UN General Assembly
1985

It has been said that people who do not understand the past are condemned to relive it. The parallels between the current world situation and that preceding the outbreak of the Second World War are too striking to be overlooked. It is not within anyone's power to undo the past, but we do have the power to use its lessons as guidelines to establish a course for an acceptable future for our children. In the process of doing so we have to face and answer the question whether we can find in ourselves the resources to overcome and reverse the obstacles to peace, or whether, lemming like, we are condemned to the same catastrophic path down the precipice followed in the past. The dangers in the trend today are readily identifiable, but as in the past, like people caught in some terrible recurrent nightmare, we seem deprived of our faculty to act to avert them.