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I have spent most of my life as a Democrat.  I recently have seen fit to follow another course.  I believe that the issues confronting us cross party lines.  Now, one side in this campaign has been telling us that the issues of this election are the maintenance of peace and prosperity....

...We're at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind...and it's been said if we lose that war, and in so doing lose this way of freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening.  Well I think it's time we ask ourselves if we still know the freedoms that were intended for us by the Founding Fathers.

Not too long ago, two friends of mine were talking to a Cuban refugee, a businessman who had escaped from Castro, and in the midst of his story one of my friends turned to the other and said, "We don't know how lucky we are."  And the Cuban stopped and said, "How lucky you are?  I had someplace to escape to."  And in that sentence he told us the entire story. If we lose freedom here, there's no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.

And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except the sovereign people, is still the newest and the most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man.

This is the issue of this election: whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.

You and I are told increasingly we have to choose between a left or right.  Well I'd like to suggest there is no such thing as a left or right.  There's only an up or down: [up] man's old -- old-aged dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism.  And regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course....

...Every responsible farmer and farm organization has repeatedly asked the government to free the farm economy, but how -- who are farmers to know what's best for them?  The wheat farmers voted against a wheat program. The government passed it anyway.  Now the price of bread goes up; the price of wheat to the farmer goes down.

Meanwhile, back in the city, under urban renewal the assault on freedom carries on.  Private property rights [are] so diluted that public interest is almost anything a few government planners decide it should be....

...Now it doesn't require expropriation or confiscation of private property or business to impose socialism on a people.  What does it mean whether you hold the deed to the -- or the title to your business or property if the government holds the power of life and death over that business or property?  And such machinery already exists.  The government can find some charge to bring against any concern it chooses to prosecute.  Every businessman has his own tale of harassment.  Somewhere a perversion has taken place.  Our natural, unalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation of government, and freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp as it is at this moment.

Our Democratic opponents seem unwilling to debate these issues....

Those who would trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state have told us they have a utopian solution of peace without victory.  They call their policy "accommodation."  And they say if we'll only avoid any direct confrontation with the enemy, he'll forget his evil ways and learn to love us.  All who oppose them are indicted as warmongers.  They say we offer simple answers to complex problems.  Well, perhaps there is a simple answer -- not an easy answer -- but simple: If you and I have the courage to tell our elected officials that we want our national policy based on what we know in our hearts is morally right.

...If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand -- the ultimatum.  And what then -- when Nikita Khrushchev has told his people he knows what our answer will be?  He has told them that we're retreating under the pressure of the Cold War, and someday when the time comes to deliver the final ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary, because by that time we will have been weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically.  He believes this because from our side he's heard voices pleading for "peace at any price" or "better Red than dead," or as one commentator put it, he'd rather "live on his knees than die on his feet."  And therein lies the road to war, because those voices don't speak for the rest of us.

You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery.  If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin -- just in the face of this enemy?  Or should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs?  Should Christ have refused the cross?  Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down their guns and refused to fire the shot heard 'round the world?  The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn't die in vain.  Where, then, is the road to peace?  Well it's a simple answer after all.

You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, "There is a price we will not pay."  "There is a point beyond which they must not advance."  And this -- this is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater's "peace through strength."  Winston Churchill said, "The destiny of man is not measured by material computations.  When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we're spirits -- not animals."  And he said, "There's something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty."

You and I have a rendezvous with destiny.

We'll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we'll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness. . .

-- from the speech A Time for Choosing by Ronald Reagan

Air date October 27, 1964 in Los Angeles, California

Entire Speech audio and transcript available at the link, you can listen to it online.

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