Search This Blog

Monday, September 11, 2006

Damn, That Churchill Was Smart

I borrowed this from Jon Meacham, the history writer for either Time or Newsweek via the blog at realclearpolitics.com About Winston Churchil, Meacham wrote this:

The lesson: there is no hiding from history. In another September, amid another war, Winston Churchill stood in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to explain why America, the anchor of the New World, seemed forever linked to the passions and politics of the Old World.

“I will offer you one explanation—there are others, but one will suffice,” Churchill said at a Harvard convocation. “The price of greatness is responsibility. If the people of the United States had continued in a mediocre station, struggling with the wilderness, absorbed in their own affairs, and a factor of no consequence in the movement of the world, they might have remained forgotten and undisturbed beyond their protecting oceans: but one cannot rise to be in many ways the leading community in the civilized world without being involved in its problems, without being convulsed by its agonies and inspired by its causes. If this has been proved in the past, as it has been, it will become indisputable in the future. The people of the United States cannot escape world responsibility.”

1 comment:

Tom Ferrick Jr. said...

Al -- I am rejecting your comment on the hiring of the new cops because it violates one of my rules: don't use any language you wouldn't use with your mother.
clean it up and i'll post it.