“We are not only all responsible for each other’s security. We are also, in some measure, responsible for each other’s welfare.”

—  Kofi Annan

Truman Library address (2006)
Context: We are not only all responsible for each other’s security. We are also, in some measure, responsible for each other’s welfare. Global solidarity is both necessary and possible. — It is necessary because without a measure of solidarity no society can be truly stable, and no one’s prosperity truly secure. That applies to national societies — as all the great industrial democracies learned in the twentieth century — but, it also applies to the increasingly integrated global market economy that we live in today. It is not realistic to think that some people can go on deriving great benefits from globalization while billions of their fellow human beings are left in abject poverty, or even thrown into it. We have to give our fellow citizens, not only within each nation but in the global community, at least a chance to share in our prosperity.

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Kofi Annan 60
7th Secretary-General of the United Nations 1938–2018

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“No nation can make itself secure by seeking supremacy over all others. We all share responsibility for each other’s security, and only by working to make each other secure can we hope to achieve lasting security for ourselves.”

Kofi Annan (1938–2018) 7th Secretary-General of the United Nations

Truman Library address (2006)
Context: No nation can make itself secure by seeking supremacy over all others. We all share responsibility for each other’s security, and only by working to make each other secure can we hope to achieve lasting security for ourselves.
— And, I would add that this responsibility is not simply a matter of States being ready to come to each other’s aid when attacked — important though that is. It also includes our shared responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity — a responsibility solemnly accepted by all nations at last year’s UN world summit. That means that respect for national sovereignty can no longer be used as a shield by Governments intent on massacring their own people, or as an excuse for the rest of us to do nothing when heinous crimes are committed.

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“It is by universal misunderstanding that we agree with each other.

If, by some misfortune, we understood each other, we would never agree.”

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) French poet

<p>C'est par le malentendu universel que tout le monde s'accorde.</p><p>Car si, par malheur, on se comprenait, on ne pourrait jamais s'accorder.</p>
Journaux intimes (1864–1867; published 1887), Mon cœur mis à nu (1864)

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