Remarks to the Lyndon B. Johnson Australian Science Scholars.

Dr. Hornig, Mr. Duggan, Professor Messel, Mr. Deer and Mr. Whitmer, my delightful young friends:

We are very glad to see you, and we want to pay you a very special warm welcome to the White House.

I was glad to hear that 20 of the brightest young students from three countries were visiting the White House today. Your visit comes at a very critical time. These are difficult days.

Therefore, I am especially glad that you have a chance to have an experience here at this time.

I want to take advantage of every opportunity I can to meet with young people, and to let them observe what this country stands for, and what it believes in, and what it is doing, and also hear from you on your views of the world that we are living in.

In a great poem an old sailor urged his followers:

"To follow knowledge like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought."

That really is what you are about to do. You are beginning a great voyage, a voyage to explore a new and an extremely exciting field of knowledge, man in inner and outer space.

I don't think there is anything I need to tell you about how important this journey is. I think that you know today that almost nothing is more important in all this world than trained intelligence.

There is one thing that matters more though, and there is one thing that is more important than all of man's knowledge and all of man's skill. That one thing we need to concentrate on and try to develop every day-that one thing is better human understanding.

At a time when nations are quarreling, when divisions of race and class and religion trouble 'people everywhere, when there is a general restlessness among the youth of all lands, when there is an insecure feeling among many, many peoples, when mighty armies can cross borders and people are not sure of what tomorrow holds for them-then your journey is an important one because the trip that you are beginning, in my judgment, offers great promise to increase and to enrich and to promote better understanding between men and between nations.

For that I am very grateful--to you and to Dr. Messel and to the Science Foundation and Sydney University and to the wonderful people of Australia. That is a great and that is a friendly land and I treasure my associations with that country and with those people.

I hope all of you have a good trip. I wish I could go with you. I know your experiences will be of great profit to you and, I believe, your country. I hope they will be pleasant ones, too. It would be wonderful to be your age again on a mission like yours.

Thank you very much.