Although a red warning light illuminates after the 15-minute time limit, United Nations officials said they could not remember anyone interrupting a head of state to explain that the allotted time had expired.

Colonel Qaddafi also attracted attention far from the General Assembly Hall. His official home in New York was the mission on East 48th Street; Libyan diplomats briefly seemed to find a place for his controversial reception tent on a Westchester estate owned by Donald Trump in Bedford, N.Y., but he apparently had no plans to go there. At the mission, he welcomed Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam, while some supporters outside sang his praises.

Inside the United Nations, reactions to his speech were mixed. Some world leaders were cursing him quietly all day because he threw off schedules for side meetings. “They were not happy,” said Heraldo Muñoz, the Chilean ambassador. “Everybody had to cancel meetings and postpone things and arrive late.” (The normal two-hour lunch break was canceled to squeeze in all the leaders scheduled to speak in the afternoon, although the lunch for world leaders hosted by Ban Ki-moon, the secretary general, went ahead a little late.)

At one point in his speech, Colonel Qaddafi waved aloft a copy of the United Nations charter and seemed to tear it, saying he did not recognize the authority of the document. Speaking later in the day from the same podium, Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain said, “I stand here to reaffirm the United Nations charter, not to tear it up.”

Michele Montas, the United Nations spokeswoman, called the denigration of the charter “unacceptable.”

Arab ambassadors accustomed to tongue-lashings from the “brother leader” laughed off the speech as vintage Qaddafi, and at least one United Nations official expressed relief that he did not talk longer. The last General Assembly address of such length likely took place in 1960, when President Fidel Castro of Cuba delivered a similarly verbose speech with a parallel theme  that all weak states were likely to face aggression from the American superpower.

“I don’t think anybody has ever done a real study of General Assembly speeches because nobody listens to them,” said Stephen Schlesinger, a historian of the body. He noted that it was only the controversial leaders who really attract attention. “It seemed like pent-up fury. It seemed like he had been smoldering over all these issues for years and wanted to get it all out.”