Madonna’s speech in Stockholm

The Madonna concert in Stockholm was already set to be one-of-a-kind Rebel Heart Tour show – the Tele 2 Arena is actually a stadium with a retractable roof, making it the biggest tour venue with an audience of more than 40,500 fans – but the Paris attacks gave to the night a deeper and even more unique vibe.

Here is what Madonna told the audience, after the 80’s Medley, and before performing Like a Prayer.

Obviously this whole show is about celebrating life and standing up for your rights, fighting for what you believe in, it’s been really hard for me to go through this show up to this point and not forget about what happened last night, so I need to take this moment to acknowledge the tragedy, the tragic killings, assassinations and the senseless endings of precious lives that occured last night in Paris.

It’s disturbed me all day, it’s been really hard actually to get through the show because in many ways I feel torn like why I’m dancing?, having fun when people are crying over the loss of their loved ones. However that is excately what theses people want to do, they want to shut us up, they want to silence us and we won’t let them, we will never let them because there is power in unity I do believe there is much chaos and pain and senseless violence and terrorism that occurs around this world not just in Paris as much as that it does occur there is much goodness in this world.

We are here to prove it.

I was gonna cancel my show tonight and i thought to myself why I should give that to them? Why I should allow them to stop ME? And to stop us from enjoying freedom. All the places where people were killed were places for people having fun, people were enjoying themselves, eating at restaurants, dancing, singing, watching a soccer match. These are freedoms we take for granted of course and we must not but these are freedoms we deserve. We work hard, we deserve to have fun. And there is no one in this world who should have the right to stop us from doing what we love.

Another important point that I wanna make is that there are people who have respect for human life and there are people who do atrocious, degrading and unforgivable things to other human beings but we will never ever ever change this world that we are living in if we do not change ourselves, if we do not change the way we treat one another on a daily basis. The way we change the world is not to elect another president, not to kill a hundred more people. The way to change the world is that we change the way we treat one another on a daily basis in the simplest ways. Ok? We must start treating every human being with dignity and respect. And this is the only thing that we change the world. This is the only thing. Only love will change the world. But it’s very hard to love, unconditionnaly. And it’s very hard to love that which we do not understand, love that which is different that we are but we have to or this will go on and on for ever.

Now before we do go on, I would like to have a moment of silence where all of us just for one minute bow our heads in respect and say a prayer for the victims who died last night in Paris and for the families of those victims, please a moment of silence…

Madonna, 11/14/2015, Stockholm

Thanks to our  Team members Sam from MadonnaTribe France for the transcript, and Neil for the picture.