VOICES THAT CARE
Ronald Reagan First Inaugural Address 1981
We have every right to dream heroic dreams.
Those who say that we’re in a time when there are no heroes — they just don’t know where to look. You can see heroes every day going in and out of factory gates. Others, a handful in number, produce enough food to feed all of us and then the world beyond. You meet heroes across a counter — and they’re on both sides of that counter. There are entrepreneurs with faith in themselves and faith in an idea who create new jobs, new wealth and opportunity.
Now I have used the words “they” and “their” in speaking of these heroes. I could say “you” and “your” because I’m addressing the heroes of whom I speak — you, the citizens of this blessed land. Your dreams, your hopes, your goals are going to be the dreams, the hopes, and the goals of this Administration, so help me God.
Ronald Reagan Change Your World Speech 1983
It was C.S. Lewis who, in his unforgettable Screw Tape Letters, wrote: “The greatest evil is not done now in those sordid ‘dens of crime’ that Dickens loved to paint. It is not even done in concentration camps and labor camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered; moved, seconded, carried and minuted in clear, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.”
Well, because these quiet men do not raise their voices, because they sometimes speak in soothing tones of brotherhood and peace, because, like other dictators before them, they’re always making “their final territorial demand,” some would have us accept them at their word and accommodate ourselves to their aggressive impulses. But if history teaches anything, it teaches that simpleminded appeasement or wishful thinking about our adversaries is folly. It means the betrayal of our past, the squandering of our freedom.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt The Great Arsenal of Democracy 1940
Let us no longer blind ourselves to the undeniable fact that the evil forces which have crushed and undermined and corrupted so many others are already within our own gates. Your government knows much about them and every day is ferreting them out. Their secret emissaries are active in our own and in neighboring countries. They seek to stir up suspicion and dissension, to cause internal strife. They try to turn capital against labor, and vice versa. They try to reawaken long slumbering racial and religious enmities which should have no place in this country. They are active in every group that promotes intolerance. They exploit for their own ends our own natural abhorrence of war. These trouble-breeders have but one purpose. It is to divide our people, to divide them into hostile groups and to destroy our unity and shatter our will to defend ourselves.
We have no excuse for defeatism. We have every good reason for hope — hope for peace, yes, and hope for the defense of our civilization and for the building of a better civilization in the future.
Huey P. Long Every Man a King 1934
Then we have heard of the great Greek philosopher, Socrates, and the greater Greek philosopher, Plato, and we have read the dialog between Plato and Socrates, in which one said that great riches brought on great poverty, and would be destructive of a country. Read what they said. Read what Plato said; that you must not let any one man be too poor, and you must not let any one man be too rich; that the same mill that grinds out the extra rich is the mill that will grind out the extra poor, because, in order that the extra rich can become so affluent, they must necessarily take more of what ordinarily would belong to the average man.
Russell Conwell Acres of Diamonds 1900-1925
“The love of money is the root of all evil.” He who tries to attain unto it too quickly, or dishonestly, will fall into many snares, no doubt about that. The love of money. What is that? It is making an idol of money, and idolatry pure and simple every where is condemned by the Holy Scriptures and by man’s common sense. The man that worships the dollar instead of thinking of the purposes for which it ought to be used, the man who idolizes simply money, the miser that hordes his money in the cellar, or hides it in his staking, or refuses to invest it where it will do the world good, that man who hugs the dollar until the eagle squeals has in him the root of all evil.
General Douglas MacArthur West Point 1962
Duty, Honor, Country: Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying points: to build courage when courage seems to fail; to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith; to create hope when hope becomes forlorn.
They make you strong enough to know when you are weak, and brave enough to face yourself when you are afraid. They teach you to be proud and unbending in honest failure, but humble and gentle in success; not to substitute words for actions, not to seek the path of comfort, but to face the stress and spur of difficulty and challenge; to learn to stand up in the storm but to have compassion on those who fall; to master yourself before you seek to master others; to have a heart that is clean, a goal that is high; to learn to laugh, yet never forget how to weep; to reach into the future yet never neglect the past; to be serious yet never to take yourself too seriously; to be modest so that you will remember the simplicity of true greatness, the open mind of true wisdom, the meekness of true strength.
Dwight D. Eisenhower Farewell Address 1961
To all the peoples of the world, I once more give expression to America’s prayerful and continuing aspiration: We pray that peoples of all faiths, all races, all nations, may have their great human needs satisfied; that those now denied opportunity shall come to enjoy it to the full; that all who yearn for freedom may experience its few spiritual blessings. Those who have freedom will understand, also, its heavy responsibility; that all who are insensitive to the needs of others will learn charity; and that the sources — scourges of poverty, disease, and ignorance will be made [to] disappear from the earth; and that in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love.
The fool who has not sense to discriminate between what is good and what is bad is well nigh as dangerous as the man who does discriminate and yet chooses the bad. There is nothing more distressing to every good patriot, to every good American, than the hard, scoffing spirit which treats the allegation of dishonesty in a public man as a cause for laughter. Such laughter is worse than the crackling of thorns under a pot, for it denotes not merely the vacant mind, but the heart in which high emotions have been choked before they could grow to fruition.
Theodore Roosevelt The Man with the Muck-rake 1906
There is any amount of good in the world, and there never was a time when loftier and more disinterested work for the betterment of mankind was being done than now. The forces that tend for evil are great and terrible, but the forces of truth and love and courage and honesty and generosity and sympathy are also stronger than ever before. It is a foolish and timid, no less than a wicked thing, to blink the fact that the forces of evil are strong, but it is even worse to fail to take into account the strength of the forces that tell for good.
I’ve Been to the Mountaintop 1968
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness. One day a man came to Jesus, and he wanted to raise some questions about some vital matters of life. At points he wanted to trick Jesus, and show him that he knew a little more than Jesus knew and throw him off base….
Now that question could have easily ended up in a philosophical and theological debate. But Jesus immediately pulled that question from mid-air, and placed it on a dangerous curve between Jerusalem and Jericho. And he talked about a certain man, who fell among thieves. You remember that a Levite and a priest passed by on the other side. They didn’t stop to help him. And finally a man of another race came by. He got down from his beast, decided not to be compassionate by proxy. But he got down with him, administered first aid, and helped the man in need. Jesus ended up saying, this was the good man, this was the great man, because he had the capacity to project the “I” into the “thou,” and to be concerned about his brother.
Let us rise up tonight with a greater readiness. Let us stand with a greater determination. And let us move on in these powerful days, these days of challenge to make America what it ought to be. We have an opportunity to make America a better nation.
Kalle Lasn as quoted in Inquiring Mind 2002
…right now our culture is manufacturing desire at an unprecedented rate, and I would guess that well over half of us have already been recruited into the consumer cult. Our lives are centered on TV, which then hypes us to want cars, foods, fashions and spectacle. We have embraced consumerism as a religion, and our salvation now lies in how much we own and consume. I think it is very important to challenge this religion. After meditating to calm our inner selves, some of the rougher souls among us should venture out into the world and try to change the external circumstances that are creating so much chaos and suffering.
Someone has to do it. From the time we are little babies crawling around the TV set, through adulthood and into old age, we are bombarded by commercial messages. Three thousand marketing messages a day now flow into the average North American brain, and marketers use focus groups and pay huge fees to psychologists, survey teams and researchers to discover the most effective ways to reach us emotionally. We are guinea pigs in one of the biggest psychological experiments in history.
Your living room is the factory; the product being manufactured is you.
All of us somehow felt that the next battleground was going to be culture. We all felt somehow that our culture had been stolen from us – by commercial forces, by advertising agencies, by TV broadcasters. It felt like we were no longer singing our songs and telling stories, and generating our culture from the bottom up, but now we were somehow being spoon-fed this commercial culture top down.”
American culture is no longer created by the people… A free, authentic life is no longer possible in AmericaTM today. We are being manipulated in the most insidious way. Our emotions, personalities and core values are under siege from media and cultural forces too complex to decode. A continuous product message has woven itself into the very fabric of our existence. Most North Americans now live designer lives-sleep, eat, sit in car, work, shop, watch TV, sleep again. I doubt there’s more than a handful of free, spontaneous minutes anywhere in that cycle. We ourselves have been branded.
From – the writings of Kalle Lasn
The story in America was a vibrant, bottoms-up democracy subverted by corporations and financial speculators. Those people now control much of the narrative. They also control the congressmen and the legislation that’s passed in Washington.
An increasing number of people are growing uncomfortable with the gulf between the world’s rich and the poor. Ostentatiously splashing your money around simply draws attention to that disparity, and to your own position on the lucky higher ground. It suggests a callousness, an inhumanity, a let’s-just-rub-their-noses-in-it arrogance.
There is a profound injustice at the heart of the American economy. You look at the media and realize that these corporate-run commercial entities are failing to give Americans the information they need to make informed choices. You look at the food we’re eating and the obesity epidemic and realize there is something fundamentally wrong about our nutritional habits. So across the board there is something fundamentally unjust about every aspect of our personal lives.
From – the writings of Kalle Lasn
It shouldn’t have happened. People at the time knew that it was wrong, that it was illegal, and that it was unconstitutional, but they did it anyway. It was wrong on both moral and legal grounds.
- It was morally wrong because of the loss of life, between one-quarter and one-third was lost.
- It was morally wrong because the arguments used to justify the move were based on falsehood.
- It stripped property rights from a minority that lacked the means to defend itself and redistributed their property to people who wanted it for themselves.
- It was legally wrong on Constitutional and judicial grounds.
- It was based, in part, on an invalid contract.
There were people who stood against it. They were unable to change U.S. policy, but their words speak to us today. They suggest that we can’t look aside and ignore something that was just part of the mindset. A group had power gained at the expense of a minority unable to defend itself. The rights of individuals against the tyranny of the majority.
It had a name. It was called the Trail of Tears. Forced Relocations. Landowners forcibly removed from their ancestral homelands. Carried out by government authorities. The relocated people suffered from exposure, disease, and starvation. It was a death march. Families described it as the “Trail Where We Cried”. The tragic and brutal removal of five Indigenous nations. A shameful and indelible scar on the body politic of this country. But it was also the people who witnessed the sorrowful, suffering movement of innocents passing through their towns who were moved to tears.
Historian Amy Sturgis Learn Liberty April 2, 2012
I have a secret plan to destroy America. if you believe, as many do, that America is too smug, too white bread, too self-satisfied, too rich, lets destroy America. It is not that hard to do. History shows that nations are more fragile than their citizens think. No nation in history has survived the ravages of time. Arnold Toynbee observed that all great civilizations rise, and they all fall, and that “an autopsy of history would show that all great nations commit suicide.” here is my plan:
- Encourage immigrants to keep their own language and culture. Have cultural subgroups enforce their differences rather than their similarities
- Make it a belief that all cultures are equal; that Black and Hispanic dropout rates are due solely to prejudice and discrimination by the majority.
- Make our fastest growing demographic group the least educated. Have a 50% dropout rate from high school.
4. Get minorities think their lack of success was the fault of the majority. Start a grievance industry blaming minority failure on the majority.
5. Have dual citizenship and promote divided loyalties. Celebrate diversity over unity and differences rather than similarities.6. Make it impossible to enforce our immigration laws.
-Paraphrased and Taken from the speech “I Have a Plan to Destroy America” by Richard D. Lamm, former Democratic governor of Colorado, 2005
The most perfect speech ever uttered by mortal man was delivered on the battlefield of Gettysburg. It has been learned by millions of children in school:
Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address