“It’s only right that you should know why I, a stranger, have become involved in your affairs. Believe me, it’s not because I am a Justice of the Supreme Court. It’s because, like all of you here, I am a citizen of this country. That is no little honour. Men have fought revolutions, have died, to be called “citizen”. And as citizens, we carry a burning responsibility. It means that when we elect men to public office, we, we cannot do it as lightly as we flip a coin. It means that after we’ve elected them we can’t sit back and say: “Our job is done. What they do now doesn’t concern us.” That philosophy of indifference is what the enemies of decent government want. If we allow them to have their way to grow strong and vicious, then the heroic struggle which welded thousands of lovely towns like this into a great nation means nothing. Then we’re not citizens, we’re traitors. The great liberties by which we live have been bought with blood. The kind of government we get is the kind of government we want. Government of the people, by the people and for the people can mean any kind of government. It’s our duty to make it mean only one kind – uncorrupted, free, united.”
From the 1943 film “A Stranger in Town, character John Josephus Grant.
