Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
We seem bent upon saving the Vietnamese from Ho Chi Minh, even if we have to kill them and demolish their country to do it....I do not intend to remain silent in the face of what I regard as a policy of madness which, sooner or later, will envelop my son and American youth by the millions for years to come.
And this is the time. It is the time for this land to become again a witness to the world for what is noble and just in human affairs. It is the time to live more with faith and less with fear- with an abiding confidence that can sweep away the strongest barriers between us and teach us that we truly are brothers and sisters.
If we are willing to concede the President dictatorial authority where we happen to agree with him, as liberals have tended to do over the years, we will have little chance of tying his hands when we do not....You will see why many of us in the Congress understand how Dr. Frankenstein must have felt when his creation ran amok.
It doesn t require any particular bravery to stand on the floor of the Senate and urge our boys in Vietnam to fight harder and if this war mushrooms into a major conflict and a hundred thousand young Americans are killed it won t be U.S. Senators who die. It will be American soldiers who are too young to qualify for the Senate.
To those who charge that liberalism has been tried and found wanting, I answer that the failure is not in the idea, but in the course of recent history. The New Deal was ended by World War II. The New Frontier was closed by Berlin and Cuba almost before it was opened. And the Great Society lost its greatness in the jungles of Indochina.
And above all, above all, honest work must be rewarded by a fair and just tax system. The tax system today does not reward hard work: it penalizes it. Inherited or invested wealth frequently multiplies itself while paying no taxes at all. But wages on the assembly line or in farming the land, these hard-earned dollars are taxed to the very last penny.
The earth has enough knowledge and resources to eradicate this ancient scourge. Hunger has plagued the world for thousands of years. But ending it is a greater moral imperative now than ever before, because for the first time humanity has the instruments at hand to defeat this cruel enemy at a very reasonable cost. We have the ability to provide food for all within the next three decades.
I don't think the American people had a clear picture of either Nixon or me. I think they thought that Nixon was a strong, decisive, tough-minded guy and that I was an idealist and antiwar guy who might not attach enough significance to the security of the country. The truth is, I was the guy with the war record, and my opposition to Vietnam was because I was interested in the nation's well-being.
From secrecy and deception in high places; come home, America. From military spending so wasteful that it weakens our nation; come home, America. From the entrenchment of special privileges in tax favoritism; from the waste of idle lands to the joy of useful labor; from the prejudice based on race and sex; from the loneliness of the aging poor and the despair of the neglected sick - come home, America.