Richard Holbrooke Quotes

The United Nations will be at the heart of our international activities. France will assume its full responsibilities at the Security Council by putting its status at the service of peace, respect for human rights and development.

The U.N. is much more than the case of Iraq.

I look forward to strengthening the U.S.-U.N. partnership and working closely with Secretary of State Kerry towards our shared goals of peace, development, and human rights.

Peacemaking and peacekeeping should run in parallel.

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

The United Nations’ founders understood that decisions affecting war and peace should happen only by consensus, and with America’s consent the veto by Security Council permanent members was enshrined in the United Nations Charter. The profound wisdom of this has underpinned the stability of international relations for decades.

it's a disgrace for the international community that we have allowed so many conflicts to become frozen, and we are not making a serious effort to solve them.

The U.N. system, born after the Second World War, collapsed. It's worthless.

The U.N. was created for people.

The aim of political institutions like the United Nations is to draw the line between struggle and conflict and to make it possible for nations to stay on the right side of that line.

The U.N. is capable of endless process and mindless psychobabble, but as far as getting the job done on the ground, I just don't see them doing it.

The U.N. is one of many competitors in a marketplace of global problem solving.

As I prepare for my second term as Secretary-General, I am thinking hard about how we can meet the expectations of the millions of people who see the U.N.'s blue flag as a banner of hope. We have to continue our life-saving work in peacekeeping, human rights, development and humanitarian relief.

We must never relent in our efforts to resolve conflicts through diplomacy and through all of the instruments bestowed by the Charter of the United Nations.

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

The purpose of the United Nations should be to protect the essential sovereignty of nations, large and small.

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

So I've gone in and out of the U.N., working on counter-terrorism, on U.N. reform, on peacekeeping, peace and security issues, many things through the years but always with a strong interest in humanitarian issues, and human rights issues as well.

I've been quite involved in a lot of U.N. operations over the years. I was a U.N. observer at the East Timor referendum in 2000. I've been very involved in that for a long time.

Attempts to settle crises by unilateral sanctions outside the framework of U.N. Security Council decisions threaten international peace and stability. Such attempts are counterproductive and contradict the norms and principles of international law.

There are big issues, like the reform of the Security Council. These kinds of questions are something the President of the General Assembly must keep his eye on.

The United Nations remains our most important global actor. These days we are continuously reminded of the enormous responsibility of the Security Council to uphold international peace and stability.

We have actively sought and are actively seeking to make the United Nations an effective instrument of international cooperation.

The U.N.'s impartiality allows it to negotiate and operate in some of the toughest places in the world. And time and again, studies have shown that U.N. peacekeeping is far more effective and done with far less money than what any government can do on its own.

Of course the UN brings in a lot of moral authority.