Mary Robinson Quotes

One of the main lessons I have learned the last five years as Secretary-General is that the United Nations cannot function properly without the support of the business community and civil society. We need to have tripartite support - the governments, the business communities and the civil society.

An awareness of the need for some kind of global government is gaining ground, one in which all members of the world community would take part.

A world technology means either a world government or world suicide.

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.

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.

Nature is not simply a technical or economical resource, and human beings are not mere numbers. To suggest that one can somehow align all the squabbling institutions of science, environmental management, government and diplomacy in an alliance of convenience to regulate the global climate seems to me optimistic.

However difficult it may be to bring it about, some form of world government, with agreed international law and means of enforcing the law, is inevitable.

If local civil government is necessary for local civil peace, then world civil government is necessary for world peace.

World government will come, but we do not know the date.

The inability of governments to take seriously the damage caused by small arms and light weapons is a failure of major proportions.

I would like to see the United States live up to U. S. law and international law. Living up to international law is probably too much to expect, but at least they could live up to United States law.

The United Nations emerged as a temple of official good intentions, a place where governments might - without abating their transgressions - go to church; a place made remote - by agreed untruth and procedural complexity, and by tedium itself - from the risk of intense public involvement.

[The American position at the UN is] essentially impotent, without influence, heavily outvoted, and isolated.

The U.N. power comes from concerted action of the governments.

We need a world-wide Department of Peace.

If we are to avoid that catastrophe [a nuclear World War III], a system of world order — preferably a system of world government — is mandatory. The proud nations someday will see the light and, for the common good and their own survival, yield up their precious sovereignty, just as America's thirteen colonies did two centuries ago. When we finally come to our senses and establish a world executive and parliament of nations, thanks to the Nuremburg precedent we will already have in place the fundamentals for the third branch of government, the judiciary.

We need to be creating a world that we would like to live in when we're not the biggest power on the block.

Nations are beginning to look to some vague organization, some nebulous course of humanity, to pay their bills and tell them what to do. This is not local self-government. It is not American. It is not the method which has made this country what it is. We can not maintain the western standard of civilization on that theory. If it is supported at all, it will have to be supported on the principle of individual responsibility.

Perhaps scientists have been the most international of all professions in their outlook... Every time you scientists make a major invention, we politicians have to invent a new institution to cope with it-and almost invariably, these days, it must be an international institution.

If we want to make progress in key areas now, we have to build a multi-stakeholder process, harnessing the appropriate energies. So not only the politicians but also business, the wider civil society, and the trade union movement all have a contribution to make, whether it is at national or at international level.

One of the fondest expressions around is that we can't be the world's policeman. But guess who gets called when suddenly someone needs a cop.

Global governance is just a euphemism for global government.

The goal of the World Federalists is peace through unity of government. We must support their vision of oneness in diversity, for it is the salvation of mankind.

The Carter Center has a policy of doing what others do not want to do. We do not compete with the World Health Organization, the United Nations or the US government.

If we have the kinds of confirmation that we need, we will once again work with the international community and the organization charged with monitoring compliance by the Syrian government, and we will reach out to patrons of Assad like Russia to put a stop to it.