These NATO quotes will inspire you. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization also called the North Atlantic Alliance, is an intergovernmental military alliance between 28 European countries, 2 North American countries, and 1 Eurasian country.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging NATO quotes, NATO sayings, and NATO proverbs.
Best NATO Quotes
- “And I think to be in NATO for the countries of our region, it means more guarantees for us, it means more responsibility for our common security, but it means fulfillment of all standards of the civilized world, like protection of human rights and democratic mechanisms.” ~ Aleksander Kwasniewski
- “NATO and the USA wanted a complete victory over the Soviet Union. They wanted to sit on the throne in Europe alone.” ~ Vladimir Putin
- “We also have a real opportunity to join NATO.” ~ Eduard Shevardnadze
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“Russia is a part of European culture. Therefore, it is with difficulty that I imagine NATO as an enemy.” ~ Vladimir Putin
- “If we get the capabilities, NATO, along with the European Union, can do amazing things.” ~ George Robertson, Baron Robertson of Port Ellen
- “We have a firm commitment to NATO, we are a part of NATO. We have a firm commitment to Europe. We are a part of Europe.” ~ Dan Quayle
- “Our alliance with our NATO partners has been a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy for nearly 70 years, in good times and in bad and through presidents of both parties because the United States has a fundamental interest in Europe’s stability and security.” ~ Barack Obama
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“I bear solemn witness to the fact that NATO heads of state and of government meet only to go through the tedious motions of reading speeches, drafted by others, with the principal objective of not rocking the boat.” ~ Pierre Trudeau
- “NATO is an alliance, so all parts of the alliance have to be capable.” ~ Newt Gingrich
- “The NATO alliance is not just a transactional relationship, once again. That alliance serves our interests. That alliance has been critical to keeping security in Europe so that we do not face another world war.” ~ James Franklin Jeffrey
- “Let’s allow Poland and the Czech Republic to have that missile shield that they were entitled to by joining NATO. I think that’s the right strategic response to Russian aggression.” ~ Mike Pence
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“It will be undertaken, of course, in the June or July summit, and then to bring NATO closer to Russia or vice versa is a way to move toward integration – toward the integration of Europe.” ~ Warren Christopher
- “My vision is to have an independent Kosovo, democratic, with a politically tolerant society and with a solid economy, integrated into the EU, the NATO and to continue with our good relations with the USA.” ~ Ibrahim Rugova
- “We’re working with NATO, the longest military alliance in the history of the world, to really turn our attention to terrorism.” ~ Hillary Clinton
- “If the Europeans truly wish to improve their NATO contribution they can show it simply enough. They can establish professional armed forces, like those of the UK. And they can acquire more advanced technology. Indeed, unless that happens soon the gulf between the European and US capabilities will yawn so wide that it will not be possible to share the same battlefield. Alas, I do not think that sharing battlefields with our American friends – but rather disputing global primacy with them – is what European defense plans are truly about.” ~ Margaret Thatcher
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“I think would send a very strong message to Putin and to Russia that NATO countries and the United States are going to respond by growing stronger economically and strategically.” ~ Mike Pence
- “Future U.S. political leaders – those for whom the Cold War was not the formative experience that it was for me – may not consider the return on America’s investment in NATO worth the cost.” ~ Robert M. Gates
- “I believe that during the intervention of NATO in Kosovo there is an element nobody can question: the air attacks, the bombs, are not caused by a material interest. Their character is exclusively humanitarian: What is at stake here are the principles, human rights which have priority above state sovereignty. This makes it legitimate to attack the Yugoslav Federation, although without the United Nations mandate.” ~ Vaclav Havel
- “US opposition to Russia and China has entailed sanctions against Russia, and Russia, in turn, has made counter-sanctions against Europe. So Europe is essentially sacrificing its opportunities for trade and investment in order to remain part of NATO. It is also agreeing to bomb Syria and the Near East, creating a wave of refugees that it doesn’t know what to do with.” ~ Michael Hudson
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“I’m all in favor of NATO.” ~ Donald Trump
- “Truman is now seen as a near-great president because he put in place the containment doctrine boosted by the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan and NATO, which historians now see as having been at the center of American success in the cold war.” ~ Robert Dallek
- “I know very well that Berlin attaches great importance to NATO and solidarity, in terms of sharing the burden. For this reason, I feel confident that the German government will take the right decision, one that serves both German and NATO interests.” ~ Anders Fogh Rasmussen
- “NATO members must finally contribute their fair share and meet their financial obligations.” ~ Donald Trump
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“When we look at how, constitutionally, only Congress can declare war, and that is routinely ignored. Not NATO or the UN, but Congress has to authorize these endless wars, and it isn’t.” ~ Edward Snowden
- “To his lasting credit, President Reagan never wavered. He recognized the strategic importance of staying the course, both in terms of denying Moscow the military hegemony it sought in Western Europe and of restoring the will, cohesiveness, and security of the NATO alliance, so badly frayed during the turbulent 1970s.” ~ Frank Gaffney
- “Unilateral disarmament by Britain is opposed to our country’s best interests, could begin the unraveling of NATO and therefore jeopardize the stability of Europe.” ~ James Callaghan
- “As you probably know, some American politicians and American journalists refer to Washington, DC as the “capital of the free world.” But it seems to me that Brussels, which boasts 1,000 years of history and which serves as the capital of Belgium, the home of the European Union, and the headquarters for NATO, this city has its own legitimate claim to that title.” ~ Joe Biden
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“I think that NATO is itself a war criminal.” ~ Harold Pinter
- “In 2003, at the time I made my “Old Europe” comment, the center of gravity in NATO and Europe had long since shifted to the East. With the former Warsaw Pact countries joining NATO, the alliance has a different mix today. Some people were sensitive about my comment because they thought it was a pejorative way of highlighting demographic realities. Apparently, they felt it pointed a white light at a weakness in Europe – an aging population. Europe has come some distance since World War II in becoming Europe.” ~ Donald Rumsfeld
- “As Far As People Who Ran The Show, It Was The Highest Levels of NATO, the U.S., MI6, CIA And The Pentagon” ~ Sibel Edmonds
- “In my opinion, terrorism is a question which is not a short-term problem for all of us. It is a long-term fight. And NATO can play, and will play, a very crucial role in this struggle.” ~ Aleksander Kwasniewski
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“Jim Stavridis is the former NATO commander who is sometimes on people’s lists, also very plausible, self-possessed, someone with sobriety.” ~ David Brooks
- “Whether [Turkey] is a NATO country or not, it doesn’t have the right to invade any other country according to the international law or to any other moral value.” ~ Bashar al-Assad
- “Nowhere is it written that NATO had to accept certain countries. All that would have been required to refrain from doing so was the political will. But people didn’t want to.” ~ Vladimir Putin
- “Vladimir Putin likes Donald Trump because he supports this view of the world, that the big guys can carve it up, sit and talk about the world, carve up the countries, shape borders. For Putin, treaties, alliances, Nato, the EU are stumbling blocks.” ~ Garry Kasparov
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“When I served as US Ambassador to NATO in the 1970s, the center of gravity in Europe was France and Germany.” ~ Donald Rumsfeld
- “Let’s not forget what the origin of the problem is. There is no place in modern Europe for ethnically pure states. That’s a 19th-century idea and we are trying to transition into the 21st century, and we are going to do it with multi-ethnic states.” ~ Wesley Clark
- “I think we should be organized in something called an Alliance Against Nuclear Terrorism. In the same way that NATO was the great alliance of the Cold War and served a great purpose then, we need now, in the war on terrorism, a new alliance, the mission of which would be to minimize the risk of nuclear terrorist attacks, and the members would agree to sign on to the gold standard.” ~ Graham T. Allison
- “The importance of strengthening Euro-Atlantic security: the growing dangers pile pressure on our rules-based international system, so we need to do more to strengthen NATO, the bedrock of our defense – not just upping spending, but making the alliance more agile and more capable of tackling dangers from all directions.” ~ James Mattis
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“It’s amazing that Europe says, “What are we going to do with these refugees?” It’s as if it doesn’t realize that being part of NATO and bombing these countries forces them to choose to live by fleeing, or to stay and get bombed.” ~ Michael Hudson
- “What NATO troops are doing in Afghanistan is to train, assist and advise Afghans, but they are actually doing the fighting. They are actually taking the responsibility for the security in their own country. And that is a great achievement, compared to what we saw just a few years ago, when NATO troops had to conduct the combat operations fighting the Taliban.” ~ Jens Stoltenberg
- “We are deploying battle groups, battalions, which we consider necessary to convey a message of deterrence, credible deterrence, that if one NATO ally is attacked, it will trigger a whole response from the whole alliance.” ~ Jens Stoltenberg
- “What’s the purpose of NATO? Well actually we have an official answer. It isn’t publicized much, but a couple of years ago, the secretary-general of NATO made a formal statement explaining the purpose of NATO in the post-Cold War world is to control global energy systems, pipelines, and sea lanes. That means it’s a global system and of course he didn’t say it, it’s an intervention force under US command, as we’ve seen in case after case. So that’s NATO.” ~ Noam Chomsky
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“I believe a strong NATO has been the bulwark of our defence in Europe. Obviously that’s important in the UK national interest and I believe it’s important in the US national interest” ~ Theresa May
- “NATO is still the most remarkable alliance in history. It stuck together through 40 years of Cold War, and it then joined together to fight in Afghanistan. In the 1980s, I would not have thought this was going to be possible.” ~ Paul Wolfowitz
- “[Mikhail] Gorbachev said that he would agree to the unification of Germany, and even adherence of Germany to NATO, which was quite a concession if NATO didn’t move to East Germany. And [George] Bush and [James] Baker promised verbally, that’s critical, verbally that NATO would not expand “one inch to the east,” which meant East Germany. Nobody was talking about anything further at the time. They would not expand one inch to the east. Now that was a verbal promise. It was never written. NATO immediately expanded to East Germany.” ~ Noam Chomsky
- “We haven’t been leading anybody. We’ve been acquiescing to a bunch of linguini-spined leftists all over the world, at the United Nations, in NATO, wherever it is. The people who don’t even pay for their own defense. The people that don’t even believe in guns and bullets to protect yourself are the people we have been acquiescing to. And they think this is called leadership. Leadership is sponsoring America’s decline. Leadership is administering America’s decline. Leadership is admitting that America’s superpower status was never deserved or warranted.” ~ Rush Limbaugh , NATO quotes leadership
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“America is the one that has led the effort to strengthen NATO and strengthen the front-line states against Russia’s pressures.” ~ John F. Kerry
- “I worked with the Nato Military Committee. The Head of the Luxembourg Armed Forces had equal standing with me, and I had to respect that. He was the leader of the armed forces of a sovereign country. I had to make sure he never thought that I was looking down on them, merely because they had less power than we did. With that kind of approach, you can develop bonds of trust. I tried to do the same thing with my colleagues when I was Secretary of State.” ~ Colin Powell
- “If Estonia or any member-state was invaded and Article V was not invoked, NATO will fall apart. If it fails once, the alliance will no longer exist.” ~ Toomas Hendrik Ilves
- “[Donald Trump] attitude towards our longest defense alliance and NATO, that we should somehow walk away from it.” ~ Hillary Clinton
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“The alliance should agree… to an effective NATO role against the new threats presented by international terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.” ~ Jose Maria Aznar
- “NATO needs to adapt its strategy to meet new challenges” ~ Angela Merkel
- “The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and their means of delivery is a threat to both the Nato allies and Russia.” ~ Anders Fogh Rasmussen
- “The Alliance and NATO is two different things. France is a member of the Alliance. NATO is an organization not mentioned in the North Atlantic Treaty, has been built up in the course of history, in the course of history France has left that organization. Normally the Alliance has been lead by consent, building up consensus on important issues of questions, in many instances over the last 30 years that I have followed events closely. In many, many cases was being done under the spiritual guidance of the American President, that is true, but sometimes also at the guidance of others.” ~ Helmut Schmidt
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“NATO member states vary dramatically in their capability and in their political steadfastness.” ~ Donald Rumsfeld
- “It has been known for some time that a major nuclear war might lead to nuclear winter that would destroy the attacker as well as the target. And threats are now mounting, particularly at the Russian border, confirming the prediction of George Kennan and other prominent figures that NATO expansion, particularly the way it was undertaken, would prove to be a “tragic mistake,” a “policy error of historic proportions.”” ~ Noam Chomsky
- “I think, of the kind of erratic behavior that many of us feared once Trump came into office. And I think you’re seeing evidence of that, even though, you know, some of the worst-case scenarios that we imagined have not yet, mercifully, come to pass. I mean, for example, he has not destroyed NATO. He has not launched a trade war with China. He has not lifted sanctions on Russia. In all those cases, in part, because his hands had been tied. And of course, it’s only a year in, so he’s still got time to go.” ~ Max Boot
- “Today, hundreds of millions dwell in freedom, from the Baltic to the Adriatic, from the Western Approaches to the Aegean. And while we must never take this for granted, the first purpose of the European Union – to secure peace – has been achieved and we should pay tribute to all those in the EU, alongside Nato, who made that happen.” ~ David Cameron
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“Afghanistan is the most daring and ambition mission in the history of NATO.” ~ George W. Bush
- “I am quite confident that in the foreseeable future armed conflict will not take the form of huge land armies facing each other across extended battle lines, as they did in World War I and World War II or, for that matter, as they would have if NATO had faced the Warsaw Pact on the field of battle.” ~ Norman Schwarzkopf
- “There’s absolutely no reason for NATO to be sticking its fingers up the nostrils of Russia at every orifice. I mean, it’s absurd. It’s absolutely absurd.” ~ Rashid Khalidi
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“I’m all for NATO. But I said they have to focus on terror, also.” ~ Donald Trump
- “We as a human family are on this train that is taking us into more and more war and more and more abuse of human rights where a lot of civilians are being killed and where human rights and international law are being set aside by America and NATO.” ~ Mairead Corrigan
- “You know, NATO as a military alliance has something called Article 5, and basically it says this: An attack on one is an attack on all. And you know the only time it’s ever been invoked? After 9/11, when the 28 nations of NATO said that they would go to Afghanistan with us to fight terrorism, something that they still are doing by our side.” ~ Hillary Clinton
