think we are evil. What they think is that we are naive and incompetent.

How much has it been your experience that Americans follow what happens in the world?

Well, I think the United States first of all has to recognize the world for what it is.

Very little of what America does is actually bad, and I don't think it ever does anything anywhere that is intentionally bad. I mean, sometimes we make mistakes and bad judgments and kind of back the wrong regimes and things, but by and large what America does is really good.

The real danger to Britain is a foreign policy that is isolationist in Europe and therefore weak in the rest of the world.

Scholars and historians have dubbed the last 100 years the American Century, and I think there can be little doubt that the Council on Foreign Relations helped to make it so.

And so I think that the idea of America working with other countries to solve problems is good for us, and it is part of digging us out of the 'my way or the highway' approach that was evident in the previous eight years.

It's clear that the United States has more to give the world than military bases.

We intend to continue our interest in the affairs of Europe and of the world.

We, as Americans, have so much to learn here. We have a shockingly low level of global awareness and familiarity and little idea of how the world sees us. And those disturbing facts keep getting us into a lot of trouble.

The United States is very good at understanding itself, and very bad at understanding others.

The United States plays, for the most part, a constructive global role, and to the extent that that role shrinks, other countries, even those most critical of what America does abroad, will suffer.

I have never dealt with people who have so little political sagacity as the Turks.

Some critics complain that Gary Hart doesn't have any experience in foreign policy. But that's not true. Why, just yesterday he had breakfast at the International House of Pancakes.

Under the Nixon-Ford administration, there has evolved a kind of secretive "Lone Ranger" foreign policy—a one-man policy of international adventure. This is not an appropriate policy for America.