Saturday, June 11, 2005

Words of the King

"The stake of each one of us is identical- life or death. We all wish to live. We all seek a world in which men are freed of the burdens of ignorance, poverty, hunger and disease. We shall all be hard-pressed to escape the deadly rain of nuclear fall-out should catastrophe over take us.
The problems which confront us today are unprecedented. They have no counterparts in human experience. men search the pages of history for solutions, for precedents but there are none.
This, then, is the ultimate challenge. Where are we to look for our survival, for the awswers to the questions which have never been posed?
We must look, first to Almighty God, who has raised man above the animals and endowed him with intelligence and reason. We must put our faith in Him, that He will not desert us or permit us to destroy humanity, which he created in His own image.
We must look to ourselves, into the depth of our souls. We must become something we have never been, more courageous, greater in spirit, larger in outlook. We must become members of a new race, overcoming petty prejudice, owing our ultimate allegiance not to nations but to our fellow men within the human community."

Haile Sellassie- Excerpt from Address to the United Nations, October 6, 1963
From THE LION ROARS: Selected Speeches and Letters of Haile Sellassie.
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