This I Believe (1951)
Context: Perhaps we should warn you that there is one thing you won’t read, and that is a pat answer for the problems of life. We don’t pretend to make this a spiritual or psychological patent-medicine chest where one can come and get a pill of wisdom, to be swallowed like an aspirin, to banish the headaches of our times.
Source: The Slumber of Christianity: Awakening a Passion for Heaven on Earth
In some published transcripts or quotations of this speech a variant of this statement appears immediately before the quote by Churchill below, but was not said during Reagan's televised address on (27 October 1964). Though he did make variations of the speech elsewhere it is unclear exactly when and where he may have said used these precise words:
: They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong. There are no easy answers, but there are simple answers. We must have the courage to do what we know is morally right.
Later variant: For many years now, you and I have been shushed like children and told there are no simple answers to the complex problems which are beyond our comprehension. Well, the truth is, there are simple answers, they just are not easy ones.
:* California Gubernatorial Inauguration Speech (5 January 1967) http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/govspeech/01051967a.htm
1960s, A Time for Choosing (1964)
“If you want things to be different, perhaps the answer is to become different yourself.”
NOW interview (2004)
Context: The ripeness was a letter that John Keats wrote to his brother who emigrated to America describing what it was like to have a peach or piece of a peach in his mouth. And it's one of the sexiest things you will ever read of how slow you should take the peach. Don't rush it. Let it go through your palette. Let it lie on your tongue. Let it melt a little bit. Let it run from the corners. It's like describing the most incredible sex orgy. And then, you bite. But, it must be so ripe. It must be so delicious. In other words, you must not waste a second of this deliciousness which for him was life and being a great poet. That you savor every, everything that happened. I want to get ripe.
“WARNING
If you dare to read this story, you become part of the Experiment”
Philosophy : the basics (Fifth Edition, 2013), Introduction
Charlie Rose interview, 3 Jun 2005 https://charlierose.com/videos/17574, quoted in An Old Eric Schmidt Interview Reveals Google’s End-Game For Search And Competition https://techcrunch.com/2013/01/04/an-old-eric-schmidt-interview-reveals-googles-end-game-for-search-and-competition/ by TechCrunch (4 Jan 2013).
Source: A Tale of Time City (1987), p. 73.
1930s, Address at the Democratic State Convention, Syracuse, New York (1936)
Context: Let me warn you, and let me warn the nation, against the smooth evasion that says: "Of course we believe these things. We believe in social security. We believe in work for the unemployed. We believe in saving homes. Cross our hearts and hope to die! We believe in all these things. But we do not like the way that the present administration is doing them. Just turn them over to us. We will do all of them, we will do more of them, we will do them better and, most important of all, the doing of them will not cost anybody anything!"
