During the interval while the judges are conferring, PSR/Sacramento president Dr. Harry Wang and Vice President Dr. Bill Durston will talk about other PSR related activities, including PSR's perspective on the war in Ukraine; the threat of nuclear war; and our work in the areas of protecting the environment, ensuring access to universal health care, and preventing gun violence.
The essay contest program will begin at 7:00 PM, but you can log in as early as 6:30 if you like. Here's the Zoom link for logging in:
We believe the essay contest is an important way of fostering and rewarding critical thinking amont high school age youth on the critical issues of our time, and the finals event offers a platform for students to publicly express their views. Prompts used in past essay contests are appended below, and winning essays in past contests are posted on the High School Essay Contest page of the PSR/Sacramento website.
The Essay Contest Finals is always one of the most inspiring and enjoyable PSR events of the year. We hope to see you (virtually) at our essay contest finals event this evening.
Quotations Used in Past PSR/Sacramento Essay Contests
2005: “War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige as the warrior does today.” John F. Kennedy
2006: “Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.” Martin Luther King
2007: “We can bomb the world to pieces, but we can’t bomb it into peace.” Michael Franti
2008: “War is a racket with the profits reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.” Maj. General Smedley Butler
2009: “We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.” Albert Einstein
2010: “We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.” Native American Proverb
2011: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed." President Dwight Eisenhower
2012: “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis
2013: “Firearm regulations, to include bans of handguns and assault weapons, are the most effective way to reduce firearm related injuries.” American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Injury and Poison Prevention, April 2000
2014: “Education is the most powerful weapon that you can use to change the world.” Nelson Mandela
2015: “The world is over-armed, and peace is under-funded.” United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon
2016: “Peace can only last where human rights are respected, where the people are fed, and where individuals and nations are free.” The 14th Dalai Lama
2017: “Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education.” President Franklin Delano Roosevelt
2018: “The connection between women’s human rights, gender equality, socioeconomic development, and peace is increasingly apparent.” Mahnaz Afkhami
2019: ““We are the first generation to feel the effect of climate change and the last generation who can do something about it.” President Barack Obama
2020: “Peace is not only the absence of war. As long as there is poverty, racism, discrimination and exclusion, we’ll be hard-pressed to achieve a world of peace.” Rigoberta Menchu Tum
2021: “The story of nuclear weapons will have an ending, and it is up to us what the ending will be. Will it be the end of nuclear weapons, or will it be the end of us?” Beatrice Fihn, Executive Director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
