Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, tomorrow, May 8, marks 80 years since Nazi Germany surrendered to America and its Allies. Victory in Europe, known as VE Day, came at a tremendous price: hundreds of thousands of Americans and millions of others dead, many more physically maimed and mentally scarred, an indeterminate amount of treasure exhausted, and a continent reduced to ruin. On that day, Mr. Speaker, President Truman said that the only way to repay that debt was through ``ceaseless devotion . . . to build an abiding peace, a peace rooted in justice and in law.'' He said, ``We can build such a peace only by hard, toilsome, painstaking work--by understanding and working with our allies in peace as we have in war.'' Mr. Speaker, I was born just a few months before that war began. I was only 5 years old when Truman said those words. I have lived my entire life virtually amid the abiding peace he envisioned all those years ago. I have lived my entire life knowing that America was the world's most consequential nation. I have lived my entire life believing that America was also the nation most committed to freedom, democracy, free markets, and self-determination, even if our deeds sometimes fell short of those goals. The Pax Americana that began in 1945 was not inevitable. As Truman said, it took hard, toilsome, painstaking work not only by the Greatest Generation that saw the horrors of World War II but also the generations that have followed.…”