William Jennings Bryan Quotes

No nation is so lost to pride as to submit the conduct of its internal affairs to the arbitrament of foreign powers.

We will never allow you to dictate to us how to run our country and whom to employ in Afghanistan. How and where we employ the foreign experts will remain the exclusive prerogative of the Afghan state. Afghanistan shall remain poor, if necessary, but free in its acts and decisions

Every country has the right to own its own sovereignty.

A nation has a right to manage its own concerns as it thinks fit.

To be called a sovereign nation, a nation has to be able to control its own borders. It is controlling your own destiny in a way, and we don't control our own borders.

As a nation we have the right to decide our own affairs, to mould our own future. This does not pose any danger to anybody. Our nation is fully aware of the responsibility for its own fate in the complicated situation of the contemporary world.

Sovereignty is as necessary as ever.

Foreign powers do not seem to appreciate the true character of our government.

We need to give the Iraqis a chance to build their own future. It should be in their hands. It must be in their hands. That is what democracy is all about. We can teach it, we can explain it, but they must want it enough to make it work for them.

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 people of every separate political community (dependent Colonies, Provinces, and Territories as well as sovereign States) have an inalienable right to govern themselves in respect to their internal polity.

We [the French] have to keep defending our vital interests …, we can say no, alone, to anything that may be unacceptable.

Dignity is the issue that vexes billions of people around the world, not democracy…. People don't like to be told what to do by outsiders … Foreign intervention offends people's dignity.

There is no nation on the earth that wants, for its security, to depend on anybody else.

It was not lust for honor, nor a seeking after fame, nor blind obstinacy nor power-seeking that demanded of the Fuhrer [Adolf Hitler] our resignation from the League of Nations, but simply the clear determination to be unconditionally responsible to ourselves in enduring and mastering our own destiny.

America can be a party to no permanent military alliance. It can enter into no political commitments, not assume any economic obligation or subject our decisions to any other than our own sovereignty.... We will accept no responsibility except as our own conscience and judgment, in each instance may determine.

Our sole aim was, by virtue of this war, to rid ourselves of the lot of them, however many international decisions there were. Each one represented a blow to our...independence.

No country can decide for another county.

We don’t tell others how to run their countries.

The state has got to be its own master. The modalities of civic life may not be prescribed for it through any power standing outside of that state - be it a private person or be it a community superior, collateral, or subordinate to that state.

I want to make clear, in the most emphatic way, that the government of Mexico and the Mexican people do not have to accept measures that, in a unilateral way, one government wants to impose on another. That we are not going to accept.

We don't need a strongman. But we need a strong country that is not subordinate to Europe.

No self-respecting country - especially one with our clout and proud history - should sign up to a proposal that surrenders the power to veto our foreign and trade policy to another entity.

It's not radical Islam that worries the US -- it's independence

My ardent desire is... to keep the United States free from political connexions with every other Country. To see that they may be independent of all, and under the influence of none.