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What God and good luck provide we must accept with gratitude. Our time is our time. It’s up to us to make the most of it, make it amount to more than the sum of our days.
We are blessed, and in turn, we have been a blessing to humanity.
We have made mistakes. We haven’t always used our power wisely. We have abused it sometimes and we’ve been arrogant. But, as often as not, we recognized those wrongs, debated them openly, and tried to do better. And the good we have done for humanity surpasses the damage caused by our errors.
We don’t build walls to freedom and opportunity. We tear them down.
To fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems is unpatriotic.
We will not thrive in a world where our leadership and ideals are absent. We wouldn’t deserve to.
Having spent more than five years of my life in prison, I tend to appreciate even the more mundane exercises of my freedom more than others might.
Learn to appreciate what you have. Even the most simple of things we take for granted. Our freedom is a right, but it is often stripped away. Appreciate everything.
I wish every American who out of ignorance or worse curses immigrants as criminals or a drain on the country’s resources or a threat to our “culture” could have been there. I would like them to know that immigrants, many of them having entered the country illegally, are making sacrifices for Americans that many Americans would not make for them.
I shouldn’t be afraid of losing. I had something to say. I thought it was important that I say it. And I would see the damn thing through.
Specialist Matthew Stanley was two months into his second tour in Iraq in December 2006 when an IED destroyed the Humvee he was in, killing him and four other soldiers. He was ten days shy of his twenty-third birthday and was still a newlywed, having married Amy the previous New Year’s Eve. I wore Matthew Stanley’s bracelet every day of the campaign, and I’ve worn it every day since. I’ll wear it for the rest of my life.
Remember those who gave everything. No matter how long it’s been it doesn’t make the sacrifice any less.
Despite our differences, much more unites us than divides us. We are fellow Americans, an association that means more to me than any other.
The cruelty of our enemies doesn’t absolve us of this duty. This was never about them. It was about us.
Reagan Republican, a proponent of lower taxes, less government, free markets, free trade, defense readiness, and democratic internationalism.
You need the opposition’s cooperation to get most big things done.
They need to be confronted before their noxious views spread further, and damage for generations the reputation of the Republican Party.
Second, the great majority of unauthorized immigrants came here to find work and raise their families, like most immigrants have throughout our history. They are not the rapists, killers, and drug dealers of fevered imaginations on the Right.
Build a thirty-foot wall, and someone will get rich selling thirty-foot ladders.
