In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.
The first is freedom of speech and expression -- everywhere in the world.
The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way -- everywhere in the world.
The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants -- everywhere in the world.
The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor -- anywhere in the world.
That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called “new order” of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.
To that new order we oppose the greater conception -- the moral order. A good society is able to face schemes of world domination and foreign revolutions alike without fear.
--President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, January 6, 1941
Friend and Brother Whipple pointed me to this article about Norman Rockwell's paintings of the Four Freedoms.
1 comment:
Jay- I use the four freedoms with my high school students in Government class to introduce the concepts of freedom, order, and equality: public policies create trade-offs and these three concepts are a great way to teach that. "Four Freedoms 2.0" is a pic I found on Flikr which illustrates how these freedoms have been reinterpreted...it always creates an interesting discussion in my classes! I'll email you the pic. Mike
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