Andy Rooney Quotes

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.

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

If I were remaking the United Nations there would only be one permanent representative—the United States because that’s the real reflection of the distribution of power in the world.

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.

…though the American government did much to encourage the organs of the League, the fact that it stood aside, sharing neither the rights nor the duties of the League powers, was a fatal handicap to joint action.

We’re not the world’s policeman. Nor the world’s judge, jury and executioner.

Like Canada, we very much wanted the United Nations to be a relevant and effective body. But once those efforts failed, we no longer saw things from a multilateral perspective. For us, now, it is much more basic than that. It is about family.

And I hope America will realise, as the only superpower now, it really must use its power in a way that's going to build up the world, and to support the United Nations.

America has a critical role to play as the most powerful member of the world community.

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

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

If the U.N. didn't exist, we'd be inventing it right now.

We have helped to organize the United Nations. We believe it will stop aggressor nations from starting wars. Because we believe it, we intend to support the United Nations organization with all the power and resources we possess.

I will do everything in my power to ensure that our United Nations can live up to its name, and be truly united; so that we can live up to the hopes that so many people around the world place in this institution, which is unique in the annals of human history.

If the savior of man would revisit and declare himself for a League of Nations, I would be opposed to it.

Everything will be all right ... when people stop thinking of the United Nations as a weird Picasso abstraction and see it as a drawing they made themselves.

The United Nations is really the League of Nations 2.0

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 seems to many of us that if we are to avoid the eventual catastrophic world conflict, we must strengthen the United Nations as a first step toward a world government patterned after our own government with a legislature, executive and judiciary, and police to enforce its international laws and keep the peace.

There is, and there will be, an increasing demand for a principled global security provider, for a superpower that believes in multilateralism and cooperation.

We in Britain do not have the same capabilities as the United States, but we are members of the United Nations Security Council. And we take our obligations and duties deriving from that very seriously.

If the U.N. is ineffective, the whole concept of multilateralism will collapse.

There are many who criticise the United Nations. And those of us who know this institution well know that it is not immune from criticism. But those who argue against the United Nations advance no credible argument as to what should replace it. Whatever its imperfections, the United Nations represents a necessary democracy of states.

The liberal vision of America is that it should be less arrogant, less unilateral, more internationalist. In Obama's view, America would subsume itself under a fuzzy internationalism in which the international community, which I think is a fiction, governs itself through the U.N.

As New Zealanders, we've been in on the United Nations from the very beginning, played a role in the drafting of the charter - it means a lot to us that those processes are followed.