Edward Mandell House Quotes

It should never be forgotten that protection to property and to persons cannot be separated.

The essence and almost the quintessence of good government is to protect property and its rights.... The major business of government becomes, therefore, the problem of keeping in due subjection to law and order the dangerous mass of poor and vicious.

The U.N. was there to protect other Rwandese.

The U.N. is worse than disaster. The U.N. creates conflicts. Look at the disgraceful U.N. Human Rights Council: It transmits norms which are harmful, anti-liberty and anti-Semitic, among other things. The world would be better off in its absence.

Liberals have been committed to the principles of human rights, international stability, and international justice. They have also sought international solutions to those problems which have demanded collective attention.

In less than eighteen months, it prepared a first draft which it submitted to the General Assembly and which, at the end of one hundred sessions of elevated, often impassioned discussion, was adopted in the form of thirty articles on December 10, 1948.

I think clearly the United States, as well as other western nations, should stand by their commitments to human rights and democracy and should try to influence other countries to move in that direction.

It is one thing to be against unilateralism and against nonhumanitarian interventionism - but it is quite another thing to be against humanitarian interventionism.

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 U.S. government engages with many countries around the world in official dialogues on human rights.

Human rights is the soul of our foreign policy, because human rights is the very soul of our sense of nationhood.

The United Nations has become a largely irrelevant, if not positively destructive institution, and the just-released U.N. report on the atrocities in Darfur, Sudan, proves the point.

In the '90s, there was scant presidential leadership and insufficient domestic political mobilization for foreign policy grounded in human rights.

International Law

The Usage of Torture is contrary to all the Dictates of Nature and Reason; even Mankind itself cries out against it, and demands loudly the total Abolition of it.

The insecurity of property in Ireland, whether real or supposed … prevents the English or Scotch capitalist from transmitting materials to be manufactured in Ireland.

We must face the fact that the United Nations is not yet the international equivalent of our own legal system and the rule of law.

To have a body of humanitarian law, built up over decades and accepted by the great majority of U. N. member states, without an enforcement mechanism is a fruitless exercise.

International policy does not aim at exploiting local, specific conditions to widen zones of influence and create difficulties for another country. The goal of international policy is to insure universal fulfillment of the "Declaration of the Rights of Man" and to prevent a sharpening of international tensions and a strengthening of militarist and nationalist tendencies.

The ultimate step in avoiding periodic wars, which are inevitable in a situation of periodic lawlessness is to make statesmen responsible to the law.

The U.N. acts as the world's conscience.

Our preachers talk glibly of "introducing the Christian spirit into international relations. Do they realize what that involves? Do they realize that the introduction of the Christian spirit into international relations is impossible without the willingness of all nations to sacrifice their national interests for the sake of international interests of greater importance? …. Are they prepared to go to their government with that demand, or to fight the next election on that basis? If not, let them talk no more of introducing the Christian spirit into international relations.

The situation that exists among nations in their relations to one another is such that it tempts even those who ordinarily come far short of cynicism to say that there is no connection between ethics and international relations.

While significant differences between our governments continue, the progress of the last two years reminds the world of what is possible when we are defined not by the past but by the future we can build together.

We should forcefully call out China whenever it violates international standards.