Helen Clark Quotes

You look at the large problems that we face - that would be overpopulation, water shortages, global warming and AIDS, I suppose - all of that needs international cooperation to be solved.

On big issues like war in Iraq, but in many other issues they simply must be multilateral. There's no other way around. You have the instances like the global warming convention, the Kyoto protocol, when the U.S. went its own way.

All the major problems of the world today are global in essence, and they cannot be solved unless through some kind of global cooperation. It's not just climate change, which is, like, the most obvious example people give. I think more in terms of technological disruption.

Multilateral diplomacy is hard. It's slower, it's tougher, it's a bigger slog. I've learned that sometimes the things you'd most like to do something about, you really have difficulty unless the international community really mobilizes.

I don't know that there is much the United States can do except work with the international community.

We have no control over the outcome of anything. Like the planet and global warming, we don't control that. If politicians want a war we don't control that. Acts of terrorism, we can't control them.

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.

Climate change is a global crisis - one the international community and private sector must tackle together if we have any hope of averting the worst impacts on our health, our economies, and our communities.

Facing dramatic global challenges, we need a global capacity to address them that reaffirms the importance of multilateralism and the importance of a rules-based set of international relations, based on the rule of law and in accordance with the U.N. Charter.

We are all living together on a single planet, which is threatened by our own actions. And if you don't have some kind of global cooperation, nationalism is just not on the right level to tackle the problems, whether it's climate change or whether it's technological disruption.

China is both an adversary, but also a potential partner in the international community if it's following the rules. So my attitude coming into office was that we are going to insist that China plays by the same rules as everybody else.

It is clear that the international community has no other universal organisation of the likes of the United Nations.

Nations are in effect ceding portions of their sovereignty to the international community and beginning to create a new system of international environmental governance.

Foreign policy is now a huge field. It isn't just people who are studying political science. There are so many aspects to it in terms of understanding hard science for people who are studying climate change, or people who are interested in health policy or food security, or people who care about education.

I think that one of our most difficult international challenges is clearly climate change and making sure that the Paris agreement goes forward. While I think the international community understands that President Trump is not taking the same position as President Obama.

The times are too difficult and the crisis too severe to indulge in schadenfreude. Looking at it in perspective, the fact that there would be a financial crisis was perfectly predictable: its general nature, if not its magnitude. Markets are always inefficient.

We have to establish a joint strategy on other issues, such as Iran and North Korea, but also on climate change. That's why I think it is important to speak at length with the American president Donald Trump and show him a path forward for possible cooperation. I feel an obligation to do so.

There was an international conference going on in Morocco that was a follow up for the Paris conference - to put some teeth in the Paris agreements. But on November 8, 2017 the conferences stopped. The question was, Will we survive? Not a word about it. Even more amazing, the world is looking to China to save them. The US is the wrecking machine that is destroying everything. The world is hoping that China will somehow come to the rescue.

We should stand by our allies, but we should also stand by our ideals and work with our allies and encourage them to live up to the democratic institutions and traditions that they enjoy.

We're in a very, very profound crisis. It's so obvious that no one in the power structure, either the corporate power structure or the political power structure, knows what to do or is willing to do what's necessary in relationship both to global war and global warming. It's so obvious that conditions are getting worse for the great majority of Americans. It's so obvious also that we face a very serious danger from people who feel, see themselves only as victims. And we have to somehow, in a very loving way, help the American people to recover the best that is in our traditions.

Particularly here in the United States there is a lack of comprehension about anything to do with the United Nations.

Even some of our friends, not only here, but in the international community, in Africa as well, were beginning to show weakness and their weakness, did not lend support to us and we found ourselves weak negotiators at various stages.

[Israel] undermines the international community's reaction to global warming.

In order for us to solve many big problems around the world, it is in our interest to work with Russia and obtain their cooperation.

I've never seen people as physically distraught as the Bush administration team was because of what was happening to the economy. I personally believe that the steps that President Obama took saved the economy. He doesn't get the credit he deserves for taking some very hard positions. But it was a terrible recession. So now we've dug ourselves out of it, we're standing, but we're not yet running.