UN General Assembly
1946

Those of the United Nations which, during the war suffered nazi occupation and saw all human values trampled under foot, have, I am sure, developed a deep feeling of the essential worth of freedom and of human rights. We feel today, as never before, that freedom is the very breath of life; as one of our poets said “Freedom and life are one.” We know from bitter experience the horror, the deadly oppressive silence, that falls on a people when freedom departs. We feel that the goal of long centuries of the pilgrimage of nations has been the attainment of what that great leader of men, Franklin D. Roosevelt, called the four freedoms. For the establishment of these freedoms, the United Nations must work and fight untiringly. In this field we will accept no compromise. We must always remember that these freedoms were what men and women fought for, what peoples suffered for and what the nations of the world expect this Organization and everyone of its Members never to forget.