Kofi Annan Quotes

I want to assure your excellency that I am occupying myself permanently and jointly with my team to achieve a solution as soon as possible to this crisis, the principal objective being the safeguarding of the health and life of those who are inside.

There is a time in the life of every predicament where it is ripe for resolution. Emotions provide the cue to act when a problem is big enough to see, yet still small enough to solve. By understanding your emotions, you can move adeptly through your current challenges and prevent future ones.

If there's an air raid during the parade and there are dead and wounded, they must be quickly removed and the parade allowed to go on.

War room

The international community spends much more time and resources managing crises than preventing them. But TV cameras are seldom there when a conflict is avoided, so it is difficult for governments and international organizations to make prevention a priority.

There are different techniques - some interventionists are really loving, others are very tough.

Keeping his face clean over Watergate was one of Kissinger's biggest successes; so was his overall handling of the Yom Kippur War.

My father's a police officer, and he's told me numerous times about his training and how they've gone through what they call verbal judo, which is essentially them trying to de-escalate the situation.

I really enjoy the immediacy of the 'knife and gun clubs,' as they're so callously called. Emergency is a great place to learn about people.

We need to act and act now to get people out of harm's way.

We talked about the resources that the justice department has available to help them -- the technical assistance to ensure that we're diffusing situations, not encouraging them to spiral out of control.

There are few situations in life that cannot be resolved promptly, and to the satisfaction of all concerned, by either suicide, a bag of gold, or thrusting a despised antagonist over a precipice on a dark night

I don't think it's a matter of going back and having a review of our process. Our process is about as thorough as there can be. Is it imperfect? Yes. Is there risk? Yes, but we start with the fact that we have an American that's being held hostage and that American's life is in danger and that's where we start. And then we proceed from there.

Conflict is like cancer; early detection increases the possibility of a healthy outcome.

If somebody wants to shoot up and die in front of you, more power to them. The herd has a way of thinning itself out.

It's a conversation that nobody really likes to have, and it seems that we never can get to a solution with it and something horrific happens. We all stand back and say, "How could we let that happen?" and then it goes away and we move on.

Sometimes the best way to keep peace in the family is to keep the members of the family apart for awhile.

Working with the UN's diplomacy and development arms, we can prevent minor differences from escalating into wars. When conflicts do break out, UN peacekeepers should play a role in defusing and settling them. Without giving up our sovereignty, we can help the UN with better training and better command and control in order to develop more effective peacekeeping forces.

Peace is not the absence of conflict, but the ability to cope with it

When someone's wounded, the first order of business is to stop the bleeding. You can figure out later how best to help them heal.

The person who runs FEMA is someone who must have the trust of the president because the person who runs FEMA is the first voice oftentimes of someone whose life has been turned upside down here's from.

There's an easy method for finding someone when you hear them scream. First get a clean sheet of paper and a sharp pencil. Then sketch out nine rows of fourteen squares each. Then throw the piece of paper away and find whoever is screaming so you can help them. It is no time to fiddle with paper.

I consider violence an uneconomical way of attaining an end. There are always better substitutes, though they may sometimes be a little less direct.

Divide the fire, and you will the sooner put it out.

Fighting with the media almost always is a mistake. You can't win the argument, the media has the last word, and most times your argument is not justified.