The founders of the United Nations expected that member nations would behave and vote as individuals after they had weighed the merits of an issue – rather like a great, global town meeting. The emergence of blocks and the polarization of the United Nations undermine all that this organization initially valued. Ronald Reagan
If the United Nations is a country unto itself, then the commodity it exports most is words. Esther B Fein
After four years at the United Nations I sometimes yearn for the peace and tranquillity of a political convention. Adlai Stevenson
The United Nations cannot do anything, and never could; it is not an animate entity or agent. It is a place, a stage, a forum and a shrine…a place to which powerful people can repair when they are fearful about the course on which their own rhetoric seems to be propelling them. Conor Cruise O’Brien
The United Nations has become a place where many countries seek to achieve a lynching of the United States by resolution. Vernon A Walters
If the United Nations is to survive, those who represent it must bolster it; those who advocate it must submit to it; and those who believe in it must fight for it. Norman Cousins
The United Nations is messy because the world is messy. Ivor Richard
The United Nations will not abolish sin, but it can make it more difficult for the sinners. Ivor Richard
The United Nations was not set up to be a reformatory. It was assumed that you would be good before you got in and not that being in would make you good. John Foster Dulles
Membership of the United Nations gives every member the right to make a fool of himself, and that is a right of which the Soviet Union in this case has taken full advantage. Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr
What has happened to the dreams of the United Nations’ founders? What has happened to the spirit which created the United Nations? The answer is clear: Governments got in the way of the dreams of the people. Ronald Reagan
Apart from a good mind, the two most important assets for a United Nations diplomat are a good tailor and a strong liver. Richard A Woolcott
The main thing that endears the United Nations to member governments, and so enables it to survive, is its proven capacity to fail, and to be seen to fail. Conor Cruise O’Brien
You can safely appeal to the United Nations in the comfortable certainty that it will let you down. Conor Cruise O’Brien
The United Nations was not created to take humanity to heaven, but to save it from hell. Dag Hammarskjold
May the United Nations ever be vigilant and potent to defeat the swallowing up of any nation, at any time, by any means – by armies with banners, by force or by fraud, by tricks or by midnight treachery. Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr
The primary, the fundamental, the essential purpose of the United Nations is to keep peace. Everything it does which helps prevent World War III is good. Everything which does not further that goal, either directly or indirectly, is at best superfluous. Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr