2005 Annual Dinner highlights
Religion & Liberty Online

2005 Annual Dinner highlights

I compiled a short list of quotations taken from the remarks made by Rev. Robert Sirico and former president of El Salvador, Francisco Flores. Both speeches are available online

Francisco Flores – Speech highlights:

  • “Responsibility and freedom are two sides of the same coin.”
  • “A free man is a responsible man.”
  • “Opportunity is choice, and choice is freedom.”

Robert Sirico – Speech Highlights:

  • “If you’re not a socialist when you’re young, you have no heart. But if you remain a socialist when you’re old, you have no brains.”
  • “A priest that believes in the free market? Well lets give it a try!”
  • “The elevator was a metaphor of the ineptitute of socialism as a whole; that it couldn’t get you from one floor to another.”
  • “I saw what freedom did. It wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t complete, but the people were vibrant; the stores were full.”
  • “This delicate balance between having an institutional separation of church and state on the one hand, but not prohibiting the moral and religious influence that can extend throughout a society on the other hand, and that is a neccessary part of that society. How risky it is to get that balance wrong.”
  • “When we witness even good and decent people who see the state as the resource of first resort, as the mediator in all social disputes, as the chief enforcer of morality; when we see this, we know that our mission is as essential now as it was fifteen years ago.”

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