幸福英语演讲稿（精选2篇）
Reagan: Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you and good evening. The sponsor has been identified, but unlike most television programs, the performer hasn't been provided with a script. As a matter of fact, I have been permitted to choose my own words and discuss my own ideas regarding the choice that we face in the next few weeks.
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. The line has been used, "We've never had it so good."
But I have an uncomfortable feeling that this prosperity isn't something on which we can base our hopes for the future. No nation in history has ever survived a tax burden that reached a third of its national income. Today, 37 cents out of every dollar earned in this country is the tax collector's share, and yet our government continues to spend 17 million dollars a day more than the government takes in. We haven't balanced our budget 28 out of the last 34 years. We've raised our debt limit three times in the last twelve months, and now our national debt is one and a half times bigger than all the combined debts of all the nations of the world. We have 15 billion dollars in gold in our treasury; we don't own an ounce. Foreign dollar claims are 27.3 billion dollars. And we've just had announced that the dollar of 1939 will now purchase 45 cents in its total value.
As for the peace that we would preserve, I wonder who among us would like to approach the wife or mother whose husband or son has died in South Vietnam and ask them if they think this is a peace that should be maintained indefinitely. Do they mean peace, or do they mean we just want to be left in peace? There can be no real peace while one American is dying some place in the world for the rest of us. We're at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars, 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.
it is a commonplace among moralists that you cannot get happiness by pursuing it. this is only true if you pursue it unwisely. gamblers at monte carlo are pursuing money, and most of them lose it instead, but there are other ways of pursuing money, which often succeed. so it is with happiness. if you pursue it by means of drink, you are forgetting the hangover. epicurus pursued it by living only in congenial society and eating only dry bread, supplemented by a little cheese on feast days. his method proved successful in his case, but he was a valetudinarian, and most people would need something more vigorous. for most people, the pursuit of happiness, unless supplemented in various ways, is too abstract and theoretical to be adequate as a personal rule of life. but i think that whatever personal rule of life you may choose it should not, except in rare and heroic cases, be incompatible with happiness. if you look around at the men and women whom you can call happy, you will see that they all have certain things in common.
the most important of these things is an activity which at most gradually builds up something that you are glad to see coming into existence. women who take an instinctive pleasure in their children can get this kind of satisfaction out of bringing up a family. artists and authors and men of science get happiness in this way if their own work seems good to them. but there are many humbler forms of the same kind of pleasure. many men who spend their working life in the city devote their weekends to voluntary and unremunerated toil in their gardens, and when the spring comes, they experience all the joys of having created beauty. the whole subject of happiness has, in my opinion, been treated too solemnly.
it had been thought that man cannot be happy without a theory of life or a religion. perhaps those who have been rendered unhappy by a bad theory may need a better theory to help them to recover, just as you may need a tonic when you have been ill. but when things are normal a man should be healthy without a tonic and happy without a theory. it is the simple things that really matter. if a man delights in his wife and children, has success in work, and finds pleasure in the alternation of day and night, spring and autumn, he will be happy whatever his philosophy may be. if, on the other hand, he finds his wife fateful, his children’s noise unendurable, and the office a nightmare; if in the daytime he longs for night, and at night sighs for the light of day, then what he needs is not a new philosophy but a new regimen--a different diet, or more exercise, or what not. man is an animal, and his happiness depends on his physiology more than he likes to think. this is a humble conclusion, but i cannot make myself disbelieve it. unhappy businessmen, i am convinced, would increase their happiness more by walking six miles every day than by any conceivable change of philosophy.
thangk you.