Juan Manuel Santos Quotes

There is still work to be done, but that remains a crucial lesson, you cannot bring peace and security to people just by signing an agreement. In fact, most peace agreements don't last.

Peace is a question of will. All conflicts can be settled, and there are no excuses for allowing them to become eternal.

Like in every peace process, and especially in Colombia, there all kinds of problems that will come through. Not only is the process by itself very complicated but it has lots of underground complications.

Many Syrians understand that the only option that exists is the option of peace, which means the option of compromise, .. Nobody can have 100 percent of his desires. He must compromise.

[Peace praxis is] a peace process that deals with conflict integratively.

Peace needs and takes time, it needs and takes caution, it needs and takes patience after 30 years of terrorism and violence.

A peace deal requires agreements, and you don't make agreements with your friends, you make agreements with your enemies.

My actions to promote peace, the mediation missions which I carried out during many conflicts, which very often occurred between brothers of the same country, are not driven by any ulterior motives or any calculations based on personal ambitions.

I'm interested in conflict and confrontation.

The only people that can make peace are the parties to the conflict, and just as they are responsible for the conflict and its consequences, so should they be given responsibility and recognition for the peace.

Along with that ongoing process Sinn Fein took a decision to establish a peace commission which had the responsibility to travel around the country to receive submissions from the general public, also our opponents.

I want to say a simple thing, that the dividing line exists not between Jordan and Israel, but between the proponents of peace and the opponents of peace.

Winning the peace is harder than winning the war.

Waging war we understand, but not waging peace, or at any rate less consciously so.

The change began in Somalia, where we discovered that we were involved in an operation where there was no peace, so there was no more a peacekeeping operation because there was no peace.

I think the day you start building the war plan is the day you start beginning the postwar plan.

Peacemaking and peacekeeping should run in parallel.

Six years ago today war was declared. Now we are starting again with officially declared peace the world in physical and spiritual chaos. History in the making can be most exhausting.

This may not be a just peace, but it is more just than the continuation of war.

There is no such thing as a happy compromise. Israelis and Palestinians cannot become one happy family because they are not one, not happy and not family either. They are two unhappy families who must divide a small house into even smaller apartments. The first step, is to sign peace with clenched teeth, and after signing the contract, start working slowly on a gradual emotional de-escalation on both sides.

For many of the world's conflicts, it is difficult even to conjure up a feasible settlement.

I have passed, I hope, many tests over the course of the last 20-odd years in relation to the peace process and intend to continue to work forward in a very sensible and reasoned way with political colleagues in the Executive.

I've learned It 's better to address conflicts head on and then move on.

Our fundamental goal in getting involved in Bosnia in the summer of 1995 was to end the war. Richard Holbrooke's fundamental goal was to negotiate a peace: a peace that was sustaining and self-sustaining over the long term.

Sustaining Peace is happening. But it is the exception - not the norm.