Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
We demonize our enemies at our own peril.
As responsible politicians, you have to manage migration.
Humanitarian action cannot be held hostage to political ends.
The sad fact is that horrendous human conflict is nothing new.
Can you really send back people to where they are fleeing from?
The abuse of civilians and combatants has existed since the dawn of time.
Urbanisation, poverty, youth unemployment are leading to violence-prone cities.
The discourse of sovereignty is a relative one when a crisis has become a global crisis.
Each day that passes without kids being able to go to school is an enormous burden on the future.
Where you are born, your parent's beliefs, or your ethnic background should not make you a target.
If you back out of a convention... you can't dodge your obligation. Torture is still not acceptable.
Cities are drivers of growth and wealth, and at the same time, cities are becoming increasingly violent.
It has always been clear that any use of nuclear weapons would have catastrophic humanitarian consequences.
Concrete steps are needed to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in military plans, doctrines, and policies.
To respond to people's needs, humanitarian action has evolved from a temporary fix to a long-term safety net.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution does not just entail risks: it also brings solutions to humanitarian problems.
Not only does disability impact individual health and well-being, it also leads to social and economic exclusion.
If private-sector capital can be harnessed for social good, the potential to scale humanitarian solutions is vast.
Short-termism is no longer an option. We have to envisage humanitarian action with a medium- and long-term perspective.
There is great potential for investments that are built around improving social, environmental, and economic conditions.
Experience shows that the reliance on illegal, immoral, and inhumane interrogation techniques is universally a very poor choice.
The whole essence of humanitarian work and the Geneva Convention is that neutral, impartial organisations can operate during war.
I have known Sepp Blatter, FIFA and football for a long time, and there are some fundamental values which FIFA and the ICRC share.
Local businesses and communities must be included from the very start in developing solutions to fragility, violence, and conflict.
We live in an environment in which connectivity and cyberspace are transforming all workplaces, including the humanitarian workplace.
Conflicts are not temporary interruptions: they are structural, socio-economic catastrophes, and funding must be allocated accordingly.
When millions of kids are missing out on school, delivering educational services becomes an issue that concerns the humanitarian system.
The creative capacity of the private sector should be harnessed to develop new and more effective ways to deliver humanitarian solutions.
The principal cause of suffering during humanitarian crises is insufficient respect of applicable rules of international humanitarian law.
Ensuring the respect of international humanitarian law and principles is one of the key areas necessary to establish accountability chains.
We need to understand that the Geneva Conventions are not just some historical documents born of another time, created for another purpose.
Torture can destroy the social fabric of communities, degrade a society's institutions, and undermine the integrity of its political systems.
While the nature of warfare is changing and wars are moving into cities, they are also becoming longer and their consequences more impactful.
The disconnect between what people think and what the political leaders are actually doing is something that we really need to start raising.
Not enough countries, not enough armies, not enough armed groups are abiding by the fundamental human values enshrined in the Geneva Conventions.
Torture and other forms of cruel or humiliating treatment are an affront to humanity, and the physical and psychological scars can last a lifetime.
People living through armed conflicts need infrastructure and services which will last, and the last thing on their mind is which budget line applies.
You don't torture people. You don't indiscriminately attack civilians. You protect as good as you can the impact of your warfare on women and children.
You can't expect humanitarian and development agencies to rebuild Syria. There is not enough money. There is not enough capacity. There are not enough skills.
Humanitarian assistance, once conceived as a short-term relief effort, is increasingly the only substitute for long-term development work in protracted armed conflicts.
Trust into leadership evaporates with communities when they see that their problems are not adequately addressed, neither at the national level nor at the international arena.
It's one thing if a politician in a small country says a little bit of torturing is good to do. There is a qualitative difference... when it's a candidate to run a superpower.
Self-reliance is not always possible; we have to acknowledge that there are situations of dramatic crisis which will force us to substitute non-existing public delivery systems.
Businesses operating in fragile or conflict-affected environments bear a responsibility to, at the very minimum, do no harm and avoid fuelling conflict or reinforcing fragility.
We need to continue to modernise current humanitarian work while at the same time drive a more systemic shift in how we envision the operation and financing of humanitarian solutions.
The humanitarian ecosystem is diverse - not only is there a variety of traditional humanitarian actors, but the system should also embrace an increasing diversity of private sector actors.
As conflicts last longer, as the scale of needs increase, we are having to adapt. There is an increasing blurring between immediate humanitarian assistance and long-term development needs.
The young, the old, women, the disabled, the sick and the wounded are entitled to protection under international law. Too often, the ICRC's calls for those laws to be respected are ignored.
While conflicts have expanded and deepened and transformed, actors have transformed, and humanitarian assistance is transforming. Protection work is transforming and taking on another character.
We cannot guarantee that a humanitarian catastrophe of the extent of the Holocaust will not happen again. On the contrary, we witness a catalogue of atrocities every day in wars across the globe.