Body

Sayings
Issue #100 Posted March 2016

"A liberal's paradise would be a place where everybody has guaranteed employment, free comprehensive healthcare, free education, free food, free housing, free clothing, free utilities, and only law enforcement has guns. and believe it or not, such a place does indeed already exist: it's called prison." -- Sheriff Joe Arpaio, Maricopa County, Arizona

"The time is now near at hand which must determine if Americans are to be freemen or slaves." -- George Washington, 1776

"[T]he executive and legislative branches of the national government depend upon, and emanate from the states. Every where the state sovereignties are represented; and the national sovereignty, as such, has no representation." -- Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution, 1833

"Everything's fine if you reach the spine." - Jim H.

"From The Wind and The Lion and hang it near where you keep your guns. "A man's wealth is measured by the number of his rifles." -- Mulay Hamid El Raisuli, Lord of the Riff, Sultan to the Berbers, from the movie, The Wind and the Lion

"Loyalty to the country always. Loyalty to the government when it deserves it." -- Mark Twain

"No dignity is quite so impressive as living within your means." -- Calvin Coolige

"Having been poor is no shame, but being ashamed of it, is." -- "Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richards Almanack, 1749

"Stability in government is essential to national character and to the advantages annexed to it, as well as to that repose and confidence in the minds of the people, which are among the chief blessings of civil society." -- James Madison, Federalist No. 37, 1788

"Men, to act with vigor and effect, must have time to mature measures, and judgment and experience, as to the best method of applying them. They must not be hurried on to their conclusions by the passions, or the fears of the multitude. They must deliberate, as well as resolve." -- Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution, 1833

"Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclination, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence." -- John Adams (1770)

"[W]hen all government, domestic and foreign, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the center of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another." -- "Thomas Jefferson, letter to Charles Hammond, 1821

"The judiciary of the United States is the subtle corps of sappers and miners constantly working under ground to undermine the foundations of our confederated fabric. They are construing our constitution from a co-ordination of a general and special government to a general and supreme one alone." -- Thomas Jefferson, letter to Thomas Ritchie, 1820

The "looters' credo" has brought you to regard your proudest achievements as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the industrialists, as blackguards, and your magnificent factories as the product and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter, who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide!" -- Ayn Rand

"Our obligations to our country never cease but with our lives." -- John Adams

"[A]ll speculative politicians will agree, that the happiness of society is the end of government, as all divines and moral philosophers will agree that the happiness of the individual is the end of man. From this principle it will follow that the form of government which communicates ease, comfort, security, or, in one word, happiness, to the greatest numbers of persons, and in the greatest degree, is the best." -- John Adamms, Thoughts on Government, 1776

Soft Despotism: "Thus, after having successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd." -- Alexis de Toqueville, Democracy in America

"There was never a slave who did not choose to be a slave. The choice may be between bondage or death but the choice is always there. -- Tyrion Lannister - Game Of Thrones

"[H]onesty will be found on every experiment, to be the best and only true policy; let us then as a nation be just." -- George Washingtonn, Circular letter to the States, 1783

"[O]f those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants." -- Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 1, 1787

"The best service that can be rendered to a country, next to that of giving it liberty, is in diffusing the mental improvement equally essential to the preservation, and the enjoyment of the blessing." -- James Madison, letter to Littleton Dennis Teackle, 1826

"There is a rank due to the United States, among nations, which will be withheld, if not absolutely lost, by the reputation of weakness." -- George Washington, Fifth Annual Message, 1793

"It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives." -- John Adams, Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, 1756

"In disquisitions of every kind there are certain primary truths, or first principles, upon which all subsequent reasoning must depend." -- Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 31, 1788

"The mobs of the great cities add just so much to the support of pure government as sores do to the strength of the human body. It is the manners and spirit of a people, which preserve a republic in vigor. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution." -- Thomas Jefferson (1787)

"But the mild voice of reason, pleading the cause of an enlarged and permanent interest, is but too often drowned, before public bodies as well as individuals, by the clamors of an impatient avidity for immediate and immoderate gain." -- James Madison, Federalist No. 42, 1788

"[O]f all the views of this law none is more important, none more legitimate, than that of rendering the people the safe, as they are the ultimate, guardians of their own liberty. ... History by apprising them of the past will enable them to judge of the future; it will avail them of the experience of other times and other nations; it will qualify them as judges of the actions and designs of men; it will enable them to know ambition under every disguise it may assume; and knowing it, to defeat its views." -- Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query 14, 1781

"[T]he opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional and what not, not only for themselves, in their, own sphere of action, but for the Legislature and Executive also in their spheres, would make the Judiciary a despotic branch." -- Thomas Jefferrson, letter to Abigail Adams, 1804

"In vain are schools, academies, and universities instituted, if loose principles and licentious habits are impressed upon children in their earliest years." -- John Adams, Diary, 1778

"The danger is not, that the judges will be too firm in resisting public opinion, and in defense of private rights or public liberties; but, that they will be ready to yield themselves to the passions, and politics, and prejudices of the day." -- Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution, 1833

"Resolved, that the flag of the thirteen United States be thirteen stripes, alternate red and white; that the union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new constellation." -- Second Continental Congress (June 14, 1777)

"The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny." -- James Madison, Federalist No. 47, 1788

"If individuals be not influenced by moral principles; it is in vain to look for public virtue; it is, therefore, the duty of legislators to enforce, both by precept and example, the utility, as well as the necessity of a strict adherence to the rules of distributive justice." -- James Madison, in response to Washington's first Inaugural address, 1789

"[O]ur commercial policy should hold an equal and impartial hand: neither seeking nor granting exclusive favors or preferences; consulting the natural course of things; diffusing and diversifying by gentle means the streams of commerce, but forcing nothing; establishing with powers so disposed; in order to give trade a stable course." -- George Washington, Farewell Address, 1796

"[Emigrants] will bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth; or, if able to throw off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness, passing, as is usual, from one extreme to another. It would be a miracle were they to stop precisely at the point of temperate liberty." -- Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1781

"The foundation of national morality must be laid in private families. ... In vain are schools, academies, and universities instituted, if loose principles and licentious habits are impressed upon children in their earliest years." --John Adams (1778)

"There are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." -- James Madison, speech to the Virginia Ratifying Convention, 1788

"[N]either the wisest constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt." -- Samuel Adams, essay in The Public Advertiser, 1749

"Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph." -- Thomas Paine, American Crisis, No. 1, 1776

"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

"[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

"All know and feel ... the sacredness of the connection between husband and wife. All know that the sweetness of social intercourse, the harmony of society, the happiness of families, depend on that mutual partiality which they feel, or that delicate forbearance which they manifest towards each other." -- John Marshall, Sexton v. Wheaton, 1823

"The propriety of a law, in a constitutional light, must always be determined by the nature of the powers upon which it is founded." -- Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 33, 1788

"Constitutions of civil government are not to be framed upon a calculation of existing exigencies, but upon a combination of these with the probable exigencies of ages, according to the natural and tried course of human affairs." -- Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 34, 1788

"The truth is, that, even with the most secure tenure of office, during good behavior, the danger is not, that the judges will be too firm in resisting public opinion, and in defense of private rights or public liberties; but, that they will be ready to yield themselves to the passions, and politics, and prejudices of the day." -- Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution, 1833

"Patriotism is as much a virtue as justice, and is as necessary for the support of societies as natural affection is for the support of families." -- Benjamin Rush, letter to His Fellow Countrymen: On Patriotism, 1773

"Our legislators are not sufficiently apprized of the rightful limits of their power; that their true office is to declare and enforce only our natural rights and duties, and to take none of them from us." -- Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Francis W. Gilmer, 1816

"History affords us many instances of the ruin of states, by the prosecution of measures ill suited to the temper and genius of their people." -- Benjamin Franklin, Emblematical Representations, 1774

"One must go through more to get a CCW and protect life than to obtain an abortion and obliterate it." -- Dana Loesch

"No political truth is certainly of greater intrinsic value, or is stamped with the authority of more enlightened patrons of liberty than that on which the objection is founded. The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny." -- James Madison, Federalist No. 47, 1788

"The very idea of the power and the right of the people to establish government presupposes the duty of every individual to obey the established government." -- George Washington, Farewell Address, 1796

"If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace." -- Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, No. 1, 1776

"In a society under the forms of which the stronger faction can readily unite and oppress the weaker, anarchy may as truly be said to reign as in a state of nature." -- James Madison, Federalist No. 51, 1788

"Nothing is so contagious as opinion, especially on questions which … beget in the mind a distrust of itself." -- James Madison (1790)

"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

"Nothing is more certain than that a general profligacy and corruption of manners make a people ripe for destruction. A good form of government may hold the rotten materials together for some time, but beyond a certain pitch, even the best constitution will be ineffectual, and slavery must ensue." -- John Witherspoon, The Dominion of Providence Over the Passions of Men, 1776

"What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals." -- Henry David Thoreau

"Your enemy is never a villain in his own eyes. Keep this in mind, it may offer a way to make him your friend. If not, you can kill him without hate." -- Robert Heinlein

"We have therefore to resolve to conquer or die: Our won Country's Honor, all call upon us for vigorous and manly exertion, and if we now shamefully fail, we shall become infamous to the whole world. Let us therefore rely upon the goodness of the Cause, and the aid of the supreme Being, in whose hands Victory is, to animate and encourage us to great and noble Actions." -- George Washington, General Orders, 1776

"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, 17789

"We lay it down as a fundamental, that laws, to be just, must give a reciprocation of right; that, without this, they are mere arbitrary rules of conduct, founded in force, and not in conscience" -- Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the state of Virginia, 1782

"Socialism only works in two places: Heaven where they don't need it and hell where they already have it." -- 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 Commandments 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

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

"No arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is as formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women." -- Ronald Reagan

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

"Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as 'bad luck.’ " -- Robert Heinlein

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