h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan accepted the centennial Nobel Peace Prize on December 10th 2001, saying the world "entered the third millennium through a gate of fire" ignited on Sept. 11.

Mr Annan accepted his prize with a call for humanity to fight poverty, ignorance and disease.

Annan said that the terrorist attacks in the United States showed that "new threats make no distinction between races, nations or regions." The world now has "a deeper awareness of the bonds that bind us all - in pain and in prosperity," he said.

"Today, no walls can separate humanitarian or human rights crises in one part of the world from national security crises in another,» he said. "What begins with the failure to uphold the dignity of one life, all too often ends with a calamity for entire nations."
Mr Annan shared the prize with the United Nations as a whole.

The chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee presented the $950,000 prize, which includes diplomas and gold medals, to Annan and the president of the U.N. General Assembly, South Korean Foreign Minister Han Seung-soo, representing the world body.

Mr Annan has given "the U.N. an external prestige and an internal morale" hardly before seen since the world body's founding in 1945, chairman Gunnar Berge said.

Mr Annan said the United Nations' mission for the 21st century "will be defined by a new, more profound, awareness of the sanctity and dignity of every human life.

"If today, after the horror of 11 September, we see better, and we see further - we will realize that humanity is indivisible."