Human rights, security, and development, taken together, make up the idea of 'larger freedom.' A young man who has HIV, who cannot read or write, and who lives on the brink of starvation is not truly free — even if he can vote to choose his rulers.
Kofi Annan
Penn State Commencement 2005, 2005
वीडियो 6:22 से शुरू होता है — जिस क्षण यह उद्धरण बोला गया था
इस उद्धरण के पीछे की कहानी
Annan introduced the concept of 'larger freedom' — borrowed from the UN Charter itself — to challenge the graduates' assumptions about what freedom really means. He traced the idea back to Franklin Roosevelt's Four Freedoms: political freedom, religious freedom, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. By linking human rights, security, and development into a single concept, Annan was making a sophisticated argument against the idea that democracy alone is sufficient. He made it viscerally concrete: a young person wracked by disease, illiteracy, and hunger is not free in any meaningful sense, regardless of voting rights. Equally, a young woman living under civil war is not free even if she has enough to eat. True freedom, Annan argued, requires all three pillars — and the world's work was far from done.