Unique Lives and Experiences Lecture Series
Speech by Ms Benazir Bhutto
Leader of the Opposition
Delivered at Cambridge - USA
May 02, 1998

Ladies and gentlemen, 

Ladies and gentlemen,  leadership and courage are often synonymous.

Ultimately, leadership depends on action, daring to take actions that are necessary but unpopular, to challenging institutions and traditions. 

To do what is right, not necessarily what is popular. 

To educate and move an electorate, as opposed to just responding to what people want. 

In Pakistan, we demonstrated leadership by increasing revenue to create sensible macroeconomic policy. 

Ladies and gentlemen, 

Our generation stands at the door way of history. 

Not only the door way of a new century, but the doorway of a new millennium. 

And as we prepare ourselves to meet this century, this new millennium, I believe we need to clearly understand the challenges that still await us and await the century. 

It is up to us, all of us, to determine the moral parameters of that new era -- the coming decade, the coming century, the coming millennium. 

Ladies and gentlemen, 

Our generation, the first in recorded history, is fundamentally empowered with the control of its own destiny. 

The chains of the past -- colonialism, ignorance, dictatorship and sexism -- are broken. 

The world has finally accepted, in the words of Robert Browning, that "ignorance is not innocence, but sin." 

We must persevere and not be intimidated by fear, not constrained by obstacles. 

I remember the last words of my father to me, writing to me from his death cell, quoting Robert F. Kennedy on Tennyson: 

"Every generation has a central concern, whether to end war, erase racial injustice, or improve the conditions of working people. Young people today demand a government that speaks directly and honestly to its citizens. 

The possibilities are too great, the stakes too high, to bequeath to the coming generation only the prophetic lament of Tennyson: 

'Ah, what shall I be at fifty...If I find the world so bitter at twenty-five." 

I remember my father's words. I will not be afraid. I will continue to speak, to fight, to help build a newer world. 

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.

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