Samantha Power Quotes

The internal affairs of other countries has a big impact on American interests.

The U.S. should worry about the effects of its polices on the rest of the world. We would like to live in a world where countries take into account the effect of their policies on other countries and do what is right, broadly, rather than what is just right given the circumstances of that country.

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.

I should drag in the United States.

We have become a great nation, forced by the fact of its greatness into relations with the other nations of the earth.

To me, there is no doubt: inaction abroad emboldens actions on the home front. They are related.

America has lost the moral high ground with the rest of the world, and we have fewer allies as a result. President Bush and his administration have undermined the war on terror by using tactics outlawed by international treaty and condemned by even our closest friends.

The humanitarian would, of course, have us meddle in foreign affairs as part of his program of world service.

Republicans are pushing legislation forward that will improve the effectiveness of and bring more accountability to U.S. foreign assistance around the world and bring democracy even further into the light.

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.

Well, I think the United States first of all has to recognize the world for what it is.

Our alliances should be understood as a means to expand our influence, not as a constraint on our power. The expansion of democracy and freedom in the world should be a shared interest and value with all nations.

I think clearly the United States, as well as other western nations, should stand by their commitments to human rights and democracy and should try to influence other countries to move in that direction.

We're in an illusion about what our role is in world politics and foreign affairs, and our policies are killing and destroying and doing a lot of things that we are not aware of.

Foreign policy is about trying to deliver for them the best possible economic benefits, the chance to travel, to study, to work, the opportunity through trade to be able to sell their goods and services and as much peace and security so they can live and bring their kids up so they don't have to fear war.

Foreign policy is really domestic policy with its hat on.

It is one thing to be against unilateralism and against nonhumanitarian interventionism - but it is quite another thing to be against humanitarian interventionism.

The Czech Republic is a dynamic United Nations Member State, active on the Human Rights Council, contributing to the peaceful settlement of disputes, and helping other countries to achieve a democratic transition.

There are, however, cases in which, while our own interests are not greatly involved, strong appeal is made to our sympathies.... in extreme cases action may be justifiable and proper. What form the action shall take must depend upon the circumstances of the case; that is, upon the degree of the atrocity and upon our power to remedy it.

The nation's mere possession of military power ready for exertion provides visible support for the nation's expression of views on foreign affairs, and that often is enough to make the expression persuasive. Thus a foreign policy which has a respectable basis in justice and morality is strengthened if it has also a respectable basis in physical force.

We have a tendency in America to deal with foreign affairs on a day by day basis. We are so saturated with facts that we do no look at a longer, broader picture.

You cannot have individual foreign policy. You cannot have celebrity foreign policy.

I wonder if these gentlemen have stopped to think how we would feel if we differed with another nation and needed help on humanitarian grounds and our political differences of opinion were used against us when we were begging to keep our people from starvation.

International policy does not aim at exploiting local, specific conditions to widen zones of influence and create difficulties for another country. The goal of international policy is to insure universal fulfillment of the "Declaration of the Rights of Man" and to prevent a sharpening of international tensions and a strengthening of militarist and nationalist tendencies.

The question of when you intervene is probably the toughest question of American foreign policy.