Samantha Power

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.

Syria is important because it lies at the heart of a region critical to U.S. security, a region that is home to friends and partners and one of our closest allies. It is important because the Syrian regime possesses stores of chemical weapons that they have recently used on a large scale and that we cannot allow to fall into terrorists' hands.

My style in diplomacy is my style as a human being - I'm very direct and very honest.

U.N. Security Council resolutions are only as effective as their enforcement.

Every decision to use military force is an excruciatingly difficult one.

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

On the rare occasions when U.N. blue helmets have made the news in the past, it has unfortunately too often been in the context of situations where peacekeepers have failed to shield civilians, or even when the peacekeepers themselves have been involved in abuse.

My career is not well thought out. Every choice has been instinctive and, quite literally, impulsive in many ways.

If your aim is to attack the United States, it is hard to imagine a more difficult way of getting here than by posing as a refugee.

History is laden with belligerent leaders using humanitarian rhetoric to mask geopolitical aims. History also shows how often ill-informed moralism has led to foreign entanglements that do more harm than good.

President Obama, like every other leader on Earth, is still going to be looking out for national and economic interests. States don't cease to be states overnight just because they get a great visionary as their new president.

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