Wednesday, July 29, 2015

FUTURE PREFERENCE: In the spirit of JFK and Georgetown Professor Carroll Quigley, "Ladies and gentlemen, we have the future before us!"

In 1974, at my high school graduation, I quoted Adlai Stevenson's cliche-ridden speech, stating iwhat William F. Buckley, Jr. called his "most analytic" remark: "Ladies and gentlemen, we have the future, before us!"
In 1991, Presidential candidate Clinton named Carroll Quigley as an important influence on his aspirations and political philosophy, when Clinton launched his presidential campaign in a speech at Georgetown.[2]:96 He mentioned Quigley again during his acceptance speech to the 1992 Democratic National Convention, as follows:
As a teenager, I heard John Kennedy's summons to citizenship. And then, as a student at Georgetown, I heard that call clarified by a professor named Carroll Quigley, who said to us that America was the greatest Nation in history because our people had always believed in two things–that tomorrow can be better than today and that every one of us has a personal moral responsibility to make it so.[17]
(Wikipedia)(text)(video).   Clinton said:

We meet at a special moment in history, you and I. The Cold War is over. Soviet communism has collapsed and our values -- freedom, democracy, individual rights, free enterprise- they have triumphed all around the world. And yet, just as we have won the Cold War abroad, we are losing the battles for economic opportunity and social justice here at home.
Now that we have changed the world, it's time to change America.
I have news for the forces of greed and the defenders of the status quo: Your time has come and gone. Its time for a change in America.

No comments: