I think that peacekeeping can do quite a lot, if they are given the right mandate with the commensurate resources to get the job done.

Business, labor and civil society organizations have skills and resources that are vital in helping to build a more robust global community.

I urge the Iraqi leadership for sake of its own people... to seize this opportunity and thereby begin to end the isolation and suffering of the Iraqi people.

I have often said that we have two UNs; the UN that is a Secretariat, that implements the mandates handed over to it by the General Assembly and the Security Council, and the UN that is the member states who sit in the Council, take the decisions, hand over the mandates, or take decisions in the General Assembly.

We need to think of the future and the planet we are going to leave to our children and their children.

The Arab spring reminds me a bit of the decolonisation process where one country gets independence and everybody else wants it. How about us, when do we get it, when do we make our move? And you have a situation where someone has been in power for decades, where the integrity of elections, democracy and security have really not been debated or discussed and most people suspect that elections are rigged and that the democratic rotation that elections are supposed to ensure doesn't really happen. And when this goes on for a while you are sitting on a powder keg.

Education is, quite simply, peace-building by another name. It is the most effective form of defense spending there is.