I believe when you are in any contest you should work like there is always to the very last minute a chance to lose it. This is battle, this is politics, this is anything. So I just see no excuse if you believe anything enough for not putting your whole heart into it. It is what I do.
But the most interesting, although horrible, sight that I encountered during the trip was a visit to a German internment camp near Gotha. The things I saw beggar description. While I was touring the camp I encountered three men who had been inmates and by one ruse or another had made their escape. I interviewed them through an interpreter. The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where they [there] were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to propaganda.
Today in America unions have a secure place in our industrial life. Only a handful of unreconstructed reactionaries harbor the ugly thought of breaking unions. Only a fool would try to deprive working men and women of the right to join the union of their choice.
The freedom of a citizen and the freedom of a religious believer are more than intimately related; they are mutually dependent. These two liberties give life to the heart of our Nation.
Probably no one here knows I coached a football team, a service team, playing against Georgetown. I think it was in the fall of 1924 Lou Little was your coach, and he beat us. But it was a very happy circumstance, because it brought me the friendship of another man, Lou Little, who to this day remains my very warm associate and friend.
Morale is the greatest single factor in successful war.
But all history has taught us the grim lesson that no nation has ever been successful in avoiding the terrors of war by refusing to defend its rights, by attempting to placate aggression.
But I noted with real satisfaction how well ex-footballers seemed to have leadership qualifications. I believe that football, perhaps more than any other sport, tends to instill in men the feeling that victory comes through hard, almost slavish, work, team play, self-confidence, and an enthusiasm that amounts to dedication.
There can be no true disarmament without peace, and there can be no real peace without very material disarmament.
When I found the first camp like that I think I never was so angry in my life. The bestiality displayed there was not merely piled up bodies of people that had starved to death, but to follow out the road and see where they tried to evacuate them so they could still work, you could see where they sprawled on the road. You could go to their burial pits and see horrors that really I wouldn't even want to begin to describe. I think people ought to know about such things. It explains something of my attitude toward the German war criminal. I believe he must be punished, and I will hold out for that forever.