Unilateral Quotes

That's what separates out American democracy from dictators and horrible governments across the world and the reason why that works is that we have a president that can consult with congress before making big decisions. That doesn't just make a unilateral decision to go in for military conflict. ~ Charles R. Chamberlain

Withdrawal of American troops must be a unilateral act, as the invasion of Vietnam by the American government was a unilateral act in the first place. ~ Noam Chomsky

Unilateral disarmament by Britain is opposed to our country's best interests, could begin the unravelling of NATO and therefore jeopardise the stability of Europe. ~ James Callaghan

Oxytocin infusion increases generosity in unilateral monetary transfers by 80 percent [and] increases donations to charity by 50 percent. ~ Paul J. Zak

On December 20, 1989, the United States attacked Panama with what was reported to be the largest airborne assault on a city since World War II.6 It was an unprovoked attack on a civilian population. Panama and her people posed absolutely no threat to the United States or to any other country. Politicians, governments, and press around the world denounced the unilateral U.S. action as a clear violation of international law. ~ John Perkins

Perhaps there is no such thing as unilateral power. After all, the man in power depends on receiving information all the time from outside. He responds to that information just as much as he causes things to happen ... it is an interaction, and not a lineal situation. ~ Gregory Bateson

And, by the way, how come all the people who were so in favor of unilateral nuclear disarmament are so opposed to unilateral protection against nukes? ~ P. J. O'Rourke

Bilateral illusion of unilateral attention ~ David Foster Wallace

What an unilateral life, when from the material of a renunciation, we must fashion something we love. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

In no system which shows mental characteristics can any part have unilateral control over the whole. In other words, the mental characteristics of the system are imminent, not in some part, but in the system as a whole. ~ Gregory Bateson

The Russian action in Chechnya could be likened to the British Army reducing Edinburgh to rubble and expelling a couple of million Scottish people in response to a unilateral declaration of independence by Scotland ~ Amjad M. Jaimoukha

The Clinton doctrine was encapsulated in the slogan "multilateral when we can, unilateral when we must." In congressional testimony, the phrase "when we must" was explained more fully: the United States is entitled to resort to the "unilateral use of military power" to ensure "uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies, and strategic resources. ~ Noam Chomsky

I think that his description of modern society is profound, with great insights, but it is too unilateral. He doesn't see that I define the modern world essentially as deprived of sacrificial protection, that is, more and more exposed to violence. For ~ Continuum

Attempts to settle crises by unilateral sanctions outside the framework of U.N. Security Council decisions threaten international peace and stability. Such attempts are counterproductive and contradict the norms and principles of international law. ~ Sergei Lavrov

One dumb-bell, Watson! Consider an athlete with one dumb-bell. Picture to yourself the unilateral development - the imminent danger of a spinal curvature. Shocking, Watson, shocking! ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

Loyalty is not unilateral. You have to give it to receive it. ~ Pat Summitt

We want to see oil and gas regulations on a continental basis given the integrated nature of this industry, with the current conditions in the oil and gas sector, this government will not consider unilateral regulation. ~ Stephen Harper

Most of the international community, most of the countries around the world, don't want any side, any party to take unilateral steps. They would like that all of us to stick to the road map. ~ Silvan Shalom

Sexuality is general, and although only one man may be receiving the favors of a woman, all men in her presence are warm. That's the great generosity of women and the great generosity of the creator who worked it out that way, that there are no unilateral agreements of sexuality. ~ Leonard Cohen

Above all, we shall wage no more unilateral, ill-planned, ill-considered, and ill-prepared invasions of foreign countries that pose no actual threat to our security. ~ Theodore C. Sorensen

The costs of an ignorance of science are nor just practical ones like misbegotten policies, forgone cures, and a unilateral disarmament in national competitiveness. There is a moral cost as well. It is an astonishing fact about our species that we understand so much about the history of the universe. the forces that make it tick, the stuff it's made of; the origin of living things, and the machinery of life. A failure to nurture this knowledge shows a philistine indifference to the magnificent achievements humanity is capable of; like allowing a great work of art to molder in a warehouse. ~ Steven Pinker

Unilateral preemption should not in any way be the model for how we conduct international relations. ~ Mohamed ElBaradei

Since January 2003, at the height of the debate on the possible unilateral strike against Iraq, I have advocated for a reinstatement of the military draft to ensure a more equitable representation of people making sacrifices in wars in which the United States is engaged. ~ Charles B. Rangel

Washington has openly declared its right to unilateral use of force anywhere to uphold its own interests. ~ Sergei Lavrov

We're saying this to both countries: We want a two-state solution. We want a Jewish state of Israel and alongside a independent Palestinian state. Unilateral measures are not helping at all to bring about this cause, and we agree that we wish to cooperate very closely on this, because as we both say, time is of the essence. ~ Angela Merkel

Desert Storm created the pattern for the American way of war that eventually prevailed in Kosovo. America learned from Vietnam that unilateral use of force eventually forfeits international legitimacy and domestic support. Desert Storm demonstrated the political necessity of coalition warfare. ~ Michael Ignatieff

The Commander of U.S. Cyber Command has predicted that "the next war will begin in cyberspace." It will not be possible to conceive of international order when the region through which states' survival and progress are taking place remains without any international standards of conduct and is left to unilateral decisions. ~ Henry Kissinger

It is unfair to ask Turkey to make a unilateral concession to take goods from Cyprus within the customs union when the E.U. is not open to northern Cyprus. ~ Ali Babacan

The Senate Majority Leader has the unilateral ability to stand up and say, 'If you defy Congress, if you defy the Constitution, if you defy the American people, none of your nominees will be confirmed.' ~ Ted Cruz

Egypt, too, learned to respect the long arm of British capitalism. During the nineteenth century, French and British investors lent huge sums to the rulers of Egypt, first in order to finance the Suez Canal project, and later to fund far less successful enterprises. Egyptian debt swelled, and European creditors increasingly meddled in Egyptian affairs. In 1881 Egyptian nationalists had had enough and rebelled. They declared a unilateral abrogation of all foreign debt. Queen Victoria was not amused. A year later she dispatched her army and navy to the Nile and Egypt remained a British protectorate until after World War Two. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

The liberal vision of America is that it should be less arrogant, less unilateral, more internationalist. In Obama's view, America would subsume itself under a fuzzy internationalism in which the international community, which I think is a fiction, governs itself through the U.N. ~ Charles Krauthammer

I don't know that I would need to be famous as a Middle East policy expert to see that unilateral imperialism is bad policy. ~ Janeane Garofalo

It was the English word she used. It was in English that the past was unilateral; in Bengali, the word for yesterday, kal, was also the word for tomorrow. In Bengali one needed an adjective, or relied on the tense of a verb, to distinguish what had already happened from what would be. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

We believe that unilateral sanctions violate international law, in fact. They violate free trade. They violate human growth and development, human development, and that when you actually sanction a bank of a country, the meaning of it is quite clear. You're sanctioning medicine for the people. ~ Hassan Rouhani

[Recep Tayyip] Erdogan is an adherent of realpolitik. He knows that international relations are not built on the strength of unilateral demands, but on solutions that are in everybody's best interest. ~ Martin Schulz

...9/11 was immediately understood not only as a tragedy for the United States and the city of New York but also as a global outrage, which took the lives of so many citizens from across the world. The headline emphasized the manner in which questions of identity were geographically and emotionally connected - the local (New York, Pennsylvania and Washington), the national (United States), and the global. Shortly afterwards, however, the event became reinscribed in overwhelmingly national terms - 'Attack on America'. Tragically, as former Vice President Al Gore has said, the United States has squandered that global goodwill and solidarity by its largely unilateral engagement in Iraq and other activities which have been judged by others to be inimical to international law, such as extraordinary rendition, detention camps, and the doctrine of pre-emption. We are certainly not all Americans now. ~ Klaus Dodds

Given that some ethnic groups - especially ones with high levels of ethnocentrism and mobilization - will undoubtedly continue to function as groups far into the foreseeable future, unilateral renunciation of ethnic loyalties by some groups means only their surrender and defeat - the Darwinian dead end of extinction. The future, then, like the past, will inevitably be a Darwinian competition in which ethnicity plays a very large role.

The alternative faced by Europeans throughout the Western world is to place themselves in a position of enormous vulnerability in which their destinies will be determined by other peoples, many of whom hold deep historically conditioned hatreds toward them. Europeans' promotion of their own displacement is the ultimate foolishness - an historical mistake of catastrophic proportions. ~ Kevin B. MacDonald

'Ornithologists concluded that migratory birds take hundreds of naps as they fly; they also practice unilateral eye closure, in which one eye closes, thereby permitting half the brain to sleep.' Is this what happens when photographers close one eye to look through a viewfinder? If so, they might be operating with only half a brain. Perhaps that explains ... ~ Bill Jay

The only power that can effect transformations of the order (of Jesus) is love. It remained for the 20th century to discover that locked within the atom is the energy of the sun itself. For this energy to be released, the atom must be bombarded from without. So too, locked in every human being is a store of love that partakes of the divine- the imago dei, image of god ... And it too can be activated only through bombardment, in its case, love's bombardment. The process begins in infancy, where a mother's initially unilateral loving smile awakens love in her baby and as coordination develops, elicits its answering smile ... A loving human being is not produced by exhortations, rules and threats. Love can only take root in children when it comes to them- initially and most importantly from nurturing parents. Ontogenetically speaking, love is an answering phenomenon. It is literally a response. ~ Huston Smith

[Israel's military occupation is] in gross violation of international law and has been from the outset. And that much, at least, is fully recognized, even by the United States, which has overwhelming and, as I said, unilateral responsibility for these crimes. So George Bush No. 1, when he was the U.N. ambassador, back in 1971, he officially reiterated Washington's condemnation of Israel's actions in the occupied territories. He happened to be referring specifically to occupied Jerusalem. In his words, actions in violation of the provisions of international law governing the obligations of an occupying power, namely Israel. He criticized Israel's failure "to acknowledge its obligations under the Fourth Geneva Convention as well as its actions which are contrary to the letter and spirit of this Convention." [...] However, by that time, late 1971, a divergence was developing, between official policy and practice. The fact of the matter is that by then, by late 1971, the United States was already providing the means to implement the violations that Ambassador Bush deplored. [...] on December 5th [2001], there had been an important international conference, called in Switzerland, on the 4th Geneva Convention. Switzerland is the state that's responsible for monitoring and controlling the implementation of them. The European Union all attended, even Britain, which is virtually a U.S. attack dog these days. They attended. A hundred and fourteen countries all together, the parties to ~ Noam Chomsky

I am an enthusiastic European, and my first-hand experience of war and hatred has strengthened that conviction. I have seen how misguided unilateral nationalistic identities have brought destruction and death. I am, however, a world citizen, too. ~ Klaus Schwab

If a woman makes a unilateral decision to bring pregnancy to term, and the biological father does not, and cannot, share in this decision, he should not be liable for 21 years of support ... autonomous women making independent decisions about their lives should not expect men to finance their choice. ~ Karen DeCrow

Israel reoccupied the cities of the West Bank by a unilateral action, and reestablished the civil and military occupation by a unilateral action, and it is the one that determines whether or not a Palestinian citizen has the right to reside in any part of the Palestinian Territory. ~ Mahmoud Abbas

Peace is purchased from strength. It's not purchased from weakness or unilateral retreats. ~ Benjamin Netanyahu

I have experienced the intensity of patriotism as a submarine officer, the ambitions of a competitive businessman, and the intensity of political debate. I have been sorely tempted to launch a military attack on foreigners, and have felt the frustration of having to negotiate with allies or even former enemies to reach a consensus instead of taking more decisive unilateral action. ~ Jimmy Carter

[With respect to child custody] a woman has no right to a unilateral choice that affects the rest of a man's life any more than a man would have the right to a unilateral choice that affects the rest of a woman's life. ~ Warren Farrell

Congress has never since effectively asserted itself to stop a president with a bead on war. It was true of George Herbert Walker Bush. It was true of Bill Clinton. And by September 11, 2001, even if there had been real resistance to Vice President Cheney and President George W. Bush starting the next war (or two), there were no institutional barriers strong enough to have realistically stopped them. By 9/11, the war-making authority in the United States had become, for all intents and purposes, uncontested and unilateral: one man's decision to make. It wasn't supposed to be like this. ~ Rachel Maddow

The formula for the parameters of a unilateral solution are: To maximize the number of Jews; to minimize the number of Palestinians; not to withdraw to the 1967 border and not to divide Jerusalem. ~ Ehud Olmert

If mutual respect does derive from unilateral respect, it does so by opposition. ~ Jean Piaget

So instead of unilateral Bush cowboyism, we elected President Outreach, a man happy to apologize for the entirety of American policy pre-January 2009. How's that working out? ~ Mark Steyn

Unilateral tolerance in a world of intolerance is like unilateral disarmament in a world of armed camps: it regards hope as a better basis for policy than reality. ~ Anthony Daniels

Peace cannot be unilateral. ~ Hassan Nasrallah

An act of unilateral nuclear disarmament by a European power would have a much more lasting impact than all the sanctions under consideration. Sanctions, as we know from the example of Iraq, always affect the least powerful citizens the most. ~ Tariq Ali