Political Quotes

“I thank the gentleman for yielding, and I rise in opposition to this motion. I traveled throughout the Soviet Union to captive nations with many of you, and I rose in those nations and said to the leaders, You need to give your people self-determination. Many of you have said the same thing on this floor. You've said it about tyrant governments that have kept their peoples from practicing their own religions, from speaking their own languages, from adopting their own laws. You have spoken out against it. They were foreign nations, and it was easy to do. But now we talk about Puerto Rico, a territory of the United States of America. What Mr. Pierluisi seeks to do, what his Governor wants to do, what two-thirds of his legislature want to do--the senate and the house--is to give them the opportunity to exercise that self-determination. Now, on this floor, we have adopted an amendment, for which many have spoken, that we ought to give four alternatives rather than three. We've done that. There will now be four alternatives for the people of Puerto Rico on the second ballot. Let us now defeat this amendment designed only to defeat this bill. Hawaii was not made to do this. As the gentleman from Alaska, Don Young, will tell you and as he said on the floor, Alaska was not made to do this, and we did not ask that to occur in any one of the captive nations to which we spoke. Ronald Reagan did not ask for that. Let us not ask for it.…”