Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I speak for the first time from the Senate floor with a simple message: The world is growing ever more dangerous and our defense spending is wholly inadequate to confront the danger. To be exact: During the last four or five years the world has grown gravely darker. . . . We have steadily disarmed, partly with a sincere desire to give a lead to other countries, and partly through the severe financial pressure of the time. But a change must now be made. We must not continue longer on a course in which we alone are growing weaker while every other nation is growing stronger. I wish I could take credit for those eloquent and ominous words, but I cannot. Winston Churchill sounded that warning in 1933, as Adolph Hitler had taken power in Germany. Tragically, Great Britain and the West did not heed this warning when they might have strangled that monster in his crib. Rather than let the locusts continue to eat away at the common defense, the Axis Powers were stronger and the West weaker, conciliating with and appeasing them, hoping their appetite for conquest and death might be sated. As we all know, however, that appetite only grew until it launched the most terrible war in human history. Today, perhaps more tragically because we ought to benefit from those lessons of history, the United States is again engaged in something of a grand experiment of the kind we saw in the 1930s. As then, military strength is seen in many quarters as a cause of military adventurism.…”