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You can oppose reparations all you want, but you got to know the facts. You really, really do.

When people think about reparations, they immediately think about people who've been dead for 100 years.

Reparations, I believe, are talked about for political reasons, trying to cater for the purpose of getting votes. If Congress was serious about reparations - in '93 and '94 the Democrats controlled the House, the Senate and the White House, and not one single Republican vote was needed for reparations.

It is with your aid, as the people, that I think we shall be able to preserve - not the country, for the country will preserve itself, but the institutions of the country - those institutions which have made us free, intelligent and happy - the most free, the most intelligent, and the happiest people on the globe.

Disasters redistribute money from taxpayers to construction workers, from insurance companies to homeowners, and even from those who once lived in the destroyed city to those who replace them. It's remarkable that this redistribution can happen so smoothly and quickly, with devastated regions reinventing themselves in a matter of months.

A country that relies on aid? Death is better than that. It stops you from achieving your potential, just as colonialism did.

Countries that will not tax their elite who expect us to come in and help them serve their people are just not going to get the kind of help from us that historically they may have.

There is fear as to whether Japan, reduced to such a predicament, could ever manage to pay reparations to certain designated Allied Powers without shifting the burden upon the other Allied Powers.

One always likes to think that other countries are not like one's own.