Kofi Annan Quotes

I think that there is never an indispensable leader, you know? I think that there is a time with dignity that one needs to leave.

I used to say I never talk about my successor, neither about my predecessor.

Things can change only through strong personalities. I am not very good at supporting ignorance and mediocrity, so maybe this leads to arrogant gestures and arrogant responses. So, nobody's perfect.

I’m not ready to hand over power to people or groups of people who have no ability to manage a nation.

The most important detail separating the West from the East is the existence of administrators who are able to give up power. Former presidents, prime ministers and deputies must be reconciled to leaving power.

I'm running [ for presidency] because we need to take our country back.

I think for many of us - speaking for just a pocket of the country - we trusted Obama. So when you leave your baby with your mom to watch, you don't run home and check the nanny cam. But now we've left the baby with Gary Busey, so we're going to be a lot more on it.

A president is a high-level official who is elected to carry out a function. He is not a king, not a god. He is not the witch doctor of a tribe who knows everything. He is a civil servant. I think the ideal way of living is to live like the vast majority of people whom we attempt to serve and represent.

Whereas I formerly believed it to be my bounden duty to call other persons to order, I now admit that I need calling to order myself.

I think it's a part of being a citizen in a country, to know what is going on and to have a say in how they want their country being run. You know, that's a part of the privilege of democracy.

Next to the assumption of power was the responsibility of relinquishing it.

Democracy is an awful way to run a country, but it's the best system we have.

As during the time of kings it would have been naive to think that the king's firstborn son would be the fittest to rule, so in our time it is naive to think that the democratically elected ruler will be the fittest. The rule of succession is not a formula for identifying the best ruler, it is a formula for conferring legitimacy on someone or other and thus forestalling civil conflict.

Unchecked pride evolves into swagger, a hypnotizing mask of insecurity that can and does compromise our ability to make progress and attain power. Pride stands in the way of forgiveness and a strategic approach to navigating a chessboard rigged to prevent pawns from becoming kings and queens.

It is a great advantage to a President, and a major source of safety to the country, for him to know he is not a great man.

America's a great country - you better believe it's a great country, one of the greatest on this planet - but even the greatest needs to pay attention. I wish the powerful sources that run this country could understand that.

For 60 years you gave chance to Shasaks, now I request you to give a Sevak 60 months. I say give me 60 months and we will give you a life of peace and happiness.

Just remember, what the French say. No, probably not the French, they've got a president or something. The Brits, maybe, or the Swedes. You know what I mean?" "No, Matthew. What do they say?" "The king is dead, that's what they say. The king is dead. Long live the king.

In America, it is indispensable that every well wisher of true liberty should understand that acts of tyranny can only proceed from the publick. The publick, then, is to be watched, in this country, as, in other countries kings and aristocrats are to be watched.

There is bound to be a certain amount of trouble running any country. If you are president, the trouble happens to you. But if you are a tyrant you can arrange things so that most of the trouble happens to other people.

When a natural king becomes a titular king, every body is pleased and satisfied.

You, me...we own this country. Politicians are employees of ours....And when somebody does not do the job, we got to let them go.

I think it's important that we run that tension between the way things are, in terms of the way we're governed, and the way we sort of become complacent.

It is extreme arrogance for one to think he...and it's usually he, is the only one who can govern his country and nobody else can do it.

Putin doesn't conduct elections in the Western sense of elections. This is more accurately probably described as a plebiscite, where people are supposed to express their support for him. The Russian system is not unique in this respect, but it is rather interesting. Here, in the West, the impression that people have is that Putin runs the whole country. This is not so, at all. To a certain extent, you could say that he runs the Kremlin, and this means that it's, in some situations, hard to tell whether it's him running the Kremlin, or the people around him running him.