Norman Borlaug Quotes

… the many armed conflicts which continue to afflict the world today present us daily with dramatic images of misery, hunger, illness and death. Without peace, there can be no form of economic development.  Violence never begets peace, the necessary condition for development.

Therefore I feel that the aforementioned guiding principle must be modified to read: If you desire peace, cultivate justice, but at the same time cultivate the fields to produce more bread; otherwise there will be no peace.

People who are starving can hardly become a peaceful people.

No nation is rich enough to pay for both war and civilization. We must make our choice; we cannot have both.

Starvation does not await the outcome of power politics.

We must be cognizant of the fact that the absence of economic rationality and perpetual political instability in our societies prevent us from fully benefiting from our resources as well as capabilities. In the extreme case, we find ourselves in devastating wars. Our conflict-ridden geography has substantially undercut our ability to develop economically. Natural wealth, including oil revenues has been wasted and the focus of attention has been other than human development

If development is the new name for peace, war and preparations for war are the major enemy of the healthy development of peoples

The sands are running out, and unless some strong hand can even now clutch Europe and rescue her from the slope down which she is slipping, the catastrophe of the peace may yet become far greater than that of the Great War

Wars are bred by poverty and oppression. Continued peace is possible only in a relatively free and prosperous world.

I will always fight for peace. But, unfortunately, it is war that drives us forward. It is war that makes the major turns. It makes Wall Street function; it makes all the bastards in the Balkans function.

The main cause of food security in Africa is war and conflict.

To deal with these problems - of world population and hunger, of peace, of energy and mineral resources, of environmental pollution, of poverty - we must broaden and deepen our knowledge of nature's laws, and we must broaden and deepen our understanding of the laws of human behavior.

War as Napoleon knew it just not possible any more. However, we're very unlikely to accept or recognize 'world peace' even when we get it.

Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries on earth. Security issue or no security issue, there would need to be a focus on it.

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.

Today continuing poverty and distress are a deeper and more important cause of international tensions, of the conditions that can produce war, than previously.

There was never a good war, or a bad peace.

The only foreign policy advice I heard from China was when they said to Sudan, 'Don't go back to war.' That's all they said. They didn't push anything else.

I grew up in war and saw the United Nations help my country to recover and rebuild. That experience was a big part of what led me to pursue a career in public service. As Secretary-General, I am determined to see this organization deliver tangible, meaningful results that advance peace, development and human rights.

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.

Many people in the world today are not starving because there is an inherent inability to produce food, they are starving because they are caught in the middle of political fights and blockades that have been used as weapons.

I resigned from the Marine Corps and flying in 1974, even though I loved them both. I quit because I no longer wanted to fight for peace. Instead, I believe we can build a more sustainable peace by working for prosperity.

'Capitalism' is a dirty word for many intellectuals, but there are a number of studies showing that open economies and free trade are negatively correlated with genocide and war.

We cannot be both the world's leading champion of peace and the world's leading supplier of the weapons of war.