Top 72 Quotes & Sayings by Shashi Tharoor - Page 2

Universality of the UN is a worthwhile thing in its own self because it means that every country belongs, feels it has a stake, and participates, rather than going away and finding other methods of conducting international relations.

There’s no longer a superpower standoff. But there are real problems that divide countries around the world. And the UN is still the place where we can get together and try and discuss them.

India is more than a sum of its contradictions, any truism about India can be contradicted with another truism. There is no fixed stereotype. But even thinking about India makes clear the immensity of the nation-building challenge.

The good terrorists are the guys who bomb and kill Indians. The bad terrorists are the ones who attack Pakistani interests, whether in Afghanistan or Pakistan. In other words, you blow up the Taj Mahal Hotel, you are a good guy. You blow up the Marriott in Islamabad, you are a bad guy.

Resolutions aren't self-executing. Somebody has to provide the soldiers, take the risks, risk their blood and their treasure to go out and implement such a resolution.

I make no bones about the fact that India matters to me, and I would like to matter to India.

What economic libralisation needs, if it is to succeed , is a general acceptance that reforms are for the general good, that they might seem to help some more than others, but that in the long run everyone will benefit from them. Such attitude is far from being realized

The British are the only people in history crass enough to have made revolutionaries out of Americans.

Basically, there are two kinds of stereotypes out there in the world about America. There's America the Goliath - the big, powerful, bullying country that pushes its way around the world and gets its ways, pursues its own interests nakedly, irrespective of what others want. And the other stereotype is America, the land of opportunity, where everyone can go and do anything, be anything, make any dreams come true.

In writing of Indian culture, I am highly conscious of my own subjectivity; arguably, there is more than one Indian culture, and certainly more than one view of Indian culture.

Im not a techno-determinist. I believe we need to improve our existing human resources, and technology can only be a complement.

This is the one international institution we have in which governments get together to work collectively for a common purpose. International crises, by definition, require international solutions. Peacekeeping is a response to conflict, is a response to situations in which often it is not the business of any one particular country to get into. It seems to me, therefore, that the world will for the foreseeable future need peacekeeping.