Quotes from Samantha Power

In the absence of full-fledged Congressional investigations, American policymakers rarely look back. They are bound by continuity and fealty across administrations and generations.

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

We decide, on issues large and small, whether we will be bystanders or upstanders.

People who care, act, and refuse to give up may not change THE world, but they can change many individual worlds.

fact, two-thirds of all of the refugees who had come to the US in the previous decade were women and children—and we knew who they were. Of the millions of refugees admitted to the United States since the landmark Refugee Act of 1980, not one has carried out a lethal act of domestic terrorism.

If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will."[4]

To this day, when I hear people judge students on the basis of their test scores, I think of my sleep-deprived African-American classmates as we geared up to take English or math tests together. We may have been equal before God, but I had three more hours of sleep, vastly more time to prepare, and many more resources at my disposal than those who were part of the busing program.

Eleanor Roosevelt wrote movingly about having her own equivalent of a Bat Cave, but in the end, she found consolation by telling herself, "Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people." I agreed with this, but I still couldn't get the small things or people out of my head. EVENTS IN MY PERSONAL LIFE required me to understand better where my "bats" were coming from.

The United Staes had never in its history intervened to stop genocide and had in fact rarely even made a point of condemning it as it occurred

Former UN secretary-general Dag Hammarskjold may have best summed up the UN's track record and its promise when he said it was created 'not to lead mankind to heaven but to save humanity from hell'" (p. 348).

The Heath brothers stressed that, counterintuitively, big problems 'are most often solved by a sequence of small solutions, sometimes over weeks, sometimes over decades.' 'Shrink the change' became a kind of motto for me and my team, along with President Obama's version of the point: 'Better is good' (p. 517).

Trump's contempt and bigotry, his rage and dishonesty, and his attacks on judges, journalists, minorities, and opposition voices are doing untold damage to the moral and political foundations of American democracy.

Early on in my tenure, I was given a cartoon that circulated widely at the UN. The cartoon showed dozens of people listening to a speech. In the first panel, the speaker asks, "Who wants change?" and all audience members enthusiastically raise their hands. In the second panel, the speaker refines his question, asking, "Who wants to change?" This time, each audience member looks toward the ground, demurring.

We can't only try diplomacy after countries have done what we want.

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously described the importance of being able "to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time," while still retaining "the ability to function." I was quickly becoming practiced at this discomfiting balance.

I believed that the most important part of decision-making was not the justness of one's intentions but the effectiveness of one's actions.

And as you grow up, please know that whenever you hear thunder, that will be me. Whenever the Red Sox win in the ninth, that will be me. Whenever you and daddy dance together, know that I am there too. I will always be watching my boys. My boys, whom I love so much that I feel my heart will burst. Love, Mum

If anybody had the grounds to anticipate systematic brutality, it seems logical that it would be those most immediately endangered.Yet those with the most at stake are in fact often the least prone to recognize their peril.

AUTHORITARIAN LEADERS FREQUENTLY MANUFACTURE and demonize "enemies" to shore up support from their political base.

Listen," he said firmly. "If you hear nothing else, hear this. You work at the White House. There is no other room where a bunch of really smart people of sound judgment are getting together and figuring out what to do. It will be the scariest moment of your life when you fully internalize this: There is no other meeting. You're in the meeting. You are the meeting. If you have a concern, raise it.

Whenever my own thoughts about the state of the world headed toward a similarly bleak impasse, I would brainstorm with my team about how we might 'shrink the change' we hoped to see (p. 517).

To paraphrase Walter Laqueur, a pioneer in the study of the Allies' response to the Holocaust, although many people thought that the Jews were no longer alive, they did not necessarily believe they were dead.18

A cat who sits on a hot stove will never sit on a hot stove again. But he won't sit on a cold stove either.

from Rudyard Kipling's poem "If": If you can meet with triumph and disaster And treat those two imposters just the same