Kofi Annan Quotes

I don't just whisper it, I say it and I say it: 'The United Nations is an anti-Semitic organization, an anti-Israel organization.'

I think that all countries that participate in multilateral institutions see the institutions as a way of advancing what they view as their national interests and they see in many cases multi-lateral institution as the best way to do that.

Worries about misplaced sovereignty [at the UN] … appear to come primarily from people aggrieved to find the United Nations so full of foreigners.

The best thing that most Americans can say about the UN is that it is ineffectual. That’s the best thing.

When America rejected the League, she had deliberately chosen to rest solely upon treaties with the sanction of public opinion alone…

The United Nations is a means. It is not an end for American foreign policy.

From Nato to the U.N. and the E.U., the generation that lived through the first half of the 20th century knew they needed to create a new world order. An order with rules and institutions which, however imperfect, could act both as constraints on individual countries going rogue and as catalysts for co-operation for mutual benefit.

In fact UN is more of a galaxy of organisations and agencies than one machine.

It is clear that the international community has no other universal organisation of the likes of the United Nations.

There was a time, with the Berlin Wall down, that [it looked as if] the UN finally could do what it was set up to do, the rivalry between the two camps would dissipate, and we could all co-operate. And then, of course, Iraq came and blew it all apart. These upheavals will always take place in the world, and the design and construct of the UN ideally should be such that it can deal with these upheavals, and possibly influence them, and survive and thrive, but it doesn't work out that way, because as an organisation we are so dependent on the same member states.

I have long believed that the only way peace can be achieved is through world government.

The unfair composition of the Security Council is largely acknowledged. The principal defects are the anachronistic privileges of the five permanent members of the Council and the Council's insufficient representativeness.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, you know, who was one of the authors of U.S. dominance, he's changed his mind, you know, and he's saying now we've got to learn to cooperate with other world powers. We are not the bully in the schoolyard here.We've got to deal with them. And that's my feeling.

António Guterres role as Secretary-General in bringing all powers together is very essential' and we hope he can succeed, it's not easy of course.

Universality of the UN is a worthwhile thing in its own self because it means that every country belongs, feels it has a stake, and participates, rather than going away and finding other methods of conducting international relations.

We shall all be the gainers if we can create a world fit for small states to live in.

What Trump has announced - that he is going to not obey rules by which we govern our relations with other countries. He's going to reject the treaties that we have had in the past. He is going to go from what is called a multilateral system, where we all work together, to trying to deal country by country and basically throw out what has been achieved over a 60-year period.

A greater international role is important to lift some of the burden from the shoulders of the United States.

[Recep Tayyip] Erdogan is an adherent of realpolitik. He knows that international relations are not built on the strength of unilateral demands, but on solutions that are in everybody's best interest.

The United Nations represents not a final stage in the development of world order, but only a primitive stage. Therefore its primary task is to create the conditions which will make possible a more highly developed organization.

The UN, of course, must also adapt to modern demands and take into account the reality of the modern world in its work.

Getting countries working together was my job every day as your secretary of state.

My alternative to American superpower is the UN and I might add when China becomes the worlds greatest superpower you will need it too.

One hundred nations in the UN have not agreed with us on just about everything that's come before them, where we're involved, and it didn't upset my breakfast at all.

I saw my job [as president] as to try to move the world from an unstable condition of interdependence toward more integrated cooperative world community. Therefore, my approach was to cooperate wherever possible and to build institutions of cooperation, an expanded NATO, the World Trade Organization, the Summit of the Americas, the Asian Pacific Leaders, all those, the coalition to fight in Bosnia and Kosovo, to cooperate wherever possible but to act alone if we had to.