Top 100 Quotes & Sayings by Antony Blinken - Page 2

During the Clinton administration, engagement, backed by the threat of force, convinced Pyongyang to freeze its dangerous nuclear program and put a moratorium on the production of long-range missiles.

There is no shortage of objectionable Iranian behavior.

We have a serious commitment to Taiwan being able to defend itself.

I think that over time, China believes that it - it - it can be and should be and will be the dominant country in the world.

Russia wants stability along its Western borders, neighbors who treat their Russian minorities with respect and prosperous trading partners. NATO enlargement promotes such developments.

Whether we like it or not, we don't choose Saudi Arabia's leaders. They do.

Chomsky's characterization of the United States as a 'propaganda' state like all the rest - distinguishable only by its more effective and seductive salesmanship - is particularly hard to swallow.

I don't think anyone in the 1990s, the late '90s, anticipated that the Putin they knew then would become the Putin we know now.

In the end, North Korea's conduct may change only when its leadership does.

President Donald J. Trump was right to strike at the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for using a weapon of mass destruction, the nerve agent sarin, against its own people.

My father's father fled a pogrom in Russia in the early 20th century and was welcomed to the United States. So was my stepmother, who escaped as a young girl from Communist Hungary in 1950.

The Revolutionary Guard Corps is the official protector of Iran's revolution, with 100,000 troops divided into air, naval and ground divisions. It plays a large role in Iran's economy. Its international paramilitary arm, the Quds Force, is Tehran's main vehicle for supporting Shiite proxy forces.

Bringing the Baltics into the alliance is not a zero sum game in which NATO's gain is Russia's loss, NATO's strength Russia's weakness.

Pyongyang possesses thousands of artillery pieces 30 miles from Seoul. Just one retaliatory salvo could decimate South Korea's capital.

As we look at China, there is no doubt that it poses the most significant challenge of any nation state to the United States, in terms of our interests the interest of the American people.

As deputy secretary of state, I spent hours with my Turkish counterparts trying to find a modus vivendi for continuing American support to the Syrian Democratic Forces.

While the United States has often taken the wrong path, it has rarely failed to demonstrate - at least in the long run - the courage to reverse its steps.

The Iran nuclear deal, the so-called JCPOA, was very effective in cutting off all of the pathways that Iran then had to produce fissile material for a nuclear weapon. And we know that that agreement was working.

When President Clinton opened NATO's doors in 1994, some predicted a crisis with Russia. That did not occur, mainly because the Kremlin understood that NATO enlargement did not threaten Russia's interests.

President Trump's daily assault on our own democracy, on its institutions, on its values, on its people, that's deeply tarnished our ability to lead.

Anti-Americanism is often the product of limits on free speech, education systems that promote bias and the practice of some leaders of saying one thing abroad and the opposite at home.

The targets of George W. Bush's 'axis of evil' speech were not Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Those regimes don't need a State of the Union address to know where they stand with the Bush administration. The intended audience was elsewhere: in France, Russia and China.

So, China is a great nation. And with that comes great responsibility.

When it comes to people, process and policy, Mr. Trump's administration has gone from bad to disastrous.

The lessons Noam Chomsky sets out to teach us in 'Toward a New Cold War' are invaluable. The United States, like any other nations, can and does err, and often in a big way. But Chomsky cannot support at all his implicit diagnosis that America is 'bad.'

When it comes to climate change, I think that success at home is directly tied to our ability to lead effectively abroad.

President-elect Biden is committed to the proposition that Iran will not acquire a nuclear weapon.

I think China knows that in the early stages of Covid, it didn't do what it needed to do, which was to, in real time, give access to international experts, in real time to share information, in real time to provide real transparency.

The late 1990s were really a moment of still tremendous hope and optimism about the relationship between Russia and the United States.

The United States will rightfully go on deploring human rights excesses in the Soviet Union. And it is hardly likely Americans will one day espouse the communist ideology. But nowhere does it say we cannot live in peace with the U.S.S.R. In the nuclear age, there is truly no alternative.

Our hope is that every single day the work we're doing is helping to make the American people just a little bit safer, a little bit more prosperous, a little bit healthier.

Climate change, the spread of weapons of mass destruction. None of those can really effectively be dealt with by any one country acting alone and even the United States can't handle them alone. China needs to be part of the game on that.

When it comes to the effective stewardship of our nation's security - especially during crises - the most successful administrations had three things in common: people, process and policy.

Washington should tell governments that printing lies and teaching intolerance will have consequences in terms of foreign assistance, political support and military aid.

Look, we don't have the luxury of not dealing with China. There are real complexities to the relationship, whether it's the adversarial piece, whether it's the competitive piece, whether it's the cooperative piece.

The United States and China are competitors. And there is nothing wrong with competition.

The world's greatest power deserves to have the world's very best diplomatic corps.

In my judgment, the JCPOA for whatever its limitations, was succeeding on its own terms in blocking Iran's pathways to producing fissile material for a nuclear weapon on short order.

We put a lot of money into Russia after the fall of the Berlin Wall, trying to support it economically, trying to support democratic institutions.

Most of the money that we provide to the WTO is done on a voluntary basis.