Sayings
Issue #16 Posted December 1, 2000
" If you have to write your ethics rules down, you've already lost" -- Tom Clancy, The Bear and The Dragon
"The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money." -- Alexis de Tocqueville
"A lie can get halfway around the world by the time the truth can get its pants on." -- Samuel Clemens.
"If you're not cheating, you're not trying." -- Attributed to Clint Smith, Thunder Ranch
Me, paranoid? Which one of my enemies told you this?
"Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead." -- Benjamin Franklin
"If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man." -- Mark Twain
"You guys almost got it right. Shoot the driver ---TAKE the truck and the cool stuff inside and use them BOTH against the enemy!" -- Annon
Nothing can resist the human will that will stake even its existence on its stated purpose." -- Benjamin Disraeli
"False is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand real advantages for one imaginary or trifling inconvenience; that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it; that has no remedy for evils, except destruction. The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm those only who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes." -- Cesare Beccaria, "On Crimes and Punishments"
"The Six P's (Prior Planning Prevents Piss-Poor Performance). Recon, Recon, Recon!! Look before you leap." -- Jim (Doc) Smith
"In the end, more than they wanted freedom they wanted a comfortable life. And, in their quest for it all (security, comfort and freedom) they lost it all. When the freedom they wished for became the freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free." -- Edward Gibbons discussing the decline and fall of the ancient city of Athens.
Prohibition breeds and exponentially increases government and criminal violence.
"Do not ascribe to malice that which is explained by stupidity" -- attributed to Napolean Bonaparte.
"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
"With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but with tyrants, I will give no quarter, nor waste arguments where they will certainly be lost." -- William Lloyd Garrison
"The only prize much cared for by the powerful is power. The prize of the general is not a bigger tent, but command." -- Oliver Wendell Homes.
"...Luck is when preparation meets opportunity." -- Paul "Bear" Bryants
"... [T]o the eye of reason what can be more clear than that all men have an equal right to happiness? Nature made no other distinction than that of higher and lower degrees of power of mind and body. But what mysterious distribution of character has the craft of statesmen, more fatal than priestcraft, introduced?" -- Samuel Adams
"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." -- 9th Amendment to the United States Constitution.
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." -- 10th Amendment to the United States Constitution.
If all men were just, there would be no need of valor." -- Agesilaus
"Some people complain that God put thorns on roses, while others praise Him for putting roses on thorns." -- Anonymous
"As the family offers us the first step beyond self-love, so this [patriotism] offers us the first step beyond family selfishness." -- C.S. Lewis
"The holy passion of Friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money." -- Mark Twain
"Everything that emancipates the spirit without giving us control over ourselves is harmful." -- Goethe
"Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man." -- Francis Bacon
"Democracy is necessitated by the fact that all men are sinners; it is made possible by the fact that we know it." -- Elton Trueblood
"Prejudice, n. a vagrant opinion without visible means of support." -- Ambrose Bierce
"You should never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and truth." -- Henrik Ibsen
"What I’d really like is to go down in history as the President who made Americans believe in themselves again..." -- Ronald Reagan
"May it be to the world... to assume the blessings and security of self-government." -- Thomas Jefferson
"The unfolding national moral decline, unappreciated by most Americans, is our inheritance from the nation's leftists. The most obvious signs of it are family breakdown, illegitimacy, incivility, rampant crime, and lack of integrity in private and public life. A recent example of the decline in integrity standards is the broad public support of a president who has been judged in a court of law as a perjurer, an adulterer and a miscreant. A core element of the nation's moral decline is the attack on individual responsibilities and the establishment of a culture of victimhood." -- Walter E. Williams
"[N]either the wisest constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt. He therefore is the truest friend of the liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue." -- Samuel Adams
"The joy of life is variety; the tenderest love requires to be rekindled by intervals of absence." -- Samuel Johnson
"Absence of occupation is not rest, A mind quite vacant is a mind distress'd." -- William Cowper
"Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving in words evidence of the fact." -- George Eliot
"No man can climb out beyond the limitations of his own character." -- John, Viscount Morley of Blackburn
"Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand." -- Mark Twain
"The history of liberty is a history of the limitations of governmental power, not the increase of it." -- Woodrow Wilson
"If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved. Similarly, if nothing is obligatory for its own sake, nothing is obligatory at all." -- C.S. Lewis
"If you don't write it down, it never happened." -- Tom Clancy, Executive Decision
"It is my opinion that art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship. It severed an umbilical cord.... In former days the artist remained unknown and his work was to the glory of God.... Today the individual has become the highest form and the greatest bane of artistic creation." -- Ingmar Bergman
"Perhaps the most dangerous of all legacies left to the United States, to NATO and to the world is the notion that our role is to launch military interventions whenever television puts horrible pictures on the screen at dinner time." -- Thomas Sowell
"What an affront to the King of the universe, to maintain that the happiness of a monster, sunk in debauchery and spreading desolation and murder among men, of a Caligula, a Nero, or a Charles, is more precious in his sight than that of millions of his suppliant creatures, who do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with their God! No, in the judgment of heaven there is no other superiority among men than a superiority in wisdom and virtue." -- Samuel Adams
"A vitiated state of morals, a corrupted public conscience, is incompatible with freedom." -- Patrick Henry
"Not every man is so great a coward as he thinks he is -- nor yet so good a Christian." -- Robert Louis Stevenson
"The winds and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators." -- Edward Gibbon
"No free government can stand without virtue in the people, and a lofty spirit of patriotism...." -- Andrew Jackson
"For every thousand hacking at the leaves of evil, there is one striking at the root." -- H.D. Thoreau
"[W]here there is no law there is no freedom." -- John Locke
"To endure is greater than to dare; to tire out hostile fortune; to be daunted by no difficulty; to keep heart when all have lost it; to go through intrigue spotless; to forgo even ambition when the end is gained--who can say this is not greatness?" -- William Makepeace Thackeray
"Whoever is happy will make others happy too. He who has courage and faith will never perish
in misery!" -- Anne Frank
"No people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the invisible hand, which conducts in the affairs of men more than the people of the United States. Every step, by which they have been advanced to the character of an independent nation, seems to have been distinguished by some token of providential agency." -- George Washington
"Arrogant lips are unsuited to a fool-- how much worse lying lips to a ruler!" (Proverbs 17:7)
"I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them." --Thomas Jefferson
"No man is above the law and no man is below it; nor do we ask any man's permission when we require him to obey it." -- Theodore Roosevelt
"He makes no friend who never made a foe." -- Tennyson
"There can be no clearer example of an intrusion into the internal structure or affairs of an association than a regulation that forces the group to accept members it does not desire." -- Justice William Brennan
"Liberty and happiness have a powerful enemy on each hand; on the one hand tyranny, on the other licentiousness [anarchy]. To guard against the latter, it is necessary to give the proper powers to government; and to guard against the former, it is necessary that those powers should be properly distributed." -- James Wilson
"Patience is the best remedy for every trouble." --Titus Maccius Plautus
"In life, as in a football game, the principle to follow is: Hit the line hard." -- Theodore Roosevelt
"Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers." -- Alfred, Lord Tennyson
"Second Amendment rights are sacred because of their connection to higher rights and higher duties, which are the very substance of liberty and justice, and to the God that America has always acknowledged as the source of both. We cannot surrender our guns without surrendering the vision of human dignity under God which is our national soul." -- Alan Keyes
"Woe to those who call good evil and evil good." -- Jewish proverb
"Genius is nothing but a greater aptitude for patience." --Georges Louis Leclerc de Buffon
"Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice." -- Spinoza
"Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example." -- Mark Twain
"One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim." -- Henry Brooks Adams
The descent to hell is easy, and those who begin by worshipping power soon worship evil." -- C.S. Lewis
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