UN General Assembly
1956

88. We meet this year in conditions which we did not expect. It is nearly eighteen months ago that we gathered in San Francisco on the tenth anniversary of the united Nations. That gathering, which had no agenda and at which we did not particularly conform to any rules of procedure, as it was not intended to transact any business, since the occasion was one of commemoration, appeared to us, as to many other delegations, as sending forth of a clarion call for a new face on the United Nations. Speaker after speaker spoke about outlawry of war and of how ten years of failures and debacles and checks and frustrations should lie behind. And we all thought, at San Francisco, with the Geneva Conference in the offing, that a new era was about to begin for the United Nations — although we were not romantic about it. In fact, many thought that, at San Francisco once again, we would begin to write a new chapter. I would not say that these hopes have been completely frustrated, but events in the last few months have been of mixed character.