(3 of 5)
Ford Foundation President Franklin A. Thomas at Cooper Union in New York City: "Our generation, the offspring of immigrants, seems to be more tolerant of other cultures and creeds. Perhaps pluralism begets pluralism. In our time immigration policy is an extension of foreign policy. In America's struggle for influence in the world, our most potent tool is not the ideological pamphlet or the shipment of arms or even economic aid. It is the example of a free, tolerant and prosperous America. Other countries may triumph at global conferences where world representatives vote with their hands. But America seems to win every contest whenever the world's people have an opportunity to vote with their feet."
National Education Association President Mary Hatwood Futrell at George Washington University in Washington:"I want to see our brightest students intellectually challenged to their utmost. I also want to see more students exposed to rigorous math and science courses. But I don't want to see America's educational system become an educational assembly line. Education should serve to increase rather than decrease human differences in one's ability to contribute to society. Our students must know how to compute. But they also must be able to factor in the social implications of their computations."
Connecticut Representative Barbara B. Kennedy at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass.: "Our nation no longer has the luxury of deferring women's full participation at every level of government. Our very future, our children's future depend on this nation's beginning to listen and to incorporate women's intellectual and moral attitudes into its decision-making bodies. Please do not interpret my remarks to mean that I am trying to resurrect some 19th century stereotype of women being better than men, angels posed on pedestals. Rather I simply note that women, perhaps because of our long history of being powerless, do seem to have a different attitude toward power, an attitude that goes beyond the traditional male concept that every conflict reaches resolution when there is a winner and a loser. In nuclear conflict, there are no winners, only losers."
Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, Archbishop of Chicago, at Emory University in Atlanta: "I am neither blind to the danger nor sympathetic to the imposition of an alien ideology in Central America. We have an obligation to resist this. But the means used to oppose such a possibility must be consistent with our constitutional and cultural traditions. Today the face we show the world in Central America does not reflect the best of either of those traditions. My plea is for perspective and purpose in keeping the nuclear peace and building a secure and just peace in Central America. Such an effort surely requires policy wisdom, but it also requires a certain quality of citizen vision."
South African Playwright Athol Fugard at Georgetown University in Washington: "I am talking about the living of a life at the most mundane level, and what I am saying is that at that level—at the level of our daily lives—one man or woman meeting with another man or woman is finally the central arena of history."