Issue #40 Posted March 9, 2006
"There is only one quality worse than hardness of the heart and that is softness of the head." -- Theodore Roosevelt
"Here rests in honored glory an American soldier known but to God." -- Inscription on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier
"Igitur qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum; qui victoriam cupit, milites inbuat diligenter; qui secundos optat eventus, dimicet arte, non casu. Nemo provocare, nemo audet offendere quem intellegit superiorem esse, si pugnet." ( "Therefore, if one wishes for peace, let him prepare for war. If he desires victory, let him train his soldiers carefully. If he hopes for favorable outcomes, let him battle artfully instead of depending on chance. No one will challenge, no one will dare to offend, one whom he knows to be superior if it comes to a fight.") -- Flavius Vegetius (Renatus), De Rei Militari III, c. 375 AD
Quid Llatine Dictum Sit, Altum Viditur. (Whatever is said in Latin sounds profound.)
"High up on my list of annoyances are references to the United States as a democracy and the suggestion that Iraq should become a democracy... I can't think of a worse place to have a democracy---majority rule. Iraq needs a republic like that envisioned by our founders---decentralized and limited government power. In a republican form of government, there is rule of law. All citizens, including government officials, are accountable to the same laws. Government intervenes in civil society to protect its citizens against force and fraud but does not intervene in the cases of peaceable, voluntary exchange. Democracy, what the Bush administration calls for, is different. In a democracy, the majority rules either directly or through its elected representatives. The law is whatever the government determines it to be. Laws aren't necessarily based upon reason but power. In other words, democracy is just another form of tyranny---tyranny of the majority." -- Walter Williams
"We learned long ago that those without swords can still die upon them" -- Lady Eowyn, adopted daughter of Theoden, King of the Rohirrim (of Rohan) in Lord of the Rings.
"[T]he only foundation for a useful education in a republic is to be laid in religion. Without this there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object and life of all republican governments." -- Benjamin Rush
"...most folks are not willing to admit that danger might be lurking. Instead, when faced with a potential threat (or even a real one right now!) their mind makes-up a rational reason for the situation, which does not include the possibility of danger!" -- Greg Mactye
Funny they need to keep ambulances and crews standing by at high school football games, but not at shooting matches.
"We did not seek this war on terror, but this is the world as we find it. We must keep our focus. We must do our duty. History is moving, and it will tend toward hope, or tend toward tragedy." -- President George W. Bush
"As through this world I've rambled I've seen lots of funny men. Some will rob you with a six-gun. Some with a fountain pen." -- Woody Guthrie
"If peace cannot be maintained with honor, it is no longer peace." -- Lord John Russell
"I keep my ammunition stored in my magazine and my magazine locked away in my pistol!" -- Jim Higginbotham
"Whatever makes good Christians, makes them good citizens." - -Daniel Webster
"What is a communist? One who hath yearnings for equal division of unequal earnings." -- Ebenezer Elliott
"Some people seem as if they can never have been children, and others seem as if they could never be anything else." -- George Dennison Prentice
"The fact that you are just dying to believe something is not hard evidence--except perhaps about your state of mind." -- Thomas Sowell
"Don't expect to build up the weak by pulling down the strong." -- Calvin Coolidge
"No government, any more than an individual, will long be respected without being truly respectable; nor be truly respectable, without possessing a certain portion of order and stability." -- Federalist No. 62
"Well... if someone tries to kill you just try to kill 'em right back." -- Capt. Mal Reynolds, In the scfi story, Firefly
The following quotes are all by president Ronald Reagan
"Without Duty Life is Worthless" -- SSgt Daniel Clay USMC
The following quotes are all by Ronald Reagan
"There's no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn't mind who gets the credit."
"The future belongs to the free."
"We defend freedom here or it is gone."
"To those who are fainthearted and unsure, I have this message: If you're afraid of the future, then get out of the way, stand aside. The people of this country are ready to move again."
"Trust but verify."
"Who can forget those so-called 'experts' who said our military buildup threatened a dangerous escalation of tensions? What kind of fool, they asked, would call the Soviet Union an 'Evil Empire'?"
"Don't be afraid to see what you see."
"If we forget what we did, we won't know who we are. I'm warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit. Let's start with some basics: more attention to American history and a greater emphasis on civic ritual."
"The real crisis we face today is a spiritual one; at root, it is a test of moral will and faith."
"I have wondered at times what the Ten Commandments would have looked like if Moses had run them through the U.S. Congress."
"Are you better off today than you were four years ago?"
"Entrepreneurs and their small enterprises are responsible for almost all the economic growth in the United States."
"Regulations are like spores of a fungus -- they settle anywhere and everywhere and create more spores."
"I don't believe in a government that protects us from ourselves."
"No arsenal or no weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women."
"Communism is neither an economic or a political system -- it is a form of insanity -- a temporary aberration which will one day disappear from the earth because it is contrary to human nature."
"The West won't contain Communism. It will transcend it. It will dismiss it as some bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written."
"All great change in America begins at the dinner table."
"The march of freedom and democracy ... will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people."
"There's no question I am an idealist, which is another way of saying I am an American."
"Those who created our country -- the Founding Fathers and Mothers -- understood that there is a divine order which transcends the human order. They saw the state, in fact, as a form of moral order and felt that the bedrock of moral order is religion. ... The truth is, politics and morality are inseparable. And as morality's foundation is religion, religion and politics are necessarily related. We need religion as a guide. We need it because we are imperfect, and our government needs the church, because only those humble enough to admit they're sinners can bring to democracy the tolerance it requires in order to survive."
"We cannot diminish the value of one category of human life -- the unborn -- without diminishing the value of all human life."
"I've noticed that everybody who is for abortion has already been born."
"The government is like a baby's alimentary canal, with a happy appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other."
"There were so many candidates on the platform that there were not enough promises to go around."
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If bureaucracy and BS could fill an empty stomach, the UN could feed the world." -- Jack Kelly"Never underestimate the power of collective stupidity." (Usually observed right around election time!)
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." -- John Milton
"While the people have property, arms in their hands, and only a spark of noble spirit, the most corrupt Congress must be mad to form any project of tyranny." -- Rev. Nicholas Collin
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -- David Hume
"A legislative act contrary to the Constitution is not law." -- Justice John Marshall
"The old days are dead, and the old men are dying, and the young ones don't know what it means to be free." -- Gabriel Dumont (1885)
"The more laws, the less justice." -- Marcus Tullius Cicero
"When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law." -- Frederic Bastiat
"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself." -- John Stuart Mill English economist & philosopher (1806 - 1873)
"These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman." -- Thomas Paine
There is no point in doing well that which you should not be doing at all. -- Thomas K. Connellan
"Minimizing risk is farming. Managing risk is living. I don't want to be farmed."
"We are far more at risk on imploding than ever being overrun. The cancer of dependence is real."
"Freedom is not defined by safety. Freedom is defined by the ability of citizens to live without government interference. "
"Every generation must resist the temptation to believe that it lives in the most dangerous time in American history. The threat of Islamic terrorism is real, but it is not the greatest danger ever faced by our nation. This is not to dismiss the threat of terrorism, but rather to put it in perspective. Those who seek to whip the nation into a frenzy of fear do a disservice to a country that expelled the British, fought two world wars, and stared down the Soviet empire."
2006-2