Throughout the world, our insistence on individual freedom and opportunity has been at the bottom of what people think when they hear the very word 'American.'
The insistence on truthfulness does not disturb the freedom of the individual. The social obligation implied in Satyagraha turns the freedom of the individual into moral freedom. An atheist is free to say or to do what he likes, provided he does what he says and says what he does. So, in the context of social relations, the freedom of the individual is moral freedom.
Throughout American history, there have been moments that call on us to meet the challenges of an uncertain world, and pay whatever price is required to secure our freedom.
I think the American people are very smart in understanding our country is very trustworthy with nuclear weapons. We've had them from the beginning. But they have also been critical for keeping the world more at peace than it would have been if it hadn't been for the American nuclear umbrella.
We believe in individual initiative, personal responsibility, opportunity, freedom, small government, the Constitution. These principles, these American principles are key to getting our economy back to being successful and leading the world.
I think feminism has always been global. I think there's feminism everywhere throughout the world. I think, though, for Western feminism and for American feminism, it not so surprisingly continues to center Western feminism and American feminism. And I think the biggest hurdle American feminists have in terms of taking a more global approach is that too often when you hear American feminists talk about international feminism or women in other countries, it kind of goes along with this condescending point of view like we have to save the women of such-and-such country; we have to help them.
Our fathers and grandfathers who poured over the Midwest were self-reliant, rugged, God-fearing people of indomitable courage...They asked only for freedom of opportunity and equal chance. In these conceptions lies the real basis of American democracy. They and their fathers give a genius to American institutions that distinguished our people from any other in the world.
Unlike the American inventions and achievements that have expanded horizons of possibility, our nation's tax code has become an excessive burden that strangles individual opportunity and economic freedom.
Our world does not need to hear more people talk about God or even about Jesus if those people do not have a lifestyle that reinforces every word they utter. The interesting thing is that the closer we walk in intimacy with God, the less we have to say. Our very lives become a bold and beautiful testimony to the purity, the freedom, and the beauty of the Lord Jesus.
The guarantees of civil liberty are but guarantees of freedom of the human mind and spirit and of reasonable freedom and opportunity to express them...The very essence of the liberty which they guarantee is the freedom of the individual from compulsion as to what he shall think and what he shall say...
The American Dream is one of the greatest ideas in the history of human achievement . . . It thrives today in an age when its core components of freedom and opportunity are open to more Americans than ever before. It holds a real, identifiable place in the American heart and mind, and it informs the aspirations of everyone from farmers to software developers, from detectives to bankers, from soldiers to social workers . . . It defines us as a people, even as we add to its meaning with each new chapter in our national experience and our individual actions.
In these sacred documents are embodied eternal principles that no man, group of men, or nation has the right to withhold from others. Here is our basis for freedom of individual achievement. Our Constitution with its Bill of Rights guarantees to all our people the greatest freedom ever enjoyed by the people of any great nation. This system guarantees freedom of individual enterprise, freedom to own property, freedom to start one's own business and to operate it according to one's own judgment so long as the enterprise is honorable.
There is more opportunity nowadays at easier and better prices than ever before. I have businesses in probably fifty countries throughout the world and it's never been easier to do business throughout the world. Never. I don't know what people are complaining about.
I do believe that freedom isn't free - but today the corporate and political right wing is trying to cheapen this truly American value. They've been cynically using the word 'freedom' to rally the American public against its own best interests.
That word 'fantasy' - I hardly ever hear it in the world of design. And that's very strange. You should hear it a lot. I think fantasy is a very important value that designers and artists should bring to the world.
We Americans understand freedom; we have earned it, we have lived for it, and we have died for it. This nation and its people are freedom's models in a searching world. We can be freedom's missionaries in a doubting world. The genius of the American system is that through freedom we have created extraordinary results from plain old ordinary people.
Do not be deluded by the abstract word Freedom. Whose freedom? Not the freedom of one individual in relation to another, but freedom of Capital to crush the worker.