UN General Assembly
1988

The wind of change that is blowing in the direction of peace in the international community provides a favourable climate for its enhancement. The Secretary-General, a tireless disciple of peace, in his report on the work of the organization, dated 14 September 1988, said of the United Nations "the small boat in which all the people of the Earth were gathered seemed to have caught a light but favourable wind." (A/43/1, p. 2). Continuing that nautical metaphor, permit me to quote the words of the immortal William Shakespeare: "There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; emitted, all of the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries." (Julius Caesar, IV: ill) The pieces of peace - if I may be permitted this clumsy pun - that are breaking out in certain regions of the world, afford the international community, whose prestige is on the rise, the opportunity to sail with the flood tide in the pursuit of peace.