I truly believe that one day we will get there, we will arrive. And if we do it right in America, maybe, just maybe, we can serve as a model for the rest of the world.
John LewisYoung people can understand, and must understand, that we had success, we had failures, but we never gave up. We never gave in. We never became bitter. We didn't hate. We continued to press on. And that's what we're saying: There are some ups, there are some downs, and when you're not down, you must have the capacity and the ability to get up and keep going.
John LewisWe have come a long way in America because of Martin Luther King, Jr. He led a disciplined, nonviolent revolution under the rule of law, a revolution of values, a revolution of ideas. We've come a long way, but we still have a distance to go before all of our citizens embrace the idea of a truly interracial democracy, what I like to call the Beloved Community, a nation at peace with itself.
John LewisThe events in Prague, together with the Berlin blockade, convinced the European recipients of American economic assistance that they needed military protection as well: that led them to request the creation of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which committed the United States for the first time ever to the peacetime defense of Western Europe.
John LewisThe vast majority of the American people agree with me and many others. You don't simply repeal the Affordable Care Act without a replacement. Republicans have had six years to come up with a replacement. They got nothing.
John LewisI thought I was going to die a few times. On the Freedom Ride in the year 1961, when I was beaten at the Greyhound bus station in Montgomery, I thought I was going to die. On March 7th, 1965, when I was hit in the head with a night stick by a State Trooper at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, I thought I was going to die. I thought I saw death, but nothing can make me question the philosophy of nonviolence.
John Lewis