We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace. There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace. General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!
Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in… While the wall is the most obvious and vivid demonstration of the failures of the Communist system, for all the world to see, we take no satisfaction in it, for it is, as your Mayor has said, an offense not only against history but an offense against humanity, separating families, dividing husbands and wives and brothers and sisters, and dividing a people who wish to be joined together.
In theory socialism may wish to enhance freedom, but in practice every kind of collectivism consistently carried through must produce the characteristic features which Fascism, Nazism and Communism have in common. Totalitarianism is nothing but consistent collectivism
The complete collapse of the belief in the attainability of freedom and equality through Marxism has forced Russia to travel the same road towards a totalitarian, purely negative, non-economic society of unfreedom and inequality which Germany has been following. Not that communism and fascism are essentially the same. Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion, and it has proved as much an illusion in Stalinist Russia as in pre-Hitler Germany.
... almost everywhere in the Soviet Union peasants were forced to join the collective farms; they were simply driven into them like cattle. The local authorities used the cruelest methods, fulfilling quotas set by the central government. Many peasants who had received land as a result of the October revolution had grown stronger, that is, they had improved their economic status; they had become what in the Soviet Union was called "middle peasants." They did not want to give up what they had earned by honest labor.
The cruelty with which collectivization was carried out is astonishing. People who were able to produce better than others, the competent and industrious, were destroyed. A terrible blow was dealt to the countryside, the consequences of which have not been outlived to this day.
We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace. There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace. General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!
Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in… While the wall is the most obvious and vivid demonstration of the failures of the Communist system, for all the world to see, we take no satisfaction in it, for it is, as your Mayor has said, an offense not only against history but an offense against humanity, separating families, dividing husbands and wives and brothers and sisters, and dividing a people who wish to be joined together.
In theory socialism may wish to enhance freedom, but in practice every kind of collectivism consistently carried through must produce the characteristic features which Fascism, Nazism and Communism have in common. Totalitarianism is nothing but consistent collectivism
The complete collapse of the belief in the attainability of freedom and equality through Marxism has forced Russia to travel the same road towards a totalitarian, purely negative, non-economic society of unfreedom and inequality which Germany has been following. Not that communism and fascism are essentially the same. Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion, and it has proved as much an illusion in Stalinist Russia as in pre-Hitler Germany. 
... almost everywhere in the Soviet Union peasants were forced to join the collective farms; they were simply driven into them like cattle. The local authorities used the cruelest methods, fulfilling quotas set by the central government. Many peasants who had received land as a result of the October revolution had grown stronger, that is, they had improved their economic status; they had become what in the Soviet Union was called "middle peasants." They did not want to give up what they had earned by honest labor.