Philip Hammond Quotes

Afghanistan has moved forward and Afghanistan will defend itself. And the progress that we have achieved, the Afghan people will not allow it to be put back or reversed.

The purpose of the United Nations should be to protect the essential sovereignty of nations, large and small.

One has to work for years and decades, to conduct negotiations, to stand for positions and points of view, to jointly develop a civilized view on the administrative and state organization of Chechnya.

Pakistan has not recognized Israel... any such decision would be taken in supreme national interests after due consultation of the parliament.

Stability cannot occur without a Palestinian Spring through the full implementation of the Palestinians' right to self-determination on their land.

Now, when we say we want peace, what we want is really for our Palestinian neighbours to have a demilitarized state next to us that recognizes the Jewish State. We're willing to recognize their state, the Palestinian state. But we ask them to recognize the Jewish state.

Peace should provide security. It should be durable. I'm ready to go far in making painful concessions. But there is one thing I will never make any concessions on and that's the security of the Israeli citizens and the very existence of the state of Israel. The Palestinians are losing time.

At the end of any peace deal, the decision-maker will be the government of Afghanistan.

How can we return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to.

There is an element of paranoia in this inclination to view any serious attempt at a compromised peace as somehow directed against Israel.

In the initiative that we issued at the beginning of year 2013 we said every party with no exceptions as long as they give up their armaments.

Let me just say you could end this violence within a very short period of time, have a complete ceasefire - which Iran could control, which Russia could control, which Syria could control, and which we and our coalition friends could control - if one man would merely make it known to the world that he doesn't have to be part of the long-term future; he'll help manage Syria out of this mess and then go off into the sunset, as most people do after a period of public life. If he were to do that, then you could stop the violence and quickly move to management.

In every war at some point in time, you do sit down and negotiate.

The important thing is Burma needs to end the civil war and for this to happen both sides must want to end the war.

I am for peace. And I am for a negotiated peace. But this accord is not a just peace.

Globalisation thus implies that sovereignty...needs to become weaker.

Politics is a dynamic process. When I was a young man in the 1970s, Yasser Arafat had just perpetrated various terrorist attacks. Just a few years later, after I had entered European Parliament, the same Yasser Arafat was given the Nobel Peace Prize.

Those who adhere to the ideology of rejecting Israel’s right to exist, they might as well reject the earth beneath them or the sky above, because Israel is not going anywhere.

First, the constitution [of Ukraine] has to be reformed. Only then can confidence building and border security follow.

The problem is, we have yet to convince the Taliban they are fellow passengers on spaceship Earth.

I'm going to continue to push for a no-fly zone and safe havens within Syria not only to help protect the Syrians and prevent the constant outflow of refugees, but to, frankly, gain some leverage on both the Syrian government and the Russians so that perhaps we can have the kind of serious negotiation necessary to bring the conflict to an end and go forward on a political track.

I don't think there's going to be peace as long as Israel is occupying land that belongs to the Palestinians, to Lebanon and to Syria.

Those localized efforts take a long time and they don't deal with the larger issue of ISIL and the question of what you're going to do to really have a solution here. We have to save Syria.

The agony of international relations is the need to try to practice politics without the basic conditions for political order.

I have long believed that Israel should seek to give up the so-called Occupied Territories in return for security, and that a Palestinian state should be established. I have felt that way all my life. I think it is unreasonable to ask the Israelis to do this in a context where there is no guarantee at all that suicide bombers will be controlled.