Arthur Henderson Quotes

The international body must have the institutions and powers it needs to do what it is created to do; in other words it must be boldly and openly set up as a super-state on a level above the national sovereignties, and that, in turn, means that the Member States must have accepted in advance as much limitation and subordination of their particular sovereignties as this superior sovereign power requires.

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

…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 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.

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

What we need now is a Treaty of the World not a Treaty of Rome.

Transferring our sovereignty and decisionmaking power to the WTO, to the United Nations, or any other international body is not in the long-term interests of our people.

We believe in multilateral organization. It's very important for countries like Canada to be great promoters of multilateral organizations. We have only one superpower, it happens to be a friend of ours, but to maintain the equilibrium in the world it is very important that we have these multilateral organizations like the UN or others.

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

Multilateralism is the democracy of international society.

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 United Nations is really the League of Nations 2.0

If the U.N. is ineffective, the whole concept of multilateralism will collapse.

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.

We shouldn't discuss the world of tomorrow in terms of becoming a balance to the United States. The real issue is whether the United States will define herself as part of the U.N. system-or not.

As the highest ranking American official in the United Nations organization, I came to understand thoroughly that the national constitutional processes of the member states define the status of territories under their sovereignty.

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.

Just think of what Woodrow Wilson stood for: he stood for world government. He wanted an early United Nations, League of Nations. But it was the conservatives, Republicans, that stood up against him.

Just as the formation of the family is basic to the formation of the state, so the states themselves are the only units that can form the basic constitution of a viable international organization.

What makes the United Nations an appropriate source of legitimacy for intervention is that it is the only place where the claims of the strong are put through the test of justification in front of the weak.

But I would say if the Security Council is only relevant if it agrees with the United States, then we have come a long way in a direction that I do not like very much.

For virtually every area of public policy there is a globalist proposal, consistent with the overall objective of reducing individual nation-state autonomy, particularly that of the United States?