Political Quotes

“Mr. President, paraphrasing a philosopher of his era, Winston Churchill once said: Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. And I doubt that Churchill was the only one that said that. I think we quote other people saying similar things. Now, Churchill was himself a devoted student to history. The research for his multivolume biography of his ancestor, John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough, likely informed his strategic military thinking as Prime Minister during World War II. Churchill was also a fierce critic of socialism in his time, and that is the main point of my remarks today--talking about socialism. Socialism, as we know it today, is based on a different view of history than what Churchill had, a history that says we are headed in a particular direction, and you just need to see where it is heading to ``be on the right side of history.'' Socialism was thought to be the wave of the future in Churchill's time, just as it was the wave of the future when Karl Marx was writing about it in the mid-1800s. In fact, a wave is an apt analogy for socialism. Enthusiasm for socialism has crested and then crashed down many, many times in the last couple of centuries. Today, some enthusiasts are again riding high on this socialism wave. Some of them are too young to know better, while others simply refuse to learn the lessons from the previous crashes that socialism has shown us.…”