7 Amazing Quotes From Ronald Reagan’s 1984 D-Day Speech
June 6, 2014
On the 70th Anniversary of the Normandy landings, we honor the brave men who risked and sacrificed their lives to free Europe from tyranny.
President Ronald Reagan’s D-Day speech in 1984, called the “Boys of Pointe Du Hoc,” is just as powerful today as it was three decades ago.
Here are 7 quotes from his speech thirty years ago, which all still ring true today:
1. “Here in Normandy the rescue began. Here the Allies stood and fought against tyranny in a giant undertaking unparalleled in human history.”
2. “These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war.”
3. “Why? Why did you do it? What impelled you to put aside the instinct for self-preservation and risk your lives to take these cliffs? What inspired all the men of the armies that met here? We look at you, and somehow we know the answer. It was faith and belief; it was loyalty and love.”
4. “One’s country is worth dying for, and democracy is worth dying for, because it’s the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man. All of you loved liberty. All of you were willing to fight tyranny, and you knew the people of your countries were behind you.”
5. “They fought — or felt in their hearts, though they couldn’t know in fact, that in Georgia they were filling the churches at 4 a.m., in Kansas they were kneeling on their porches and praying, and in Philadelphia they were ringing the Liberty Bell.”
6. “Here, in this place where the West held together, let us make a vow to our dead. Let us show them by our actions that we understand what they died for.”
