Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) asserted Sunday that he didn’t compare those skeptical of his defund Obamacare effort to Nazi appeasers during his 21-hour quasi-filibuster last week.

“The premise of your question isn’t true. I didn’t make that comparison,” Cruz said when asked by Meet The Press host David Gregory if he regretted the comments. “I went through the centuries where, over and over again, when facing big challenges, Americans have risen to the occasion… At every stage, there were the voices of conventional wisdom that said this can’t be done, and every time, Americans have risen to the challenge.”

Here’s what Cruz said Tuesday during his floor speech, as TPM reported.

“If you go to the 1940s, Nazi Germany,” Cruz said. “Look, we saw in Britain, Neville Chamberlain, who told the British people, ‘Accept the Nazis. Yes, they’ll dominate the continent of Europe but that’s not our problem. Let’s appease them. Why? Because it can’t be done. We can’t possibly stand against them.'”

“And in America there were voices that listened to that,” he continued. “I suspect those same pundits who say it can’t be done, if it had been in the 1940s we would have been listening to them. Then they would have made television. They would have gotten beyond carrier pigeons and beyond letters and they would have been on TV and they would have been saying, ‘You cannot defeat the Germans.'”