Imperial War Museum (public domain)
We need a new study for the purpose of creating a world assembly elected directly from the people of the world, as a whole, to whom the Governments who form the United Nations are responsible and who, in fact, make the world law which they, the people, will then accept and be morally bound and willing to carry out."
Ernest Bevin, British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs (1945-1951), in a speech in the House of Commons, 1945
Wikimedia Commons (public domain)
The most obvious things are the hardest to do, for peoples and nations as well as for individuals. What is the present League of Nations? Nothing. We all long for a world parliament. We need a real League of Nations.
Gerhart Hauptmann, German dramatist and novelist (1862-1946), Nobel Prize laureate, in an interview, 1923
Library of Congress
When the peoples of all the nations are capable of governing themselves through an International Parliament then and not till then, will war cease to burden man and universal peace become a thing accomplished.
William Sulzer, U.S. Congressman and Chairman of the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs, 1912
For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see, / Saw the vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be; …Till the war-drum throbbed no longer, and the battle-flags were furl’d / In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world. There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe, / And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, British poet, quote from the poem Locksley Hall, 1842
