In this paper, a general version of the KKM theorem is derived by using the concept of generalized KKM mappings introduced by Chang and Zhang. By employing our general KKM theorem, we obtain a general minimax inequality which contains several existing ones as special cases. As applications of our general minimax inequality, we derive an existence result for saddle-point problems under general setting. We also establish several existence results for generalized variation inequalities and generalized quasi-variational inequalities.