Samantha Power Quotes
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I'm relieved that after all these years of doing atrocity work, I still cry my eyes out every time I read the paper in the morning. It's surprising, actually.
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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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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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India is at the vanguard of figuring out how to exploit technology and innovation on behalf of democratic accountability.
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I've been a war reporter and a human rights defender. A professor and a columnist. A diplomat and - by far most thrillingly - a mother. And what I've learned from all these experiences is that any change worth making is going to be hard. Period.
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Historical hypocrites have themselves carried out the very human rights abuses that they suddenly decide warrant intervention elsewhere.
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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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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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Virtually all of Darfur's six million residents are Muslim, and, because of decades of intermarriage, almost everyone has dark skin and African features.
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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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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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Brokenness is the operative issue of our time - broken souls, broken hearts, broken places.
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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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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.
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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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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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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?
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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 United States should not frame its policy options in terms of doing nothing or unilaterally sending in the Marines.
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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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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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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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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.