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| Edward Abbey | A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. | |
| Henry Brooks Adams | Politics, as a practise, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds. | |
| Samuel Adams | The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil Constitution,
are worth defending at all hazards;
and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks.
We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors:
they purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure
and blood, and transmitted them to us with care and diligence.
It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation,
enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us
by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them
by the artifices of false and designing men. | |
| Samuel Adams | If ever a time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in Government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin. | |
| Samuel Adams | And that the said Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press, or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms; or to raise standing armies, unless necessary for the defense of the United States, or of some one or more of them; or to prevent the people from petitioning, in a peaceable and orderly manner, the federal legislature, for a redress of grievances; or to subject the people to unreasonable searches and seizures of their persons, papers or possessions. | |
| Samuel Adams | All might be free if they valued freedom, and defended it as they should. | |
| Publius Terentius Afer | Charity begins at home. | |
| American Library Association | The freedom to read is essential to our democracy. It is continuously under attack… These actions apparently arise from a view that our national tradition of free expression is no longer valid; that censorship and suppression are needed to avoid the subversion of politics and the corruption of morals. | |
| Fisher Ames | I am commonly opposed to those who modestly assume the rank of champions of liberty, and make a very patriotic noise about the people. It is the stale artifice which has duped the world a thousand times, and yet, though detected, it is still successful. I love liberty as well as anybody. I am proud of it, as the true title of our people to distinction above others; but ... I would guard it by making the laws strong enough to protect it. | |
| Rev. Francis Bellamy | I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands;
one Nation, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all. | |
| Ezra Taft Benson | If America is destroyed, it may be by Americans who salute the flag, sing the national anthem, march in patriotic parades, cheer Fourth of July speakers – normally good Americans, but Americans who fail to comprehend what is required to keep our country strong and free, Americans who have been lulled away into a false security. | |
| Albert J. Beveridge | Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so. | |
| Ambrose Bierce | Diplomacy: The patriotic art of lying for one's country. | |
| Napoleon Bonaparte | When a government is dependent upon bankers for money, they and not the leaders of the government control the situation, since the hand that gives is above the hand that takes. Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole object is gain. | |
| Justice Louis D. Brandeis | The constitutional right of free speech has been declared to be the same in peace and war. In peace, too, men may differ widely as to what loyalty to our country demands, and an intolerant majority, swayed by passion or by fear, may be prone in the future, as it has been in the past, to stamp as disloyal opinions with which it disagrees. | |
| Tom Braun | If you think we are free today, you know nothing about tyranny and even less about freedom. | |
| Edmund Burke | They defend their errors as if they were defending their inheritance. | |
| George W. Bush | Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September the 11th; malicious lies that attempt to shift the blame away from the terrorists, themselves, away from the guilty. | |
| Major General Smedley Darlington Butler | My mental faculties remained in suspended animation
while I obeyed the orders of the higher-ups.
This is typical with everyone in the military. | |
| Gaius Julius Caesar | Beware of the leader, who strikes the war drum in order to transfer the citizens into patriotic glow, patriotism is indeed a double-sided sword. It makes the blood so boldly, like it constricts the intellect. And if the striking of the war drum reached a fiebrige height and the blood is cooking and hating, and the intellect is dismissed, the leader doesn't need to reject the citizens rights. The citizens, cought by anxiety and blinded through patriotism, will subordinate all their rights to the leader and this even with happy courage. Why do I know that? I know it, because this is, what I did. And I am Gajus Julius Cäsar. | |
| Pablo Casals | The love of one's country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border? | |
| Edwin Hubbel Chapin | No more duty can be urged upon those who are entering the great theater of life than simple loyalty to their best convictions. | |
| Dr. G. Brock Chisolm | To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men, their individualism, loyalty to family traditions, national patriotism and religious dogmas. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | Never give in. Never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | Today we may say aloud before an awe-struck world: 'We are still masters of our fate. We are still captain of our souls.' | |
| Tom Clark | Those who do not believe in the ideology of the United States, shall not be allowed to live in the United States. | |
| Grover Cleveland | The best results in the operation of a government wherein every citizen has a share largely depend upon a proper limitation of the purely partisan zeal and effort and a correct appreciation of the time when the heat of the partisan should be merged in the patriotism of the citizen. ... At this hour the animosities of political strife, the bitterness of partisan defeat, and the exultation of partisan triumph should be supplanted by an ungrudging acquiescence in the popular will and a sober, conscientious concern for the general weal. ... Public extravagance begets extravagance among the people. | |
| Henry Steele Commager | Men in authority will always think that
criticism of their policies is dangerous.
They will always equate their policies with
patriotism, and find criticism subversive. | |
| Henry Steele Commager | Men in authority will always think that criticism of their policies is dangerous. They will always equate their policies with patriotism, and find criticism subversive. | |
| Marvin Cooley | I will no longer pay for the destruction of my country, family, and self. Damn tyranny! Damn the Federal Reserve liars and thieves! Damn all pettifogging, oath-breaking US attorneys and judges.… I will see you all in Hell and shed my blood before I will be robbed of one more dollar to finance a national policy of treason, plunder, and corruption | |
| Thomas Cooley | The right is general.
It may be supposed from the phraseology of this provision
that the right to keep and bear arms
was only guaranteed to the militia;
but this would be an interpretation not warranted by the intent.
The militia, as has been explained elsewhere,
consists of those persons who, under the law,
are liable to the performance of military duty,
and are officered and enrolled for service
when called upon. . . .
[I]f the right were limited to those enrolled,
the purpose of the guarantee might be defeated altogether
by the action or the neglect to act
of the government it was meant to hold in check.
The meaning of the provision undoubtedly is,
that the people, from whom the militia must be taken,
shall have the right to keep and bear arms,
and they need no permission or regulation of law
for that purpose. | |
| Steven R. Covey | Our ultimate freedom is the right and power to decide how anybody or anything outside of ourselves will affect us. | |
| Elmer Davis | The republic was not established by cowards, and cowards will not preserve it. | |
| Alexis de Tocqueville | Where are we then? The religionists are the enemies of liberty, and the friends of liberty attack religion; the high-minded and the noble advocate subjection, and the meanest and most servile minds preach independence; honest and enlightened citizens are opposed to all progress, whilst men without patriotism and without principles are the apostles of civilization and intelligence. Has such been the fate of the centuries which have preceded our own? and has man always inhabited a world like the present, where nothing is linked together, where virtue is without genius, and genius without honor; where the love of order is confounded with a taste for oppression, and the holy rites of freedom with a taste for law; where the light thrown by conscience on human actions is dim, and where nothing seems to be any longer forbidden or allowed, honorable or shameful, false or true? | |
| Eugene Debs | They have always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war, and strange as it certainly appears, no war by any nation in any age has ever been declared by the people. | |
| Declaration of Independence | But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. | |
| Richard M. Ebeling | In the hands of the state, compulsory public education becomes a tool for political control and manipulation -- a prime instrument for the thought police of the society. And precisely because every child passes through the same indoctrination process -- learning the same "official history," the same "civic virtues," the same lessons of obedience and loyalty to the state -- it becomes extremely difficult for the independent soul to free himself from the straightjacket of the ideology and values the political authorities wish to imprint upon the population under its jurisdiction. For the communists, it was the class struggle and obedience to the Party and Comrade Stalin; for the fascists, it was worship of the nation -- state and obedience to the Duce; for the Nazis, it was race purity and obedience to the Fuhrer. The content has varied, but the form has remained the same. Through the institution of compulsory state education, the child is to be molded like wax into the shape desired by the state and its educational elite. We should not believe that because ours is a freer, more democratic society, the same imprinting procedure has not occurred even here, in America. Every generation of school-age children has imprinted upon it a politically correct ideology concerning America's past and the sanctity of the role of the state in society. Practically every child in the public school system learns that the "robber barons" of the 19th century exploited the common working man; that unregulated capitalism needed to be harnessed by enlightened government regulation beginning in the Progressive era at the turn of the century; that wild Wall Street speculation was a primary cause of the Great Depression; that only Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal saved America from catastrophe; and that American intervention in foreign wars has been necessary and inevitable, with the United States government required to be a global leader and an occasional world policeman. | |
| Albert Einstein | Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it. | |
| Albert Einstein | Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them! | |
| Dwight D. Eisenhower | They [the founders] proclaimed to all the world the revolutionary doctrine of the divine rights of the common man. That doctrine has ever since been the heart of the American faith. | |
| Dwight D. Eisenhower | Here in America we are descended in spirit from revolutionaries and rebels -- men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. | |
| Andrew Fletcher | Let me write the songs of a nation - I don't care who writes its laws. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | Where liberty dwells, there is my country. | |
| Elbridge Gerry | The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy. The people do not want virtue, but are the dupes of pretended patriots. | |
| Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. | |
| Ulysses S. Grant | If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon's but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition and ignorance on the other. | |
| G. Edward Griffin | To oppose corruption in government is the highest obligation of patriotism. | |
| Lt. Col. James Bo Gritz (Ret) | A spider web of 'patriots for profit', operating from the highest positions of special trust and confidence, have successfully circumvented our constitutional system in pursuit of a New World Order. | |
| Nathan Hale | I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country. | |
| Alexander Hamilton | The safety of a republic depends essentially on the energy of a common national sentiment; on a uniformity of principles and habits; on the exemption of the citizens from foreign bias and prejudice, and on the love of country which will almost invariably be found to be closely connected with birth, education, and family. The opinion advanced in Notes on Virginia [by Thomas Jefferson] is undoubtedly correct, that foreigners will generally be apt to bring with them attachments to the persons they have left behind; to the country of their nativity, and to its particular customs and manners. They will also entertain opinions on government congenial with those under which they have lived; or, if they should be led hither from a preference to ours, how extremely unlikely is it that they will bring with them that temperate love of liberty, so essential to real republicanism? | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | From the saintly and single-minded idealist to the fanatic is often but a step. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice. | |
| Robert A. Heinlein | Love your country, but never trust its government. | |
| Patrick Henry | 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! | |
| Sidney Hook | To silence criticism is to silence freedom. | |
| Jacob G. Hornberger | Of course, the proponents of political tyranny are usually well-motivated. Those who enacted the gun-registration law in California point to criminals who have used semiautomatic weapons to commit horrible, murderous acts. But the illusion -- the pipe dream -- is that bad acts can be prevented by the deprivation of liberty. They cannot be! Life is always insecure. The only choice is between liberty and insecurity, on the one hand, and insecurity and enslavement on the other. The true patriot scrutinizes the actions of his own government with unceasing vigilance. And when his government violates the morality and rightness associated with principles of individual freedom and private property, he immediately rises in opposition to his government. This is why the gun owners of California might ultimately go down in history as among the greatest and most courageous patriots of our time. | |
| Jacob G. Hornberger | The true patriot scrutinizes the actions of his own government with unceasing vigilance. And when his government violates the morality and rightness associated with principles of individual freedom and private property, he immediately rises in opposition to his government. | |
| Robert G. Ingersoll | Courage without conscience is a wild beast. | |
| Isaiah | Loose the bands of wickedness, undo the bundles that oppress, let those who are broken go free, and break asunder every burden. Share your bread with the hungry, welcome into your house the afflicted and homeless; when you see a naked man, clothe him, and do not turn your back on your own flesh. Then your light will arise like the dawn, and your wound will quickly be healed. Your justice shall go before you, the glory of the Lord will closely follow you | |
| Andrew Jackson | The brave man inattentive to his duty, is worth little more to his country than the coward who deserts her in the hour of danger. | |
| Thomas J. Jackson | The patriot volunteer, fighting for country and his rights, makes the most reliable soldier on earth. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The patriot, like the Christian, must learn to bear revilings and persecutions as a part of his duty; and in proportion as the trial is severe, firmness under it becomes more requisite and praiseworthy. It requires, indeed, self-command. But that will be fortified in proportion as the calls for its exercise are repeated. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. ... And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I discharge every person under punishment or prosecution under the Sedition Law, because I considered, and now consider, that law to be a nullity as absolute and palpable as if Congress had ordered us to fall down and worship a golden image. | |
| Dr. Samuel Johnson | Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. | |
| Walt Kelly | We have met the enemy and he is us. | |
| John F. Kennedy | And so, my fellow Americans: Ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: Ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetuate it. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive. | |
| Robert E. Lee | With all my devotion to the Union and the feeling of loyalty and duty of an American citizen, I have not been able to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home. I have therefore resigned my commission in the Army, and save in defense of my native State, with the sincere hope that my poor services may never be needed, I hope I may never be called on to draw my sword... | |
| C. S. Lewis | A man may have to die for our country: but no man must, in any exclusive sense, live for his country. He who surrenders himself without reservation to the temporal claims of a nation, or a party, or a class is rendering to Caesar that which, of all things, most emphatically belongs to God: himself. | |
| General Douglas MacArthur | Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervour - with the cry of grave national emergency. Always, there has been some terrible evil at home, or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the
exorbitant sums demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real. | |
| James Madison | [A]ll power is originally vested in, and consequently derived from, the people. That government is instituted and ought to be exercised for the benefit of the people; which consists in the enjoyment of life and liberty and the right of acquiring property, and generally of pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety. That the people have an indubitable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to reform or change their government whenever it be found adverse or inadequate to the purpose of its institution. | |
| James Madison | Equal laws protecting equal rights -- the best guarantee of loyalty and love of country. | |
| James Madison | [T]he delegation of the government, in [a republic], to a small number of citizens elected by the rest . . . [is] to refine and enlarge the public views by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations. | |
| George McGovern | The highest patriotism is not a blind acceptance of official policy, but a love of one's country deep enough to call her to a higher standard. | |
| H. L. Mencken | The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country
more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a
good citizen driven to despair. | |
| H. L. Mencken | Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under. | |
| H. L. Mencken | To die for an idea: it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true. | |
| John Stuart Mill | A general State education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mold in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body. | |
| Henry Morgenthau, Jr. | We can hardly expect the nation-state to make itself superfluous, at least not overnight. Rather what we must aim for is really nothing more than caretakers of a bankrupt international machine which will have to be transformed slowly into a new one. The transition will not be dramatic, but a gradual one. People will still cling to national symbols. | |
| Edward R. Murrow | We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home. | |
| Huey P. Newton | You can jail a Revolutionary, but you can't jail the Revolution. | |
| Huey P. Newton | The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man.
Unless he understands this, he does not grasp the essential meaning of his life. | |
| Huey P. Newton | I have the people behind me and the people are my strength. | |
| Huey P. Newton | My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning. I wanted my death to be something the people could relate to, a basis for further mobilization of the community. | |
| Thomas Paine | These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed, if so celestial an article as Freedom should not be highly rated. | |
| Thomas Paine | Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it. | |
| Thomas Paine | The danger to which the success of revolutions is most exposed, is that of attempting them before the principles on which they proceed, and the advantages to result from them, are sufficiently seen and understood. | |
| General George S. Patton, Jr. | It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived. | |
| Dr. Ron Paul | Why is patriotism thought to be blind loyalty to the government and the politicians who run it, rather than loyalty to the principles of liberty and support for the people? Real patriotism is a willingness to challenge the government when it’s wrong. | |
| Dr. Ron Paul | The obligations of our representatives in Washington are to protect our liberty, not coddle the world, precipitating no-win wars, while bringing bankruptcy and economic turmoil to our people. | |
| Dr. Chester Pierce | Every child in America who enters school at the age of five is
mentally ill, because he comes to school with an allegiance toward
our elected officials, toward our founding fathers, toward our
institutions, toward the preservation of this form of government that
we have. Patriotism, nationalism, and sovereignty, all that proves that
children are sick because a truly well individual is one who has
rejected all of those things, and is truly the international child of
the future. | |
| Plato | When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing more to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader. | |
| Pledge of Allegiance | I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. | |
| General Colin Powell | Over the years, the United States has sent many of its fine young men and women into great peril to fight for freedom beyond our borders. The only amount of land we have ever asked for in return is enough to bury those that did not return. | |
| General Colin Powell | So our record of living our values and letting our values be an inspiration to others I think is clear.
And I don't think I have anything to be ashamed of or apologize for with respect to what America has done for the world.
We have gone forth from our shores repeatedly over the last hundred years and we've done this as recently as the last year in Afghanistan and put wonderful young men and women at risk, many of whom have lost their lives, and we have asked for nothing except enough ground to bury them in, and otherwise we have returned home ... to live our own lives in peace. | |
| Will Rogers | You shake a slogan at an American and it's just like showing a hungry dog a bone. | |
| Theodore Roosevelt | To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. | |
| Dr. Benjamin Rush | Let our pupil be taught that he does not belong to himself, but that he is public property. Let him be taught to love his family, but let him be taught, at the same time, that he must forsake, and even forget them, when the welfare of his country requires it. | |
| Edward G. Ryan | Blind submission to the Administration of the government is not devotion to the country or the Constitution. The administration is not the government. | |
| Eric Schaub | Americans find it intolerable that one constitutional right should have to be surrendered in order to assert another. America is the land of the free and home of the brave -- we don't need a Patriot Act, because we are already patriots. We know freedom means responsibility, but I am not sure Congress and its domestic enforcement agencies do. More often than not, new security measures enacted by the government have resulted in more violations of the citizenry than terrorists have ever done. The terrorists want us to be afraid -- well, we are not afraid. Stop wasting dollars on this program -- it is not good for America. To give up essential liberty for a little security provides neither. The right to be left alone from government intrusion is the beginning of all freedoms. | |
| Carl Schurz | If you want to be free, there is but one way; it is to guarantee an equally full measure of liberty to all your neighbors. There is no other. | |
| George Bernard Shaw | Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it. | |
| Richard Brinsley Sheridan | Give them a corrupt House of Lords, give them a venal House of Commons, give they a tyrannical Prince, give them a truckling court, and let me have but an unfettered press. I will defy them to encroach a hair’s breadth upon the liberties of England. | |
| Roger Sherman | If the president alone was vested with the power of appointing all officers, and was left to select a council for himself, he would be liable to be deceived by flatterers and pretenders to patriotism. | |
| Justice Joseph Story | If aliens might be admitted indiscriminately to enjoy all the rights of citizens at the will of a single state, the Union might itself be endangered by an influx of foreigners, hostile to its institutions, ignorant of its powers, and incapable of a due estimate of its privileges. | |
| Tecumseh | Live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart.\\
Trouble no one about his religion.\\
Respect others in their views and demand that they respect yours.\\
Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life.\\
Seek to make your life long and of service to your people.\\
Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide.\\
Always give a word or sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend, or even a stranger, if in a lonely place.\\
Show respect to all people, but grovel to none.\\
When you rise in the morning, give thanks for the light, for your life, for your strength. \\
Give thanks for your food and for the joy of living. If you see no reason to give thanks, the fault lies in yourself.\\
Abuse no one and no thing, for abuse turns the wise ones to fools and robs the spirit of its vision.\\
When your time comes to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way.\\
Sing your death song, and die like a hero going home. | |
| Mark Twain | How you can win the population for war: At first, the statesman will invent cheap lying, that impute the guilt of the attacked nation, and each person will be happy over this deceit, that calm the conscience. It will study it detailed and refuse to test arguments of the other opinion. So he will convince step for step even therefrom that the war is just and thank God, that he, after this process of grotesque even deceit, can sleep better. | |
| Mark Twain | When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory – must follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God the Father fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!<p>
'O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle – be Thou near them! With them – in spirit – we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with hurricanes of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it – for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.'<p>
[After a pause.] Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits. | |
| Mark Twain | Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified and excusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let me label you as they may. | |
| Mark Twain | In the beginning of a change the patriot is a scarce man and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him for then it costs nothing to be a patriot. | |
| Mark Twain | My kind of loyalty was to one's country, not to its institutions or its officeholders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease, and death. | |
| Unknown | War is the tool through which the remaining Constitutional restraints on government and rights of the people will be destroyed. War will be the
gateway through which total statism in any of its forms (fascism, socialism, communism) will be imposed upon the United States. They will rally the
people’s patriotism, and give the laws Orwellian sounding names like the “Patriot Acts”, and “Freedom Laws” and cries of “America First,” but these
acts will be anti-patriotic, anti-freedom, and anti-American. At the core of all these activities will be one purpose -- to impose ever increasing control
over the citizens, marching toward total statism. They will suspend due process and Constitutional restrictions proclaiming “extraordinary times”
require extraordinary measures. At first they will only be used against a few select atrocious and most heinous individuals with unfamiliar
appearance, customs and beliefs. Initially, it will simply be a matter of degree, but the precedent is now set. Extraordinary measures solely for
extraordinary individuals, but slowly and then more rapidly the extraordinary will become the ordinary until such measures can apply to anyone.
They will deride anyone who opposes these Orwellian acts as dangerously naïve, as pacifists, as isolationists, as unpatriotic, as sympathizing with
“the enemy” whoever “the enemy” may be at the time, and as un-American. They will make war with vague, ever changing goals and objectives.
They will make war on elusive, obscure enemies by proclaiming wars against “subversives” or “guerillas” or “militias” or “revolutionaries” or
“aggressors” or “terrorists” or whatever ambiguous name they can imagine so that the “enemies” will always be elusive, never eliminated or fully
defeated. There will always be more “enemies.” War will be perpetual, lasting years or even decades. War will be the final mechanism that destroys
America from within; and the people will proudly cheer and defend and support the dismantling of their rights and destruction of their Constitutional
Republic, all out of supposed “necessity” to support “the war.” | |
| Bill Vaughan | A real patriot is the fellow who gets a parking ticket and rejoices that the system works. | |
| Veterans of Foreign Wars | Whereas it has been proposed that the United States of America
become a part of a world federal government; and ...
this program...would entail the surrender of our national sovereignty
and...bring into being a form of government whose authority would
supercede that of the Constitution of The United States Government; and
...institute a system of laws where-by American citizens
could be tried by aliens in controversion of the provisions
of the Constitution of the United States; and
...the Veterans of Foreign Wars is composed solely of men who have
worn the uniform of the United States on foreign shores and in hostile waters
in time of war and from their personal experiences
are familiar with the traditions and operations of other countries; and
...many of our comrades rest forever in foreign soil and their sacrifices
were made to retain the dignity and sovereignty of the United States of America:
Now therefore, be it Resolved by the Fiftieth Annual Convention
of the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States,
That we hereby declare that we are unalterably opposed
to any program which would entail the surrender of any part
of the sovereignty of the United States of America
in favor of a world government... | |
| George Washington | It should be the highest ambition of every American to extend his views beyond himself, and to bear in mind that his conduct will not only affect himself, his country, and his immediate posterity; but that its influence may be co-extensive with the world, and stamp political happiness or misery on ages yet unborn. | |
| Daniel Webster | The inherent right in the people to reform their government, I do not deny; and they have another right, and that is to resist unconstitutional laws without overturning the government. | |
| Noah Webster | Another source of power in government is a military force. But this, to be efficient, must be superior to any force that exists among the people, or which they can command; for otherwise this force would be annihilated, on the first exercise of acts of oppression. Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States. A military force, at the command of Congress, can execute no laws, but such as the people perceive to be just and constitutional; for they will possess the power, and jealousy will instantly inspire the inclination, to resist the execution of a law which appears to them unjust and oppressive. | |
| Walter E. Williams | The framers gave us the Second Amendment not so we could go deer or duck hunting but to give us a modicum of protection against congressional tyranny. | |
| Woodrow Wilson | A man who thinks of himself as belonging to a particular national group in America has not yet become an American. And the man who goes among you to trade upon your nationality is no worthy son to live under the Stars and Stripes. | |
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