I have spoken to Chinese leaders occasionally on human rights, but I’ve always done it in private.

Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative.

The idea that putting Americans ‚first‘ requires a withdrawal from the world is simply wrongheaded because a retreat would achieve exactly the opposite for our citizens.

Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves; and under the rule of a just God, cannot long retain it.

Egypt is the second-largest recipient over a long period of U.S. military and economic aid. Israel is first.

Saddam’s goal is to achieve the lifting of U.N. sanctions while retaining and enhancing Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs. We cannot, we must not and we will not let him succeed.

The United States is not, and never will be, at war with Islam.

Law is always better than war.

I don’t see any possibility of Britain and the U.S. allowing a sovereign independent Iraq; that’s almost inconceivable.

The notion that it is improper to look beyond the borders of the United States in grappling with hard questions has a certain kinship to the view that the U.S. Constitution is a document essentially frozen in time as of the date of its ratification.

Putin goes to bed at night knowing he can break all the rules, and the West will follow all the rules.

Safeguarding the rights of others is the most noble and beautiful end of a human being.

The fact is, with every friendship you make, and every bond of trust you establish, you are shaping the image of America projected to the rest of the world. That is so important. So when you study abroad, you’re actually helping to make America stronger.

In the literal sense, there has been no relevant evolution since the trek from Africa. But there has been substantial progress towards higher standards of rights, justice and freedom – along with all too many illustrations of how remote is the goal of a decent society.

I am confident my Hindutva face will be an asset when dealing with foreign affairs with other nations.

The global importance of the Middle East is that it keeps the Far East and the Near East from encroaching on each other.

Many things shall change in Cuba, but they shall change because of our efforts and despite the United States. Perhaps that empire shall crumble first.

The Oslo Accords in 1993 determined that the Gaza Strip and the West Bank are a single territorial entity which cannot be divided. Immediately, the United States and Israel set about separating the two and making sure that they would not be united.

Ronald Reagan used to alarm his Soviet counterparts by saying that surely they’d both unite against an invasion from Mars.

Foreign policy is like human relations, only people know less about each other.

No foreign policy – no matter how ingenious – has any chance of success if it is born in the minds of a few and carried in the hearts of none.

War is the continuation of politics by other means.

Politics is the womb in which war develops.

I think all Americans believe in human rights. And health is an often overlooked aspect of basic human rights. And it’s one that’s easily corrected. The reason I say that is that many of the diseases that we treat around the world, I knew when I was a child. My mother was a registered nurse. And they no longer exist in our country.

There is no person in this room whose basic rights are not involved in any successful defiance to the carrying out of court orders.

There can be no greater error than to expect, or calculate, upon real favors from nation to nation. It is an illusion which experience must cure, which a just pride ought to discard.

War is not an independent phenomenon, but the continuation of politics by different means.

There are thousands of Palestinians in prison virtually for no reason.

There is no such thing as part freedom.

For this generation, ours, life is nuclear survival, liberty is human rights, the pursuit of happiness is a planet whose resources are devoted to the physical and spiritual nourishment of its inhabitants.

In some respects, South African apartheid was more vicious than Israeli practices, and in some respects the opposite is true.

If you’re white and you’re wrong, then you’re wrong; if you’re black and you’re wrong, you’re wrong. People are people. Black, blue, pink, green – God make no rules about color; only society make rules where my people suffer, and that why we must have redemption and redemption now.

A world without nuclear weapons would be less stable and more dangerous for all of us.

The many questions about the bombing of Yugoslavia by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation – meaning primarily the United States – come down to two fundamental issues: ‚What are the accepted and applicable ‚rules of world order,‘ and how do these apply in the case of Kosovo?‘

There are nuclear-weapons-free zones in several parts of the world already, except that they’re not implemented fully, because the U.S. won’t allow it.

And every human being is precious.

To deprive a man of his natural liberty and to deny to him the ordinary amenities of life is worse then starving the body; it is starvation of the soul, the dweller in the body.

Leadership is absolutely vital if there are comparable countries which can affect the security of the world you live in. Between Lincoln and Roosevelt’s time, America was protected by huge oceans and, in practice, by the British navy. Today, it’s different, and the obsession of the Obama administration has been for retrenchment.

Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?

The equal right of all citizens to health, education, work, food, security, culture, science, and wellbeing – that is, the same rights we proclaimed when we began our struggle, in addition to those which emerge from our dreams of justice and equality for all inhabitants of our world – is what I wish for all.

If the United Nations once admits that international disputes can be settled by using force, then we will have destroyed the foundation of the organization and our best hope of establishing a world order.

War is regarded as nothing but the continuation of state policy with other means.

I don’t think it is so difficult to solve the problems between Cuba and the United States; it all depends on whether there is a dialogue, a discussion, or if the prejudices and hatred of people like the extremists and terrorists from the Cuban community, who try to impose their policies, prevail.

This was not an act of terrorism, but it was an act of war.

Other than being crazy enough to press a button, there is nothing that Putin can do militarily to fundamentally alter American interests.

Today we are engaged in a deadly global struggle for those who would intimidate, torture, and murder people for exercising the most basic freedoms. If we are to win this struggle and spread those freedoms, we must keep our own moral compass pointed in a true direction.

It cannot be too often stressed that Israel had no credible pretext for its 2008-9 attack on Gaza, with full U.S. support and illegally using U.S. weapons.

President Assad, I worked with. I know him reasonably well, met with him a few times, and he’s a liar.

Human rights is the soul of our foreign policy, because human rights is the very soul of our sense of nationhood.

No one doubts that innocent men, women and children have been the victims of chemical weapons attacks in Syria. And there’s no doubt who is responsible for this heinous use of chemical weapons in Syria: the Syrian regime.

Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure.

In 1962, war was avoided by Khrushchev’s willingness to accept Kennedy’s hegemonic demands.

No country can act wisely simultaneously in every part of the globe at every moment of time.

No nation should threaten its neighbors by massing troops along the border.

War is not an exercise of the will directed at an inanimate matter.

The truth is, no one of us can be free until everybody is free.

By very conservative estimates, Turkish repression of Kurds in the 1990s falls in the category of Kosovo. It peaked in the early 1990s; one index is the flight of more than a million Kurds from the countryside to the unofficial Kurdish capital, Diyarbakir, from 1990 to 1994, as the Turkish army was devastating the countryside.

America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense human rights invented America.

I do think that Magna Carta and international law are worth paying some attention to.

I was arrested three times and tortured once.

When you single out any particular group of people for secondary citizenship status, that’s a violation of basic human rights.