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"For all our egalitarianism, Americans like the narrative of the dauphin turned man of the people. We like our leaders' elite pedigrees, as long as they are worn lightly." David Greenberg, Yale presidency historian.
"If all else fails, immortality can always be achieved by spectacular error." J.K. Galbraith (1908-).
"No matter how far you've gone down the wrong road, turn back." Turkish proverb
"It ain't what they call you, it's what you answer to." Bill Clinton
"A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves." -- Edward R. Murrow
"While it's not necessarily true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is the case that most stupid people are conservative." John Stuart Mill
"Difficile est saturam non scribere." (It is difficult not to write satire) Juvenal (60-130).
"Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel" Dr. Johnson, 7 April 1775, quoted by Boswell. "With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer, I submit that it is the first." Ambrose Bierce
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must undergo the fatigue of supporting it." Thomas Paine
"If you want the sympathy of broad masses, then you must tell them the crudest and most stupid things." Adolph Hitler
"A State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes -- will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished." John Stuart Mill
"Paranoia, my dad said, is the price of liberty. Vigilance is not enough." unknown
"I don't know whether you have any rights before you're born. All I know is that being born again doesn't entitle you to twice as many." A. Whitney Brown, "The Big Picture: Bush v. Roe v. Wade".
"As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression... 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." Justice William O. Douglas
"With reasonable men, I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter, nor waste arguments where they will certainly be lost." William Lloyd Garrison
"Political tags - such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth - are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire." -- Robert A. Heinlein
"That's why I say politics is good even when it is bad... because the only alternative is force -- and somebody gets hurt." -- Robert Heinlein as Uncle Tom in "Podkayne of Mars"
"Only a large-scale popular movement toward decentralization and self-help can arrest the present tendency toward statism." Aldous Huxley
"Nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight;
Got to kick at the darkness 'till it bleeds daylight"
Bruce Cockburn
"Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evilminded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachments by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding." Louis B. Brandeis.
"Of all the 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. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences." C.S. Lewis
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed; those who are cold and are not clothed" -- Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1953-04-16
"Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience." Adam Smith (1723-1790)
"The surest defence against evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even, if you will, eccentricity.... Evil is a sucker for solidity. It always goes for big numbers, for confident granite, for ideological purity, for drilled armies and balanced sheets." Joseph Brodsky
"I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the rights of the people by the gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." James Madison, Virginia Convention, 1788.
"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt." Bertrand Russell
"If you want truly to understand something, try to change it." Kurt Lewin
"Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm." Winston Churchill
"Violence does, in truth, recoil upon the violent, and the schemer falls into the pit which he digs for another." Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Conan Doyle)
"I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I'm a human being first and foremost, and as such I am for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole." Malcolm X
"There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is the willingness to comtemplate what is happening." Marshall McLuhan.
"We must meet reverses boldly, and not suffer them to frighten us.... We must learn to act the play out. We must live misfortune down!" Aunt Betsy, "David Copperfield", Charles Dickens
"If there is to be peace in the world, there must be peace in the nations. If there is to be peace in the nations, there must be peace in the cities. If there is to be peace in the cities, there must be peace between neighbors. If there is to be peace between neighbors, there must be peace in the home. If there is to be peace in the home, there must be peace in the heart." Lao Tzu
"True victory is not defeating an enemy. True victory gives love and changes the enemy's heart." -- Morihei Ueshiba, founder of Aikido
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