From Ronald Reagan's "A Time for Choosing" speech, October 27, 1964 ...
Not too long ago, two friends of mine were talking to a
Cuban refugee, a businessman who had escaped from Castro, and in the midst of
his story one of my friends turned to the other and said, "We don't know
how lucky we are." And the Cuban stopped and said, "How lucky you
are? I had someplace to escape to." And in that sentence he told us the
entire story. If we lose freedom here, there's no place to escape to. This is
the last stand on earth.
And this idea that government is beholden to the people,
that it has no other source of power except the sovereign people, is still the
newest and the most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation
to man.
This is the issue of this election: whether we believe in
our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution
and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol can plan
our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.
You and I are told increasingly we have to choose between a
left or right. Well I'd like to suggest there is no such thing as a left or
right. There's only an up or down: [up] man's old -- old-aged dream, the
ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the
ant heap of totalitarianism. And regardless of their sincerity, their
humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have
embarked on this downward course.
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