Bono Quotes

We were instrumental in creating the United Nations and the World Bank, and now we threaten their health.

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

The Nation is ceasing to be the leading form off the world’s structure; organizations transcending national boundaries are becoming more and more numerous and effective.

Without American leadership at the U.N., countries just continue to talk and socialize and spend taxpayer dollars.

I've been involved in and out of the U.N. for many years - in fact my first internship was in 1971, so it goes back a couple of years!

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.

The U.N. is one of many competitors in a marketplace of global problem solving.

As New Zealanders, we've been in on the United Nations from the very beginning, played a role in the drafting of the charter - it means a lot to us that those processes are followed.

Legislation that would withhold funding for the United Nations is fundamentally flawed in concept and practice, sets us back, is self-defeating, and doesn't work.

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.

I would never play any role in anything that involves the United Nations for obvious reasons.

There is no such thing as the United Nations.

The nations must be organized internationally and induced to enter into partnership, subordinating in some measure national sovereignty to worldwide institutions and obligations.

Look at the international bodies that came out of U.N. - international, publicly funded bodies that neither you or I know their names, because they are completely outdated and still publicly funded because there are no sunset clauses.

My job is to prioritize multi-lateralism, and that of course interests Brazil, which is a global player. I'm representing 159 members, and one of them happens to be Brazil.

If Australia wants an effective United Nations, we have to be comprehensively, not marginally, engaged.

I think the American people, understandably, have sort of lost faith in the United Nations.

If governments do not want to work with the U.N. and the international organizations, there is a limit to what you can do. And there is also a limit to patience.

No country can dictate its laws to the world.

The main thing that endears the United Nations to member governments, and so enables it to survive, is its proven capacity to fail, and to be seen to fail. If there is something you are expected to do, but don't want to do, or even have done for you, you can safely appeal to the UN in the comfortable certainty that it will let you down.

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.

…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.

When America rejected the League, she had deliberately chosen to rest solely upon treaties with the sanction of public opinion alone…

The United Nations is useless...and also harmful. It is a land that flowers demagoguery with a bunch of newborn countries, devoid of any tradition.

The United Nations is really the League of Nations 2.0