I realized the speech above is abridged...this was the part that struck me upon my initial read, but from the American Rhetoric database. Here, Reagan extols religious faith in America and had help from his advisor on Russian culture, Suzanne Massey with citing some powerful quotes from Russia’s most cherished writers regarding freedom:
“Freedom, it has been said, makes people selfish and materialistic, but Americans are one of the most religious peoples on Earth. Because they know that liberty, just as life itself, is not earned but a gift from God, they seek to share that gift with the world. “Reason and experience,” said George Washington in his farewell address, “both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle. And it is substantially true, that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.” Democracy is less a system of government than it is a system to keep government limited, unintrusive; a system of constraints on power to keep politics and government secondary to the important things in life, the true sources of value found only in family and faith.
But I hope you know I go on about these things not simply to extol the virtues of my own country but to speak to the true greatness of the heart and soul of your land. Who, after all, needs to tell the land of Dostoyevsky about the quest for truth, the home of Kandinsky and Scriabin about imagination, the rich and noble culture of the Uzbek man of letters Alisher Navoi about beauty and heart? The great culture of your diverse land speaks with a glowing passion to all humanity.
Let me cite one of the most eloquent contemporary passages on human freedom. It comes, not from the literature of America, but from this country, from one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, Boris Pasternak, in the novel “Dr. Zhivago.” He writes: “I think that if the beast who sleeps in man could be held down by threats — any kind of threat, whether of jail or of retribution after death — then the highest emblem of humanity would be the lion tamer in the circus with his whip, not the prophet who sacrificed himself. But this is just the point — what has for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel, but an inward music — the irresistible power of unarmed truth.”
Show me a Leftist or Statist entity in which the Individuals accept Truth as an inner standard for critical thinking.
How about the Democrat Party?
The ACLU, NAACP, SPLC, CORE, BLM, Occupy (Fill in blank)
The American Mainstream Media?
Any part of American Government subsidized educational system?
American Hollywood Motion Picture Elite?
The biggest part of American Music, Stage and Literary communities?
How about even the GOP Elite and FBI cops?
NO, we live in the Era of the Ninth Commandment, the modern Western Reality is Entirely based upon the False Witness Lie, the Uniparty Deep Swamp rules with the lie, and they use Useless Idiot "Democracy" to accomplish that rule.
While Reagan was a GREAT Man, he was also tricked more than once by the Leftist Liars.
Democracy is not the solution, it is the moral and ethical value of Men themselves as Reagan noted.