Quotes from Samantha Power

My basic feeling about military intervention is that it should be a last resort, undertaken only to stave off large-scale bloodshed.

Every decision to use military force is an excruciatingly difficult one.

Some anti-Americanism derives simply from our being a colossus that bestrides the earth. But much anti-Americanism derives from the role U.S. political, economic and military power has played in denying such freedoms to others.

The economic dynamic in Zimbabwe is perversely robust: while ordinary people suffer, black-market dealers and people with foreign bank accounts prosper, making them powerful stakeholders in the perpetuation of devastating economic policies.

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.

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

Success is not about who never fails. It is about who can spring - or even stagger - back up.

I have only so many foreign-language neurons. When I learned Spanish, that displaced whatever Irish was left, and then I learned German, and that displaced the Spanish, and when I learned Serbo-Croatian, that displaced the German. So I'm a bit of a muddle.

The way governments treat their own citizens matters; it matters because it can have a direct impact on international peace and security - and on our respective national security interests.

Violence against women isn't cultural, it's criminal. Equality cannot come eventually, it's something we must fight for now.

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

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

On the rare occasions when U.N. blue helmets have made the news in the past, it has unfortunately too often been in the context of situations where peacekeepers have failed to shield civilians, or even when the peacekeepers themselves have been involved in abuse.

For me, it's not an option to despair. The question is: what can we do to make someone's life better? Take the unimaginable strides made in places like Bosnia, where I cut my teeth, and Rwanda. Their stories aren't perfect, but I wouldn't have dreamt they could happen in a million years.

Whatever its flaws, the United Nations is still the only institution that brings together all the countries of the world. And it is the best forum for the United States to spur countries to act - and to hold them accountable when they don't.

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.

The United States should not frame its policy options in terms of doing nothing or unilaterally sending in the Marines.

'Acting as if...' I decided, ridiculously in retrospect, that my experience covering women's volleyball for my college newspaper was sufficient for me to at least try to become a war correspondent.

The performance of international institutions will be symptomatic of the domestic political priorities of influential member states. International institutions don't really have a life and a mind of their own.

Re-examining our reasoning is not something that has come naturally to American statesmen.

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.

I think I would like the sort of job where you can work away in obscurity to try and improve things, without being caught up in the political maelstrom.

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.

There are something like 300 anti-genocide chapters on college campuses around the country. It's bigger than the anti-apartheid movement. There are something like 500 high school chapters devoted to stopping the genocide in Darfur. Evangelicals have joined it. Jewish groups have joined it.