Abba Eban Quotes

Throughout my career, I learned plenty about war on the battlefield, but I learned even more about the importance of finding peace. And that is what the State Department and U.S.A.I.D. do: prevent the wars that we can avoid so that we fight only the ones we must.

I beg Osama to stop warring. He is a Muslim, and Islam means peace. Nobody wins in a war... I wish I were tapped in the problem about Iraq. I knew Saddam enough that I could have talked him into surrendering. But it's too late.

Since there will be no one left to talk peace after the next war, it makes good sense to break with tradition and hold the peace conference first.

Diplomacy was the only protection we had against war; and its achievements were of the utmost importance and value to the human race.

I have done all I can to prevent wars. All my life I've been dedicated to preventing just what has happened today.

If you don't want war, then you had better be an advocate for diplomacy with muscle.

Disarmament requires trust.

War is much too serious a thing to be left to military men.

I am, on principle, opposed to war and in favor of peace because I regard peace as a positive good and war as a positive evil.

All war represents a failure of diplomacy.

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.

Like any other people, like fathers, mothers, sons and daughters in every land, when the issue of peace or war has been put squarely to the American people, they have registered for peace.

Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war that we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living.

Wars will remain while human nature remains. I believe in my soul in cooperation, in arbitration; but the soldier's occupation we cannot say is gone until human nature is gone.

War is failure of diplomacy.

Anyone who believes that the eternal question of war and peace in Europe is no longer there risks being deeply mistaken.

Every diplomatic breakthrough is preceded by a crisis, but not every crisis leads to a breakthrough.

We are here to make a choice between the quick and the dead.... We must elect World Peace or World Destruction.

The most expensive peace is far less costly than the cheapest war.

Surely diplomacy is needed when there is conflict, not when there is harmony.

Thinking about the war now and the occupation later is not an acceptable solution.

Negotiations are the most essential tool of statecraft.

War, which remains an anomaly in a civilized world, has taken on so devastating and universal a character...that every thought and every effort should be aimed, above all, at making it impossible.

If development is the new name for peace, war and preparations for war are the major enemy of the healthy development of peoples

We will have to want peace, want it enough to pay for it, pay for it in our own behavior and in material ways. We will have to want it enough to overcome our lethargy and go out and find all those in other countries who want it as much as we do.