Sayings
Issue #58 Posted March, 2009

"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on to them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free." -- Ronald Reagan

"A Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever." -- John Adams

"If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you; that is the principal difference between a dog and a man." -- Mark Twain

"When dealing with politicians ignore the pretty smiles and fancy words; watch their hands." -- Unknown

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." -- Theodore Roosevelt, May 07, 1918

"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy." -- Ernest Benn

"In selecting men for office, let principle be your guide. Regard not the particular sect or denomination of the candidate - look to his character." -- Noah Webster

"The road to truth is long, and lined the entire way with annoying bastards" -- Unknown

"The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money." -- Margaret Thatcher

"I will not be wronged; I will not be insulted; I will not be layed a hand upon. I don't do these things, and, I expect the same of others. -- " J.B.Books, Credo, John Wayne in the "The Shootist."

"Nothing brings out the lower traits of human nature like office seeking." -- Rutherford B. Hayes

"There are some that only employ words for the purpose of disguising their thoughts." -- Voltaire

"I should like to adopt political doctrines that would live longer than my dog." -- James Garfield

"A man to be a sound politician and in any degree useful to the country must be governed by higher and steadier considerations than those of personal sympathy and private regard." -- Martin Van Buren

"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the roots." -- Henry David Thoreau

"It is not honorable to take mere legal advantage, when it happens to be contrary to justice." -- Thomas Jefferson

"It is not the function of the government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error." -- Justice Robert H. Jackson

"Liberty cannot be caged into a charter or handed on ready-made to the next generation. Each generation must recreate liberty for its own times. Whether or not we establish freedom rests with ourselves." -- Florence Ellinwood Allen

"If your pistol is not on your person, it is too far away." -- Pete B.

"For those who are in sovereign control of arms are in a sovereign position to decide whether the constitution is to continue or not." -- Aristotle, The Politics

"You can preach a better sermon with your life than with your lips." -- Oliver Goldsmith

"I am the first acknowledged comedian to receive a vote for the Presidency--not the first comedian, mind you, but the first acknowledged one." -- Will Rogers

"The government cannot give to anyone anything that it does not first take from someone else." -- Unknown

"Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names." -- J.F. Kennedy

"Today's federal government is too big, too powerful, and too expensive because it is doing things beyond the scope of the Constitution. This is foolish and it is dangerous." -- newly elected Georgia Rep. Paul Broun

"You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it." -- Dr. Adrian Rogers

"An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it." -- Jeff Cooper

[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." -- Thomas Jefferson

"If it be asked, What is the most sacred duty and the greatest source of our security in a Republic? The answer would be, An inviolable respect for the Constitution and Laws-- the first growing out of the last... A sacred respect for the constitutional law is the vital principle, the sustaining energy of a free government." -- Alexander Hamilton

"When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators." -- P.J. O'Rourke, Humorist

"Very few established institutions, governments and constitutions... are ever destroyed by their enemies until they have been corrupted and weakened by their friends." -- Walter Lippmann

A veteran - whether active duty, retired, or national guard or reserve--is someone who, at one point in his, or her life, wrote a blank check made payable to "The United States of America," for an amount of "up to and including my life." That is honor, and there are way too many people in this country who no longer understand it. -- Author unknown.

"Religion and good morals are the only solid foundation of public liberty and happiness." -- Samuel Adams

"To live in the presence of great truths and eternal laws, to be led by permanent ideals-- that is what keeps a man patient when the world ignores him, and calm and unspoiled when the world praises him." -- Honore De Balzac

"The natural cure for an ill-administration, in a popular or representative constitution, is a change of men." -- Alexander Hamilton

"Tax rates are not tax revenues. ... How many times does it have to happen before people stop equating tax rates with tax revenues? Do the tax-and-spend politicians and their media supporters not know any better-- or are they counting on the rest of us not knowing any better?" -- Thomas Sowell

"If dissent is so rare, why do global-warming conformists feel the strong need to argue that minority views should be dismissed as nutty or venal? Why not posit that there is such a thing as honest disagreement on the science?" -- Debra Saunders

"If you think too much about being re-elected, it is very difficult to be worth re-electing." -- Woodrow Wilson

"When they call the roll in the Senate, the senators do not know whether to answer 'present' or 'guilty'." -- Theodore Roosevelt

"Now I know what a statesman is; he's a dead politician. We need more statesmen." -- Bob Edwards

"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing it, and then misapplying the wrong remedies." -- Groucho Marx

"And I reiterate my belief that everyone is NOT entitled to an opinion. It has become one of our religious mantras along with "tolerance". Nobody dare confront someone who puts forth a stupid position, just accept it, its OK, don't smash his self-esteem. If someone is never confronted on their opinions they start to believe they have validity, and they will attempt to force them on society. -- Scott Kassa

"Because you were unprepared when evil visited you, you want to make sure the rest of us are unprepared. The most vile instrument of death isn't a gun, it is government wielded by "do-gooders" that know what's best for the masses." -- Unknown

"Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom." -- Albert Einstein

"Whosoever is out of patience, is out of possession of his mind, body and soul." -- Sir Francis Bacon

"The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding one's self in the ranks of the insane." -- Marcus Aurelius

"Sometimes I wish I were a Democrat because Democrats seem to have more fun. At other times I wish I were a Libertarian because Republicans are too much like Democrats. What I actually am is a right-wing independent who is registered Republican because there isn't any place else to go." -- Lyn Nofziger

"Never blame a legislative body for not doing something. When they do nothing, they don't hurt anybody. When they do something is when they become dangerous." -- Will Rogers

"What is a hoax is that only rich industrialized nations are causing [global warming], that it is manmade. I don't think we have the ability, and I think it's outrageous for people to claim with such vanity that we have such power on the one hand, and on the other hand we're no more important than field mice. In fact, some people would say that for the earth to survive, we'd have to get off of it, or die. It's a religion." -- Rush Limbaugh

"Guns don't kill people. The government kills people." -- Dale Gribble

"The two pillars of 'political correctness' are, a) willful ignorance, and b) a steadfast refusal to face the truth." -- George MacDonald Fraser

"Love work, hate domination, and do not let your name come to the attention of the ruling powers." -- The Talmud, "Sayings of the Fathers"

"When the federal government is more concerned with militias than street gangs, then you know for certain that someone real high up there is scared of something." -- Right on the Web

"The tank, the B-52, the fighter-bomber, the state-controlled police and military are the weapons of dictatorship. The rifle is the weapon of democracy. If guns are outlawed, only the government will have guns. Only the police, the secret police, the military. The hired servants of our rulers. Only the government - and a few outlaws. I intend to be among the outlaws." -- Edward Abbey, The Right to Arms, Abbey's Road, 1979

"By calling attention to 'a well regulated militia', the 'security' of the nation, and the right of each citizen 'to keep and bear arms', our founding fathers recognized the essentially civilian nature of our economy. Although it is extremely unlikely that the fears of governmental tyranny which gave rise to the Second Amendment will ever be a major danger to our nation, the Amendment still remains an important declaration of our basic civilian-military relationships, in which every citizen must be ready to participate in the defense of his country. For that reason, I believe the Second Amendment will always be important." -- Senator John F. Kennedy, 1960

"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banners openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their garments, and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared." -- Marcus Tullius Cicero - 42 BC

"People must be judged on their character and abilities; anything else is racist. It's amusing that those who claim to be champions of "minority" races and colorblind are the most racist of them all." -- Tod W.

"In recent years it has been suggested that the Second Amendment protects the "collective" right of states to maintain militias, while it does not protect the right of "the people" to keep and bear arms... The phrase "the people" meant the same thing in the Second Amendment as it did in the First, Fourth, Ninth and Tenth Amendments-- that is, each and every free person. A select militia defined as only the privileged class entitled to keep and bear arms was considered an anathema to a free society, in the same way that Americans denounced select spokesmen approved by the government as the only class entitled to the freedom of the press." If anyone entertained this notion in the period during which the Constitution and Bill of Rights were debated and ratified, it remains one of the most closely guarded secrets of the 18th century, for no known writing surviving from the period between 1787 and 1791 states such a thesis." -- Stephen P. Holbrook, That Every Man Be Armed: The Evolution of a Constitutional Right

"It is my belief that there are `absolutes' in our Bill of Rights, and that they were put there on purpose by men who knew what words meant, and meant their prohibitions to be `absolutes'." -- Justice Hugo Black, The Bill of Rights, 35 NYU L.R. 865, 1970

"You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence." -- Charles A. Beard, American Historian, (1874-1948)

"They that would give up essential liberty for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin

"The claim and exercise of a Constitutional right cannot be converted into a crime." -- Miller v US, 230 F 2d 486, 489

"Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent... the greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding." -- Justice Louis Brandeis

"I heartily accept the motto `The government is best which governs least'; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which I also believe, - `That government is best which governs not at all'." -- Henry David Thoreau

"In America, freedom and justice have always come from the ballot box, the jury box, and when that fails, the cartridge box." -- Steve Symms, US Senator from Idaho, 1990

"It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees." -- Dolores Ibarruri `La Pasionaria'

"It is not the function of our Government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the Government from falling into error." -- Robert H. Jackson, US Judge (1892-1954)

"The strongest reason for people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government." -- Thomas Jefferson

"The Second Amendment's language and historical and philosophical background demonstrated that it was designed to guarantee individuals the possession of certain kinds of arms for three purposes: (1) crime prevention or what we would today describe as self-defense; (2) national defense; and (3) preservation of individual liberty..." -- Don Kates, Handgun Prohibition and the Original Meaning of the Second Amendment, 1983

"Liberty is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes. Of all the so-called natural human rights that have ever been invented, liberty is the least to be cheap and is never free of cost." -- Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers

"All men having power ought to be mistrusted." -- James Madison

"Reminder: Don't forget to pay your taxes .... 12 million Illegal aliens need their welfare."

"The conclusion is thus inescapable that the history, concept, and wording of the second amendment to the Constitution of the United States, as well as its interpretation by every major commentator and court in the first half-century after its ratification, indicates that what is protected is an individual right of a private citizen to own and carry firearms in a peaceful manner."

2009-2