Top 55 Samantha Power Quotes

My career is not well thought out. Every choice has been instinctive and, quite literally, impulsive in many ways.

Western governments have generally tried to contain genocide by appeasing its architects. But the sad record of the last century shows that the walls the United States tries to build around genocidal societies almost inevitably shatter.

Countries that intervene militarily rarely do so out of pure altruism.

If you represent everyone, in some ways you represent no one. You’re un-owned.

The story of U.S. policy during the genocide in Rwanda is not a story of willful complicity with evil. U.S. officials did not sit around and conspire to allow genocide to happen.

When it came to the Vietnam War, Mr. McNamara was an early advocate of escalation but came to realize the flaws in the American approach earlier than many of his colleagues. Yet in public, he continued to defend the war.

I think Obama is right when he talks about the rule of law as a cornerstone of what the United States should stand for. That can encompass our elected officials’ adherence to law and our country’s return to the Geneva Conventions.

I would like to put forward a simple thesis that should no longer be at all controversial: it is now objectively the case that our national interests are increasingly affected not just by what happens between states, but also by how people are treated within states.

It is a false choice to tell Israel that it has to choose between peace on the one hand and security on the other. The United Nations would not ask any other country to make that choice, and it should not ask it of Israel.

We no longer live in an era in which foreign policymakers can claim to serve their nations’ interests treating what happens to people in other countries as an afterthought… What happens to people in other countries matters. It matters to the welfare of our own nations and our own citizens.

Engaging Iran won’t guarantee improved U.S.-Iranian relations or a more stable Gulf region. But not engaging means more of the same.

Over the years, Western governments have been criticized for working with foreign police who have proved abusive or corrupt.

It’s not ideal to always be one eye on the Blackberry and two arms around my children. For the sake of mothers out there who don’t have the Blackberry but do have the children and are hoping someone will be raising their voice on their behalf, it’s a great privilege.

Every decision to use military force is an excruciatingly difficult one.

Foreign policy is an explicitly amoral enterprise.

I came to America when I was 9. My mother brought me.

Historical hypocrites have themselves carried out the very human rights abuses that they suddenly decide warrant intervention elsewhere.

America needs a sensible, sustainable Iran policy that can meet U.S. security and economic interests, command international support and withstand the shifting Middle Eastern sands.

There are something like 300 anti-genocide chapters on college campuses around the country. It’s bigger than the anti-apartheid movement. There are something like 500 high school chapters devoted to stopping the genocide in Darfur. Evangelicals have joined it. Jewish groups have joined it.

American decision-makers must understand how damaging a foreign policy that privileges order and profit over justice really is in the long term.

Ignorance and prejudice make for bad advisers.

Changing the DNA of a large, multilateral organization such as the United Nations to deal effectively with modern threats is not easy. Indeed, when the United Nations was created in the wake of World War II, threats came almost exclusively from one state carrying out acts of aggression against another.

Half of Syria’s refugees are children, and we know what can happen to children who grow to adulthood without hope or opportunity in refugee camps. The camps become fertile recruiting grounds for violent extremists.

I’ve got two small kids. I want to make sure they grow up to be good people. Do they treat people well? Are they kind?

For me, it’s not an option to despair. The question is: what can we do to make someone’s life better? Take the unimaginable strides made in places like Bosnia, where I cut my teeth, and Rwanda. Their stories aren’t perfect, but I wouldn’t have dreamt they could happen in a million years.

What is most needed in Darfur is an international peacekeeping and protection presence, and this is what the Sudanese government most wants to avoid.

Some anti-Americanism derives simply from our being a colossus that bestrides the earth. But much anti-Americanism derives from the role U.S. political, economic and military power has played in denying such freedoms to others.

I have only so many foreign-language neurons. When I learned Spanish, that displaced whatever Irish was left, and then I learned German, and that displaced the Spanish, and when I learned Serbo-Croatian, that displaced the German. So I’m a bit of a muddle.

I think Obama is right when he talks about the rule of law as a cornerstone of what the United States should stand for.

The U.S. government engages with many countries around the world in official dialogues on human rights.

The performance of international institutions will be symptomatic of the domestic political priorities of influential member states. International institutions don’t really have a life and a mind of their own.

In the absence of full-fledged Congressional investigations, American policymakers rarely look back. They are bound by continuity and fealty across administrations and generations.

President Obama, like every other leader on Earth, is still going to be looking out for national and economic interests. States don’t cease to be states overnight just because they get a great visionary as their new president.

The key to U.N. reform is giving Americans a clearer picture of what the U.N. is and what it isn’t, what it can be and what it can’t be.

India is at the vanguard of figuring out how to exploit technology and innovation on behalf of democratic accountability.

No more than a surgeon can operate while tweeting can you reach your potential with one ear in, one ear out. You actually have to reacquaint yourself with concentration. We all do.

Because it started as an offshoot of al Qaeda in Iraq, ISIL has long been subject to U.N. sanctions, and all countries have a legal obligation to freeze its assets and prohibit its business dealings. But countries around the world need to do more to make these sanctions work.

International institutions are composed of governments. Governments control their own military forces and police.

In many college classes, laptops depict split screens – notes from a class, and then a range of parallel stimulants: NBA playoff statistics on ESPN.com, a flight home on Expedia, a new flirtation on Facebook.

President Reagan, of course, did more than any other person to entrench the Republican reputation for toughness on national security.

On the rare occasions when U.N. blue helmets have made the news in the past, it has unfortunately too often been in the context of situations where peacekeepers have failed to shield civilians, or even when the peacekeepers themselves have been involved in abuse.

The inertia of the governed cannot be disentangled from the indifference of the government. American leaders have both a circular and a deliberate relationship to public opinion.

I was extremely close to my father, inseparable. Where we hung out most of the time was the pub.

Citizens victimized by genocide or abandoned by the international community do not make good neighbors, as their thirst for vengeance, their irredentism and their acceptance of violence as a means of generating change can turn them into future threats.

All advocacy is, at its core, an exercise in empathy.

There are young idealists all around the world falling in love with the Yankees now and realists who are gravitating to the Red Sox. I think the universe is on its head.

Being an occupier is not good for anybody’s global standing. It is a catalyst for terrorist recruitment.

Serving in the executive branch is very different than sounding off from an academic perch.

I like to think that as I get older I’m getting better at spending time with people who have qualities that make them worth spending time with.

I had eleven varsity letters. I loved basketball the best, but cross-country is a little more under your control.

Throughout history, when societies face tough economic times, we have seen democratic reforms deferred, decreased trust in government, persecution of minority groups, and a general shrinking of the democratic space.

The U.N. brings everybody together. And without it, we can’t deal with Ebola or terrorism or climate change. But it’s 70 years old. It’s tired. It’s acquired a lot of bad habits. And often it feels like only new bad habits get added and old bad habits don’t get taken away.

We are not accepting that countries just get to sit back and let the United States meet threats that are going to roost in their worlds just as easily as they are in ours.

In the ’90s, there was scant presidential leadership and insufficient domestic political mobilization for foreign policy grounded in human rights.