There Are No Degrees Of Honesty.

But In The West Today, We See A Free World That Has Achieved A Level Of Prosperity And Well-being Unprecedented In All Human History. In The Communist World, We See Failure, Technological Backwardness, Declining Standards Of Health, Even Want Of The Most Basic Kind - Too Little Food. Even Today, The Soviet Union Still Cannot Feed Itself. After These Four Decades, Then, There Stands Before The Entire World One Great And Inescapable Conclusion: Freedom Leads To Prosperity. Freedom Replaces The Ancient Hatreds Among The Nations With Comity And Peace. Freedom Is The Victor.

Facts Are Stupid Things — Stubborn Things, I Should Say.

I Know All The Bad Things That Happened In That War. I Was In Uniform Four Years Myself.

Our Natural, Inalienable Rights Are Now Considered To Be A Dispensation From Government, And Freedom Has Never Been So Fragile, So Close To Slipping From Our Grasp As It Is At This Moment.

Yet Optimism Is In Order, Because Day By Day Democracy Is Proving Itself To Be A Not-at-all-fragile Flower. From Stettin On The Baltic To Varna On The Black Sea, The Regimes Planted By Totalitarianism Have Had More Than 30 Years To Establish Their Legitimacy. But None - Not One Regime - Has Yet Been Able To Risk Free Elections. Regimes Planted By Bayonets Do Not Take Root.