Faulkner Nobel acceptance speech

We are but tiny specks of organic matter on a spaceship we call Earth being hurled through space at thousands of kilometers per hour. The race that we are, our existence, is fast approaching extinction, and the gift that we bear is the ability to imagine the days of the future we can't live, the future we don't deserve.

We have so far destroyed our habitat, mangled our home without remorse, the state of which is a travesty passed onto us from our previous residents. But damn us if we fail to learn from their mistakes, how unfortunate it is that we preoccupy ourselves with lesser amusements.

There are however, those who still retain faith in humanity. Here is William Faulkner's Nobel acceptance speech:

Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.