Political Quotes

“I would like to thank the gentleman from Rhode Island for yielding and for leading this important conversation. We come here today to call attention to a misguided turn that this administration proposes to take in our country's cultural history. I am the only Ph.D physicist in Congress, so I frequently come to the floor to speak out in defense of science and scientific research, but I am here today for another reason, to call attention to the grave threat that President Trump's budget poses to the future of our country's arts and culture. What is it that makes a country great; and how will our country be viewed a generation from now, a century from now, or in the next millennia? To answer this question, we can only look to the great nations of the past. Why was Athens great in a way that Sparta never was? Why is Florence, under the Medici, revered and remembered in a way that its forgotten competitors never are? It is because, after they defended their homeland, after they conquered their rivals in war, after they triumphed in commerce, those countries invested a significant fraction of their national wealth in things that had nothing to do with material conquest. The Medici supported the science and the art of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and the Renaissance masters; and Athens supported the immortal accomplishments of the Greek storytellers, historians, artists, and philosophers, and that is what made them great.…”