108 Quotes About United-nations

Arabs and other Muslims generally agreed that Saddam Hussein might be a bloody tyrant, but, paralleling FDR's thinking, "he is our bloody tyrant." In their view, the invasion was a family affair to be settled within the family and those who intervened in the name of some grand theory of international justice were doing so to protect their own selfish interests and to maintain Arab subordination to the west.

People gather in giant rooms like this, deliver fancy speeches, but nothing ever changes. They still hate, they still fight. All we do, despite all our efforts, is put a pause to it, to bury all the dead. People are still the same, the rage inside them is still the same. What we do is not a cure, but mere bandages on the corpses, utterly useless.

Whether for good or for bad, the Iran that ultimately rises out of the ashes of last summer's uprising will be unlike the Iran we know today, and for that we can thank the Green Movement, not another round of useless sanctions.

At daybreak on the first day, thousands of Cambodians are already calmly waiting outside my polling station. They squat on the ground, silent and patient. We didn't expect this at all. We thought they would fail to understand how democracy works. We thought they would be afraid of the Khmer Rouge. We thought they would passively accept their fate. We were wrong.

The purpose of any charity is simply to turn people's mirrors into windows. An outward view of the world's needs are vast in comparison to an inward one.

The role of the United Nations is to set the mental clocks of the world leaders from past problems to the present opportunities and from local power mindset to global welfare mindset.

Someone had to show them there was more to life than constant war, that was my mission.

Weber also saw that a bureaucratic world contained risks. It produced increasingly powerful and autonomous bureaucrats who could be spiritless, driven only by impersonal rules and procedures, and with little regard for the people they were expected to serve. Weber famously warned that those who allow themselves to be guided by rules will soon find that those rules have defined their identities and commitments.

If you ever feel useless, just think of the UN.