Quote collection
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"Poland is at the center of European civilization. It has contributed mightily to that civilization. It is doing so today by being magnificently unreconciled to oppression. Poland's struggle to be Poland and to secure the basic rights we often take for granted, demonstrates why we dare not take those rights for granted."
"Yet optimism is in order, because day by day democracy is proving itself to be a not-at-all-fragile flower. From Stettin on the Baltic to Varna on the Black Sea, the regimes planted by totalitarianism have had more than 30 years to establish their legitimacy. But none - not one regime - has yet been able to risk free elections. Regimes planted by bayonets do not take root."
"We may be the generation that sees Armageddon."
"A bird on a tether, no matter how long the rope, can always be pulled back."
"The task that has fallen to us as Americans is to move the conscience of the world, to keep alive the hope and dream of freedom. For if we fail or falter, there'll be no place for the world's oppressed to flee to. This is not a role we sought. We preach no manifest destiny. But like the Americans who brought a new nation into the world 200 years ago, history has asked much of us in our time. Much we've already given; much more we must be prepared to give."
"Concentrated power has always been the enemy of liberty. Democracy is worth dying for, because it's the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man.Entrepreneurs and their small enterprises are responsible for almost all the economic growth in the United States."
"We cannot diminish the value of one category of human life -- the unborn -- without diminishing the value of all human life . . . there is no cause more important."
"Because Vietnam was not a declared war, the veterans are not even eligible for the G. I. Bill of Rights with respect to education or anything."
"Trains are not any more energy efficient than the average automobile, with both getting about 48 passenger miles to the gallon."
"The American Petroleum Institute filed suit against the EPA [and] charged that the agency was suppressing a scientific study for fear it might be misinterpreted... The suppressed study reveals that 80 percent of air pollution comes not from chimneys and auto exhaust pipes, but from plants and trees."
"What does an actor know about politics?"
"The state of California has no business subsidizing intellectual curiosity."
"Even now I wonder what I might have accomplished if I'd studied harder"
"Our reluctance for conflict should not be misjudged as a failure of will."
"Congressional mistakes have dramatically increased immigration through a series of what I believe were ill-advised actions going back to 1965 when the basic notions of our immigration laws were revised. In 1990, Congress opened the floodgates by passing a 35-percent increase in legal immigration."
"The things that unite us-America's past of which we are so proud, our hopes and aspirations for the future of the world and this much loved country-these things far outweigh what little divides us."