Kofi Annan Quotes

We can't just pop off and drop a bomb on North Korea and think everything's going to be OK. It just doesn't work like that. It's a complicated puzzle.

If Obama commits thermonuclear war, I won't have to worry about November and neither will you.

War and preparations for war have acquired a kind of legitimacy.

Politicians do not enter into wars lightly. It is usually the military themselves who are keener to become involved.

Do we really want a world in which every country feels entitled to attack any other that might someday threaten it?

History teaches, perhaps, very few clear lessons. But surely one such lesson learned by the world at great cost is that aggression, unopposed, becomes a contagious disease.

…sanctions applied to a large nation meant war. They bred “incurable hatreds”.

Let us face squarely the paradox that the world which goes to war is a world, usually, genuinely desiring peace.

We can’t always pick and choose which conflicts were going to get into.

If this phrase of “the balance of power” is to be always an argument for war, the pretext for war will never be wanting …

If the North Korean Communists provoke another war, we must immediately deter it and give them a decisive counterattack at the initial place of aggression.

Lightly armed nations can move toward war just as easily as those which are armed to the teeth, and they will do so if the usual causes of war are not removed.

Humans are very aggressive and scrappy, and go to war at the drop of a hat. However, a standard land war is no longer going to work as it is no longer technically possible.

Some think the worst horrors of war might be avoided by an international agreement not to use atomic bombs. This is a vain hope.

Of the four wars in my lifetime, none came about because the U.S. was too strong.

To my mind, what we ought to have maintained from the beginning was the strictest neutrality. If we had done this, I do not believe we would have been on the verge of war at the present time.

No nation should stoke instability in its neighbor's country.

People do not make wars; governments do.

But which is the State's essential function, aggression or defence, few seem to know or care.

To secure peace is to prepare for war.

I don't think a wise thing at this moment is for Israel to launch a military attack on Iran.

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

Every move we make in fear of the next war in fact hastens it.

We shall never be able to remove suspicion and fear as potential causes of war until communication is permitted to flow, free and open, across international boundaries.

Each particular society begins to feel its strength, whence arises a state of war between different nations.