Samantha Power > Quotes

“We decide, on issues large and small, whether we will be bystanders or upstanders.”
― Samantha Power, The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir

“People who care, act, and refuse to give up may not change THE world, but they can change many individual worlds.”
― Samantha Power, The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir

“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,”
― Samantha Power, "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide

“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).”
― Samantha Power, The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir

“If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”[4]”
― Samantha Power, The Education of an Idealist

“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.”
― Samantha Power, The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir

“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.”
― Samantha Power, The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir

“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.”
― Samantha Power, The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir

“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.”
― Samantha Power, The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir

“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.”
― Samantha Power, The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir

“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.”
― Samantha Power, The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir

“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.”
― Samantha Power, The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir

“People have explained U.S. failures to respond to specific genocides by claiming that the United States didn’t know what was happening, that it knew but didn’t care, or that regardless of what it knew, there was nothing useful to be done. I have found that in fact U.S. policymakers knew a great deal about the crimes being perpetrated. Some Americans cared and fought for action, making considerable personal and professional sacrifices. And the United States did have countless opportunities to mitigate and prevent slaughter. But time and again, decent men and women chose to look away. We have all been bystanders to genocide. The crucial question is why.”
― Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide

“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).”
― Samantha Power, The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir

“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”
― Samantha Power, The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir

“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.”
― Samantha Power, The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir

“We can't only try diplomacy after countries have done what we want.”
― Samantha Power, The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir

“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”
― Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide

“Those who argued that the number of Cambodians killed was in the hundreds of thousands or those who tried to generate press coverage of the horrors did so assuming that establishing the facts would empower the United States and other Western governments to act. Normally, in a time of genocide, op-ed writers, policymakers, and reporters root for a distinct outcome or urge a specific U.S. military, economic, legal, humanitarian, or diplomatic response. Implicit indeed in many cables and news articles, and explicit in most editorials, is an underlying message, a sort of “if I were czar, I would do X or Y.” But in the first three years of KR rule, even the Americans most concerned about Cambodia—Twining, Quinn, and Becker among them—internalized the constraints of the day and the system. They knew that drawing attention to the slaughter in Cambodia would have reminded America of its past sins, reopened wounds that had not yet healed at home, and invited questions about what the United States planned to do to curb the terror. They were neither surprised nor agitated by U.S. apathy. They accepted U.S. noninvolvement as an established background condition. Once U.S. troops had withdrawn from Vietnam in 1973, Americans deemed all of Southeast Asia unspeakable, unwatchable, and from a policy perspective, unfixable. “There could have been two genocides in Cambodia and nobody would have cared,” remembers Morton Abramowitz, who at the time was an Asia specialist at the Pentagon and in 1978 became U.S. ambassador to Thailand. During the Khmer Rouge period, he remembers, “people just wanted to forget about the place. They wanted it off the radar.”
― Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide

“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.”
― Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide

“This reminded me of the peril of applying analogies in geopolitics, best encapsulated in Mark Twain’s line: “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.”
― Samantha Power, The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir

“Despite the UN secretary-general’s grand title, he was named in the UN Charter as the administrator of the organization. For this reason, former secretary-general Kofi Annan described the position as “more secretary than general.”
― Samantha Power, The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir

“AUTHORITARIAN LEADERS FREQUENTLY MANUFACTURE and demonize “enemies” to shore up support from their political base.”
― Samantha Power, The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir

“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).”
― Samantha Power, The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir

“Imagine if you were sitting at home and you suddenly found that your telephone line had been cut. You couldn’t even call your parents to tell them you were okay. Imagine having to sleep in every layer of clothing you owned to survive without heat. Imagine not being able to send your kids to school because it was safer to keep them in your dark basement than for them to take a short walk down the block. Imagine hearing your child’s tummy growling and not being able to help because the next UN food delivery was not for another week. Imagine getting shot at by people whose weddings you had attended. This is what is happening right now to people like us.”
― Samantha Power, The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir

“In “A Problem from Hell,” I had highlighted the work of Albert Hirschman, the Princeton economist who published the landmark book The Rhetoric of Reaction in 1991. Hirschman’s thesis was that those who didn’t want to pursue a particular course of action tended to argue that a given policy would be futile (“futility”), that it would likely make matters worse (“perversity”), or that it would imperil some other goal (“jeopardy”).”
― Samantha Power, The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir

“I saw how important it is not to shun those with whom we disagree. As the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once said, 'We must always seek the truth in our opponent's error and the error in our own truth.' This is just as important in our domestic politics as in our foreign dealings.”
― Samantha Power, The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir

“Mum, since when have you ever decided whether or not to do something based on an assumption that you will fail?” I asked. “If I think everyone else will be better than me, then you’re right, I shouldn’t try. But if that is my approach, maybe I should just preemptively admit defeat and retire now.”
― Samantha Power, The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir

“from Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If”: If you can meet with triumph and disaster And treat those two imposters just the same”
― Samantha Power, The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir

“And here it was 1988, and in Proxmire's words, the Congress had gone sound to sleep: 'We should take a special international prize for gross hypocrisy. The Senate resoundingly passes the ratification of the Genocide Treaty. We thereby tell the world that we recognize this terrible crime. Then what do we do about it? We do nothing about it. We speak loudly but carry no stick at all.”
― Samantha Power, "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide