Activists From The United States

"In the past couple years, I have seen many news items that referred to the Moral Majority, prolife and other religious groups as "the new right," and the "new conservatism." Well, I have spent quite a number of years carrying the flag of the old conservatism. And I can say with conviction that the religious issues of these groups have little or nothing to do with conservative or liberal politics. The uncompromising position of these groups is a divisive element that could tear apart the very spirit of our representative system, if they gain sufficient strength. As it is, they are diverting us away from the vital issues that our Government needs to address. Far too much of the time of members of Congress and officials in the Executive Branch is used up dealing with special-interest groups on issues like abortion, school busing, ERA, prayer in the schools and pornography. While these are important moral issues, they are secondary right now to our national security and economic survival."

"I must make it clear that I don't condemn these groups for what they believe. I happen to share many of the values emphasized by these organizations. I'm frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in "A," "B," "C" and "D." Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of "conservatism." … This unrelenting obsession with a particular goal destroys the perspective of many decent people. They have become easy prey to manipulation and misjudgment."

"The religious factions will go on imposing their will on others unless the decent people connected to them recognize that religion has no place in public policy. They must learn to make their views known without trying to make their views the only alternatives. The great decisions of Government cannot be dictated by the concerns of religious factions. This was true in the days of Madison, and it is just as true today. We have succeeded for 205 years in keeping the affairs of state separate from the uncompromising idealism of religious groups and we mustn't stop now. To retreat from that separation would violate the principles of conservatism and the values upon which the framers built this democratic republic."

"Johnson was a dirty fighter. Any campaign with him in it would involve a lot of innuendo and lies. Johnson was a wheeler-dealer. Neither he nor anyone else could change that. That's what he was. And Johnson was a treacherous boot. He'd slap you on the back today and stab you in the back tomorrow. Moreover, LBJ was dull. He was a lousy public speaker. The man didn't believe half of what he said. He was a hypocrite, and it came through in the hollowness of his speech. LBJ made me sick."

"Vietnam is about halfway around the world from Washington. It's as large as the major European nations, with nearly 130,000 square miles... Its ancient recorded history goes back to 111 B.C... We entered (that country) with considerable ignorance."

"I told Johnson and old colleagues on Capitol Hill that we had two clear choices. Either win the [[Vietnam War|[Vietnam] war]] in a relatively short time, say within a year, or pull out all our troops and come home."

"When you say "radical right" today, I think of these moneymaking ventures by fellows like Pat Robertson and others who are trying to take the Republican Party away from the Republican Party, and make a religious organization out of it. If that ever happens, kiss politics goodbye."

"I said one day that Dole had a temper, and he got madder than hell. He has one. He has a mean one."

"The best thing Clinton could do — I think I wrote him a letter about this, but I'm not sure — is to shut up.... He has no discipline."

"The big thing is to make this country, along with every other country in the world with a few exceptions, quit discriminating against people just because they're gay. You don't have to agree with it, but they have a constitutional right to be gay. And that's what brings me into it."

"Having spent 37 years of my life in the military as a reservist, and never having met a gay in all of that time, and never having even talked about it in all those years, I just thought, why the hell shouldn't they serve? They're American citizens. As long as they're not doing things that are harmful to anyone else... So I came out for it."

"A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have."

"Where fraternities are not allowed, communism flourishes."

"In your heart you know he's right."

"Goldwater started this whole notion of a right wing in America and he did it with an honesty that the politicians who succeeded him cannot tolerate. When they won all these elections, including knocking my friend Cuomo out in New York, not one of them mentioned Goldwater's name."

"He was truly an American original … I never knew anybody quite like him … he was uncommonly kind to me and to Hillary. I always came away … with the impression that he was a great patriot and a truly fine human being."

"He was your friend forever, but if your opponent, an implacable foe. He never changed."

"I'm liberal up to a degree, I think everybody should be free, but if you think I'll let Barry Goldwater move in next door and marry my daughter, you must think I'm crazy. I wouldn't let him do it for all the farms in Cuba."

"Anticommunism, militarism, and states rights (anti-civil rights) formed Goldwater's ideology."

"Unlike nearly every other politician who ever lived, anywhere in the world, Barry Goldwater always said exactly what was on his mind. He spared his listeners nothing."

"The central fact that must be recognized in any discussion of political tactics today is that Goldwater's nomination in 1964 pushed all politics to the right.... The Ultra Right is working for a political realignment on its terms, based upon the appeal to hysterical anti-Communism and to the "white backlash.""

"The Republican primary battles in California in 1962 foreshadowed the Goldwater presidential nomination of 1964, just as Goldwater's campaign led to Reagan's rise to power, first in California and then in national politics. Three Republican congressional nominees in 1962 publicly identified themselves as members of the Birch Society. All three went down to defeat in the fall election, as did Richard Nixon in his race for the governor's seat against the incumbent Democrat Pat Brown (which prompted Nixon's famous promise to the press, later reneged on, that "You won't have Dick Nixon to kick around any more"). On the surface, liberals had much to cheer about in those results, but in fact they marked an ominous new development. From here on, in order to win a Republican primary in California, a candidate would have to satisfy the ideological demands of the far Right."

"I am compelled to urge Negroes and all people of goodwill to vote against him. His election would be a tragedy and certainly, suicidal almost for the nation and the world."

"[Barry Goldwater was] one of the giants of 20th century American politics... [he] blazed the trail for the type of conservatism that has dominated government for the better part of three decades."

"America, the only nation ever founded in the name of liberty, never had a more ardent champion of liberty than Barry Goldwater. Simply put, Barry Goldwater was in love with freedom."

"Think of a senator winning the Democratic nomination in the year 2000 whose positions included halving the military budget, socializing the medical system, re-regulating the communications and electrical industries, establishing a guaranteed minimum income for all Americans, and equalizing funding for all schools regardless of property valuations — and who promised to fire Alan Greenspan, counseled withdrawal from the World Trade Organization, and, for good measure, spoke warmly of adolescent sexual experimentation. He would lose in a landslide. He would be relegated to the ash heap of history. But if the precedent of 1964 were repeated, two years later the country would begin electing dozens of men and women just like him. And not many decades later, Republicans would have to proclaim softer versions of those positions to get taken seriously for their party’s nomination."

"It was both unfortunate and disastrous that the Republican Party nominated Barry Goldwater as its candidate for President of the United States. In foreign policy Mr. Goldwater advocated a narrow nationalism, a crippling isolationism, and a trigger-happy attitude that could plunge the whole world into the dark abyss of annihilation. On social and economic issues, Mr. Goldwater represented an unrealistic conservatism that was totally out of touch with the realities of the twentieth century. The issue of poverty compelled the attention of all citizens of our country. Senator Goldwater had neither the concern nor the comprehension necessary to grapple with this problem of poverty in the fashion that the historical moment dictated. On the urgent issue of civil rights, Senator Goldwater represented a philosophy that was morally indefensible and socially suicidal. While not himself a racist, Mr. Goldwater articulated a philosophy which gave aid and comfort to the racist. His candidacy and philosophy would serve as an umbrella under which extremists of all stripes would stand. In the light of these facts and because of my love for America, I had no alternative but to urge every Negro and white person of goodwill to vote against Mr. Goldwater and to withdraw support from any Republican candidate that did not publicly disassociate himself from Senator Goldwater and his philosophy."

"Our Democratic opponents seem unwilling to debate these issues. They want to make you and I believe that this is a contest between two men—that we’re to choose just between two personalities. Well what of this man that they would destroy—and in destroying, they would destroy that which he represents, the ideas that you and I hold so dear? Is he the brash and shallow and trigger-happy man they say he is? Well I’ve been privileged to know him ‘when.’ I knew him long before he ever dreamed of trying for high office, and I can tell you personally I’ve never known a man in my life I believed so incapable of doing a dishonest or dishonorable thing. This is a man who, in his own business before he entered politics, instituted a profit-sharing plan before unions had ever thought of it. He put in health and medical insurance for all his employees. He took 50 percent of the profits before taxes and set up a retirement program, a pension plan for all his employees. He sent monthly checks for life to an employee who was ill and couldn’t work. He provides nursing care for the children of mothers who work in the stores. When Mexico was ravaged by the floods in the Rio Grande, he climbed in his airplane and flew medicine and supplies down there. An ex-GI told me how he met him. It was the week before Christmas during the Korean War, and he was at the Los Angeles airport trying to get a ride home to Arizona for Christmas. And he said that a lot of servicemen there and no seats available on the planes. And then a voice came over the loudspeaker and said, ‘Any men in uniform wanting a ride to Arizona, go to runway such-and-such,’ and they went down there, and there was a fellow named Barry Goldwater sitting in his plane. Every day in those weeks before Christmas, all day long, he’d load up the plane, fly it to Arizona, fly them to their homes, fly back over to get another load. During the hectic split-seocnd timing of a campaign, this is a man who took time out to sit beside an old friend who was dying of cancer. His campaign managers were understandably impatient, but he said ‘There aren’t many left who care what happens to her. I’d like her to know I care.’ This is a man who said to his 19-year-old son, ‘There is no foundation like the rock of honesty and fairness, and when you begin to build your life on that rock, with the cement of the faith in God that you have, then you have a real start.’ This is not a man who could carelessly send other people’s sons to war. And that is not the issue of this campaign that makes all the other problems I’ve discussed academic, unless we realize we’re in a war that must be won."

"Low education and low intelligence, Goldwater once declared to the delight of his equally well-upholstered followers, are the real causes of poverty. One wonders what he, who did not last out more than one year of college, would have done if a family fortune and a family business did not await him back home."

"The Goldwaterite picture of themselves, as of their hero, is as distant from reality as the rest of the private universe they are defending. The frontier virtues they claim to embody are as synthetic as the frontier they inhabit. Their desert is air-conditioned and landscaped; their covered wagons are Cadillacs; their chaps are from Abercrombie & Fitch; their money, like their candidate’s, is mostly inherited from grandpappy, or acquired with their wives. In their favorite campaign photos, on that horse and under that ten-gallon Stetson, looking into the setting sun, is no cowboy or even rancher but a Phoenix storekeeper. The Western trade he caters to, in business as in politics, is dude ranch."

"Half a century after Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona rose to prominence by opposing civil-rights legislation designed to dismantle Jim Crow, the Republican Party's shift toward nativism foreclosed another path, not just to ethnic diversity but to the moderation and tolerance that sharing power with those unlike you requires."

"In nominating Goldwater, the Republicans backed a candidate who equated Social Security with socialism, opposed the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a violation of states' rights, and denounced as pusillanimous the bipartisan anticommunist foreign policy of containment. As one of his supporters, Phyllis Schlafly (who was then still obscure), put it in the title of a best-selling campaign tract, Goldwater offered the country "a choice, not an echo." Yet the hard-right Republican crusade seemed to fall apart in November, when Kennedy's successor, Lyndon Johnson, who had pledged to continue the policies of the New Frontier, crushed Goldwater in the greatest popular landslide to that time in presidential politics."

"At the end of a long campaign, I believe I know the people of our state as well as anyone. Based on this knowledge of Georgians North and South, Rural and Urban, liberal and conservative, I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over."

"I guess I always had wanted ultimately to be Chief of Naval Operations. But when I went back home to where I had lived, and when I saw what my father's life had meant in the view of those who knew him best, his service on the school board, his work for the new hospital, his dealing with the education of farmers, his life in the church, and his life in politics- he had just been elected to the legislature and had served one year when he died- I could feel a pull on me that was almost irresistible to go back and renew my ties to my birthplace. I felt I had to make the choice. Did I want to be Chief of Naval Operations, and devote my whole life to that narrowly-defined career, which was a good one, or did I want to go back and build a more diverse life with a lot of friends, and have permanent stability in a community, an integral part in the life of a whole group of people? And I chose the latter. Regrets? None at all."

"We should live our lives as though Christ were coming this afternoon."

"I have nothing against a community that is made up of people who are Polish, or who are Czechoslovakians, or who are French Canadians or who are blacks trying to maintain the ethnic purity of their neighborhoods. This is a natural inclination. … Government should not break up a neighborhood on a numerical basis. As soon as the Government does, the white folks flee."

"I've looked on many women with lust. I've committed adultery in my heart many times. This is something that God recognizes I will do — and I have done it — and God forgives me for it.""

"Sometimes we try to justify this unsavory business on the cynical ground that by rationing out the means of violence we can somehow control the world’s violence. The fact is that we cannot have it both ways. Can we be both the world’s leading champion of peace and the world’s leading supplier of the weapons of war?"

"My name is Jimmy Carter, and I’m running for President. It’s been a long time since I said those words the first time, and now I’ve come here after seeing our great country to accept your nomination."

"There is a new mood in America. We have been shaken by a tragic war abroad and by scandals and broken promises at home. Our people are searching for new voices and new ideas and new leaders. Although government has its limits and cannot solve all our problems, we Americans reject the view that we must be reconciled to failures and mediocrity, or to an inferior quality of life. For I believe that we can come through this time of trouble stronger than ever. Like troops who have been in combat, we have been tempered in the fire; we have been disciplined, and we have been educated. Guided by lasting and simple moral values, we have emerged idealists without illusions, realists who still know the old dreams of justice and liberty, of country and of community."

"Any system of economics is bankrupt if it sees either value or virtue in unemployment. We simply cannot check inflation by keeping people out of work.."

"Our nation should always derive its character directly from the people and let this be the strength and the image to be presented to the world — the character of the American people. To our friends and allies I say that what unites us through our common dedication to democracy is much more important than that which occasionally divides us on economics or politics. To the nations that seek to lift themselves from poverty I say that America shares your aspirations and extends its hand to you. To those nation-states that wish to compete with us I say that we neither fear competition nor see it as an obstacle to wider cooperation. To all people I say that after two hundred years America still remains confident and youthful in its commitment to freedom and equality, and we always will be."

"I see an America on the move again, united, a diverse and vital and tolerant nation, entering our third century with pride and confidence, an America that lives up to the majesty of our Constitution and the simple decency of our people. This is the America we want. This is the America that we will have."

"A strong nation, like a strong person, can afford to be gentle, firm, thoughtful, and restrained. It can afford to extend a helping hand to others."

"The destruction was mutual. We went to Vietnam without any desire to capture territory or impose American will on other people. I don't feel that we ought to apologize or castigate ourselves or to assume the status of culpability."

"Democracy’s great recent successes — in India, Portugal, Spain, Greece — show that our confidence in this system is not misplaced. Being confident of our own future, we are now free of that inordinate fear of communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in that fear. I’m glad that that’s being changed. For too many years, we’ve been willing to adopt the flawed and erroneous principles and tactics of our adversaries, sometimes abandoning our own values for theirs. We’ve fought fire with fire, never thinking that fire is better quenched with water. This approach failed, with Vietnam the best example of its intellectual and moral poverty. But through failure we have now found our way back to our own principles and values, and we have regained our lost confidence."

"Penalties against drug use should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself. Nowhere is this more clear than in the laws against the possession of marijuana in private for personal use."

"We cast this message into the cosmos. It is likely to survive a billion years into our future, when our civilization is profoundly altered and the surface of the Earth may be vastly changed. Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some — perhaps many – may have inhabited planets and spacefaring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message:"

"For myself and for our Nation, I want to thank my predecessor for all he has done to heal our land. In this outward and physical ceremony we attest once again to the inner and spiritual strength of our Nation."

"Ours was the first society openly to define itself in terms of both spirituality and of human liberty. It is that unique self-definition which has given us an exceptional appeal, but it also imposes on us a special obligation, to take on those moral duties which, when assumed, seem invariably to be in our own best interests."