A Mother’s Fearless Heart
Community Courage SocietyIf you want to be secure, make your enemy secure, because then the enemy will not be an enemy anymore.
Visaka Dharmadasa
Founder, Association of War Affected Women
If you want to be secure, make your enemy secure, because then the enemy will not be an enemy anymore.
Visaka Dharmadasa
Founder, Association of War Affected Women
We are working to empower women. And we think that solutions will come from women, when they have power. That's my hope. And to talk about the problem is to act. When you make the problem known, it will bring solutions, somehow, though we don't know how.
ChouChou Namegabe Dubuisson
Radio Journalist from the City of Bikavu in the Democratic Republic of Congo
Operating on fear is an issue of character. Courage is not merely, or primarily, the absence of fear. It is the taking on of tasks and concerns that are larger than the fear. It is discovering how to face your fears and moving through them as a whole person. That is what is essential.
Rev. James Lawson
Nonviolence Strategist of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement
The politics of courage is with us today. People still care intensely about courage, and we're still trying to stack the deck in our own favor. Determining who has courage, what actions count, who gets the prize, is disputed now no less than in the Iliad. Look whom we call heroes and claim are courageous.
William Ian Miller
It was Archbishop Desmond Tutu who first coined the term “rainbow nation” to describe a country that draws strength, not suspicion, from the differences among its people; pride, not fear, from its diversity. And perhaps that, writ large, is as fair a summary as any of the cause that has brought us here tonight. The world we want really is rainbow coloured. It is a world of brilliant diversity, where each one of us is free and equal, and where everyone is treated with the same measure of respect and dignity.
Navi Pillay, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights on the occasion of the International Day against Homophobia and Transphobia
“So long as human history continues, we will face the perennial challenge of realizing, maintaining and strengthening peace through dialogue, of making dialogue the sure and certain path to peace. We must uphold and proclaim this conviction without cease, whatever coldly knowing smiles or cynical critiques may greet us.”
Daisaku Ikeda
"We all want to live in a jazz world where we all work together, improvise together, are not afraid of taking chances and expressing ourselves."
Herbie Hancock
UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador
The problems of AIDS, malaria or food insecurity are not grand problems of cosmic uncertainty. They are not the great mysteries of the universe. They are the mysteries of our inattention.
Jeffrey D. Sachs
Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University
International Mother Earth Day is a chance to reaffirm our collective responsibility to promote harmony with nature at a time when our planet is under threat from climate change, unsustainable exploitation of natural resources and other man-made problems. When we threaten the planet, we undermine our only home – and our future survival. On this International Day, let us renew our pledges to honour and respect Mother Earth.
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon
Message for the International Mother Earth Day 2013
My administration's nuclear posture recognizes that the massive nuclear arsenal we inherited from the Cold War is poorly suited to today's threats, including nuclear terrorism. . . .But I believe the United States has a unique responsibility to act-- indeed, we have a moral obligation. I say this as President of the only nation ever to use nuclear weapons.
President Barack Obama's speech at Hankuk University in Seoul on March 26, 2012