Sayings
Issue #99 Posted  March 2016

"Never judge legislation as if it would be interpreted and executed by people who think as you do, but as it would be by your worst enemies." -- Unknown

If we do not learn, history does repeat itself." -- Unknown

"Radical Muslims want to cut your head off. Moderate Muslims want a radical Muslim to cut your head off." -- Terry F.

"Arms discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property...Horrid mischief would ensue were the law-abiding deprived of the use of them." -- Thomas Paine

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, McCullough v. Maryland, 1819

"Screw being politically correct. From now on, I'm just gonna be correct." -- A pissed off American

"Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy." -- Winston Churchill

"The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it's good-bye to the Bill of Rights." -- H.L. Mencken

"It is a very great mistake to imagine that the object of loyalty is the authority and interest of one individual man, however dignified by the applause or enriched by the success of popular actions." -- Samuel Adams, Loyalty and Sedition, essay in The Advertiser, 1748

"O judgment, thou art fled to brutish beasts, and men have lost their reason!" -- Shakespeare.

"If you take a glass of sewage, and put a drop of wine in it, you still have a glass of shit. Take a glass of wine, and put a drop of sewage in it. Now you have a glass of shit." -- Terry F.

The stages of a project:

"Governments first duty is to protect the people, not run their lives." -- Ronald Reagan

"As parents, we can have no joy, knowing that this government is not sufficiently lasting to ensure any thing which we may bequeath to posterity: And by a plain method of argument, as we are running the next generation into debt, we ought to do the work of it, otherwise we use them meanly and pitifully." -- Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776

"Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been and ever will be pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit." -- James Madison, Federalist No. 51, 1788

"People will forget what you did. People will forget what you said. BUT People will never forget how you made them feel. -- Unknown

"If you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite." -- Winston Churchill

"It already appears, that there must be in every society of men superiors and inferiors, because God has laid in the constitution and course of nature the foundations of the distinction." -- John Adams, Thoughts on Government, 1776

"I've noted that people who annoy people who live by the sword also die by the sword." -- Jim H.

"Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves, therefore, are its only safe depositories." -- Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XIV, 1781

"We must make our election between economy and Liberty, or profusion and servitude." -- Jefferson (1816)

"If God wanted us to vote, he would have given us candidates." -- Jay Leno~

"The problem with political jokes is they get elected." -- Henry Cate, VII

"We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office." -- Aesop

"Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even where there is no river." -- Nikita Khrushchev

"When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President; I'm beginning to believe it." -- Clarence Darrow

"There ought to be one day -- just one -- when there is open season on Congressmen." -- Will Rogers

"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, The Farmer Refuted, 1775

"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 a war, is much worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice, -- is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever-renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other." -- John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy

"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. Is this the part of wise men, engaged in a great and arduous struggle for liberty? Are we disposed to be of the number of those, who having eyes, see not, and having ears, hear not, the things which so nearly concern their temporal salvation? For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it might cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst, and to provide for it." -- Patrick Henry, speech in the Virginia Convention, 177

"He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself." -- Thomas Paine, Dissertation on First Principles of Government, 1791

"There is not a single instance in history in which civil liberty was lost, and religious liberty preserved entire. If therefore we yield up our temporal property, we at the same time deliver the conscience into bondage." -- John Witherspoon, The Dominion of Providence Over the Passions of Men, 1776

"[T]hat form of government which is best contrived to secure an impartial and exact execution of the laws, is the best of republics." -- John Adams, Thoughts on Government, 1776

"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigues of supporting it." -- Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

"I am commonly opposed to those who modestly assume the rank of champions of liberty, and make a very patriotic noise about the people. It is the stale artifice which has duped the world a thousand times, and yet, though detected, it is still successful." -- Fisher Ames, letter to George Richard Minot, 1789

"The state governments have a full superintendence and control over the immense mass of local interests of their respective states, which connect themselves with the feelings, the affections, the municipal institutions, and the internal arrangements of the whole population. They possess, too, the immediate administration of justice in all cases, civil and criminal, which concern the property, personal rights, and peaceful pursuits of their own citizens." -- Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution, 1833

"If it were to 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, Essay in the American Daily Advertiser, 1794

"The virtues of men are of more consequence to society than their abilities; and for this reason, the heart should be cultivated with more assiduity than the head." -- Noah Webster, On the Education of Youth in America, 1788

"It has been a source of great pain to me to have met with so many among [my] opponents who had not the liberality to distinguish between political and social opposition; who transferred at once to the person, the hatred they bore to his political opinions." -- Thomas Jefferson, letter to Richard M. Johnson, 1808

"The rights of neutrality will only be respected when they are defended by an adequate power. A nation, despicable by its weakness, forfeits even the privilege of being neutral." -- Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 11, 1787

"If virtue and knowledge are diffused among the people, they will never be enslaved. This will be their great security." -- Samuel Adams, Letter to James Warren, 1779

"I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power." -- Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Charles Jarvis, 1820

"Our conflict is not likely to cease so soon as every good man would wish. The measure of iniquity is not yet filled; and unless we can return a little more to first principles, and act a little more upon patriotic ground, I do not know when it will..." -- George Washington (1779)

"Foreign influence is truly the Grecian horse to a republic. We cannot be too careful to exclude its influence." -- Alexander Hamilton, Pacificus, No. 6, 1793

"[T]he present Constitution is the standard to which we are to cling. Under its banners, bona fide must we combat our political foes -- rejecting all changes but through the channel itself provides for amendments." -- Alexander Hamilton, letter to James Bayard, 1802

"It is ... [the citizens'] choice, and depends upon their conduct, whether they will be respectable and prosperous, or contemptible and miserable as a nation. This is the time of their political probation; this is the moment when the eyes of the world are turned upon them." -- George Washington, Letter to the Governors, 1783

"It will be worthy of a free, enlightened, and, at no distant period, a great nation, to give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence." -- George Washington, Farewell Address, 1796

"There is no maxim in my opinion which is more liable to be misapplied, and which therefore needs elucidation than the current one that the interest of the majority is the political standard of right and wrong.... In fact it is only reestablishing under another name and a more specious form, force as the measure of right." --James Madison, letter to James Monroe, 1786

"According to the way the government calculates it, if everyone in America lost their jobs and gave up looking for another, we would have full employment." -- Paul K.

"[T]he great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachment of the others." -- James Madison, Federalist No. 51, 1788

"Let us recollect that peace or war will not always be left to our option; that however moderate or unambitious we may be, we cannot count upon the moderation, or hope to extinguish the ambition of others." --Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 34, 1788

"In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution." -- Thomas Jefferson, fair copy of the drafts of the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798

"This was the object of the Declaration of Independence. Not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take." -- Thomas Jefferson

"The legislative department is everywhere extending the sphere of its activity and drawing all power into its impetuous vortex." -- James Madison, Federalist No. 48, 1788

"[W]here there is no law, there is no liberty; and nothing deserves the name of law but that which is certain and universal in its operation upon all the members of the community." --Benjamin Rush, Letter to David Ramsay, 1788

"Let the American youth never forget, that they possess a noble inheritance, bought by the toils, and sufferings, and blood of their ancestors; and capacity, if wisely improved, and faithfully guarded, of transmitting to their latest posterity all the substantial blessings of life, the peaceful enjoyment of liberty, property, religion, and independence." --Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution, 1833

"Your love of liberty -- your respect for the laws -- your habits of industry -- and your practice of the moral and religious obligations, are the strongest claims to national and individual happiness." -- George Washington, letter to the Residents of Boston, 1789

"There is no maxim in my opinion which is more liable to be misapplied, and which therefore needs elucidation than the current one that the interest of the majority is the political standard of right and wrong." -- James Madison, letter to James Monroe, 1786

"[F]oreigners will generally be apt to bring with them attachments to the persons they have left behind; to the country of their nativity; and to its particular customs and manners. They will also entertain opinions on government congenial with those under which they have lived; or if they should be led hither from a preference to ours, how extremely unlikely is it that they will bring with them that temperate love of liberty, so essential to real republicanism?" -- Alexander Hamilton, 1802

"I pray heaven to bestow the best of blessing on this house, and on all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof!" -- John Adams, letter to his wife Abigail, 1800

"The multiplication of public offices, increase of expense beyond income, growth and entailment of a public debt, are indications soliciting the employment of the pruning knife." -- Thomas Jefferson, letter to Spencer Roane, 1821

"A Jew who votes for Obama is like a chicken who votes for Col. Sanders." -- Unknown

"[N]o mound of parchment can be so formed as to stand against the sweeping torrent of boundless ambition on the one side, aided by the sapping current of corrupted morals on the other." -- George Washington, draft of first Inaugural Address, 1789

"[T]he most productive system of finance will always be the least burdensome." -- James Madison, Federalist No. 35, 1788

"No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause, because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity." -- James Madison, Federalist No. 10, 1787

"When we assumed the Soldier, we did not lay aside the Citizen; and we shall most sincerely rejoice with you in the happy hour when the establishment of American Liberty, upon the most firm and solid foundations shall enable us to return to our Private Stations in the bosom of a free, peacefully and happy Country." -- George Washington (1775)

"[T]he government must be a weak one indeed, if it should forget that the good of the whole can only be promoted by advancing the good of each of the parts or members which compose the whole." -- John Jay, Federalist No. 64, 1788

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