Patrice Lumumba (1925–1961) Congolese Prime Minister, cold war leader, executed
Letter to his wife (Congo, My Country)
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), IX The Practice of Painting
Patrice Lumumba (1925–1961) Congolese Prime Minister, cold war leader, executed
Letter to his wife (Congo, My Country)
Isaac Barrow (1630–1677) English Christian theologian, and mathematician
p, 125
Geometrical Lectures (1735)
Georges Bataille (1897–1962) French intellectual and literary figure
Source: Erotism: Death and Sensuality (1962), p. 107
Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America
Remarks by President Obama in Address to the United Nations General Assembly (24 September 2013) http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/09/24/remarks-president-obama-address-united-nations-general-assembly <br class="br">2013
Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement
1950s, Give Us the Ballot (1957)
Context: We must not seek to use our emerging freedom and our growing power to do the same thing to the white minority that has been done to us for so many centuries. Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate the white man. We must not become victimized with a philosophy of black supremacy. God is not interested merely in freeing black men and brown men and yellow men, but God is interested in freeing the whole human race. We must work with determination to create a society, not where black men are superior and other men are inferior and vice versa, but a society in which all men will live together as brothers and respect the dignity and worth of human personality.
Pope John Paul II (1920–2005) 264th Pope of the Catholic Church, saint
Message for the XXVIII World Day of Peace, 8 December 1994 <br class="br">Source: www.vatican.va http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/messages/peace/documents/hf_jp-ii_mes_08121994_xxviii-world-day-for-peace_en.html
“Some men a forward motion love,
But I by backward steps would move.”
Henry Vaughan (1621–1695) Welsh author, physician and metaphysical poet
"The Retreat," l. 29.
Silex Scintillans (1655)
Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America
2009, Nobel Prize acceptance speech (December 2009)
Context: Peace is not merely the absence of visible conflict. Only a just peace based on the inherent rights and dignity of every individual can truly be lasting.
It was this insight that drove drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights after the Second World War. In the wake of devastation, they recognized that if human rights are not protected, peace is a hollow promise.