UN General Assembly
1953

98. No purely legal argument, no circumstantial explanation of political expediency, will persuade peoples who consider themselves fit to exercise their right to sovereignty that they must abandon their aspirations or delay their realization until some later time. In discussing that problem, which, like all the others, is affected by the international tension arising from the ideological struggle of our era, we should avoid injecting into our debates factors which do not concern either the origins of the problem or its development. We must recognize that the standard raised by the masses in the modern world, both in the dependent and Trust Territories and in some independent States, bears the device, not of subversive ideologies, but of the basic needs which have gone unsatisfied for centuries: the need for bread, land, freedom, peace, the desire for self-determination and development of their own cultures. That standard was raised long before all the “isms”, and will outlast them so long as large sectors of the world’s population cannot satisfy their basic needs and fulfil aspirations which they consider just and legitimate.