Political Quotes

“Well, I very much appreciate the little history lesson and also the shot of inspiration that you have shared with us, the idea of the shining city on a hill. I think that there are a lot of people that can be quoted. I'm thinking of good old Alexis de Tocqueville, a Frenchman who traveled around America, took a look at our system and said he looked for the secret of America's greatness. And he had a great quote along those lines, but one of the things he said was: You have a weakness in America, and that is, if the public realizes that they can vote themselves largesse out of the public treasury, you're really going to be in trouble. There's another name for that. It's called socialism; the idea that voters can demand the Federal Government to keep giving them more and more stuff. The problem with that system is that eventually you run out of other people's money. That was one of the great weaknesses that Alexis de Tocqueville saw with our system, that because we are a self-governing people, because people have the right to vote, they can also make irresponsible votes and they can perpetuate a socialistic system. A lot of Americans don't really know what socialism means anymore. They don't understand that the concept of American law was that people are all equal before the law, that Lady Justice is not supposed to give a special deal to a rich person or a poor person or anybody else, that people are all equal before the law. The Pilgrims experimented with socialism.…”