THANK YOU very much. I appreciate that. I appreciate what you have said very much.
Our only effort in the world is for world peace. We want all the peoples of the world to enjoy the same individual liberties which we enjoy. We had hoped, after our conversations at Yalta and Potsdam, that that would be the case with Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, but it is not, I am sorry to say.
We are going to continue our efforts to see if we can't get freedom in those countries as we enjoy it here.
You people know that you don't have to be afraid here. You are not going to be arrested because you don't think like I do. You are not going to be arrested because somebody says you are wrong in your political beliefs.
And that is what I would like to see in the whole world. And as long as I am President, I shall keep working for that sort of arrangement.
I can't tell you how much I appreciate this scroll.
Note: The President spoke at 12:55 p.m. in the Rose Garden at the White House.
Leaders of the Federation, which is composed of religious, fraternal, and other organizations whose members are of Hungarian ancestry, presented a scroll to the President, thanking him for his statement of July 27 denouncing the Communist Government of Hungary for mass internments and deportations of citizens (see Item 173).
Harry S Truman, Remarks to a Delegation From the American Hungarian Federation. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/231012
