Elihu Root Quotes

You cannot have individual foreign policy. You cannot have celebrity foreign policy.

Foreign policy is too important to be left up to foreign service officers.

Foreign policy can no longer be the province of just a few elites.

I'm a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy.

Probably the most useful thing I can do as secretary of state is to assist the president in adapting and renewing the transnational institutions that were created after World War II.

In critical ways, Obama has reversed not just Bush policy but every president's approach to the world since the Second World War, save for that of his soulmate Jimmy Carter.

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.

Foreign Policy has to be less foreign.

You can't build a foreign policy on the presence of an individual [a particular foreign leader].

Congress cannot and should not run foreign policy.

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

U. S. Foreign Policy is usually largely reactive.

Foreign policy is the most constraining form of policy-making

The United Nations is a means. It is not an end for American foreign policy.

People think that it only takes an American decision to solve this or that problem [in foreign affairs].

When I became secretary of state, I felt one of my primary jobs was building relationships around the world.

In the United States, there is a broadly shared view that the U.N. is one of many potential instruments to advance U.S. issues, and we have to decide whether a particular issue is best done through the U.N. or best done through some other mechanism.

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.

Obama's foreign policy is strangely self-centered, focused on himself and the United States rather than on the conduct and needs of the nations the United States allies with, engages with, or must confront.

American foreign policy, for all its shortcomings, has underpinned political stability around the world.

I didn't serve on a committee that dealt with foreign policy.

We shouldn't discuss the world of tomorrow in terms of becoming a balance to the United States. The real issue is whether the United States will define herself as part of the U.N. system-or not.

Unilateral preemption should not in any way be the model for how we conduct international relations.

Foreign policy is really domestic policy with its hat on.

I loved being Secretary of State, that's probably evident to everyone who watched me.