Sayings
Issue #43 Posted September 1, 2006

"Ours is a time of impermanence, of virtual reality in which acts become speech, and speech is said to include the basest actions. The effect is that both speech and action lose their moral power. Whether it is the small gesture that adorns daily life or a common respect for the national flag, our public discourse seems to have lost touch with the symbolic, and therefore with much of the grace of public life. American society no longer seems able to value simple gifts, like the respectful gestures that make it a society instead of just a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing much." -- Paul Greenberg

"Put your trust in God; but mind to keep your powder dry!" -- Oliver Cromwell

"Safety is nice but it is not first. Life is first and life is not safe." -- Jeff Cooper

All that is necessary for individual happiness, is learning to be satisfied with your choices.

"It does not take a majority to prevail...but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men." -- Samuel Adams

"To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it." -- Thomas Jefferson

"For too long, the world was paralyzed by the argument that terrorism could not be stopped until the grievances of terrorists were addressed. The complicated and heartrending issues that perplex mankind are no excuse for violent, inhumane attacks, nor do they excuse not taking aggressive action against those who deliberately slaughter innocent people." -- Ronald Reagan

"It is God's job to judge the terrorists. It is our job to arrange the meeting." -- USMC bumper sticker

"Newspapers... serve as chimneys to carry off noxious vapors and smoke." -- Thomas Jefferson

"The hero is the one who kindles a great light in the world, who sets up blazing torches in the dark streets of life for men to see by. The saint is the man who walks through the dark paths of the world, himself a light." -- Felix Adler

"The most may err as grossly as the few." -- John Dryden

"What can be added to the happiness of a man who is in health, out of debt, and has a clear conscience?" -- Adam Smith

"I think we all have a need to know what we do not need to know." -- William Safire

"The truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering the more you suffer." -- Thomas Merton

"The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Many a man thinks he is buying pleasure, when he is really selling himself a slave to it." -- Benjamin Franklin

"Nature has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself shall not be defended." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Men will always be mad, and those who think they can cure them are the maddest of all." -- Voltaire

"It takes a heap of sense to write good nonsense." -- Mark Twain

"[A] wise and frugal government... shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government." -- Thomas Jefferson

"I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents...." -- James Madison

"Our peculiar security is in the possession of a written Constitution. Let us not make it a blank paper by construction." -- Thomas Jefferson

"Remember that if the opportunities for great deeds should never come, the opportunities for good deeds are renewed day by day. The thing for us to long for is the goodness, not the glory." -- F.W. Faber

"The great trouble with you Americans is that you are still under the influence of that second-rate-shall I say third-rate?-mind, Karl Marx." -- H. G. Wells

"The most successful politician is the one who says what the people are thinking most often in the loudest voice." -- Theodore Roosevelt

"If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner." -- H. L. Mencken

"Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation." -- Henry Kissinger

"I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts." -- Will Rogers

"The proper response to difficulty is not to retreat, it is to prevail." -- President George W. Bush

"Once created, federal programs are nearly impossible to eliminate." -- Rep. Ron Paul

"The battle over judicial appointments today is a battle over how much power judges should have in our system of government. If judges are masters over the charter they have sworn to protect, then 'we the people' are not." -- Sen. Orrin Hatch

"In politics, throwing the taxpayers' money at disasters is supposed to show your compassion. But robbing Peter to pay Paul is not compassion. It is politics." -- Thomas Sowell

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." -- Ronald Reagan

"Here's my strategy on the Cold War: We win, they lose." -- Ronald Reagan

"The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help." -- Ronald Reagan

"The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they're ignorant: It's just that they know so much that isn't so." -- Ronald Reagan

"Of the four wars in my lifetime none came about because the U.S. was too strong." -- Ronald Reagan

"I have wondered at times about what the Ten Commandment's would have looked like if Moses had run them through the U.S. Congress." -- Ronald Reagan

"The taxpayer: That's someone who works for the federal government but doesn't have to take the civil service examination." -- Ronald Reagan

"Government is like a baby: An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other." -- Ronald Reagan

"If we ever forget that we're one nation under God, then we will be a nation gone under." -- Ronald Reagan

"The nearest thing to eternal life we will ever see on this earth is a government program." -- Ronald Reagan

"I've laid down the law, though, to everyone from now on about anything that happens: no matter what time it is, wake me. even if it's in the middle of a Cabinet meeting." -- Ronald Reagan

"It has been said that politics is the second oldest profession. I have learned that it bears a striking resemblance to the first." -- Ronald Reagan

"Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." Ronald Reagan

"Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book." -- Ronald Reagan

Values, however universal in principle, will always require muscle and self-interest to enforce." -- Robert D. Kaplan, Warrior Politics, p.100

"...be sociable with them that will be sociable, and formidable to them that will not." -- Hobbes

"I wonder how many of the people who profess to believe in the leveling ideas of collectivism and egalitarianism really just believe that they themselves are good for nothing. I mean, how many leftists are animated by a quite reasonable self-loathing? In their hearts they know that they are not going to become scholars or inventors or industrialists or even ordinary good kind people. So they need a way to achieve that smugness for which the left is so justifiably famous. They need a way to achieve self-esteem without merit. Well, there is politics. In an egalitarian world everything will be controlled by politics, and politics requires no merit." -- P.J. O'Rourke

"The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive." -- Thomas Sowell

"It's amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites." -- Thomas Sowell

"Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions." -- James Madison

"A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing." -- Oscar Wilde

"The notion that the church, the press, and the universities should serve the state is essentially a Communist notion. In a free society these institutions must be wholly free--which is to say that their function is to serve as checks upon the state." -- Alan Barth

"But to manipulate men, to propel them toward goals which you--the social reformers--see, but they may not, is to deny their human essence, to treat them as objects without wills of their own, and therefore to degrade them." -- Isaiah Berlin

"It is better by noble boldness to run the risk of being subject to half the evils we anticipate than to remain in cowardly listlessness for fear of what might happen." -- Herodotus

"More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones." -- Mother Teresa

"Government is instituted for the common good...the people alone have an incontestable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to institute government; and to reform, alter, or totally change the same, when their protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness require it." -- John Adams

2006-5