UN General Assembly
1979

64. More than 2,000 years ago, the greatest of Greek historians, Thucydides, provided mankind with some of the deepest insights ever given into the nature of the human condition and of relations among men. In this effort he has not been surpassed; the lessons of the Peloponnesian wars are as relevant to our times as they were to his troubled era. The causes of human conflict, he said, are rooted in the motives of fallible man. But the management of conflict depends on the faint spark of wisdom which, as a gift of the gods, inheres in the very frailty of mankind. 65. It is not inappropriate to recall this thought at this time, for while the correspondence between the world of ancient Greece and ours is not exact, Thucydides provides us with an ancient guideline to the management of modern conflicts in our complex era.