Sayings
Issue #49 Posted Sep. 1, 2007
"[T]he more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer." -- Benjamin Franklin
"Laws are for the guidance of wise men and the blind obedience of fools" -- Solon the Lawmaker Athens, c. 550 BC
"If someone tries to kill you, you do not have the option of averting your eyes or changing the subject. You are forced to deal with that person’s behavior. The experience is, in the end, a loss of certain illusions. The world is not how you want it to be. The world is how it is. There are bad people in the world. They have to be stopped." -- The revelation of Peter Evan in the novel State of Fear, by Michael Crichton
"The great body of our citizens shoot less as times goes on. We should encourage rifle practice among schoolboys, and indeed among all classes, as well as in the military services by every means in our power. Thus, and not otherwise, may we be able to assist in preserving peace in the world... The first step in the direction of preparation to avert war if possible, and to be fit for war if it should come is to teach men to shoot!" -- Theodore Roosevelt
"What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance. Let them take arms." -- Thomas Jefferson
"If someone has a gun and is trying to kill you, it would be reasonable to shoot back with your own gun." -- The Dali Lama
"The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter." -- Winston Churchill
"Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act of depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest." -- Mohandas Gandhi
"Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined." -- Patrick Henry
"The dumber people think you are, the more surprised they're going to be when you kill them." -- William Clayton
"Survival is nothing more than an ordinary life well lived in extreme circumstances." -- Laurence Gonzales in "Deep Survival"
"When death comes at last, as it must to all men, the true man can say that he left not one drop in the cup." -- Alcibiades
"When the shooting starts, would you rather be armed or legal?" -- From Cormac McCarthy's No Country For Old Men
"Never undertake anything for which you wouldn't have the courage to ask the blessing of heaven." -- G. C. Lichtenberg
"[W]e don't have deficits because people are taxed too little. We have deficits because big government spends too much." -- Ronald Reagan
"After order and liberty, economy is one of the highest essentials of a free government." -- Calvin Coolidge
"Government must proceed carefully when exercising power, lest a 'long Train of Abuses and Usurpations' inspire the people to again water the 'tree of liberty... with the blood of patriots and tyrants.' In no other culture and under no other government has the importance of an armed citizenry been made so explicit or as carefully guaranteed as it has under the American constitutional order. While both ancient Rome and the British Parliament paid statutory lip service to the value of being armed, only in the United States was being armed recognized as an inviolable right protected by the Constitution... If the average person today wonders about his relationship to his government, the Second Amendment provides ample guidance. It represents the ideal of American political and social life: the individual, self-governing, self-motivated, self-respecting, dignified, free citizen---who takes these virtues so seriously that he will maintain the personal power to back them up." -- Scott McPherson
"You cannot add to the peace and good will of the world if you fail to create an atmosphere of harmony and love right where you live and work." -- Thomas Dreier
"We have got but one life here. It pays, no matter what comes after it, to try and do things, to accomplish things in this life and not merely to have a soft and pleasant time." -- Theodore Roosevelt
"The said constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms." -- Samuel Adams
"The real problem is in the hearts and minds of men. It is not a problem of physics but of ethics. It is easier to denature plutonium than to denature the evil from the spirit of man." -- Albert Einstein
"Unionism seldom, if ever, uses such power as it has to insure better work; almost always it devotes a large part of that power to safeguarding bad work." -- H.L. Mencken
"We can forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light." -- Plato
"In the first place we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the man's becoming in very fact an American, and nothing but an American ... There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag, and this excludes the red flag, which symbolizes all wars against liberty and civilization, just as much as it excludes any foreign flag of a nation to which we are hostile ... We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language ... and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people." -- Theodore Roosevelt, 1907
"The eyes of the world being thus on our Country, it is put the more on its good behavior, and under the greater obligation also, to do justice to the Tree of Liberty by an exhibition of the fine fruits we gather from it." -- James Madison
"Poverty is uncomfortable; but nine times out of ten the best thing that can happen to a young man is to be tossed overboard and compelled to sink or swim." -- James Garfield
"A man who never has gone to school may steal from a freight car, but if he has a university education, he may steal from the whole railroad." -- Theodore Roosevelt
"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle." -- Edmund Burke
"There is never any peace for those who resist God." -- Francois Fenelon
"I am convinced that the best service a retired general can perform is to turn in his tongue along with his suit, and to mothball his opinions." -- General Omar Bradley
"Immigrants in past centuries came here to become Americans, not to remain foreigners, much less to proclaim the rights of their homelands to reclaim American soil, as some of the Mexican activist groups have done... Today, immigrant spokesmen promote grievances, not gratitude, much less patriotism." -- Thomas Sowell
"[W]e're all rotten sinners, incapable of redemption on our own. The liberal answer to sin is to say: I can never pay this back, so my argument will be I didn't do anything wrong." -- Ann
Coulter
"[M]y real exercise, that truly keeps me fit, is to get on my knees each morning and each night and thank God for waking up in America, and to thank God for the men and women who wear the uniform in Iraq and Afghanistan and everywhere else they serve..." -- Ben Stein
"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." -- James Madison
"[T]here is not in all America a more dangerous trait than the deification of mere smartness unaccompanied by any sense of moral responsibility." -- Theodore Roosevelt
"No crisis is beyond the capacity of our people to solve; no challenge too great." -- Ronald Reagan
"Liberty is not collective, it is personal. All liberty is individual liberty." -- Calvin Coolidge
"Some people say it is 'name-calling' if you refer to someone as a liberal. There is nothing inherently negative about the word 'liberal.' If it has acquired negative overtones, that is because of what liberals have done and the consequences that followed." -- Thomas Sowell
"Mere knowledge isn't enough. It never has been, and it never will be. What matters is what we do with what we know." -- Rebecca Hagelin
"Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition." -- Thomas Jefferson
"You can't achieve anything without getting in someone's way." -- Abba Eban
"The Party System was founded on one national notion of fair play. It was the notion that folly and futility should be fairly divided between both sides." -- G. K. Chesterton
"Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule-- and both commonly succeed, and are right." -- H. L. Mencken
"Always stand on principle, even if you stand alone." -- John Quincy Adams
"The purpose of government is to hire and pay government workers. Given that task has been accomplished other things may be done, but that is the primary purpose, and NOTHING will be allowed to interfere with it." -- Jerry Pournelle
Understand that the purpose of welfare is not to help anyone: it is to pay the welfare workers. (It has long been known that if you take what is spent fighting poverty and divide by the number of people in poverty you will find the number greater than the amount needed to not be in poverty. The conclusion is obvious.) -- Jerry Pournelle
"As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another." -- PROVERBS 27:17
"If you believe the term "militia" means the National Guard then you must believe that freedom of speech is reserved for the Government Printing Office." -- Unknown
"When only the police have guns, it's called a Police State." -- Unknown
"A gun in the hands of a free man frightens and angers the autocrat, not because he fears the power of the gun, but, rather, the spirit of the man who holds it." -- Unknown
"Gun Control: The assumption that everyone is a potential criminal." -- Unknown
"Gun control is the weapon of a paranoid government" -- Unknown
Work like you don't need money, Love like you've never been hurt, and dance like no one's watching.
"He either loves his life too much, or holds its desserts small, who dares not put it to the touch, to win or lose it all." -- The Earl of Montrose
"There is no more educated whore in the land than the lawyer, nor one so well paid, excepting the politician. The judge is both." -Anon.
"Ho-ka hey! It is a good day to fight! It is a good day to die! Strong hearts, brave hearts, to the front! Weak hearts and cowards to the rear." -- Crazy Horse
"From the lowest to the highest creatures, intelligence progresses by acts of discrimination; and it continues so to progress among men, from the most ignorant to the most cultured." -- Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), The Man versus the State (1884)
"Undeveloped intellectual vision is just as indiscriminating and erroneous in its classings as undeveloped physical vision." -- ibid
"If men use their liberty in such a way as to surrender their liberty, are they thereafter any the less slaves? If people by a plebiscite elect a man despot over them, do they remain free because the despotism was of their own making? Are the coercive edicts issued by him to be regarded as legitimate because they are the ultimate outcome of their own votes?" -- ibid
"[T]he policy or advantage of [immigration] taking place in a body may be much questioned; for, by so doing, they retain the Language, habits and principles which they bring with them. Whereas by an intermixture with our people, they, or their descendants, get assimilated to our customs, measures and laws: in a word, soon become one people." -- George Washington
"It should be the highest ambition of every American...to bear in mind that his conduct will not only affect himself, his country, and his immediate posterity; but that its influence may be co-extensive with the world, and stamp political happiness or misery on ages yet unborn." -- George Washington
"It is not necessary that whilst I live I live happily; but it is necessary that so long as I live I should live honorably." -- Immanuel Kant
"We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive." -- C. S. Lewis
"[T]he people are not to be disarmed of their weapons. They are left in full possession of them." -- Zacharia Johnson
"Anybody can become angry, that is easy; but to be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose, and in the right way, that is not within everybody's power, that is not easy." -- Aristotle
"If it is not right do not do it; if it is not true do not say it." -- Marcus Aurelius
"It appears we have appointed our worst generals to command forces, and our most gifted and brilliant to edit newspapers! In fact, I discovered by reading newspapers that these editor/geniuses plainly saw all my strategic defects from the start, yet failed to inform me until it was too late. Accordingly, I'm readily willing to yield my command to these obviously superior intellects, and I'll, in turn, do my best for the Cause by writing editorials- after the fact." -- Robert E. Lee in 1863
"If men of wisdom and knowledge, of moderation and temperance, of patience, fortitude and perseverance, of sobriety and true republican simplicity of manners, of zeal for the honour of the Supreme Being and the welfare of the commonwealth; if men possessed of these other excellent qualities are chosen to fill the seats of government, we may expect that our affairs will rest on a solid and permanent foundation." -- Samuel Adams
"The two pillars of 'political correctness' are, a) willful ignorance, and b) a steadfast refusal to face the truth." -- George MacDonald Fraser
"Politics and morality are inseparable. And as morality's foundation is religion, religion and politics are necessarily related. We need religion as a guide. We need it because we are imperfect, and our government needs the church, because only those humble enough to admit they're sinners can bring to democracy the tolerance it requires in order to survive." -- Ronald Reagan
"If duties are too high, they lessen the consumption; the collection is eluded; and the product to the treasury is not so great as when they are confined within proper and moderate bounds." -- Alexander Hamilton
2007-5