Charles Evans Hughes Quotes

World power is fleeting. Nations rise and fall.

Now what sensible person wants Turkey to be a world power again … ?

The progress made in refinement of manners and morals seems to have gone on simultaneously with the improvement in arts, manufactures and commerce. It moved slowly at first, but has been constantly increasing in velocity…. we are a much better people than we were then, better instructed, more sincere and kind-hearted, less gross and brutal, and have fewer of the concomitant vices of a less civilized state.

We Americans have no commission from God to police the world.

There will be a meeting of the great powers who will disagree, and the next noise we hear will be the screeching of elevators going up and down from heaven to hell.

Our use of the United Nations as an instrument for opposing Soviet expansion. prior to the conclusion of peace, has strained that institution severely. It has an increasing tendency to alarm smaller nations and to paralyze, rather than stimulate, their will to play an active part in the organization

A nation must be strong in spirit, knowledge, science and morals. Military strength comes last…Today it is not enough to have arms in hand in order to take one’s place in the world.

It is essential in the highest interests, not merely of this country, but of the world, that Britain should at all hazards maintain her place and her prestige amongst the Great Powers of the world. Her potent influence has many a time been in the past, and may yet be in the future, invaluable to the cause of human liberty. It has more than once in the past redeemed Continental nations, who are sometimes too apt to forget that service, from overwhelming disaster and even from national extinction

Great Powers must recognize that effective nation building requires not only the heart of the humanitarian but also the hubris of an imperialist.

The government should not present the anomaly which it now presents—a government the freest, perhaps the most democratic in the world with reference to local and domestic matters in which you rule yourselves as fully as any people in the world, while in your foreign affairs, your relations with other countries, whether peaceful or warlike, commercial, financial, or otherwise, you may have no more voice than the people of Japan.

... the greatest moral victory in the history of civilization if it actually keeps out of a war.

There is not a man here [in Congress] who does not feel four hundred percent bigger in 1900—bigger intellectually, bigger, hopefully, bigger patriotically that he as a citizen of a country that has become a world power.

I believe that a navy is the greatest insurer of peace that we could possibly have—a navy commensurate with our resources and commensurate with the number of dependencies we have and commensurate with our population and commensurate with our influence as a world power.

The best American internationalists reject the idea that their nation holds a global copyright that gives it a mandate to churn out replicas dotting the world.

In Western Europe there are now only small countries—those that know it and those that don't know it yet.

It’s not a dictatorship in the United States. But it is dictatorial to the rest of the world. Who’s going to say no?

… to me, I confess, they are pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a game for domination of the world.

Honoring the identity and the special heritage of each nation in the world, we shall never use our strength to try to impress upon another people our own cherished political and economic institutions.

The policy of the United States in the Spanish war and since has given it a position of influence among the nations that it never had before.

People the world over now see democracy promotion as a dishonest, dangerous cover for the protection of U. S. power and influence.

The abolition of war is like the abolition of slavery, a matter of education and civilization.

What really matters for great powers is power—national economic and military strength—and that speaks loudly and clearly for itself.

... we Americans know and we observe the differences between world leadership and imperialism.

Now the situation is perilous, and the Powers are glaring at us like tigers eyeing their prey, all trying to barge into our country. Considering the financial and military situation in China today, we will of course try and avoid a war … But if our powerful enemies try and force us to yield to demands to which we cannot possibly consent, then we shall have no other alternative but to rely on the justice of our cause and to unite and fight.

Peace is an Excellent Thing, and War is a great Misfortune. But there are Many things More valuable than Peace, and many Things Much worse than war. The maintenance of the Ottoman Empire belongs to the First Class, the Occupation of Turkey by Russia belongs to the Second.