Link to the complete file on YouTube:
https://youtu.be/kfz4LjLYz5o

“Do not ask me to write with compromise. I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice. I will not think, speak or write gently.
No! Tell a man whose house is on fire to warn others gently; or tell him to rescue his wife gently from the hands of someone carrying her forcibly from their home; or tell a mother to lift her child gently from the fire into which the child has fallen. So do not tell me to speak gently in an hour such as the one before us.
I have risen in earnest. I will not speak with a stammer. I will apologise to no one and retreat not one step, and I assure you that I will be heard.”

These words are attributed here to a man born, in a meaningful coincidence, on 10 December—a date that, 140 years later, would become Human Rights Day. With empty hands he founded an all-encompassing movement against injustice and oppression in his land, and through steadfastness in the path of truth eventually prevailed.

Hearing the story of our hero on such a day is especially important for us Iranians today because he too, like us, stood empty-handed before humiliation and oppression, weapons, imprisonment and repression, and ultimately prevailed. Throughout thirty years of struggle he did not retreat even one step from the human values and justice he defended. He did not lose hope and remained steadfast until a major transformation was realised in his society.

Our hero was born in America on 10 December 1805 and began his struggle through writing at the age of twenty-six. In the editorial of the first issue of his newspaper, which he called *The Liberator*, published from the corner of his modest room when he was its sole writer, he wrote words whose force and connection with our own life and time we can still feel, thousands of kilometres away and two centuries later. William Garrison, the great figure in the American abolitionist movement, went to war with nothing but a pen against a tradition, commerce and an economy of violence prepared to eliminate every opponent and every opposition in the pursuit of its interests.