Sayings
Issue #19 Posted June 1, 2001
"You may prefer to fill the air with lead, but I prefer one bullet to the head." – Anonymous
"I have never wished anyone dead, but I have read many an obituary with great joy"--Winston Churchill
"Greatness and transcendence are why people join political parties, and why they go to war. It is why they risk and sacrifice, and engage in political argument. Ultimately they are moved by principle, and will for its sake throw aside or forgo the material things that scoundrel politicians think they hold above all else." -- Mark Helprin, contributing editor, Wall Street Journal
"Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle! Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress." -- Frederick Douglass, August 4, 1857.
"My Crusader mentality suggests there's a reason The Lord put his cross in my reticle!" – Thad Coyne
The Saxons submitted not to the arbitrary rule of princes. They administered an oath to their sovereigns, which bound them to acknowledge the laws, and to defend the rights of the church and people; and if they forgot this obligation, they forfeited their office... the smallest violation of ancient usage, or the least step towards tyranny, was always dangerous, and often fatal to them." -- Stuart on the Constitution of England.
"But who is to guard the guards themselves?" -- Juvenal, a Roman writer
"When the king holds part of the supreme power, and the senate or the people holds part,... just force can be used against a king who encroaches upon the part which is not his own... since when power is given the right of protecting that power is given." -- Grotius, De jure, bk. 1, ch. 4, sec 13.
"Those unaware are unaware of being unaware" -- Merrill Jenkins
"Do not be afraid of your enemies - in the worst case they can kill you; Do not be afraid of your friends - in the worst case they can betray you; Be afraid of the indifferent ones: it is from their silent blessings that all the evil is happening in the world!" -- Bruno Yasensky, a Russian writer. As quoted by Bob Djurdjevic, May 25, 1999
"If men, through fear, fraud, or mistake, should in terms renounce or give up any natural right, the eternal law of reason and the grand end of society would absolutely vacate such renunciation. The right to freedom being a gift from God, it is not in the power of man to alienate this gift and voluntarily become a slave." -- Samuel Adams
"It is easy to be tolerant of the principles of other people if you have none of your own." -- Sir Herbert Samuel, Peter's Quotations
Would the boy you were be proud of the man you are?
"The necessary and constructive use of government must not lead to a doctrinaire and expedient use of government." -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
"Prejudice not being founded on reason cannot be removed by argument. -- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
"If we believe absurdities we shall commit atrocities." -- Voltaire (1694-1778)
"When a man assumes a public trust, he should consider himself as public property." -- Thomas Jefferson
"The punishment which the wise suffer, who refuse to take part in the government, is to live under the government of worse men." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"'Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death." -- Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, Dec. 19, 1776 as quoted in Our Sacred Honor, pg. 38.
"..But now all such principles have been sold as in open market, and those imported in exchange by which Greece is ruined and diseased. What are they? Envy where a man gets a bribe; laughter if he confesses it; mercy to the convicted; hatred of those that denounce the crime: all the usual attendants upon corruption..." -- Demosthenes denouncing the ambitions of Philip of Macedon, A Treasury of the World's Great Speeches
"No man ever achieved any great good to mankind who did not fight for it with courage and perseverance, and who did not, in the conflict, sacrifice either his name or his life. John lost his head. The Savior was crucified. The ancient confessors were slain. The reformers were excommunicated. If I am not slandered and misrepresented, I shall be a most unworthy advocate of the cause which has always provoked the resentment of those who, fattened upon the ignorance and stupidity of the mass, will not try to think and learn." -- Alexander Campbell
"He who is void of virtuous attachments in private life is, or very soon will be, void of all regard for his country. There is seldom an instance of a man guilty of betraying his country, who had not before lost the feeling of moral obligations in his private connections." -- Samuel Adams, letter to James Warren, Nov. 4, 1775
Education is neither intelligence nor wisdom. An educated fool can always find a philosophy to justify his folly.
"Do you really think our forefathers really went to all the effort of drafting the Second Amendment so a bunch of people could go hunting?" -- Allan Keys
"I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious." -- Thomas Jefferson
"We may train marksmen, and make soldiers, but only God can make a warrior. In peacetime its very easy to mistake one for the other." -- John Nichols
Check 6, reload, regroup, re-engage.
"I was born an American; I live an American; I shall die an American; and I intend to perform the duties incumbent upon me in that character to the end of my career. I mean to do this with absolute disregard of personal consequences. What are the personal consequences? What is the individual man, with all the good or evil that may betide him, in comparison with the good or evil which may befall a great country, and in the midst of great transactions which concern that country's fate? Let the consequences be what they will, I am careless. No man can suffer too much, and no man can fall too soon, if he suffer, or if he fall, in the defense of the liberties and constitution of his country." -- Daniel Webster, An American Without Reserve
"A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word darkness on the walls of his cell." -- C. S. Lewis
Well-timed silence hath more eloquence than speech." -- Martin Farquhar Tupper
"Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced -- Even a proverb is no Proverb to you till your Life has illustrated it." -- John Keats
"Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes." -- Oscar Wilde
"When you disarm your subjects, however, you offend them by showing that either from cowardliness or lack of faith, you distrust them; and either conclusion will induce them to hate you." -- Niccolo Machiavelli, "The Prince"
"The life of the camp corrupts less than that of the court. Battle tests the real worth of a man as politics never can." -- John Keegan in The Mask of Command
"Liberals are arrant bigots. They would deny moral equality to anyone who disagrees with them" -- Winston Churchill.
"People who never get carried away should be." -- Malcolm Forbes
"To be wronged is nothing unless you continue to remember it." -- Confucius
"Winning isn't everything. Wanting to win is." -- Catfish Hunter
"Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports." -- George Washington
"It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man who knows that the law is today, can guess what it will be tomorrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?" -- James Madison, Federalist #62
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Updated 2001-05-30 @ 1200 - Fr. Frog