Samantha Power Quotes
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We know that often holding those who have carried out mass atrocities accountable is at times our best tool to prevent future atrocities.
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In the '90s, there was scant presidential leadership and insufficient domestic political mobilization for foreign policy grounded in human rights.
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Initially, I tried to become an aid worker and someone who could help people, but I was unsuccessful in convincing anyone that I could be of any use. So I went and became a war correspondent without any experience in war or in being a correspondent. So that was daring.
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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.
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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.
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Brokenness is the operative issue of our time - broken souls, broken hearts, broken places.
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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?
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People in my confirmation process, on the right and the left, really loved that idea of having someone who's going to be in meetings arguing on behalf of the dignity of people who sometimes aren't represented in meetings. But by the same token, they have somewhat unrealistic expectations that I can kind of make my own policy.
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The media is an ally when it comes to showing the truth about terrorist groups. Attacking the media will not produce a more compliant citizenry. It will produce a more alienated, suspicious and disenfranchised public, one more likely to chafe under a government's attempts at control, all to the benefit of terrorist groups.
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My basic feeling about military intervention is that it should be a last resort, undertaken only to stave off large-scale bloodshed.
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Democracies are expense-averse and they think in terms of short-term, political interests rather than a long-term interest in stability.
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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.
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India is at the vanguard of figuring out how to exploit technology and innovation on behalf of democratic accountability.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Over the years, Western governments have been criticized for working with foreign police who have proved abusive or corrupt.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I came to America when I was 9. My mother brought me.
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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.
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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.
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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.