Oscar Arias Quotes
I shall never accept that the law can be used to justify tragedy, to keep things as they are, to make us abandon our ideas of a different world. Law is the path of liberty, and must as such open the way to progress for everyone.
Arias Sánchez, Óscar. "Nobel Lecture." NobelPrize.org, Nobel Prize Outreach AB, 10 Dec. 1987.
This is one of the earliest and most eloquent argument for an end to racial discrimination. Burchard argued for giving Blacks the right to vote. While Wisconsin was vehemently opposed to slavery, the convention decided to not include or preclude Negroes from voting and instead left the issue up to later legislatures.
The issue of slavery which had been suppressed in Congress for the first decades of the nation broke out when Missouri statehood was considered. By previous agreement, slavery was not even discussed in Congress but the time period elapsed. Tallmadge not only proposed that no more slaves could come into Missouri {613176} but most shocking to the Southerners was that every person born in the new state would be free at the age of 25. In a generation, there would be no more slavery in Missouri and there would be no economic compensation for slave owners at all. The House of Representatives accepted the amendment, but it failed in the Senate. At that time, Senators were not elected by voters but were appointed by the state legislators and the Southern slave states had a disproportionate share of the senate from a population point of view. But what this quotation shows clearly that a majority of the country in 1819 were opposed to slavery and were willing to end it without compensation.
Johnson was then the Vice President. “States’ Rights” has since the beginning of our nation been the code words for the “right” to maintain slaves and after slavery was outlawed, the “right” to discriminate against Blacks—the “right” to commit wrongs.
Vladimir Lenin. After the Russian Revolution the Soviet State rejected the use of a copyright and patent system with the notion that all intellectual property belonged to the state. According to some political economic theorists, this would portend great difficulty in obtaining innovative and creative output in the arts, industry, and sciences. However, in the next 50 years, Russia went from a backward nation to one of the most scientifically sophisticated in the world and their creative arts output, quality and quantity was second to none. They did not fare as well in consumer technology although their military technology was very powerful and all the more amazing considering where they were in 1918 when the Russians adopted these policies. The issue of whether artists, scientists, and inventors need exclusive control of their output in order to be motivated to create has been in dispute for years.
Óscar Arias Sánchez is a Costa Rican activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. He was President of Costa Rica from 1986 to 1990 and from 2006 to 2010. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1987 for his efforts to end the Central American crisis. He was also a recipient of the Albert Schweitzer Prize for Humanitarianism and a trustee of Economists for Peace and Security. In 2003, he was elected to the board of directors of the International Criminal Court's Trust Fund for Victims.
