Top 50 Samantha Power Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Violence against women isn’t cultural, it’s criminal. Equality cannot come eventually, it’s something we must fight for now.”

— Samantha Power

2. “Silence in the face of atrocity is not neutrality; silence in the face of atrocity is acquiescence.”

— Samantha Power

3. “We decide, on issues large and small, whether we will be bystanders or upstanders.”

— Samantha Power

4. “It is easy to get used to the morning news, habituated. But don’t. The morning news is yours to alter.”

— Samantha Power

5. “People who care, act, and refuse to give up may not change THE world, but they can change many individual worlds.”

— Samantha Power

6. “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

7. “Brokenness is the operative issue of our time – broken souls, broken hearts, broken places.”

— Samantha Power

8. “Success is not about who never fails. It is about who can spring – or even stagger – back up.”

— Samantha Power

9. “When it came to the Vietnam War, Mr. McNamara was an early advocate of escalation but came to realize the flaws in the American approach earlier than many of his colleagues. Yet in public, he continued to defend the war.”

— Samantha Power

10. “If you represent everyone, in some ways you represent no one. You’re un-owned.”

— Samantha Power

11. “There is a convergence of crises that makes it challenging to keep the world’s attention.”

— Samantha Power

12. “My basic feeling about military intervention is that it should be a last resort, undertaken only to stave off large-scale bloodshed.”

— Samantha Power

13. “Historical hypocrites have themselves carried out the very human rights abuses that they suddenly decide warrant intervention elsewhere.”

— Samantha Power

14. “I got into journalism not to be a journalist but to try to change American foreign policy. I’m a corny person. I was a dreamer predating my journalistic life, so I got into journalism as a means to try to change the world.”

— Samantha Power

15. “I happen to miss the Constitution; I thought it was a good document.”

— Samantha Power

16. “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

17. “International institutions are composed of governments. Governments control their own military forces and police.”

— Samantha Power

18. “There are times when the best medication and therapist simply can’t help a soldier suffering from this new generation of peacekeeping injury. The anger, the rage, the hurt, and the cold loneliness that separates you from your family, friends, and society’s normal daily routine are so powerful that the option of destroying yourself is both real and attractive.”

— Samantha Power

19. “Without investing in the rule of law for the poor, none of the other investments we make will be sustainable.”

— Samantha Power

20. “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

21. “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

22. “In the 2000 election, George W. Bush, who had shirked military service, succeeded in presenting himself as more reliable on national security than Al Gore.”

— Samantha Power

23. “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

24. “I like to think that as I get older I’m getting better at spending time with people who have qualities that make them worth spending time with.”

— Samantha Power

25. “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

26. “Being an occupier is not good for anybody’s global standing. It is a catalyst for terrorist recruitment.”

— Samantha Power

27. “I’m going to Washington on a fateful, even historic, mission. I feel that I am an emissary of all Israel’s citizens, even those who do not agree with me, and of the entire Jewish people.”

— Samantha Power

28. “India is at the vanguard of figuring out how to exploit technology and innovation on behalf of democratic accountability.”

— Samantha Power

29. “When dictators feel their support slipping among adults, it is not unusual for them to alter school textbooks in the hope of enlisting impressionable youths in their cause.”

— Samantha Power

30. “One of the things that a president needs in the face of genocide is resolve.”

— Samantha Power

31. “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

32. “Re-examining our reasoning is not something that has come naturally to American statesmen.”

— Samantha Power

33. “As even a democracy like the United States has shown, waging war can benefit a leader in several ways: it can rally citizens around the flag, it can distract them from bleak economic times, and it can enrich a country’s elites.”

— Samantha Power

34. “I believe the United States is the greatest country on Earth. I really do.”

— Samantha Power

35. “No more than a surgeon can operate while tweeting can you reach your potential with one ear in, one ear out. You actually have to reacquaint yourself with concentration. We all do.”

— Samantha Power

36. “I think Obama is right when he talks about the rule of law as a cornerstone of what the United States should stand for.”

— Samantha Power

37. “What is most needed in Darfur is an international peacekeeping and protection presence, and this is what the Sudanese government most wants to avoid.”

— Samantha Power

38. “American decision-makers must understand how damaging a foreign policy that privileges order and profit over justice really is in the long term.”

— Samantha Power

39. “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

40. “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

41. “Without ever discussing it or making a conscious shift, we reflexively engaged one another in meetings. This did not mean we always agreed with one another; some of my most heartfelt arguments were with my fellow female Senior Directors. But we took one another’s ideas seriously. This meant never leaving them simply hanging in the air, which typically happened in large group discussions.”

— Samantha Power

42. “Countries that intervene militarily rarely do so out of pure altruism.”

— Samantha Power

43. “Over the years, Western governments have been criticized for working with foreign police who have proved abusive or corrupt.”

— Samantha Power

44. “In the ’90s, there was scant presidential leadership and insufficient domestic political mobilization for foreign policy grounded in human rights.”

— Samantha Power

45. “Democracies are expense-averse and they think in terms of short-term, political interests rather than a long-term interest in stability.”

— Samantha Power

46. “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

47. “We know that often holding those who have carried out mass atrocities accountable is at times our best tool to prevent future atrocities.”

— Samantha Power

48. “Foreign policy is an explicitly amoral enterprise.”

— Samantha Power

49. “We can’t only try diplomacy after countries have done what we want.”

— Samantha Power

50. “President Reagan, of course, did more than any other person to entrench the Republican reputation for toughness on national security.”

— Samantha Power