UN General Assembly
1967

56. I feel that historians will one day in the future seriously ponder over many initiatives of the socialist countries not taken up by the West as other examples of great opportunities lost. For East-West relations have followed — and regretfully still show — a pattern in which it is easier in the West to throw invectives and spread suspicion about the real intentions of the commonwealth of socialist countries than properly to grasp their essence and profound meaning, to understand sincerely that Warsaw, Minsk, Kiev, Berlin, Dresden and other destroyed towns, villages and hamlets, were not rebuilt in order to be once again levelled to the ground, and that we seek in all earnestness constructively to realize the principle of peaceful coexistence of countries with different systems — which is the basic principle of the foreign policy of my country and of all the socialist States.