In 1974, the International Chess Federation adopted as its motto gens una sumus, the Latin phrase which means that we human beings are all of one family. It's easy to see how this idea applies to chess players. The board makes everyone equal before its clearly defined rules. The players may speak different languages, but on the chessboard they all use the same idiom. Nationality, sex, skin color, temperament - all make no difference to what happens in the course of the game. Though gens una sumus has never been formally adopted by the United Nations, it's by now the unofficial ethos of that body, and the European Union committed to something very similar when in 1985 it adopted the "Ode to Joy," Beethoven's setting of Friedrich Schiller's early poem "An die Freude," as its anthem. Schiller's text includes the telling words: "Alle Menschen werden Brüder" - all men become brothers.
- From A Short History of Relations Between Peoples: How the World Began to Move Beyond Tribalism by John M. Ellis
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