Samantha Power Quotes

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

Samantha Power

#2. I believe the United States is the greatest country on Earth. I really do.

Samantha Power

#3. 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.

Samantha Power

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

Samantha Power

#5. The economic dynamic in Zimbabwe is perversely robust: while ordinary people suffer, black-market dealers and people with foreign bank accounts prosper, making them powerful stakeholders in the perpetuation of devastating economic policies.

Samantha Power

#6. When dictators feel their support slipping among adults, it is not unusual for them to alter school textbooks in the hope of enlisting impressionable youths in their cause.

Samantha Power

#7. Silence in the face of atrocity is not neutrality; silence in the face of atrocity is acquiescence.

Samantha Power

#8. I got into journalism not to be a journalist but to try to change American foreign policy. I'm a corny person. I was a dreamer predating my journalistic life, so I got into journalism as a means to try to change the world.

Samantha Power

#9. All we talk about is 'Islamic terrorism.' If the two words are associated for long enough it's obviously going to have an effect on how people think about Muslims.

Samantha Power

#10. In the 2000 election, George W. Bush, who had shirked military service, succeeded in presenting himself as more reliable on national security than Al Gore.

Samantha Power

#11. I worry about Zimbabweans. They bend, they bend, they bend, they bend - where do the people break? How long can they go on scrounging for food in garbage dumps and using the moisture from sewage drains to plant vegetables?

Samantha Power

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

Samantha Power

#13. 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.

Samantha Power

#14. The United Staes had never in its history intervened to stop genocide and had in fact rarely even made a point of condemning it as it occurred,

Samantha Power

#15. By 2003 he had begun to worry that powerful countries were pursuing their own security in ways that aggravated their peril. He

Samantha Power

#16. Brokenness is the operative issue of our time - broken souls, broken hearts, broken places.

Samantha Power

#17. 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.

Samantha Power

#18. One of the things that a president needs in the face of genocide is resolve.

Samantha Power

#19. 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.

Samantha Power

#20. I think I would like the sort of job where you can work away in obscurity to try and improve things, without being caught up in the political maelstrom.

Samantha Power

#21. You know, there is a long tradition in the U.S. of, um, promoting elections up to the point that you get an outcome you don't like. Look at Latin America in the Cold War.

Samantha Power

#22. Virtually all of Darfur's six million residents are Muslim, and, because of decades of intermarriage, almost everyone has dark skin and African features.

Samantha Power

#23. Zimbabweans are severely malnourished, and deaths from starvation occur even in the cities. The country has not yet suffered nationwide famine only because international donors have stepped in.

Samantha Power

#24. 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.

Samantha Power

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

Samantha Power

#26. 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.

Samantha Power

#27. Without investing in the rule of law for the poor, none of the other investments we make will be sustainable.

Samantha Power

#28. It is easy to get used to the morning news, habituated. But don't. The morning news is yours to alter.

Samantha Power

#29. As even a democracy like the United States has shown, waging war can benefit a leader in several ways: it can rally citizens around the flag, it can distract them from bleak economic times, and it can enrich a country's elites.

Samantha Power

#30. History is laden with belligerent leaders using humanitarian rhetoric to mask geopolitical aims. History also shows how often ill-informed moralism has led to foreign entanglements that do more harm than good.

Samantha Power

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

Samantha Power

#32. Success is not about who never fails. It is about who can spring - or even stagger - back up.

Samantha Power

#33. 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.

Samantha Power

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

Samantha Power

#35. We know that often holding those who have carried out mass atrocities accountable is at times our best tool to prevent future atrocities.

Samantha Power

#36. Re-examining our reasoning is not something that has come naturally to American statesmen.

Samantha Power

#37. I'm going to Washington on a fateful, even historic, mission. I feel that I am an emissary of all Israel's citizens, even those who do not agree with me, and of the entire Jewish people

Samantha Power

#38. 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.

Samantha Power

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

Samantha Power

#40. Violence against women isn't cultural, it's criminal. Equality cannot come eventually, it's something we must fight for now.

Samantha Power

#41. To paraphrase Walter Laqueur, a pioneer in the study of the Allies' response to the Holocaust, although many people thought that the Jews were no longer alive, they did not necessarily believe they were dead.18

Samantha Power

#42. Since 9/11, there has been a huge leap in people wanting to get personally involved in public service and international affairs.

Samantha Power

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

Samantha Power

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

Samantha Power

#45. 'Acting as if ... ' I decided, ridiculously in retrospect, that my experience covering women's volleyball for my college newspaper was sufficient for me to at least try to become a war correspondent.

Samantha Power

#46. We need to deter the Palestinians in any way we can.

Samantha Power

#47. 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.

Samantha Power

#48. Americans have long trusted the views of Democrats on the environment, the economy, education, and health care, but national security is the one matter about which Republicans have maintained what political scientists call 'issue ownership.'

Samantha Power

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

Samantha Power

#50. 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.

Samantha Power

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

Samantha Power

#52. 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.

Samantha Power

#53. My basic feeling about military intervention is that it should be a last resort, undertaken only to stave off large-scale bloodshed.

Samantha Power

#54. There is a convergence of crises that makes it challenging to keep the world's attention.

Samantha Power

#55. Democracies are expense-averse and they think in terms of short-term, political interests rather than a long-term interest in stability.

Samantha Power

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

Samantha Power

#57. 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.

Samantha Power

#58. 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.

Samantha Power

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

Samantha Power

#60. I happen to miss the Constitution; I thought it was a good document.

Samantha Power

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

Samantha Power

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

Samantha Power

#63. Foreign policy is an explicitly amoral enterprise.

Samantha Power