A quote by Ralph Bunche

'Hearts are the strongest when they beat in response to noble ideals.'

- American diplomat Ralph Bunche (1904–1971)

Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1941 speech framed World War II as a global fight for universal rights

Eleven months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt outlined four fundamental freedoms that, in his words, people "everywhere in the world" ought to enjoy—speech, worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.

A quote by Lucille Ball

"Love yourself first and everything else falls into line. You really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world."

A quote by award-winning actor Tom Hanks

"We are still in the position of waking up and having a choice. Do I make the world better today somehow, or do I not bother?"

A quote by Herman Melville

"Whoever is not in the possession of leisure can hardly be said to possess independence."

'And I knew that it was better to live out one's absurdity than to die for that of others.'

-Ralph Ellison, from "Invisible Man" (1913-1994)

'To live is to choose. But to choose well, you must know who you are and what you stand for, where you want to go and why you want to get there.'

- Diplomat Kofi Annan (1938-2018)

'Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth.'

- Muhammad Ali (1942-2016)

A quote by Whitney Houston

"I believe that children are our future. Teach them well and let them lead the way. Show them all the beauty they possess inside."

'If the time is not ripe, we have to ripen the time.'

- Activist Dorothy Height (1912-2010)

'One man can make a difference and every man should try.'

- Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (1929-1994)

A quote by broadcast legend Walter Cronkite

"In seeking truth you have to get both sides of a story."

Social work pioneer Jane Addams (1860 - 1935) on civilization

"Civilization is a method of living, an attitude of equal respect for all men."

'Happiness depends more upon the internal frame of a persons own mind—than on the externals in the world.'

- George Washington (1732-1799)

'We become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams.'

- President Jimmy Carter (1924-2024)

'The most important single ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with people.'

- Former President Theodore Roosevelt's (1858–1919)

'The bounty of nature is also one of the deep needs of man.'

- Lady Bird Johnson (1912-2007)

1978: Thurgood Marshall, commencement address at the University of Virginia

"Where you see wrong or inequality or injustice, speak out, because this is your country. This is your democracy. Make it. Protect it. Pass it on."

Some scholars consider the Bretton Woods system one of the best foreign policy decisions in US history

A survey of historians by the Council on Foreign Relations ranked the creation of the Bretton Woods system among the top 10 foreign policy decisions in US history, highlighting its role in establishing postwar stability, prosperity, and decades of economic growth.

The UN's primary goal is to promote peace and cooperation

The UN's self-proclaimed mission is to promote peace, protect human rights, and tackle global challenges like poverty and climate change. The About Us page on the UN's website is a good entry point to understand how this international organization works and its impact in today's world.

Being nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize is easy—winning one is not

Hundreds of people are nominated yearly, including controversial figures like Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, since nominations can come from professors or politicians worldwide. Le Duc Tho refused the 1973 prize jointly awarded to him and Henry Kissinger, citing ongoing conflict in Vietnam.

John Mearsheimer argued that the liberal international order was bound to fail

University of Chicago political scientist John Mearsheimer argued in his influential essay Bound to Fail that expanding liberal democracy and open markets into other great powers' spheres inevitably leads to conflict, and that the liberal order contains the roots of its own collapse.

Twain's ‘To the Person Sitting in the Darkness’ satirized American imperialism

The 1901 essay was a response to the Philippine-American War as well as Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “The White Man’s Burden,” which argued that Western nations had a moral duty to rescue non-Western nations from ignorance. Twain’s essay ironically encouraged lecturing citizens of the countries being invaded: “for the sake of the Business we must persuade him to look at the Philippine matter in another and healthier way. We must arrange his opinions for him.”

The world's most peaceful countries

Global Peace Index presents the most comprehensive data-driven analysis to date on trends in peace, including the most and least peaceful countries in the world.

How constitutional AI helps cultivate good human values in Anthropic's AI tools

By incorporating elements from documents such as the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights into a framework against which it can check its outputs, Anthropic hopes the approach will help Claude operate with good human values and behaviors beyond what human-driven training alone can provide.

SpongeBob exemplifies Aristotle's philosophy for living well because he understands that happiness doesn't come from external factors like money, recognition, or power.

The US Constitution is widely regarded as the longest-standing written national constitution still in force—see how it has influenced rights worldwide.

Sunflowers have long been a symbol of nuclear disarmament because they can extract large amounts of radioactive cesium from soil.

Existentialist writer Jean-Paul Sartre coined the famous phrase 'Hell is—other people' in his play 'No Exit'

Famed poet TS Eliot rejected the manuscript for George Orwell's political fable 'Animal Farm,' writing that its criticism of authoritarianism was not 'the right point of view.'

After NASA's Voyager 1 captured Earth as a single pixel as it left the solar system in 1990, astronomer Carl Sagan used the image to reflect on humanity's fragility and the responsibility to protect 'the only world we've ever known.'

See the most iconic photos from four decades of LIFE magazine

In 2026, Finland was named the world's happiest country for the ninth consecutive year based on its wealth, social safety network, and high life expectancy, among other factors.

In 1939, baseball star Lou Gehrig delivered his inspirational 'Luckiest Man' speech after retiring due to the health condition that now bears his name.

The identity of the Tank Man in the iconic photo from the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests remains unknown and was possibly killed.

American dance legend Martha Graham, sometimes called 'the Picasso of dance,' refused to perform at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin and conceived the piece 'Chronicle' in response to the experience.

The United States has had a tumultuous relationship with Cuba since its 1959 revolution, highlighted by a nuclear crisis and a decades-long trade embargo.

Warren Buffett's former professor Benjamin Graham is known as the 'father of value investing,' a strategy in which investors seek to buy stocks trading below their intrinsic worth.

Read a deep dive on the 'all-purpose healing' peptide BPC-157.

Cultural norms about how to handle the bodies of loved ones in communities in West Africa have hampered Ebola responses.

Abraham Lincoln was almost assassinated weeks before his inauguration as he traveled from Illinois to DC through Baltimore in 1861; it took two independent claims for Lincoln to be convinced the threat was real

The story of Dollree Mapp, whose legal challenge over her 1957 conviction for possessing "obscene material" led to a major strengthening of the Fourth Amendment

See a ranking of the best (and worst) Federal Reserve Chairs since 1914 out of the 16 men and women who have held the office since.

At the beginning of the 20th century, a group of young men ate standard American food—replete with food additives like borax and formaldehyde—as part of government research to better understand food safety.

In 2018, 26-year-old missionary John Allen Chau was killed by tribesmen after attempting to reach and evangelize on India's isolated North Sentinel Island

A small portion of The Winstons' 'Amen, Brother,' an obscure '60s gospel record, is the basis for thousands of hip-hop tracks, making it one of the most sampled records ever that's informally known as 'the Amen break.'

In 2025, four executives from large tech companies were given positions in the US Army Reserves—including Palantir Chief Technology Officer Shyam Sankar, which reinforced Palantir's ties with the US military and its role as a leading defense partner.

Some researchers have labeled nomophobia, the fear of being without your phone, as 'the phobia of the 21st century.'

Researchers believe the brain consolidates memories, processes emotions, and plans for the future during dream states

Up to a million Girl Scouts sell about 200 million cookie boxes every spring, generating $800 million, largely because refusing a child is frowned upon