Samantha Power Quotes

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

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

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

Foreign policy is an explicitly amoral enterprise.

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

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

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

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

Another longstanding foreign policy flaw is the degree to which special interests dictate the way in which the "national interest" as a whole is defined and pursued.... America's important historic relationship with Israel has often led foreign policy decision-makers to defer reflexively to Israeli security assessments, and to replicate Israeli tactics, which, as the war in Lebanon last summer demonstrated, can turn out to be counter-productive.

We have an interest in combating tactics in war that are abhorrent and that only fuel terrorism because they incite people on the ground.

There's something beautiful about working in the one place in the world where the world is present, like United Nations. Otherwise, one would have to go to each of these countries to negotiate.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

I was interning in the CBS sports affiliate in Atlanta with Robin Roberts.... I was taking notes on a Braves-Padres game, and on the live feed came footage of these kids protesting and getting crushed during the Tiananmen Square uprising in China in 1989. In that moment I became like a lot of young people in this country today, horrified and inspired but confused as to what I might do.

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