UN General Assembly
1964

11. Never has such a statement been more appropriate to the circumstances. The United Nations has experienced, or rather is experiencing, a crisis of confidence in itself. At the moment, this Assembly seems rather like a meeting of invalids. The basic machinery of our debates has stopped functioning, like the limbs of someone who is paralysed. Speaking in strictly legal terms we might say that some important provisions of the Charter are in suspension. We know and we wish to believe that this paralysis is fortunately a passing phase. In the interim, however, the laws of parliamentary democracy, proclaimed as the life and soul of the Assembly, are not being applied: it might be said that they have become impotent. This is certainly not the first time that a conflict of this nature has arisen between the possibilities of strictly parliamentary democracy and the essential political, social or economic reality of the world in which we live.