“If you take the anti-heroic view that there is nothing the individual person can do to control his own destiny, then stand aside.  Be the helpless pawn of fate you say you are.  But if you long for the sense of life and purpose our era denies; if your mind hungers and your spirit thirsts for something far better than the pursuit of things, or power, or politics, or self, then the time to change is now.”
-George Roche

Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Reagan, & Kemp:

“God grant that men of principle be our principal men.”

“Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations- entangling alliances with none.”

“The whole of government is in the art of being honest.”

“Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever.”

“When a man assumes a public trust, he should consider himself as public property.”

“I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be.”

“No government ought to be without censors; and where the press is free no one ever will.”

“Do not bite at the bait of pleasure, till you know there is no hook beneath it.”

“Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we should soon want for bread.”

“My views . . . are the result of a life of inquiry and reflection, and very different from the anti-Christian system imputed to me by those who know nothing of my opinions.  To the corruptions of Christianity I am indeed opposed, but not the genuine precepts of Jesus himself.  I am a Christian in the only sense in which he wished anyone to be, sincerely attached to his doctrines in preference of all others . . .”

“State a moral case to a plowman and a professor.  The former will decide it as well, and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules.”

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

“There is a natural aristocracy among men.  The grounds of this are virtue and talents.”

“The boisterous sea of liberty is never without a wave.”

“To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical.”

“In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.”

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.

“All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of

science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride legitimately, by the grace of god.

“If the present Congress errs in too much talking, how can it be otherwise in a body to which the people send one hundred and fifty lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, and talk by the hour? ”

-Thomas Jefferson

“Things may come to those who wait but only the things left by those who hustle.”

“Capitol is only the fruit of labor and could never have existed if labor had not first existed.”

“Determine that the thing can and shall be done, and then we shall find the way.”

“We on our side, are praying to Him to give us victory, because we believe we are right; but those on the other side pray to Him, too, for victory, believing they are right.  What must he think of us?”

“At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected?  I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad.  If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher.  As a nation of freemen we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

“Public sentiment is everything.  With public sentiment nothing can fail.  Without it nothing can succeed.  Consequently, he who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.  He makes statues and decisions possible or impossible.”

“I have been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had no where else to go.”

“I do the very best I know how.  If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won’t amount to anything.  If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.”

“We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven.  We have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity.  We have grown in numbers, wealth and power as no other nation has ever grown.  But we have forgotten God… We have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own.  Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us!

“All the good the Savior gave to the world was communicated through this book.  But for it we could not know right from wrong.  All things most desirable for man’s welfare, here and hereafter, are to be found portrayed in it.” (On the Bible)

“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”

“Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it.”

“Do you think that the nature of man will be changed- that the same causes that produced agitation at one time will not have the same effect at another?”

“I can see how it might be possible for a man to look down upon the earth and be an athiest, but I cannot conceive how he could look up to the heavens and say there is no God.”

“The only assurance of our nation’s safety is to lay our foundation in morality and religion.”

I remember my mother’s prayers and they have always followed me. They have clung to me all my life.

“It is true that you may fool all of the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all the time.”

“The leading rule for the lawyer, as for the man of every calling, is diligence.  Leave nothing for tomorrow which can be done today.”

-Abraham Lincoln

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.  The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumphs of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”

“It is difficult to make our material condition better by the best law, but it is easy enough to ruin it by bad laws.”

“Fighting for right is the noblest sport the world has to offer.”

“There is need to develop all the virtues that have the state for their sphere of action; but these virtues are as dust in a windy street unless back of them lie the strong and tender virtues of a family life based on the love of the one man for the one woman and on their joyous and fearless acceptance of their common obligation to the children that are theirs.”

“We demand that big business give people a square deal.”

“To every man who faces life with real desire to do his part in everything, I appeal for a study of the Bible.”

“It is eminently desirable that we should none of us be hard-hearted, but it is no less desirable that we should not be soft-headed.”

“To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.”

“No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expediency.”

“If efficiency is left solely to bad men, and if virtue is confined solely to inefficient men, the result cannot be happy.”

“Love of peace is common among weak, short-sighted, timid, and lazy persons; and on the other hand courage is found among many men of evil temper and bad character.  Neither quality shall by itself avail.  Justice among the nations of mankind, and the uplifting of humanity, can be brought about only by those strong and daring men who with wisdom love peace, but who love righteousness more than peace.”

“I am sorry I did not study elocution in college; but I am exceedingly glad that I did not take part in the type of debate in which stress is laid, not upon getting a speaker to think rightly, but on getting him to talk glibly on the side to which he is assigned, without regard either to what his convictions are or to what they ought to be.”

“The first requisite of a good citizen in this republic of ours is that he shall be able and willing to pull his weight.”

“Speak softly and carry a big stick.”

“I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life.”

“The man who loves other countries as much as his own stands on a level with the man who loves other women as much as he loves his own wife.”

“There can be no fifty-fifty Americanism in this country. There is room here for only 100% Americanism, only for those who are Americans and nothing else.”

“Peace is normally a great good, and normally it coincides with righteousness, but it is righteousness and not peace which should bind the conscience of a nation as it should bind the conscience of an individual; and neither a nation nor an individual can surrender conscience to another’s keeping.”

“I don’t pity any man who does hard work worth doing.  I admire him.  I pity the creature who does not work, at whichever end of the social scale he may regard himself as being.”

“Probably the greatest harm done by vast wealth is the harm that we of moderate means do ourselves when we let the vices of envy and hatred enter deep into our own natures.”

“Nine-tenths of wisdom consists in being wise in time.”

“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.”

“No brave and good man can properly shirk death; and no criminal who has earned death should be allowed to shirk it.”

“My desire was to achieve results, and not merely to issue manifestoes of virtue.  It is very easy to be efficient if the efficiency is based on unscrupulousness, and it is still easier to be virtuous if one is content with the purely negative virtue which consists in not doing anything wrong, but being wholly unable to accomplish anything positive for good.”

“But, in the final event, the statesman, and the publicist, and the reformer, and the agitator for new things, and the upholder of what is good in old things, all need more than anything else to know human nature, to know the needs of the human soul; and they will find this nature and these needs set forth as nowhere else by the great imaginative writers, whether of prose or of poetry.”

“It is exceedingly interesting and attractive to be a successful lawyer or doctor; or a writer, or a President, or a ranchman, or the colonel of a fighting regiment, or to kill grizzly bears and lions.  But for unflagging interest and enjoyment, a household of children, if things go reasonably well, certainly makes all other forms of success and achievement lose their importance by comparison.”

“It is not what we have that will make us a great nation; it is how we use it.”

“It is impossible to win the great prizes of life without running risks, and the greatest of all prizes are those connected with the home.  No father and mother can hope to escape sorrow and anxiety, and there are dreadful moments when death comes very near those we love, even if for the time being it passes by.  But life is a great adventure, and the worst of all fears is the fear of living.  There are many forms of success, many forms of triumph.  But there is no other success that in any shape or way approaches that which is open to most of the many, many men and women who see that it is the intimate and homely things which count most.  They are the men and women who have the courage to strive for the happiness which comes only with labor and effort and self-sacrifice, and only to those whose joy in life springs in part from power of work and sense of duty.”

-Theodore Roosevelt

“Dr. King’s activism was rooted in the true patriotism that cherishes America’s ideals and strives to narrow the gap between those ideals and reality.”

“The 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.”

“Freedom prospers when religion is vibrant and the rule of law under God is acknowledged.”

“Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.”

“We have so many people who can’t see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion that the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one!”

“The Marxist vision of man without God must eventually be seen as an empty and a false faith –the second oldest in the world –first proclaimed in the Garden of Eden with whispered words of temptation:  “Ye shall be as gods.”

“One way to make sure that crime wouldn’t pay would be to let the government run it.”

“This is the issue of this election, whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.” (1964 Presidential election comment)

“Without God there is no virtue because there is no prompting of the conscience…without God there is a coarsening of the society, without God democracy will not and cannot long endure. If we ever forget that we are One Nation Under God, then we will be a Nation gone under.”
“A communist is someone who reads Marx.  An anti-communist is someone who understands Marx.”

“Let no opposition candidate quote your words in the general election to advance the cause of statism or the philosophy of those who have lost confidence for man’s capacity for self-rule.”

“All great change happens at the dinner table.”

-Ronald Reagan

“Conservatives define compassion not by the number of people who recieve some kind of government aid but rather by the number of people who no longer need it.”

“Winning is like shaving – you do it every day or you wind up looking like a bum.”

“The power of one man or one woman doing the right thing for the right reason, and at the right time, is the greatest influence in our society.

“Every team requires unity. A team has to move as one unit, one force, with each person understanding and assisting the roles of his teammates. If the team doesn’t do this, whatever the reason, it goes down in defeat. You win or lose as a team, as a family.

“The chance to own a home; chance to own an education; chance to get access to capital. This is the real civil rights battle of the twenty-first century.

“Democracy without morality is impossible.”

“There are no limits on our future if we don’t put limits on our people.”

“My passion for ideas is not matched with a passion for partisan or electoral politics.”

“We must win the war on poverty by enlisting the greatest weapon ever invented – free enterprise

“I never met a poor person who wanted to soak the rich; they want to get rich.”

“When people lack jobs, opportunity, and ownership of property they have little or no stake in their communities.”

“Taxes on capital, taxes on labor, inflation, bureaucratic regulation, minimum wage laws, are all – to different degrees – unnecessary slices of the wedge that stand between an individual’s effort and reward for that effort.”

“With the end of the cold war, all the ‘isms’ of the 20th century – Fascism, Nazism, Communism and the evil of apartheid-ism – have failed. Except one. Only democracy has shown itself true the help of all mankind.”

“Our goals for this nation must be nothing less than to double the size of our economy and bring prosperity and jobs, ownership and equality of opportunity to all Americans, especially those living in our nation’s pockets of poverty.”

“In America, we tax work, investment, employment, savings, and production, while we subsidize non-work, consumption, and debt. It’s time we reverse this trend.”

“American society as a whole can never achieve the outer-reaches of potential, so long as it tolerates the inner cities of despair.”

“When democratic governments create economic calamity, free markets get the blame.”

“There’s only one race – it’s human. We are all brothers and sisters.”

-Jack Kemp

Others:

“Men qualify for freedom in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains on their own appetites.  Society cannot exist unless a controlling power is put somewhere on will and appetite, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.  It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free.  Their passions forge their fetters.”
-Edmund Burke

“Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.”

-G. K. Chesterton

“A nation which hates politics will not long thrive as a democracy.”

-E. J. Dionne

“If Americans ran their businesses like they run their families, the entire nation would soon grind to a halt.”

-Amitai Etzioni

“One who breaks an unjust law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.”

-Martin Luther King, Jr.

“In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men.  It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs.”

-Walter Lippmann

“Vanity of science.  Knowledge of physical science will not console me for ignorance of morality in time of affliction, but knowledge of morality will always console me for ignorance of physical science.”

-Blaise Pascal

“To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections.  It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind.”

– Edmund Burke

“You should never have your best trousers on when you turn out to fight for freedom and truth.”

-Henrik Ibsen

“You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.”

-G. K. Chesterton

“Socialism can only arrive by bicycle.”

-Jose Antonio Viera Gallo

“There are only two alternatives in the intellectual life, either one conforms desire to truth or one conforms truth to desire.”

-E. Michael Jones

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

-Santayana

“To drive men from independence to live on alms, is itself great cruelty.”

-Edmund Burke

“War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things.  The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse.  A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing he cares about more than his own personal safety is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.”

-John Stuart Mill

“I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom.”

-Bob Dylan

“To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.”

-Edmund Burke

“Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men’s belief that they “own” their bodies –those vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are ejected at the pleasure of Another!”

-C. S. Lewis

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and discipline”

-Proverbs 1:7

“Pride makes some men ridiculous but prevents others from being so.”

-Charles Caleb Colton

“In skating over thin ice, our safety is in speed.”

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

-Edmund Burke

“Don’t aim for success if you want it; just do what you love and believe in and it will come naturally.”

-David Frost

“Live so that your friends can defend you but never have to”

-Arnold H. Glasgow

“Over the years I have learned that what is important in a dress is the woman who is wearing it.”

-Yves Saint Laurent

“But the bravest are surly those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and not withstanding go out and meet it.”

-Thucydides

“Some people so treasure the truth that they use it with great economy.”

-H Ray Golenor

“Presence is more than just being there.”

-Malcom S. Forbes

“You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more ‘drive,’ or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or ‘creativity.’  In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function.  We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise.   We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.  We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”

-C.S. Lewis

“One man with courage makes a majority.”

-Andrew Jackson

“Classic- a book which everybody praises but nobody reads.”

-Mark Twain

“It’s not the size of the dog in the fight but the size of the fight in the dog.”

-Dwight D. Eisenhower

“The name American must always exalt the pride of patriotism.”

-George Washington

“I cannot trust a man to control others who cannot control himself.  Do your duty in all things; you should never wish to do less.”

-Gen. Robert E. Lee

“Without struggle there is no progress.”

-Fredrick Douglas

“Manners are of more importance than laws.  Upon them, in a great measure, the laws depend.  The law touches us but here and there, and now and then.  Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe in.  They give their whole form and colour to our lives.  According to their quality, they aid morals, they supply them, or they totally destroy them.”

-Edmund Burke

“Necessity is the mother of taking chances.”

-Mark Twain

“I shall pass through this world but once; any good that I can do, or any kindness I can show any human being, let me do it now and not defer it; for I shall not pass this way again.”

-Stephen Grellet

“He that conquereth his own soul is greater than he who taketh a city.”

-Proverb

“You’ve got to stand for something or you’ll fall for anything”

-Arron Tippin

“People who wonder where the younger generation is going should remember where it came from.”

-Sam Ewing, Wall Street Jrn.

“Civilizations do not give out, they give in.  In a society where everything goes, eventually everything will.”

-John Underwood, Boston Globe

“Pessimism never won any battle”

-Dwight D. Eisenhower

“Be bold in what you stand for and careful what you fall for.”

-Ruth Borstein, Wall ST. Jrn.

“I have often been adrift, but I have always stayed afloat”

-David Berry

“Good health is not just in the genes.  It’s also how you wear them.”

-Bryant A. Stamford and Porter Shimer

“Some things have to be believed to be seen.”

-Ralph Hodgson

“Children are America’s most important natural resource.”

-John F. Kennedy

“We are tomorrow’s past”

-Mary Webb

“Ideals are like stars; you will not succeed in touching them with your hands. But like the seafaring man on the desert of waters, you choose them as your guides, and following them you will reach your destiny.”

-Carl Schurz

“A man gazing on the stars is proverbially at the mercy of the puddles in the road.”

-Alexander Smith

“Discipline is remembering what you want”

-David Campbell

“If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door.”

-Milton Berle

“He knows not his own strength that hath not met adversity”

-Ben Johnson

“Dreams and dedication are a powerful combination.”

-William Longgood

“Solitude is a good place to visit but a poor place to stay.”

-Josh Billings

“Liberty necessitates the diminuization of political ambition and concern.  Liberty necessitates concentration on other matters than mere civil governance.  Rather whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, freemen must think on those things.”

-Patrick Henry

“Reflect upon your present blessings- of which every man has many- not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.”

-Charles Dickens

“Love is a great beautifier”

-Louisa May Alcott

“Apathy is the glove into which evil slips its hand.”

-Bodie Thoene

“Lots of people want to ride with you in the limo, but what you want is someone who will take the bus with you when the limo breaks down.”

-Oprah Winfrey

“The quality of a persons life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence, regardless of their chosen field of endeavor.”

-Vincent T. Lombardi

“Small opportunities are often the beginning of great enterprises.”

-Demosthenes

“Adversity reveals genius, prosperity conceals it.”

-Horace

“The price of greatness is responsibility.”

-Winston Churchill

“Mans mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.”

-Oliver Wendell Holmes

“The reward of a thing well done is to have it done.”

-Ralph Waldon Emerson

“No problem can stand the assault of sustained thinking.”

-Voltaire

“Progress always involves risk; you can’t steal second base and keep your foot on first”

-Frederick Wilcox

“Many receive advice, only the wise profit from it.”

-Syrus

“Don’t wait for your ship to come in- go out and get it”

-Unknown

“As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say.  I just watch what they do.”

-Andrew Carnagie

“The man who wins may have been counted out several times, but he didn’t hear the referee.

-H.E. Jansen

“The secret of happiness is not doing what one likes, but liking what one does.”

-James M. Barrie

“Great minds must be ready not only to take opportunities, but to make them.”

-Colton

“There is always room at the top.”

-Daniel Webster

“Wisdom is knowing what to do next, skill is knowing how to do it, and virtue is doing it.”

-David Starr Jordan

“Courage is doing what you’re afraid to do, there can be no courage unless you’re scared.”

-Eddie Rickenbacher

“Whether you think you can or think you can’t- you are right.”

-Henry Ford

“The surest way to go broke is to sit around waiting for a break.”

-Unknown

“Well done is better than well said.”

-Ben Franklin

“Success is a journey, not a destination.”

-Ben Sweetland

“Some men dream of worthy accomplishments while others stay awake and do them.”

-Unknown

“The greatest thing in this world is not so much where we are but in what direction we’re going.”

-O.W. Holmes

“Love is never afraid of giving too much.”

-Unknown

“Real leaders are ordinary people with extraordinary determination.”

-Unknown

“We cannot direct the wind…  But we can adjust the sails.”

-Unknown

“I will prescribe regimen for the good of my patients, according to my judgment and ability, and never do harm to anyone.  To please no one will I prescribe a deadly drug, nor give advice which may cause his death.  Nor will I give a woman a pessary to procure abortion.  But I will preserve the purity of my life and my art…”

-Hippocratic Oath

“If a man has done his best, what else is there?”

-George S. Patton

“A will finds a way.”

-Orison Swett Marden

“Failure is success if we learn from it.”

-Malcolm S. Forbes

“A man without a purpose is like a ship without a rudder.”

-Thomas Carlyle

“It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.”

-Mark Twain

“You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong.”

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Success doesn’t come to you… you go to it.”

-Marva Collins

“What force is more potent than love?”

-Igor Stravinsky

“If there’s a way to do it better… find it.”

-Thomas Edison

“No legacy is so rich as honesty.”

-William Shakespeare

“We are told never to cross a bridge till we come to it, but this world is owned by men who have ‘crossed bridges’ in their imagination far ahead of the crowd.”

-Speakers Library

“Rather fail with honor than succeed by fraud.”

-Sophocles

“Aerodynamically, the bumble bee shouldn’t be able to fly, but the bumble bee doesn’t know it so it goes on flying anyway.”

-Mary Kay Ash

“Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.”

-Unknown

“A ship in a harbor is safe, but that’s not what ships are built for.”

-William Shedd

“Where there is love there is life…”

-Mohandas Ghandi

“Waste not fresh tears over old griefs.”

-Unknown

“People can alter their lives by altering their attitudes.”

-William James

“Only the test of fire makes fine steel.”

-Unknown

“Write injuries in sand, kindness in marble.”

-French Proverb

“Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful.”

-Molly Ivins

“What I admire in Columbus is not his having discovered a new world but his having gone to search for it on the faith of an opinion.”

-A Robert Turgo

“Everything is changing.  People are taking their comedians seriously and the politicians as a joke.”

-Will Rogers

“Be patient with everyone, but above all with yourself.”

-St Francis de Sales

“Democracy doesn’t guarantee equality, only equality of opportunity.”

-Irving Kristol

“If you take too long in deciding what to do with your life, you’ll find you’ve done it.”

-Pam Shaw

“Getting people to like you is only the other side of liking them.”

-Norman Vincent Peale

“The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing in the right place, but to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.”

-Dorothy Nevill

“Without education, we are in a horrible danger of taking educated people seriously.”

-G.K. Chesterton

“All that is worth cherishing in this world begins in the heart, not in the head.”

-Suzanne Chazin

“Now it is our preference that decides against Christianity, not arguments.”

-Nietzsche

“They that deny God destroy mans nobility; for certainly, man is akin to the beast by his body and if he be not of kin to God by his spirit, he is a base and ignoble creature.”

-Francis Bacon

“My kingdom is not of this world.”

-Jesus Christ

“I die the kings good servant, but God’s first.”

-Sir Thomas More

“It is bad to live under a Prince who permits nothing, but it is worse to live under one who permits everything.”

-John Calvin

“The greatest question of our time is not communism versus individualism, not Europe versus America, not even the East versus the West; it is whether men can live without God.”

-Will Durant

“Whatever makes men good Christians, makes them good citizens.”

-Daniel Webster

“It is a magicians bargain;  give up our souls, get power in return.  But once our souls, that is ourselves, have been given up, the power thus confirmed will not belong to us.  We shall, in fact, be slaves and puppets of that to which we have given ours souls.”

-C.S. Lewis

“Men since the beginning of time have sought peace.  Various methods through the ages have been attempted to devise an international process to prevent or settle disputes between nations.  From the very start, workable methods were found insofar as individual citizens were concerned, but the mechanics of an instrumentality of larger international scope have never been successful.  Military alliances, balances of power, leagues of nations, all in turn failed, leaving the only path to be by way of the crucible of war.  The utter destructiveness of war now blots out this alternative.  We have had our last chance.  If we do not devise some greater and more equitable system, Armageddon will be at our door.  The problem is basically theological and involves a spiritual recrudescence and improvement of human character.  It must be of the spirit if we are to save the flesh.”

-General Douglas MacArthur after W.W.II

“Problems loom large when men don’t.”

-Robert James Bidinotto

“Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.”

-Soren Kierkegaard

“Diplomacy gets you out of what tact would have kept you out of.”

-Brian Bowling

“At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet.”

-Plato

“Always do what you say you are going to do.  It is the glue and fiber that binds successful relationships.”

-Jeffrey A Timmons

“That which man builds man destroys, but the city of God is built by God and cannot be destroyed by man.”

-Augustine

“Man builds his kingdoms in accordance with his concept of God.”

-Spinoza

“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.”

-George Washington

“Never, never, never quit.”

-Winston Churchill

“To carry a grudge is like being stung to death by one bee.”

-William H. Walton

“Most of us ask for advise when we know the answer but want a different one.”

-Ivern Ball

“Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.”

-John Wooden

“A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it.”

-Jean de la Fontaine

“People are always making rules for themselves and always finding loopholes.”

-William Rotsler

“We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.”

-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“The fault lies not in the stars, but in ourselves.”

-Shakespeare

“Absence makes the heart grow fonder, Isle of Beauty, fare thee well!”

-Thomas H Bayly

“As a white candle in a holy place, so is the beauty of an aged face.”

-Joseph Campbell

“The American people never carry an umbrella.  They prepare to walk in eternal sunshine.”

-Alfred E Smith

“The man who has not anthing to boast of but his illustrious ancestors is like a potato- the only good belonging to him is underground.”

-Sir Thomas Overbury

“Character is what you are in the dark.”

-Dwight L. Moody

“God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose.”

-Emerson

“All history is incomprehensible without Christ.”

-Ernest Renan

“Christianity taught men that love is worth more than intelligence.”

-Jacque Maritain

“Some to church repair

Not for the doctrine, but the music there.”

-Alexander Pope

“Associate yourself with men of good quality if you esteem your own reputation for it is better to be alone than in bad company.”

-George Washington

“Conscience is Gods presence in man.”

-Swedenborg

“God Almighty hates a quitter.”

-Gen. Samuel Fessenden, Rep. convention, 1896

“Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste death but once.”

-Shakespeare

“A creditor is worse than a master; for a master owns only your person, a creditor owns your dignity, and can belabor that.”

-Victor Hugo

“Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world.”

-Matthew Arnold

“Cynic- a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

-Oscar Wilde

“Millions for defense but not one cent for tribute.”

-Charles Pinckney, 1796

“The devil can cite scripture for his purpose.”

-Shakespeare

“Dictatorship, a fetish worship of one man, is a passing phase.  A state of society where men may not speak their mind, where children denounce their parents to the police… such a state cannot long endure.”

-Winston Churchill

“No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.”

-Booker T. Washington

“The better part of valor is discretion.”

-Shakespeare

“‘Tis distance lends enchantment to the view,

And robes the mountain in its azure hue.”

-T Campbell

“If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you.  That is the principle difference between a dog and a man.”

-Mark Twain

“When you risk nothing, you risk everything.”

-Geena Davis

“There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds.”

-Tennyson

“To disagree, one doesn’t have to be disagreeable.”

-Barry M. Goldwater

“Sticks and stones may break our bones, but words will break our hearts.”

-Robert Fulgham

“There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.”

-Beverly Sills

“Governments can’t give us anything without depriving us of something else.”

-Henry Hazlitt

“Experience keeps a dear school, yet fools will learn in no other.”

-Franklin

“He that is down needs fear no fall, he that is low, no pride.”

-John Bunyan

“All happy families resemble one another; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

-Tolstoy

“The greatest of faults is to be conscious of none.”

-Carlyle

“Be to her virtues very kind, be to her faults a little blind.”

-Prior

“If anyone attempts to haul down the American flag, shoot him on the spot.”

-John A. Dix

“Fortune favors the bold.”

-Virgil

“Beware the fury of a patient man.”

-Dryden

“The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.”

-Ibsen

“God will not look you over for medals, degrees or diplomas, but for scars.”

-Elbert Hubbard

“Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.”

-Tennyson

“Labor conquers everything.”

-Virgil

“Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom.”

-Wendell Phillips

“We would rather die on our feet than live on our knees.”

-Franklin Delano Roosevelt

“Better by far you should forget and smile, than you should remember and be sad.”

-Christina Rossetti

“Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.”

-Francis Bacon

“God is not a cosmic bell-boy for whom we can press a button to get things.”

-Harry Emerson Fosdick

“Every country has the government it deserves.”

-Joseph De Maistre

“We must all hang together, else we shall all hang separately.”

-Benjamin Franklin

“You have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.”

-Bernard Shaw

“Hating people is like burning down your house to get rid of a rat.”

-Harry Emerson Fosdick

“The heart of the fool is in his mouth, but the mouth of the wise man is in his heart.”

-Benjamin Franklin

“He that will not when he may, he shall not when he will.”

-Robert Mannyng

“Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.”

-Oscar Wilde

“It is with our passions as it is with fire and water, they are good servants but bad masters.”

-Sir Roger L’Estrange

“We don’t know who we are until we see what we can do.”

-Martha Grimes

“If dandelions were hard to grow, they would be most welcome on any lawn.”

-Andrew V. Mason M.D.

“Sports serve society by providing vivid examples of excellence.”

-George F. Will

“It is never wise to seek or wish for anothers misfortune.  If malice or envy were tangible and had a shape,  it would be the shape of a boomerang.”

-Charles Reese

“What we do not understand we do not possess.”

-Goethe

“The ultimate test of a relationship is to disagree but still hold hands.”

-Alexandra Penney

“Expect people to be better than they are; it helps them to become better.  But don’t be disappointed when they are not; it helps them to keep trying.”

-Merry Browne

“The Christian life is a battleground, not a playground.”

“Your life is God’s gift to you; what you do with it is your gift to God.”

“Instead of putting others in their place, put yourself in their place.”

“God pours his love into our hearts to flow out to others lives”

“The message of the cradle contains the mission of the cross.”

“Christ’s birth brought God to man; Christ’s death brought man to God.”

“A good aim is no good if you don’t pull the trigger.”

“Couples who pray together stay together.”

-Our Daily Bread

“The best remedy for a short temper is a long walk.”

-Jacqueline Schiff

“Character is much easier kept than recovered.”

-Thomas Paine

“The older you get the greater you were.”

-Lee Grosscup

“Marriage should be a duet- when one sings, the other should clap.”

-Joe Murray

“The surest way to be late is to have plenty of time.”

-Leo Kennedy

“Use soft words and hard arguments.”

-English Proverb

“Trust in God and DO something.”

-Mary Lyon

“There is more to life than increasing its speed.”

-Mohandas K. Ghandi

“What bothers me about T.V. is that it takes our mind off our minds.”

-Robert Orben

“If a man has common sense, he has all the sense there is.”

-Sam Rayburn

“Candor is a compliment; it implies equality.  It’s how true friends talk.”

-Peggy Noonan

“The most remarkable thing about pollsters is how they find so many people with no opinion.”

-Doug Larson

“If we live good lives, the times are also good.  As we are, such are the times.”

-St. Augustine

“Half the failures in life arise from pulling in one’s horse as he is leaping.”

-Julius Charles Hare &

Augustus William Hare

“He turns not back who is bound to a star.”

-Leonardo DaVinci

“If you have no personality conflicts, you have no personality.”

-Unknown

“Cut it down and forget it.”

-Gen. Robert E. Lee when shown

a tree damaged by Union soldiers

“Love may not make the world go around, but I must admit that it sure makes the ride worthwhile.”

-Sean Connery

“Luv is a verb.”

-D.C. Talk

“Utter helplessness demands utter protection.”

-Hans Jones

“They say that God is everywhere, and yet we always think of Him as somewhat of a recluse.”

-Emily Dickenson

“If your prayers were always answered, you’d have reason to doubt the wisdom of God.”

-Unknown

“God is dead” Friedrich Nietzsche, in 1882

“Nietzsche is dead.”, God, in 1900

-Jason Lioi

“The one who loves the least is in control of the relationship.”

-Robert Anthony

“A survey of obscure government records found that of the 117 largest nonprofit organizations, more than 1 out of 4 pay their top executives $250,000 a year or more.”

-Rush Limbaugh

“Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper.”

-Robert Frost

“Loneliness is the ultimate poverty.”

-Abigail Van Buren

“While the question of ‘Who killed President Kennedy’ is important, the question ‘What killed him’ is more important…

It is a climate where men cannot disagree without being disagreeable, and where they express their disagreement through violence and murder.  It is the same climate that murdered Medgar Evers in Mississippi and six innocent children in Birmingham, Alabama.  So in a sense we are all participants in that horrible act that tarnished the image of our nation….  We have created an atmosphere in which violence and hatred have become popular pastimes.”

-Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

“Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne and I have built great empires.  But upon what did they depend?  They depended on force.  But centuries ago Jesus started an empire that was built on love, and even to this day millions would die for him.”

-Napoleon Bonaparte

“I decide on the basis of conscience.  A genuine leader doesn’t reflect consensus, he molds consensus.”

-Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

“Let it simply be asked, Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice.”

-George Washington

“Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle”

-George Washington

“Wealth lies not in the extent of possession, but in the fewness of wants”

-Unknown

“Not all of us have to possess earthshaking talent. Just common sense and love will do.”

-Myrtle Auvil

“One never realizes how much and how little he knows until he starts talking.”

-Louis L’Amour

“The pioneers cleared the forests from Jamestown to the Mississippi with fewer tools than are stored in the typical modern garage.”

-Dwayne Laws

“Wise are those who learn that bottom line doesn’t always have to be their top priority.”

-William Arthur Ward

“If you didn’t know in your heart of hearts that abortion was a savage, violent act, what I did wouldn’t have bugged you so much.  I took you inside an abortion mill, and some of you couldn’t take it.  You can’t handle it when it was only dramatized.  Yet, you’re not bothered by abortion when it happens for real.  Is there not a contradiction here?”

-Rush Limbaugh,

on his “caller abortions”

“Smooth seas do not make skillful sailors.”

-African proverb

“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture.  Just get people to stop reading them.”

-Ray Bradbury

“What good is pull if you don’t pull with it?”

-John Podhoretz

“Now and then an innocent man is sent to the legislature.”

-Kin Hubbard

“One-half the troubles of this life can be traced to saying yes too quickly and not saying no soon enough.”

-Josh Billings

“Men don’t care what’s on TV.  They only care what else is on TV.”

-Jerry Seinfeld

“A statesman who keeps his ear permanently glued to the ground will have neither elegance of posture nor flexibility of movement.”

-Abba Eban

“Foolproof systems don’t take into account the ingenuity of fools.”

-Gene Brown

“A sculptor can leave his work and come back to it another day, and take it up where he left off, But it is not so with the growth of the soul.  The work of grace in us either waxes or wanes, flows or ebbs.”

-Andrew Anderson

“The mark of an immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.”

-Unknown

“We’re getting to the point where the tax producers will someday be outnumbered by the tax eaters of society.”

-Rush Limbaugh

“Be tolerant people of great conviction.”

-Senator Dan Coates

“We have staked the whole future of the American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it.  We have staked the future… upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves, according to the Ten Commandments.”

-James Madison

“Whoever made regulations has never been to war.”

-George S. Patton

“Concensus is the death of leadership.”

-Margaret Thatcher

“The first rule of holes:  when you’re in one, stop digging.”

-Molly Ivins

“When the wine is in, the wit is out.”

-English Proverb

“A lot of people mistake a short memory for a clear conscience.”

-Doug Larson

“The best proof of love is trust.”

-Joyce Brothers

“Congress is continually appointing fact-finding committees, when what we really need are some fact-facing committees.”

-Roger Allen

“Learn to say no.  It will be of more use to you than to be able to read Latin.”

-Charles Haddon Spurgeon

“Compassion is defined not by how many people are on the government dole but by how many people no longer need governmental assistance.”

-Rush Limbaugh

“The sexual revolution hurt the poor the most.  As the elites talked self-fulfillment, the welfare system told poor women:  ‘If you get pregnant, it’s not so bad.’  The combination of those two things were deadly.”

-Charles Murray

“If you come from a home as chaotic as mine had become, it’s very reassuring to know what’s expected.”

-H. Norman Schwarzkopf,

on his military high school

“Religion in America takes no direct part in the government of society, but it must be regarded as the first of their political institutions; for if it does not impart a taste for freedom, it facilitates the use of it.  Indeed, it is in this same point of view that the inhabitants of the United States themselves look upon religious belief.  I do not know whether all Americans have a sincere faith in their religion–for who can search the human heart–but I am certain that they hold it to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions.”

-Alexis de Tocqueville

“The doctrine of original sin is the only philosophy empirically validated by the centuries of recorded history.”

-G.K. Chesterson

“The American soldier is a proud one and he demands professional competence in his leaders.  In battle, he wants to know that the job is going to be done right, with no unnecessary casualties.  The noncommissioned officer wearing the chevron is supposed to be the best soldier in the platoon and he is supposed to know how to perform all the duties expected of him.  The American soldier expects his sergeant to be able to teach him how to do his job.  And he expects even more from his officers.”

-GEN Omar Bradley

“Love is a little blind; when we love someone dearly we unconsciously overlook many faults.”

-Beatrice Saunders

“We love the blather and boast, the charge and countercharge of campaigning.  Governing is a tougher deal.”

-Hugh Sidney

“Today is the tomorrow that yesterday you spent money like there was no.”

-Ivern Ball

“The extravagance of government rhetoric is inversely proportional to the seriousness of the act involved.”

-George F. Will

“The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.”

-G.K. Chesterson

“Liberty is the only thing you cannot have unless you are willing to give it to others.”

-William Allen White

“We have war when at least one of the parties to a conflict wants something more than it wants peace.”

-Jean J. Kirkpatrick

“How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.”

-Benjamin Disraeli

“The greatest gifts you can give your children are the roots of responsibility and the wings of independence.”

-Denis Waitley

“Anytime you see a young man open a car door for his girlfriend, either the car is new or the girlfriend is.”

-Robert E. Limbaugh II

“Illegitimacy is the single most important social problem of our time- more important than crime, drugs, poverty, illiteracy, welfare or homelessness- because it drives everything else.”

-Charles Murray

“Freedom is a road less traveled by the multitudes.”

-Malcolm X

“Never let yourself be persuaded that any one Great Man, any one leader, is necessary to the salvation of America.  When America consists of one leader and 158 million followers, it will no longer be America.”

-Dwight Eisenhower

“When we consider that the theory of our institutions guarantees to every citizen the full enjoyment of all the fruits of his industry and enterprise, with only such deduction as may be his share toward the careful and economical maintenance of the Government which protects him, it is plain that the exaction of more than this is indefensible extortion and a culpable betrayal of American fairness and justice.”

-Grover Cleveland

“My idea is that each individual citizen of the United States should look to himself, and it is not the purpose of this Government to give work to individuals throughout the United States by appropriating money which belongs to other people and does not belong to the Senate.”

-James H. Berry                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             Senator, Arkansas (1890’s)

“In my judgment it is not the business of government to attempt, by statutes or international agreements, to override the fixed laws of economics, nor can government repeal, amend, or mitigate the operation of those laws.”

-J. Sterling Morton

Secretary of Agriculture

“It is not the function of the Government to relieve individuals of their responsibilities  to their neighbors, or to relieve private institutions of their responsibilities to the public, or of local government to the states, or of state governments to the Federal Government . . . . It is vital that the programs of the Government shall not compete with or replace any of them but shall add to their initiative and their strength.  It is vital that by the use of public revenues and public credit in emergency the Nation shall be strengthened and not weakened . . . . It is only by this release of initiative, this insistence upon individual responsibility, that there accrue the great sums of individual accomplishment which carry this Nation forward.”

-Herbert Hoover

“Men and women are two locked caskets, each of which contains the key to the other.”

-Isak Dinesen

“The conscience is a three-corned thing in my heart that stands still when I’m good, but when I’m bad it turns around and around; and the corners hurt a lot.  But if I keep on doing wrong, the corners wear off and it stops hurting.”

-Unknown

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood

And I, I took the one less traveled by

And that has made all the difference.”

-Robert Frost

“It is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us the freedom of press.  It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech.  It is the soldier, not the campus organizer, who gives us the freedom to demonstrate.  It is the soldier who salutes the flag, who serves beneath the flag and whose coffin is draped by the flag, who allows the protester to burn the flag.”

-Father Dennis Edward O’Brien

Sergeant, USMC

“A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and of course, as long as you’re looking down, you can’t see something that’s above you.”

-C.S. Lewis

“They should have known that he was God.  His patience should have proved that to them.”

-Tertullian

“Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road.”

-Voltaire

“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”

-Henry David Thoreau

“It has been said that though God cannot alter the past, historians can.”

-Samuel Butler

“Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.”

-Thomas Paine

“The office of government is not to confer happiness, but to give men opportunity to work out happiness for themselves.”

-William Ellery Channing

“They can conquer who believe they can.”

-Virgil

“It’s difficult to stand on a pedestal and wash the feet of those below.”

-Charles Colson

“No human society has ever been able to maintain both order and freedom, both cohesiveness and liberty apart from the moral precepts of the Christian Religion applied and accepted by all the classes.  Should our Republic ere forget this fundamental precept of governance, men are certain to shed their responsibilities for licentiousness and this great experiment will then surely by doomed.”

-John Jay

“No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful.  Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.”

-Hebrews 12:11

“Fifty years ago it would have seemed quite impossible in America that an individual be granted boundless freedom with no purpose but simply for the satisfaction of his whims.  The defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society  as a whole defenseless.  It is time to defend, not so much human rights, as human obligations.”

-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“It is no great thing to be humble when you are brought low; but to be humble when you are praised is a great and rare attainment.”

-St. Bernard

“The ability of a country to pay taxes must always be proportioned, in a great degree, to the quantity of money in circulation, and to the celerity with which it circulates.”

-Alexander Hamilton

“Justice is the end of government.  It is the end of civil society.  It ever has been and ever will be pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit.”

-James Madison

“The genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges, or churches, or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors, but always most in the common people.”

-Walt Whitman

“Organic life, we are told, has developed gradually from the protozoan to the philosopher, and this development, we are assured, is indubitably an advance. Unfortunately it is the philosopher, not the protozoan, who gives us this assurance.”

-Bertrand Russell

“You only have power over people so long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything he’s no longer in your power –he’s free again.”

-Alexander Solzhenitsyn

“Those who have been once intoxicated with power, and have derived any kind of emolument from it, even though but for one year, never can willingly abandon it. They may be distressed in the midst of all their power; but they will never look to anything but power for their relief.”

-Edmund Burke

“In going to America one learns that poverty is not a necessary accompaniment to civilization.”

-Oscar Wilde

“You don’t seem to realize that a poor person who is unhappy is in a better position than a rich person who is unhappy. Because the poor person has hope. He thinks money would help.”

-Jean Kerr

“To suppose such a thing possible as a society, in which men, who are able and willing to work, cannot support their families, and ought, with a great part of the women, to be compelled to lead a life of celibacy, for fear of having children to be starved; to suppose such a thing possible is monstrous.”

-William Cobbett, 1762 –1835

English journalist, reformer

“Poverty is an anomaly to rich people. It is very difficult to make out why people who want dinner do not ring the bell.”

-Walter Bagehot, 1826 –77

English economist, critic

“The greatest destroyer of peace is abortion because if a mother can kill her own child, what is left for me to kill you and you to kill me? There is nothing between.”

-Mother Teresa

“A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception which has nothing sound in it and nothing true.”

-Socrates

“Morality without religion is only a kind of dead reckoning –an endeavor to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the distance we have run, but without any observation of the heavenly bodies.”

-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“Moral choices do not depend on personal preference and private decision but on right reason and, I would add, divine order.”

-Basil Hume

“We moralise among ruins.”

-Benjamin Disraeli

“Morals are in all countries the result of legislation and government; they are not African or Asian or European: they are good or bad.”

-Denis Diderot

“We do not fear censorship for we have no wish to offend with improprieties or obscenities, but we do demand, as a right, the liberty to show the dark side of wrong, that we may illuminate the bright side of virtue –the same liberty that is conceded to the art of the written word, that art to which we owe the Bible and the works of Shakespeare.”

-D. W. Griffiths

“Don’t join the book burners.  Don’t think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed.”

-Dwight D. Eisenhower

“Ignorance. . . is a painless evil; so, I should think, is dirt, considering the merry faces that go along with it.”

-George Eliot

“It might sound a paradoxical thing to say –for surely never has a generation of children occupied more sheer hours of parental time –but the truth is that we neglected you.  We allowed you a charade of trivial freedoms in order to avoid making those impositions on you that are in the end both the training ground and proving ground for true independence.  We pronounced you strong when you were still weak in order to avoid the struggles with you that would have fed your true strength.  We proclaimed you sound when you were foolish in order to avoid taking part in the long, slow, slogging effort that is the only route to genuine maturity of mind and feeling.  Thus, it was no small anomaly of your growing up that while you were the most indulged generation, you were also in many ways the most abandoned to your own meager devices by those into whose safe-keeping you had been given.”

-Midge Decter

“Discipline is a symbol of caring to a child.  He needs guidance. If there is love, there is no such thing as being too tough with a child.  A parent must also not be afraid to hang himself.  If you have never been hated by your child, you have never been a parent.”

-Bette Davis

“What is a neglected child?  He is a child not planned for, not wanted.  Neglect begins, therefore, before he is born.”

-Pearl S. Buck

“Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”

-James Baldwin

“I am convinced that, except in a few extraordinary cases, one form or another of an unhappy childhood is essential to the formation of exceptional gifts.”

-Thornton Wilder

“The childhood shows the man,

As morning shows the day.”

-John Milton

“The first idea that the child must acquire, in order to be actively disciplined, is that of the difference between good and evil; and the task of the educator lies in seeing that the child does not confound good with immobility, and evil with activity.”

-Maria Montessori

“I have lived, Sir, a long time, and the longer I live the more convincing proofs I see of this truth:  ‘That God governs in the affairs of man.’  And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?

We have been assured, Sir, in the Sacred Writings that except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it.  I firmly believe this.  I also believe that without His concurring aid, we shall succeed in the political building no better than the builders of Babel.

I therefore beg leave to move that, henceforth, prayers imploring the assistance of Heaven and its blessing on our deliberation be held in this assembly every morning before we proceed to business.”

-Benjamin Franklin

“The moral principles and precepts contained in the scriptures ought to form the basis of all our constitution and laws . . . All the miseries and evils which men suffer from vice, crime, ambition, injustice, oppression, slavery, and war, proceed from their despising or neglecting the precepts contained in the Bible.”

-Noah Webster

“The only fence against the world is a thorough knowledge of it.”

-John Locke

“Kindness and intelligence don’t always deliver us from the pitfalls and traps: there are always failures of love, of will, of imagination. There is no way to take the danger out of human relationships.”

-Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

“It is not true that democracy will always safeguard freedom of conscience better than autocracy. Witness the most famous of all trials. Pilate was, from the standpoint of the Jews, certainly the representative of autocracy. Yet he tried to protect freedom. And he yielded to a democracy.”

-Joseph A. Schumpeter

“The shallow consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise man sees in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws.

-Walt Whitman

“Man is the head of the family, woman the neck that turns the head.”

-Chinese Aphorism

“The proliferation of support groups suggests to me that too many Americans are growing up in homes that do not contain a grandmother. A home without a grandmother is like an egg without salt and Helpists know it. They have jumped into the void left by the disappearance of morbid old ladies from the bosom of the American family.”

-Florence King

“He that raises a large family does, indeed, while he lives to observe them, stand a broader mark for sorrow; but then he stands a broader mark for pleasure too.”

-Benjamin Franklin

“If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.”

-Benjamin Franklin

“Lieutenants are generally good after they have lost their West Point ways.”

-Corporal E.A. Boyd

“The best friend is likely to acquire the best wife, because a good marriage is based on the talent for friendship.”

-Friedrich Nietzsche

“The love of liberty is the love of others.  The love of power is the love of ourselves.

-William Hazlitt

“Those who corrupt the public mind are just as evil as those who steal from the public purse.”

-Adlai Stevenson

“The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults.”

-Peter De Vries

“An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile- hoping it will eat him last.”

-Winston Churchill

“It is a great deal better to live a holy life than to talk about it.  Lighthouses do not ring bells and fire cannons to call attention to their shining – they just shine.”

-Dwight L. Moody

“For leaders unable to choose among their alternatives, circumspection becomes an alibi for inaction.”

-Henry Kissenger

“It is in vain to summon a people who have been rendered so dependent on the central powers to choose from time to time the representatives of that power; this rare and brief exercise of their free choice, however important it may be, will not prevent them from gradually losing the faculties of thinking, feeling, and acting for themselves, and thus gradually falling below the level of humanity.”

-Alexis de Toqueville

“The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”

-G.K. Chesterton

“Both the child’s life and its very temporary residence in the womb are imposed by the will of others.  The act of conception thus imposes a primary moral duty on both parents to provide continued sanctuary and nurture until adulthood.”

-William D. Gairdner

“Between the omnipotent State and the naked individual looms the first line of resistance against totalitarianism:  the economically and politically independent family, protecting the space within which free and independent individuals may receive the necessary years of nurture.”

-Michael Novak

“Newspeak:  language designed to make lies truthful and murder respectable.”

-George Orwell

“The public does not in the long run respect leaders who mirror its own insecurities or see only the symptoms of crises rather than the long-term trends.  The role of the leader is to assume the burden of acting on the basis of a confidence in his own assessment of the direction of events and how they can be influenced.  Failing that, crises will multiply, which is another way of saying that a leader has lost control over events.”

-Henry Kissenger

“No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he’d only had good intentions –he had money as well.”

-Margaret Thatcher

“It is not helpful to help a friend by putting coins in his pockets when he has got holes in his pockets.”

-Douglas Hurd

“Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.”

-Alexander Solzhenitsyn

“It is far easier to make war than to make peace.”

-Georges Clemenceau

“If merely “feeling good” could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.”

-William James

“I used to think I was poor. Then they told me I wasn’t poor, I was needy. Then they told me it was self-defeating to think of myself as needy, I was deprived. Then they told me deprived was a bad image, I was underprivileged. Then they told me underprivileged was overused, I was disadvantaged. I still don’t have a dime. But I sure have a great vocabulary.”

-Jules Feiffer

“It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things:  freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.”

-Mark Twain

“The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.”

-G. K. Chesterton

“There is no thrill quite like doing something you didn’t know you could.”

-Marjorie Holmes

“Providence has given to our people the choice of their rulers, and it is a duty as well as a privilege and interest of our ‘Christian nation’ to select and prefer Christians to be their rulers.”

-John Jay

“Before any man can be considered as a member of civil society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governor of the universe–religion is the basis and foundation of government.”

-James Madison

“The greatest challenge America faces in the era beyond peace is to learn the art of national unity in the absence of war or some other external threat.”

-Richard Nixon

“All persons must learn before they die what they are running from and what they are running to, and why.”

-James Thurber

“No one should fear to undertake any task in the name of our Savior, if it is just and if the intention is purely for His holy service.  The working out of all things has been assigned to each person by our Lord, but it all happens according to His sovereign will even though he gives advice.  He lacks nothing that it is in the power of men to give him.  Oh what a gracious Lord, who desires that people should perform for Him those things for which He holds Himself responsible!  Day and night moment by moment, everyone should express to Him their most devoted gratitude.”

-Christopher Columbus

“Democracy is the worst form of government- except for all the others.”

-Winston Churchill

“A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.”

-George Orwell

“I received public schooling as a child, but I never let it interfere with my education.”

-Mark Twain

“A general state education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another:  and the mould in which it cast them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government . . . in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over the body.”

-John Stuart Mill

“Centuries of struggle, agony, and bloodshed have gone into promoting the ideal of “a government of laws and not of men.”  Now all of that has been blithely waved aside with lofty talk about “evolving standards”- which means that you cannot know what the law means until judges issue the latest bulletin from the “evolving standards” front.”

-Thomas Sowell

“Some things must be done on faith, but the most dangerous kind of faith is that which masquerades as ‘science.’  As the pretense of science has replaced commonsense experience, we have abandoned many old-fashioned practices that worked in favor of high-sounding innovations that have led to disaster.”

-Thomas Sowell

“That Religion, or the Duty which we owe to our Creator, and the Manner of discharging it, can be directed only by Reason and Conviction, not by Force or Violence; and therefore, all Men are equally entitled to the free exercise of Religion, according to the Dictates of Conscience; and that it is the mutual Duty of all to practice Christian Forbearance, Love, and Charity, towards each other.”

-Article 16, Virginia Bill of Rights (Patrick Henry)

Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.  In area after area- crime, education, housing, race relations- the situation has gotten worse after the bright new theories were put into operation.  The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them.”

-Thomas Sowell

“A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.”

-John le Carre

“I have one request: may  I never use my reason against truth.”

-Elie Wiesel

“When goods do not cross borders, soldiers will.”

-Frederic Bastiat

“A good example is like a bell that calls many to church.”

-Danish Proverb

Why not go out on a limb?  Isn’t that where the fruit is?

-Frank Scully

“Worst of all, guilt has so furtively stolen into many hearts and minds that people feel apologetic about being civilized, educated, and productive when others are barbaric, uneducated, and parasitic.  When civilization apologizes to barbarism, something has gone very wrong at a very fundamental level.”

-Thomas Sowell

“While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but when once they lose their virtue they will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader… If virtue and knowledge are diffused among the people, they will never be enslaved.  This will be their great security.”

-Samuel Adams

“Let us all be of one heart, and stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free; and may he, of his infinite mercy grant us deliverance out of all our troubles.”

-William Prescott

“It is in the man of piety and inward principle, that we may expect to find the uncorrupted patriot, the useful citizen, and the invincible soldier.- God grant that in America true religion and civil liberty may be inseparable and that the unjust attempts to destroy the one, may in the issue tend to the support and establishment of both.”

-John Witherspoon

“Religion is the only solid basis of good morals; therefore education should teach the precepts of religion, and the duties of man towards God.”

-Gouverneur Morris

“Suppose a nation in some distant Region, should take the Bible for their only law Book, and every member should regulate his conduct by the precepts there exhibited. . . . What a Eutopia, What a Paradise would this region be.”

-John Adams

“The highest glory of the American Revolution was this:  it connected, in one indissoluble bond, the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity.”

-John Quincy Adams

“Whenever the pillars of Christianity shall be overthrown, our present republican forms of government, and all the blessings which flow from them, must fall with them.”

-Jedediah Morse

“The Soviet Union was so rich that it took 70 years for communism to destroy the nation.”

-Dr. Dean Dudley

“The religionists are the enemies of liberty, and the friends of liberty attack religion; the high-minded and the noble advocate bondage, and the meanest and most servile preach independence; honest and enlightened citizens are opposed to all progress, while men without patriotism and without principle put themselves forward as the apostles of civilization and intelligence.”

-Alexis de Tocqueville

“I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set I go into the other room and read a book.”

-Groucho Marx

“But the fight for our planet, physical and spiritual, a fight of cosmic proportions, is not a vague matter of the future; it has already started.  The forces of Evil have begun their decisive offensive.  You can feel their pressure, yet your screens and publications are full of prescribed smiles and raised glasses.  What is the joy about?”

-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be.”

-C. S. Lewis

“When the religion of a people is destroyed, doubt gets hold of the higher powers of the intellect and half paralyzes all the others.  Every man accustoms himself to having only confused and changing notions on the subjects most interesting to his fellow creatures and himself.  His opinions are ill-defended and easily abandoned; and, in despair of ever solving by himself the hard problems respecting the destiny of man, he ignobly submits to think no more about them.”

-Alexis de Tocqueville

“The root of the righteous cannot be moved.”

-Proverbs 12:3

“The basis of our Bill of Rights comes from the teachings we get from Exodus and St. Matthew, from Isaiah and St. Paul.  I don’t think we emphasize that enough these days.  If we don’t have a proper fundamental moral background, we will finally end up with a . . . government which does not believe in rights for anybody except the State!”

-Harry S. Truman

“As nations can not be rewarded or punished in the next world they must be in this.  By an inevitable chain of causes & effects, providence punishes national sins, by national calamities.”

-George Mason

“There are two powers only which are sufficient to control men, and secure the rights of individuals and a peaceable administration; these are the combined force of religion and law, and the force or fear of the bayonet.”

-Noah Webster

“Guard well your spare moments.  They are like uncut diamonds.  Discard them and their value will never be known.  Improve them and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life.”

-Ralph Waldo Emerson.

“Pour gasoline on the fire of teen-age anger.  Encourage kids to be rude.  Ridicule authority figures, parental and otherwise, as out-of-it decorum-obsessed dweebs.  Assist young people in their often perilous search for identity by suggesting they embrace the most garish kind of self-centered nihilism. . . . What greater service can an advertiser perform, against the backdrop of teen suicide, for example, than to trumpet the meaningless of existence.  Bravo.”

-Bob Garfield, sarcastic critique of advertisers

“I asked God for strength, that I might achieve,

I was made weak, that I might learn humbly to obey.

I asked for health, that I might do great things,

I was given infirmity, that I might do better things.

I asked for riches, that I might be happy,

I was given poverty, that I might be wise.

I asked for power, that I might have the praise of people,

I was given weakness, that I might feel the need of God.

I asked for all things, that I might enjoy life,

I was given life that I might enjoy all things.

I got nothing that I asked for–

but everything I had hoped for.

Almost despite myself,

my unspoken prayers were answered.

I am, among all people, most richly blessed.”

-Anonymous

“In days of prosperity we have many refuges to resort to; in the day of adversity, only one.”

-Horatio Bonar

“The praise of ancient authors proceeds not from the reverence of the dead, but from the competition and mutual envy of the living.”

-Thomas Hobbes

“It is not best that we should all think alike; it is difference of opinion which makes horse races.”

-Mark Twain

“You cannot have Liberty in this world without what you call Moral Virtue, & you cannot have Moral Virtue without the slavery of that half of the human race who hate what you call Moral Virtue.”

-William Blake

“Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.”

-George Bernard Shaw

“Where there is no law, there is no liberty; and nothing deserves the name of law but that which is certain, and universal in its operation, upon all the members of the community.”

-Benjamin Rush

“For it is with the mysteries of our religion, as with wholesome pills for the sick, which swallowed whole, have the virtue to cure; but chewed, are for the most part cast up again without effect.”

-Thomas Hobbes

“It is identifying yourself with the hopes, dreams, fears and longing of others that you may understand them and help them.”

-Wilfred A. Peterson

“Were the works of God readily understandable by human reason, they would be neither wonderful nor unspeakable.”

-Thomas A Kempis

“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”

-Eleanor Roosevelt

“Government policy ought not to discount marriage by offering a substitute relationship that demands much less than children and society need.”

-Pete Wilson

“A pint of sweat will save a gallon of blood.”

-George S. Patton

“All propaganda has to be popular and has to adapt its spiritual level to the perception of the least intelligent of those towards whom it intends to direct itself.”

-Adolph Hitler

“War cannot for a single minute be separated from politics.”

-Mao Tse-tung

“I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed.  But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either.”

-Alexander Solzhenitsyn

“Science is the knowledge of consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another.”

-Thomas Hobbes

“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting.  It has been found difficult; and left untried.”

-G. K. Chesterton

“Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe.  We cannot imagine a Second Coming that would not be cut down to size by the televised evening news, or a Last Judgment not subject to pages of holier-than-Thou second-guessing in The New York Review of Books.”

-John Updike

“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.”

-George Orwell

“Here clearly one sees how liberalism has become a doctrine whose means are its ends, whose combatants are its clientele, whose standards are not even those of the mob but worse, are those the bargainers can fashion to fit the bargain.”

-Theodore J. Lowi

“We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end.”

-G. K. Chesterton

“So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.”

-George Orwell

“Woe to the leader whose arguments at the end of a war are not as plausible as they were at the beginning.”

-Otto Von Bismarck

“The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.”

-G. K. Chesterton

“The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.”

-G. K. Chesterton

“I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all for fear of being carried off their feet. The prospect really does frighten me that they may finally become so engrossed in a cowardly love of immediate pleasures that their interest in their own future and in that of their descendants may vanish, and that they will prefer tamely to follow the course of their destiny rather than make a sudden energetic effort necessary to set things right.”

-Alexis De Tocqueville

“One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.”

-G. K. Chesterton

“Now, more than ever before, the people are responsible for the character of their Congress.  If that body be ignorant, reckless, and corrupt, it is because the people tolerate ignorance, recklessness, and corruption.  If it be intelligent, brave, and pure, it is because the people demand these high qualities to represent them in the national legislature. . . . If the next centennial does not find us a great nation. . . it will be because those who represent the enterprise, the culture, and the morality of the nation do not aid in controlling the political forces.”

-James Garfield, 1876

“Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot.  Religion is much more necessary in the republic which they [Americans] set forth in glowing colors than in the monarchy which they attack; it is more needed in democratic republics than in any other.  How is it possible that society should escape destruction if the moral tie is not strengthened in proportion as the political tie is relaxed?  And what can be done with a people who are their own masters if they are not submissive to the Deity?”

-Alexis De Tocqueville

“A cosmic philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a cosmic philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos. A man can no more possess a private religion than he can possess a private sun and moon.”

-G. K. Chesterton

“Society is endangered , not by the profligacy of a few, but by laxity of morals among all.  In the eyes of a legislator prostitution is less to be dreaded than intrigue.”

-Alexis de Toqueville

“The evil which assails us is not in the localities we inhabit but in ourselves. We lack strength to endure the least task, being incapable of suffering pain, powerless to enjoy pleasure, impatient with everything. How many invoke death when, after having tried every sort of change, they find themselves reverting to the same sensations, unable to discover any new experience.”

-Seneca

“Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.”

-George Santayana

“It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes.  It may even lie on the surface; but we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions –especially selfish ones.”

-Alexander Solzhenitsyn

“Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket.  But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.”

-G. K. Chesterton

“It is the dissimilarities and inequalities among men which give rise to the notion of honor; as such differences become less, it grows feeble; and when they disappear, it will vanish too.”

-Alexis De Tocqueville

“However energetically society in general may strive to make all the citizens equal and alike, the personal pride of each individual will always make him try to escape from the common level, and he will form some inequality somewhere to his own profit.”

-Alexis De Tocqueville

“Every pleasure or pain has a sort of rivet with which it fastens the soul to the body and pins it down and makes it corporeal, accepting as true whatever the body certifies.”

-Socrates

“Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice.”

-Alexander Solzhenitsyn

“Not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but also clouds their view of their descendants and isolates them from their contemporaries.  Each man is for ever thrown back on himself alone, and there is danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart.”

-Alexis De Tocqueville

“For anything worth having one must pay the price; and the price is always work, patience, love, self-sacrifice, (and faith)”

-John Burroughs

“The problems of victory are more agreeable than the problems of defeat, but they are no less difficult.”

-Sir Winston Churchill

“It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.”

-George Santayana

“Ideal conversation must be an exchange of thought, and not, as many of those who worry most about their shortcomings believe, an eloquent exhibition of wit or oratory.”

-Emily Post

“The punishment which the wise suffer who refuse to take part in the government, is to live under the government of worse men.”

-Plato

“In every one of us there are two ruling and directing principles, whose guidance we follow wherever they may lead; the one being an innate desire of pleasure; the other, an acquired judgment which aspires after excellence.”

-Socrates

“The best laws cannot make a constitution work in spite of morals; morals can turn the worst laws to advantage. That is a commonplace truth, but one to which my studies are always bringing me back. It is the central point in my conception. I see it at the end of all my reflections.”

-Alexis De Tocqueville

“A gem cannot be polished without friction nor man perfected without trials!”

-Chinese Proverb

“We are asking the nations of Europe between whom rivers of blood have flowed to forget the feuds of a thousand years.”

-Sir Winston Churchill, 1948

“There is hardly a pioneer’s hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare.  I remember reading the feudal drama of Henry V for the first time in a log cabin.”

-Alexis De Tocqueville

“God is tolerated in the media only when He is bland enough to pose no threat.”

-Charles Colson

“It is the little bits of things that fret and worry us; we can dodge an elephant, but we can’t dodge a fly.”

-Josh Billings

“The fundamental question posed by abortion is this:  Once a child had been conceived, what is the proper response of a good society- of America at her best?  If pregnancy presents a challenge, do we, as a society, rise to that challenge or do we steal away, dispensing with the challenge by dispensing with the child?  And when a pregnancy comes at a difficult time, what is the worthier response?  Do we surround mother and child with protection and love, or do we hold out to her the cold comfort of a trip to an abortionist?  Where is our true character to be seen, in an adoptive home or at the abortion clinic?

-Gov. Robert P. Casey

“It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. . . . The quotations, when engraved upon the memory, give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more.”

-Sir Winston Churchill

“Saddle your dreams afore you ride ’em.”

-Mary Webb

“The freedom now desired by many is not freedom to do and dare but freedom from care and worry.”

-James Truslow Adams

“The main business of religions is to purify, control, and restrain that excessive and exclusive taste for well-being which men acquire in times of equality.”

-Alexis De Tocqueville

The body of

-Franklin, printer,

(like the cover of an old book,

its contents torn out and

stripped of its lettering and gilding)

lies here, food for worms.

But the work shall not be lost;

for it will (as he believed)

appear once more,

in a new and more elegant edition,

revised and corrected

by the Author.

-Benjamin Franklin’s epitaph

“I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”

-Sir Winston Churchill

“Since an intelligence common to us all makes things known to us and formulates them in our minds, honorable actions are ascribed by us to virtue, and dishonorable actions to vice; and only a madman would conclude that these judgments are matters of opinion, and not fixed by nature.”

-Cicero

“Man has demonstrated that he is master of everything –except his own nature.”

-Henry Miller

“The Congress. . . Desirous. . . to have people of all ranks and degrees duly impressed with a solemn sense of God’s superintending providence, and of their duty, devoutly to rely. . . on his aid and direction. . . Do earnestly recommend. . . a day of humiliation, fasting, and prayer; that we may, with united hearts, confess and bewail our manifold sins and transgressions, and by a sincere repentance and amendment of life. . . and, through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ, obtain his pardon and forgiveness.”

-Congressional Proclamation of May 16, 1776

“The man who says his evening prayer is a captain posting his sentinels. He can sleep.”

-Charles Baudelaire

“Trade is the natural enemy of all violent passions.  Trade loves moderation, delights in compromise, and is most careful to avoid anger.  It is patient, supple, and insinuating, only resorting to extreme measures in cases of absolute necessity.  Trade makes men independent of one another and gives them a high idea of their personal importance: it leads them to want to manage their own affairs and teaches them to succeed therein.  Hence it makes them inclined to liberty but disinclined to revolution.”

-Alexis De Tocqueville

“Life sucks; get a helmet.”

-Dennis Leary

“The United States is and should be multicultural ethnically and racially, but it needs common values concerning the importance of family and work; a culture with firm foundations cannot be built on the sand of radical autonomy.”

-Marvin Olasky

“All law implicitly involves morality; the popular idea that ‘you can’t legislate morality’ is a myth.  Morality is legislated every day from the vantage point of one value system or another.  The question is not whether we will legislate morality, but whose morality we will legislate.”

-Charles Colson

“In Germany they came first for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist.  Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.  Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist.  Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant.  Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up.”

-Martin Niemoller

“When the architects of our great republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.  This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed to the inalienable rights of life liberty and the pursuit of happiness…

But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads to this palace of justice.  In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds.  Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.  We must forever conduct our struggle on the highest plane of dignity and discipline.  We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence.  Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.  The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny and their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom.  We cannot walk alone.”

-Martin Luther King Jr.

“Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders than from the arguments of its opposers.”

-William Penn

“I doubt if any appeal could have straightened me out except a Power over and above man-the appeal of God.  Iron-rod discipline couldn’t have done it.  Nor all the punishment and reward systems that could have been devised.  God had an eye out for me, just as He has for you, and He was pulling for me to make the grade.”

-George Herman “Babe” Ruth

“I anticipate with pleasing expectations that retreat in which I promise myself to realize, without alloy, the sweet enjoyment of partaking, in the midst of my fellow citizens, the benign influence of good laws under a free government, the ever favorite object of my heart, and the happy reward, as I trust, of our mutual cares, labors, and dangers.”

-George Washington

“The main motive for “nonattachment” is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work.”

-George Orwell

“Confused leaders have a tendency to substitute public relations maneuvers for a sense of direction.”

-Henry Kissenger

“Attitudes are contagious.  Is yours worth catching?”

-Unknown

“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

-Henry David Thoreau

“There are no illegitimate children, only illegitimate parents –if the term is to be used at all.”

-O. O. McIntyre

“Our treatment of both older people and children reflects the value we place on independence and autonomy. We do our best to make our children independent from birth. We leave them all alone in rooms with the lights out and tell them,  ‘Go to sleep by yourselves.’  And the old people we respect most are the ones who will fight for their independence, who would sooner starve to death than ask for help.”

-Margaret Mead

“The foremost or indeed the sole condition required in order to succeed in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community is to love equality, or to get men to believe you love it.”

-Alexis de Toqueville

“If you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics –a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage –surely that proves that you are in the right?”

-George Orwell

“God is my judge, not you.”

-Clarence Thomas

“Discipline is the soul of an army.  It makes small numbers formidable; procures success to the weak, and esteem to all.”

-George Washington

“When fascism comes to America it will come in the name of democracy.”

-Huey Long

“You can’t make kids religious, they say, because it just won’t take.  Send kids to Sunday School and they too often end up hating it and the church.  Don’t you believe it.  As far as I’m concerned, and I think as far as most kids go, once religion sinks in, it stays there–deep down.  The lads who get religious training, get it where it counts–in the roots.  They may fail it, but it never fails them.  When the score is against them, or they get a bum pitch, that unfailing Something inside will be there to draw on.”

-George Herman “Babe” Ruth

“Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder.”

-George Washington

“I would rather walk with God in the dark than go alone in the light.”

-Mary Gardiner Brainard

“Do not have your concert first and tune your instruments afterward.  Begin the day with God.”

-J. Hudson Taylor

“It is no small irony that the twentieth century- the age of popular will and of impersonal forces- should have been forged by so few individuals, and that its greatest calamity might have been avoided by the elimination of a single individual [Hitler].”

-Henry Kissenger

“O God, our Father, Thou Searcher of human hearts, help us to draw near to Thee in sincerity and truth.  May our religion be filled with gladness and may our worship of Thee be natural.  Strengthen and increase our admiration for honest dealing and clean thinking, and suffer not our hatred of hypocrisy and pretense ever to diminish.  Encourage us in our endeavor to live above the common level of life.  Make us to choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong, and never to be content with a half truth when the whole can be won.  Endow us with courage that is born of loyalty to all that is noble and worthy, that scorns to compromise with vice and injustice and knows no fear when truth and right are in jeopardy.  Guard us against flippancy and irreverence in the sacred things of life.  Grant us new ties of friendship and new opportunities of service.  Kindle our hearts in fellowship with those of a cheerful countenance, and soften our hearts with sympathy for those who sorrow and suffer.  Help us to maintain the honor of the Corps untarnished and unsullied, and to show forth in our lives the ideals of West Point in doing our duty to Thee and to our Country.  All of which we ask in the name of the Great Friend and Master of all, Jesus Christ our Lord.”

-West Point Cadet Prayer

“When a man and a woman decide that their family comes first, and order their lives in ways that prove their seriousness, society will prosper and politicians will have neither the authority nor the need to run our lives.”

-Cal Thomas

“The American people always do the right thing… after they have exhausted every other possibility.”

-Winston Churchill

“Christianity doesn’t make people perfect.  But it does make us better than we would have been.  Remove the restraint of God’s law, and the worst barbarism break forth… Don’t be intimidated when your friends bring up the tired old lines about the Crusades and the Inquisition.  Just remind them how much worse people are when Christian restraints are removed.”

-Charles Colson

“Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence. True friendship is a plant of slow growth, and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation.”

-George Washington

“We may appeal to every page of history… for proofs irrefutable, that the people, when they have been unchecked, have been as unjust, tyrannical, barbarous and cruel as any king or senate possessed of uncontrollable power.”

-John Adams

“Repression is an unpleasant instrument, but it is absolutely necessary for civilizations that believe in order and human rights.”

-William Buckley

“There are no uninteresting things; there are only uninterested people.”

-Gilbert K. Chesterton

“Sometimes you just run out of rocks.”

-Forrest Gump

“I returned and saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong.”

-Ecclesiastes 9:11

“Wrong, it’s not black and white; it’s right and wrong.”

-Jack Ryan

“It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.”

-Epictetus

“I am a great believer in luck and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.”

-Stephen Leacock

“Do not ever let anyone claim to be a true American Patriot, if they ever attempt to separate religion from politics.”

-George Washington

“The Bible is the chief moral cause of all that is good, and the best corrector of all that is evil, in human society; the best book for regulating the temporal concerns of men, and the only book that can serve as an infallible guide to future felicity.”

-Noah Webster

“It is neglect of timely repair that makes rebuilding necessary.”

-Richard Whately

“All times I have enjoyed greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those that loved me…”

-Alfred, Lord Tennyson

“I have never advocated war except as a means of peace.”

-Ulysses S. Grant

“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, then to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.”

-Theordore Roosevelt

“Soldiers usually win the battles and generals get the credit for them.”

-Napoleon Bonaparte

Government implies the power of making laws.  It is essential to the idea of a law, that it be attended with a sanction; or, in other words, a penalty or punishment for disobedience.”

-Alexander Hamilton

“It is well that war is so terrible – we shouldn’t grow too fond of it.”

-Robert E. Lee

“The war is over-the rebels are our countrymen again.”

-Gen. Ulysses Grant after stopping his troops from cheering at Appomattox Courthouse

“Humility must always be the portion of any man who receives acclaim earned in the blood of his followers and the sacrifices of his friends.”

-Dwight Eisenhower

“Our literature and history are a rich quarry of moral literacy.  We should mine that quarry.  Children must have at their disposal a stock of examples illustrating what we see to be right and wrong, good and bad-examples illustrating that, in many instances, what is morally right and wrong can indeed be known and promoted.”

-William Bennett

“It is almost as important to know what is not serious, as to know what is.”

-John Kenneth Galibraith

It’s better to swallow your pride than to eat your words.”

-Unknown

“When we assumed the Soldier, we did not lay aside the Citizen.”

-George Washington

“Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right. . . and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean the characters and conduct of their rulers.”

-John Adams

“It is well, I die hard, but I am not afraid to go.”

-George Washington

“It is better to have an army of asses lead by a lion than to have an army of lions lead by an ass.”

-George Washington

“The power to tax involves the power to destroy.”

-John Marshall

“I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.”

-Nathan Hale

“Sir, we are not weak, if we make a proper use of those means which the God of nature hath placed in our power.  Three millions of people, armed in the holy cause of liberty, and in such a country as that which we possess, are invincible by any force which our enemy can send against us.  Besides, sir, we shall not fight our battles alone.  There is a just God who presides over the destinies of nations; and who will raise up friends to fight our battle for us.  The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave.  Besides, sir, we have no election.  If we were base enough to desire it, it is not too late to retire from the contest.  There is no retreat but in submission and slavery!  Our chains are forged; their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston!  The war is inevitable– and let it come!  I repeat it, sir, let it come!

It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter.  Gentlemen may cry, Peace, peace; but there is no peace.  The war is actually begun.  The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms.  Our brethren are already in the field.  Why stand we here idle?  What is it that gentlemen wish?  What would they have?  Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?  Forbid it, Almighty God.  I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”

-Patrick Henry

“Why has government been instituted at all?  Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice, without constraint.”

-Alexander Hamilton

“Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.  It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.”

-William Pitt

“My definition [of a philosopher] is of a man up in a balloon, with his family and friends holding the ropes which confine him to earth and trying to haul him down.”

-Louisa May Alcott

“Try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of value.”

-Albert Einstein

“It is harder to preserve than to obtain liberty.”

-John Calhoun

“Civilian leaders talk about the state of morale in a given country as if it were a sort of uncontrollable event or phenomenon, like a thunderstorm or a cold winter.  The soldier leader looks on morale as the greatest of all his problems, but also as one about which he can and must do something.”

-Dwight D. Eisenhower

“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”

-William Butler Yeats

“Let him that would move the world, first move himself.”

-Socrates

“He that would be a leader must be a bridge.”

-Welsh Proverb

“Journalism is merely history’s first draft.”

-Geoffrey C. Ward

“Movie producers say their work is merely a reflection of society, but I think they’ve been leaders, not mirrors.”

Andy Rooney

“All sects differ, because they come from men; morality is everywhere the same, because it comes from God.”

-Voltaire

“The hand that rocks the cradle

Is the hand that rules the world.”

-W. R. Wallace

“You cannot be true man until you learn to obey.”

-General Robert E. Lee

“If thou thinkest twice before thou speakest once, thou wilt speak twice the better for it.”

-William Penn

“Nothing is so fatal to religion as indifference which is, at least, half infidelity.”

-Edmund Burke

“Few things help an individual more than to place responsibility upon him, and to let him know that you trust him.”

-Booker T. Washington

“It is infinitely easier to suffer in obedience to a human command than to accept suffering as free, responsible men.”

-Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“Truth is always strange- stranger than friction.”

-Lord Byron

“I don’t want any yes-men around me.  I want everyone to tell me the truth- even though it cost him his job.”

-Samuel Goldwyn

“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry.  He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great sweeper who did his job well.”

-Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Keep thy eyes wide open before marriage, and half shut afterwards.”

-Benjamin Franklin

“Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.”

-Franklin Delano Roosevelt

“They have a right to censure that have a heart to help.”

-William Penn

“They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

-Benjamin Franklin

“No one ever said at the end of his days, ‘I have read my Bible too much, I have thought of God too much, I have prayed too much, I have been too careful with my soul.”

-J. C. Ryle

“Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.”

-Mark Twain

“The superior man thinks always of virtue; the common man thinks of comfort.”

-Confucius

“Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow.”

-Ronald E. Osborn

“Great opportunities to help others seldom come, but small ones surround us.”

-Sally Koch

“When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing.”

– Enrique Jardiel Poncela

“Heredity is a splendid phenomenon that relieves us of responsibility  for our shortcomings.”

-Doug Larson

“When the mouth stumbles, it is worse than the foot.”

-West African Proverb

“Tradition lives because young people come along who catch its romance and add new glories to it.”

-Michael Novak

“Mr. Lely, I desire you would use all your skill to paint my picture truly like me, and not flatter me at all; but remark all these roughnesses, pimples, warts, and everything as you see me, otherwise I will never pay a farthing for it.”

-Oliver Cromwell

“In the tumult of men and events, solitude was my temptation; now it is my friend.  What other satisfaction can be sought once you have confronted History?”

-Charles De Gaulle

“It is odd that some Christians see themselves as the media do, as bland guys in gray suits with gray buzzcuts.  They ought to see themselves as young Marlon Brando on a Harley, for they are the true anti-establishment, the true rebels, and with a cause.”

-Peggy Noonan

“An army without culture is a dull-witted army, and a dull-witted army cannot defeat the enemy.”

-Mao Zedong

“On becoming soldiers we have not ceased to be citizens.”

-Address,  “Humble Representation,” 1647, to the English Parliament by Oliver Cromwell’s soldiers.

“Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.”

-G. K. Chesterton

“All great leaders walk alone.  Their singularity springs from their ability to discern challenges that are not yet apparent to their contemporaries.”

-Henry Kissenger

“There is no calamity which a great nation can invite which equals that which follows a supine submission to wrong and injustice and the consequent loss of national self-respect and honor, beneath which are shielded and defended a people’s safety and greatness.”

-Grover Cleveland

“Our civilization has decided. . . that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men. . . . When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up its specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.”

-G. K. Chesterton

“A general is just as good or just as bad as the troops under his command make him.”

-Douglas MacArthur

“The conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerrilla wins if he does not lose.”

-Henry Kissinger

“I had rather have a plain, russet-coated Captain, that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than that which you call a Gentle-man and is nothing else.”

-Oliver Cromwell

“My country, right or wrong” is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying “My mother, drunk or sober.”

-G. K. Chesterton

“Prescience- knowing which way to lead- lies at the heart of great leadership.  The very word leader implies the ability to act as the guide, to see beyond the present in charting a course into the future.”

-Richard Nixon

“States that rise quickly, just as all the other things of nature that are born and grow rapidly, cannot have roots and ramifications; the first bad weather kills them.”

-Niccolo Machiavelli

“Happiness is a mystery, like religion, and should never be rationalized.”

-G. K. Chesterton

“The mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation.”

-William McKinley

“The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.”

-G. K. Chesterton

“The reason prophets are so rarely honored in their own country is that their role is to transcend the limits of their contemporaries’ experience and imagination.  They achieve recognition only when their vision has been turned into experience- in short, when it is too late to benefit from their foresight.”

-Henry Kissenger

“The frog in the well doesn’t know the dimensions of heaven and earth.”

-Japanese saying

“An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.”

-H. L. Mencken

“Goals are dreams with deadlines.”

-Diana Scharif

“A stiff apology is a second insult. . . . The injured party does not want to be compensated because he has been wronged; he wants to be healed because he has been hurt.”

-G. K. Chesterton

“…experience suggests that the most dangerous moment for an evil government is usually when it begins to reform itself.  Only great ingenuity can save a prince who undertakes to give relief to his subjects after long oppression.  The sufferings that are endured patiently, as being inevitable, become intolerable the moment it appears that there might be an escape.  Reform then only serves to reveal more clearly what still remains oppressive and now all the more unbearable.”

-Alexis de Toqueville

“However, when talks become their own objective, they are at the mercy of the party most prepared to break them off, or at least the party that is able to give that impression.”

-Henry Kissenger

“The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically.  But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society.  The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals.”

-Martin Luther King, Jr.

“I have read in Plato and Cicero sayings that are very wise and very beautiful; but I have never read in either of them,

‘Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden

and I will give you rest.'”

-St. Augustine

“Any plan conceived in moderation must fail when the circumstances are set in extremes.”

-Prince Metternich

“Compromise used to mean that half a loaf was better than no bread. Among modern statesmen it really seems to mean that half a loaf is better than a whole loaf.”

-G. K. Chesterton

“From the beginning a basic philosophy guided the movement.  This guiding principle has since been referred to variously as nonviolent resistance, noncooperation, and passive resistance.  But in the first days of the protest none of these expressions was mentioned; the phrase most often heard was ‘Christian love.’  It was the Sermon on the Mount, rather than a doctrine of passive resistance, that initially inspired the Negroes of Montgomery to dignified social action.  It was Jesus of Nazareth that stirred the Negroes to protest with the creative weapon of love.”

-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

“I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult.  But the age of chivalry is gone.  That of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is gone forever.”

-Edmund Burke

“In general, diplomats rarely pay for services already rendered- especially in wartime.  Typically, it is pressure on the battlefield that generates the negotiation.  Relieving that pressure reduces the enemy’s incentive to negotiate seriously, and it tempts him to drag out the negotiations in order to determine whether other unilateral gestures might be forthcoming.”

-Henry Kissenger

“Everything else you grow out of, but you never recover from childhood.”

-Bainbridge

“I am proud of my Latin heritage.  Our devotion to family and to the Church and our contributions in philosophy, music, and art are admirable.  But we Latins are just not good at government.  We find it difficult to strike the balance between order and freedom.  We go to extremes-  too much order and too little freedom or too much freedom and too little order.”

-Luis Munoz Marin, former Gov of Peurto Rico

“What separates the men from the boys in politics is that the boys want high office in order to be somebody; the men want high office in order to do something.”

-Richard Nixon

“I am personally opposed to killing abortionist.  However, inasmuch as my personal opposition to this practice is rooted in a sectarian [Catholic] religious belief….I am unwilling to impose it on others….”

-Princeton professor Robert P. George, parodying the

“personally opposed” line of those favoring government-protected abortion

“Our intelligence can furnish us with the theoretic, general abstract knowledge of what it is, but only instinct can give the practical, particular, and concrete feel of it.”

-Charles de Gaulle on leadership

“There are 40 kinds of lunacy, but only one kind of common sense.”

-African proverb

“Serenity was the quality most needed in a leader whose mission was to give his country, which had every reason to doubt its past, the courage to face an uncertain future.”

-Henry Kissenger on Konrad Adenauer

“A leader who keeps his ear fixed to the ground allows his rear end to become a target.”

-Angie Papadakis

“We worry about what a child will be like tomorrow, yet we forget that his is someone today.”

-Stacia Tauscher

“You cannot paint the “Mona Lisa” by assigning one dab each to a thousand painters.”

-Wiliam F. Buckley, Jr.

“Never confuse energy with strength.”

-Konrad Adenauer

“The conscience is not to be healed, if it be not wounded.  Thou preachest and presseth the law, the judgment to come, with much earnestness and importunity.  He which hears, if he be not terrified, if he be not troubled, is not to be comforted.”

-St. Augustine

“When a country abjures its intention of exploiting a conflict between two other parties, it is in fact signaling that it has the capacity to do so and that both parties would do well to work at preserving that neutrality.  So too, when a nation expresses its ‘deep concern’ over a military contingency, it is conveying that it will assist- in some as yet unspecified way- the victim of what it has defined as aggression.”

-Henry Kissenger

“Our problem is not to be rid of fear but rather to harness and master it.”

-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

“The new cross does not slay the sinner; It redirects him.  It gears him into a cleaner and jollier way of living and saves his self-respect.  To the self assertive it says, ‘Come and assert yourself for Christ.’  To the egoist it says, ‘Come and do your boasting in the Lord.’  To the thrill-seeker it says, ‘Come and enjoy the abundant Christian life.’  The idea behind this kind of thing may be sincere, but its sincerity does not save it from being false.  It misses completely the whole meaning of the cross.  The cross is a symbol of death.  It stands for the abrupt, violent end of a person.  God salvages the individual by liquidating him and then raising him to newness of life.  The corn of wheat must fall into the ground and die.  God then bestows life, but not an improved old life.  Whoever would possess it must pass under the rod.  He must repudiate himself and concur in God’s just sentence against him.  How can this theology be translated in life?  Simply, the non-Christian must repent and believe.  He must forsake his sins and then go on to forsake himself.  Let him cover nothing, defend nothing, excuse nothing.  Let him not seek to make terms with God, but let him bow his head before the stroke of God’s stern displeasure and acknowledge himself worthy to die.”

-A. W. Tozer

“If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I never would lay down my arms –never –never –never!”

-William Pitt The Elder, Lord Chatham

“Real difficulties can be overcome; it is only the imaginary ones that are unconquerable.”

-Theodore Vail

“I am so weak that I cannot work; I cannot read my Bible; I cannot even pray.  I can only lie still in God’s arms like a child, and trust.”

Hudson Taylor

“I have met some leaders who were effective technicians but who had no discernible idealism.  I have met others who were starry-eyed idealists who did not have the foggiest notion of how to achieve their ideals.  Adenauer was one of those rare leaders whose practical political intelligence matched his idealism. ”

-Richard Nixon

“People ask the difference between a leader and a boss. . . . The leader works in the open, and the boss in covert. The leader leads, and the boss drives.”

-Theodore Roosevelt

“To “know your place” is a good idea in politics. That is not to say “stay in your place” or “hang on to your place,” because ambition or boredom may dictate upward or downward mobility, but a sense of place –a feel for one’s own position in the control room –is useful in gauging what you should try to do.”

-William Safire

“Our success does not depend on our position with people and our attitude with God, but our position with God and our attitude with people.”

-Richard Funk

“Here I am a barbarian, because men understand me not.”

-Ovid

“We should consider what is natural not in things which are depraved but in those which are rightly ordered according to nature.”

-Aristotle

“Always remember, others may hate you. Those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself.”

-Richard M. Nixon

“There is something behind the throne greater than the King himself.”

-William Pitt The Elder, Lord Chatham

“To have no time for philosophy is to be a true philosopher.”

-Blaise Pascal

“Act as men of thought.  Think as men of action.”

-Henri Bergson

“Faith, like light, should always be simple and unbending; while love, like warmth, should beam forth on every side, and bend to every necessity of our brother.”

-Martin Luther

“Friendship is not a reward for our discrimination and good taste in finding one another.  It is the instrument by which God reveals to each of us the beauty of all the others.”

-C. S. Lewis

“If violence is wrong in America, violence is wrong abroad. If it is wrong to be violent defending black women and black children and black babies and black men, then it is wrong for America to draft us, and make us violent abroad in defense of her. And if it is right for America to draft us, and teach us how to be violent in defense of her, then it is right for you and me to do whatever is necessary to defend our own people right here in this country.”

-Malcolm X

“Frequently the glibbest talker turns out to be the shallowest thinker.  A good rule for the would-be leader, when he has a choice, is to exercise his tongue less and his brain more.”

-Richard Nixon

“A man’s riches may ransom his life, but a poor man hears no threat.”

-Proverbs 13:8

“A servant of Jesus Christ is one who is willing to go to martyrdom for the reality of the gospel of God.”

-Oswald Chambers

“If there be some weaker one,

Give me strength to help him on;

If a blinder soul there be,

Let me guide him nearer Thee;

Make my mortal dreams come true

With the work I fain would do;

Clothe with life the weak intent,

Let me be the thing I meant;

Let me find in Thy employ

Peace that dearer is than joy…”

-John Greenleaf Whittier

“They knew legalism, but not life.”

-Theodore Roosevelt on the court of appeals

“The major flaw of the modern welfare state is not that it is extravagant, but that it is too stingy.  It gives the needy bread and tells them to be content with that alone.  It gives the rest of us the opportunity to be stingy also:  We can soothe our consciences as we scrimp on what many of the destitute need most- love, time, and challenge.  We need to recapture the optimism that a look at history can provide.  We need to recapture the understanding that a true definition of compassion suggests.”

-Marvin Olasky

“Abortion is the only operation that can be performed on a child without parental permission.”

-Thomas Sowell

“Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.”

-H. L. Mencken

“A striking feature of moral and political argument in the modern world is the extent to which it is innovators, radicals, and revolutionaries who revive old doctrines, while their conservative and reactionary opponents are the inventors of new ones.”

-Alasdair Chalmers Macintyre

“What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?  If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”

-James Madison

“The lunatic fringe wags the underdog.”

-H. L. Mencken

“You can’t separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom.”

-Malcolm X

“People think that if a man has undergone any hardship, he should have a reward; but for my part, if I have done the hardest possible day’s work, and then come to sit down in a corner and eat my supper comfortably –why, then I don’t think I deserve any reward for my hard day’s work –for am I not now at peace?  Is not my supper good?”

-Herman Melville

“Defeat doesn’t finish a man –quit does. A man is not finished when he’s defeated.  He’s finished when he quits.”

-Richard M. Nixon

“If someone ever discovers why lemmings stampede headlong into the sea and drown, it may provide a clue as to why human beings are so anxious to be ‘with it.'”

Thomas Sowell

“The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.”

-H. L. Mencken

“Women’s Liberation is just a lot of foolishness. It’s the men who are discriminated against. They can’t bear children. And no one’s likely to do anything about that.”

-Golda Meir

“A man who has never lost himself in a cause bigger than himself has missed one of life’s mountaintop experiences.  Only in losing himself does he find himself.  Only then does he discover all the latent strengths he never knew he had and which otherwise would have remained dormant.”

-Richard M. Nixon

“The freedom that women were supposed to have found in the Sixties largely boiled down to easy contraception and abortion; things to make life easier for men, in fact.”

-Julie Burchill

“Even the trade-off involved with a working mother has been waved aside with a phrase like “quality time,” suggesting that the quantity of time lost between a mother and child can be made up later by the quality.  But when a child is frantic and sobbing at 10:30 Monday morning, that is when he needs his mother- and a trip to the zoo next Saturday is not going to make it up.”

-Thomas Sowell

“Confidence, like art, never comes from having all the answers; it comes for being open to all the questions.”

-Earl Gary Stephens

“Books had instant replay long before televised sports.”

-Bern Williams

“We are born with our eyes closed and our mouths open, and we spend our whole lives trying to reverse that mistake of nature.”

-Dale E. Turner

“Tell me whom you love, and I’ll tell you who you are.”

-Creole Proverb

“All men like to think they can do it alone, but a real man knows there’s no substitute for support, encouragement or a pit crew.”

-Tim Allen

“The sadness of the women’s movement is that they don’t allow the necessity of love. See, I don’t personally trust any revolution where love is not allowed.”

-Maya Angelou

“Movements born in hatred very quickly take on the characteristics of the thing they oppose.”                                                                                       -J. S. Habgood

“What the vast majority of American children needs is to stop being pampered, stop being indulged, stop being chauffeured, stop being catered to. In the final analysis it is not what you do for your children but what you have taught them to do for themselves that will make them successful human beings.”

-Ann Landers

“The child is father of the man.”

-William Wordsworth

“Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves.”

-Edmund Burke

“Advertising is the modem substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.”

-George Santayana

“All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.”

-John Kenneth Galbraith

“There was never a great man who had not a great mother.”

-Olive Schreiner

“She plucked from my lapel the invisible strand of lint (the universal act of woman to proclaim ownership).”

-O. Henry [William Sydney Porter]

“I have no hesitation in saying that although the American woman never leaves her domestic sphere and is in some respects very dependent within it, nowhere does she enjoy a higher station. And. . . if anyone asks me what I think the chief cause of the extraordinary prosperity and growing power of this nation, I should answer that it is due to the superiority of their women.”

-Alexis De Tocqueville

“When they kept you out it was because you were black; when they let you in, it is because you are black.  That’s progress?”

-Marilyn French

“If there hadn’t been women we’d still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girl friends. And they tolerated it and let us go ahead and play with our toys.”

-Orson Welles

“If you bungle raising your children, I don’t think whatever else you do well matters very much.”

-Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

“By the miraculous sign of Providence, that protected me beyond all human expectations; I had four bullets through my coat, and two horses shot under me, and yet escaped unhurt.  Providence has heretofore taken us up when all other means and hope seemed to be departing from us, in this I will confide.”

-George Washington

I consider it an indispensable duty to close this last solemn act of my official life, by commending the interest of our dearest country to the protection of Almighty God, and those who have the superintendence of them, to His holy keeping.”

-George Washington

“To be a leader of men one must turn one’s back on men.”

-Havelock Ellis

“Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; but urge me not to use moderation in a case like the present.”

-William Lloyd Garrison

“It is always easier to fight for one’s principles than to live up to them.”

-Alfred Adler

“Respect is earned, not conferred.  It is not a door prize.  Equal respect is a contradiction in terms, since the very concept of respect implies an inequality of esteem and regard.  All may be entitled to a common decency but not all can receive a higher relative ranking.”

-Thomas Sowell

“There is nothing new in the world except the history that you do not know.”

-Harry S. Truman

“Almighty God; We make our earnest prayer that Thou wilt keep the United States in Thy holy protection; and Thou wilt incline the hearts of the citizens to cultivate a spirit of subordination and obedience to government; and entertain a brotherly affection and love for one another and their fellow citizens of the United States at large.”

-George Washington’s prayer for the United States

“I sought for the key to the greatness and genius of America and her harbors . . . ; in her fertile fields and boundless forests; in her rich mines and vast world commerce; in her public school system and institutions of learning.  I sought for it in her democratic Congress and in her matchless Constitution.  Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power.  America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.”

-Alexis de Toqueville

“You seem to have no real purpose in life and won’t realize at the age of twenty-two that for a man life means work, and hard work if you mean to succeed.”

-Jennie Jerome Churchill, mother of Winston                                                                                                 Churchill

“The Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations. . . . This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people, was the real American Revolution.”

-John Adams

“History is Philosophy teaching by examples.”

-Thucydides

“Study men, not historians.”

-Harry S Truman

“There was never yet an uninteresting life.  Such a thing is an impossibility.  Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.”

-Mark Twain

“A politician’s words reveal less about what he thinks about his subject than what he thinks about his audience.”

-George F. Will

“None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating power of the hope of freedom to those who are not free.”

-Pearl S. Buck

“The buck stops here.”

-Harry S Truman

“I sit on a man’s back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means –except by getting off his back.”

-Leo Tolstoy on liberals

“Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.”

-J. R. R. Tolkien

“Philosophic argument, especially that drawn from the vastness of the universe, in comparison with the apparent insignificance of this globe, has sometimes shaken my reason for the faith that is in me; but my heart has always assured and reassured me that the gospel of Jesus Christ must be Divine Reality. The Sermon on the Mount cannot be a mere human production. This belief enters into the very depth of my conscience. The whole history of man proves it.”

Daniel Webster

“Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.”

-Mark Twain

“Too bad that all the people who know how to run the country are busy driving taxicabs and cutting hair.”

-George Burns

“What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer.”

-Francis Bacon

“I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.”

-John Adams

“Race prejudice is not only a shadow over the colored –it is a shadow over all of us, and the shadow is darkest over those who feel it least and allow its evil effects to go on.”

-Pearl S. Buck

“One leak will sink a ship: and one sin will destroy a sinner.”

-John Bunyan

“Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil, and you’re a thousand miles from the corn field.”

-Dwight D. Eisenhower

“Tew bring up a child in the wa he should go –travel that wa yourself.”

-Josh Billings [Henry Wheeler Shaw]

“It is possible to lead astray an entire generation, to strike it blind, to drive it insane, to direct it towards a false goal. Napoleon proved this.”

-Alexander Herzen

“A hen is only an egg’s way of making another egg.”

-Samuel Butler

“I want to see you shoot the way you shout.”

-Theodore Roosevelt

“Isn’t privacy about keeping taboos in their place?”

-Kate Millet

“The humanities are about more than social power.  What gives them their abiding worth are truths that pass beyond time and circumstance; truths that, transcending accidents of class, race and gender, speak to us all.”

-Lynne Cheney

“Outside the world of education, few would be confident, or even comfortable, claiming that it is a lack of self-esteem which leads to felonies or its presence which leads to Nobel Prizes.  Yet American schools are permeated with the idea that self-esteem precedes performance, rather than vice-versa.”

-Thomas Sowell

“The future greatness of America in no small degree depends upon the possession by the average American citizen of the qualities which my men showed when they served under me at Santiago.”

-Theodore Roosevelt

“To see what is in front of one’s nose requires a constant struggle.”

-George Orwell

“Success is how high you bounce when you hit bottom.”

-General George S. Patton

“History is a better guide than good intentions.”

-Jean Kirkpatrick

“The reputation of a thousand years may be determined by the conduct of one hour.”

-Japanese Proverb

“You cannot get ahead while you are getting even.”

-Representative Dick Armey

“The true preachers of peace, who strive earnestly to bring nearer the day when peace shall obtain among all peoples, and who really do help forward the cause, are men who never hesitate to choose righteous war when it is the only alternative to unrighteous peace.”

-Theodore Roosevelt

“It is precisely my living evangelical and Christian faith that lays upon me the duty- in behalf of the land where I was born and for whose service God created me and where high office has been entrusted to me- to guard that office against all sides.”

-Otto von Bismarck

“Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, it is a troublesome servant and a fearful master.”

-George Washington

“It’s more fun to arrive at a conclusion than to defend it.”

-Malcolm S. Forbes

“The hood does not make the monk.”

-William Shakespeare

“We have done much to attempt to put everyone on a level playing field, but do we not have the right to expect the players to give their best, rather than to sit on the sidelines and demand more?”

-Larry L. King

“In order then that the social compact may not be an empty formula, it tacitly includes the undertaking, which alone can give force to the rest, that whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body.  This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free; for this is the condition which, by giving each citizen to his country, secures him against all personal dependence.  In this lies the key to the working of the political machine; this alone legitimizes civil undertakings, which, without it, would be absurd, tyrannical and liable to the most frightful abuses.”

-Jean-Jaques Rousseau

“Whether men will or not, they must be subject always to the Divine Power.  By denying the Existence, or Providence of God, men may shake off their Ease, but not their Yoke.”

-Thomas Hobbes

“To get out of a difficulty, one must usually go through it.”

-Samuel Easton

“God has given us two hands–one to receive with and the other to give with.  We are not cisterns

made for hoarding; we are channels made for giving.”

-Billy Graham

“Good habits are not made on birthdays, nor Christian character at the New Year.  The workshop of character is everyday life. The uneventful and commonplace hour is where the battle is lost or won.”

-Maltbie D. Babcock

“And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds.”

-Hebrews 10:24

I cannot say “Our” if my religion has no room for others and their needs.

I cannot say “Father” if I do not demonstrate this relationship in my daily life.

I cannot say “Who Art In Heaven” if all my interests and pursuits are in earthly things.

I cannot say “Hallowed Be Thy Name” if I, who am called by his name am not holy.

I cannot say “Thy Kingdom Come” if I am unwilling to give up my own sovereignty and accept the righteous reign of God.

I cannot say “Thy Will Be Done” if I am unwilling or resentful of having it in my life.

I cannot say “On Earth As It Is In Heaven” unless I am truly ready to give myself to his service here and now.

I cannot say “Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread” without expending honest effort for it or by ignoring the genuine needs of my fellowmen.

I cannot say “Forgive Us Our Trespasses As We Forgive Those Who Trespass Against Us” if I continue to harbor a grudge against anyone.

I cannot say “Lead Us Not Into Temptation” if I deliberately choose to remain in a situation where I am likely to be tempted.

I cannot say “Deliver Us From Evil” if I am not prepared to fight in the spiritual realm with the weapon of prayer.

I cannot say “Thine Is The Kingdom” if I do not give the King the disciplined obedience of a loyal subject.

I cannot say “Thine Is The Power” if I fear what my neighbors and friends may say or do.

I cannot say “Thine Is The Glory” if I am seeking my own glory first.

I cannot say “Forever” if I am too anxious about each day’s affairs.

I cannot say “Amen” unless I honestly say, “cost what it may, this is my prayer”.

-Unknown

“I see Jesus in every human being.  I say to myself, this is hungry Jesus, I must feed him.  This is sick

Jesus.  This one has leprosy or gangrene; I must wash him and tend to him.  I serve them because I love Jesus.”

-Mother Teresa

“I am an optimist.  It doesn’t seem too much use being anything else.”

-Winston Churchill

A MORNING PRAYER

Grant, almighty God,

that as You shine on us by Your word,

we may not be blind at midday,

nor willfully see darkness,

and thus lull our minds asleep:

but, may we be roused daily by Your words,

and may we stir up ourselves

more and more to fear Your name

and thus present ourselves and all our pursuits,

as a sacrifice to You, that You may peaceably rule

and perpetually dwell in us until You gather us

to Your celestial habitation,

where there is reserved for us

eternal rest and glory,

through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.

-John Calvin

“God cannot give us happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there.  There is no such thing.”

-C. S. Lewis

“Great works are performed not by strength, but by perseverance.”

-Samuel Johnson

“God giveth the shoulder according to the burden.”

-German Proverb

“Destiny?  Tomorrow?  Truth?  All are questions within the reach of the man who knows his source.  It is in seeing Jesus that man sees his Source.”

-Max Lucado

“Many a man thinks he has an open mind, when it’s merely vacant.”

-Unknown

“Parents are not simply a source of experience from their own lives; they are a conduit for the distilled experience of others in earlier generations, experience conveyed in traditions and moral codes responding to the many dangers that beset human life.  Psychological-conditioning programs which enshrine current “feelings” fail to understand that it is precisely feelings of the moment which lead to many dangers, and that inhibitions toward some feelings have evolved for that very reason.”

-Thomas Sowell

“They tell you sex has become such a mess because it was hushed up.  But for the last twenty years  it has not been hushed up.  It has been chattered about all day long.  Yet it is still in a mess.  If hushing up had been the cause of the trouble, ventilation would have set it right.  But it has not.  I think it is the other way round.  I think the human race originally hushed it up because it had become such a mess.”

-C. S. Lewis

“Treat your friends as you do your pictures, and place them in their best light.”

-Jennie Jerome Churchill

“Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor.”

-Norman Mailer

“In America the taint of sectarianism lies broad upon the land.  Not content with acknowledging the supremacy as the Deity, and with erecting temples in his honor, where all can bow down with reverence, the pride and vanity of human reason enter into and pollute our worship, and the houses that should be of God and for God, alone, where he is to be honored with submissive faith, are too often merely schools of metaphysical and useless distinctions.  The nation is sectarian, rather than Christian.”

-James Fenimore Cooper

“One cannot be a good historian of the outward, visible world without giving some thought to the hidden, private life of ordinary people; and on the other hand one cannot be a good historian of this inner life without taking into account outward events where these are relevant. They are two orders of fact which reflect each other, which are always linked and which sometimes provoke each other.”

-Victor Hugo

“Wherever the citizen becomes indifferent to his fellows, so will the husband be to his wife, and the father of a family toward the members of his household.”

-Karl Wilhelm Von Humboldt

“If denying and hiding their faith is the price of a partnership with government, religious groups and their allies should flatly refuse.”

-Raul Yanes

“Who wants to go back to the 19th century?  Nobody, if what you mean by the 19th century is no cars, airplanes, TV, air conditioning, or penicillin.  If what you mean by the 19th century is united families, enduring marriages, a near-universal commitment to transcendent faith, and a sense of raw excitement over the exercise of freedom, then yes, it is right to bemoan the passage of much that was associated with the 19th century.”

-William F. Buckley Jr.

“Let him begin by treating the Patriotism or the Pacifism as a part of his religion.  Then let him, under the influence of partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part.  Then quietly and gradually nurse him on to the stage at which the religion becomes merely part of the ‘Cause,’ in which Christianity is valued chiefly because of the excellent arguments it can produce in favor of the British war effort or of pacifism.  ”

-Screwtape, in the Screwtape Letters

“America’s most dangerous diseases have developed an immunity to politics.  We suffer not from a failure of political organization or power, but a failure of love.  Our most pressing problem isn’t the federal deficit, but a deficit of time and attention that parents give their children and each other.  In violent streets and broken homes, the cry of anguished souls is not for more laws but for more conscience and character.”

-Cal Thomas

“You miss 100% of the shots you never take.”

-Wayne Gretsky

“There is certainly no country in the world where the tie of marriage is more frequently respected than in America or where conjugal happiness is more highly or worthily appreciated.  In Europe almost all the disturbances of society arise from the irregularities of domestic life.  To despise the natural bonds and legitimate pleasures of home is to contract a taste for excesses, a restlessness of heart, and fluctuating desires.”

-Alexis de Toqueville

“When we reflect upon the insidious art of wicked and designed men, the various and plausible pretenses for continuing and increasing the inordinate lust of power in the few, we shall no longer be surprised that freeborn man hath been enslaved, and that those very means which were contrived for his preservation have been perverted to his ruin.”

-George Mason

“Mothers are the most instinctive philosophers.”

-Harriet Beecher Stowe

“If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.”

-W. Somerset Maugham

“Children have more need of models than of critics.”

-Carolyn Coats

“To love and to be loved is to feel the sun from both sides.”

-David Viscott, M.D.

“Being defeated is often a temporary condition.  Giving up is what makes it permanent.”

-Marilyn vos Savant

“The politician who never made a mistake never made a decision.”

-John Major

“At home you always have to be a politician. When you’re abroad you almost feel yourself a statesman.”

-Harold Macmillan

“Whatever it is that the government does, sensible Americans would prefer that the government do it to somebody else. This is the idea behind foreign policy.”

-P. J. O’Rourke

“He who would eat the fruit must climb the tree.”

-Scottish Proberb

“A diamond is a chunk of coal that made good under pressure.”

-Classic Crossword Puzzles

“Without courage, all other virtues lose their meaning.”

-Winston Churchill

“One of the annoying things about believing in free will and individual responsibility is the difficulty of finding somebody to blame your problems on. And when you do find somebody, it’s remarkable how often his picture turns up on your driver’s license.”

-P. J. O’Rourke

“A will finds a way.”

-Orison Swett Marden

“Only a mediocre person is always at his best.”

-W. Somerset Maugham

“Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.”

-Robert Kennedy

“The trouble with most of us is that we’d rather be ruined by praise than loved by criticism.”

-Norman Vincent Peale

“The man who has a right to boast does not have to.”

-Anonymous

“The principle feature of American liberalism is sanctimoniousness. By loudly denouncing all bad things –war and hunger and date rape –liberals testify to their own terrific goodness. More important, they promote themselves to membership in a self-selecting elite of those who care deeply about such things. . . . It’s a kind of natural aristocracy, and the wonderful thing about this aristocracy is that you don’t have to be brave, smart, strong or even lucky to join it, you just have to be liberal.”

-P. J. O’Rourke

“One of the reasons for the failure of feminism to dislodge deeply held perceptions of male and female behavior was its insistence that women were victims, and men powerful patriarchs, which made a travesty of ordinary people’s experience of the mutual interdependence of men and women.”

-Rosalind Coward

“If you stand up and be counted, from time to time you may get yourself knocked down, but remember this:  A man flattened by an opponent can get up again; a man flattened by conformity stays down for good.”

-Thomas J. Watson, Jr.

“Snowflakes are one of nature’s most fragile things, but just look what they can do when they stick together.”

-Vesta M. Kelly

“Ideology, politics and journalism, which luxuriate in failure, are impotent in the face of hope and joy.”

-P. J. O’Rourke

“The law is only one of several imperfect and more or less external ways of defending what is better in life against what is worse. By itself, the law can never create anything better. . . . Establishing respect for the law does not automatically ensure a better life for that, after all, is a job for people and not for laws and institutions.”

-Vaclav Havel

“Personally, I’m always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.”

-Winston Churchill

“If you have a job without aggravations, you don’t have a job.”

-Malcolm Forbes

“Experience is a hard teacher.  The test is given first, the lesson afterwards.”

-Anonymous

“Newsmen believe that news is a tacitly acknowledged fourth branch of the federal system. This is why most news about government sounds as if it were federally mandated –serious, bulky and blandly worthwhile, like a high-fiber diet set in type.”

-P. J. O’Rourke

“There used to be a thing or a commodity we put great store by. It was called the People. Find out where the People have gone. I don’t mean the square-eyed toothpaste-and-hair-dye people or the new-car-or-bust people, or the success-and-coronary people. Maybe they never existed, but if there ever were the People, that’s the commodity the Declaration was talking about, and Mr. Lincoln.”

-John Steinbeck

“There is no security on this earth, only opportunity.”

-Douglas MacArthur

“Being powerful is like being a lady.  If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.”

-Margaret Thatcher

“Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.”

-Sir Winston Churchill

“This is a Senate of equals, of men of individual honor and personal character, and of absolute independence.  We know no masters, we acknowledge no dictators.  This is a hall for mutual consultation and discussion; not an arena for the exhibition of champions.”

-Daniel Webster

“In order to move others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility.”

-Joseph Conrad

“Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.”

-John F. Kennedy

“Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.”

-Will Rogers

“I like to think of my behavior in the sixties as a ‘learning experience.’  Then again, I like to think of anything stupid I’ve done as a ‘learning experience.’  It makes me feel less stupid.”

-P. J. O’Rourke

“We are lonesome animals.  We spend all our life trying to be less lonesome.  One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say –and to feel –“Yes, that’s the way it is, or at least that’s the way I feel it. You’re not as alone as you thought.”

-John Steinbeck

“Each one should use whatever gift he has received to serve others, faithfully administering God’s grace in its various forms.”

-1 Peter 4:10

“The weak can never forgive.  Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.”

-Mohandas K. Gandhi

“You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it.”

-Margaret Thatcher

“Blessed is the man who finds wisdom, the man who gains understanding.”

-Proverbs 3:13

“That book [The Bible], sir, is the rock on which the republic rests.”

-Andrew Jackson on the Bible

“Social Security is a government program with a constituency made up of the old, the near old and those who hope or fear to grow old. After 215 years of trying, we have finally discovered a special interest that includes 100 percent of the population. Now we can vote ourselves rich.”

-P. J. O’Rourke

“The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.”

-John Steinbeck

“Do you see a man skilled in his work?  He will serve before kings; he will not serve before obscure men.”

-Proverbs 22:29

“So-called Western Civilization, as practiced in half of Europe, some of Asia and a few parts of North America, is better than anything else available. Western civilization not only provides a bit of life, a pinch of liberty and the occasional pursuance of happiness, it’s also the only thing that’s ever tried to. Our civilization is the first in history to show even the slightest concern for average, undistinguished, none-too-commendable people like us.”

-P. J. O’Rourke

“It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.”

-Seneca

“I’ve taken some hits, but in football, in the ministry, and in politics someone has to stand in the gap sometimes.  That person doesn’t particularly like it, but it’s for the good of the team.”

-J.C. Watts

“Religious signs and symbols play an important role in ordering society.  They penetrate beyond the cognitive faculties to the spiritual imagination.  Their public display expresses a society’s deepest beliefs, reinforcing a common commitment to civilizing virtues.  When that public expression is forbidden, we lose a crucial means of instilling virtue in the next generation.”

-Charles Colson

“God giveth the shoulder according to the burden.”

-German Proverb

“A man should be upright, not be kept upright.”

-Marcus Aurelius

“The great Easter truth is not that we are to live newly after death–that is not the great thing–but that we are to be new here and now by the power of the resurrection.”

-Phillips Brooks

“One day a poor peddler went to the market place to sell a basket of eggs. He came upon a crowd mocking a man who staggered with a heavy cross on which he was about to be crucified. The peddler ran to his aid, leaving the basket by the roadside.  When he returned, he found the eggs transformed into exquisite designs of bright colors.  The man was Christ; the peddler, Simon.  And the eggs were to become the symbol of rebirth for all mankind.

-Ukrainian Folk Tale.

“Take it from one who was inside the Watergate web looking out, who saw firsthand how vulnerable a cover-up is. Nothing less than a witness as awesome as the resurrected Christ could have caused those men to maintain to their dying whispers that Jesus is alive and lord.”

-Charles Colson

“Could I have but a line a century hence crediting a contribution to the advance of peace, I would gladly yield every honor which has been accorded by war.”

-General Douglas MacArthur

“Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

-Vaclav Havel

“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.”

-Francis Bacon

“Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.  Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity (in the Harvard sense) of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we’re dead we’re dead?”

-John Updike

“That which is not good for the bee-hive cannot be good for the bees.”

-Marcus Aurelius

“They are ill discoverers that think there is no land when they see nothing but sea.”

-Francis Bacon

“No pain, no palm; no thorns, no throne; no gall, no glory; no cross, no crown.”

-William Penn

“Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.  It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.”

C.S. Lewis

“As the births of living creatures, at first, are ill-shapen: so are all Innovations, which are the births of time.”

-Francis Bacon

“The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremist folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing.  No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized.  It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of these privileges.  The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera-house.”

-Booker T. Washington

“Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes.”

-Bertolt Brecht

“Anyone who takes himself too seriously always runs the risk of looking ridiculous; anyone who can consistently laugh at himself does not.”

-Vaclav Havel

“If we do not maintain Justice, Justice will not maintain us.”

-Francis Bacon

“I offer neither pay, nor quarters, nor food; I offer only hunger, thirst, forced marches, battles and death. Let him who loves his country with his heart, and not merely with his lips, follow me.”

-Giuseppe Garibaldi

“The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other; and with them this conviction does not spring from that barren, traditionary faith which seems to vegetate rather than to live in the soul.”

-Alexis de Toqueville

“For a crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.”

-Francis Bacon

“No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we’re looking for the sources of our troubles, we shouldn’t test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.”

-P. J. O’Rourke

“It is a strange desire, to seek power, and to lose liberty; or to seek power over others, and to lose power over a man’s self.”

-Francis Bacon

“Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.”

-P. J. O’Rourke

“I. . . chose my wife as she did her wedding-gown, not for a fine glossy surface, but such qualities as would wear well.”

-Oliver Goldsmith

“The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning –in other words, of absurdity –the more energetically meaning is sought.”

-Vaclav Havel

“Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more a man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.”

-Francis Bacon

“Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes.  And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.”

-P. J. O’Rourke

“The difference between our historically grounded constitutional freedoms and those the theorists, whether of the academy or of the bench, would replace them with is akin to the difference between the American and the French revolutions.  The outcome for the liberty was much less happy under the regime of the abstract ‘rights of man’ than it has been under the American Constitution.  What Burke said of the abstract theorists who produced the calamities of the French Revolution might equally be said of those, judges and professors alike, who would remake our constitution out of moral philosophy:  ‘This sort of people are so taken up with their theories about the rights of man that they have totally forgotten his nature.’  Those who made and endorsed our Constitution knew man’s nature, and it is to their ideas, rather than to the temptations of utopia, that we must ask that our judges adhere.”

-Robert Bork

“He who eats alone chokes alone.”

-Arab Proverb

“If you want to know about a man you can find out an awful lot by looking at who he married.”

-Kirk Douglas

“A woman is like a tea bag –only in hot water do you realize how strong she is.”

-Nancy Reagan

“Woman –for example, look at her case! She turns tantalizing inviting glances on you. You seize her. No sooner does she feel herself in your grasp than she closes her eyes. It is a sign of her mission, the sign by which she says to man:  “Blind yourself, for I am blind.”

-Luigi Pirandello

“People have passed through a very dark tunnel at the end of which there was a light of freedom. Unexpectedly they passed through the prison gates and found themselves in a square. They are now free and they don’t know where to go.”

-Vaclav Havel, on the New World Order

“The gap between ideals and actualities, between dreams and achievements, the gap that can spur strong men to increased exertions, but can break the spirit of others –this gap is the most conspicuous, continuous land mark in American history.  It is conspicuous and continuous not because Americans achieve little, but because they dream grandly.  The gap is a standing reproach to Americans; but it marks them off as a special and singularly admirable community among the world’s peoples.”

-George F. Will

“Politics ought to be the part-time profession of every citizen who would protect the rights and privileges of free people and who would preserve what is good and fruitful in our national heritage.”

-Dwight D. Eisenhower

“We have not all had the good fortune to be ladies.  We have not all been generals, or poets, or statesmen; but when the toast works down to the babies, we stand on common ground.”

-Mark Twain

“As usual the Liberals offer a mixture of sound and original ideas. Unfortunately none of the sound ideas is original and none of the original ideas is sound.”

-Harold Macmillan

“The more characteristic American hero in the earlier day, and the more beloved type at all times, was not the hustler but the whittler.”

-Mark Sullivan

“Most people aren’t appreciated enough, and the bravest things we do in our lives are usually known only to ourselves. No one throws ticker tape on the man who chose to be faithful to his wife, on the lawyer who didn’t take the drug money, or the daughter who held her tongue again and again. All this anonymous heroism.”

-Peggy Noonan

“The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.”

-Franklin Delano Roosevelt

“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”

-Dwight D. Eisenhower

“A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.”

-Proverbs 15:1

“As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension, and man began to lose control of it.”

-Vaclav Havel

“There is nothing makes a man suspect much, more than to know little.”

-Francis Bacon

“If we Americans are to survive it will have to be because we choose and elect and defend to be first of all Americans; to present to the world one homogeneous and unbroken front, whether of white Americans or black ones or purple or blue or green. . . . If we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don’t deserve to survive, and probably won’t.”

-William Faulkner

“History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid.”

-Dwight D. Eisenhower

“After all, the ultimate goal of all research is not objectivity, but truth.”

-Helene Deutsch

“I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment I still have a dream.  It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.  I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed:  ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal.’  I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.  I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.  I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.  I have a dream today.  I have a dream that one day the state of Alabama, whose governor’s lips are presently dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, will be transformed into a situation where little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as brothers and sisters.  I have a dream today.  I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plains, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.”

-Martin Luther King, Jr.

“The Americans do not affect a brutal indifference to a future state; they affect no puerile pride in despising perils that they hope to escape from.  They therefore profess their religion without shame and without weakness; but even in their zeal there generally is something so indescribably tranquil, methodical, and deliberate that it would seem as if the head far more than the heart brought them to the foot of the altar.”

-Alexis de Toqueville

“Once the state has been founded, there can no longer be any heroes. They come on the scene only in uncivilized conditions.”

-Georg Hegel

“Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things.”

-Colossians 2:19

“Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.”

-Francis Bacon

“Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.”

-Bertrand Russell

“There are times when we must sink to the bottom of our misery to understand truth, just as we must descend to the bottom of a well to see the stars in broad daylight.”

-Vaclav Havel

“America is a large, friendly dog in a very small room.  Every time it wags its tail, it knocks over a chair.”

-A. J. Toynbee

“It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent.  The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.”

-George Santayana

“We who lived in the concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread.  They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing:  The last of his freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

-Viktor E. Frankl

“Young people everywhere have been allowed to choose between love and a garbage disposal unit. Everywhere they have chosen the garbage disposal unit.”

-Guy Debord

“May we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.”

-Dwight D. Eisenhower

“Today’s misspent enthusiasm for political solutions to the moral problems of our culture arises from a distorted view of both politics and spirituality — too low a view of the power of a sovereign God and too high a view of the ability of man.”

-Charles Colson

“From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.”

-Luke 12:48

“If you hold a small coin close to your eyes, it will obstruct your view.  Only if you keep it at a proper distance, will you see things beyond and in their right proportion.  Whatever has happened to you at the time, of necessity must look very large and obscure everything else.  After some time, when you have reached a certain distance from it, it might appear not only small but trifling.”

-Unknown

“Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.”

-George Eliot

“Once one is caught up into the material world not one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic concepts for himself, or to form what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life.”

-F. Scott Fitzgerald

“A state that denies its citizens their basic rights becomes a danger to its neighbors as well: internal arbitrary rule will be reflected in arbitrary external relations.  The suppression of public opinion, the abolition of public competition for power and its public exercise opens the way for the state power to arm itself in any way it sees fit. . . . A state that does not hesitate to lie to its own people will not hesitate to lie to other states.”

-Vaclav Havel

“The hand of the aggressor is stayed by strength- and strength alone.”

-Dwight David Eisenhower

“A shocking crime was committed on the unscrupulous initiative of few individuals, with the blessing of more, and amid the passive acquiescence of all.”

-Tacitus, on the assassination of Emperor Galba

“Family is the most effective form of government.”

-Robert Half

“True gold is not afraid of the refiner’s fire.”

-Chinese proverb

“To me, consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies.  So it is something in which no one believes and to which no one objects.”

-Margaret Thatcher

“Influence is like a savings account. The less you use it, the more you’ve got.”

-Andrew Young

“The principle office of history I take to be this: to prevent virtuous actions from being forgotten, and that evil words and deeds should fear an infamous reputation with posterity.”

-Tacitus

“All hope cannot be pinned on science, technology, economic growth.  The victory of technological civilization has also instilled a spiritual insecurity in us.  Its gifts enrich, but enslave us as well… All is a struggle for material things; but an inner voice tells us that we have lost something pure, elevated, and fragile.  We have ceased to see the purpose.  Let us admit, even if in a whisper and only to ourselves:  In this bustle of life at breakneck speed–  what are we living for ?…

Nothing speaks more of the current helplessness of our spirit, or our intellectual disarray, than the loss of a clear and calm attitude toward death.  The greater his well-being, the deeper cuts the chilling fear of death into the soul of modern man.  This mass fear, a fear the ancients did not know, was born of our insatiable, loud, and bustling life.  Man has lost the sense of himself as a limited point in the universe, albeit one possessing free will.  He began to think himself the center of his surroundings, not adapting himself to the world, but the world to himself.  And then, of course, the thought of death becomes unbearable: it is the extinction of the entire universe at a stroke.  Having refused to recognize the unchanging Higher Power above us, we have filled that space with personal imperatives, and suddenly life becomes a harrowing prospect indeed…

-Alexander Solzhenitsyn

“I seem to smell the stench of appeasement in the air.”

-Margaret Thatcher , on the Gulf crisis

“Values issues have some real pitfalls.  However, those who think that economic and political issues alone are enough run the risk that, even if successful politically, they may be like the man who gained the whole world and lost his soul.”

-Thomas Sowell

“Noble character is best appreciated in those ages in which it can most readily develop.”

-Tacitus

“I am extraordinarily patient provided I get my own way in the end.”

-Margaret Thatcher

“I wish I were honest enough to admit all my shortcomings:  brilliant enough to accept flattery without it making me arrogant; tall enough to tower above deceit; strong enough to treasure love; brave enough to welcome criticism; compassionate enough to understand human frailties; wise enough to recognize my mistakes; humble enough to appreciate greatness; staunch enough to stand by my friends; human enough to be thoughtful of my neighbor; and righteous enough to be devoted to the love of God.”

-Gordon H. Taggart

“The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.”

-Dolly Parton

“Outwardly, we are a religious people, but inwardly our religious beliefs make no difference in how we live. We are obsessed with self; we live, raise families, govern, and die as though God does not exist.”

-Charles Colson

“What I do not like about our definitions of genius is that there is in them nothing of the day of judgment, nothing of resounding through eternity and nothing of the footsteps of the Almighty.”

-G. C. Lichtenberg

“I am in politics because of the conflict between good and evil, and I believe that in the end good will triumph.”

-Margaret Thatcher

“The hands of those I meet are dumbly eloquent to me. The touch of some hands is an impertinence. I have met people so empty of joy, that when I clasped their frosty finger-tips, it seemed as if I were shaking hands with a northeast storm. Others there are whose hands have sunbeams in them, so that their grasp warms my heart.”

-Helen Keller

“I’ll stay until I’m tired of it.  So long as Britain needs me, I shall never be tired of it.”

-Margaret Thatcher

“No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land.”

-Nathaniel Hawthorne

“The mere process of growing old together will make the slightest acquaintance seem a bosom friend.”

-Logan Pearsall Smith

“The cocks may crow, but it’s the hen that lays the egg.”

-Margaret Thatcher

“May you live in interesting times.”

-Chinese curse

“As a Christian, I believe that there is a life after death, and so I understand that this is not the end of life.  The soul… lives on.  Death is only a stage, some would say even a liberation.  In any case, I have no fear of death.”

-Alexander Solzhenitsyn

“Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on a rock.  The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock.  But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand.  The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a crash.”

-Jesus Christ

“It was not until the present century that morality became so thoroughly relativized that universal virtues became personal ‘values.’  So long as morality was couched in the language of ‘virtue,’ it had a firm, resolute character.  One cannot say that anyone’s virtues are as good as anyone else’s, or that everyone has a right to their own virtues.  Only values can lay that claim to moral neutrality.  The term ‘values’ brings with it the assumption that all moral ideas are subjective, that they are mere customs and conventions, that they have a purely utilitarian purpose, and that they adhere to particular peoples- or, as we now say, are race-, class-, and gender-specific.”

-Gertrude Himmelfarb

“Perseverance is the hard work you do after you get tired of doing the hard work you already did.”

-Newt Gingrich

“Americans and Europeans alike sometimes forget how unique the United States of America is.  No other nation has been created so swiftly and successfully.  No other nation has been built upon an idea- the idea of liberty.  No other nation has so successfully combined people of different races and nations within a single culture.  Both the founding fathers of the United States and successive waves of immigrants to your country were determined to create a new identity.  Whether in flight from persecution or from poverty, the huddled masses have, with few exceptions, welcomed American values, the American way of life and American opportunities.  And American herself has bound them to her with powerful bonds of patriotism and pride.  The European nations are not and can never be like this.  They are the product of history and not philosophy.  You can construct a nation on an idea; but you cannot reconstruct a nation on the basis of one.”

-Margaret Thatcher

“The difference between reality and fiction?  Fiction has to make sense.”

-Tom Clancy

“When the search for truth is confused with political advocasy, the pursuit of knowledge is reduced to the quest for power.”

-Alston Chase

“You can’t put your finger on a problem when you’ve got it to the wind.”

-Dick Armey

“It is only when we no longer compulsively need someone that we can have a real relationship with them.”

-Anthony Storr

“When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That’s relativity.”

-Albert Einstein

“I know you don’t believe in it-but don’t be over-wise; fling yourself straight into life, without deliberation; don’t be afraid- the flood will bear you to the bank and set you safe on your feet again.  What bank? How can I tell?  I only believe that you have long life before you.”

-Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“Remind the people to be subject to rulers and authorities, to be obedient, to be ready to do whatever is good, to slander no one, to be peaceable and considerate, and to show true humility toward all men.  At one time we too were foolish, disobedient, deceived and enslaved by all kinds of passions and pleasures.  We lived in malice and envy, being hated and hating one another.  But when the kindness and love of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy.  He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us generously through Christ Jesus our Savior, so that, having been justified by his grace, we might become heirs having the hope of eternal life.”

– Titus 3:1-7

“Superstars strive for approbation; heroes walk alone.  Superstars crave consensus; heroes define themselves by the judgment of a future they see it as their task to bring about.  Superstars seek success in a technique for eliciting support; heroes pursue success as the outgrowth of inner values.”

-Henry Kissenger

“Rescue those being led away to death; hold back those staggering toward slaughter.  If you say, ‘But we knew nothing about this,’ does not he who weighs the heart perceive it?  Does not he who guards your life know it?  Will he not repay each person according to what he has done?”

-Proverbs 24:11-12

“Brain power comes from the lungs.  Breath deeply.”

-General George S. Patton

“The proverb warns that “You should not bite the hand that feeds you.”  But maybe you should, if it prevents you from feeding yourself.”

-Thomas Szasz

“Do you want me to tell you something really subversive?  Love is everything it’s cracked up to be. That’s why people are so cynical about it. . . . It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.”

-Erica Jong

“Do not pervert justice; do not show partiality to the poor or favoritism to the great, but judge your neighbor fairly.”

-Leviticus 19:15

“The dictionary is the only place where success comes before work.”

-Unknown

“Defend the cause of the weak and fatherless; maintain the rights of the poor and oppressed.”

-Psalm 82:3

“I am grateful, above all, to Almighty God, who had so often guided me through the shadows of the valley of death and who nerved me in my hours of lonely vigil and deadly decision.”

-General Douglas MacArthur

“It is impossible for the man of pious reflection not to perceive in it a finger of that Almighty hand which has been so frequently and signally extended to our relief in the critical stages of the revolution.”

-James Madison

“We have not a government strong enough to restrain the unbridled passions of men.  This Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.  It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.”

-John Adams

“The conviction of sin is hardly possible to us.  We believe not in sin and forgiveness but in illness and recovery.  It is the endless message of our culture that everyone is basically good and that most of our problems will be solved when we realize this – in other words, when we build up our self-esteem.”

-Brian Abel Ragen

” Don’t be so open-minded your brains fall out. ”

-Unknown

“There is a closer tie than is commonly supposed between the improvement of the soul and the amelioration of what belongs to the body.  Man may leave these two things apart and consider each of them alternately, but he cannot sever them entirely without at last losing sight of both.”

-Alexis de Toqueville

“Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is Liberty.”

-II Corinthians 3:17

“When he is told that some pleasures should be sought and valued as arising from desires of a higher order, others chastised and enslaved because the desires are base, he will shut the gates of the citadel against the messengers of truth, shaking his head and declaring that one appetite is as good as another and all must have their equal rights.  So he spends his days indulging the pleasure of the moment, now intoxicated with wine and music, and then taking to a spare diet and drinking nothing but water; one day in hard training, the next doing nothing at all, the third apparently immersed in study.  Every now and then he takes a part in politics, leaping to his feet to say or do whatever comes into his head.  Or he will set out to rival someone he admires, a soldier it may be, or, if the fancy takes him, a man of business.  His life is subject to no order or restraint, and he has no wish to change an existence which he calls pleasant, free, and happy.

That well describes the life of one whose motto is liberty and equality.”

-Plato

“Death is not extinguishing the light; it is putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.”                                                                                          -Rabindranath Tagore

“For I am convinced, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able, to separate

us from the love of God, which is in, Christ Jesus, our Lord.”

-Romans 8:38-39

“Liberty is power cut up into pieces.”

-Thomas Hobbes

“Seek not to understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand.”

-St. Augustine

“Strength of character may be acquired at work, but beauty of character is learned at home.  There the affections are trained.  There the gentle life reaches us, the true heaven life.  In one word, the family circle is the supreme conductor of Christianity.”

-Henry Drummond

“The serene, silent beauty of a holy life is the most powerful influence in the world, next to the might of the Spirit of God”

-Blaise Pascal

“The shortest and surest way to live with honor in the world is to be in reality what we appear to be.”                                                                           -Socrates

“Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority.  It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions.  There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern.  They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.”

-Daniel Webster

“Thus a heavy task is laid upon this Gift-Love.  It must work towards its own abdication.  We must aim at making ourselves superfluous.  The hour when we can say ‘They need me no longer’ should be our reward.  But the instinct, simply in its own nature, has no power to fulfill this law.  The instinct desires the good of its object, but not simply; only the good it can itself give.  A much higher love- a love which desires the good of the object as such, from whatever source that good comes- must step in and help or tame the instinct before it can make the abdication.  And of course it often does.  But where it does not, the ravenous need to be needed will gratify itself either by keeping its objects needy or by inventing for them imaginary needs.  It will do this all the more ruthlessly because it thinks (in one sense truly) that it is a Gift-Love and therefore regards itself as ‘unselfish.'”

-C.S. Lewis

“I like getting into hot water: it keeps me clean.”

-G. K. Chesterson

“The purpose of education is to give the student the intellectual tools to analyze, whether verbally or numerically, and to reach conclusions based on logic and evidence.”

-Thomas Sowell

“A bad idea can survive only if it need not stand the test of reality.”

-Dick Armey

“Christianity has never been tried, the cliché runs.  And of course it’s true, but so is it true that Christianity has checked the movements of millions of men and women who but for the pull of dogma would know no vital brake upon their behavior.  Sometimes the brake is effective, sometimes it is not.  But that it should be there outweighs any concern over the excesses of Jimmy Swaggart or the Ayatollah or the Mormon extremist or the Venezuelan savage- or the European relativist.”

-William F. Buckley Jr.

“If it’s true, it’s not new.  If it’s new, it’s not true.”

-Unknown

“If you love peace more than freedom, you lose.”

-Dick Armey

“It is indeed difficult to conceive how men who have entirely given up the habit of self-government should succeed in making a proper choice of those by whom they are to be governed; and no one will ever believe that a liberal, wise, and energetic government can spring from the suffrages of a subservient people.”

-Alexis de Toqueville

“If we [university teachers] are any good we must always be working towards the moment at which our pupils are fit to become our critics and rivals.  We should be delighted when it arrives, as the fencing master is delighted when his pupil can pink and disarm him.”

-C.S. Lewis

“As a long-term civil rights activist and a career social worker, I have been deeply distressed by the continuing fact that, for every white baby killed by abortion, (as a percent of our numbers), there have been three minority race babies die.  This is the establishment’s way of solving poverty.  They kill the unborn children of the poor, among whom my black brothers and sisters number a significant proportion.”

-Erma Clardy Craven

“The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.”

-Arnold Toynbee

“A well-defined problem is half solved.”

-Ken Morris

“There are no menial jobs, only menial attitudes.”

-William Bennett

“The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.”

-Theodore M. Hesburgh

“The elegance of honesty needs no adornment.”

-Merry Browne

“Unless one values the lives of his soldiers and is tormented by their ordeals he is unfit to command.”

-General Omar Bradley

“Yes, evil comes in many forms, whether it be a man-eating cow or Joseph Stalin, but you can’t let the package hide the pudding! Evil is just plain bad!  You don’t put cotton on it.  You gotta smack it in the nose with the rolled-up newspaper of goodness! Bad dog! Bad dog!”

-The Tick

“We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean.  But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop.”

-Mother Teresa

“The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do.  The hard part is doing it.”

-Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf

“Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God’s service when it is violating all His Laws.”

-John Adams

“Man with dog closes a gap in the universe.”

-C.S. Lewis

“There is a serious argument to be had about devolution, and it should begin with this historically accurate reformulation:  The heart of the American project was that government’s powers should be limited and exercised as close to home as possible.  The federalization of American life in the last half-century, not the prospect of devolution in 1995, is the historical aberration.”

-Charles Murray

“When they say that these people are running for the Presidency, I think they are walking.”

-Lawrence Eagleburger

“I shall decide on an action only if I am absolutely convinced… that France will not interfere and that consequently Britain will like-wise do nothing.”

-Adolf Hitler, June 18, 1938

“The truths of the Judaic-Christian tradition are infinitely precious, not only because they are true but also because they provide the moral impulse which alone can lead to that peace, in the true meaning of the word, for which we all long.  There is little hope for democracy if the hearts of men and women cannot be touched by a call to something greater than themselves.  Political structures, state institutions, collective ideals are not enough.”

-Margaret Thatcher

“Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it.  Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number.  Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word:  equality.  But notice the difference:  while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.”

-Alexis de Toqueville

“To love at all is to be vulnerable.  Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken.  If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal.  Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness.  But in that casket–safe, dark, motionless, airless–it will change.  It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.  The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation.  The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”

-C.S. Lewis

“Morally, there is no justification for what might be called a hospital divided:  In one room doctors struggle (with increasing success) to save premature babies who have been in the womb for as little as 24 weeks.  In another room physicians are at work to end pregnancies of similar duration.”

-Malcolm S. Forbes Jr.

“If men were ever to content themselves with material objects, it is probable that they would lose by degrees the art of producing them; and they would enjoy them in the end, like the brutes, without discernment and without improvement.”

-Alexis de Toqueville

“Father of mercies, take me to thyself.”

-Last words of George Washington

“Wholehearted devotion to liberty is unassailable and half-hearted devotion to justice is indefensible.”

-Barry Goldwater

“I am aware that many of my contemporaries maintain that nations are never their own masters here below, and that they necessarily obey some insurmountable and unintelligent power, arising from anterior events, from their race, or from the soil and climate of their country.  Such principles are false and cowardly; such principles can never produce aught but feeble men and pusillanimous nations.  Providence has not created mankind entirely independent or entirely free.  It is true that around every man a fatal circle is traced beyond which he cannot pass; but within the wide verge of that circle he is powerful and free;  as it is with man, so with communities.  The nations of our time cannot prevent the conditions of men from becoming equal, but it depends upon themselves whether the principle of equality is to lead them to servitude or freedom, to knowledge or barbarism, to prosperity or wretchedness.”

-Alexis de Toqueville

“You believe in a God who plays dice, and I in complete law and order in a world which objectively exists and which I, in a wildly speculative way, am trying to capture.  I firmly believe, but I hope that someone will discover a more tangible basis than it has been my lot to find.”

-Albert Einstein, to a colleague.

“For society as a whole, nothing comes as a “right” to which we are “entitled.”  Even bare subsistence has to be produced- and produced at a cost of heavy toil for much of human history.  The only way anyone can have a right to something that has to be produced is to force someone else to produce it for him.  The more things are provided as rights, the less the recipients have to work and the more others have to carry their load.”

-Thomas Sowell

He who has no charity deserves no mercy.”

-English Proverb

“Without virtue, and without integrity, the finest talents and the most brilliant accomplishments can never gain the respect, and conciliate the esteem, of the truly valuable part of mankind.”

-George Washington

“The death of objectivity relieves me of the obligation to be right; it demands only that I be interesting.”

-Stanley Fish

“There is nothing more influential in a child’s life than the moral power of quiet example.  For children to take morality seriously they must see adults take morality seriously.”

-William Bennett

“If a substantial part of our adult population believes in astrology and the efficacy of pyramids in promoting health, why should we expect thoughtful analysis?”

-Donald Kennedy

“Providence has heretofore taken us up, when all other means and hope seemed to be departing from us.”

-George Washington

“Give us those things which are best, whether we pray for them or not; but command evil things to remain at a distance from us, even though we implore them.”

-prayer by Plato

“I am responsible for my own profit and loss.  I am no man’s charity.  For feeding 128 people worldwide who will never thank me.  Next year I’m shooting for 132.  For keeping my water pure enough for drinking, swimming and an 8-pound bass named Joe.  For high finance, organic chemistry, mechanical engineering and biting my tongue when I hear someone say, ‘He’s just a farmer.’  For being an active environmentalist. Not an environmental activist.  For answering to God.  To the land.  To my family.  I farm accordingly.”

-Anonymous farmer, Successful Farming

“Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?  fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is?  If you prick us, do we not bleed?  if you tickle us, do we not laugh?  if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?  If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.–If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? revenge.  If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example?  why, revenge.  The villiany you teach me I will execute; and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.”

-Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

“The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips and walk out the door and deny him by their lifestyle.  That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelieveable.”

-D.C. Talk

“Such phrases as ‘the holy cause of southern freedom,’ ‘duty to one’s country,’ ‘death before Yankee rule,’ ‘glorious destiny,’ ‘bursting the bonds of tyranny,’ and the like, may come across to this post-Freudian age as mawkish posturing, romantic sentimentalism, hollow platitudes.  We seldom speak or write that way anymore.  Most people have not done so since World War I, which, as Ernest Hemmingway and Paul Fussell have written, made such words as glory, honor, courage, hallow, sacrifice, valor, and sacred vaguely embarrassing if not mock-heroic.  Without question, such hackneyed phrases as ‘tell mother I died for my country,’ were a sentimental convention.  But our cynicism about the genuineness of such sentiments is more our problem than theirs.  It raises a barrier to our understanding of what I am convinced, after reading at least 25,000 letters and more than a hundred diaries of Civil War soldiers, were deeply felt convictions.  That was the age of romanticism in literature, music, art, and philosophy.  It was a sentimental age when strong men were not afraid to cry (or weep, as they would say), when Harriett Beecher Stowe’s great novel and Stephen Foster’s songs could stir genuine emotions.  What seems like bathos or platitudes to us were real pathos and convictions for them.”

-James M. McPherson

“The fight against bad English is not frivolous.”

-George Orwell

“The French thinker Auguste Comte once told Thomas Carlyle he was going to start a new religion to replace Christianity.  ‘Very good,‘ said Carlyle, ‘all you’ll have to do is to be crucified, rise against the third day, and get the world to believe you are still alive.  Then your religion will have a chance.”

-Leighton Ford

“Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goals.”

-Henry Ford

“A reader eager to reduce all human motivation to self-interest narrowly conceived may interpret what the Good Samaritans or the Holocaust rescuers did as efforts at reputation building, but taking this view stretches the concept of self-interest as to deprive it of any meaning.”

-James Q. Wilson

“A man’s manners are a mirror in which he shows his portrait.”

-Goethe

“Start doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible; and suddenly you’re doing the impossible.”

-St. Francis of Assisi

“Friendship is a single soul dwelling in two bodies.”

-Aristotle

“A dog teaches a boy fidelity, perseverance, and to turn around three times before laying down.”

-Robert Benchley

“Gardens are not made by singing ‘Oh, how beautiful,’ and sitting in the shade.”

-Rudyard Kipling

“All gardeners live in beautiful places because they make them so.”

-Joseph Joubert

“There is never a better measure of what a person is than what he does when he’s absolutely free to choose.”

-William M. Bulger

“Success is always temporary.  When all is said and done, the only thing you have left is your character.”

-Vince Gill

“Duty is the disposition to honor obligations even without hope of reward or fear of punishment.”

-James Q. Wilson

“I always knew that looking back on what once made me cry

would one day make me laugh…

but I never thought that looking back on what

once made me laugh would one day make me cry.”

-Winnie the Pooh

“Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire.  It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing… We have seen with our own eyes, beyond and above the golden fields, the snowy heights of honor, and it is for us to bear the report to those who come after us.”

-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

“Men may be inexact or even untruthful, in ordinary matters, and suffer as a consequence only the disesteem of their associates, or even the inconvenience of unfavorable litigation, but the inexact or untruthful soldier trifles with the lives of his fellow men, and the honor of his government; and it is, therefore, no matter of idle pride but rather of stern disciplinary necessity that makes West Point require of her students a character of trustworthiness which knows no evasions.  In the final analysis of the West Point product, character is the most precious component.”

-Newton D. Baker, Secretary of War

“For, while politicians contend, and men are swerved this way and that by conflicting tides of interest and passion, the great cause of human liberty is in the hands of one, of whom it is said:  ‘He shall not fail nor be discouraged till He have set judgement in the earth.  He shall deliver the needy when he crieth, the poor, and him that hath no helper.  He shall redeem their soul from deceit and violence, and precious shall their blood be in His sight.’”

-Harriet Beecher Stowe

“It is easier to love humanity as a whole than to love one’s neighbor.”

-Eric Hoffer

“Traditions are the guideposts driven deep into our subconscious minds.  The most powerful ones are those we can’t even describe, aren’t even aware of.”

-Ellen Goodman

“True power is knowing that you can, but you don’t.”

-Juliet Alicia Jarvis

“Oratory is the art of enchanting the soul, and therefore one who would be an orator has to learn the differences of human souls.”

-Plato

“Let truth and falsehood grapple; who ever knew truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?”

-John Milton

“The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet.  But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape?  The words compelle intrare, compel them to come in, have been so abused by wicked men that we shudder at them; but, properly understood, they plumb the depth of the Divine mercy.  The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.”

-C. S. Lewis

“What poor substitutes for real diversity are the wild rainbows of dyed hair and other external differences that tell the observer nothing about what is inside.”

-Alan Bloom

“Words are plentiful, but deeds are precious.”

-Lech Walesa

“It is so much easier to extol the virtues of civility than to talk civilly about the virtues we need to uphold.”

-Amitai Etzioni

“No matter how many communes anybody invents, the family always creeps back.”

-Margaret Mead

“Modesty is a constant reminder of their [Men and Women] peculiar relatedness and its outer forms and inner sentiments, which impede the self’s free creation or capitalism’s technical division of labor.  It is a voice constantly repeating that a man and a woman have a work to do together that is far different from that found in the marketplace, and of a far greater importance.”

-Allan Bloom

“Whether something is right or wrong is not an issue in therapy.  Modern therapy promotes self-centeredness. Everything is rational or relative.  I’m not.  My morality is based on the Old Testament and the Talmud.  Whenever I can, I try to push people toward religion.”

-Dr. Laura Schlessinger

“Sex can be an indifferent thing for men, but it really cannot quite be so for women.  This is what might be called the female drama.  Modernity promised that all human beings would be treated equally.  Women took that promise seriously and rebelled against the old order.  But as they have succeeded, men have also been liberated from their old constraints.  And women, now liberated and with equal careers, nevertheless find they still desire to have children, but have no basis for claiming that men should share their desire for children or assume a responsibility for them.  So nature weighs more heavily on women.  In the old order they were subordinated and dependent on men; in the new order they are isolated , needing men, but not able to count on them, and hampered in the free development of their individuality.  The promise of modernity is not really fulfilled for women.”

-Allan Bloom

“One of the greatest victories you can gain over someone is to beat him at politeness.”

-Josh Billings

“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.”

-Plato

“True liberal education requires that the student’s whole life be radically changed by it, that what he learns may affect his action, his tastes, his choices, that no previous attachment be immune to examination and hence re-evaluation.  Liberal education puts everything at risk and requires students who are able to risk everything.”

-Allan Bloom

“The poet that beautified the sect that was otherwise inferiour to the rest, saith yet excellently well:  It is pleasure to stand upon the shore, and to see ships tost upon the Sea:  a pleasure to stand in the window of a Castle and to see a Battaile and the Adventures thereof below:  But no pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage ground of Truth (a hill not to be commanded, and where the ayre is alwaies cleare and serene) and to see the Errours and Wandrings and Mists, and Tempests, in the vale below; so alwaies, that this prospect be with pitty, and not with swelling or pride.  Certainly it is heaven upon earth to have a man’s minde move in charitie, rest in providence, and turne upon the poles of Truth.”

-Francis Bacon

“To hit something, especially when it is approaching at an arrogant angle, is a beautiful thing.”

-George Santayana on football

“Political equality [In Victorian England] depended on moral equality.  And this, in turn, assumed that the working classes had the same virtues, aspirations, and capacities as all other classes—that they shared a common human nature and a common civic and political right.”

-Gertrude Himmelfarb

“Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray, but almost blind, in the service of my country.”

-George Washington, Newburg Address

“One prince notably failed to meet those qualifications [Of a gentleman]—George IV, whose greatest distinction, Thackeray said, was the invention of a shoe buckle that covered almost the whole of his instep.  Quoting from two journals published the same month (March 1784), Thackeray compared the account in one of the grand ball given by the prince in his lavishly renovated palace to celebrate (somewhat belatedly) his twenty-first birthday; and the account in the other of a ceremony in which a ‘great gentleman of English extraction’ resigned as commander in chief of the army of the United States.  ‘Which of these is the true gentleman,’ Thackeray asked, ‘yon fribble dancing in lace and spangles, or yonder hero who sheathes his sword after a life of spotless honour, a purity unreproached, a courage indomitable, and a consummate victory?’”

-Gertrude Himmelfarb

“The aim of every society must be a state of affairs in which every man is his own constable, until at last none other is required.”

-Hippolyte Taine

“Some people say there’s not enough generosity to take care of all needs; therefore, we need government.  That proposition differs little from saying that if people do not give enough voluntarily, then government intimidation, threats, and coercion should be used to take their money.  Good people must ask if that proposition should serve as the foundation for a moral society.”

-Walter Williams

“Sometimes the road less traveled is less traveled for a reason.”

-Jerry Seinfeld

“Never fear shadows.  They simply mean there’s a light shining somewhere nearby.”

-Ruth E. Renkel

“What you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing;  it also depends on what sort of person you are.”

-C. S. Lewis

“I’m the 82d Airborne, and this is as far as the bastards are going.”

-unknown paratrooper at the Battle of the Bulge

“Honor is simply that peculiar rule founded upon a peculiar state of society, by the application of which a people or a class alot praise or blame.”

-Alexis de Toqueville

“Show me how you allocate your time and I’ll tell you what your priorities are.”

-Dr. Don Snider

“The reason families need two incomes today is not to support themselves but to support the government.”

-Dick Armey

“The Nazis declared that some people possessed lives unworthy of life and acted out the logic of that doctrine.  Today that odious doctrine is promulgated again–against the unborn, the weak, and aged, the radically handicapped.

-William F. Buckley Jr.

“Let every Student be plainly instructed, and earnestly pressed to consider well, the main end of his life and studies is, to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life.”

-Harvard University

“To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances… could have been formed by natural selections, seems, freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.”

-Charles Darwin

“Whoever shall introduce into public affairs the principles of primitive Christianity will change the face of the world.”

-Benjamin Franklin

“The propitious smiles of Heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right which Heaven itself has ordained.”

-George Washington

“We ought to have skins thick enough to prevent pain but thin enough to feel.”

-Indian Theologian

“[The Constitution] is made for people of fundamentally differing views, and the accident of our finding certain opinions natural and familiar or novel and even shocking ought not to conclude our judgment upon the question whether statutes embodying them conflict with the Constitution of the United States.”

-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

“Surely no one today remembers the Armenians.”

-Hitler, explaining Polish genocide to his officers

“Self-love is at once the most delicate and the most tenacious of our sentiments; a mere nothing will wound it, but nothing on earth will kill it.”

-The Family Favorite and Temperance Journal

“Question your answers

Truth has no anger”

-Collective Soul

“What is education? Properly speaking, there is no such thing as education.  Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.  Whatever the soul is like, it will have to be passed on somehow, consciously or unconsciously, and that transition may be called education. … What we need is to have a culture before we hand it down.  In other words, it is a truth, however sad and strange, that we cannot give what we have not got, and cannot teach to other people what we do not know ourselves.”

-G. K. Chesterton

“A popular Government, without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or perhaps both.   Knowledge will forever govern ignorance;  And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”

-James Madison to W. T. Barry, August 4, 1822

“It’s often hard to bear the tears that we ourselves cause.”

-Marcel Proust

“Dissent, not satisfied with toleration, is not conscience, but ambition.”

-Edmund Burke

“Young man, your father, your grandfathers, all four of your great grandfathers, all eight of your great great grandfathers and on back beyond the reach of recorded time, all their fathers performed successfully and heterosexually. You are the product of eons of heterosexual activity.  Young lady, your mother and your grandmother were not the product of parthenogenesis. They and all your maternal ancestors

performed heterosexually and successfully. You are living proof they did.

-Morton C. Blackwell

THE GODS OF THE COPYBOOK HEADINGS

“As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,

I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market-Place.

Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

“We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn

That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:

But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,

So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

“We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,

Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market-Place;

But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come

That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

“With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch.

They denied that the Moon was Stilton: they denied she was even Dutch.

They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings.

So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.”

“When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace,

They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.

But when we disarmed They sold us, and delivered us bound to our foe,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “Stick to the Devil you know.”

“On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life

(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)

Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: ‘ The Wages of Sin is Death.”‘

“In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,

By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;

But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: ‘If you don’t work you die.'”

“Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew,

And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true

That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four–

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

* * * *

“As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man–

There are only four things certain since Social Progress began:–

That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,

And the burnt fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins

When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,

As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,

The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!”

-Rudyard Kipling

“The truth is, that it is quite an error to suppose that absence of definite convictions gives the mind freedom and agility. A man who believes something is ready and witty, because he has all his weapons about him. He can apply his test in an instant. The man engaged in conflict with a man like Mr. Bernard Shaw may fancy he has ten faces; similarly a man engaged against a brilliant duellist may fancy that the sword of his foe has turned to ten swords in his hand. But this is not really because the man is playing with ten swords, it is because he is aiming very straight with one. Moreover, a man with a definite belief always appears bizarre, because he does not change with the world; he has climbed into a fixed star, and the earth whizzes below him like a zoetrope. Millions of mild black-coated men call themselves sane and sensible merely because they always catch the fashionable insanity, because they are hurried into madness after madness by the maelstrom of the world.”

-G. K. Chesterton

“A smile is a curve that sets everything straight.”

-Phyllis Diller

“Try not. Do, or do not.  There is no try.”

-Yoda

“You must unlearn what you have learned.”

-Yoda

“The inspiration of a noble cause involving human interests wide and far, enables men to do things they did not dream themselves capable of before, and which they were not capable of alone.  The consciousness of belonging, vitally, to something beyond individuality; of being part of a personality that reaches we know not where, in space and time, greatens the heart to the limit of the soul’s ideal, and builds out the supreme of character.”

-General Joshua L. Chamberlain

“And so these Gettysburg hills, which lifted up such splendid valor, and drank in such high heart’s blood, shall hold the mighty secret in their bosom till the great day of revelation and recompense, when these heights shall flame again with transfigured light—they, too, have part in that adoption, which is the manifestation of the sons of God!”

-General Joshua L. Chamberlain

“Reverence for the old was a phase of a society that placed strong emphasis upon family life…. A society that has shaped its ideals about progress can never place its affairs in the hands of the old and give the reverence that a society does that lives in the past…. The decline of ancestor-worship, the competitive character of modern economic life, democratic government, individualism, and the cult of progress, have thus all conspired to reduce to a marked degree the functions and rank possessed by the aged in earlier society.”

-Cecil C. North

“Never does a man stand so tall as when he stoops to help a child.”

-Unknown

“Home is an invention on which no one has yet improved.”

-Ann Douglas

“Mystery is a resource, like coal or gold, and its preservation is a fine thing.”

-Tim Cahill

“Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.”

-Lillian Hellman

“Nothing is as frustrating as arguing with someone who knows what he’s talking about.”

-Sam Ewing

“The softest things in the world overcome the hardest things in the world.”

-Lao-tzu

“No day in which you learn something is a complete loss.”

-David Eddings

“I have an important and dangerous mission.  Send me an Army football player.”

-General George C. Marshall

“Instead of quixotic efforts at shaping a better world for my children, my greatest task has now become shaping the world through my children.  On Mother’s Day and all through the year, I realize that they are the most enduring legacy I leave.”

-Barbara Curtis

“Today the very word ‘stigma’ has become odious, whether applied to dependency, illegitimacy, addiction, or anything else.  Yet stigmas are the corollaries of values.  If work, independence, responsibility, respectability are valued, then their converse must be devalued, seen as disreputable.  The Victorians, taking values seriously, also took seriously the need for social sanctions that would stigmatize and censure violations of these values.”

-Gertrude Himmelfarb

“Youth is not a time of life,

it is a state of mind;

it is not a matter of rosy cheeks,

red lips, and supple knees;

it is a matter of the will,

a quality of the imagination,

a vigor of the emotions;

it is the freshness of the deep springs of life.

Youth means the temperamental predominance

of courage over timidity,

of the appetite for adventure

over the love of ease.

This often exists in a man of sixty

more than a boy of twenty.

Nobody grows old merely

by a number of years.

We grow old by deserting our ideals.”

-Samuel Ullman

“This quiet little book is uniquely calculated to infuriate John Dewey’s disciples and all other moralists who want to pick and choose from among the scraps of universal morality, who want to have their cake and eat it too.  The final chapter will horrify the people who share Mr. Lewis’s views, for it presents an all-too-plausible picture of man’s destiny after the concept of absolute values has gone out the window… In 1947 we still believe our ‘realism’ is directed toward some desirable goal.  Unless humanity makes an abrupt about-face, it seems likely that our grandchildren will have no goals.  They will love or hate, caress or kill, as irrational nature dictates, and no one will use the words ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘social’ or ‘anti-social’, or even ‘expedient’ or ‘inexpedient’.”

-Chad Walsh, reviewing The Abolition of Man

“For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline and virtue.  For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men.”

-C. S. Lewis

“Democratic education, says Aristotle, ought to mean, not the education which democrats like, but the education which will preserve democracy.  Until we have realized that the two things do not necessarily go together we cannot think clearly about education.”

-C. S. Lewis

“My power, for good, whatever it may be, would be gone if I didn’t try to live up to the doctrines I have tried to preach.”

-Theodore Roosevelt

“It is a disastrous discovery, as Emerson says somewhere, that we exist.  I mean, it is disastrous when instead of merely attending to a rose we are forced to think of ourselves looking at the rose, with a certain type of mind and a certain type of eyes.  It is disastrous because, if you are not very careful, the colour of the rose gets attributed to our optic nerves and its scent to our noses, and in the end there is no rose left.”

-C. S. Lewis

“If ‘good’ and ‘better’ are terms deriving their sole meaning from the ideology of each people, then of course ideologies themselves cannot be better or worse than one another.  Unless the measuring rod is independent of the things measured, we can do no measuring.”

-C. S. Lewis

“Does a permanent moral standard preclude progress?  On the contrary, except on the supposition of a changeless standard, progress is impossible.  If good is a fixed point, it is at least possible that we should get nearer and nearer to it; but if the terminus is as mobile as the train, how can the train progress toward it?  Our ideas of the good may change, but they cannot change either for the better or the worse if there is not absolute and immutable good to which they can approximate or from which they can recede.  We can go on getting a sum more and more nearly right only if the one perfectly right answer is ‘stagnant.’”

-C. S. Lewis

“If a man will go into a library and spend a few days with the Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics he will soon discover the massive unanimity of the practical reason in man.   From the Babylonian Hymn to Samos, from the Laws of Manu, the Book of the Dead, the Analects, the Stoics, the Platonists, from Austrialian aboriginies and Redskins, he will collect the same triumphantly monotonous denunciations of oppression, murder, treachery, and falsehood, the same injunctions of kindness to the aged, the young, and the weak, of almsgiving and impartiality and honesty… Far from finding a chaos, we find exactly what we should expect if good is indeed something objective and reason the organ whereby it is apprehended-—that is, a substantial agreement with considerable local differences of emphasis and, perhaps, no one code that includes everything.”

-C. S. Lewis

“You fail only when you stop trying.”

-Unknown

“The Will to Order can make tyrants out of those who merely aspire to clean up a mess.  The beauty of tidiness is used as a justification for despotism.”

-Aldous Huxley

“In Brave New World non-stop distractions of the most fascinating nature (the feelies, orgy-porgy, centrifugal bumblepuppy) are deliberately used as instruments of policy, for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and political situation.”

-Aldous Huxley

“Philosophy teaches us to feel uncertain about the things that seem to us self-evident.  Propaganda, on the other hand, teaches us to accept as self-evident matters about which it would be reasonable to suspend our judgement or feel doubt.”

-Aldous Huxley

“The survival of democracy depends on the ability of large numbers of people to make realistic choices in the light of adequate information.”

-Aldous Huxley

“Irrational propaganda depends for its effectiveness on a general failure to understand the nature of symbols…  The principles underlying this kind of propaganda are extremely simple.  Find some common desire, some widespread unconscious fear or anxiety; think out some way to relate this wish or fear to the product you have to sell; then build a bridge of verbal or pictoral symbols over which your customer can pass from fact to compensatory dream, and from the dream to the illusion that your product, when purchased, will make the dream come true.”

-Aldous Huxley

“The political merchandisers appeal only to the weaknesses of voters, never to their potential strength.  They make no attempt to educate the masses into becoming fit for self-government; they are content  merely to manipulate and exploit them.  For this purpose all the resources of psychology and the social sciences are mobilized and set to work… The methods now being used to merchandise the political candidate as though he were a deodorant positively guarantee the electorate against ever hearing the truth about anything.”

-Aldous Huxley

“Meanwhile pharmacology, biochemistry and neurology are on the march, and we can be quite certain that, in the course of the next few years, new and better chemical methods for increasing suggestibility and lowering psychological resistance will be discovered.  Like everything else, these discoveries may be used well or badly.  The may help the psychiatrist in his battle against mental illness, or they may help the dictator in his battle against freedom.  More probably (since science is divinely impartial) they will both enslave and make free, heal and at the same time destroy.”

-Aldous Huxley

“A democratic society is a society dedicated to the proposition that power is often abused and should therefore be entrusted to officials only in limited amounts and for limited periods of time.”

-Aldous Huxley

“In their anti-rational propaganda the enemies of freedom systematically pervert the resources of language in order to wheedle or stampede their victims into thinking, feeling and acting as they, the mind-manipulators, want them to think, feel and act.”

-Aldous Huxley

“The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim.  To him, the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free.  That he is not free is apparent only to other people.  His servitude is strictly objective.”

-Aldous Huxley

“The old dictators fell because they could never supply their subjects with enough bread, enough circuses, enough miracles and mysteries.  Nor did they possess a really effective system of mind manipulation.”

-Aldous Huxley

“The mother’s heart is the child’s schoolroom.”

-Henry Ward Beecher

“A society that exalts virtue has 270 million policemen.  A society that scorns virtue cannot have enough.”

-Michael Novak

“What you do with your Saturdays now will dictate what you do with you Saturdays twenty years from now”

-Clarence Thomas to a group of teenagers

“The idea (at least in its grossest and most popular form) that Christianity brought a new ethical code into the world is a grave error.  If it had done so, then we should have to conclude that all who first preached it wholly misunderstood their own message:  for all of them, its Founder, His precursor, His apostles, came demanding repentance and offering forgiveness, a demand and an offer both meaningless except on the assumption of a moral law already known and already broken.”

-C. S. Lewis

“What is prudence in the conduct of every private family, can scarcely be folly in that of a great kingdom.”

-Adam Smith

“The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories…  But this story has entered History and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation has been raised to the fulfillment of creation.”

-J.R.R. Tolkien

“The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact…  It happens at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences… By becoming fact, it does not cease to be myth:  that is the miracle.”

-C.S. Lewis

“All that is gold does not glitter,

Not all those who wander are lost;

The old that is strong does not wither,

Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,

A light from the shadows shall spring;

Renewed shall be blade that was broken:

The crownless again shall be king.”

-J.R.R. Tolkien

“I do not now feel either ashamed or dubious on the Eden ‘myth’.  It has not, of course, historicity of the same kind as the NT, which are virtually contemporary documents, while Genesis is separated by we do not know how many sad exiled generations from the Fall, but certainly there was an Eden on this very unhappy earth.  We all long for it, and we are constantly glimpsing it:  our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, it gentlest and most humane, is still soaked with the sense of ‘exile’.

-J.R.R. Tolkien

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse [hand-outs] from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always vote for the candidate promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.”
– Sir Alexander Fraser Tytler

(18th century Scottish historian)

“Many have dreamed up republics and principalities that have never in truth been known to exist; the gulf between how one should live and how one does live is so wide that that a man who neglects what is actually done for what should be done learns the way to self-destruction rather than self-preservation.”

-Niccolo Machiavelli

“If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or your arms. Crouch down and lick the hands, which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.”
– Samuel Adams.

“The right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary government; one more safeguard against tyranny, which though now appears remote in America, history has proven to be always possible.”
~Senator Hubert H. Humphrey

“By yielding to a false form of civility, we sometimes allow our critics to intimidate us. Active citizens are often subjected to truly vile attacks. They are branded as mean-spirited, racist, Uncle Tom, homophobic, sexist, et cetera. To this we often respond, if not succumb, so as not to be constantly fighting by trying to be tolerant and non-judgmental. That is, we censor ourselves. This is not civility, it is cowardice, or well-intentioned self-deception at best.”
-Justice Clarence Thomas

“When you come to the edge of that you know and you are about to step off unto the unknown, faith is knowing that one of two things will happen – there will be something solid to stand on – or we will be TAUGHT TO FLY”

-Unknown

“I want to see you shoot the way you shout.”

-Theodore Roosevelt

“There is a self-satisfaction that comes from self-denial that cannot be matched by self-indulgence.”

-George Plagenz

“An intellectual is a person who has a commanding knowledge of a field that’s really none of his business as a professional.”

-Donald Carnie-Ross

“The nation that will insist on drawing a broad demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards.”
-Sir William Francis Butler

“The world of a man who believes that God created him for a specific purpose, that he has an immortal soul … is radically different from the world of a man who believes in none of these things… the reasons for action, the moral codes, the political beliefs, the tastes, the personal relationships of the former will deeply and systematically differ from those of the latter.”

-Isaiah Berlin

“Now I treat my body like a temple, not an amusement park.”

-Nell Carter’s daughter, reflecting on her mother’s death

“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”

-George Orwell

“If there was affirmative action in golf, nobody would give Tiger Woods half the credit he gets — and deserves.

Would you prefer to have a “compulsory” health care system imposed on you and your doctor or to have “universal” health care? Or do you realize that they are the same thing in different words?

Name three things coming out of the Middle East today besides oil and terrorism. If you can’t do that, try naming one thing.

If I were to get to heaven, I would probably find an exhausted guardian angel who had been getting me out of trouble all these years.

You can fail to achieve any of the things you planned and still live a happy and fulfilled life, because of opportunities that come along that you never planned for. But these opportunities can be missed if you stick doggedly to your preconceived blueprint.

People have a right to their own cultures — even Americans. Those who come here and say that they cannot follow some of our laws that conflict with their culture are free to leave.

Much of what are called “social problems” consists of the fact that intellectuals have theories that do not fit the real world. From this they conclude that it is the real world which is wrong and needs changing.

Some of the questions on the California High School Exit Exam are the kinds of questions whose answers you would have been expected to know before you got into high school in past generations.

I don’t care whether professional golf is coed or single-sex but I am sick and tired of third party busybodies trying to tell everybody how to run their business or live their lives.

Bob Hope’s 100th birthday recalls a comedy skit from some years ago. The setting is in 1776. Someone tells an eagle that someday he will be the symbol of America. The eagle replies: “You mean I’ll be Bob Hope?”

It is heartbreaking to watch people — especially young people — throw away gold and go for brass.

In baseball, football, and tennis, an official can turn to other officials who may have been in a better position to see something that is disputed. But, in boxing, a foul not seen by the referee is just a foul that one of the fighters gets away with.

Although my wife and I live a modest life, I am amazed at the bills that come in each month — and I can’t help wondering how people who live it up manage to make ends meet.

The political left seems to regard economic policy issues as litmus tests for whether you are a good person, rather than as questions of facts about what works and doesn’t work.

Tony Snow of Fox News seems to be the only one in the media who has pointed out what a farce it is for people to be talking about a tax cut in terms of so many billions of dollars. Government can only change the tax rates. How much the tax revenue will change — and in which direction — will be known only after the fact.

Thank heaven human beings are born with an ability to laugh at absurdity. Otherwise, we might go stark raving mad from all the absurd things we encounter in life.

It is amazing how many people act as if the right to free speech includes the right to be free of criticism for what you say — which means that other people should not have the same right to free speech that they claim for themselves.

Do those “citizen of the world” types who think we should open our borders to free immigration leave their front doors open at night when they go to sleep, with a “Welcome Neighbor” neon sign blinking over it? Yet their neighbors are probably more similar to themselves than many people who are immigrating here from around the world.

Insurance companies are in the business of reducing given risks and transferring them, for a price. Non-profit advocacy groups are in the business of maximizing fears from given risks, in order to attract the donations that keep them going. Yet because the latter’s income is not called by the dreaded word “profit,” they are considered to be doing something more noble.”

-Thomas Sowell

“Democracies are more difficult to create.  They are also more difficult to destroy.”

-Bernard Lewis

“A truth that’s told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.”
– William Blake (1757-1827), English poet

“The General is sorry to be informed that the foolish and wicked practice of profane cursing and swearing , a vice heretofore little known in an American Army, is growing into fashion.  He hopes the officers will check it, and that both they and the men will reflect, that we can have little hope of the blessings of Heaven on our arms, if we insult it by our impiety and folly.  Added to this, it is a vice so mean and low, without temptation, that every man of character and sense detests and despises it.”

-General George Washingon, July 1776

“The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice.”

“Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.”

“The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”

“The Declaration of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created all men equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they were certainly evolved unequal. There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man.”

“Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.”

“What we call emancipation is always and of necessity simply the free choice of the soul between one set of limitations and another.”

The great majority of people will go on observing forms that cannot be explained; they will keep Christmas Day with Christmas gifts and Christmas benedictions; they will continue to do it; and some day suddenly wake up and discover why.”

“The first two facts which a healthy boy or girl feels about sex are these: first that it is beautiful and then that it is dangerous.”

“Making the landlord and the tenant the same person has certain advantages, as that the tenant pays no rent, while the landlord does a little work.”

“The decay of society is praised by artists as the decay of a corpse is praised by worms.”

What is called matriarchy is simply moral anarchy, in which the mother alone remains fixed because all the fathers are fugitive and irresponsible.”

“Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it.”

“You cannot grow a beard in a moment of passion.”

-G. K. Chesterton

“While it is wise to learn from experience, it is wiser to learn from the experience of others.  There isn’t enough time to learn everything in life by trial and error.”

-Rick Warren

“Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to fit the vision, instead we are always changing the vision.”

“Men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.”

“My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday.”

“Comforts that were rare among our forefathers are now multiplied in factories and handed out wholesale; and indeed, nobody nowadays, so long as he is content to go without air, space, quiet, decency and good manners, need be without anything whatever that he wants; or at least a reasonably cheap imitation of it.”

“Properly speaking, of course, there is no such thing as a return to nature, because there is no such thing as a departure from it. The phrase reminds one of the slightly intoxicated gentleman who gets up in his own dining room and declares firmly that he must be getting home.”

“The position we have now reached is this: starting from the State, we try to remedy the failures of all the families, all the nurseries, all the schools, all the workshops, all the secondary institutions that once had some authority of their own. Everything is ultimately brought into the Law Courts. We are trying to stop the leak at the other end.”

-G.K. Chesterton

“Conscience is but the name which cowardice, fleeing the battle, scrawls upon its shield.”

-Oscar Wilde

“The belief in a God All Powerful wise and good, is so essential to the moral order of the the world and to the happiness of man, that arguments which enforce it cannot be drawn from too many sources nor adapted with too much solicitude to the different characters and capacities impressed with it.”

-James Madison

“If a woman makes a unilateral decision to bring pregnancy to term, and the biological father does not, and cannot, share in this decision, he should not be liable for 21 years of support … autonomous women making independent decisions about their lives should not expect men to finance their choice.”

-Karen DeCrow, Former NOW President

“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.”

-Henry David Thoreau

“The liberty, prosperity, and the happiness of our country will always be the object of my most fervent prayers to the Supreme Author of All Good.”

-James Monroe

“To be ignorant and simple now – not to be able to meet the enemies on their own ground – would be to throw down our weapons, and to betray our uneducated bretheren who have, under God, no defense but us against the intellectual attacks of the heathen.  Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.”

-C.S. Lewis

“It is no use trying to see through first principles.  If you see through everything, then everything is transparent.  But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world.  To see through all things is the same as not to see.”

-C.S. Lewis

“He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.”

-Jim Elliot

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

“Ethical Axioms are found and tested not very differently from the axioms of science.  Truth is what stands the test of experience.”

“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”

“If you are out to describe truth, leave elegance to the tailor.”

“It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.”

“The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem.  It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.”

“Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”

-Albert Einstein

“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

-George Orwell

“And many of you being immediate Successors, cannot but be very sensible what these New England Liberties have Cost your Progenitors, some of them having buried their Estates, all of them their bones in these Foundations, and left you in Possession, that if you should put Contempt upon their Adventures, their Courage, Wisdom, Zeal, and Self Denial, by Under-prizing these Inestimable Infranchizements, and slight them… God may then put you to learn the Worth of them at that School where they Learnt it;  and I am sure you will pay dear for your Tutoring if it comes to that.”

-John Wise, 1717

“Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.”

-G.K. Chesterton

“The nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its fighting done by cowards and its thinking done by fools.”

-Thucydidies

“Find a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.”

-Kenny Roger’s Mom

“Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance.”

“An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered.”

“What embitters the world is not excess of criticism, but an absence of self-criticism.”

“He is a [sane] man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.”

“Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity.”

“Complaint always comes back in an echo from the ends of the world; but silence strengthens us.”

“Customs are generally unselfish. Habits are nearly always selfish”

“I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid.”

“To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.”

“We have had no good comic operas of late, because the real world has been more comic than any possible opera.”

“The aesthete aims at harmony rather than beauty. If his hair does not match the mauve sunset against which he is standing, he hurriedly dyes his hair another shade of mauve. If his wife does not go with the wall-paper, he gets a divorce.”

“Man is always something worse or something better than an animal; and a mere argument from animal perfection never touches him at all. Thus, in sex no animal is either chivalrous or obscene. And thus no animal invented anything so bad as drunkeness – or so good as drink.”

“When we step into the family, by the act of being born, we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world we have not made. In other words, when we step into the family we step into a fairy-tale.”

“A thing may be too sad to be believed or too wicked to be believed or too good to be believed; but it cannot be too absurd to be believed in this planet of frogs and elephants, of crocodiles and cuttle-fish.”

“To hurry through one’s leisure is the most unbusiness-like of actions.”

“War is not ‘the best way of settling differences; it is the only way of preventing their being settled for you.”

“There is a corollary to the conception of being too proud to fight. It is that the humble have to do most of the fighting.”

“The unconscious democracy of America is a very fine thing. It is a true and deep and instinctive assumption of the equality of citizens, which even voting and elections have not destroyed.”

“When you break the big laws, you do not get freedom; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws.” –

“He is a very shallow critic who cannot see an eternal rebel in the heart of a conservative.”

“When a politician is in opposition he is an expert on the means to some end; and when he is in office he is an expert on the obstacles to it.”

“It is the mark of our whole modern history that the masses are kept quiet with a fight. They are kept quiet by the fight because it is a sham-fight; thus most of us know by this time that the Party System has been popular only in the sense that a football match is popular.”

“It is a good sign in a nation when things are done badly. It shows that all the people are doing them. And it is bad sign in a nation when such things are done very well, for it shows that only a few experts and eccentrics are doing them, and that the nation is merely looking on.”

“The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.”

“It is true that I am of an older fashion; much that I love has been destroyed or sent into exile.”

“I think the oddest thing about the advanced people is that, while they are always talking about things as problems, they have hardly any notion of what a real problem is.”

“There have been household gods and household saints and household fairies. I am not sure that there have yet been any factory gods or factory saints or factory fairies. I may be wrong, as I am no commericial expert, but I have not heard of them as yet.”

“Over-civilization and barbarism are within an inch of each other. And a mark of both is the power of medicine-men.”

“By experts in poverty I do not mean sociologists, but poor men.”

“The modern city is ugly not because it is a city but because it is not enough of a city, because it is a jungle, because it is confused and anarchic, and surging with selfish and materialistic energies.”

“Self-denial is the test and definition of self-government.”

“Love means loving the unlovable – or it is no virtue at all.”

“A man imagines a happy marriage as a marriage of love; even if he makes fun of marriages that are without love, or feels sorry for lovers who are without marriage.”

“Women are the only realists; their whole object in life is to pit their realism against the extravagant, excessive, and occasionally drunken idealism of men.”

“The whole pleasure of marriage is that it is a perpetual crisis.”

“A good man’s work is effected by doing what he does, a woman’s by being what she is.”

“Women have a thirst for order and beauty as for something physical; there is a strange female power of hating ugliness and waste as good men can only hate sin and bad men virtue.”

“Marriage is a duel to the death which no man of honour should decline.”

“The first two facts which a healthy boy or girl feels about sex are these: first that it is beautiful and then that it is dangerous.”

“I have little doubt that when St. George had killed the dragon he was heartily afraid of the princess.”

“One of the chief uses of religion is that it makes us remember our coming from darkness, the simple fact that we are created.”

“The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.”

“If there were no God, there would be no atheists.”

“There are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions.”

“The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.”

“It has been often said, very truely, that religion is the thing that makes the ordinary man feel extraordinary; it is an equally important truth that religion is the thing that makes the extraordinary man feel ordinary.”

“Theology is only thought applied to religion.”

“The truth is, of course, that the curtness of the Ten Commandments is an evidence, not of the gloom and narrowness of a religion, but, on the contrary, of its liberality and humanity. It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted: precisely because most things are permitted, and only a few things are forbidden.”

“These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own.”

“If a man called Christmas Day a mere hypocritical excuse for drunkeness and gluttony, that would be false, but it would have a fact hidden in it somewhere. But when Bernard Shaw says that Christmas Day is only a conspiracy kept up by Poulterers and wine merchants from strictly business motives, then he says something which is not so much false as startling and arrestingly foolish. He might as well say that the two sexes were invented by jewellers who wanted to sell wedding rings.”

“Any one thinking of the Holy Child as born in December would mean by it exactly what we mean by it; that Christ is not merely a summer sun of the prosperous but a winter fire for the unfortunate.”

“The more we are proud that the Bethlehem story is plain enough to be understood by the shepherds, and almost by the sheep, the more do we let ourselves go, in dark and gorgeous imaginative frescoes or pageants about the mystery and majesty of the Three Magian Kings.”

“The great majority of people will go on observing forms that cannot be explained; they will keep Christmas Day with Christmas gifts and Christmas benedictions; they will continue to do it; and some day suddenly wake up and discover why.”

“It’s not that we don’t have enough scoundrels to curse; it’s that we don’t have enough good men to curse them.”

“There is a case for telling the truth; there is a case for avoiding the scandal; but there is no possible defense for the man who tells the scandal, but does not tell the truth.”

“The whole truth is generally the ally of virtue; a half-truth is always the ally of some vice.”

“Truth is sacred; and if you tell the truth too often nobody will believe it.”

“Civilization has run on ahead of the soul of man, and is producing faster than he can think and give thanks.”

“It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.”

“There’d be a lot less scandal if people didn’t idealize sin and pose as sinners.”

“All men thirst to confess their crimes more than tired beasts thirst for water; but they naturally object to confessing them while other people, who have also committed the same crimes, sit by and laugh at them.”

“Idolatry is committed, not merely by setting up false gods, but also by setting up false devils; by making men afraid of war or alcohol, or economic law, when they should be afraid of spiritual corruption and cowardice.”

“I say that a man must be certain of his morality for the simple reason that he has to suffer for it.”

“To the humble man, and to the humble man alone, the sun is really a sun; to the humble man, and to the humble man alone, the sea is really a sea.”

“Great truths can only be forgotten and can never be falsified.”

“The voice of the special rebels and prophets, recommending discontent, should, as I have said, sound now and then suddenly, like a trumpet. But the voices of the saints and sages, recommending contentment, should sound unceasingly, like the sea.”

“All science, even the divine science, is a sublime detective story. Only it is not set to detect why a man is dead; but the darker secret of why he is alive.”

“Most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities.”

“If we want to give poor people soap we must set out deliberately to give them luxuries. If we will not make them rich enough to be clean, then empathically we must do what we did with the saints. We must reverence them for being dirty.”

“The world will very soon be divided, unless I am mistaken, into those who still go on explaining our success, and those somewhat more intelligent who are trying to explain our failure.”

“There are some desires that are not desirable.”

“In the struggle for existence, it is only on those who hang on for ten minutes after all is hopeless, that hope begins to dawn.”

“Modern broad-mindedness benefits the rich; and benefits nobody else.”

“It is the main earthly business of a human being to make his home, and the immediate surroundings of his home, as symbolic and significant to his own imagination as he can.”

“Big Business and State Socialism are very much alike, especially Big Business.”

“[No society can survive the socialist] fallacy that there is an absolutely unlimited number of inspired officials and an absolutely unlimited amount of money to pay them.”

“A citizen can hardly distinguish between a tax and a fine, except that the fine is generally much lighter.”

“Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists.”

“Price is a crazy and incalculable thing, while Value is an intrinsic and indestructible thing.”

“Because a girl should have long hair, she should have clean hair; because she should have clean hair, she should not have an unclean home; because she should not have an unclean home, she should have a free and leisured mother; because she should have a free mother, she should not have an usurious landlord; because there should not be a usurious landlord, there should be a redistribution of property; because there should be a redistribution of property, there shall be a revolution.”

“Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.”

“The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs.”

“Savages and modern artists are alike strangely driven to create something uglier than themselves. but the artists find it harder.”

“The beautification of the world is not a work of nature, but a work of art, then it involves an artist.”

“By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece.”

“And all over the world, the old literature, the popular literature, is the same. It consists of very dignified sorrow and very undignified fun. Its sad tales are of broken hearts; its happy tales are of broken heads.”

“The aim of good prose words is to mean what they say. The aim of good poetical words is to mean what they do not say.”

“Bigotry is an incapacity to conceive seriously the alternative to a proposition.” – Lunacy and Letters

“Our materialistic masters could, and probably will, put Birth Control into an immediate practical programme while we are all discussing the dreadful danger of somebody else putting it into a distant Utopia.”

“Modern man is staggering and losing his balance because he is being pelted with little pieces of alleged fact which are native to the newspapers; and, if they turn out not to be facts, that is still more native to newspapers.”

“America has a genius for the encouragement of fame.”

“Though the academic authorities are actually proud of conducting everything by means of Examinations, they seldom indulge in what religious people used to descibe as Self-Examination. The consequence is that the modern State has educated its citizens in a series of ephemeral fads.”

“Anyone who is not an anarchist agrees with having a policeman at the corner of the street; but the danger at present is that of finding the policeman half-way down the chimney or even under the bed.”

“Psychoanalysis is a science conducted by lunatics for lunatics. They are generally concerned with proving that people are irresponsible; and they certainly succeed in proving that some people are.”

“Let all the babies be born. Then let us drown those we do not like.”

“A modern vegetarian is also a teetotaler, yet there is no obvious connection between consuming vegetables and not consuming fermented vegetables. A drunkard, when lifted laboriously out of the gutter, might well be heard huskily to plead that he had fallen there through excessive devotion to a vegetable diet.”

“Now a man preaching what he thinks is a platitude is far more intolerant than a man preaching what he admits is a paradox.

“Atheism is indeed the most daring of all dogmas . . . for it is the assertion of a universal negative.”

“It is still bad taste to be an avowed atheist. But now it is equally bad taste to be an avowed Christian.”

“There is no bigot like the atheist.”

“The atheist is not interested in anything except attacks on atheism.”

“An interesting essay might be written on the possession of an atheistic literary style. There is such a thing. The mark of it is that wherever anything is named or described, such words are chosen as suggest that the thing has not got a soul in it. Thus they will not talk of love or passion, which imply a purpose and a desire. They talk of the “relations” of the sexes, as if they were simply related to each other in a certain way, like a chair and a table. Thus they will not talk of the waging of war (which implies a will), but of the outbreak of war – as if it were a sort of boil. Thus they will not talk of masters paying more or less wages, which faintly suggests some moral responsibility in the masters: they will talk of the rise and fall of wages, as if the thing were automatic, like the tides of the sea. Thus they will not call progress an attempt to improve, but a tendency to improve. And thus, above all, they will not call the sympathy between oppressed nations sympathy; they will call it solidarity. For that suggests brick and coke, and clay and mud, and all the things they are fond of.”

“Progress is Providence without God. That is, it is a theory that everything has always perpetually gone right by accident. It is a sort of atheistic optimism, based on an everlasting coincidence far more miraculous than a miracle.”

“There are two kinds of peacemakers in the modern world; and they are both, though in various ways, a nuisance. The first peacemaker is the man who goes about saying that he agrees with everybody. He confuses everybody. The second peacemaker is the man who goes about saying that everybody agrees with him. He enrages everybody. Between the two of them they produce a hundred times more disputes and distractions than we poor pugnacious people would ever have thought of in our lives.”

“There are two kinds of revolutionists, as of most things – a good kind and a bad. The bad revolutionists destroy conventions by appealing to fads – fashions that are newer than conventions. The good do it by appealing to facts that are older than conventions.”

“There are two kinds of paradoxes. They are not so much the good and the bad, nor even the true and the false. Rather they are the fruitful and the barren; the paradoxes which produce life and the paradoxes that merely announce death. Nearly all modern paradoxes merely announce death.”

“There are only two kinds of people, those who accept dogmas and know it, and those who accept dogmas and don’t know it.”

“There are two ways of dealing with nonsense in this world. One way is to put nonsense in the right place; as when people put nonsense into nursery rhymes. The other is to put nonsense in the wrong place; as when they put it into educational addresses, psychological criticisms, and complaints against nursery rhymes.”

“There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there.”

“The new school of art and thought does indeed wear an air of audacity, and breaks out everywhere into blasphemies, as if it required any courage to say a blasphemy. There is only one thing that it requires real courage to say, and that is a truism.”

“The professional soldier gains more and more power as the general courage of a community declines.”

“It is the first law of practical courage. To be in the weakest camp is to be in the strongest school.”

“Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.”

“There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one’s grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers. The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past.”

“I would rather a boy learnt in the roughest school the courage to hit a politician, or gained in the hardest school the learning to refute him – rather than that he should gain in the most enlightened school the cunning to copy him.”

“. . . For friendship implies individuality; whereas comradeship really implies the temporary subordination, if not the temporary swamping of individuality. Friends are the better for being two; but comrades are the better for being two million.”

“Only friendliness produces friendship. And we must look far deeper into the soul of man for the thing that produces friendliness.”

“It is not merely true that a creed unites men. Nay, a difference of creed unites men – so long as it is a clear difference. A boundary unites. Many a magnanimous Moslem and chivalrous Crusader must have been nearer to each other, because they were both dogmatists, than any two agnostics. “I say God is One,” and “I say God is One but also Three,” that is the beginning of a good quarrelsome, manly friendship.”

“A queer and almost mad notion seems to have got into the modern head that, if you mix up everybody and everything more or less anyhow, the mixture may be called unity, and the unity may be called peace. It is supposed that, if you break down all doors and walls so that there is no domesticity, there will then be nothing but friendship. Surely somebody must have noticed by this time that the men living in a hotel quarrel at least as often as the men living in a street.”

“Liberty is the very last idea that seems to occur to anybody, in considering any political or social proposal. It is only necessary for anybody for any reason to allege any evidence of any evil in any human practice, for people instantly to suggest that the practice should be suppressed by the police.”

“Without authority three is no liberty. Freedom is doomed to destruction at every turn, unless there is a recognized right to freedom. And if there are rights, there is an authority to which we appeal for them.”

“The man of the true religious tradition understands two things: liberty and obedience. The first means knowing what you really want. The second means knowing what you really trust.”

“It is assumed that the sceptic has no bias; whereas he has a very obvious bias in favour of scepticism.”

“Pride consists in a man making his personality the only test, instead of making truth the test. The sceptic feels himself too large to measure life by the largest things; and ends by measuring it by the smallest thing of all.”

“It is the decisive people who have become civilised; it is the indecisive, otherwise called the higher sceptics, or the idealistic doubters, who have remained barbarians.”

“Latter-day scepticism is fond of calling itself progressive; but scepticism is really reactionary. Scepticism goes back; it attempts to unsettle what has already been settled. Instead of trying to break up new fields with its plough, it simply tries to break up the plough.”

“No sceptical philosopher can ask any questions that may not equally be asked by a tired child on a hot afternoon.”

“It is ludicrous to suppose that the more sceptical we are the more we see good in everything. It is clear that the more we are certain what good is, the more we shall see good in everything.”

“The sceptic ultimately undermines democracy (1) because he can see no significance in death and such things of a literal equality; (2) because he introduces different first principles, making debate impossible: and debate is the life of democracy; (3) because the fading of the images of sacred persons leaves a man too prone to be a respecter of earthly persons; (4) because there will be more, not less, respect for human rights if they can be treated as divine rights.”

“The average businessman began to be agnostic, not so much because he did not know where he was, as because he wanted to forget. Many of the rich took to scepticism exactly as the poor took to drink; because it was a way out.”

“A strange fanaticism fills our time: the fanatical hatred of morality, especially of Christian morality.”

“Moderns have not the moral courage, as a rule, to avow the sincere spiritual bias behind their fads; they become insincere even about their sincerity. Most modern liberality consists of finding irreligious excuses for religious bigotry. The earlier type of bigot pretended to be more religious than he really was. The later type pretends to be less religious than he really is. He does not wear a mask of piety, but rather a mask of impiety – or, at any rate, of indifference.”

“The sort of man who admires Italian art while despising Italian religion is a tourist and a cad.”

“I might inform those humanitarians who have a nightmare of new and needless babies (for some humanitarians have that sort of horror of humanity) that if the recent decline in the birth-rate were continued for a certain time, it might end in there being no babies at all; which would console them very much.”

“We lose our bearings entirely by speaking of the ‘lower classes’ when we mean humanity minus ourselves.”

-G.K. Chesterton

“Nothing pains some people more than having to think.”

– Martin Luther King, Jr.

You can learn many things from children. how much patience you have, for instance.

– Franklin P. Jones

Children have more need of models than of critics.
— Joseph Joubert

The best thing to spend on children is your time.
— Arnold Glasow

Parents have a duty to govern their children. But the object of all good government is to prepare the subject for self-government.
— Dr. Lyman Abott

If I were to asked to name the world’s greatest need, I should say, unhesitatingly; wise mothers and… exemplary fathers.
— David O. McKay

You can learn many things from children. how much patience you have, for instance.
— Franklin P. Jones

There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One of these is roots; the other, wings.
—Hodding Carter

Remember when your mother used to say, “Go to your room -“? This was a terrible penalty. Now when a mother says the same thing, a kid goes to his room. There he’s got an air-conditioner, a TV set, an intercom, a shortwave radio – he’s better off than he was in the first place.
— Sam Levenson

A three-year-old child is a being who gets almost as much fun out a a fifty-six dollar set of swings as it does out of finding a small green worm.
— Norman Doublas

You know children are growing up when they start asking questions that have answers.
— John J. Plomp

You are to have as strict as guard upon yourself amongst your children, as if you were amongst your enemies.
— Lord Halifax (George Savile)

Reasoning with a child is fine, if you can reach the child’s reason without destroying your own.
— John Mason Brown

Be ever gentle with the children God has given you. Watch over them constantly; reprove them earnestly, but not in anger.
— Elihu Burritt

Parents have a duty to govern their children. But the object of all good government is to prepare the subject for self-government.
— Dr. Lyman Abbott

The trouble with being a parent is that by the time you are experienced you usually are unemployed

The family is the nucleus of civilization
— Will and Ariel Durant

A House is not a Home.
— Polly Adler

The strength of a nation is derived from the integrity of its homes.
— Confucius

No other success can compensate for failure in the home
— David O. McKay

This is the true nature of home – it is the place of Peace; the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division.
— John Ruskin

Research shows that you have a greater impact on people by how you listen than by what you say.
— Steven W. Vannoy, The 10 Greatest Gifts I Give My Children

We could put up ten-foot banners around the house reminding our children how much we love them or how special they are, and yet these will have far less impact than a simple act of truly listening.
Steven W. Vannoy, The 10 Greatest Gifts I Give My Children

Most of the successful people I’ve known are the ones who do more listening than talking.
Bernard Baruch

It is the province of knowledge to speak, and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.
Oliver Wendell Homes, Sr.

I know how to listen when clever men are talking. That is the secret of what you call my influence.
Sudermann

The art of conversation consists as much of listening politely as in talking agreeably.
George Atwell

Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you’d preferred to talk.
Doug Larson

I have learned that the head does not hear anything until the heart has listened. And what the heart knows today the head will understand tomorrow.
James Stevens

It takes a great man to make a good listener.
Sir Arthur Helps

If you want to know how to make people shun you and laugh at you behind your back and even despise you, here is the recipe: Never listen to anyone for long. Talk incessantly about yourself. If you have an idea while the other person is talking, don’t wait for him or her to finish: bust right in and interrupt in the middle of a sentence.

-Dale Carnegie

a primary position, and the basis of our system, that every Citizen who enjoys the protection of a Free Government, owes not only a proportion of his property, but even of his personal services to the defense of it.”

-George Washington

“One great piece of mischief has been done by the modern restriction of the word Temperance to the question of alcohol. It helps people to forget that you can be just as intemperate about lots of other things. A man who makes his football or his car the centre of his life, or a woman who devotes all her thoughts to clothes or men or her dog, is being just as ‘intemperate’ as someone who gets drunk every evening. Of course, it does not show on the outside so easily: fashion-mania or football-mania do not make you fall down in the middle of the road. But God is not deceived by externals.”

-S. Lewis

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it”

– Aristotle

Be thankful we’re not getting all the government we’re paying for.

– Will Rogers

Who has the audacity to demand unarmed helplessness? Who likes dead good guys?

I’ll tell you who. People who tramp on the Second Amendment, that’s who. People who refuse to accept the self-evident truth that free people have the God-given right to keep and bear arms, to defend themselves and their loved ones. People who are so desperate in their drive to control others, so mindless in their denial that they pretend access to gas causes arson, Ryder trucks and fertilizer cause terrorism, water causes drowning, forks and spoons cause obesity, dialing 911 will somehow save your life, and that their greedy clamoring to “feel good” is more important than admitting that armed citizens are much better equipped to stop evil than unarmed, helpless ones.

-Ted Nugent

“Was it a millionaire who said “Imagine no possessions”?

-Elvis Costello

“Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.”

-Thomas Mann

“Television is where you watch people in your living room that you would not want near your house.”

-Groucho Marx

“If I give you everything you want, and I can afford to do that, you’ll grow up to be a 40-year-old child. I build men, not boys. I want you to grow up to be a 40-year-old man.”

-Jane Wyman to her son Michael Reagan

“If you can read this, thank a teacher. If it is in English, thank a Soldier.”

-Unknown

The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.”

– M. Aurelius

“The people of Islam awakened and realised that they are the main target…”

-Osama Bin Laden, 1996

“The Sahwa began because people thought the Americans were the enemy.  We rose up and let the people see the truth – let them see that the Americans are here to help us.  That was the true Awakening.”

-Shaykh Abd Al Sattar Abu Risha, 2006

“When you can’t make them see the light, make them feel the heat”

-Ronald Reagan

“None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free.”

-J.W. von Goethe

“If you do not believe in a personal God, the question ‘What is the purpose of life?’ is unaskable and unanswerable. … it may be said that the chief purpose of life, for any one of us, is to increase according to our capacity our knowledge of God by all the means we have, and to be moved by it to praise and thanks.”

-J.R.R. Tolkien, responding to a child’s question regarding the purpose of life

“No matter what the motive, love of ease, or desire to the save from suffering the unborn innocent, the woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed. It will burden her conscience in life and burden her soul in death.”

-Susan B. Anthony, on abortion

“When we consider that women are treated as property, it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit.”

-Elizabeth Cady Stanton, on abortion

“A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.”
– George Bernard Shaw

“Truth must trump ignorance even when this ignorance is well-intended.”
-Stephen Happel

“We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.”
-E.R. Murrow

“Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other is unfit to rule – and both commonly succeed .”
-E.R. Murrow

“Morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless.”
-Dr. Martin Luther King

“The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing.”

-Jean B. Colbert

“”I had two jobs as a kid, one at a fast-food restaurant and one at a Ford dealership. And I’d put the money from one job in one pocket and spend it. And the other paycheck I’d save,” he says. “I do that now. I have always banked my Tonight Show money and lived off the stand-up. I have one credit card, no mortgage, and I don’t lease.”

-Jay Leno

“I am, therefore I’ll think”

“So you think that money is the root of all evil? Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can’t exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?

The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it.

Love is our response to our highest values.

She was twelve years old when she told Eddie Willers that she would run the railroad when they grew up. She was fifteen when it occurred to her for the first time that women did not run railroads and that people might object. To hell with that, she thought—and never worried about it again.

Rationality is the recognition of the fact that existence exists, that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it, which is thinking…

If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose- because it contains all the others- the fact that they were the people who created the phrase to make money. No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity- to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created.

A desire presupposes the possibility of action to achieve it; action presupposes a goal which is worth achieving.

All work is an act of philosophy.

The purpose of philosophy is not to help men find the meaning of life but to prove to them that there is none.

An inventor is a man who asks ‘Why?’ of the universe and lets nothing stand between the answer and his mind.

“Existence exists—and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists.”

“Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where the gun begins.”

Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values.

–Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

A house can have integrity, just like a person, and just as seldom.

Worry is a waste of emotional reserve.

…the person who loves everybody and feels at home everywhere is the true hater of mankind. He expects nothing of men, so no form of depravity can outrage him.

Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision. Their goals differed, but they all had this in common: that the step was first, the road new, the vision unborrowed, and the response they received–hatred. The great creators–the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors–stood alone against the men of their time. Every great new thought was opposed. Every great new invention was denounced. The first motor was considered foolish. The first airplane was considered impossible. The power loom was considered vicious. Anesthesia was considered sinful. But the men of unborrowed vision went ahead. They fought, they suffered and they paid. But they won.

-Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

Neither am I the means to any end others may wish to accomplish. I am not a tool for their use. I am not a servant of their needs. I am not a bandage for their wounds, I am not a sacrifice on their altars.

There is no such thing as duty. If you know that a thing is right, you want to do it. If you don’t want to do it–it isn’t right. If it’s right and you don’t want to do it–you don’t know what right is and you’re not a man.

There are only two means by which men can deal with one another: guns or logic. Force or persuasion. Those who know that they cannot win by means of logic, have always resorted to guns.

The conservatives see man as a body freely roaming the earth, building sand piles or factories—with an electronic computer inside his skull, controlled from Washington. The liberals see man as a soul freewheeling to the farthest reaches of the universe—but wearing chains from nose to toes when he crosses the street to buy a loaf of bread.

The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. Whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.

America’s abundance was created not by public sacrifices to the common good, but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America’s industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages, and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance- and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way.

Economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value; political power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction. The businessman’s tool is values; the bureaucrat’s tool is fear.

A gun is not an argument.

Businessmen are the one group that distinguishes capitalism and the American way of life from the totalitarian statism that is swallowing the rest of the world. All the other social groups- workers, farmers, professional men, scientists, soldiers- exist under dictatorships, even though they exist in chains, in terror, in misery, and in progressive self-destruction. But there is no such group as businessmen under a dictatorship. Their place is taken by armed thugs: by bureaucrats and commissars. Businessmen are the symbol of a free society- the symbol of America.

Every government interference in the economy consists of giving an unearned benefit, extorted by force, to some men at the expense of others.

Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation’s troubles and use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen.

It is futile to fight against, if one does not know what one is fighting for.

Remember also that the smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights, cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.

Observe, in politics, that the term extremism has become a synonym of “evil,” regardless of the content of the issue (the evil is not what you are extreme about, but that you are “extreme”—i.e., consistent).

A genius is a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race—and a moron is a moron, regardless of the number of geniuses who share his racial origin.

The skyline of New York is a monument of a splendor that no pyramids or palaces will ever equal or approach.

All the reasons which made the initiation of physical force evil, make the retaliatory use of physical force a moral imperative.

Ask yourself why totalitarian dictatorships find it necessary to pour money and effort into propaganda for their own helpless, chained, gagged slaves, who have no means of protest or defense. The answer is that even the humblest peasant or the lowest savage would rise in blind rebellion, were he to realize that he is being immolated, not to some incomprehensible noble purpose, but to plain, naked human evil.

A culture is made — or destroyed — by its articulate voices.

Aristotle may be regarded as the cultural barometer of Western history. Whenever his influence dominated the scene, it paved the way for one of history’s brilliant eras; whenever it fell, so did mankind.

Every coercive monopoly was created by government intervention into the economy: by special privileges, such as franchises or subsidies, which closed the entry of competitors into a given field, by legislative action.

Thanksgiving is a typically American holiday… The lavish meal is a symbol of the fact that abundant consumption is the result and reward of production.

The right to vote is a consequence, not a primary cause, of a free social system—and its value depends on the constitutional structure implementing and strictly delimiting the voters’ power; unlimited majority rule is an instance of the principle of tyranny.

Competition is a by-product of productive work, *not* its goal. A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, *not* by the desire to beat others.

Honor is self-esteem made visible in action.

…observe that in all the propaganda of the ecologists—amidst all their appeals to nature and pleas for ‘harmony with nature’—there is no discussion of man’s needs and the requirements of his survival. Man is treated as if he were an unnatural phenomenon. Man cannot survive in the kind of state of nature that the ecologists envision—i.e., on the level of sea urchins or polar bears…

There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.

An Asian peasant who labors through all of his waking hours, with tools created in Biblical times—a South American aborigine who is devoured by piranha in a jungle stream—an African who is bitten by the tsetse fly—an Arab whose teeth are green with decay in his mouth—these do live with their ‘natural environment,’ but are scarcely able to appreciate its beauty. Try to tell a Chinese mother, whose child is dying of cholera: ‘Should one do everything one can? Of course not.’ Try to tell a Russian housewife, who trudges miles on foot in sub-zero weather in order to spend hours standing in line at a state store dispensing food rations, that America is defiled by shopping centers, expressways and family cars.

By the same principle, the government may not give special leniency to the perpetrator of a crime, on the grounds of the nature of his ideas.

Contrary to the ecologists, nature does not stand still and does not maintain the kind of equilibrium that guarantees the survival of any particular species – least of all the survival of her greatest and most fragile product: man.

Definitions are the guardians of rationality, the first line of defense against the chaos of mental disintegration.

An artist reveals his naked soul in his work.

The worst evil that you can do, psychologically, is to laugh at yourself. That means spitting in your own face.

I can say – not as a patriotic bromide, but with full knowledge of the necessary metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, political, and aesthetic roots – that the United States of America is the greatest, the noblest and, in its original founding principles, the only moral country in the history of the world.

In a capitalist society, all human relationships are voluntary. Men are free to cooperate or not, to deal with one another or not, as their own individual judgments, convictions and interests dictate.

Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).

Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.

Inflation is not caused by the actions of private citizens, but *by the government*: by an artificial expansion of the money supply required to support deficit spending. No private embezzlers or bank robbers in history have ever plundered people’s savings on a scale comparable to the plunder perpetrated by the fiscal policies of statist governments.

Intellectual freedom cannot exist without political freedom; political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind and a free market are corollaries.

It is a grave error to suppose that a dictatorship rules a nation by means of strict, rigid laws which are obeyed and enforced with rigorous, military precision. Such a rule would be evil, but almost bearable; men could endure the harshest edicts, provided these edicts were known, specific and stable; it is not the known that breaks men’s spirits, but the unpredictable. A dictatorship has to be capricious; it has to rule by means of the unexpected, the incomprehensible, the wantonly irrational; it has to deal not in death, but in sudden death; a state of chronic uncertainty is what men are psychologically unable to bear.

It is not justice or equal treatment that you grant to men when you abstain equally from praising men’s virtues and from condemning men’s vices. When your impartial attitude declares, in effect, that neither the good nor the evil may expect anything from you – whom do you betray and whom do you encourage?

It is the metaphysically given that must be accepted: it cannot be changed. It is the man-made that must never be accepted uncritically: it must be judged, then accepted or rejected and changed when necessary.

It makes no difference whether government controls allegedly favor the interests of labor or business, of the poor or the rich, of a special class or a special race: the results are the same. The notion that a dictatorship can benefit any one social group at the expense of others is a worn remnant of the Marxist mythology of class warfare, refuted by half a century of factual evidence. All men are victims and losers under a dictatorship; nobody wins-except the ruling clique.

Just as man’s physical existence was liberated when he grasped that ‘nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed’, so his consciousness will be liberated when grasps that nature, to be apprehended, must be obeyed – that the rules of cognition must be derived from the nature of existence and the nature, the identity, of his cognitive faculty.

Justice does exist in the world, whether people choose to practice it or not. The men of ability are being avenged. The avenger is reality. Its weapon is slow, silent, invisible, and men perceive it only by its consequences – by the gutted ruins and the moans of agony it leaves in its wake. The name of the weapon is: *inflation*.

Love, friendship, respect, admiration are the emotional response of one man to the virtues of another, the spiritual payment given in exchange for the personal, selfish pleasure which one man derives from the virtues of another man’s character. Only a brute or an altruist would claim that the appreciation of another person’s virtues is an act of selflessness, that as far as one’s own selfish interest and pleasure are concerned, it makes no difference whether one deals with a genius or a fool, whether one meets a hero or a thug, whether one marries an ideal woman or a slut.

Loyalty is like rubber: one can stretch it so far and then – it snaps.

Man’s character is the product of his premises.

Men have been taught that the highest virtue is not to achieve, but to give. Yet one cannot give that which has not been created. Creation comes before distribution- or there will be nothing to distribute. The need of the creator comes before the need of any possible beneficiary. Yet we are taught to admire the second-hander who dispenses gifts he has not produced above the man who made the gifts possible. We praise an act of charity. We shrug at an act of achievement.

Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men’s stupidity, but your talent to their reason.

Neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims. Just as a man is free to attempt to survive by any random means, as a parasite, a moocher or a looter, but not free to succeed at it beyond the range of the moment – so he is free to seek his happiness in any irrational fraud, any whim, any delusion, any mindless escape from reality, but not free to succeed at it beyond the range of the moment not to escape the consequences.

Pity for the guilty is treason to the innocent.

Politics is based on three other philosophical disciplines: metaphysics, epistemology and ethics- on a theory of man’s nature and of man’s relationship to existence. It is only on such a base that one can formulate a consistent political theory and achieve it in practice. When, however, men attempt to rush into politics without such a base, the result is that embarrassing conglomeration of impotence, futility, inconsistency and superficiality which is loosely designated today as conservatism.

Rights are moral principles which define and protect a man’s freedom of action,but impose no obligation on other men.

Since there is no such entity as ‘the public,’ since the public is merely a number of individuals, the idea that ‘the public interest’ supersedes private interests and rights can have but one meaning: that the interests and rights of some individuals take precedence over the interests and rights of others.

Since time immemorial and pre-industrial, ‘greed’ has been the accusation hurled at the rich by the concrete-bound illiterates who were unable to conceive of the source of wealth or of the motivation of those who produce it.

The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see.

The men who are not interested in philosophy need it most urgently; they are most helplessly in its power.

The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man’s rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence… The only proper functions of a government are: the police, to protect you from criminals; the army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by others, and to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law.

The only purpose of education is to teach a student how to live his life-by developing his mind and equipping him to deal with reality. The training he needs is theoretical, i.e., conceptual. He has to be taught to think, to understand, to integrate, to prove. He has to be taught the essentials of the knowledge discovered in the past-and he has to be equipped to acquire further knowledge by his own effort.

The purpose of all art is the objectification of values.

The right to agree with others is not a problem in any society; it is the right to disagree that is crucial. It is the institution of private property that protects and implements the right to disagree…

The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow.

The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life.

There are four characteristics which brand a country unmistakably as a dictatorship: one-party rule- executions without trial or with a mock trial, for political offenses- the nationalization or expropriation of private property- and censorship. A country guilty of these outrages forfeits any moral prerogatives, any claim to national rights or sovereignty, and becomes an outlaw.

There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.

There can be no such thing as a political crime under the American system of law. Since an individual has the right to hold and to propagate any ideas he chooses (obviously including political ideas), the government may not infringe his right; it may neither penalize nor reward him for his ideas; it may not take any judicial cognizance whatever of his ideology. By the same principle, the government may not give special leniency to the perpetrator of a crime, on the grounds of the nature of his ideas.

There can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permitted to a mob.

There is no escape from the fact that men have to make choices; so long as men have to make choices, there is no escape from moral values; so long as moral values are at stake, no moral neutrality is possible. To abstain from condemning a torturer, is to become an accessory to the torture and murder of his victims.

There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals. When there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.

They proclaim that every man is entitled to exist without labor and, the laws of reality to the contrary notwithstanding, is entitled to receive his minimum sustenance his food, his clothes, his shelter, with no effort on his part, as his due and his birthright. To receive it, from whom?

To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one’s thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one’s mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.

To deal with men by force is as impractical as to deal with nature by persuasion.

To discuss evil in a manner implying neutrality, is to sanction it.

To fear to face an issue is to believe the worst is true.

To love is to value. Only a rationally selfish man, a man of self-esteem, is capable of love – because he is the only man capable of holding firm, consistent, uncompromising, unbetrayed values. The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone

To preserve one’s mind intact through a modern college education is a test of courage and endurance, but the battle is worth it and the stakes are the highest possible to man: the survival of reason. {from The Comprachicos}

Today, when a concerted effort is made to obliterate this point, it cannot be repeated too often that the Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals- that it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government- that it is not a charter for government power, but a charter of the citizen’s protection against the government.

Unjust laws have to be fought ideologically; they cannot be fought or corrected by means of mere disobedience and futile martyrdom.

We cannot fight against anything, unless we fight for something — and what we must fight for is the supremacy of reason, and a view of man as a rational being.

Wealth is the product of man’s capacity to think.

What they have to discover, what all the efforts of capitalism’s enemies are frantically aimed at hiding, is the fact that capitalism is not merely the ‘practical,’ but the only moral system in history.

Whatever their future, at the dawn of their lives, men seek a noble vision of man’s nature and of life’s potential

When the common good of a society is regarded as something apart from and superior to the individual good of its members, it means that the good of some men takes precedence over the good of others, with those others consigned to the status of sacrificial animals.

When I say capitalism, I mean a full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez faire capitalism, with a separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.

Whether you know the shape of a pebble or the structure of a solar system, the axioms remain the same: that it exists and that you know it.

Words are a lens to focus one’s mind.

I want to see, real, living, and in the hours of my own days, that glory I create as an illusion. I want it real. I want to know that there is someone, somewhere, who wants it, too. Or else what is the use of seeing it, and working, and burning oneself for an impossible vision? A spirit, too, needs fuel. It can run dry.

America is the land of the uncommon man. It is the land where man is free to develop his genius — and to get its just rewards.

-Ayn Rand

Some make it happen, some watch it happen, and some say, “What happened?”
-Anonymous

“Among men, sex sometimes results in intimacy; among women, intimacy sometimes results in sex.”

– Barbara Cartland

Morality is the judgement to distinguish right and wrong, vision to see the truth, courage to act upon it, dedication to that which is good, integrity to stand by the good at any price.”

– Ayn Rand

You know that you can’t give away everything and starve yourself. You’ve forced yourselves to live with undeserved, irrational guilt. Is it ever proper to help another man? No, if he demands it as his right or as a duty that you owe him. Yes, if it’s your own free choice based on your judgment of the value of that person and his struggle. This country wasn’t built by men who sought handouts. In its brilliant youth, this country showed the rest of the world what greatness was possible to Man and what happiness is possible on Earth.

– Ayn Rand

Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.

Evil requires the sanction of the victim.

The right of “the self-determination of nations” applies only to free societies or to societies seeking to establish freedom; it does not apply to dictatorships. Just as an individual’s right of free action does not include the “right” to commit crimes (that is, to violate the rights of others), so the right of a nation to determine its own form of government does not include the right to establish a slave society (that is, to legalize the enslavement of some men by others). There is no such thing as “the right to enslave.” A nation can do it, just as a man can become a criminal—but neither can do it by right.

-Ayn Rand

“If you want to be important – wonderful. If you want to be great – wonderful. But recognize that he who is greatest among you shall be your servant. That’s a new definition of greatness … by giving that definition of greatness, it means that everybody can be great, because everybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You don’t have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve. You don’t have to know Einstein’s theory of relativity to serve. You don’t have to know the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve. You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love. And you can be that servant.”

– Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

“Mostly I hear people say, ‘Why did we attack Iraq?’ for instance. Well, we’re taking on an idea. Nobody questions why we, after Pearl Harbor, attacked Nazi Germany. It was because we were taking on a form of global fascism, we’re doing the same thing now… It seems to me quite obvious that our country and the entire Western World is up against an existential foe that knows exactly what it wants… and we’re behaving like a collapsing empire. Mighty cultures are almost never conquered, they crumble from within. And frankly, I think that a lot of Americans are acting like spoiled brats… For some reason, nobody seems to be talking about who we’re up against, and the sixth century barbarism that they actually represent. These people saw people’s heads off. They enslave women, they genitally mutilate their daughters, they do not behave by any cultural norms that are sensible to us. I’m speaking into a microphone that never could have been a product of their culture, and I’m living in a city where three thousand of my neighbors were killed by thieves of airplanes they never could have built.”

-Frank Miller

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction.”
-Albert Einstein

“Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.”
-Vince Lombardi

“Even minutiae should have a place in our collection, for things of a seemingly trifling nature, when enjoined with others of a more serious cast, may lead to valuable conclusion.”

— George Washington

When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time.  Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?

-G.K. Chesterton

‘The Church does not superstitiously observe days, merely as days, but as memorials of important facts.  Christmas might be kept as well upon one day of the year as another; but there should be a stated day for commemorating the birth of our Saviour, because there is danger that what may be done on any day, will be neglected.”

-Samuel Johnson

“I won’t insult your intelligence by suggesting that you really believe what you just said.”

“Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.”

“Back in the thirties we were told we must collectivize the nation because the people were so poor. Now we are told we must collectivize the nation because the people are so rich.”

“It is not a sign of arrogance for the king to rule. That is what he is there for.”

“You cultivate the essential virtues: high purpose, intelligence, decency, humility, fear of the Lord, and the passion for freedom.”

“I get satisfaction of three kinds. One is creating something, one is being paid for it and one is the feeling that I haven’t just been sitting on my ass all afternoon.”

“I profoundly believe it takes a lot of practice to become a moral slob.”

“Liberals, it has been said, are generous with other peoples’ money, except when it comes to questions of national survival when they prefer to be generous with other people’s freedom and security.”

“The best defense against usurpatory government is an assertive citizenry.”

“I mean to live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never to the authority of political truths arrived at yesterday at the voting booth.”

“I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.”

“The academic community has in it the biggest concentration of alarmists, cranks and extremists this side of the giggle house.”

“One must bear in mind that the expansion of federal activity is a form of eating for politicians.”

– William F. Buckley, Jr.

“Radical Chic, after all, is only radical in Style; in its heart it is part of Society and its traditions – Politics, like Rock, Pop, and Camp, has its uses.”

“A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested.”

“In this country, there’s nothing daring about going against the government.”

“If a man has a talent and cannot use it, he has failed. If he has a talent and uses only half of it, he has partly failed. If he has a talent and learns somehow to use the whole of it, he has gloriously succeeded, and won a satisfaction and a triumph few men ever know.”

“Frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it, I can’t see painting.”

“Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs.”

“Not even the most powerful organs of the press, including Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times, can discover a new artist or certify his work and make it stick. They can only bring you the scores.”

“The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.”

“The surest cure for vanity is loneliness.”

“There are some people who have the quality of richness and joy in them and they communicate it to everything they touch. It is first of all a physical quality; then it is a quality of the spirit.”

– Tom Wolfe

“A school without football is in danger of deteriorating into a medieval study hall.”

“Coaches who can outline plays on a black board are a dime a dozen. The ones who win get inside their player and motivate.”

“Confidence is contagious. So is lack of confidence.”

“Dictionary is the only place that success comes before work. Hard work is the price we must pay for success. I think you can accomplish anything if you’re willing to pay the price.”

“Fatigue makes cowards of us all.”

“Football is like life – it requires perseverance, self-denial, hard work, sacrifice, dedication and respect for authority.”

“I don’t think there’s a punch-line scheduled, is there?”

“I firmly believe that any man’s finest hour, the greatest fulfillment of all that he holds dear, is that moment when he has worked his heart out in a good cause and lies exhausted on the field of battle – victorious.”

“If winning isn’t everything, why do they keep score?”

“If you are not fired with enthusiasm, you will be fired with enthusiasm.”

“If you can accept losing you can’t win. If you can walk you can run. No one is ever hurt. Hurt is in your mind.”

“If you can accept losing, you can’t win.”

“Individual commitment to a group effort – that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.”

“It’s easy to have faith in yourself and have discipline when you’re a winner, when you’re number one. What you got to have is faith and discipline when you’re not a winner.”

“It’s not whether you get knocked down, it’s whether you get up.”

“Leaders aren’t born they are made. And they are made just like anything else, through hard work. And that’s the price we’ll have to pay to achieve that goal, or any goal.”

“Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!”

“Once you agree upon the price you and your family must pay for success, it enables you to ignore the minor hurts, the opponent’s pressure, and the temporary failures.”

“Once you learn to quit, it becomes a habit.”

“People who work together will win, whether it be against complex football defenses, or the problems of modern society.”

“Show me a good loser, and I’ll show you a loser.”

“Some of us will do our jobs well and some will not, but we will be judged by only one thing-the result.”

“Some people try to find things in this game that don’t exist but football is only two things – blocking and tackling.”

“Success demands singleness of purpose.”

“Teamwork is what the Green Bay Packers were all about. They didn’t do it for individual glory. They did it because they loved one another.”

“The achievements of an organization are the results of the combined effort of each individual.”

“The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack of will.”

“The greatest accomplishment is not in never falling, but in rising again after you fall.”

“The harder you work, the harder it is to surrender.”

“The leader can never close the gap between himself and the group. If he does, he is no longer what he must be. He must walk a tightrope between the consent he must win and the control he must exert.”

“The measure of who we are is what we do with what we have.”

“The only place success comes before work is in the dictionary.”

“The price of success is hard work, dedication to the job at hand, and the determination that whether we win or lose, we have applied the best of ourselves to the task at hand.”

“The real glory is being knocked to your knees and then coming back. That’s real glory. That’s the essence of it.”

‘There is no room for second place. There is only one place in my game and that is first place. I have finished second twice in my time at Green Bay and I never want to finish second again.”

“We didn’t lose the game; we just ran out of time.”

“We would accomplish many more things if we did not think of them as impossible.”

“Winners never quit and quitters never win.”

“Winning is not a sometime thing; it’s an all time thing. You don’t win once in a while, you don’t do things right once in a while, you do them right all the time. Winning is habit. Unfortunately, so is losing.”

“Winning is not everything, but wanting to win is.”

-Vince Lombardi

“You can’t spell cliché without ‘Che.’”

-Kyle Smith

“A conservative is a liberal who has been mugged.”

-Unknown

“A liberal is a man too broad-minded to take his own side in a quarrel.”

-Robert Frost

“If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend six hours sharpening my ax”

“Be sure you put your feet in the right place, then stand firm.”

“I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money-power of the country will endeavor to prolong it’s reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”

“Four score and seven years ago, our father brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”

“I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live by the light that I have. I must stand with anybody that stands right, and stand with him while he is right, and part with him when he goes wrong.”

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan – to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

“If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.”

“Among free men there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and those who take such appeal are sure to lose their cause and pay the costs.”

“To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.”

“Truth is generally the best vindication against slander.”

“What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried?”

“Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all.”

“‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’ I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved – I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.”

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”

-Albert Einstein

Remember, there’s what people want to hear, there’s what people want to believe, there’s everything else, then there’s the truth. The truth means responsibility. Which is why everyone dreads it!”

-Unknown

“We didn’t admit it at the time, but practically the whole New Deal was extrapolated from programs that Hoover started”

—Rexford Tugwell, part of FDR’s ‘Brain Trust’

“As soon as A observes something which seems to him to be wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B, and A and B then propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X. Their law always proposes to determine what C shall do for X, or in the better case, what A, B and C shall do for X…What I want to do is look up C. I want to show you what manner of man he is. I call him the Forgotten Man. Perhaps the appellation is not strictly correct. He is the man who never is thought of….He works, he votes, generally he prays-but he always pays…”

-William Graham Sumner, Yale, 1883

You can pass a minimum wage law and go interview the happy employee at Burger King who just had her wage boosted, but you can’t interview the person who doesn’t know she got squeezed out of a job.

-Ted Balaker

“We all have biological predispositions. I’m naturally inclined to have sex with every beautiful woman I see. But that doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do.”

– Rick Warren

“Man has two supreme loyalties — to country and to family. So long as their families are safe, they will defend their country, believing that by their sacrifice they are safeguarding their families also. But even the bonds of patriotism, discipline and comradeship are loosened when the family itself is threatened,”

-Gen. William Sherman, 1864

“We cannot allow ourselves to become a force for oppression of one group in the name of liberating another.”

-Anne Finger

“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”

-C. S. Lewis

The wealth of the country, its capital, its credit, must be saved from the predatory poor as well as the predatory rich, but above all from the predatory politician.

-James J. Hill

“Experience is a great teacher, but submits steep bills.”

-Unknown

““To every complex question there is a simple answer:  Neat, Plausible, and Wrong.”

– H.L. Mencken

“The trouble with traditional American conservatism is that it lacks a naturally cheerful, optimistic disposition. Not only does it lack one, it regards signs of one as evidence of unsoundness, irresponsibility.”

“There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn’t work.”

“I have observed over the years that the unanticipated consequences of social action are always more important, and usually less agreeable, than the intended consequences.”

“What rules the world is idea, because ideas define the way reality is perceived.”

“It requires strength of character to act upon one’s ideas; it requires no less strength of character to resist being seduced by them.”

“An intellectual may be defined as a man who speaks with general authority about a subject on which he has no particular competence.”

“Nostalgia is one of the legitimate and certainly one of the most enduring of human emotions; but the politics of nostalgia is at best distracting, at worst pernicious.”

“The liberal paradigm of regulation and license has led to a society where an 18-year-old girl has the right to public fornication in a pornographic movie — but only if she is paid the minimum wage.”

“Senator McGovern is very sincere when he says that he will try to cut the military budget by 30%. And this is to drive a knife in the heart of Israel… Jews don’t like big military budgets. But it is now an interest of the Jews to have a large and powerful military establishment in the United States… American Jews who care about the survival of the state of Israel have to say, no, we don’t want to cut the military budget, it is important to keep that military budget big, so that we can defend Israel.”

“After all, if you believe that no one was ever corrupted by a book, you also have to believe that no one was ever improved by a book (or a play or a movie). You have to believe, in other words, that all art is morally trivial and that, consequently, all education is morally irrelevant. No one, not even a university professor, really believes that.”[23]

“The enemy of liberal capitalism today is not so much socialism as nihilism.”

“It is ironic to watch the churches, including large sections of my own religion, surrendering to the spirit of modernity at the very moment when modernity itself is undergoing a kind of spiritual collapse….”

“Young people, especially, are looking for religion so desperately that they are inventing new ones. They should not have to invent new ones; the old religions are pretty good.”

“Power breeds responsibilities, in international affairs as in domestic — or even private. To dodge or disclaim these responsibilities is one form of the abuse of power.”

“The danger facing American Jews today is not that Christians want to persecute them but that Christians want to marry them.”

-Irving Kristol

“I am a pessimist by nature, which is why I have spent my life as a journalist instead of trying to be a leader, which requires optimism.”

-Robert Novak

“It is almost impossible to distinguish a politician from a gangster.”

-Will Durant, 1931

“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.”

-Reinhold Niebuhr

“Above these [citizens] an immense tutelary power is elevated, which alone takes charge of assuring their enjoyments and watching over their fate. It is absolute, detailed, far-seeing, and mild. It would resemble paternal power if, like that, it had for its object to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood; it likes citizens to enjoy themselves provided that they think only of enjoying themselves. It willingly works for their happiness; but it wants to be the unique agent and sole arbiter of that; it provides for their security, foresees and secures their needs, facilitates their pleasures, conducts their principal affairs, directs their industry, regulates their estates, divides their inheritances; can it not take away from them entirely the trouble of thinking and the pain of living?  Subjection in small affairs manifests itself every day and makes itself felt without distinction by all citizens. It does not make them desperate, but it constantly thwarts them and brings them to renounce the use of their wills. Thus little by little, it extinguishes their spirits and enervates their souls.

So it is that every day it renders the employment of free will less useful and more rare; it confines the action of the will in a smaller space and little by little steals the very use of free will from each citizen. Equality has prepared men for all these things: it has disposed them to tolerate them and often even to regard them as a benefit.

Thus, after taking each individual by turns in its powerful hands and kneading him as it likes, the sovereign extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.”

-Alexis De Tocqueville

“The salvation of a single soul is more important than the production or preservation of all the epics and tragedies in the world.”

“You don’t have a soul; you are a soul.  You have a body.”

“If I discover within myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world”

“The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That’s the deal.”

“There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, “All right, then, have it your way”

“We are all a little weird and life’s a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love.”

“Romance is thinking about your significant other, when you are supposed to be thinking about something else.”

-C.S. Lewis

“The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants.”

-Albert Camus

“As a rule, the mind, residing in a body that has become weakened by pampering, is also weak, and where there is no strength of mind there can be no strength of soul.”

-Mahatma Gandhi

“Merely having an open mind is nothing; the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.”

-Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“This book contains the mind of God, the state of man, the way of salvation, the doom of sinners and the happiness of believers. Its doctrines are holy, its precepts are binding, its histories are true, and its decisions are immutable. Read it to be wise, believe it to be safe, and practice it to be holy. It contains light to direct you, food to support you, and comfort to cheer you. It is the travelers map, the pilgrims staff, the pilots compass, the soldiers sword, and the Christians character. Here paradise is restored, Heaven opened, and the gates of hell disclosed. Christ is its grand object, our good is its design, and the glory of God its end. It should fill the memory, rule the heart, and guide the feet. Read it slowly, frequently, and prayerfully. It is given you in life and will be opened in the judgement and will be remembered forever. It involves the highest responsibility, will reward the greatest labor, and will condemn all who trifle with its sacred contents.”

-Author Unknown

“…the subject which will be of most importance politically is Mass Psychology. … The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated. … As yet there is only one country which has succeeded in creating this politician’s paradise.”

– Bertrand Russell, Impact of Science on Society, 1960.

“Remember, you were also unproductive once – as a child and will become unproductive again when you retire.”
-L Raj, on Objectivism

“You have an ear infection.  Your coworkers infected it with negativity, pessimism, discouragement, and fear.”

-Randy Glasbergen

“Be careful what you listen to because it will affect what you say.  Be careful what you say because it will affect what you do.  Be careful what you do because your actions will become your habits.  Be careful what your habits are because they will become your destiny.”

-Unknown

A battle lost or won is easily described, understood, and appreciated, but the moral growth of a great nation requires reflection, as well as observation, to appreciate it.

A gentleman will not insult me, and no man not a gentleman can insult me.

A little learning, indeed, may be a dangerous thing, but the want of learning is a calamity to any people.

A man’s character always takes its hue, more or less, from the form and color of things about him.

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed.

Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.

I am a Republican, a black, dyed in the wool Republican, and I never intend to belong to any other party than the party of freedom and progress.

I didn’t know I was a slave until I found out I couldn’t do the things I wanted.

I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.

I recognize the Republican party as the sheet anchor of the colored man’s political hopes and the ark of his safety.

It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.

It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.

Man’s greatness consists in his ability to do and the proper application of his powers to things needed to be done.

People might not get all they work for in this world, but they must certainly work for all they get.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

Slaves are generally expected to sing as well as to work.

The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous.

The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppose.

The soul that is within me no man can degrade.

The thing worse than rebellion is the thing that causes rebellion.

The white man’s happiness cannot be purchased by the black man’s misery.

Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.

To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.

We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and the future.

What to the Slave is the 4th of July?

When men sow the wind it is rational to expect that they will reap the whirlwind.

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.
-Frederick Douglass

“Associate yourself with people of good quality, for it is better to be alone than in bad company.”

“At the bottom of education, at the bottom of politics, even at the bottom of religion, there must be for our race economic independence.”

“Character is power.”

“Character, not circumstances, makes the man.”

Dignify and glorify common labor. It is at the bottom of life that we must begin, not at the top.

Excellence is to do a common thing in an uncommon way.

Few things can help an individual more than to place responsibility on him, and to let him know that you trust him.

I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has had to overcome while trying to succeed.

I let no man drag me down so low as to make me hate him.

I shall allow no man to belittle my soul by making me hate him.

I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.

If you can’t read, it’s going to be hard to realize dreams.

If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.

No greater injury can be done to any youth than to let him feel that because he belongs to this or that race he will be advanced in life regardless of his own merits or efforts.

No man, who continues to add something to the material, intellectual and moral well-being of the place in which he lives, is left long without proper reward.

No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.

Nothing ever comes to one, that is worth having, except as a result of hard work.

One man cannot hold another man down in the ditch without remaining down in the ditch with him.

Success in life is founded upon attention to the small things rather than to the large things; to the every day things nearest to us rather than to the things that are remote and uncommon.

Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome.

The individual who can do something that the world wants done will, in the end, make his way regardless of his race.

There are two ways of exerting one’s strength: one is pushing down, the other is pulling up.

There is no power on earth that can neutralize the influence of a high, simple and useful life.

To hold a man down, you have to stay down with him.

We do not want the men of another color for our brothers-in-law, but we do want them for our brothers.

We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

We must reinforce argument with results.

You can’t hold a man down without staying down with him.

-Booker T. Washington

“You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.  You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.  You cannot help little men by tearing down big men.  You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.  You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.  You cannot establish sound security on borrowed money.  You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.  You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than you earn.  You cannot build character and courage by destroying men’s initiative and independence.  And you cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they can and should do for themselves.”

The “Seven National Crimes are:  I don’t think, I don’t know, I don’t care, I am too busy, I leave well enough alone, I have no time to read and find out, I am not interested.

-William J.H. Boetcker

“I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.”

“There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.”

-John Adams

“There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose.”

-John Kenneth Galbraith

“The trouble with socialism is socialism. The trouble with capitalism is capitalists.”

-Willi Schlamm

It’s better to spank a child with a belt at the age of 4 than have a police officer explain why a taser was required at the age of 24.

-Anjuan Simmons

“Those who don’t take risks take what’s left over.”

-Bobby Britt

“We’re all pretty bizarre. Some of us are just better at hiding it, that’s all.”

– Andrew Clark (The Breakfast Club)

When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it. But when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind: it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be.

–Lord Kelvin, 19th-century British physicist

“Someone’s sitting under a tree today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.” –Warren Buffett

“Neither Interest, I fear, display that Sobriety of Manners, Temperance, or Frugality—among other manly Virtues—which once were the Glory and Strength of our Christian Sparta on the Bay…”

-Samuel Adams, on the Federalists and Anti-Federalists

“What makes a good newspaperman? The answer is easy. He knows everything. He is aware not only of what goes on in the world today, but his brain is a repository of the accumulated wisdom of the ages. “He hates lies and meanness and sham, but keeps his temper. He is loyal to his paper and to what he looks upon as his profession; whether it is a profession or merely a craft, he resents attempts to debase it. “When he dies, a lot of people are sorry, and some of them remember him for several days.” –Stanley Walker

I’m not an atheist and I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God.

—Albert Einstein

The critical habit of thought, if usual in society, will pervade all its mores, because it is a way of taking up the problems of life. Men educated in it cannot be stampeded by stump orators … They are slow to believe. They can hold things as possible or probable in all degrees, without certainty and without pain. They can wait for evidence and weigh evidence, uninfluenced by the emphasis or confidence with which assertions are made on one side or the other. They can resist appeals to their dearest prejudices and all kinds of cajolery. Education in the critical faculty is the only education of which it can be truly said that it makes good citizens.

~ William Graham Sumner, Folkways, 1906

[Critical thinking is a] desire to seek, patience to doubt, fondness to meditate, slowness to assert, readiness to consider, carefulness to dispose and set in order; and hatred for every kind of imposture.

~ Francis Bacon (1605)

“Consider a postage stamp. It sticks to the same thing until it gets to where it needs to go.”

-Josh Billings

“Build A Better Mousetrap And The World Will Beat A Path To Your Door.”

-Henry David Thoreau

DNA is a code.  All codes we know the origin of are designed.  DNA was designed. Therefore God exists.

-Perry Marshall

The athiests’ dilemma:  DNA is a language; show me a language that was not created by a mind.”

-Perry Marshall

“Thank you for your very amusing review. After reading it, in fact, my brother George and I cried all the way to the bank.”

-Liberace

“The lost children of Bastiat have traded a monarchy for a union-made straitjacket.”

-Rachel Marsden

An American contemporary encourages men and youths to fight manfully the battle of life by giving the following examples from American’history :— Peter Cooper failed in making hats, failed as a cabinet-maker, locomotive builder, and grocer, but a 8 often as. he failed he ” tried again,” until he could stand upon his feet alone, then crowned his victory by giving a million dollars to help the poor boys in times to come. Horace Gree’ey tried three or four lines of business before he founded the Tribune, and made it worth a million dollars.  Patrick Henry failed at everything he undertook until he made himself the ornament of his age and nation. The founder of the New York Herald kept on failing and sinking money for ten years, and then made one of the most profitable newspapers on earth. Stephtn A. Douglas made dinner-tables and bedsteads and bureaus many a long year before he made himself a giant on the floor of Congress. . General Grant failed at everything except smoking cigars; he* learned to tan hides, but could not sell leather enough to purchase a pair of breeches. A dozen years ago “he brought up “on the top of a wood-pile “teaming it” to town for dOdols. a month, and yet he is at the head of a great nation.

-Thames Star, 1875

“Don’t solve peoples’ problems until you figure out why they enjoy having them.”
-Glenn Livingston

“Leisure is the mother of philosophy.”

-Thomas Hobbes

If we knew exactly what animal life was like before the fall into sin and knew what nature was like before the law of entropy invaded it, we would already be living in heaven.

-Walter Lang

Just as the constant increase of entropy is the basic law of the universe, so it is the basic law of life to be ever more highly structured and to struggle against entropy.

-Vaclav Havel

“Unless we make this an attractive state to do business in and to live in, people are going to continue to move out,” he said. “We have to reverse that trend.”

-Michael Bloomberg

A school without football is in danger of deteriorating into a medieval study hall.

Coaches who can outline plays on a black board are a dime a dozen. The ones who win get inside their player and motivate.

Confidence is contagious. So is lack of confidence.

The dictionary is the only place that success comes before work. Hard work is the price we must pay for success. I think you can accomplish anything if you’re willing to pay the price.

Fatigue makes cowards of us all.

Football is like life – it requires perseverance, self-denial, hard work, sacrifice, dedication and respect for authority.

I firmly believe that any man’s finest hour, the greatest fulfillment of all that he holds dear, is that moment when he has worked his heart out in a good cause and lies exhausted on the field of battle – victorious.

If it doesn’t matter who wins or loses, then why do they keep score?

If you aren’t fired with enthusiasm, you will be fired with enthusiasm.

If you can accept losing, you can’t win.

Individual commitment to a group effort – that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.

It’s easy to have faith in yourself and have discipline when you’re a winner, when you’re number one. What you got to have is faith and discipline when you’re not a winner.

Leaders are made, they are not born. They are made by hard effort, which is the price which all of us must pay to achieve any goal that is worthwhile.

Once you agree upon the price you and your family must pay for success, it enables you to ignore the minor hurts, the opponent’s pressure, and the temporary failures.

People who work together will win, whether it be against complex football defenses, or the problems of modern society.

Practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect.

Show me a good loser, and I’ll show you a loser.

Some of us will do our jobs well and some will not, but we will be judged by only one thing-the result.

Some people try to find things in this game that don’t exist but football is only two things – blocking and tackling.

Success demands singleness of purpose.

Teamwork is what the Green Bay Packers were all about. They didn’t do it for individual glory. They did it because they loved one another.

The achievements of an organization are the results of the combined effort of each individual.

The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack of will.

The greatest accomplishment is not in never falling, but in rising again after you fall.

The harder you work, the harder it is to surrender.

The leader can never close the gap between himself and the group. If he does, he is no longer what he must be. He must walk a tightrope between the consent he must win and the control he must exert.

The measure of who we are is what we do with what we have.

The price of success is hard work, dedication to the job at hand, and the determination that whether we win or lose, we have applied the best of ourselves to the task at hand.

The real glory is being knocked to your knees and then coming back. That’s real glory. That’s the essence of it.

There is no room for second place. There is only one place in my game and that is first place. I have finished second twice in my time at Green Bay and I never want to finish second again.

We didn’t lose the game; we just ran out of time.

We would accomplish many more things if we did not think of them as impossible.

Winners never quit and quitters never win.

Winning is habit. Unfortunately, so is losing.

Winning isn’t everything, but the will to win is everything.

-Vince Lombardi

“A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg – or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God; or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

-C.S. Lewis

“I am an historian, I am not a believer, but I must confess as a historian that this penniless preacher from Nazareth is irrevocably the very center of history. Jesus Christ is easily the most dominant figure in all history.”

-H.G. Wells

MY PROMISE TO MY CHILDREN: I will stalk you, flip out on you, lecture you, drive you crazy, be your worst nightmare, embarrass you in front of your friends, & hunt you down like a bloodhound..because I LOVE YOU! When you understand that, I will know you are a responsible adult. You will NEVER find someone who loves you, prays for you, cares about you, & worries about you more than your MOM!

-Unknown

“Few discoveries are more irritating than those which expose the pedigree of ideas”

-Lord Acton

“What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it his heaven”

-F. Holderlin

“We were the first to assert that the more complicated the forms assumed by civilization, the more restricted the freedom of the individual must become”

-Benito Mussolini

“”The statesman who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals would not only load himself with most unnecessary attention but assume an authority which could safely be trusted to no council and senate whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of man who have folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it. ”

As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce.

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.

Labour was the first price, the original purchase – money that was paid for all things. It was not by gold or by silver, but by labour, that all wealth of the world was originally purchased.

The theory that can absorb the greatest number of facts, and persist in doing so, generation after generation, through all changes of opinion and detail, is the one that must rule all observation.

To feel much for others and little for ourselves; to restrain our selfishness and exercise our benevolent affections, constitute the perfection of human nature.

Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience.

What can be added to the happiness of a man who is in health, out of debt, and has a clear conscience?

The real and effectual discipline which is exercised over a workman is that of his customers. It is the fear of losing their employment which restrains his frauds and corrects his negligence.

Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.

-Adam Smith

“Who will deny that a world in which the wealthy are powerful is still a better world than one in which only the already powerful can acquire wealth?”

A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers.

If most people are not willing to see the difficulty, this is mainly because, consciously or unconsciously, they assume that it will be they who will settle these questions for the others, and because they are convinced of their own capacity to do this.

‘Emergencies’ have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.

Even the striving for equality by means of a directed economy can result only in an officially enforced inequality – an authoritarian determination of the status of each individual in the new hierarchical order.

Freedom granted only when it is known beforehand that its effects will be beneficial is not freedom.

I have arrived at the conviction that the neglect by economists to discuss seriously what is really the crucial problem of our time is due to a certain timidity about soiling their hands by going from purely scientific questions into value questions.

I regard it in fact as the great advantage of the mathematical technique that it allows us to describe, by means of algebraic equations, the general character of a pattern even where we are ignorant of the numerical values which will determine its particular manifestation.

If we wish to preserve a free society, it is essential that we recognize that the desirability of a particular object is not sufficient justification for the use of coercion.

It can hardly be denied that such a demand quite arbitrarily limits the facts which are to be admitted as possible causes of the events which occur in the real world.

It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only those individuals know.

It seems to me that socialists today can preserve their position in academic economics merely by the pretense that the differences are entirely moral questions about which science cannot decide.

Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one’s government is not necessarily to secure freedom.

This means that to entrust to science – or to deliberate control according to scientific principles – more than scientific method can achieve may have deplorable effects.

We must face the fact that the preservation of individual freedom is incompatible with a full satisfaction of our views of distributive justice.

“The problem of monopoly would not be difficult as it is if it were only the capitalist monopolist whom we have to fight.”

-F.A. Hayek

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere, insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them.  But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.  And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

-Alexander Solzhenitsyn

“Technological innovation and increasing productivity can forestall declining marginal returns only so long.  A new energy subsidy will at some point be essential.”

“The Empire that emerged under Diocletian and Constantine was administered by a government that was larger, more complex, more highly organized, and that commanded larger and more powerful military forces.  It taxed its citizens more heavily, conscripted their labor, and regulated their lives and their occupations.  It was a coercive, omnipresent, all-powerful organization that subdued individual interests and levied all resources toward one overarching goal:  the survival of the State.”

-Joseph Tainter,                                                                                                                                              The Collapse of Complex Societies

“Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.”

— G.K. Chesterton

“I want to be a liberal but reality keeps getting in the way.”

-Unknown

“The problems facing us, faced by all mankind engaged in Democracy, may seem complex, or indeed insolvable, and we, in despair, may revert to a state of wish fulfillment-a state of “belief” in the power of the various experts presenting themselves as a cure for our indecision. But this is a sort of Stockholm Syndrome. Here, the captives, unable to bear the anxiety occasioned by their powerlessness, suppress it by identifying with their captors.

This is the essence of Leftist thought. It is a devolution from reason to “belief,” in an effort to stave off a feeling of powerlessness. And if government is Good, it is a logical elaboration that more government power is Better. But the opposite is apparent both to anyone who has ever had to deal with Government and, I think, to any dispassionate observer.

It is in sympathy with the first and in the hope of enlarging the second group that I have written this book.”

-David Mamet, The Secret Knowledge

Growing interdependency has given larger authority to those in power. Those in power are granted wider freedoms in their rule, and everyone else must acquiesce or attempt to gain positions of power to survive. As the close hardens, society sheds its free and democratic characteristics and takes on a more hierarchic or statist appearance.

-Eric Robert Morse

“Preach the gospel at all times and when necessary use words.”

-St. Francis of Assisi

“Relativity applies to physics, not ethics.”

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking when we created them.”

“Life is like riding a bicycle, to keep balance you must keep moving.”

“If you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

-Albert Einstein

“I have a really interesting political point of view, and it’s not always something I say too loud at dinner tables here,” the star once said. “But you can’t go from a $2,000-a-night suite at La Mirage to a penitentiary, and really understand it, and come out a liberal.”

Robert Downey, Jr.

“The victor is not victorious if the vanquished does not consider himself so”

-Ennius

“When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.”

-P.J. O’Rourke

Interviewer: You know, you want to be better than everybody else? You want to be the best, the funniest?  Brand: You cannot define yourself in reference to other external coordinates. You must define yourself internally with your relationship with a higher entity. Think of yourself as a manifestation of some higher thing, some higher frequency. This is the visible realization. And you know that because you can’t see atoms, can you? And you certainly can’t see the forces that hold atoms together. There, in the micro-quantum world, Richard, lie the answers to everything. We can’t understand it with our logical, rational minds, but we feel it intuitively. Get yourself in alignment with that stuff and you beam like the sun.  Interviewer: Jeepers creepers.  Brand: Yeah, man.

-Russel Brand

I think we’ve been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it’s the Government’s job to cope with it. “I have a problem, I’ll get a grant.” “I’m homeless, the Government must house me.” They’re casting their problems on society. And you know, there’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It’s our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbors. People have got their entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There is no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation.”

-Margaret Thatcher

Hey America… yeah you. Here’s the deal. The military doesn’t have a rape or sexual harassment problem. Do you know who does? You do. That’s right it’s societies problem. The military didn’t make these guys sexual predators and deviants… you did. Bad parenting, broken homes, self involved people, who lack a moral compass. You created these disconnected and disaffected dirtbags. Unfortunately, it’s the military that is being held accountable for your failures… just like always.

-Rich Ince

“A vice in common can be the ground of a friendship but not a virtue in common. X and Y may be friends because they are both drunkards or womanizers but, if they are both sober and chaste, they are friends for some other reason.”

– W. H. Auden

The men who try to do something and fail are infinitely better than those who try to do nothing and succeed.

-Lloyd Jones

[Aaron] Hernandez saw his athletic gifts as a platform to represent where he was from, not where he hoped to go.

-Jason Whitlock

“Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.” ~ Albert Camus

“A system cannot fail those it was never built to protect”

-Rihanna

“Rich People plan for three generations. Poor people plan for Saturday night”

―Gloria Steinem

“In every encounter we either give life or we drain it; there is no neutral exchange.”

-Brennan Manning

“A woman is not a fish and a man is not a bicycle.”

Good is the enemy of Excellent. Talent is not necessary for Excellence.
Persistence is necessary for Excellence. And Persistence is a Decision.

The doorstep to the temple of wisdom is the knowledge of one’s own ignorance. -Benjamin Franklin

-When you come to a fork in the road, take it.
-You can observe a lot by just watching.
-It ain’t over till it’s over.
-It’s like déjà vu all over again.
-No one goes there nowadays, it’s too crowded.
-Baseball is 90% mental and the other half is physical.
-A nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore.
-Always go to other people’s funerals, otherwise they won’t come to yours.
-We made too many wrong mistakes.
-Congratulations. I knew the record would stand until it was broken.
-You better cut the pizza in four pieces because I’m not hungry enough to eat six.
-You wouldn’t have won if we’d beaten you.
-I usually take a two-hour nap from one to four.
-Never answer an anonymous letter.
-Slump? I ain’t in no slump… I just ain’t hitting.
-How can you think and hit at the same time?
-The future ain’t what it used to be.
-I tell the kids, somebody’s gotta win, somebody’s gotta lose. Just don’t fight about it. Just try to get better.
-It gets late early out here.
-If the people don’t want to come out to the ballpark, nobody’s going to stop them.
-We have deep depth.
-Pair up in threes.
-Why buy good luggage, you only use it when you travel.
-You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you are going, because you might not get there.
-All pitchers are liars or crybabies.
-Even Napoleon had his Watergate.
-Bill Dickey is learning me his experience.
-He hits from both sides of the plate. He’s amphibious.
-It was impossible to get a conversation going, everybody was talking too much.
-I can see how he (Sandy Koufax) won twenty-five games. What I don’t understand is how he lost five.
-I don’t know (if they were men or women fans running naked across the field). They had bags over their heads.
-I’m a lucky guy and I’m happy to be with the Yankees. And I want to thank everyone for making this night necessary.
-I’m not going to buy my kids an encyclopedia. Let them walk to school like I did.
-In baseball, you don’t know nothing.
-I never blame myself when I’m not hitting. I just blame the bat and if it keeps up, I change bats. After all, if I know it isn’t my fault that I’m not hitting, how can I get mad at myself?
-I never said most of the things I said.
-It ain’t the heat, it’s the humility.
-If you ask me anything I don’t know, I’m not going to answer.
-I wish everybody had the drive he (Joe DiMaggio) had. He never did anything wrong on the field. I’d never seen him dive for a ball, everything was a chest-high catch, and he never walked off the field.
-So I’m ugly. I never saw anyone hit with his face.
-Take it with a grin of salt.
-(On the 1973 Mets) We were overwhelming underdogs.
-The towels were so thick there I could hardly close my suitcase.
-Little League baseball is a very good thing because it keeps the parents off the streets.
-Mickey Mantle was a very good golfer, but we weren’t allowed to play golf during the season; only at spring training.
-You don’t have to swing hard to hit a home run. If you got the timing, it’ll go.
-I’m lucky. Usually you’re dead to get your own museum, but I’m still alive to see mine.
-If I didn’t make it in baseball, I won’t have made it workin’. I didn’t like to work.
-If the world were perfect, it wouldn’t be.
-A lot of guys go, ‘Hey, Yog, say a Yogi-ism.’ I tell ’em, ‘I don’t know any.’ They want me to make one up. I don’t make ’em up. I don’t even know when I say it. They’re the truth. And it is the truth. I don’t know.

-Yogi Berra

“To overdraw its evils is a simple impossibility … We passed a slave woman shot or stabbed through the body and lying on the path. [Onlookers] said an Arab who passed early that morning had done it in anger at losing the price he had given for her, because she was unable to walk any longer. We passed a woman tied by the neck to a tree and dead … We came upon a man dead from starvation … The strangest disease I have seen in this country seems really to be broken heartedness, and it attacks free men who have been captured and made slaves.”

-David Livingstone

The current scenario of the origin of life is about as likely as the assemblage of a 747 by a tornado whirling through a junkyard.

-Frederick Hoyle, creater of the term “The Big Bang”

“An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.”

-Francis Crick, Co-discoverer of the DNA helix

“I think it quite possible that life is so extremely improbable that nothing can “explain” why it originated.”

-Karl Popper, Philosopher of Science

“The very best Miller-Urey chemistry, as we have seen, does not take us very far along the path to a living organism.  A mixture of simple chemicals, even one enriched with a few amino acides, no more resembles a bacterium than a small pile of real and nonsense words, each written on an individual scrap of paper, resembles the complete works of Shakespeare.”

-Robert Shapiro

“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”

― Galilei, Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina

“As a blind man has no idea of colors, so we have no idea of the manner by which the all-wise God perceives and understands all things.”

—Isaac Newton

For while comets move in very eccentric orbs in all manner of positions, blind fate could never make all the planets move one and the same way in orbs concentric, some inconsiderable irregularities excepted which may have arisen from the mutual actions of comets and planets on one another, and which will be apt to increase, till this system wants a reformation.

-Isaac Newton

This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent Being. […] This Being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all; and on account of his dominion he is wont to be called “Lord God” παντοκρατωρ [pantokratōr], or “Universal Ruler”. […] The Supreme God is a Being eternal, infinite, [and] absolutely perfect.

-Isaac Newton

“Human DNA is like a computer program but far,far more advanced than any software ever created.”

-Bill Gates

The human genome consists of all the DNA of our species, the hereditary code of life. This newly revealed text was 3 billion letters long, and written in a strange and cryptographic four-letter code. Such is the amazing complexity of the information carried within each cell of the human body, that a live reading of that code at a rate of one letter per second would take thirty-one years, even if reading continued day and night. Printing these letters out in regular font size on normal bond paper and binding them all together would result in a tower the height of the Washington Monument.

-Francis Collins

“We conclude that God is known first through Nature, and then again, more particularly, by doctrine; by Nature in His works, and by doctrine in His revealed word.”

-Galileo, quoting Tertullian

“The origin of life is unsolvable as a scientific problem.”

-Hugh Yockey, Information Theorist and Member of the Manhattan Project

Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules; and history records that whenever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed, if not annihilated. But orthodoxy is the bourbon of the world of thought, it learns not, neither can it forget.

-Thomas Huxley, 1860

For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.

-Robert Jastrow, Director of NASA Goddard Institute, 1978

“The leap from chemistry to biology requires something in addition to chance and law, because of the fundamentally informational character of life.  Law produces the same simple pattern over and over again—highly ordered, repetitive sequences like crystals or snowflakes.  Chance produces disordered, unspecific sequences that show no consistent patterns.  No combination of chance and law can do the job because the genetic information, like the information in Windows 98 or the Bible, is both highly specified and random (ie., not repetitive).

-Phillip E. Johnson, Dallas Willard

“Men became scientific because they expected law in nature and they expected law in nature because they believed in a lawgiver.”

-C.S. Lewis

“The meaning of the message will not be found in the physics and chemistry of the paper and ink.”

-Roger Sperry

“Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.”

-Frank Herbert

“There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments, and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance – that principle is contempt prior to investigation.”

― William Paley

“Let’s say you’re walking around and you find a watch on the ground. As you examine it, you marvel at the intricately complex interweaving of its parts, a means to an end. Surely you wouldn’t think this marvel would have come about by itself. The watch must have a maker. Just as the watch has such complex means to an end, so does nature to a much greater extent. Just look at the complexity of the human eye. Thus we must conclude that nature has a maker too.”

― William Paley

“The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution.”

-Stephen Jay Gould

“Most families, orders, classes, and phyla appear rather suddenly in the fossil record, often without anatomically intermediate forms smoothly interlinking evolutionarily derived descendant taxa with their presumed ancestors.”

-Niles Eldredge

“Scientists oft times have the greatest faith in a higher power.  The more they dig into established facts and figures, the more they marvel about the mystery of it all.”

-Malcolm Forbes

“Failure is success if we learn from it.”

-Malcolm Forbes

“Educations purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.”

-Malcolm Forbes

“When things are bad, we take comfort in the thought that they could always get worse.  And when they are, we find hope in the thought that things are so bad they have to get better.”

-Malcolm Forbes

“Too many people overvalue what they are not and undervalue what they are.”

-Malcolm Forbes

“…probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed by the Creator.”

-Charles Darwin

“We are what we repeatedly do.  Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

“Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.”

“I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies; for the hardest victory is over self.”

“The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.”

“Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.”

“The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead.”

“All men by nature desire knowledge.”

-Aristotle

Tough times never last, but tough people do.

-Robert H. Schuller

“You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist.”

-Indira Ghandi

If you can not measure it, you can not improve it.

There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement. (Misattributed)

If you study science deep enough and long enough, it will force you to believe in God.

Can you measure it? Can you express it in figures? Can you make a model of it? If not, your theory is apt to be based more upon imagination than upon knowledge.

In science there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting.

When you are face to face with a difficulty, you are up against a discovery.

Christianity without the cross is nothing. The cross was the fitting close of a life of rejection, scorn and defeat. But in no true sense have these things ceased or changed. Jesus is still He whom man despiseth, and the rejected of men. The world has never admired Jesus, for moral courage is yet needed in every one of its high places by him who would “confess” Christ. The “offense” of the cross, therefore, has led men in all ages to endeavor to be rid of it, and to deny that it is the power of God in the world.

Large increases in cost with questionable increases in performance can be tolerated only in race horses and fancy women.

When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it.

To measure is to know.

We only know God in His works, but we are forced by science to admit and to believe with absolute confidence in a Directive Power-in an influence other than physical, or dynamical, or electrical forces.

If you cannot measure it, then it is not science.

Accurate and minute measurement seems to the non-scientific imagination, a less lofty and dignified work than looking for something new. But nearly all the grandest discoveries of science have been but the rewards of accurate measurement and patient long-continued labour in the minute sifting of numerical results.

Suppose that you could mark the molecules in a glass of water; then pour the contents of the glass into the ocean and stir the latter throughly so as to distribute the marked molecules uniformly throughout the seven seas; if then you took a glass of water anywhere out of the ocean, you would find in it about a hundred of your marked molecules.

Mathematics is the only true metaphysics.

Mathematics is the only good metaphysics.

The more thoroughly I conduct scientific research, the more I believe that science excludes atheism.

The only census of the senses, so far as I am aware, that ever before made them more than five, was the Irishman’s reckoning of seven senses. I presume the Irishman’s seventh sense was common sense; and I believe that the possession of that virtue by my countrymen-I speak as an Irishman.

I need scarcely say that the beginning and maintenance of life on earth is absolutely and infinitely beyond the range of all sound speculation in dynamical science. The only contribution of dynamics to theoretical biology is absolute negation of automatic commencement or automatic maintenance of life.

Fourier is a mathematical poem.

I have no satisfaction in formulas unless I feel their numerical magnitude.

I can never satisfy myself until I can make a mechanical model of a thing. If I can make a mechanical model, I can understand it. As long as I cannot make a mechanical model all the way through I cannot understand.

-Lord Kelvin, a “Father of Modern Physics”

“Spectacular achievement is always preceded by unspectacular preparation.”

-Robert Schuller

“The family is not a fad.  In it there is a supernatural sense of belonging.”

-Stefano Gabbana

“It is this strong biblical tradition which has been the foundation of the freedom struggle for the past three centuries.’

-Martin Luther King Jr.