Emily Greene Balch

Acceptance Speech

As the Laureate was unable to be present on the occasion of the award of the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, December 10, 1946 the acceptance was read by Gunnar Jahn, Chairman of the Nobel Committee.

I desire to express my grateful appreciation of this great honour and my pleasure in being associated in it today with Dr. John R. Mott and, earlier, with Jane Addams, with that martyr for peace and freedom, Karl von Ossietzky, and with so many others, both the publicly honored and the unknown who have served and are serving the same cause. I am happy in thinking that not I myself but the Womens’ International League for Peace and Freedom, with which I am identified, is the true recipient. Hoping, as I do, that this internationally organized body of women has ahead of it a great opportunity for usefulness in educating people everywhere toward the world-mindedness on which peace must be based with other people, I am hoping that 1946 will mark a turning point in the age-old effort to rid the world of war, to national disarmament, to renunciation of power politics, and to development of international trusteeship, not only for dependent peoples, but for regions and interests which are essentially supranational in character, such as the Polar regions and the main waterways of the world, including the Mediterranean and all the great strategic canals, among them the Panama.

From Les Prix Nobel en 1946, Editor Arne Holmberg, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 1947

Copyright © The Nobel Foundation 1946

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