Ban Ki-moon Quotes

More than 150 heads of state attended the UN Summit, giving New Yorkers a chance to get in touch with prejudices they didn't even know they had.

I will do everything in my power to ensure that our United Nations can live up to its name, and be truly united; so that we can live up to the hopes that so many people around the world place in this institution, which is unique in the annals of human history.

I travel the world, and I'm happy to say that America is still the great melting pot - maybe a chunky stew rather than a melting pot at this point, but you know what I mean.

Let us mingle with other nations as one of them and not stand as one apart. Let us seek their friendship not their hate.

Houston is kind of a melting pot. There are many different cultures and ethnicities represented out there, even on my team. It's really cool: you'll see so many different things.

I believe that our national security lies not just in protecting our borders, but in bridging divides.

To contrast national solidarity and international cooperation as two opposites seems foolish to me.

Apart from the scientific interest attached to my various journeyings, it has been made clear to me that human needs and aspirations differ little the world over and that no great difficulties arise in one race dealing with another when matters of scientific importance are involved.

I'm suggesting that, ironically, the secret to becoming a world 'hyperpower' is tolerance. If you look at history, you see great powers being very tolerant in their rise to global dominance.

If the U.N. didn't exist, we'd be inventing it right now.

The great men of a nation reach out to all mankind. They are unifying, not divisive; internationally conciliating and still great nationally.

Here we encounter two conflicting concepts with which we must come to grips in our time: the idea of national solidarity and the idea of international cooperation.

The countries that share this conception should be able to go further together, without excluding the others, since they can still live in a greater community of exchange and co-operation.

Diversity in the world is a basic characteristic of human society, and also the key condition for a lively and dynamic world as we see today.

The melting pot was always a tension between difference and sameness.

Assimilation is what has made America great.

There are men of eighteen different languages; they are scattered here and there upon the [Hudson] river.

This is a country where Jews and Arabs speak without fear. Where people come from different cultures the world over. Where everyone becomes Brazilian rapidly.

We, in the United States, are a melting-pot and, by being so, we have demonstrated that peoples can get along together irrespective of race, color or creed. Using the ‘melting-pot’ or some such catch phrase for a theme we might be able to use the Met [Metropolitan Opera Company] as an example of how Europeans can get along together in the United States and that, therefore, some sort of European Federation is entirely practicable.

Everything will be all right ... when people stop thinking of the United Nations as a weird Picasso abstraction and see it as a drawing they made themselves.

It's a time where every country and every human should be united. I mean, every country has its problems.

The U.N. was created for people.

We talk about America as a melting pot, where you can't turn salt into pepper. Then you got too much pepper. You need the salt. You need the paprika. You need the broth.

The subway in New York is a great social experiment; there are so many races and ways of life sitting together on each car.

The European vision is the United Nations' vision.