Hubert Humphrey (1911 – 1978)
Vice President of the United States of America from 1965 to 1969 and was the Democratic presidential candidate in 1968.
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For all of us here, for the millions who have sent us, for the whole two billion members of the human family, our land is now, more than ever before, the last best hope on earth. And I know that we can, and I know that we shall began [sic] here the fuller and richer realization of that hope — that promise of a land where all men are truly free and equal, and each man uses his freedom and equality wisely well.
I had no money to buy books, so between classes and work, I haunted the library. I even tutored in French with a sliding scale of payment: twenty dollars for an A, fifteen for a B, ten for a C, five for a D.
We can't use a double standard — there’s no room for double standards in American politics — for measuring our own and other people's policies. Our demands for democratic practices in other lands will be no more effective than the guarantee of those practices in our own country.
To those who say — My friends, to those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them we are 172 years late. To those who say — To those who say that this civil-rights program is an infringement on states’ rights, I say this: The time has arrived in America for the Democratic party to get out of the shadow of states' rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.
The story of the labor movement needs to be taught in every school in this land... America is a living testimonial to what free men and women, organized in free democratic trade unions can do to make a better life ... we ought to be proud of it!
The right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible.
The Senate is a place filled with goodwill and good intentions, and if the road to hell is paved with them, then it's a pretty good detour.
In real life, unlike in Shakespeare, the sweetness of the rose depends upon the name it bears. Things are not only what they are. They are, in very important respects, what they seem to be.
The moral test of government is how it treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the aged; and those in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.
I wish to suggest that ample opportunity does exist for dissent, for protest, and for nonconformity. But I must also say that the right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.
The vast number of titles which are published each year—all of them are to the good, even if some of them may annoy or even repel us for a time. For none of us would trade freedom of expression and of ideas for the narrowness of the public censor. America is a free market for people who have something to say, and need not fear to say it.
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