William Shawcross Quotations

Weapons of mass destruction are the greatest threat to life on earth. Biological weapons are often called the poor man's atomic bomb. Saddam Hussein is the ruler who has for decades been making the most determined and diabolical illegal effort to acquire them.

Most Muslim charities are run by good people.

Writing or talking about famine and the world's response to it is not very easy.

A few weeks before the jubilee began in 2002, Queen Elizabeth died, and the public outpouring of grief and affection, with hundreds of thousands of people queuing for hours to pass by her coffin, showed how widely and deeply loved she was.

Charities should not become the junior partner in the welfare state; whether or not they provide services funded by Government or, indeed, receive grants from Government, they must remain independent and focused on their mission.

If trustees feel it is in their charity's interest to pay high salaries to attract talented people, then they should have the courage of their conviction and explain their decisions publicly.

It is so basic as to be mundane, but in disaster relief, all the good will in the world can go to hell in a hand basket if the logistics don't work. In Ethiopia at the best of times, the logistics are difficult. It is a huge country - about the same size as Texas, New Mexico and Oklahoma combined. It is also a transportation nightmare.

You cannot do justice to the dead. When we talk about doing justice to the dead we are talking about retribution for the harm done to them. But retribution and justice are two different things.

Together they [President Nixon and Secretary Kissinger] pursued ends that frequently had a tenuous link with reality, using means that were not merely disproportionate but counterproductive and untrue to those values they were meant to defend. In fact neither man demonstrated much faith in those values.

The important point was that whatever errors America had made [in Vietnam] "we are so powerful [according to Secretary Kissinger] that Hanoi is simply unable to defeat us militarily" and must therefore eventually be forced to compromise.

Cambodia was not a mistake; it was a crime. The world is diminished by the experience.