Elie Wiesel: “Do not stand idly by if you witness injustice…”

[Ed. while campus politics were in full gear, this speech was given]
In order to obtain and hold power, a man must love it. — Leo Tolstoy

From the campus paper, The Record:

Do not stand idly by if you witness injustice, Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor and human rights activist, told the Class of 2011 during the 150th Commencement ceremony at Washington University in St. Louis.

“You must intervene. You must interfere,” Wiesel told the approximately 2,700 degree candidates gathered before him May 20 in Brookings Quadrangle on Washington University’s Danforth Campus.

Wiesel, winner of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize, has worked on behalf of oppressed people for much of his adult life. His personal experience of the Holocaust has led him to use his talents as an author, teacher and storyteller to defend human rights and peace throughout the world.

“You are now going into a world which is hounded, obsessed with so much violence, often so much despair,” Wiesel said. “When you enter this world and you say the world is not good today, good! Correct it!

“That’s what you have learned here for four years from your great teachers. Go there, and tell them what you remember. Tell them that the nobility of the human being cannot be denied.”

The entire text here.