Swami Vivekananda's Chicago address: Top 10 key points from 'Indian Hindu monk'

On the occasion of 125th anniversary of Swami Vivekananda's famous address at World Parliament of Religions in Chicago, Prime Minister Naredra Modi has addressed students from Vigyan Bhawan in New Delhi.

PM Modi stressed on the need for all Indian citizens to join in the campaign for a "Clean India", saying citizens should think fifty times and ask themselves whether they have the right to chant 'Vande Mataram' when they can't keep the country clean or abuse the land on which they live.
He also took on Twitter and said, “The convention of students is being held on 11th September, the day Swami Vivekananda delivered his historic address at Chicago in 1893.”

“This year, we are marking 125th anniversary of Swami Vivekananda’s Chicago address & Pt. Deendayal Upadhyaya centenary celebrations,” he said in an another tweet.

Here are top 10 points from Swami Vivekananda’s historical speech at the Parliament of Religion, Chicago:

1-I am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance. We believe not only in universal toleration but we accept all religions as true.

2- I am proud to belong to a nation which has sheltered the persecuted and the refugees of all religions and all nations of the earth.

3- I am proud to tell you that we have gathered in our bosom the purest remnant of the Israelites, who came to Southern India and took refuge with us in the very year in which their holy temple was shattered to pieces by Roman tyranny.

4- Sectarianism, bigotry, and its horrible descendant, fanaticism, have long possessed this beautiful earth. They have filled the earth with violence, drenched it often and often with human blood, destroyed civilization and sent whole nations to despair. Had it not been for these horrible demons, human society would be far more advanced than it is now.

5- But their time is come; and I fervently hope that the bell that tolled this morning in honor of this convention may be the death-knell of all fanaticism, of all persecutions with the sword or with the pen, and of all uncharitable feelings between persons wending their way to the same goal.

6- I am a Hindu. I am sitting in my own little well and thinking that the whole world is my little well. The Christians sit in their little well and think the whole world is their well. The Muslims sit in their little well and think that is the whole world. I have to thank you of America for the great attempt you are making to break down the barriers of this little world of ours, and hope that, in the future, the Lord will help you to accomplish your purpose.

7- From the high spiritual flights of the Vedanta philosophy, of which the latest discoveries of science seem like echoes, to the low ideas of idolatry with its multifarious mythology, the agnosticism of the Buddhists and the atheism of the Jains, each and all have a place in the Hindu’s religion.

8- The Hindus have received their religion through revelation, the Vedas. They hold that the Vedas are without beginning and without end. It may sound ludicrous to this audience, how a book can be without beginning or end. But by the Vedas no books are meant. They mean the accumulated treasury of spiritual laws discovered by different persons in different times.

9- Just as the law of gravitation existed before its discovery, and would exist if all humanity forgot it, so is it with the laws that govern the spiritual relations between soul and soul and between individual spirits and the Father of all spirits were there before their discovery, and would remain even if we forgot them.

10- Here I Stand and if I shut my eyes, and try to conceive my existence, “I,” “I,” “I,” what is the idea before me? The idea of a body. Am I, then, nothing but a combination of material substances? The Vedas declare, “No” I am a spirit living in a body: I am not the body. The body will die, but I shall not die. Here I am in this body; it will fall, but shall go on living. I had also a past. The soul was not created, for creation means a combination, which means a certain future dissolution. If then the soul was created, it must die. Some are born happy, enjoy perfect health with beautiful body, mental vigor, and all wants supplied.