Jeane Kirkpatrick Quotes

If the American people are to say yes to U. N. peace keeping, the United Nations must know when to say no.

During the three decades of its existence, the effectiveness of the United Nations has, on the whole, tended to decrease, particularly in the field of peace and security and, more generally, all issues in which the developed countries feel they have important stakes.

In the United States, there is a broadly shared view that the U.N. is one of many potential instruments to advance U.S. issues, and we have to decide whether a particular issue is best done through the U.N. or best done through some other mechanism.

I'm a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy.

In the United Nations, when China entered, we voted on the same position, and since then we have maintained the same position, that position has not changed.

There's no such thing as the United Nations. If the U.N. secretary building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference.

I think the American people, understandably, have sort of lost faith in the United Nations.

When states decide to use force to deal with broader threats to international peace and security, they need the unique legitimacy provided by the United Nations.

The United Nations Security Council is there to protect the interest of the Americans and the British.

We begin by not taking it [the United Nations] seriously.

Without the U. N., world politics is inconceivable.

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

In order to ensure prompt and effective action by the United Nations, its Members confer on the Security Council primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security, and agree that in carrying out its duties under this responsibility the Security Council acts on their behalf.

… unless the United Nations stops becoming simply a debating society for anti-American rhetoric, I'm going to show them the door.

People think that it only takes an American decision to solve this or that problem [in foreign affairs].

I spent eight years at the U.N., so I understand that U.S. ambassadors have a lot of issues to cover.

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.

I am against preventive war because it means measures by the UN against us.

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.

American foreign policy, for all its shortcomings, has underpinned political stability around the world.

The U.N. is much more than the case of Iraq.

In the euphoria after the Cold War, there was a misplaced notion that the UN could solve every problem anywhere.

The interests of the United States are better served by demanding reform and seeing that reform takes place than by removing our influence from the UN.

Now, the United Nations is an organization that I believe was founded with good intentions. As a matter of fact, a prominent Tennessean named Cordell Hull was very involved with it.