Sayings
Issue #65 Posted May 5, 2010
"The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave. ... [I]t is now too late to retire from the contest. There is no retreat but in submission and slavery! Our chains are forged! Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston! The war is inevitable -- and let it come! I repeat it, sir, let it come!" --Patrick Henry
"It is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favors." -- George Washington
"Both oligarch and tyrant mistrust the people and therefore seek to deprive them of their arms." -- Aristotle
"The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist." -- Winston Churchill, Nov. 21, 1943
"You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’ You must do the thing you think you cannot do." -- Eleanor Roosevelt
"The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people. It is an instrument for the people to restrain the government." -- Patrick Henry
"On every question of construction carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed." --Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Johnson, 1823
"A just security to property is not afforded by that government, under which unequal taxes oppress one species of property and reward another species." -- James Madison
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." -- C. S. Lewis (1898 - 1963)
"The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." -- Chief Justice John Roberts
"The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. ... I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere." -- Thomas Jefferson
"Government can do something for the people only in proportion as it can do something to the people." -- Thomas Jefferson
"[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
"They pull a knife, you pull a gun. They send one of yours to the hospital, you send one of theirs to the morgue. They use a dirty bomb, you drop a thermonuclear device....... That's the Chicago way!" -- with apologies to Sean Connery in "The Untouchables"
"The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered as the palladium of the liberties of a republic." -- Justice Joseph Story
"No man in his senses can hesitate in choosing to be free, rather than a slave." -- Alexander Hamilton
"If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people, under the pretence of taking care of them, they must become happy." -- Thomas Jefferson
"Security' is mostly superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. In the long run, avoiding danger is no safer than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing." -- Helen Keller, 1950
"The budget must be balanced. The Treasury must be refilled. Public debt must be reduced. Arrogance of officialdom must be tempered and controlled. Assistance to foreign lands must be curtailed, lest Rome become bankrupt. Citizens must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance." -- Cicero, 55 BC
"That [tyrannical government] power is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?" -- French historian Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)
"With respect to the two words 'general welfare,' I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators." -- James Madison
"The great advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science or in literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government." -- economist Milton Friedman (1912-2006)
"We have rights, as individuals, to give as much of our own money as we please to charity; but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of public money." -- American hunter, frontiersman, soldier and politician." -- Davy Crockett (1786-1836)
"Politics are not the high class, marvelous thing that lots of you picture. Our whole government workings are crammed with 'baloney.'" -- humorist Will Rogers (1879-1935)
"It is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth -- and listen to the song of that syren, till she transforms us into beasts." -- Patrick Henry
" What could have been, or should have been, are gone forever--It's what you do now that's important " -- Charles Bunczk
"A good government implies two things; first, fidelity to the object of the government; secondly, a knowledge of the means, by which those objects can be best attained." -- James Madison
"I apprehend no danger to our country from a foreign foe ... Our destruction, should it come at all, will be from another quarter. -- From the inattention of the people to the concerns of their government, from their carelessness and negligence, I must confess that I do apprehend some danger. I fear that they may place too implicit a confidence in their public servants, and fail properly to scrutinize their conduct; that in this way they may be made the dupes of designing men, and become the instruments of their own undoing. Make them intelligent, and they will be vigilant; give them the means of detecting the wrong, and they will apply the remedy." -- U.S. Senator Daniel
"Washington is out of control. It does as it likes, without restraint. It spends American money and American lives to fight remote wars for which it cannot provide a plausible reason. It determines what our children will be taught, who we can hire and fire, to whom we can sell our houses, whether we can defend ourselves, even what names we can call each other. The feds read our email and track the web sites we visit, make us hop around barefoot in airports at the command of surly unaccountable rentacops. They search us at random in train stations without even a pretense of probable cause. We have no influence over them, no way of resisting. Except, perhaps, to ignore them."-- "Fred," from the website Fred on Everything, (www. fredoneverything.net/Nullification.shtml)
"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
"In general, the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other." -- French writer Voltaire (1694-1778)
"Forced to choose, the poor, like the rich, love money more than political liberty; and the only political freedom capable of enduring is one that is so pruned as to keep the rich from denuding the poor by ability or subtlety and the poor from robbing the rich by violence or votes." -- American psychologist and philosopher Will Durant (1885-1981)
"By virtue of exchange, one man's prosperity is beneficial to all others." -- French economist, statesman and author Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850)
"Did you ever know a politician that was not 'facing the most critical time in the world's affairs' every time he spoke in public?" -- humorist Will Rogers (1879-1935)
"Nothing is more essential to the establishment of manners in a State than that all persons employed in places of power and trust must be men of unexceptionable characters." -- Samuel Adams
"The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them." -- Patrick Henry
"To go against the dominant thinking of your friends, of most of the people you see every day, is perhaps the most difficult act of heroism you can have." -- American journalist and historian Theodore H. White (1915-1986)
"Here comes the orator! With his flood of words, and his drop of reason." -- Benjamin Franklin
"The main vice of capitalism is the uneven distribution of prosperity. The main vice of socialism is the even distribution of misery." -- former British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
"There are 1011 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers." -- American physicist Richard Feynman (1918-1988)
"When small men begin to cast big shadows, it means that the sun is about to set." -- Chinese writer Lin Yutang (1895-1976)
"The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite." -- James Madison, Federalist No. 45
"In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself." -- James Madison, Federalist No. 51
"The ideal tyranny is that which is ignorantly self-administered by its victims. The most perfect slaves are, therefore, those which blissfully and unawaredly enslave themselves. A truth's initial commotion is directly proportional to how deeply the lie was believed. It wasn't the world being round that agitated people, but that the world wasn't flat. When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic." -- author Dresden James
"An unlimited power to tax involves, necessarily, a power to destroy; because there is a limit beyond which no institution and no property can bear taxation." -- John Marshall
"The collection of taxes which are not absolutely required, which do not beyond reasonable doubt contribute to the public welfare, is only a species of legalized larceny. The wise and correct course to follow in taxation is not to destroy those who have already secured success, but to create conditions under which everyone will have a better chance to be successful." -- President Calvin Coolidge (1873-1933)
"[I]n this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes." -- Benjamin Franklin
"When more of the people's sustenance is exacted through the form of taxation than is necessary to meet the just obligations of government, such exaction becomes ruthless extortion and a violation of the fundamental principles of a free government." -- President Grover Cleveland (1837-1908)
"Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt." -- President Herbert Hoover (1874-1964)
"To tax the community for the advantage of a class is not protection: it is plunder." -- British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881)
"The difference between death and taxes is death doesn't get worse every time Congress meets." -- American humorist Will Rogers (1879-1935)
"I cannot find any authority in the Constitution for public charity." -- President Franklin Pierce (1804-1869)
"I feel obliged to withhold my approval of the plan to indulge in benevolent and charitable sentiment through the appropriation of public funds. I find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution." -- President Grover Cleveland (1837-1908)
"I don't like the income tax. Every time we talk about these taxes we get around to the idea of 'from each according to his capacity and to each according to his needs.' That's socialism. It's written into the Communist Manifesto. Maybe we ought to see that every person who gets a tax return receives a copy of the Communist Manifesto with it so he can see what's happening to him." -- accountant and Commissioner of Internal Revenue T. Coleman Andrews (1899-1983)
"I am not afraid to go unarmed...I simply detest being unarmed. It is a contemptible and undignified condition in which to find oneself." - anon. Gunsite graduate
"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." -- Thomas Jefferson
"The government of the absolute majority is but the government of the strongest interests; and when not effectively checked, is the most tyrannical and oppressive that can be devised... [To read the Constitution is to realize that] no free system was ever farther removed from the principle that the absolute majority, without check or limitation, ought to govern." -- American statesman John C. Calhoun (1782-1850)
"Truth does not become more true by virtue of the fact that the entire world agrees with it, nor less so even if the whole world disagrees with it." -- Jewish philosopher Maimonides (1135-1204)
"There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly." -- American author and poet Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
"The first and governing maxim in the interpretation of a statute is to discover the meaning of those who made it." -- James Wilson, Of the Study of Law in the United States, 1790
"Shame on the men who can court exemption from present trouble and expense at the price of their own posterity's liberty!" -- Samuel Adams
"Men use thought only to justify their wrongdoings, and speech only to conceal their thoughts." -- French writer Voltaire (1694-1778)
"Words, like eyeglasses, blur everything that they do not make more clear." -- French writer Joseph Joubert (1754-1824)
"We resent all criticism which denies us anything that lies in our line of advance." -- American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
"If you ever injected truth into politics, you would have no politics." -- American humorist Will Rogers (1879-1935)
"Man, once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the sport of every wind. With such persons, gullibility, which they call faith, takes the helm from the hand of reason and the mind becomes a wreck." -- Thomas Jefferson
"As riches increase and accumulate in few hands, as luxury prevails in society, virtue will be in a greater degree considered as only a graceful appendage of wealth, and the tendency of things will be to depart from the republican standard. This is the real disposition of human nature." -- Alexander Hamilton
"[T]here is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust." -- James Madison
"I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious." -- Thomas Jefferson
"The executive branch of this government never has, nor will suffer, while I preside, any improper conduct of its officers to escape with impunity." -- George Washington
"[W]here is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation deserts the oaths...?" -- George Washington
"Let it simply be asked where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation deserts the oaths, which are the instruments of investigation in the Courts of Justice? And let us with caution indulge the opposition, that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that National morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle." -- George Washington in his Farewell Address of 1796
"The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time. ... Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever." -- Thomas Jefferson
"The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for, among old parchments, or musty records. They are written, as with a sun beam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power." --Alexander Hamilton
"In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm and three or more is a congress." -- John Adams
"Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness..." These are natural rights -- gifts from God, not government." -- John Adams
Moreover, it was with firm regard to this fact that our Constitution was written and ratified "in order secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity." As such, it established a constitutional republic ruled by laws based on natural rights, not rights allocated by governments or those occupying seats of power. -- John Adams
"Our political way of life is by the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God, and of course presupposes the existence of God, the moral ruler of the universe, and a rule of right and wrong, of just and unjust, binding upon man, preceding all institutions of human society and government." -- John Adams
"[A] good moral character is the first essential in a man..." -- George Washington
"[W]e ought to deprecate the hazard attending ardent and susceptible minds, from being too strongly, and too early prepossessed in favor of other political systems, before they are capable of appreciating their own." -- George Washington
"Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right, from the frame of their nature, to knowledge, as their great Creator, who does nothing in vain, has given them understandings, and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge; I mean, of the characters and conduct of their rulers." -- John Adams
"Law and liberty cannot rationally become the objects of our love, unless they first become the objects of our knowledge." -- James Wilson
"A nation under a well regulated government should permit none to remain uninstructed. It is monarchical and aristocratical government only that requires ignorance for its support." -- Thomas Paine
"No people will tamely surrender their Liberties, nor can any be easily subdued, when knowledge is diffused and Virtue is preserved. On the Contrary, when People are universally ignorant, and debauched in their Manners, they will sink under their own weight without the Aid of foreign Invaders." -- Samuel Adams
2010-3