Nicholas Stern Quotes

We haven't had a world war in a long time. We do have mass movements of people out of Syria and North Africa. But, fundamentally, if you take Japan, you're complaining that the economy isn't booming, they'd like to have slightly higher inflation.

Nobody's interests are served by what's happening in Syria today. It's a catastrophe. It's the worst human catastrophe since World War II. And, as I said just now, it represents a failure of the entire international community to come to grips with solving it.

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

A World War with its incalculable ramifications will strengthen social democracy which sermonizes the virtues of peace. War could easily cost some rulers their thrones.

I think massive migration is inevitable. As sea levels rise, as climate change happens, as fertile fields become arid, as wars are fought, people are going to move. They always have.

A war is going to destroy our economy even further. It's going to be a threefold humanitarian disaster.

As we have 250,000 Syrians murdered, slaughtered; millions running around the world, running for their lives. It's not working. We need to try something else. And that is not reckless.

A world war - God forbid! - will leave only smoldering ashes as a mute testimony of a human race whose folly led inexorably to untimely death. Yet there are those who sincerely feel that disarmament is an evil and international negotiation is an abominable waste of time.

We are confronted with the possibility of a war of such destruction that the whole existence of our nation and of the whole world is at stake. And yet, people know it - people read it in the newspapers, people read that at the first attack, a hundred million Americans might be killed. And yet, they talk about it as if they were talking about something being wrong with the carburetor of their car, perhaps.

Continuous wars - which we have now had since 2001 - starting with Afghanistan, continuing on to Iraq. And even since Iraq, it's been more or less continuous. The appalling war in Libya, which has wrecked that country and wrecked that part of the world, and which isn't over by any means. The indirect Western intervention in Syria, which has created new monsters. These are policies, which if carried out by any individual government, would be considered extremist. Now, they're being carried out collectively by the United States, backed by some of the countries of the European Union.

The greater part of our best years has been passed for our generation in these two great worldconvulsions. All will be changed after this war, which spends in one month more than nations earned before in yearsthere is no more security in our time than in those of the Reformation or the fall of Rome.

The world is a total mess. Take a look at what's happening with Aleppo. Take a look what's happening in Mosul. Take a look what's going on in the Middle East. And people are fleeing and they're going into Europe and all over the place. The world is a mess.

As Churchill said about the Great War, and he said this in about 1924, that it was the first war in which man realized that he could obliterate himself completely. If you consider the way the whole world was impacted, 18 million people worldwide died, and that is taking into account military and civilian deaths: 18 million people. And it was the whole world, if you will. You know, many of those trenches were dug by Chinese. There are photographs of Chinese looking like they just came from China, with their hats and so on, digging the trenches, right from the beginning.

The Second World War took place not so much because no one won the First, but because the Versailles Treaty did not acknowledge this truth.

If global warming is not contained, the West will face a choice of a refugee crisis of unimaginable proportions, or direct complicity in crimes against humanity.

The First World War began because one man was shot. The Second World War began because of a mad German dictator. Who knows how a third could start. There are also people who think that the war has been going for a long time.

There will be no veterans of World War III.

It's very hard to track down what's real and what's not real. We haven't absorbed what climate change is doing. Because whether people associate it or not, fear of immigration is completely related to climate change, because the mass migrations that are happening, the war in Syria, all of these structural human migrations are related to climate change.

in this great war [WWI] ... they had, all of them, on all sides, lost their freedom. The freedom to think hopefully of the future.

Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free, and life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fall, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age... Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.'

We will not really address our foreign policy and these endless wars that show no end in sight and seem to be getting deeper and broader and more catastrophic with each passing day.

The day of reckoning is not just coming for Saddam Hussein. It's coming for the anti-war movement.

You people speak so lightly of war; you don't know what you're talking about. War is a terrible thing!

10.30 Newsnight: What Are The Chances Of World War Three Breaking Out After You Have Gone To Bed?

After the allied victory of 1918, at the end of my father's war, the victors divided up the lands of their former enemies. In the space of just seventeen months, they created the borders of Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia and most of the Middle East. And I have spent my entire career — in Belfast and Sarajevo, in Beirut and Baghdad — watching the people within those borders burn.