Maurice Strong, Under Secretary General, UN
Guest Speaker at the Grand Opening of the Church of Scientology New York (cont.)

If I’ve learned anything in all my years in the global arena, it is that world governments do not possess all the tools to bring resolution to the problems that beset human kind. Governments can guide, can incense, but most of the doing is left, left to people like us, organizations like yours. Those who are able to make such tools available, we must applaud and thank. And to establish human rights and respect for diversity amongst people and nations — diversity itself is the source of the richness of human kind and that’s why I commend every efforts of the Scientologists on cultures and creating bonds of understanding amongst people. But that diversity is also the source of conflict when it is not well understood. And this is one of the problems of our world — is that we do not embrace or respect sufficiently the rights and opportunities or the beliefs of others. We must do so. Diversity must be, it must be turned into an asset, in the cause of peace — without it we will surely not bring to the world a peace to which we all aspire.

Also, to create a world not dependent on harmful drugs and toxic substances, whether they reach the individual through their ingestion personally or involuntarily through contamination of our water, our air or our food chain, which is the heart of our environmental struggle.

The world has become over–dependent on toxic substances, and the work that Scientology is doing to help, not only to prevent this continued over–dependence, which is contaminating our individual as well as our collective life, but also to, to cure it when drug addiction seizes control of the life of individuals. Indeed, we will be doing our part to give effect to Mr. Hubbard’s call to help build a world without insanity, criminality and war, where honest people have rights and Man is free to rise to greater heights.

I really do want to reiterate my deep appreciation of this opportunity, my appreciation of the many ways in which the work that you, to which you are committed and for which this Church will permit an extension and expansion is serving the purposes it’s trying to in the Charter of the United Nations and in the Declaration of Human Rights and in a document that I also commend to you that has been adopted by millions of people around the world — the Earth charter, setting out certain basic ethical and moral principles to guide the conduct of people and nations towards each other and towards the Earth. In all this work, I’m very pleased to pay testimony to your leadership and to the manner in which you are giving hope to a troubled world.