UN General Assembly
1968

28. Next week, in my country’s capital city, the nineteenth Olympic Games will begin. Young men and women of more than 100 countries, without distinction as to race, belief or ideology — a point which acquires a symbolic value in this International Year for Human Rights — will be meeting in clean competition for the honour of returning home, some bearing honours, the rest with the satisfaction of having tried their utmost to set the youth of the entire world an example which may encourage future generations to attain better physical and spiritual standards than those of the present generation. As a parallel celebration, a very successful “Cultural Olympics” has been in progress for a number of months. Thanks to the generous participation of the majority of nations, we have been able to exhibit on the plain of Anáhuac, to the delight and admiration of the inhabitants and foreign visitors, many of mankind’s finest achievements in his constant search for beauty in all forms, animate or inanimate, plastic or immaterial, from the earliest times up to the present.