Elihu Root Quotes

We have helped to organize the United Nations. We believe it will stop aggressor nations from starting wars. Because we believe it, we intend to support the United Nations organization with all the power and resources we possess.

However difficult it may be to bring it about, some form of world government, with agreed international law and means of enforcing the law, is inevitable.

World government is a premature concept at this stage. We are moving more and more into supernational arrangements, but it is too early still.

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

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.

The Disarmament Conference has become the focal point of a great struggle between anarchy and world order... between those who think in terms of inevitable armed conflict and those who seek to build a universal and durable peace.

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

To solve the problem of organizing world peace we must establish world law and order.

And I hope America will realise, as the only superpower now, it really must use its power in a way that's going to build up the world, and to support the United Nations.

There is no such thing as the United Nations.

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

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

Most Americans have no memory of the designs Franklin Roosevelt's New Dealers had for postwar-American foreign policy. Human rights, self-determination and an end to European colonization in the developing world, nuclear disarmament, international law, the World Court, the United Nations - these were all ideas of the progressive left.

The UN's unique legitimacy flows from a universal perception that it pursues a larger purpose than the interests of one country or a small group of countries.

The present U.N. must be annihilated by our power. That is the stage for Communists. We must make a new U.N.

We would have to invent the U.N. if we did not have it, which is not an original thought.

If nations could only depend upon fair and impartial judgments in a world court of law, they would abandon the senseless, savage practice of war.

If it must come to war, I argue that the world should respond through the United Nations. This is the best way to give legitimacy to the use of force in these circumstances.

If the savior of man would revisit and declare himself for a League of Nations, I would be opposed to it.

If the American people are to say yes to U. N. peace keeping, the United Nations must know when to say no.

This organization [the United Nations] is created to prevent you from going to hell. It isn't created to take you to heaven.

We must have a world organization for the purpose of deliberation, but not for the purpose of waging wars and imposing sanctions.

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.

We shall have world government whether or not we like it. The only question is whether World government will be achieved by conquest or consent.

The mobilization of world opinion and methods of negotiation should be developed and used by every nation in order to strengthen the United Nations. Then if we are forced into war, it will be because there has been no way to prevent it through negotiation and the mobilization of world opinion. In which case we should have the voluntary support of many nations, which is far better than the decision of one nation alone, or even of a few nations.