verified
هرگز از بلند کردن صدای خود برای صداقت و حقیقت و همدردی در برابر بیعدالتی و دروغ و طمع نترسید. اگر مردم در سراسر جهان این کار را انجام دهند، زمین تغییر خواهد کرد.
Verified
Confirmed by our editorial team.
We traced this quote to a primary published source and confirmed the words are genuinely the author's. You can cite it with confidence.
Source
William Faulkner, address to the graduating class of University High School, Fulton Chapel, University of Mississippi, May 28, 1951. Filmed excerpt, documentary "William Faulkner" (1952). Text published in Essays, Speeches & Public Letters, ed. James B. Meriwether (Random House, 1965).
Editorial Note
This is genuine Faulkner, and its origin is well documented. It comes from
the commencement address he delivered on May 28, 1951 at Fulton Chapel on
the University of Mississippi campus, to the graduating class of University
High School in Oxford, a class that included his daughter Jill, who had
talked her reluctant father into speaking only months after his trip to
Stockholm to accept the Nobel Prize. The four-and-a-half-minute talk was one
of the very few public addresses he ever gave. Faulkner handed his own copy
to the local Oxford Eagle editor, from which it went out on the wire
services, and the text is preserved in the standard collection Essays,
Speeches & Public Letters. Film of Faulkner delivering the speech survives
in the 1952 documentary William Faulkner, and the line can be heard in his
own voice.
The single-sentence version most people share, "If people all over the
world...would do this, it would change the earth," is a compressed excerpt.
The original runs "If you, not just you in this room tonight, but in all the
thousands of other rooms like this one...you will change the earth." The
condensed form is not something Faulkner said, so the full passage is given
here as the quotation of record, with the popular version noted as a
variant.
A stray online claim crediting the British abolitionist William Wilberforce
rests on no source and appears to be simple confusion of two men named
William. There is no documented earlier use and no credible rival author.
The line is authentic Faulkner, spoken and later published.
the commencement address he delivered on May 28, 1951 at Fulton Chapel on
the University of Mississippi campus, to the graduating class of University
High School in Oxford, a class that included his daughter Jill, who had
talked her reluctant father into speaking only months after his trip to
Stockholm to accept the Nobel Prize. The four-and-a-half-minute talk was one
of the very few public addresses he ever gave. Faulkner handed his own copy
to the local Oxford Eagle editor, from which it went out on the wire
services, and the text is preserved in the standard collection Essays,
Speeches & Public Letters. Film of Faulkner delivering the speech survives
in the 1952 documentary William Faulkner, and the line can be heard in his
own voice.
The single-sentence version most people share, "If people all over the
world...would do this, it would change the earth," is a compressed excerpt.
The original runs "If you, not just you in this room tonight, but in all the
thousands of other rooms like this one...you will change the earth." The
condensed form is not something Faulkner said, so the full passage is given
here as the quotation of record, with the popular version noted as a
variant.
A stray online claim crediting the British abolitionist William Wilberforce
rests on no source and appears to be simple confusion of two men named
William. There is no documented earlier use and no credible rival author.
The line is authentic Faulkner, spoken and later published.
