The Millennium Development Goals can be met by 2015, but only if all involved break with business as usual and dramatically accelerate and scale up action now.
Interpretation
The goals set for global development can be achieved by 2015 if there is a significant shift in current practices and an urgent increase in efforts.
Kofi Annan emphasizes that the ambitious targets for the Millennium Development Goals are attainable within the designated timeline, provided that individuals and organizations abandon complacency and vigorously enhance their commitment to taking action. He calls for immediate and substantial efforts to address pressing global issues, suggesting that without a transformation in approach and pace, these goals remain out of reach.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about global development initiatives to emphasize urgency and diligence.
If you have a problem and you can't find a solution, you meet again tomorrow and you keep talking until you find a solution. You can disagree with behavior or a particular position, but you do not resort to calling an opponent worthless.
Let us remember the large numbers of citizens who, day in and day out, through acts of volunteerism large and small, bring hope to so many of the world's disadvantaged. Let us ensure that this wonderful resource, available in abundance to every nation, is recognized and supported as it works towards a more prosperous and peaceful world.
We may have different religions, different languages, different colored skin, but we all belong to one human race.
The global HIV/AIDS epidemic is an unprecedented crisis that requires an unprecedented response. In particular it requires solidarity - between the healthy and the sick, between rich and poor, and above all, between richer and poorer nations. We have 30 million orphans already. How many more do we have to get, to wake up?
People of different religions and cultures live side by side in almost every part of the world, and most of us have overlapping identities which unite us with very different groups. We can love what we are, without hating what β and who β we are not. We can thrive in our own tradition, even as we learn from others, and come to respect their teachings.
Democracy is, in essence, a form of non-violent conflict management. If war is the worst enemy of development, healthy and balanced development is the best form of conflict prevention.
Each of us can work to change a small portion of events. And it's in the total of all those acts that the history of this generation will be written.
Those who can't imagine change reveal the deficits of their imaginations, not the difficulty of change.
It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union.... Men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less
I who am in the night will move into the day.
A careless way of sauntering across the earth and breaking open its treasures, a terrible dependency on sucking out the world's best juices for ourselves-these may also be our enemies. The changes we dread most may contain our salvation.
We must think differently, look at things in a different way. Peace requires a world of new concepts, new definitions.
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