Being a student of history Fr. Frog has collected many wise and witty sayings from both the famous and infamous of our past and present. These words of wisdom deal with life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and the field of weaponcraft. All are applicable to modern life, and all are guaranteed to be politically incorrect. There may be occasional duplicates from past issues since I don't have the time to check.
Note: I have not tried to verify any of the quotes as to authenticity, but even if they are not authentic the sentiments stated therein are genuine.
I will try to update this section on a regular (well OK, so it's irregular) basis. Hopefully they'll appear January, March, May, July, September, and November, but lately I have fallen way behind. Hopefully things will be more consistent. but I may just go to "a couple of times a year."
If you have some gems of wisdom that you think should be included in the big list you can email them to Fr. Frog by clicking here. All submissions will be gladly accepted but your only reward will be in helping to raise the educational level of those who browse here. I hope you enjoy and profit from them.
Stout heart and good cheer!
Fr. Frog
Sayings
#138
We should be unfaithful to ourselves if we should ever lose sight of the danger to our liberties if anything partial or extraneous should infect the purity of our free, fair, virtuous, and independent elections."-- John Adams (1797)
"Welcome to real life where no one cares if you're offended, and your feelings don't matter" -- From the Internet on January 20, 2025
"Society today is reliving and re-enacting the fall of the Roman Empire, only with the addition of Wi-Fi." -- Stewart Bond
"The tendency of taxation is to create a class of persons who do not labor, to take from those who do labor the produce of that labor, and to give it to those who do not labor."-- William Cobbett (1763-1835)
"The prosperity of commerce is now perceived and acknowledged by all enlightened statesmen to be the most useful as well as the most productive source of national wealth, and has accordingly become a primary object of its political cares."-- Alexander Hamilton (1787)
"In a system of free trade and free markets poor countries-- and poor people-- are not poor because others are rich. Indeed, if others became less rich the poor would in all probability become still poorer."-- Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013)
Those who can make you believe in absurdities can make you commit atrocities" - Voltaire
"There is no emotional bondage greater, than that of the man whose entire guilt potential… has become the property of ideological totalists." - Robert Jay Lifton
"They don't use language to communicate, they use it to manipulate" -- Michael Malice
"The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command." -- George Orwell
"I hope you will also find time to read and improve your mind. Read history, works of truth, not novels and romances. Get correct views of life, and learn to see the world in its true light. It will enable you to live pleasantly, to do good, and, when summoned away, to leave without regret."-- Robert E. Lee (1807-1870), letter to his daughter
"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)
"To live his life in his own way, to call his house his castle, to enjoy the fruits of his own labour, to educate his children as his conscience directs, to save for their prosperity after his death-- these are wishes deeply ingrained in civilized man. Their realization is almost as necessary to our virtues as to our happiness. From their total frustration disastrous results both moral and psychological might follow."-- C. S. Lewis (1898-1963)
"Let each citizen remember at the moment he is offering his vote that he is not making a present or a compliment to please an individual-- or at least that he ought not so to do; but that he is executing one of the most solemn trusts in human society for which he is accountable to God and his country."-- Samuel Adams (1781)
"Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich, by promising to protect each from the other."-- Oscar Ameringer (1870-1943)
"Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves, therefore, are its only safe depositories."-- Thomas Jefferson (1781)
"History fails to record a single precedent in which nations subject to moral decay have not passed into political and economic decline. There has been either a spiritual awakening to overcome the moral lapse, or a progressive deterioration leading to ultimate national disaster."-- General Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964)
"We are, heart and soul, friends to the freedom of the press. It is however, the prostituted companion of liberty, and somehow or other, we know not how, its efficient auxiliary. It follows the substance like its shade; but while a man walks erect, he may observe that his shadow is almost always in the dirt. It corrupts, it deceives, it inflames. It strips virtue of her honors, and lends to faction its wildfire and its poisoned arms, and in the end is its own enemy and the usurper's ally."-- Fisher Ames (1807)
"Nature never deceives us; it is always we who deceive ourselves."-- Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)
"Man, once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the sport of every wind. With such persons, gullibility, which they call faith, takes the helm from the hand of reason and the mind becomes a wreck."-- Thomas Jefferson (1822)
"Every attempt to gag the free expression of thought is an unsocial act against society. That is why judges and juries who try to enforce such laws make themselves ridiculous."-- Jay Fox (1870-1961)
"The best means of forming a manly, virtuous, and happy people will be found in the right education of youth. Without this foundation, every other means, in my opinion, must fail."-- "George Washington (1784)
"An entirely new and unique and dense sort of ignorance will be manufactured by a combination of censorship of the Press and censorship by the Press."-- G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
"Enlighten the people, generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like spirits at the dawn of day."-- Thomas Jefferson (1816)
"Our experience has shown us that in the excitement of great popular elections, deciding the policy of the country, and its vast patronage, frauds will be committed, if a chance is given for them. If these frauds are allowed, the result is not only that the popular will may be defeated, and the result falsified, but that the worst side will prevail. The side which has the greater number of dishonest men will poll the most votes. The war cry, 'Vote early and vote often!' and the familiar problem, 'how to cast the greatest number of votes with the smallest number of voters', indicate the direction in which the dangers lie."-- Richard Henry Dana, Jr. (1815-1882)
"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 (1788)
"Congress have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birthright of an American... The unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people."-- Tench Coxe (1755-1824)
"The only thing keeping us a free country is our Second Amendment. ... I will protect that until my last dying breath. I really will."-- Arizona Republican gubernatorial nominee Karri Lake
"Nothing is more certain than that a general profligacy and corruption of manners make a people ripe for destruction."-- John Witherspoon (1776)
"The short memories of the American voters is what keeps our politicians in office."-- Will Rogers (1879-19335)
"One of the most dangerous trends of our times is making the truth socially unacceptable, or even illegal, with 'hate speech' laws."-- Thomas Sowell
"There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily."-- George Washington (1795)
"Ten million ignorances do not constitute one knowledge."-- Clemens von Metternich (1773-1859)
"People will forgive you for being wrong, but they will never forgive you for being right-- especially if events prove you right while proving them wrong."-- Thomas Sowell
"Everyone agrees that affirmative action in the NBA would ruin basketball, and affirmative action in the NFL would ruin football. Turns out that affirmative action in engineering & medicine has a similar effect: this should surprise no one. Fix the problem by addressing the failures of public schools in K-12. Break up the public teachers' unions, instead of cosmetically 'fixing' their failures through racist college admissions policies."-- Vivek Ramaswamy
"John Roberts said it best: the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. It's past time to end the discriminatory practice of affirmative action."-- Senator Tom Cotton
"It is the madness of folly, to expect mercy from those who have refused to do justice; and even mercy, where conquest is the object, is only a trick of war; the cunning of the fox is as murderous as the violence of the wolf."-- Thomas Paine (1776)
"Suppression of expression conceals the real problems confronting a society and diverts public attention from the critical issues. It is likely to result in neglect of the grievances which are the actual basis of the unrest, and this prevent their correction."-- Thomas I. Emerson (1907-1991)
"Let each citizen remember at the moment he is offering his vote that he is not making a present or a compliment to please an individual-- or at least that he ought not so to do; but that he is executing one of the most solemn trusts in human society for which he is accountable to God and his country."-- Samuel Adams (1781)
"It is only by believing in God that we can ever criticize the Government. Once they abolish God, the Government becomes the God."-- G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
"I rejoice in a belief that intellectual light will spring up in the dark corners of the earth; that freedom of enquiry will produce liberality of conduct."-- George Washington (1789)
"To vest a few fallible men-- prosecutors, judges, jurors-- with vast powers of literary or artistic censorship ... is to make them despotic arbiters of literary products... If one day they ban mediocre books as obscene, another day they may do otherwise to a work of a genius. Originality, not too plentiful, should be cherished, not stifled. An author's imagination may be cramped if he must write with an eye on prosecutors or juries."-- Jerome D. Frank (1889-1957)
"Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main bulwark."-- Walter Lippman (1899-1974)
"Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience."-- George Washington (1748)
"Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm."-- James Madison (1787)
"There are in fact four very significant stumbling blocks in the way of grasping the truth, which hinder every man however learned, and scarcely allow anyone to win a clear title to wisdom, namely, the example of weak and unworthy authority, long-standing custom, the feeling of the ignorant crowd, and the hiding of our own ignorance while making a display of our apparent knowledge."-- Roger Bacon (11220-1292)
"I think all the world would gain by setting commerce at perfect liberty."-- Thomas Jefferson (1785)
"Censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion. ... In the long run it will create a generation incapable of appreciating the difference between independence of thought and subservience."-- Henry Steele Commager (1902-1998)
"Finding the occasional straw of truth awash in a great ocean of confusion and bamboozle requires intelligence, vigilance, dedication and courage. But if we don't practice these tough habits of thought, we cannot hope to solve the truly serious problems that face us-- and we risk becoming a nation of suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan who comes along."-- Carl Sagan (1934-1996)
"All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree."-- James Madison (1787)
"Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions that differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions." -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
"A fondness for power is implanted, in most men, and it is natural to abuse it, when acquired."-- Alexander Hamilton (1775)
"By age 14 John Quincy Adams had mastered 5 languages, had an astonishing command of European History, and was serving as private secretary to the American ambassador in St. Petersburg. Teenage boys are capable of so much more than fast food and video games." -- Jeremy Wayne Tate
"It is necessary for every American, with becoming energy to endeavor to stop the dissemination of principles evidently destructive of the cause for which they have bled."-- Mercy Warren (1805)
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."-- The Declaration of Independence
"No punishment, in my opinion, is too great for the Man, who can build his greatness upon his Country's ruin." -- George Washington (1778)
"The Army (considering the irritable state it is in, its suffering and composition) is a dangerous instrument to play with."-- George Washington (1783)
"Man is condemned to be free. Condemned because he did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at liberty, and from the moment he is thrown into this world he is responsible for everything he does."-- Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
"The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse."-- James Madison (1829)
"The true meaning of America, you ask? It's in a Texas rodeo, in a policeman's badge, in the sound of laughing children, in a political rally, in a newspaper... In all these things, and many more, you'll find America. In all these things, you'll find freedom. And freedom is what America means to the world. And to me."-- Medal of Honor recipient Audie Murphy
"As riches increase and accumulate in few hands, as luxury prevails in society, virtue will be in a greater degree considered as only a graceful appendage of wealth, and the tendency of things will be to depart from the republican standard."-- Alexander Hamilton (1788)
"The most sacred of the duties of a government [is] to do equal and impartial justice to all citizens."-- Thomas Jefferson (1816)
"Public virtue cannot exist in a nation without private, and public virtue is the only foundation of republics. There must be a positive passion for the public good, the public interest, honour, power and glory, established in the minds of the people, or there can be no republican government, nor any real liberty: and this public passion must be superior to all private passions."-- John Adams (17776)
"The best thing we can do is uphold [gun] laws that already exist. None of this is to argue that simply because some people ignore laws, they are unnecessary or useless. It's to argue that laws that almost exclusively target innocent people from practicing a constitutional right, and do nothing to stop criminals, are unnecessary and useless. The central problem in this debate is that Democrats believe civilian gun ownership itself is a plague on the nation, so it doesn't really matter to them what gun is being banned or what law is being passed, as long as something is being 'done.' The other side believes that being able to protect themselves, their families, their property and their community from criminality-- and, should it descend into tyranny, the government-- is a societal good. They see gun bans as autocratic and unconstitutional, and, also, largely unfeasible. And they're right."-- David Harsanyi
"There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily."-- George Washington (11795)
"If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought-- not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate."-- Justice Olivver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841-1935)
"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 (1824)
"When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear."-- Thomas Sowell
"Every man who loves peace, every man who loves his country, every man who loves liberty ought to have it ever before his eyes that he may cherish in his heart a due attachment to the Union of America and be able to set a due value on the means of preserving it."-- James Madison (1788)
"I implore the Vatican press office to emphatically clarify that Pope Francis rightly calls abortion murder. It is time to denounce Biden's fake Catholicism."-- Roman Catholic Bishop Joseph Strickland after Biden implied that Pope Francis did not object to taxpayer-funded abortions
"The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale."-- Thomas Jefferson (1816)
"No one understood better than Stalin that the true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade, but to produce a uniform pattern of public utterance in which the first trace of unorthodox thought immediately reveals itself as a jarring dissonance."-- historian Alan Bullock (1914-2004)
"Government, in my humble opinion, should be formed to secure and to enlarge the exercise of the natural rights of its members; and every government, which has not this in view, as its principal object, is not a government of the legitimate kind."-- James Wilson (1791)
"Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the ease with which the many are governed by the few."-- Scottish economist David Hume (1711-1776)
"It's the left that started the culture wars, not the right! It's the left that demands you pay for late-term abortions. It's the left that demands a right to groom children and keep secrets from parents. It's the left that is pushing open borders and wants to defund the police. ... The left will not 'tolerate' us and our values. So, we shouldn't be afraid to engage in this fight."-- Gary Bauer
"During the course of administration, and in order to disturb it, the artillery of the press has been leveled against us, charged with whatsoever its licentiousness could devise or dare. These abuses of an institution so important to freedom and science are deeply to be regretted, inasmuch as they tend to lessen its usefulness and to sap its safety."-- Thomas Jefferson (1805)
"The same prudence which in private life would forbid our paying our own money for unexplained projects, forbids it in the dispensation of the public moneys."-- Thomas Jefferson (18808)
"Energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government. It is essential to the protection of the community against foreign attacks; it is not less essential to the steady administration of the laws; to the protection of property against those irregular and high-handed combinations which sometimes interrupt the ordinary course of justice; to the security of liberty against the enterprises and assaults of ambition, of faction, and of anarchy." -- Alexander Hamilton (1788)
"I think it unnecessarily politicizes a game that traditionally has brought Americans together and it represents a capitulation of the NFL to the most radical elements in our society. It is divisive and it has no place in sports. And when you think about sports and football in particular, that has been an area for blacks where you had a meritocracy, that black players have been pretty successful. And this is something that will drive away supporters and it does nothing to unite our nation."-- Dr. Carol Swain on playing the so-called Black National Anthem at NFL games
"Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence, (I conjure you to believe me fellow citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake; since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of Republican Government."-- George Washington (1796)
2025-03-04 @ 1300 #138
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2025-03-04 @1300 #138