Great Britain
"I want to start by commending the Committee for your decision to engage in what I consider to be the greatest challenge facing our nation – how to remain the world leader in intellectual capital. Slowly, yet systematically, the advantage the United States has in producing and retaining the thought leaders of our world has been eroded. We are, I believe, at an inflection point that will determine whether America remains a strong and viable leader in a global world economy or whether, like Great Britain before us, we will allow other countries to become the drivers of innovation while the United States slowly fades into a nation of shopkeepers."
- Governor Mitt Romney, 05-17-2005 "High School Reform: Examining State and Local Efforts"
ROMNEY: Well, of course, we have to respect our Constitutional guarantees of freedom, recognize that the most important civil right we have is the right to life. And we need to make sure that our citizens are protected and don‘t lose their lives by virtue of not having done an effective job to survey those who would attack us.
Fortunately, in Great Britain, they have a very tough Patriot Act equivalent which allows them to do the kind of surveillance that identifies this plot before five or 10 aircraft end up killing all on board.
That‘s the most important thing that we have to do is to protect our citizens, and we can do it within a constitutional framework that we‘ve come to know and love. But intelligence work and counterterrorism has once again been proven as the only effective way to protect the homeland.
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