Dalai Lama Quotes

Negotiations can create conditions that can lead to solutions.

You need people that are willing to talk to the other side, or you're never going to get anything done. You need to be willing to expand your ground. There's always usually a place on issues where you can find common ground.

If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner.

The best way to solve problems and to fight against war is through dialogue.

Costa Rica believes in building bridges, in looking for solutions to problems, and not clinging to positions.

Conflict resolution cannot be merely about eliminating all opposition or reducing the choices in negotiating the problem to two mutually exclusive sets of rights and wrongs. Rather, it must consist of laboring to bring everybody to accept reality and then to project a future with this understanding as the foundation.

We extend our hand towards peace. Our people are committed to peace. We know that peace entails painful compromise for both sides.

Societies can easily talk themselves into conflict and misery. But they can also talk, and act, their way out.

Through mutual understanding, sincerity and goodwill, and with great wisdom and broad views, the leaders on both sides should jointly initiate new opportunities for peace, stability, cooperation and mutual benefit.

My opinion on who's wrong or who's right has nothing to do with the fact that we have to bring together people who are against each other, to transform antagonism into cooperation.

It's better to have a dialogue with your enemies than not.

There is never any military solution to any problem. Even when you have total victory you still have to go in and talk to people.

If we can’t agree on the facts, how can we agree on the solutions?

I believe the answers to most problems that confront us around the world can and should be approached by engaging both friend and foe in dialogue. No, I don't naively think that dialogue always works, but I believe we should avoid the rigidity of saying that dialogue never works.

Choose the path of dialogue rather than the path of unilateral decisions.

We've got to take confrontation out of the centre of politics. With fighting, no one wins; with dialogue, everyone wins.

Accommodation is a willingness to maintain constructive relationship with others with whom one is in serious and even intractable disagreement. Social cooperation would come under impossible pressure if it always depended on strict agreement.

The main aim of the [political] dialogue should be to resolve the problems of the nation, not to find who is the winner and who is the loser. That's not what it's all about. It's to try and find an answer that is acceptable to all parties concerned, which would of course require some give and take.

It's very dramatic when two people come together to work something out. It's easy to take a gun and annihilate your opposition, but what is really exciting to me is to see people with differing views come together and finally respect each other.

The Fundamental Principle that governs - or ought to govern -human affairs if we wish to avoid misunderstandings, conflicts, or pointless utopias, is negotiation.

You need to be able to agree from time to time if we're going to get anywhere. Once you have started a civil dialogue, it's a much smoother road to compromise. The key thing to remember is it's a daily practice.

There is no conflict in the world that cannot be solved.

There should be an honest attempt at the reconciliation of differences before resorting to combat.

I hope everybody will go back to the negotiating table. I've always said this is the only way forward.

Intervention only works when the people concerned seem to be keen for peace.