Jonathan Powell Quotes

The disagreeable reality for those who believe in human rights is that there are some occasions - and Iraq may be one of them - when war is the only real remedy for regimes that live by terror.

There are lots of countries that are having these kinds of internal civil wars in other parts of the world and nobody is talking about intervening.

What is more immoral than war?

If I took the 40 years of my dad talking to me about war and battles and taking me to battlefields and distilled it down into one question, it would probably be the idea of the necessary or unnecessary war.

There are laws for peace as well as war.

The only excuse for war is that we may live in peace unharmed.

I feel like war should occur only for the most vital and necessary reasons, and only then.

Either a war has to be fought, or it doesn't.

While war is never anyone first choice, sometimes it is a necessary choice.

Most wars, after all, present themselves as humanitarian endeavors to help people.

People say, 'Surely there's the right reasons for going to war?' And my perspective is, 'Surely there's a better way of asking that question?'

The preservation of peace and the guaranteeing of man's basic freedoms and rights require courage and eternal vigilance: courage to speak and act - and if necessary, to suffer and die - for truth and justice; eternal vigilance, that the least transgression of international morality shall not go undetected and unremedied.

This enemy of peace in the world today is unlike any we have seen in the past, and our military is learning from, and building on, previous successes while carrying peace and freedom into the future.

Peace enforcement is a much more difficult kind of operation than peacekeeping.

If the minds of men can be turned even for a short time away from passion, race antagonism and from national aggrandizement to a contemplation of the individual and … to the shocking horrors which modern warfare entails, a step, and by no means a short one, will have been taken towards the substitution of justice for force in the settlement of institutional differences.

War should be the last resort, not the first response.

War sometimes is a necessary instrument to bring clarity to a society.

It is necessary to take the further step of using the right to intervention as a preventive measure, to stop wars before they start and to stop murderers before they kill ... We knew what was likely to happen in Somalia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo long before they exploded into war. But we didn’t act. If these experiences have taught us anything, it is that the time for a decisive evolution in international consciousness has arrived.

The abolition of war is like the abolition of slavery, a matter of education and civilization.

We should wage war not to win war, but to win peace.

The United States has the burden to lead for peace. And not just peace - we need peace with justice, a much harder goal.

Military confrontation is not a suitable alternative in confronting terror and current security threats.

We make war that we may live in peace.

During practically all of my public life, I have been a sincere advocate of an agreement between the leading nations of the world to set up all the necessary international machinery that would bring about a practical abolition of war between civilized nations.

War and preparations for war have acquired a kind of legitimacy.