Wijze Woorden
In deze sectie vindt u een compleet overzicht van de citaten die dagelijks op ConservatismeWeb.com zijn verschenen:
30 Juni: "Freedom prospers when religion is vibrant and the rule of law under God is acknowledged" - Ronald Reagan
29 Juni: "Our real blessings often appear to us in the shape of pains, losses, and disappointments, but let us have patience, and we soon shall see them in their proper figures" - Joseph Addison
28 Juni: "A little philosophy inclines a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy brings men's minds about to religion" - Francis Bacon
27 Juni: "I know God won't give me anything I can't handle. I just wish He didn't trust me so much" - Mother Teresa
26 Juni: "Humanism is not new. It is, in fact, man's second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: 'Ye shall be as gods'" - Whittaker Chambers
25 Juni: "Philosophy is perfectly right in saying that life must be understood backward. But then one forgets the other clause - that it must be lived forward" - Soren Kierkegaard
24 Juni: "None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty" - Henry David Thoreau
23 Juni: "A democracy is a state in which the poor, gaining the upper hand, kill some and banish others, and then divide the offices among the remaining citizens equally, usually by lot" - Plato
22 Juni: "Do not go from the slavery of the Communist regime to the slavery of consumerism" - Pope John Paul II
21 Juni: "National Defense is not a threat to peace; it is the guarantee of peace with freedom" - Ronald Reagan
20 Juni: "Good counselors lack no clients." - William Shakespeare
19 Juni: "Lord, when we are wrong, make us willing to change; and when we are right, make us easy to live with" - Peter Marshall
18 Juni: "Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders than from the arguments of its opposers" - William Penn
16 Juni:
15 Juni:"I have learned that money is not the measure of a man, but it is often the means of finding out how small he is" - Oswald J. Smith
13 Juni:
"Diligence is the mother of good fortune" - Miguel de Cervantes
11 Juni: "I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting system, through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in" - George Washington Carver
10 Juni: "All great change in America begins at the dinner table" - Ronald Reagan
9 Juni: "Talk of the devil and he'll appear" - Erasmus
8 Juni: "More persons, on the whole, are humbugged by believing nothing, than by believing too much" - P. T. Barnum
7 Juni: "Those who are believed to be most abject and humble are usually most ambitious and envious" - Spinoza
6 Juni: "Oh my debt of praise, how weighty is it, and how far run up! Oh that others would lend me to pay, and teach me to praise!" - Samuel Rutherford
5 Juni: "If ye keep watch over your hearts, and listen for the Voice of God and learn of Him, in one short hour ye can learn more from Him than ye could learn from Man in a thousand years" - Johannes Tauler
4 Juni: "For these fellows of infinite tongue, that can rime themselves into ladies' favors, they do always reason themselves out again" - William Shakespeare
3 Juni: "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it" - Aristotle
2 Juni: "The worst thing in this world, next to anarchy, is government" - Henry Ward Beecher
1 Juni: "One of the disadvantages of democracy is that the minority has the say and the majority has to pay" - John Perkins
30 Mei:"Prosperity doth best discover vice, but adversity doth best discover virtue" - Francis Bacon
29 Mei: "At the end, God will not ask what you have saved, but what you have given" - Flora Larson
28 Mei: "God hath given to man a short time here upon earth, and yet upon this short time eternity depends" - Jeremy Taylor
27 Mei: "The beauty of the soul shines out when a man bears with composure one heavy mischance after another, not because he does not feel them, but because he is a man of high and heroic temper" - Aristotle
26 Mei: "...[I]nnocence, like truth, exists as a power of its own in the world, independent of
the machinations of men" - Carl M. Cannon
25 Mei: "All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen" - Ralph Waldo Emerson
24 Mei: "Apt words have power to assuage the tumors of a troubled mind" - John Milton
23 Mei: "Fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear" - Benedict Spinoza
22 Mei:
21 Mei: "Absence of occupation is not rest, A mind quite vacant is a mind distress'd" - William Cowper
20 Mei: "No profit grows where is no pleasure ta'en; In brief, sir, study what you most affect" - William Shakespeare
19 Mei: "Disobedience is a right that belongs to every human being, and it becomes a sacred duty when it springs from civility, or, which is the same thing, love" - M. K. Gandhi
17 Mei: "Giving a bureaucrat a new rule is like handing a pyro-maniac a lighted match in a haymow" - Ronald Reagan
16 Mei: "Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits" - Mark Twain
15 Mei: "I think the best possible social program is a job" - Ronald Reagan
14 Mei: "We are all pencils in the hand of a writing God, who is sending love letters to the world" - Mother Teresa
11 Mei: "Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless" - Thomas Edison
10 Mei: "First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do" - Epictetus
9 Mei: "Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it." - Mark Twain
8 Mei: "There is no security on this earth; there is only opportunity" - Douglas MacArthur
7 Mei: "Do good by stealth, and blush to find it fame" - Alexander Pope
6 Mei:
5 mei: "The best way to keep one's word is not to give it" - Napoleon Bonaparte
4 mei: "Before God we are all equally wise, and equally foolish" - Albert Einstein
3 mei: "Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you" - Aldous Huxley
2 mei: "They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea" - Francis Bacon
1 mei: "Setting an example is not the main means of influencing another; it is the only means" - Abraham Lincoln
30 april:
29 april: "Free enterprise has done more to reduce poverty than all the government programs dreamed up by Democrats." - Ronald Reagan
28 april: "There is then creative reading as well as creative writing." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
27 april: "Of all tyrannies a tyranny 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
26 april: "What America needs is spiritual renewal and reconciliation - first, man with God, and then man with man." - Ronald Reagan
25 april: "A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty." - Sir Winston Churchill
24 april: "Justice is a machine that, when someone has once given it the starting push, rolls on of itself." - John Galsworthy
23 april: "No man is the whole of himself. His friends are the rest of him." - George Whitefield
22 april: "It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations." - Winston Churchill
20 april: "So long as we govern our nation by the letter and spirit of the Bill of Rights, we can be sure that our nation will grow in strength and wisdom and freedom." - Dwight D. Eisenhower.
18 april: "Nature never deceives us; it is always we who deceive ourselves." - Jean Jacques Rousseau
15 april: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation." - Henry David Thoreau
14 april: "Good company and good discourse are the very sinews of virtue." - Izaak Walton
13 april: "Of all the affections which attend human life, the love of glory is the most ardent." - Sir Richard Steele
12 april: "The mind is always the dupe of the heart." - François Duc de La Rochefoucauld
11 april: "Things are not always what they seem." - Phaedrus
10 april: "When the doors of perception are cleansed, man will see things as they truly are, infinite." - William Blake
9 april: "Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There's no better rule." - Charles Dickens
8 april: "Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently." - Henry Ford
7 april: "Once 'our people' get themselves into a position to make policy, they cease being 'our people'." - M. Stanton Evans
5 april: "You just can't beat the person who never gives up."
-Babe Ruth
4 april: "If a key fits a lock, you know it is the right key." -G.K. Chesterton
3 april: "Tyranny, like fog in the well known poem, often creeps in silently 'on little cat feet.'" - Ronald Reagan
2 april: "Those who know how to win are much more numerous than those who know how to make proper use of their victories." - Polybius
1 april: "Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts." - Henry Brooks Adams
31 maart:
30 maart:
29 maart: "Not by age but by capacity is wisdom acquired." - Titus Maccius Plautus
28 maart: "To fear the worst oft cures the worse." - William Shakespeare
27 maart: "The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance." - Paul Johnson
24 maart: "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; and since the preservation of the sacred fire of
liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government are justly considered, perhaps, as deeply, as finally, staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people." - George
Washington
23 maart: "Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win great triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat." - Theodore Roosevelt
22 maart: "The importance of morality is that people behave themselves even if nobody's watching. There are not enough cops and laws to replace personal morality as a means to produce a civilized society. Indeed, the police and criminal justice system are the last desperate line of defense for a civilized society. Unfortunately, too many of us see police, laws and the criminal justice system as society's first line of defense." - Walter Williams
19 maart: "Have faith and pursue the unknown end." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr
18 maart: "An educated guess is just as accurate and far faster than compiled errors." - George S. Patton
17 maart: "The next best thing to knowing something is knowing where to find it." - Samuel Johnson
16 maart: "There is strong shadow where there is much light." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
15 maart: "The significance of a man is not in what he attains, but rather what he longs to attain." - Kahlil Gibran
14 maart:
13 maart: "Nature abhors a vacuum, and if I can only walk with sufficient carelessness I am sure to be filled." - H.D. Thoreau
10 Maart:
8 Maart:
6 Maart:
5 Maart: "Any philosophy worth considering must attempt to account for the existence of evil in the world." - Elie Kedourie
4 Maart: "Humility is the foundation of all virtues." - Confucius
3 Maart: "Our patience will achieve more than our force" - Edmund Burke
2 Maart: "Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents" - Arthur Schopenhauer
1 Maart: "Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people" - Eleanor Roosevelt
28 Februari: "The great tragedy of Science -- the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact." - Thomas Henry Huxley
27 Februari: "Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family." - George Bernard Shaw
26 Februari: "Nine requisites for contented living: Health enough to make work a pleasure. Wealth enough to support your needs. Strength enough to battle with difficulties and overcome them. Grace enough to confess your sins and forsake them. Patience enough to toil until some good is accomplished. Charity enough to see some goods in your neighbor. Love enough to move you to be useful and helpful to others. Faith enough to make real the things of God. Hope enough to remove all anxious fears concerning the future." - Goethe
25 Februari: "Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile" - Albert Einstein
22 Februari: "The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order" - Alfred North Whitehead
21 Februari: "The multitude of books is making us ignorant" - Voltaire
20 Februari: "No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come" - Victor Hugo
19 Februari: "Custom is the mother of legitimacy" - Joseph de Maistre
17 Februari: "The less government we have the better - the fewer laws and the less confided power. The antidote to this abuse of formal government is the influence of private character, the growth of the individual" - Ralph Waldo Emerson
16 Februari: "If there is no God, all things are permissible" - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
15 Februari: When we are born, we cry for we are come to this great stage of fools - William Shakespeare
14 Februari: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win" - Mahatma Gandhi
11 Februari: " What you have as heritage, Take now as task; For thus you will make it your own" - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
10 Februari:
9 Februari: "Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves" - Abraham Lincoln
8 Februari: "The eternal difference between right and wrong does not fluctuate. It is immutable. And if the moral order does not change, then it imposes on us obligations toward God and man. Duty, then, requires the willingness to accept responsibility and to sacrifice one's desires to a higher law" - Patrick Henry
7 Februari: "Today we are particularly conscious of the Courage of Ronald Reagan. .. Right from the beginning, Ronald Reagan set out to challenge everything that the liberal political elite of America accepted and sought to propagate. They believed that America was doomed to decline: He believed it was destined for further greatness. They imagined that sooner or later there would be convergence between the free Western system and the socialist Eastern system, and that some kind of social democratic outcome was inevitable. He, by contrast, considered that socialism was a patent failure, which should be cast onto the trash heap of history. They thought that the problem with America was the American people, though they didn't quite put it like that. He thought that the problem with America was the American government, and he did put it just like that. ... Ronald Reagan has changed America and the world, but the changes he made were to restore historic conservative values, not to impose artificially constructed ones." - Margaret Thatcher
6 Februari: "Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
5 Februari: "You can never plan the future by the past" - Edmund Burke
3 Februari:
2 Februari: "To be able to endure odium is the first art to be learned by those who aspire to power" - Seneca
1 Februari: "Presidents come and go. History comes and goes. But principles endure" - Ronald Reagan
31 Januari: "All that is not eternal is eternally out of date " - C. S. Lewis
29 Januari: "We are guided by a power larger than ourselves, Who created us equal in his image. ... Abandonment and abuse are not acts of God, they are failures of love. ... Church and charity, synagogue and mosque, lend our communities their humanity, and they will have an honored place in our plans and laws. ... Sometimes in life we are called to do great things. But as a saint of our times has said, every day we are called to do small things with great love" - George W. Bush
28 Januari: "I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free" - Michelangelo
27 Januari: "We can draw lessons from the past, but we cannot live in it" - Lyndon B. Johnson
26 Januari: "The firm, the enduring, the modest and the simple are near to virtue" - Confucius
24 Januari: "As long as our government is administered for the good of the people...as long as it secures to us the rights of person and of property, liberty of conscience and of the press, it will be worth defending" - Andrew Jackson
20 Januari: "I will treat the office with care and I will always remember who it belongs to - to all of us, the American people" - George W. Bush
19 januari: What experience and history teach is this - that people and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it " - Georg Willheim Friederich Hegel
18 januari:"Ignorance of one's misfortunes is clear gain" - Euripides
17 januari: "A constitution is not the act of a government, but of a people constituting a government; and government without a constitution is power without a right. All power exercised over a nation, must have some beginning. It must be either delegated, or assumed. There are not other sources. All delegated power is trust, and all assumed power is usurpation. Time does not alter the nature and quality of either" - Thomas Paine
16 januari: "For a man to achieve all that is demanded of him he must regard himself as greater than he is" - Goethe
15 januari: "The world is weary of statesmen whom democracy has degraded into politicians" - Benjamin Disraeli
14 Januari: "An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concern for the broader concern of all humanity" - Martin Luther King
11 Januari:
10 Januari: "It is astonishing with how little wisdom mankind can be governed, when that little wisdom is its own" - W. R. Inge
8 Januari: "It is part of human nature to hate those whom you have harmed" - Tacitus
7 Januari: "We know and feel from experience that we are eternal" - Spinoza
6 Januari: "The most fluent talkers or the most plausible reasoners are not always the justest thinkers" - William Hazlitt
4 Januari: "No arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women" - Ronald Reagan
24 December 2000 - 2 januari 2001: "Let no pleasure tempt thee, no profit allure thee, no ambition corrupt thee, no example sway thee, no persuasion move thee to do anything which thou knowest to be evil; so thou shalt live jollily, for a good conscience is a continual Christmas" - Benjamin Franklin
22 December: "Reason often makes mistakes, but conscience never does" - John Billings
21 December: "Conservatism is not a fixed and immutable body of dogma, and conservatives have inherited from Burke a talent for re-expressing their convictions to fit the times" - Russell Kirk
19 December: "
17 December: "In the past, presidents have declared war on poverty and promised to create a great society. But these grand gestures and honorable aims were frustrated. We found that government can spend money, but it can't put hope in our hearts or a sense of purpose in our lives. We have learned from their mistakes" - George W. Bush
15 December: "All political careers end in failure" - Enoch Powell
14 December: "The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold" - Aristotle
13 December: "And if I laugh at any mortal thing, 'Tis that I may not weep" - Lord Byron
12 December: Duty, then, is the sublimest word in our language. Do your duty in all things. [...] You cannot do more, you should never wish to do less - Robert E. Lee
11 December: "The most successful revolutions aren't those that are celebrated with parades and banners, drums and trumpets, cannons and fireworks. The really successful revolutions are those that occur quietly, unnoticed, uncommemorated. We don't celebrate the day the United States Constitution was destroyed; it didn't happen on a specific date, and most Americans still don't realize it happened at all. We don't say the Constitution has ceased to exist; we merely say that it's a 'living document.' But it amounts to the same thing" - Joseph Sobran
10 December: "Veracity is the heart of morality" - Thomas Henry Huxley
9 December:
8 December: "Democracy means not, I'm as good as you are, but, you're as good as I am" - Theodore Parker
7 December:
6 December:
5 December: "You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all of the time." - Abraham Lincoln
4 December:
3 December:
2 December:
1 December: "If the human race wishes to have a prolonged and indefinite period of material prosperity, they have only got to behave in a peaceful and helpful way towards one another" - Winston Churchill
30 November:
29 November: "Theology teaches us what ends are desirable and what means are lawful, while politics teaches what means are effective" - C.S. Lewis
28 November: "The conservative believes in a transcendent order, or body of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience " - Russell Kirk
27 November: "Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle " - Thomas Jefferson
26 November: "Democracy, though slowly attained and never by revolutionary jumps, is the best government on earth when it tries to make all its citizens aristocrats. But not when it guillontines whoever is individual, superior, or just different" - Peter Viereck
24 November:
23 November: "Lovers of liberty everywhere should cheer this development. We're looking at a possible rebirth of 19th century style political wrangling and gridlock. ...With an evenly divided electorate, there is no mandate. There is no clear vision of 'greatness' and there is no consensus" - Ryan McMaken
22 November: "Pray hardest when it is hardest to pray" - Bishop Charles H. Brent
20 November: "Information is the currency of democracy" - Theodore Roosevelt
19 November: "Surround yourself with the best people you can find, delegate authority, and don't interfere" - Ronald Reagan
18 November:
17 November: " 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 and in wealth and in power as no other ever has, but we have forgotten God. We have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace and too proud to pray" - Abraham Lincoln
15 November:
14 November: "View and read everything with skepticism. Remember that truth and information are not synonyms. And do learn to think for yourself. There already are more than enough sheep in this world" - Charley Reese
13 November: "Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?" - Friedrich Nietzsche
12 November: "I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity." - Dwight D. Eisenhouwer
11 November: " Personal actions speak louder than political words." - Michelle Makin
10 November: "All men are born equal, but quite a few eventually get over it." - Lord Mancroft
9 November: "Gratitude is not a normal feature of political life" - David Maxwell-Fyfe
7 November: "Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counsellors, and the most patient of teachers" - Charles W. Eliot
6 November: "I had to set limits to knowledge in order to make place for religion" - Immanuel Kant
5 November: "Nothing is interesting if you're not interested" - Helen McInness
4 November: "Men prefer to believe what they prefer to be true" - Francis Bacon
3 November: "The optimist proclaims we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true" - James Branch Cabell
2 November: " Who, being loved, is poor?" - Oscar Wilde
1 November: "Conservatives are liberals who have been mugged by reality." - Irving Kristol
31 October:
29 October:
28 October: "A judicial activist is a judge who interprets the Constitution to mean what it would have said if he, instead of the Founding Fathers, had written it." - Sen. Sam Erving
27 October: "If government could create jobs and raise children, socialism would have worked." - Gerald Gilder
26 October: "I believe that to have no wants is divine." - Socrates
25 October: "Conservatism is enjoyment." - Walter Bagehot
24 October:
23 October: "Fame is a vapor; popularity an accident; the only earthly certainty is oblivion." - Mark Twain
22 October: "Everyone is born with genius, but most people only keep it a few minutes." - Edgar Varese
21 October: "Only mediocrities rise to the top in a system that won't tolerate wavemaking." - Laurence J. Peter
20 October: "There can be no rational administration of government when good men are held in the same esteem as bad ones." - Polybius
18 October: "The main dangers in this life are the people who want to change everything - or nothing." - Nancy Astor
17 October: "There is no patent recipe for getting good citizenship. You get it by applying the old, old rules of decent conduct, the rules in accordance with which decent men have had to shape their lives from the beginning...fundamental precepts, put forth in the Bible and embodied consciously or unconsciously in the code of morals of every great and successful nation from antiquity to modern times." - Theodore Roosevelt
16 October: "All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward." - Ellen Glasgow
16 October: "Words are things; and a small drop of ink/Falling like dew upon a thought, produces/That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think." - Lord Byron
14 October: "To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting." - Edmund Burke
13 October: "Philosophy is suspect to the many." - Cicero
12 October: "Do I not destroy my enemy by making him my friend?" - Abraham Lincoln
11 October: "Lord, what fools these mortals be!" - Shakespeare
10 October: "Happiness is a waystation between too little and too much." - Channing Pollock
9 October: "The problem is that some people tend to regard anyone who would pronounce a definitive judgement as an unsophisticated Philistine or a closed-minded "elitist" trying to impose his view on everybody else." - William Bennett
8 October: "The air of capitalism liberates." - Peter Berger
7 October: "The Republican form of government is the highest form of government; but because of this it requires the highest type of human nature - a type nowhere at present existing." - Herbert Spencer
6 October: "Humility is a praiseworthy depreciation of oneself to the very lowest degree." - Thomas
5 October: "Give every man your ear, but very few your voice/Take each man's censure but reserve your judgement." - Shakespeare
4 October: "The Devil is wounded to the death by our love for our enemies." - Chaucer
3 October: "Only free men are thoroughly grateful one to another." - Spinoza
2 October: "I have always believed that a government had a limited capacity to do good and a virtually infinite capacity to do harm." - Neil Hamilton
1 October: "Man: a being in search of meaning." - Plato
30 September: "We are not just atomised individuals, pursuing our own narrow economic self-interest." - William Hague
29 September: "[The] impersonal process of the market...can be neither just nor unjust, because the results are not intended or foreseen." - Friedrich Hayek
28 September: "Civilization is a race between education and catastrophe." - H.G. Wells
27 September: "True nobility is exempt from fear." - William Shakespeare
26 September: "Life is a long lesson in humility." - James M. Barrie
25 September: "The wisdom of the wise and the experience of the ages are perpetuated by quotations." - Benjamin Disraeli
24 September: "Humility is to make a right estimate of one's self." - Charles Haaddon Spurgeon
23 September: "You don't get into a war by being too strong. You get into a war by being too weak." - Ronald Reagan
22 September: "Where all men think alike, no one thinks very much." - Walter Lippmann
21 September: "Human action can be modified to some extent, but human nature can not be changed." - Abraham Lincoln
19 September: "Nihil nova sub soli." ("Er is niets nieuws onder de zon") [There is nothing new under the Sun.]- Solomon
18 September: "Happiness is not being pained in body or troubled in mind." - Thomas Jefferson
17 September: "If the imagination were obedient, the appetites would give us very little trouble." - C.S. Lewis
15 September: "The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence." - T.S. Eliot
14 September: "Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found." - Edmund Burke
13 September: "Prevention of birth is a precipitation of murder." - Tertullian
12 September: "Capitalism works better than any of us can imagine. It is also the only truly moral system of exchange." - Malcolm Forbes Jr.
11 September: "The liberty of the individual must be this far limited; he must not make himself a nuisance to other people." - John Stuart Mill
10 September: "Moderation, the noblest gift of heaven." - Euripides
9 September: "Justice is truth in action." - Benjamin Disraeli
8 September: "Freedom and liberty lose out by default because good people are not vigilant." - Desmond Tutu
7 September: "Government is the people's business and every man, woman and child becomes a shareholder with the first penny of tax paid." - Ronald Reagan
6 September: "Every man prefers belief to the excercise of judgment." - Seneca
5 September: "He approaches nearest to the gods who knows how to be silent even though he knows he is right." - Cato
3 September: "But constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it, and to carry his authority as far as it will go." - Montesquieu
2 September: "No horse gets anywhere until he is harnessed. No stream or gas drives anything until it is confined. No Niagara is ever turned into light and power until it is tunneled. No life ever grows great until it is focused, dedicated, disciplined." - Harry Emerson Fosdick
1 September: "What is the best government? That which teaches us to govern ourselves." - Goethe
31 Augustus: "Bureaucratic rules cannot take the place of common sense." - Newt Gingrich
29 Augustus: "I am not a critic of the west: I am a critic of the weakness of the west." - Alesandr Solzhenitsyn
28 Augustus: "Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance." - C.S. Lewis
27 Augustus: "We must love them both - those whose opinions we share and those whose opinions we reject. For both have labored in the search for truth, and helped us in the finding of it." - Thomas Aquinos
26 Augustus: "The unbelieving mind would not be convinced by any proof, and the worshiping heart needs none." - A.W. Tozer
25 Augustus: "He [the Sophist] is concerned with wisdom not for its own sake, not because he hates the lie in the soul more than anything else, but for the sake of the honor or the prestige that attends wisdom
24 Augustus: "The American dream does not happen by asking Americans to accept what's immoral and wrong in the name of tolerance." - J.C. Watts
23 Augustus: "The freedom and happiness of man...are the sole objects of all legitimate government." - Thomas Jefferson
22 Augustus: "The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance." - Socrates
21 Augustus: "The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything - except what is worth knowing." - Oscar Wilde
20 Augustus: " Avarice, envy, pride,/Three fatal sparks, have set the hearts of all/On Fire." - Dante Alighieri
19 Augustus: "Let them obey that know not how to rule." - William Shakespeare
18 Augustus: "A progressive is always a conservative; he conserves the direction of progress. A reactionary is always a rebel." - G.K. Chesterton
17 Augustus: "History is littered with the wars which everybody knew would never happen." - Enoch Powell
16 Augustus: "We don't believe children are just mouths to feed. They are hearts, minds, and souls for our future. And they deserve our protection not only after their birth, but before they are born." - Jack Kemp
15 Augustus: "The control man has secured over nature has far outrun his control over himself." - Ernest Jones
14 Augustus: "Help from without is often enfeebling in its effect, but help from within invariably invigorates." - Samuel Smiles
11 Augustus: "Never trust governments absolutely and always do what you can to prevent them from doing too much harm." - John Arthur Passmore
10 Augustus: "Only the shallow know themselves." - Oscar Wilde
9 Augustus: " Little things affect little minds." - Benjamin Disraeli
6 Augustus: "Tolerance is the virtue of a man without convictions." - G.K. Chesterton
5 Augustus: "Big government is not the answer. But the alternative to bureaucracy is not indifference. It is to put conservative values and conservative ideas into the thick of the fight for justice and opportunity." - George W. Bush
4 Augustus: "Beware of false knowledge, it is more dangerous than ignorance." - George Bernard Shaw
2 Augustus: "The empires of the future are the empires of the mind." - Winston Churchill
1 Augustus: "All real education is the architecture of the soul." - William Bennett
31 Juli: "We clamour for equality chiefly in areas where we cannot ourselves hope to obtain excellence." - Eric Hoffer
30 Juli: "Democracy arose from men's thinking that if they are equal in any respect they are equal absolutely." - Aristoteles
29 Juli: "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
27 Juli: "Only this morning I came upon yet another book; this time upon the Great Pyramid and the end of the world. The world is to end next summer. I don’t believe it. It’s too good to be true." - Hillaire Belloc
24 Juli: "Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others." - Cicero
23 Juli: "A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both." - Dwight D. Eisenhower
22 Juli: "I am not a concensus politician - I'm a conviction politician." - Margaret Thatcher
21 Juli: "That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves." - Thomas Jefferson
20 Juli: "If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free: if our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed." - Edmund Burke
19 Juli: "In the end more than they wanted freedom, they wanted security. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society, but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for was the freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free." - Edward Gibbon
18 Juli: "Civilization is nothing else but the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort." - José Ortega y Gasset
17 Juli: "To begin with unlimited freedom is to end with unlimited despotism." - Fyodor Dostoevsky
16 Juli: "With every civil right there has to be a corresponding civil obligation." - Edison Haines
15 Juli: "The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones." - Joseph Joubert
14 Juli: "The modern parent's attempt to make children feel loved and wanted does not conceal an underlying coolness - the remoteness of those who have little to pass on to the next generation and who in any case give priority to their own self-fulfillment." - Christopher Lasch
13 Juli: "It is with infinite caution that any man ought to venture pulling down an edifice which has answered in any tolerable degree for ages the common purposes of society, or on building it up again without having models and patterns of approved utility before his eyes." - Edmund Burke
12 Juli: "How can the modern relativist exercise tolerance if he doesn't believe in anything to begin with? It is not hard to exhibit toleration toward a point of view if you have no point of view of your own with which that point of view conflicts." - William F. Buckley
11 Juli: "It is the greatest inequality to try to make unequal things equal" - Aristoteles
10 Juli: "Sin is the punishment of sin." - Augustinus
8 Juli: "Everything that will happen will be for the worse, so it is in our interest that as little should happen as possible" - Lord Salisbury
7 Juli: "The good life is one inspired by love and guided by wisdom" - Bertrand Russell
6 Juli: "What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against
the new and untried?" Abraham Lincoln
5 Juli: "By early 1933, therefore, the two largest and strongest of Europe were
firmly in the grip of totalitarian regimes which preached and practiced,
and indeed embodied, moral relativism, with all its horrifying
potentialities." - Paul Johnson
4 Juli: "Welfare's purpose should be to eliminate, as far as possible, the need
for its own existence." Ronald Wilson Reagan
3 Juli: "There is no principle in the conservative philosophy than that of the
inherent and absolute incompatibility between liberty and equality." - Robert A. Nisbet
30 Juni: "It better befits a man to laugh at life than to lament over it." - Seneca
29 Juni: "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
28 Juni: "The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried." - G.K. Chesterton
27 Juni: "It is not, what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity,reason, and justice, tell me I ought to do." - Edmund Burke
26 Juni: "The real community of man, in the midst of all the self-contradictory simulacra of community, is the community of those who seek the truth." - Allan Bloom
25 Juni: "The concessions of the weak are the concession of fear." - Edmund Burke
24 Juni: "All cruelty springs from weakness." – Seneca
23 Juni: "There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative." - Allan Bloom
22 Juni: "Articulating our unalienable rights not as granted, but as affirmed,established their existence prior to the U.S. Constitution. Acknowledging God as the source of our unalienable rights placed those rights forever beyond the reach of man. By the same token, if we forsake God, those rights are no longer guaranteed. At once, they may be discussed, debated, altered, eliminated. They become the battleground of political activists, the plaything of demagogues." - Balint Vazsonyi
20 Juni: "I am nothing. Truth is everything." - Abraham Lincoln
19 Juni: "When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change." - Lord Falkland
18 Juni: "The twentieth-century conservative is concerned, first of all, for the regeneration of spirit and character, with the perennial problem of the inner order of the soul, the restoration of the ethical understanding, and the religious sanction upon which any life worth living is founded. This is conservatism at its highest." - Russell Kirk
17 Juni: "You cannot help men permanently by doing what they could and should do for themselves. You cannot help the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer. You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than you earn. You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by encouraging class hatred. You cannot build character and courage by taking away man's initiative and independence." - President Abraham Lincoln
On May 3, 1854, President Franklin Pierce vetoed a bill that (in his words) concerned "the constitutionality and propriety of the Federal Government assuming to enter into a novel and vast field of legislation, namely, that of providing for the care and support of all those … who by any form of calamity become fit objects of public philanthropy." Continued Pierce: "I cannot find any authority in the Constitution for making the Federal Government the great almoner of public charity throughout the United States. To do so would, in my judgment, be contrary to the letter and spirit of the Constitution and subversive of the whole theory upon which the Union of these States is founded."
In a letter on January 21st of the same year, Madison warned: "If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one, subject to particular exceptions."
Of course, the Founders’ intent with regard to the general welfare clause has been ignored and distorted, causing Madison’s dire warnings to come true. But the modern-day interpretation was not yet in vogue in December 1831, when Madison wrote: "Beginning with the great question growing out of the terms ‘common defence and general welfare,’ my early opinion expressed in The Federalist, limiting the phrase to the specified powers, has been adhered to on every occasion which has called for a test of it."
Madison’s understanding of the general welfare clause was echoed by many other Founding Fathers, including Thomas Jefferson, who in 1817 stated that Congress does not possess "unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but were restrained to those specifically enumerated...."
The phrase "general welfare" is often misunderstood by present-day Americans because of the development of the Welfare State. But at the time the Constitution was written, the phrase did not refer to giving taxpayer money to the poor, but to the general welfare of the nation. On May 3, 1854, President Franklin Pierce vetoed a bill that (in his words) concerned "the constitutionality and propriety of the Federal Government assuming to enter into a novel and vast field of legislation, namely, that of providing for the care and support of all those … who by any form of calamity become fit objects of public philanthropy." Continued Pierce: "I cannot find any authority in the Constitution for making the Federal Government the great almoner of public charity throughout the United States. To do so would, in my judgment, be contrary to the letter and spirit of the Constitution and subversive of the whole theory upon which the Union of these States is founded."
On February 16, 1887, President Grover Cleveland vetoed a bill to appropriate money to provide seeds to drought-stricken counties of Texas because "I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution, and I do not believe that the power and duty of the General Government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit."
The original intent, however, was not to manage the American economy, but to prevent the states, which were then operating almost as separate countries in a loose confederation, from inhibiting the interstate flow of goods through tariffs or other barriers. James Madison reaffirmed this intent when he wrote in a letter dated February 13, 1829 that "it is very certain that [the commerce clause] grew out of the abuse of the power by the importing States in taxing the non-importing, and was intended as a negative and preventive provision against injustice among the States themselves, rather than as a power to be used for the positive purposes of the General Government...."
Thomas Jefferson echoed the same sentiment on February 15, 1791 when he wrote that this clause "does not extend to the internal regulation of the commerce of a State (that is to say, of the commerce between citizen and citizen) … but to its external commerce only, that is to say, its commerce with another State, or with foreign nations, or with the Indian tribes."
But Franklin D. Roosevelt expressed a radically different view when he argued in a May 31, 1935 press conference that the commerce clause was written "in the horse-and-buggy age" and that "since that time … we have developed an entirely different philosophy." "We are interdependent, we are tied in together," he claimed. "And the hope has been that we could, through a period of years, interpret the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution in the light of these new things that have come to the country. It has been our hope that under the interstate commerce clause we could recognize by legislation and by judicial decision that a harmful practice in one section of the country could be prevented on the theory that it was doing harm to another section of the country. That was why the Congress for a good many years, and most lawyers, have had the thought that in drafting legislation we could depend on an interpretation that would enlarge the constitutional meaning of interstate commerce to include not only those matters of direct interstate commerce, but also those matters which indirectly affect interstate commerce." That is, change the meaning of the clause to fit the changing times — and don’t worry about the intent of the Founders.
In his statement, Roosevelt was responding to a Supreme Court decision that defined the commerce clause narrowly enough to interfere with his statist schemes, including the regulation of farm products. "Are we going to take the hands of the federal government completely off any effort to adjust the growing of national crops," he complained, "and go right straight back to the old principle that every farmer is a lord of his own farm and can do anything he wants, raise anything, any old time, in any quantity, and sell any time he wants?" Certainly no such freedoms could be tolerated in the brave new world, which is why Roosevelt dealt with the justified judicial response by audaciously attempting to pack the Supreme Court.
"Had the states been despoiled of their sovereignty by the generality of the preamble," declared Virginia’s General Assembly on January 23, 1799, "and had the Federal Government been endowed with whatever they should judge to be instrumental towards the union, justice, tranquility, common defence, general welfare, and the preservation of liberty, nothing could have been more frivolous than an enumeration of powers."
Jefferson observed in 1803 that "our peculiar security is in the possession of a written Constitution. Let us not make it a blank paper by construction."
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