Unilateral Quotes

“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 bilateral illusion of unilateral attention was almost infantilely gratifying from an emotional standpoint: you got to believe you were receiving somebody's complete attention without having to return it. Regarded with the objectivity of hindsight, the illusion appears arational, almost literally fantastic: it would be like being able to both lie and to trust other people at the same time.”

— David Foster Wallace

“Bilateral illusion of unilateral attention”

— David Foster Wallace

“Opponents of U.S. sanctions have made 'unilateral sanctions' their special target. They argue that sanctions observed by many nations would be much more effective. True enough. Far better for trade with an outlaw regime to be restricted by many nations than by just one.”

— Elliott Abrams

“We are distressed by the unilateral actions of those provinces that are clearly determined to redefine what our common faith was once.”

— Peter Akinola

“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

“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

“Peace is purchased from strength. It's not purchased from weakness or unilateral retreats.”

— Benjamin Netanyahu

“Peace cannot be unilateral.”

— Hassan Nasrallah

“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

“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

“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

“I don't think the American people want unilateral government control over the entire health-care system.”

— Judd Gregg

“The heart of compromise is the willingness of all parties to sacrifice reciprocally and equally for the greater good of a relationship.
Reconciling conflicting needs for the sake of unity can't work if just one person does it. A coerced compromise, when one partner deceives or overpowers the other without allowing room for shared truths, usually results in an empty agreement that's soon undermined by unilateral acting out.”

— Alexandra Katehakis

“What an unilateral life, when from the material of a renunciation, we must fashion something we love.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“It would be a tragedy if the remarkable international coalition against terrorism, successfully marshalled in the aftermath of 11 September, were to fragment over a unilateral U.S. strike against Baghdad.”

— Charles Kennedy

“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

“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

“Washington has openly declared its right to unilateral use of force anywhere to uphold its own interests.”

— Sergei Lavrov

“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

“Gary had hoped to find her more cooperative. He already had one "alternative" sibling and he didn't need another. It frustrated him that people could so happily drop out of the world of conventional expectations; it felt like a unilateral rewriting, to his disadvantage, of the rules of life.”

— Jonathan Franzen

“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

“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

“Unilateral preemption should not in any way be the model for how we conduct international relations.”

— Mohamed ElBaradei

“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

“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

“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

“'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

“Oxytocin infusion increases generosity in unilateral monetary transfers by 80 percent [and] increases donations to charity by 50 percent.”

— Paul J. Zak

“What I want to know is what in the world so many Democrats are doing supporting the President's unilateral intervention in Iraq?”

— Howard Dean

“[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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“We must face the fact that unilateral action on the part of the United States will never be enough to stop illegal immigration. Immigrants come here illegally from source countries where conditions prevail that encourage or even compel them to leave. Attacking the causes of illegal migration is essential and will require international cooperation.”

— Barbara Jordan

“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

“Loyalty is not unilateral. You have to give it to receive it.”

— Pat Summitt

“I hate to think that someday Americans will be looking at the ruins of their cities and saying that this happened because their leaders were afraid of the word unilateral.”

— Thomas Sowell

“[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

“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

“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