Hans Blix Quotes & Sayings

“What surprises me, what amazes me, is that it seems the military people were expecting to stumble on large quantities of gas, chemical weapons and biological weapons.”

“If you take the biological weapons in the United States we still will have perhaps a single individual who was able to make anthrax, dry it, and spread it through the mail and cause terror.”

“Look at the Palestinians with the huge, huge percentage of unemployed. What does that breed? Anyone who's unemployed in the world, you feel there's no meaning and there's a risk that you drift over to something desperate. Yes, we have to tackle the social problems as well.”

“I also hear your president say that war is the means of last resort and I think he means that. I met him last autumn and he assured me that they wanted to come through and disarm Iraq by peaceful means, and that's what we are trying to do as hard as we can.”

“I think that we have to do our job well, investigate thoroughly and then describe very honestly what we see to the Security Council. And some of the things might please people there and other things may not please the people.”

“Now the idea about taking people abroad is that if they come over to Cyprus, which we have in mind, and bring their families and would have the possibility to defect after they would be ready to speak their mind, well I hope so.”

“On big issues like war in Iraq, but in many other issues they simply must be multilateral. There's no other way around. You have the instances like the global warming convention, the Kyoto protocol, when the U.S. went its own way.”

“They have been saying for a long time that Iraq made an effort to import active uranium, and my colleague demonstrated the other day that they came to the conclusion that it was a fake document that everybody is relying upon.”

“Like I said, I'm more worried long term about the environmental issues then the use of arms.”

“I found it peculiar that those who wanted to take military action could - with 100 per cent certainty - know that the weapons existed and turn out to have zero knowledge of where they were.”