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|  John Quincy Adams | Posterity -- you will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good
use of it. | |
| Arnold Ahlert | [A] deep-rooted culture of incompetence and corruption has made it virtually impossible for government to function fairly and efficiently. And because most government employees are shielded by layers of protection, they couldn't care less. Never before in the history of this nation has there been a greater divide between a self-serving federal leviathan and millions of Americans... 'Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,' Ronald Reagan reminded us during his inaugural address in 1981. Nothing's changed since then, with one exception: It's gotten far worse. | |
| Mordechai Anielewicz | The most difficult struggle of all is the one within ourselves. Let us not get accustomed and adjusted to these conditions. The one who adjusts ceases to discriminate between good and evil. He becomes a slave in body and soul. Whatever may happen to you, remember always: Don’t adjust! Revolt against the reality! | |
| Hannah Arendt | The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil. | |
| Hannah Arendt | The main characteristic of any event is that it has not been foreseen. We don’t know the future but everybody acts into the future. Nobody knows what he is doing because the future is being done, action is being done by a “we” and not an “I.” Only if I were the only one acting could I foretell the consequences of what I’m doing. What actually happens is entirely contingent, and contingency is indeed one of the biggest factors in all history. Nobody knows what is going to happen because so much depends on an enormous number of variables, on simple hazard. On the other hand if you look at history retrospectively, then, even though it was contingent, you can tell a story that makes sense…. Jewish history, for example, in fact had its ups and downs, its, enmities and its friendships, as every history of all people has. The notion that there is one unilinear history is of course false. But if you look at it after the experience of Auschwitz it looks as though all of history -- or at least history since the Middle Ages -- had no other aim than Auschwitz…. This, is the real problem of every philosophy of history how is it possible that in retrospect it always looks as though it couldn’t have happened otherwise? | |
| Reuben Blades | I think we risk becoming the best informed society that has ever died of ignorance. | |
| Dr. Jim Boren | Public apathy is more powerful than public opinion. There's more of it. | |
| Judge Robert Bork | As government regulations grow slowly, we become used to the harness. Habit is a powerful force, and we no longer feel as intensely as we once would have [the] constriction of our liberties that would have been utterly intolerable a mere half century ago. | |
| James Bovard | To blindly trust government is to automatically vest it with excessive power. To distrust government is simply to trust humanity - to trust in the ability of average people to peacefully, productively coexist without some official policing their every move. The State is merely another human institution - less creative than Microsoft, less reliable than Federal Express, less responsible than the average farmer husbanding his land, and less prudent than the average citizen spending his own paycheck. | |
| Samuel Butler | I don't mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy. | |
| Agatha Christie | I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays and have things arranged for them that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas. | |
| William Kingdon Clifford | There is one thing in the world more wicked than the desire to command, and that is the will to obey. | |
| Bill Clinton | We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans... | |
| Donna Woolfolk Cross | When law enforcers are shown to have such unswerving integrity, only the most churlish among us would question the methods they use to “get their man.” Constitutional guarantees are regarded as bothersome “technicalities” that impede honest law enforcers in the performance of their duties. | |
| John Philpot Curran | It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become prey to the active. The conditions upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime, and the punishment of his guilt. | |
| Voltairine de Cleyre | ...So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men. | |
| François Duc de La Rochefoucauld | We have all sufficient strength to endure the misfortunes of others. | |
| François Duc de La Rochefoucauld | A true friend is the greatest of all blessings, and that which we take the least care of all to acquire. | |
| Joseph de Maistre | Every nation gets the government it deserves. | |
| Charles-Louis De Secondat | The deterioration of every government begins with the decay of the principles on which it was founded. | |
| Daniel Defoe | I hear much of people's calling out to punish the guilty, but very few are concerned to clear the innocent. | |
| John Dickenson | Indeed nations, in general, are not apt to think until they feel; and therefore nations in general have lost their liberty: For as violations of the rights of the governed, are commonly not only specious, but small at the beginning, they spread over the multitude in such a manner, as to touch individuals but slightly. Thus they are disregarded. The power or profit that arises from these violations centering in few persons, is to them considerable. For this reason the governors having in view their particular purposes, successively preserve an uniformity of conduct for attaining them. They regularly increase the first injuries, till at length the inattentive people are compelled to perceive the heaviness of their burthens -- They begin to complain and inquire — but too late. They find their oppressors so strengthened by success, and themselves so entangled in examples of express authority on the part of their rulers, and of tacit recognition on their own part, that they are quite confounded: for millions entertain no other idea of the legality of power, than it is founded on the exercise of power. | |
| Justice William O. Douglas | As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air - however slight - lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness. | |
| Will Durant | [H]istory assures us that civilizations decay quite leisurely. | |
| Dwight D. Eisenhower | History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid. | |
| Abraham Flexner | We must not overlook the role that extremists play. They are the gadflies that keep society from being too complacent. | |
| Viktor Frankyl | Freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West coast. | |
| John Kenneth Galbraith | These are the days when men of all social disciplines and all political faiths seek the comfortable and the accepted; when the man of controversy is looked upon as a disturbing influence; when originality is taken to be a mark of instability; and when, in minor modification of the original parable, the bland lead the bland. | |
| Gallagher | I wish there was a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence. There's a knob called "brightness", but it doesn't work. | |
| Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | The moment men obtain perfect freedom, that moment they erect a stage for the manifestation of their faults. The strong characters begin to go wrong by excess of energy; the weak by remissness of action. | |
| Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel | What experience and history teach is this -- that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it. | |
| Hindu Saying | Pitiful is the one who, fearing failure, makes no beginning. | |
| David Hume | It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once. | |
| Samuel Huntington | Some of the problems of governance in the United States today stem from an excess of democracy ... The effective operation of a democratic political system usually requires some measure of apathy and non-involvement on the part of some individuals and groups. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | We have the greatest opportunity the world has ever seen, as long as we remain honest -- which will be as long as we can keep the attention of our people alive. If they once become inattentive to public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, judges and governors would all become wolves. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people. | |
| Arthur Koestler | Habit is the denial of creativity and the negation of freedom; a self-imposed straitjacket of which the wearer is unaware. | |
| Charles Krauthammer | The Brady Bill's only effect will be to desensitize the public to regulation of weapons in preparation for their ultimate confiscation. | |
| Stony Loft | If you look like a rabbit, and act like a rabbit, you will be treated like a rabbit -- prey for all predators. | |
| Henry Wadsworth Longfellow | It takes less time to do a thing right, than it does to explain why you did it wrong. | |
| Clare Boothe Luce | There are no hopeless situations; There are only men who have grown hopeless about them. | |
| Niccolo Machiavelli | For the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are. | |
| Niccolo Machiavelli | The wise man does at once what the fool does finally. | |
| James Madison | Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of freedoms of the people by gradual and silent encroachment of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations. | |
| James Madison | If this spirit shall ever be so far debased as to tolerate a law not obligatory on the legislature, as well as on the people, the people will be prepared to tolerate anything but liberty. | |
| George Mason | [W]hen the resolution of enslaving America was formed in Great Britain, the British Parliament was advised by an artful man, who was governor of Pennsylvania, to disarm the people; that it was the best and most effectual way to enslave them; but that they should not do it openly, but weaken them, and let them sink gradually, by totally disusing and neglecting the militia. | |
| Al McGuire | I think the world is run by 'C' students. | |
| H. L. Mencken | The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues, and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else...Their purpose, in brief, is to make docile and patriotic citizens, to pile up majorities, and to make John Doe and Richard Doe as nearly alike, in their everyday reactions and ways of thinking, as possible. | |