Senator Ted Cruz - Announcement of Presidential Campaign (March 2015) lyrics

CRUZ: Good to see you. (APPLAUSE) Thank you. (APPLAUSE) Thank you so much, President Falwell. God bless Liberty University. (APPLAUSE) I am thrilled to join you today at the largest Christian university in the world. (APPLAUSE) Today I want to talk with you about the promise of America. Imagine your parents when they were children. Imagine a little girl growing up in Wilmington, Delaware during World War II, the daughter of Irish and Italian Catholic family, working cla**. Her uncle ran numbers in Wilmington. She grew up with dozens of cousins because her mom was the second youngest of 17 kids. She had a difficult father, a man who drank far too much, and frankly didn't think that women should be educated. And yet this young girl, pretty and shy, was driven, was bright, was inquisitive, and she became the first person in her family ever to go to college. In 1956, my mom, Eleanor, graduated from Rice University with a degree in math and became a pioneering computer programmer in the 1950s and 1960s. (APPLAUSE) Imagine a teenage boy, not much younger than many of you here today, growing up in Cuba. Jet black hair, skinny as a rail. (LAUGHTER) Involved in student council, and yet Cuba was not at a peaceful time. The dictator, Batista, was corrupt, he was oppressive. And this teenage boy joins a revolution. He joins a revolution against Batista, he begins fighting with other teenagers to free Cuba from the dictator. This boy at age 17 finds himself thrown in prison, finds himself tortured, beaten. And then at age 18, he flees Cuba, he comes to America. Imagine for a second the hope that was in his heart as he rode that ferry boat across to Key West, and got on a Greyhound bus to head to Austin, Texas to begin working, washing dishes, making 50 cents an hour, coming to the one land on earth that has welcomed so many millions. When my dad came to America in 1957, he could not have imagined what lay in store for him. Imagine a young married couple, living together in the 1970s, neither one of them has a personal relationship with Jesus. They have a little boy and they are both drinking far too much. They are living a fast life. When I was three, my father decided to leave my mother and me. We were living in Calgary at the time, he got on a plane and he flew back to Texas, and he decided he didn't want to be married anymore and he didn't want to be a father to his 3-year-old son. And yet when he was in Houston, a friend, a colleague from the oil and gas business invited him to a Bible study, invited him to Clay Road (ph) Baptist Church, and there my father gave his life to Jesus Christ. (APPLAUSE) And God transformed his heart. And he drove to the airport, he bough a plane ticket, and he flew back to be with my mother and me. (APPLAUSE) There are people who wonder if faith is real. I can tell you, in my family there's not a second of doubt, because were it not for the transformative love of Jesus Christ, I would have been saved and I would have been raised by a single mom without my father in the household. Imagine another little girl living in Africa, in Kenya and Nigeria. That's a diverse crowd. (LAUGHTER) Playing with kids, they spoke Swahili, she spoke English. Coming back to California. (APPLAUSE) Where her parents who had been missionaries in Africa raised her on the Central Coast. She starts a small business when she's in grade school baking bread. She calls it Heidi's Bakery. She and her brother compete baking bread. They bake thousands of loaves of bread and go to the local apple orchard where they sell the bread to people coming to pick apples. She goes on to a career in business, excelling and rising to the highest pinnacles, and then Heidi becomes my wife and my very best friend in the world. (APPLAUSE) Heidi becomes an incredible mom to our two precious little girls, Caroline and Catherine, the joys and loves of our life. (APPLAUSE) Imagine another teenage boy being raised in Houston, hearing stories from his dad about prison and torture in Cuba, hearing stories about how fragile liberty is, beginning to study the United States Constitution, learning about the incredible protections we have in this country that protect the God-given liberty of every American. Experiencing challenges at home. In the 1980s, oil prices crater and his parents business go bankrupt. Heading off to school over a thousand miles away from home, in a place where he knew nobody, where he was alone and scared, and his parents going through bankruptcy meant there was no financial support at home, so at the age of 17, he went to get two jobs to help pay his way through school. He took over $100,000 in school loans, loans I suspect a lot of ya'll can relate to, loans that I'll point out I just paid off a few years ago. (APPLAUSE) These are all of our stories. These are who we are as Americans. And yet, for so many Americans, the promise of America seems more and more distant. What is the promise of America? The idea that -- the revolutionary idea that this country was founded upon, which is that our rights don't come from man. They come from God Almighty. (APPLAUSE) And that the purpose of the Constitution, as Thomas Jefferson put it, is to serve as chains to bind the mischief of government. (APPLAUSE) The incredible opportunity of the American dream, what has enabled millions of people from all over the world to come to America with nothing and to achieve anything. And then the American exceptionalism that has made this nation a clarion voice for freedom in the world, a shining city on a hill. That's the promise of America. That is what makes this nation an indispensable nation, a unique nation in the history of the world. And yet, so many fear that that promise is today unattainable. So many fear it is slipping away from our hands. I want to talk to you this morning about reigniting the promise of America: 240 years ago on this very day, a 38-year-old lawyer named Patrick Henry... (APPLAUSE) ... stood up just a hundred miles from here in Richmond, Virginia... (APPLAUSE) ... and said, “Give me liberty or give me d**h.” (APPLAUSE) I want to ask each of you to imagine, imagine millions of courageous conservatives, all across America, rising up together to say in unison “we demand our liberty.”