Pertinent Words from W. Churchill

The last several months I have been treading through Andrew Roberts, A History of the English Speaking Peoples Since 1900.  I read Winston Churchill's four-volume set, A History of the English Speaking Peoples the summer before I started law school, so reading Roberts' work naturally seemed appropriate for my last year of law school.

As I was reading about the Allied Forces efforts in World War II, I thought a speech Winston Churchill gave in September of 1943 seemed pertinent for our nation today.  

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 undistrubed beyone 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.  Although we live in a period so tumultous that little can be predicted, we may be quite sure that this process will be intensified with every forward step the United States make in wealth and in power.  Not only are the responsibilities of this great Republic growing, but the world over which they range is itself contracting in relation to our powers of locomotion at a positively alarming rate.

As you read these words, I hope that you will consider not only the policy of the politicians you elect, but I also hope that you will consider your influence in the place that you live.  Remember, "The price of greatness is responsibility."