This is my personal tribute to António Guterres, outgoing Secretary General of the United Nations.
I have used more quotes from António Guterres, in speeches, articles, tweets, what have you, than from any other single human being. (I don’t know this for a fact, but I just suspect it to be the case!). He’s been an absolute hero of mine over the last decade.
So here are just a few of my favourite quotes, with a bit of commentary along the way.
“We are committing suicide by proxy”.
As the UN Secretary General, he’s required to be the world’s ‘top diplomat’. His main problem has been having to deal, for the most part, with a decade’s worth of top muppets, incompetent, compromised, corrupt and cretinous.
Throughout their time, they will have known that he has been right about every single aspect of the climate crisis. The problem is that they’re there to serve the interests of Big Oil rather than the interests of humankind.
“We cannot rescue a burning planet with a firehose of fossil fuels”.
As Secretary General, he’s presided over all the relevant UN agencies, including the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – both so comprehensively captured by Big Oil that neither has ever been able to match his truth-telling.
“The air is unbreathable. The heat is unbearable. And the level of fossil fuel profits is entirely unacceptable”.
Both the UNFCCC and the IPCC can barely bring themselves to mention the role of fossil fuels in their endless and increasingly irrelevant deliberations. Just seven little words from Guterres demonstrates their uselessness:
“Your core product is our core problem”.
He knows that both the climate crisis and the breakdown of Nature are symptoms of a much deeper malaise:
“Our bottomless appetite for unchecked and unequal economic growth”.
And with every single world leader still pushing that kind of economic growth, he unflinchingly demands that we confront the ultimate existential reality of our time.
“Humanity has become a weapon of mass destruction”.
And that’s the truth of it — as a direct consequence of this systematic betrayal by a generation of political leaders, completely incapable of understanding that there can be no viable future for humankind without a thriving planet.
“Humanity has opened the gates of Hell”.
In speech after speech, the pain of this has been etched in those grizzled features. The trauma ahead, as we open up every last page of the “Atlas of human suffering”, especially for the poorest and the most vulnerable, is all but unbearable for him. As is the fate of the more-than-human world:
“The fate of Nature and the fate of Humanity are one and the same”.
He also cares passionately about the whole notion of sustainable development – primarily because the UN is the repository of the Sustainable Development Goals. Those Goals represent the most powerful manifestation of what the UN stands for since some of its founding statements after the Second World War. It’s been his personal tragedy to watch as those aspirations have withered and then died. Including the promises made to future generations, resulting in:
“The most profound intergenerational power imbalance of all”.
It sometimes feels a bit lonely banging on and on about intergenerational justice, but this has become an increasingly powerful part of his advocacy as he nears the end of his tenure, appalled at the vision of:
“One generation consuming the future of the next”.
I’ve never met António Guterres. But I feel much, much closer to him than most of the ‘movers and shakers’ that I have met over the last 50 years. He knows we’re pretty much screwed, still hurtling along —
“on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator” —
and he knows exactly who history will come to judge as the principal instigators of that utterly avoidable catastrophe.
But like all of us, despite everything, he’s somehow managed to keep hope in the mix, year after year, setback after setback.
“A window of opportunity remains open, but only a narrow shaft of light remains”.
So, thank you, António. You’ve been an absolute fucking legend.
And whatever else you do, keep on giving us your frank, forceful and incredibly inspiring insights.
Jonathon Porritt 28 September 2026
