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.
The Millennium Development Goals can be met by 2015, but only if all involved break with business as usual and dramatically accelerate and scale up action now.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The goals set for global development can be achieved by 2015 if there is a significant shift in current practices and an urgent increase in efforts.
Kofi Annan emphasizes that the ambitious targets for the Millennium Development Goals are attainable within the designated timeline, provided that individuals and organizations abandon complacency and vigorously enhance their commitment to taking action. He calls for immediate and substantial efforts to address pressing global issues, suggesting that without a transformation in approach and pace, these goals remain out of reach.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a speech about global development initiatives to emphasize urgency and diligence.
More from Kofi Annan
All quotes βLet 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.
Similar quotes
The only way to end poverty, to make it history, is to build viable systems on the ground that deliver critical and affordable goods and services to the poor, in ways that are financially sustainable and scaleable. If we do that, we really can make poverty history.
As each breath goes out, let it be the end of that moment and the birth of something new. . .
After the clouds, the sunshine; after the winter, the spring; after the shower, the rainbow; for life is a changeable thing. After the night, the morning, bidding all darkness cease, after life's cares and sorrows, the comfort and sweetness of peace.
You can't change your past but you can change you destiny but deciding for Christ.
This is the moment of your defeat; you have just put in the last nails in the coffin of communism.
Someday, our children, and our childrenβs children, will look at us in the eye and they'll ask us, did we do all that we could when we had the chance to deal with this problem and leave them a cleaner, safer, more stable world?