Fierce national competition over water resources has prompted fears that water issues contain the seeds of violent conflict.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the potential for conflict arising from competition over essential resources, particularly water.
Kofi Annan's quote reflects the alarming reality that as nations compete for limited water resources, tensions could escalate into violent conflicts. Water is a fundamental necessity for life, and its scarcity can create desperate situations, leading to disputes that threaten peace and stability. This observation serves as a warning about the importance of managing water resources collaboratively to prevent future conflicts.
In practice
During a conference on sustainable development, this quote could be used to emphasize the need for cooperative water management practices.
If you have a problem and you can't find a solution, you meet again tomorrow and you keep talking until you find a solution. You can disagree with behavior or a particular position, but you do not resort to calling an opponent worthless.
Let us remember the large numbers of citizens who, day in and day out, through acts of volunteerism large and small, bring hope to so many of the world's disadvantaged. Let us ensure that this wonderful resource, available in abundance to every nation, is recognized and supported as it works towards a more prosperous and peaceful world.
We may have different religions, different languages, different colored skin, but we all belong to one human race.
The global HIV/AIDS epidemic is an unprecedented crisis that requires an unprecedented response. In particular it requires solidarity - between the healthy and the sick, between rich and poor, and above all, between richer and poorer nations. We have 30 million orphans already. How many more do we have to get, to wake up?
People of different religions and cultures live side by side in almost every part of the world, and most of us have overlapping identities which unite us with very different groups. We can love what we are, without hating what β and who β we are not. We can thrive in our own tradition, even as we learn from others, and come to respect their teachings.
Democracy is, in essence, a form of non-violent conflict management. If war is the worst enemy of development, healthy and balanced development is the best form of conflict prevention.
The mind is the Buddha, and the Buddha is the mind.
Against the background of general freakishness the case of my particular freakishness was lost.
It is a very solemn delusion when ministers think they are prospering, and yet do not hear of conversions.
Since man, fragment of the universe, is governed by the same laws that preside over the heavens, it is by no means absurd to search there above for the themes of our lives, for those frigid sympathies that participate in our achievements as well as our blunderings.
A human being becomes human not through the casual convergence of certain biological conditions, but through an act of will and love on the part of other people.
What is reprehensible is that while leading good lives themselves and abhorring those of wicked men, some, fearing to offend, shut their eyes to evil deeds instead of condemning them and pointing out their malice.
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