Kofi Annan Quotes

In a civil war… every side is wrong. It’s hopeless to try to untangle it. Everyone is a victim.

It seems that humanity is incapable of putting a halt to the shedding of innocent blood.

As I watch what is happening in the Middle East and the carnage that comes over our television screens every evening, I cannot help but ask myself, what is wrong with humankind that we cannot stop the killing?

Violence in Darfur is cataclysmic.

The Gates of Hell have been opened in Iraq.

Syria cannot continue this way—killing their people

Around us in the Middle East there is total chaos. I'm not willing to give up on my land for this chaos.

War is a lot of things and it's useless to pretend that exciting isn't one of them. (pg. 144)

Just watching Israel bombarding Palestine and Palestine sending one or two little rockets over to Israel - it's just too sad for words.

People who are anxious to bring on war don't know what they are bargaining for; they don't see all the horrors that must accompany such an event.

This bloody conflict has been going on for much too long. It is doing terrible things to Israelis, to Palestinians. One of the terrible things it is causing is indifference.

To me, you can't win. You can't win. There's a war in Iraq; there's no way that they're ending that. The war in Afghanistan is still going on. There's no way that's going to end anytime soon. You can complain about it, you can throw rocks at it, but you really have to come to the conclusion that this is a really twisted place sometimes and some stuff you're not going to win.

Peace is only better than war when it's not hell too. War being hell makes sense.

You cannot talk about winning the war as long as there's killing and destruction on daily basis.

Libya is still a mess right now.

I think the suffering, violence and cruelty and Guantanamo and the rest is going to go on and on in Iraq.

Violence has been Nicaragua's most important export to the world.

We're not going to cure terrorism and spread peace and goodwill in the Middle East by killing innocent people, or I'm not even saying our bullets and bombs are killing them. The occupation that they don't have food. They don't have clean water. They don't have electricity. They don't have medicine. They don't have doctors.

The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.

The most difficult idea to reconcile in war is the notion that anything is going to be solved by killing a stranger, or in risking your life for a cause anchored in some distant political arena.

We have to bring stability to Iraq, otherwise we will be faced with a future dilemma of sending our loved ones into harms way to stop a civil war or the rise of a new tyrant born from the instability that we created.

War drags human beings from their tasks of building and improving, and pushes them en masse into the category of destroyers and killers.

The alternative to peace is war, which will expose everyone to mass casualties, misery and a loss of perspective for many years to come.

There is nothing glamorous or romantic about war. It's mostly about random pointless death and misery.

Serbia did not want to recognize our country in a peaceful way, so that is why they wanted to destroy us. All our efforts to find a peaceful solution were impossible. In order to save the people, NATO had to intervene.