6 февраля 2016 года исполнилось 105 лет со дня рождения Рональда Рейгана.
В своей автобиографии "An American Life" 40-й президент США с любовью и трепетом вспоминает визит в МГУ и встречу со студентами:
(отрывок из книги "An American Life")
For more than thirty years, I’d been preaching about freedom and liberty. During my visit to Moscow, I was given a chance to do something I never dreamed I would do: Gorbachev let me lecture to some of the brightest young people of Moscow—among them some of the future leaders of the Soviet Union—about the blessings of democracy and individual freedom and free enterprise.
On what was for me an extraordinary day I never thought possible, I tried in a few minutes at Moscow State University to summarize a philosophy that had guided me most of my life.
Many countries of the world, I said, had constitutions, but in almost every case they were documents in which governments told their people what they could do. The United States had a constitution, I said, that was different from all the others because in it the people tell their government what it can do. Its three most important words are “We the people,” its most important principle, freedom. Then I said something about the great economic engine that had made America what it was.
“The explorers of the modern era,” I told the students,
"are the entrepreneurs, men with vision, with the courage to take risks and faith enough to brave the unknown. These entrepreneurs and their small enterprises are responsible for almost all the economic growth in the United States. They are the prime movers of the technological revolution. In fact, one of the largest personal computer firms in the United States was started by two college students, no older than you, in the garage behind their home.
Some people, even in my own country, look at the riot of experiment that is the free market and see only waste. What of all the entrepreneurs that fail? Well, many do, particularly the successful ones; often several times. And if you ask them the secret of their success, they’ll tell you it’s all that they learned in their struggles along the way; yes, it’s what they learned from failing. Like an athlete in competition or a scholar in pursuit possible. But it is only by working and maintaining a dynamic dialogue that we will put into effect what we have made possible, and will make possible tomorrow what is yet impossible today."
