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That night he attended an hour-long reception and then marched into the main dining room of the Ambassador Hotel for his birthday banquet. In his main address, General MacArthur made a cloud-high. impassioned appeal for "the abolition of war,"* but his words—in vintage MacArthur oratory—on youth and age are likely to be remembered longer: "Youth is not entirely a time of life—it is a state of mind. It is not wholly a matter of ripe cheeks, red lips or supple knees. It is a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions... Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years. People grow old only by deserting their ideals...You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubt; as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear; as young as your hope, as old as your despair. In the central place of every heart, there is a recording chamber; so long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer and courage, so long are you young. When the wires are all down and your heart is covered with the snows of pessimism and the ice of cynicism, then, and then only, are you grown old..."
* Some editors seemed startled by the "abolition of war" line, although it has been standard MacArthur fare since 1945, when he accepted the Japanese surrender on the Missouri. He wrote the famed no-war, no-arms clause in the Japanese Constitution, and in scores of Tokyo conversations with visiting Americans, he discoursed on the line "War is obsolete."