The Great Dictator last speech - Chaplin's Contemporary Politics

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGfLAtiUi1A

Chaplin urges hope for the liberty of people and democracy in a speech which this blog thinks is as powerful now as it could have ever been.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BbFs6fQGow&feature=player_embedded


The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.
- Plato

To those who can hear me I say: 'Do not despair'. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed, the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass and dictators die; and the power they took from the people will return to the people...
- Charles Chaplin in The Great Dictator

Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
- Patrick Henry, 1775

Educate and inform the whole mass of the people... They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.
— Thomas Jefferson


Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline.

- Martin Luther King Jr

And when I look at people in public life... I'm not a political animal but I think the biggest disease this world suffers from in this day and age is the disease of people feeling unloved, and I know that I can give love - for a minute, for an hour, for a day, for a month, but I can give. I'm very happy to do that and I want to do that.
- Diana, Princess of Wales

When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.
- Sri Chinmoy Ghose

This makes us tick...
"As for being a mass killer, does not the world encourage it? Is it not building weapons of destruction for the sole purpose of mass killing? Has it not blown unsuspecting women and little children to pieces? And done it very scientifically? As a mass killer, I am an amateur by comparison... That's the history of many a big business: wars, conflicts, it's all business. One murder makes a villain, millions a hero. Numbers sanctify, my good fellow!"
- Charles Chaplin (as) Monsieur Verdoux, 1947

"If Parliament becomes so disconnected from those who send us here, its sovereignty, which has been a bastion of our liberal interpretation of our liberty, in fact becomes the greatest tyranny, and that what this House imposes without reference to the public disconnects it from the public, and undermines the very constitutional search that we have undergone to become a free and democratic people."
- Richard Shepherd MP (Conservative), 19th Jan 2010


"We want a new breed of MPs who will consistently tell the whips to get stuffed; who will smash the brutal and intellectually enervating system of party discipline that turns Westminster into a kind of Seventies Leyland car factory, apathetically turning out badly assembled laws to plague the people of this country".
- Boris Johnson, 25th May 2009

"My first guiding principle is this: willing and active co-operation between independent sovereign states is the best way to build a successful European Community. To try to suppress nationhood and concentrate power at the centre of a European conglomerate would be highly damaging and would jeopardise the objectives we seek to achieve. Europe will be stronger precisely because it has France as France, Spain as Spain, Britain as Britain, each with its own customs, traditions and identity. It would be folly to try to fit them into some sort of identikit European personality".
- Margaret Thatcher, 20th Sept. 1988


"Labour and the Liberal Democrats think of themselves as progressive parties. They see themselves as heirs to that radical tradition which, at its best, is a noble and high-minded one. But such is their contempt for anything that smacks of British patriotism that, when it comes to Europe, they line up with the elites against the people and defend the most backward and anti-democratic project in the Western world".
- Dan Hannan, April 2009

On Gordon Brown and the Labour Government: "I don't care what the government does any more. They can announce cuts, they can announce increases, they can set out whatever they want. Set the whole thing to music and do a karaoke. I have lost faith in a prime minister who stands up and says black is white. We will make our own decisions about what's right for the country".
- David Cameron, 29th June 2009

"Jacqui Smith was one of a succession of authoritarian Labour Home Secretaries that rode roughshod over civil liberties".
- LibDem MP Chris Huhne, June 2009

"The obligations of our representatives... are to protect our liberty, not coddle the world, precipitating no-win wars, while bringing bankruptcy and economic turmoil to our people."
- US Senator Ron Paul