Boutros Boutros-Ghali Quotes

Waging war we understand, but not waging peace, or at any rate less consciously so.

You can't make war in the Middle East without Egypt and you can't make peace without Syria.

Treaties of peace, made after war, are entrusted to individuals to negotiate and carry out.

Peacemaking and peacekeeping should run in parallel.

We, Britain and Germany, can neither of us be happy about our handling of the Iraq war.

I fought for peace in the fifties.

Preventing a war is tantamount to winning a war.

Wishful thinking won't make the Palestinians an Israeli peace partner, no matter how much President Barack Obama pressures Israel to make concessions; caustically mocking Putin's worldview won't make it any less real or mitigate the Russian threat.

The only foreign policy advice I heard from China was when they said to Sudan, 'Don't go back to war.' That's all they said. They didn't push anything else.

The grim fact is that we prepare for war like precocious giants, and for peace like retarded pygmies.

The change began in Somalia, where we discovered that we were involved in an operation where there was no peace, so there was no more a peacekeeping operation because there was no peace.

Intervention continues to be a prominent dimension of the post-cold war world.

My colleagues and I have gone in the footsteps of our predecessors since the very first day we were called by our people to care for their future. We went any place, we looked for any avenue, we made any effort to bring about negotiations between Israel and its neighbors, negotiations without which peace remains an abstract desire.

Among the many defects that have been pointed out in the Federal Constitution ... is an office for promoting and preserving perpetual peace in our country.... Let a Secretary of Peace be established.

Americans have learned that it is harder to end wars than it is to begin them

When I was defense minister, I was very popular, and now that I'm president, I'm unpopular because I'm trying to make peace. It's much easier to make war and get trophies.

Our fundamental goal in getting involved in Bosnia in the summer of 1995 was to end the war. Richard Holbrooke's fundamental goal was to negotiate a peace: a peace that was sustaining and self-sustaining over the long term.

You cannot prevent and prepare for war at the same time.

There have always been people during periods of history that thought that we could get along with the enemy if only we would reach out. Peace in our time is a philosophy.

The politicians, who once stated that war was too complex to be left to the generals, now act as though peace were too complex to be left to themselves.

The problems of peace are greater than the problems of war.

In Europe, war is a disease which has been in the family for generations: no one is surprised when it makes another leap. Even the patient only attends to it with part of his mind.

A smart soldier wants to know the causes of wars. Also how to end them. After all, war is the normal state of affairs, isn't it? Peace is the name of the ideal we deduce from the fact that there have been interludes between wars.

We will not let the price of peace be greater than the price of war, we will firmly safeguard the achievements of the past 13 years under former President Karzai.

We were so shocked by how fast that war went that President Bush did not have a plan, a peace plan.