Political Quotes

“I rise today with a heavy heart to remember 19 brave men, 19 grieving families, 19 empty places in the Prescott community that will never be filled. Arizona and the entire Nation, shares in their sorrow. The loss of the members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots and the loss to the community was both terrible and swift. We are right to ask why. Why were they taken from us? Why were these seemingly fearless men, these exemplars of all that is brave, good, and decent in men, choose a job that causes them to run into an inferno just as everyone else is running away from it? In answering that, we get an essence of who these men are, these 19 lives of achievement and purpose, courage and discipline. From all corners of America, they came together in Prescott with a single goal in mind: protecting people and property. To do this, they trained relentlessly, willingly took the worst that Mother Nature could throw at them, all to save lives and homes for their friends and their neighbors. They did so accepting the risks, embracing them even, in the words of the old hymn, ``calm in distress, in danger bold.'' They did so in the name of community. Americans are characterized by the world, by our sense of communal spirit, civic duty, and service to others. This is what makes us who we are. Those characteristics describe perfectly the 19 members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots. They were not merely given the gratitude and respect of the citizens of Prescott, they earned it.…”