Henry A. Kissinger Quotes

China has always maintained that all countries, big or small, rich or poor, strong or weak, are equal members of the international community and they should stand and speak in the world as such.

The nations must be organized internationally and induced to enter into partnership, subordinating in some measure national sovereignty to worldwide institutions and obligations.

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.

Multilateralism may be little more than a polite way of camouflaging what is in practice unilateralism with allies.

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

As long as the problem of world reconstruction remains the center of interest for all nations, blocs having similar attitudes will form and operate even within the League itself.

Nations, like individuals in a state of nature, are equal and independent, possessing certain rights and owing certain duties to each other.

The statesmen still say that we should not interfere in the internal affairs of other nations and yet it is not possible any longer not to interfere, even when we do not mean to do so.

Ultimate authority in a global system remains with sovereigns. Governments will not have it any other way: politicians face instant rejection from their electorate if they allow transnational authorities to dictate terms.

Multi- polarisation has become an inevitable trend in the process of shaping a global political pattern and has been widely welcomed by the international community as it reflects the common interests and aspiration of the overwhelming majority of countries.

The U.N. guards the vital principles entrenched in its charter, notably the sovereign equality of states and the inadmissibility of interference in their internal affairs. It is precisely because the U.N. is the chief guardian of both these sacrosanct principles that it alone is allowed to approve derogations from them.

Today we stand on a bridge leading from the territorial state to the world community. Politically, we are still governed by the concept of the territorial state; economically and technically, we live under the auspices of worldwide communications and worldwide markets.

All in all, the League of Nations is not inevitably bound, as some maintain from time to time, to degenerate into an impotent appendage of first one, then another of the competing great powers.

Unilateral preemption should not in any way be the model for how we conduct international relations.

It is a commonplace that the League of Nations is not yet-what its most enthusiastic protagonists intended it to be.

The world before 1914 was already a world in which the welfare of each individual nation was inextricably bound up with the prosperity of the whole community of nations.

The U.S.-led western alliance, while acting as an advocate of democracy, rule of law and human rights, is acting from the opposite position, rejecting the democratic principle of the sovereign right of states enshrined in the U.N. Charter and trying to decide for others what is good and what is bad.

The logic of collective security is flawless, provided it can be made to work under the conditions prevailing on the international scene... The odds, however, are strongly against such a possibility.

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.

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.

The most tragic paradox of our time is to be found in the failure of nation-states to recognize the imperatives of internationalism.

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.

... assertive multilateralism.

Multilateralism is the democracy of international society.

No nation is responsible to itself alone, but that laws of political morality are universal; and that obedience to such laws is incumbent upon all nations.