| Abortion is the low point in the history of America. A nation that prides itself on liberty has neglected to extend the most basic liberty to the most innocent and defenseless among us. The right to life is the right of all rights. Without the right to life, there is no liberty. In the not too distant future, I believe that the Supreme Court will rectify the worst decision it ever made. The life span of Roe v. Wade and its progeny is waning. One day we will look back on this time of history since 1973 with shame and sorrow. — Mathew D. Staver, President and General Counsel of Liberty Counsel
Above all, we must realize that 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. It is a weapon our adversaries in today's world do not have. It is a weapon that we as Americans do have. — Ronald Reagan
A bureaucrat is the most despicable of men, though he is needed as vultures are needed, but one hardly admires vultures whom bureaucrats so strangely resemble. I have yet to meet a bureaucrat who was not petty, dull, almost witless, crafty or stupid, an oppressor or a thief, a holder of little authority in which he delights, as a boy delights in possessing a vicious dog. Who can trust such creatures? — Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC) Roman Statesman, Philosopher and Orator
A culture of entitlement without responsibility is not just a consequence of the welfare state, it is pretty much the objective of the welfare state. — Perry de Havilland
Adolescents accept, learn from and may emulate behaviors portrayed in media as normative, attractive and without risk. — Dr. Michael Rich, director of the Center on Media and Child Health at Children's Hospital in Boston/Harvard Medical School
After reading the arguments in the Pledge of Allegiance case before the Supreme Court, I am left with a question: If we are not 'one nation under God,' what are we? — Tom Bray, 2004
A full-page ad in the New York Times, funded by a liberal front group called DefConAmerica, screamed, "The religious right is imposing its will on all Americans....That loud noise you hear is the wall between church and state crumbling." Wait a minute. Aren't Christians allowed to have a voice in politics like everybody else, or has the First Amendment been repealed? — Charles Colson, Jul 2006
A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have. — Gerald Rudolph Ford (1913-2006) US President
A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within. The essential causes of Rome's decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars. — Durant, p. 665
A group of venture capitalists is in the process of developing their own liberal radio network to counter conservative shows like Rusk Limbaugh. They feel the liberal viewpoint is not being heard — except on TV, in the movies, in music, by comedians, in magazines and newspapers. Other than that, it's not getting out! — Jay Leno, 2004
A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money. — G. Gordon Liddy
A lie left unchallenged becomes the truth. — Tom Gresham
Almost three-quarters of [federal agricultural] subsidies go to 20,000 multi-millionaire play farmers and blue-chip corporations. Farm subsidies are supposed to help the farm belt. But there's a map of where the subsidies go that you can find on the Internet. And judging from the beneficiaries, the farm belt runs from Park Avenue down Wall Street, out to the Hamptons, and then by yacht over to Martha's Vineyard, which they really ought to rename Martha's Barnyard. Among the farmers piling up the dollar bills under the mattress are Ted Turner, Sam Donaldson, the oil company Chevron, and that dirt-poor, hardscrabble share-cropper David Rockefeller. — Mark Steyn, 29 Sep 2007 at Hillsdale College
All Men being naturally equal, as descended from a common Parent, enbued with like Faculties and Propensities, having originally equal Rights and Properties, the Earth being given to the Children of Men in general, without any difference, distinction, natural Preheminence, or Dominion of one over another, yet Men not being equally industrious and frugal, their Properties and Enjoyments would be unequal. — Abraham Williams, An Election Sermon, 1762
All politics are based on the indifference of the majority. — James Reston
All that is necessary for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing. — Edmund Burke
All people are born alike - except Republicans and Democrats. — Groucho Marx
Although liberal families’ incomes average 6 percent higher than those of conservative families, conservative-headed households give, on average, 30 percent more to charity than the average liberal-headed household ($1,600 per year vs. $1,227)....People who reject the idea that “government has a responsibility to reduce income inequality” give an average of four times more than people who accept that proposition. — Arthur C. Brooks (Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compasionate Conservatism Who Gives, Who Doesn't, and Why It Matters)
A majority of Americans are not resentful of this country, or running around bitter, enraged, or angry. To the extent that those who are angry are angry, it's because of the incompetence of the government they have to deal with from federal, state, to local. It's not because government's not doing enough. It's because government doesn't do enough right. — Rush Limbaugh, 17 Apr 2008
A man who thinks of himself as belonging to a particular national group in America has not yet become an American. — Woodrow Wilson
America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards. — Claire Wolfe
Americans are not victims who need handouts. Americans need the freedom to flourish. And until our president realizes this, he, and America, will lose out. — Kathryn Lopez, National Review editor, 29 Jan 2010
Americans are tolerant, generous and kind people. We all oppose bigotry and disparagement, and we all wish to avoid hurtful disregard of the feelings of others. But the debate over same-sex marriage is not a debate over tolerance. It is a debate about the purpose of the institution of marriage. — Mitt Romney, Governor of Massachusetts
Americans, especially parents, still have deep concerns about the direction of our culture, and the health of our most basic institutions. They are concerned about unethical conduct by public officials, and discouraged by activist courts that try to redefine marriage. — George W. Bush, US President, 31 Jan 2006
America's future is clear: Unless we start cutting spending and take control of entitlement programs, our children will go broke making good on our promises. ... The government can never spend its way out of recession. It can only get out of the way, through lower tax rates and less costly regulation, and allow private business to grow again. — Rich Tucker
Amnesty is not a solution. It's a surrender. The rule of law must be upheld and our borders secured. — Mark Shurtleff, Utah Attorney General
An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself. — Joseph Pulitzer
An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last. — Winston Churchill
A national government is a government of the people of a single state or nation, united as a community by what is termed the “social compact,’ and possessing complete and perfect supremacy over persons and things, so far as they can be made the lawful objects of civil government. A federal government is distinguished from a national government by its being the government of a community of independent and sovereign states, united by compact. — Black's Law Dictionary, Revised Fourth Edition, 1968, p 1176
A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. — Cicero (106-43 BC)
A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague. — Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC) 58 BC Speech in the Roman Senate
Another plague upon the land, as devastating as the locusts God loosed on the Egyptians, is 'Political Correctness.' — Charlton Heston (Moses)
Any alleged 'right' of one man, which necessitates the violation of the rights of another, is not and cannot be a right. — Ayn Rand
Anybody who wants the presidency so much that he'll spend two years organizing and campaigning for it is not to be trusted with the office. — David Broder
Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the US media. — Noam Chomsky (1928- ) US educator and linguist
Any time we deny any citizen the full exercise of his constitutional rights, we are weakening our own claim to them. — Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969), 34th US President
A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both. — Dwight D. Eisenhower
A right delayed is a right denied. — Martin Luther King
As a result of 'evolving standards' and 'nuanced' judicial decisions, we no longer have clear-cut rights. We have a ticket to a crapshoot in a courtroom. That ticket is worth a lot more to those with slick lawyers than to ordinary citizens. — Thomas Sowell
As it has always done, somehow Government, like some monster from the past, has again outwitted the freedom-loving masses and has convinced them that they don’t need protection from Government, but from everything else. And so the age-old beast our founding fathers had tamed is once more banging at our door. — Dave Duffy
As I watch government at all levels daily eat away at our freedom, I keep thinking how prosperity and government largesse have combined to make most of us fat and lazy and indifferent to, or actually in favor of, the limits being placed on that freedom. — Lyn Nofziger [Franklyn C. Nofziger] (1924-2006) American journalist, political consultant, author, Press Secretary for President Reagan
As long as greed, stupidity and cowardice remain a part of the human condition, there will be a constituency for Democrats. — Jack Kelly
A socialist is somebody who doesn't have anything, and is ready to divide it up equally among everybody. — George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand. — Josh Billings
A survey by the Pew Research Center shows that conservatives are happier than liberals -- in all income groups. While 34 percent of all Americans call themselves 'very happy,' only 28 percent of liberal Democrats (and 31 percent of moderate or conservative Democrats) do, compared with 47 percent of conservative Republicans. This finding is niftily self-reinforcing: It depresses liberals. Election results do not explain this happiness gap... Liberals have made this the era of surly automobile bumpers, millions of them, still defiantly adorned with Kerry-Edwards and even Gore-Lieberman bumper stickers, faded and frayed like flags preserved as relics of failed crusades. To preserve these mementos of dashed dreams, many liberals may be forgoing the pleasures of buying new cars -- another delight sacrificed on the altar of liberalism. But, then, conscientious liberals cannot enjoy automobiles because there is global warming to worry about, and the perils of corporate-driven consumerism, which is the handmaiden of bourgeoisie materialism... And then there is -- was -- all that rustic beauty paved over for highways... And automobiles discourage the egalitarian enjoyment of mass transit. And automobiles, by facilitating suburban sprawl, deny sprawl's victims -- that word must make an appearance in liberal laments; and lament is what liberals do -- the uplifting communitarian experience of high-density living. And automobiles... You see? Liberalism is a complicated and exacting, not to say grim and scolding, creed. And not one conducive to happiness. — George Will, 2006
As usual, government's stumbling, bureaucratic 'solutions' exacerbate problems that free people, allowed to pursue their own self-interest, would address on their own. We'd still suffer some tough times -- it's painful when bubbles pop -- but recovery comes sooner when businesses must quickly fix their own mistakes -- or die. — John Stossel, on Congress, the US economy and government bailouts, Nov 2008
As we hear calls for a 'compassionate' response to the victims of this [hurricane] tragedy, it is important to remember that you can't be compassionate with other people's money. This difference is as simple as the difference between my reaching into my pocket for money to help someone in need and my reaching into your pocket for the same purpose. The former is charity -- the latter is not. — Michael Tanner, Sep 2005
As you may have heard, the U.S. is putting together a constitution for Iraq. Why don't we just give them ours? Think about it -- it was written by very smart people, it's served us well for over two hundred years, and besides, we're not using it anymore. — Jay Leno, 2005
At least when right-wingers rant, there's a point. — Ann Coulter
A universal peace, it is to be feared, is in the catalogue of events, which will never exist but in the imaginations of visionary philosophers, or in the breasts of benevolent enthusiasts. — James Madison (essay in the National Gazette, 2 Feb 1792)
[A] wise and frugal government...shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government. — Thomas Jefferson
A wise man's heart directs him towards the right, but a foolish man's heart directs him towards the left. — Bible: Ecclesiates 10:2
Bad men cannot make good citizens. It is when a people forget God that tyrants forge their chains. A vitiated state of morals, a corrupted public conscience, is incompatible with freedom. No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue; and by a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles. — Patrick Henry
Be able to recognize when you're reading or hearing material biased to your own side. — Marilyn vos Savant
Beginning in the 1960s, liberalism, once the home of many deep thinkers, began to substitute feeling for thought and descended into superficiality. One-word put-downs of opponents' ideas and motives were substituted for thoughtful rebuttal. Though liberals regard themselves as intellectual -- their views, after all, are those of nearly all university professors -- liberal thought has almost died. Instead of feeling the need to thoughtfully consider an idea, most liberal minds today work on automatic. One-word reactions to most issues are the liberal norm... Here is a list of terms liberals apply to virtually every idea or action with which they differ: Racist, Sexist, Homophobic, Islamophobic, Imperialist, Bigoted, Intolerant. And here is the list of one-word descriptions of what liberals are for: Peace, Fairness, Tolerance, The poor, The disenfranchised, The environment. These two lists serve contemporary liberals in at least three ways. First, they attack the motives of non-liberals and thereby morally dismiss the non-liberal person. Second, these words make it easy to be a liberal -- essentially all one needs to do is to memorize this brief list and apply the right term to any idea or policy... Third, they make the liberal feel good about himself -- by opposing conservative ideas and policies, he is automatically opposing racism, bigotry, imperialism, etc. Examples could fill a book. — Dennis Prager
Being a Christian means that I am called upon to do battle against lies, injustice, cruelty, hypocrisy -- you know, all the virtues in the church of liberalism. — Ann Coulter, 2006
Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't. — Margaret Thatcher
Be thankful we're not getting all the government we're paying for. — Will Rogers
Between 1995 and 2005, the prison population grew by 30 percent, meaning an additional half million criminals were behind bars, rather than lurking in dark alleys with switchblades. You can well imagine liberals' surprise when the crime rate went down as more criminals were put in prison. The New York Times was reduced to running querulous articles with headlines like "Number in Prison Grows Despite Crime Reduction" and "As Crime Rate Drops, the Prison Rate Rises and the Debate Rages. — Ann Coulter, Godless: The Church of Liberalism, 2006)
Beware the greedy hand of government, thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry. — Thomas Paine (1737-1809)
Bill and I didn’t come to Washington to do business as usual and compromise. — Hillary Clinton
Boy Scout Motto: 2 words.
Boy Scout Slogan: 5 words.
Boy Scout Law: 15 words.
Philmont Grace: 23 words.
Boy Scout Oath: 40 words.
The Lord's prayer: 66 words.
The 10 Commandments: 179 words.
The Gettysburg address: 286 words.
The Declaration of Independence: 1,300 words.
The US Government regulations on the sale of cabbage: 26,911 words.
No wonder we're in trouble!
Broad-minded is just another way of saying a fellow's too lazy to from an opinion. — Will Rogers
But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. — Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850) French economist, statesman, and author (The Law, 1848)
But if we are to be told by a foreign Power...what we shall do, and what we shall not do, we have Independence yet to seek, and have contended hitherto for very little. — George Washington
By the time a child finishes elementary school she will have witnessed 8,000 murders and 100,000 acts of violence on television. — Center for Media Education
By the time they have reached their senior year in high school, 3 out of 5 young people in the US have had sex, and 1 in 5 of those has had sex with 4 or more partners, according to the 2001 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance. A study by the Kaiser Family Foundation on the media habits of young people found that on average, 8- to 18-year-olds watch nearly 4 hrs of television a day and devote nearly 2 hrs a day listening to music. Another Kaiser report released 2 years ago said that in a sampling of programming from the 2001-02 television season, 64% of the shows included sexual content, 32% sexual behavior and 14% featured strong suggestions of sexual intercourse. — The Washington Post, 20 Jun 2005
Can it really be true, that the First Amendment can permit Nazis and Ku Klux Klansmen to march on public property, advocate the extermination of people of the Jewish faith and the subjugation of blacks, while the same amendment forbids our children from saying a prayer in school? — Ronald Reagan, 1984
Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes was wrong. You have an absolute and perfect right to shout 'Fire!' in a crowded theater -- and to accept responsibility for the consequences. — Alexander Hope in Hope
Classical liberalism has been so thoroughly defeated by modern liberalism's statism and its coercive homogenization of cultural life that even its name has been appropriated. "Liberal" once referred to a political tradition that honored individual liberty and a cultural ethos that allowed for the best that is known and thought to emerge from the free exchange of ideas. That kind of liberalism is today judged to be a marginal counterculture, especially in elite circles. Thus classical liberals - now known as conservatives - face an uphill battle in their struggle to preserve what is best in our inheritance. — Judge Robert Bork, Dec. 8, 1999 - from a review of Betrayal of Liberalism, Kramer and Kimball, editors, published in the Wall Street Journal
Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself. — Jean Francois Rev
Climate change is no longer science. It's politics. Climate change is also about power. Power to control. It's about who gets to decide: how much energy we will have, where that energy will come from, what it will cost. It's about simulations, scenarios and monsters conjured up by computer models that should never be used to chart government policy -- especially on matters that will profoundly affect our livelihoods, living standards, life spans and dreams of a better future. So hold onto your wallets, and hope you can hold onto your homes, cars and jobs. You're about to be put on a wild political roller coaster. — Paul Driessen, TownHall.com
Congress is spending us into a hole. We hear about the cost of earmarks and the Iraq war. But what about ‘entitlements’? That’s the government’s ironic term for programs that transfer money from people who earned it to people who didn’t. Entitlement? How can you be entitled to someone else’s money? To finance ‘entitlement’ programs, the government threatens force against the taxpayers who provide the money. Why are people who favor compulsion called humanitarians, while those who favor freedom are stigmatized as greedy?... What we really need is a top-to-bottom freeing of the economy, including the health-care industry, and massive cuts in government both spending and taxes. This would leave us wealthy enough to take care of ourselves, with private charity assisting those who can’t manage. — John Stossel
CNN ran a story: North Korea kids are taught to hate the USA. So? What's unique about that? That's happening right here in the United States! — Rush Limbaugh, 9 May 2008
Consensus is not truth. — Bessman and Swazey
Conservatives are interested in pursuing policies that will better reinforce and encourage the best of our people's common culture, habits, and beliefs. Conservatism, too, is based on the belief that the social order rests upon a moral base, and that ties us together as a people is in constant need of support. — William Bennett (The De-Valuing of America, p 35)
Corn is the answer to our food problems, not our fuel problems. The World Bank estimates that the amount of corn needed to fill the gas tank of an SUV is enough to feed one person for an entire year. That's a tradeoff the world can no longer afford. — Edwin Feulner, Heritage Foundation President, Regarding Ethanol Subsidies
Covetousness is the root of socialism. — Blaine Nay
Cowardice asks the question, "Is it safe"? Expediency asks the question, "Is it politic"? Vanity asks the question, "Is it popular"? But, Conscience asks the question, "Is it right"? And, there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but one must take it because one's conscience tells one that it is right. — Martin Luther King
Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a law breaker, it breeds contempt for the law. — Louis D. Brandeis (1856-1941) US Supreme Court Justice
Criticism of government finds sanctuary in several portions of the First Amendment. It is part of the right of free speech. It embraces freedom of the press. — Hugo L. Black (1886-1971) US Supreme Court Justice
Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude. — Alexis de Tocqueville (Nineteenth-century historian)
Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. — H.L. Mencken
Democracy is being allowed to vote for the candidate you dislike least. — Robert Byrne
Democracy is indispensable to socialism. — Vladimir Lenin
Democracy is sometimes just millions of people making the bad decisions slowly and inefficiently that a dictator could make with the stroke of a pen. — Selwyn Duke
Democracy is the road to socialism. — Karl Marx
Democrats can't get elected unless things get worse -- and things won't get worse unless they get elected. — Jeane Kirkpatrick
Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition. — Thomas Jefferson
Dependency is a cash crop. — John Longenecker
Did you watch the [2007] Live Earth concert against global warming? Neither did I! I was shoveling coal into my Styrofoam factory, enjoying roast penguin. — Craig Ferguson
Discipline without freedom is tyranny; freedom without discipline is chaos. — Cullen Hightower
Don't expect to build up the weak by pulling down the strong. — Calvin Coolidge
Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you
nothing. It was here first. <— Mark Twain
Don't you find it stunning that the Democrats are eager to go to the Supreme Court to fight for the life of an unborn chad, but you'll never see them go to the Supreme Court to fight for an unborn child? — Rush Limbaugh
Doomsday is the day we get all the government we pay for. — John Kenneth Blackwell, Mayor of Cincinnatti, Ohio
Do we operate under a system of equal justice under law? Or is there one system for the average citizen and another for the high and mighty? — Senator Ted Kennedy (1973), unlicensed, probably drunk, driver who left Mary Jo Kopechne to die in his submerged car at at Chappaquiddick, Massachusetts on the night of 19 Jul 1969
Ecology is science. Environmentalism is an ideology and political platform. — Alan Korwin
English experience indicates that when two political parties agree about something, it is generally wrong. — GK Chesterton
'E Pluribus Unum' is no longer our national motto. These three words are: 'Do For Me.' As in:
'What will the government do for me?' — Michelle Malkin, 5 Nov 2008
Equal treatment of individuals does not mean equal treatment of behavior. That is why a polygamist is on the FBI's "most wanted" list. He is not allowed to redefine marriage to suit himself any more than the advocates of "gay marriage" are. — Thomas Sowell
Eventually you have to trust someone, or civilization has broken down. — Richard Falley, commenting on intrusive baggage searches imposed on airline pilots
Everybody's trying to micromanage this economic trouble. If they'd just get out of the way and let the market handle it, yeah, there would be a lot of pain, but there's going to be anyway. Obama's policies are only going to prolong it. — Rush Limbaugh, 24 Nov 2008
Every man has a right to his opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts. — Bernard M. Baruch
Every man who parrots the cry of ’stand by the President’ without adding the proviso ’so far as he serves the Republic’ takes an attitude as essentially unmanly as that of any Stuart royalist who championed the doctrine that the King could do no wrong. No self-respecting and intelligent free man could take such an attitude. — Theodore Roosevelt
Every politician is emphatically a promising politician. — GK Chesterton
Every politician on earth claims to support freedom. The problem is so few of them understand the simple meaning of the word. — Ron Paul, US Congressman, 7 Feb 2005
Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state wants to live at the expense of everyone. — Frederic Bastiat
Every time that we try to lift a problem from our own shoulders, and shift that problem to the hands of the government, to the same extent we are sacrificing the liberties of our people. — John F. Kennedy
Extreme taxation, excessive controls, oppressive government competition with business, frustrated minorities and forgotten Americans are not the products of free enterprise. They are the residue of centralized bureaucracy, of government by a self-anointed elite. — Ronald Reagan
Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. — Barry M. Goldwater, 1964
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. — Aldous Huxley
Fear of truth is the father of censorship. — John N. Booth
Felons, by virtue of their deeds, are stripped of civic and other benefits as part of the penalty for their actions. I prize my privilege to vote. Giving felons a vote degrades that privilege. Democrats should stop dipping into the bottom of the barrel. — Lyle E. Holmgren (Newsweek, 28 Mar 2005, p 19)
Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them. — Frederick Douglass, abolitionist
Forced equality is tyranny. — Selwyn Duke
Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries. — Douglas Casey
Forty years ago abortion and homosexuality weren't issues, they were unmentionables. — Joseph Sobran (2005)
Free cheese is only found in mousetraps. — Russian proverb
Freedom is based on truth, and no man is completely free as long as any part of his belief is based on error. — N. Eldon Tanner (Ensign, May 1978, page 14)
Freedom is never an achieved state; like electricity, we've got to keep generating it or the lights go out. — Wayne LaPierre
Freedom is not only a gift, but a summons to personal responsibility. — Pope Benedict XVI, Apr 2008
Free enterprise has done more to reduce poverty than all the government programs dreamed up by Democrats. — Ronald Reagan
Free speech isn't free speech unless it applies to those with whom you disagree....Fight for free speech, even if you find it offensive -- you have many rights, but the right to not be offended isn't among them. — Lady Liberty
From each according to his means and to each according to his needs? If you enforce that principle through government, the result will be fewer people with means and more people with needs. — Selwyn Duke
Get all the fools on your side and you can be elected to anything. — Frank Dane
Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please. — Mark Twain
God created the Heavens and the Earth, and on the sixth day He made man. On the seventh day God rested, and the Devil made liberals. — Selwyn Duke
God left the world unfinished for man to work his skill upon. He left the electricity in the cloud, the oil in the earth. He left the rivers unbridged and the forests unfelled and the cities unbuilt. God gives to man the challenge of raw materials, not the ease of finished things. He leaves the pictures unpainted and the music unsung and the problems unsolved, that man might know the joys and glories of creation. — Thomas S. Monson (Ensign, Mar 1988)
God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of people that these liberties are a gift from God? — Inscription on a wall of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, DC
Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.... We've been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. Well, if no one among us is capable of government himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else? All of us together, in and out of government, must bear the burden. The solutions we seek must be equitable, with no one group singled out to pay a higher price. — Ronald Reagan
Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it. — Ronald Reagan
Government welfare programs -- if they should exist at all -- should be limited to helping those who really need assistance. They should be safety nets, not dragnets that capture everyone. — Mark Skousen
(Econopower, p 55)
Great danger lies in the notion that we can reason with evil. — Doug Patton
Great truths can only be forgotten and can never be falsified. — G. K. Chesterton
Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm -- but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves. — T.S. Eliot
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance. — The Declaration of Independence, 1776 (History certainly repeats itself)
Hell, I never vote for anybody. I always vote against. — W.C. Fields
Helping the poor through the government is like feeding the sparrows through cows. — Walter Williams
He's qualified, but he's out of the mainstream....He's stuck in the past. He believes the Constitution means what it says. — Charles Schumer, Liberal Democrat US Senator, making the case for a "no" vote on confirming Samuel Alito for the US Supreme Court, 2005
He who does not punish evil, commands it to be done. — Leonardo da Vinci
History affords us many instances of the ruin of states, by the prosecution of measures ill suited to the temper and genius of their people. The ordaining of laws in favor of one part of the nation, to the prejudice and oppression of another, is certainly the most erroneous and mistaken policy....These measures never fail to create great and violent jealousies and animosities between the people favored and the people oppressed; whence a total separation of affections, interests, political obligations, and all manner of connections, by which the whole state is weakened. — Benjamin Franklin
How can there possibly be liberty and justice for all, when, in the name of justice, people claim rights to income, food, housing, education, health care, transportation, ad infinitum? We can't. Positive rights to receive such things, absent an obligation to earn them, must violate others' liberty, by taking some of their income without their consent. They are really just wishes, convertible into benefits for some only by employing the government to violate others' rights not to have what is theirs taken. — Pepperdine Professor Gary Galles, 2004
How could a readiness for war in time of peace be safely prohibited, unless we could could prohibit, in like manner, the preparations and establishments of every hostile nation? — James Madison (Federalist No. 41, 1788)
I am at liberty to vote as my conscience and judgment dictates to be right, without the yoke of any party on me...Look at my arms, you will find no party hand-cuff on them. — Davy Crockett (1786-1836) American frontiersman
I am concerned for the security of our great nation, not so much because of any threat from without, but because of the insidious forces working from within. — General Douglas MacArthur
I am for a government rigorously frugal and simple. Were we directed from Washington when to sow, when to reap, we should soon want bread. — Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I traveled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer. — Benjamin Franklin, On the Price of Corn, and Management of the Poor, London Chronicle, November 1766
I believe it is appropriate to have an overrepresentation of factual presentations on how dangerous it [global warming] is, as a predicate for opening up the audience. — Al Gore warming to Grist Magazine
I believe the best social program is a job. — Ronald Reagan
I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy -- but that could change. — Al Gore, 22 May 1998
I cannot find any authority in the Constitution for public charity. [To approve such spending] would be contrary to the letter and the spirit of the Constitution and subversive to the whole theory upon which the Union of these States is founded. — Franklin Pierce (1804-1869), US President
I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents. — James Madison (1751-1836), US President, Father of the US Constitution, in disapproval of Congress appropriating $15,000 to assist some French refugees in 1792
I certainly think the free-market has failed. — Hillary Clinton, 4 Jun 2007
I could not say less in view of questions of such gravity that go down to the very foundations of the government. If the provisions of the Constitution can be set aside by an Act of Congress, where is the course of usurpation to end? The present assault upon capital is but the beginning. It will be but the stepping-stone to others, larger and more sweeping, till our political contests will become a war of the poor against the rich; a war growing in intensity and bitterness. — Justice Stephen J. Field (1816-1899) US Supreme Court Justice
I could totally win [President Bush] in a mind contest... Like if it was like a psychic thing and he was like, okay Rosanne, bring your best powers against my best powers, even though he's like totally world-wide connected, and I'm not so world-wide, I could so totally still win on account of like being female, being a grandmother and like, you know, being intelligent. I could totally win. — Actress/comedian Roseanne Barr putting her intelligence on display, Oct 2005
I decline utterly to be impartial as between the fire brigade and the fire. — Winston Churchill (House of Commons, 1927)
I don't know that I subscribe to the notion that power corrupts, but I do know that it releases inhibitions, causing one's true colors to shine through. — Selwyn Duke
I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the acts. — Will Rogers
I don't want anybody to be forced to buy a car they don't want or forced to use ethanol. Not in the 'land of the free and home of the brave' where we have life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. — Rush Limbaugh, 24 Nov 2008
I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God. — Congressional Oath of Office (Yeah, right!)
[I]f adultery has always been understood as involving a man and a woman, how much more so has marriage always been an opposite-sex institution? — Jeff Jacoby
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be. — Thomas Jefferson
If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that, too. — Somerset Maugham
If capitalism screws up, such as these banks, you get more government. But when government screws up, you don't get more capitalism. You get more government! — Rush Limbaugh, 17 Apr 2009
I favor the policy of economy, not because I wish to save money, but because I wish to save people. The men and women of this country who toil are the ones who bear the cost of the Government. Every dollar that we carelessly waste means that their life will be so much the more meager. Every dollar that we prudently save means that their life will be so much more abundant. Economy is idealism in its most practical form. — Calvin Coolidge, US President, 1925
If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare, and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare, they may take the care of religion into their own hands; they may appoint teachers in every state, county, and parish, and pay them out of the public treasury; they may take into their own hands the education of children establishing in like manner schools throughout the union; they may assume the provision for the poor; they may undertake the regulation of all roads other than post roads; in short, everything, from the highest object of state legislation down to the most minute object of police, would be thrown under the power of congress. — James Madison, issuing a warning about an unrestrained Congress in 1798
I feel obliged to withhold my approval of the plan to indulge in benevolent and charitable sentiment through the appropriation of public funds. I find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution. — President Grover Cleveland (1837-1908), US President
If everyone is a victim, who's the victimizer? — Selwyn Duke
I feel that the greater destroyer of peace today is abortion. By abortion, the mother does not learn to love, but kills even her own child to solve her problems. — Mother Teresa at the National Prayer Breakfast, 3 Feb 1994
If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing. — Anatole France
If in the last few years you haven't discarded a major opinion or acquired a new one, check your pulse. You may be dead. — Gelett Burgess
If I studied all my life, I couldn't think up half the number of funny things passed in one session of congress. — Will Rogers
If it can't be grown it must be mined! — Author Unknown
If it's only about power, you lose. — Dick Armey, Former US House Majority Leader
If Karl, instead of writing a lot about capital, had made a lot of it, it would have been much better. — Karl Marx's mother
If men through fear, fraud or mistake, should in terms renounce and give up any essential natural right, the eternal law of reason and the great end of society, would absolutely vacate such renunciation; the right to freedom being the gift of God Almighty, it is not in the power of Man to alienate this gift, and voluntarily become a slave. — John Adams, Rights of the Colonists, 1772
If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. — James Madison, Federalist no. 51
If our economy of freedom fails to distribute wealth as ably as it has created it, the road to dictatorship will be open to any man who can persuasively promise security to all. — Will Durant (1885-1981)
If politics were like baseball, the Republicans would be smart to trade Senator John McCain to the Democrats for Senator Joseph Lieberman, even if they had to throw in a future draft choice. — Thomas Sowell
If President Bush were as intent on cracking down on illegal immigration as he is on insulting conservatives, we'd have a secure border by now. — Brian Darling, Heritage Foundation Senate Relations Director
If private companies won't put up their money, why should the taxpayers? — President Ronald Reagan when he outlawed Federal funding of stem-cell research
If 'pro' is the opposite of 'con' what is the opposite of 'progress'? — Paul Harvey
I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves. — Harriet Tubman
If some men are entitled by right to the products of the work of others, it means that those others are deprived of rights and condemned to slave labor. — Ayn Rand
If the laws could speak for themselves, they would complain of lawyers in the first place. — Charles Montagu
If the government is the answer, it must have been a stupid question. — Author Unknown
If the Jewish reader forgets the seven million Christians murdered by the Nazis, along with the Jews, then not only will he let five million Jews die in vain, but has betrayed the Jewish heritage of compassion and justice. — Max I. Dimont (Jews, God and History)
If the personal freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution inhibit the government's ability to govern the people, we should look to limit those guarantees. — Bill Clinton, US President, 12 Dec 1993
If there is any Hell more unprincipled than our rulers, and we, the ruled, I feel curious to see it. — Henry David Thoreau (Slavery in Massachusetts)
If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace. — Thomas Paine
If tomorrow the theory of manmade global warming were proved to be a false alarm, one might reasonably expect a collective sigh of relief from everyone. But instead there would be cries of anguish from vested interests. About the only thing that might cause global warming hysteria to end will be a prolonged period of cooling... or at least, very little warming. We have now had at least six years without warming, and no one really knows what the future will bring. And if warming does indeed end, I predict that there will be no announcement from the scientific community that they were wrong. There will simply be silence. — Roy Spencer, University of Alabama climate scientist
If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal. — Emma Goldman
If we Americans are so rich and so smart, why can't we treat our citizens as well as the Finns do? They pay nothing for education at any level, including medical school or law school. Their medical care, which contributes to an infant mortality rate that is half of ours and a life expectancy greater than ours, costs relatively little....Unemployment benefits are good and last, in one form or another, indefinitely. — Robert Kaiser, former editor of The Washington Post (Where does the money come from for all this "free stuff" -- heaven?)
If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people, under the pretence of taking care of them, they must become happy. — Thomas Jefferson, letter to Thomas Cooper, 1802
If we could have but one generation of properly born, trained, educated and healthy children, a thousand other problems of government would vanish. We would assure ourselves of healthier minds, more vigorous bodies, to direct the energies of our nation to greater heights of achievement. — Herbert Hoover, US President
If we keep treating our most important values as meaningless relics, that's exactly what they'll become. — Michael Josephson
If you came and you found a strange man... teaching your kids to punch each other, or trying to sell them all kinds of products, you'd kick him right out of the house, but here you are; you come in and the TV is on, and you don't think twice about it. — Jerome Singer
If you deprive a man of his right to fail in the righteous use of his property, you also deprive him of his right to succeed. If you remove from a man his right to “go to hell,” you likewise remove his free agency to go to heaven. Satan’s entire philosophy is based on a “something for nothing” philosophy: salvation without effort – a free gift. — Howard W. Hunter (BYU Devotional, 8 Mar 1966)
If you don't read the newspaper, you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed. — Mark Twain
If you ever injected truth into politics you would have no politics. — Will Rogers
If you have a right to someone else's approval, then they do not have a right to their own opinions and values. You cannot say that what 'consenting adults' do in private is nobody else's business and then turn around and say that others are bound to put their seal of approval on it. — Thomas Sowell
If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there would be a shortage of sand. — Attributed to Milton Friedman
If you're going to sin, sin against God, not the bureaucracy. God will forgive you, but the bureaucracy won't. – Admiral Hyman G. Rickover
If you want total security, go to prison. There you're fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking...is freedom. — Dwight D. Eisenhower
If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than live as slaves. — Sir Winston Churchill
I had no idea that after I left in 1986 they would evolve into a band of scientific illiterates….Clearly, my former Greenpeace colleagues are either not reading the morning paper or simply don't care about the truth. — Patrick Moore, Greenpeace co-founder, writing in Canada’s National Post (October, 2001)
I have always felt that a politician is to be judged by the animosities he excites among his opponents. — Sir Winston Churchill
I have only one thing to say about the idea that Hispanics are reluctant to learn English: I’ve never been asked if I wanted to press two for German. — Selwyn Duke
I have seen gross intolerance shown in support of tolerance. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I have talked face to face with the godless communist leaders. It may surprise you to learn that I was host to Mr. Khrushchev for a half day when he visited the United States, not that I’m proud of it. I opposed his coming then, and I still feel it was a mistake to welcome this atheistic murderer as a state visitor. But, according to President Eisenhower, Khrushchev had expressed a desire to learn something of American Agriculture -- and after seeing Russian agriculture I can understand why. As we talked face to face, he indicated that my grandchildren would live under communism. After assuring him that I expected to do all in my power to assure that his and all other grandchildren will live under freedom he arrogantly declared in substance: ‘You Americans are so gullible. No, you won’t accept communism outright, but we’ll keep feeding you small doses of socialism until you’ll finally wake up and find you already have communism. We won’t have to fight you. We’ll so weaken your economy until you’ll fall like overripe fruit into our hands.’ And they’re ahead of schedule in their devilish scheme. — Ezra Taft Benson, Devotional Address at Brigham Young University, circa 1968
I hesitate to say anything nice about him, for fear that it would be used against him. And that's a terrible commentary on the state of politics and the political climate today. — John McCain, Republican Senator of Arizona, on Senator Joseph Lieberman, Democrat Senator of Connecticut
I'm not sure I want popular opinion on my side - I've noticed those with the most opinions often have the fewest facts. — Bethania McKenstry
I’m so glad there’s California. It’s kind of a big petri dish for the rest of the nation. Every time someone has a stupid idea, California tries it out, mercifully sparing the rest of us. — Tim Slagle
In 2005, Americans donated more than $95 billion to the developing world. That is almost four times what the U.S. government gives in foreign aid and many times more than what Europeans give in public and private donations, according to a study by the Hudson Institute, to be released next month. — Washington Times (Private charity outpaces, outperforms foreign aid)
In a democracy, the individual enjoys not only the ultimate power but carries the ultimate responsibility. — Norman Cousins
In a society in which it is a moral offense to be different from your neighbor your only escape is to never let them find out. — Robert A. Heinlein
Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law. — Ayn Rand
Inequality exists as long as liberty exists. It unavoidably results from that very liberty itself. — Alexander Hamilton
In free countries, every man is entitled to express his opinions and every other man is entitled not to listen. — G. Norman Collie
In liberal land, the thinking goes like this: If a majority of Americans seek a change in direction they must be denied by the courts for their own good. But when a tiny sliver of the minority seeks change it must be granted them by a handful of judges for the nation's good. This phenomenon used to be referred to as the 'tyranny of the minority', but is now simply known as the New York Times editorial policy. — Lisa Fabrizio
In most modern politics, unfortunately, it may truly be said that those who make history never know history. — GK Chesterton (1874-1936)
In my estimation, more misery has been created by reformers than by any other force in human history. Show me someone who says, "Something must be done!" and I will show you a head full of vicious intentions that have no other outlet. What we must strive for always is to find the natural flow and go with it. — Frank Herbert (Dune)
In one sixth of British households, not one person works. One fifth of British children are raised in households where nobody works. — Mark Steyn, 2 Sep 2009
In order to avoid poverty, just do three things: finish high school, marry before having a child, and don't have a child until you're at least twenty years old. Only 8 percent of people who do all three of those things wind up poor, but a staggering 79 percent of those who fail to do them wind up in poverty. — Bernard Goldberg, Arrogance, p 12
In our attempt to blame poverty on prejudice, we have taught the poor to be prejudiced against the basic values necessary to sustain a free and civil society....We've taught them there are no real absolutes to the human condition -- except perhaps that the highest value in life is to acquire things. — Star Parker
In San Francisco, a chief medical officer for Planned Parenthood testified that she chooses methods of abortion that violate the new law because they are among the safest options. Asked by a government lawyer whether the fetus exhibits pain during the procedures, Maureen Paul replied, 'I have no idea what you mean.' — James Taranto
In such a performance you may lay the foundation of national happiness only in religion, not by leaving it doubtful "whether morals can exist without it," but by asserting that without religion morals are the effects of causes as purely physical as pleasant breezes and fruitful seasons. — Benjamin Rush (letter to John Adams, 20 Aug 1811)
In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against such men because of creed or birthplace origin. But this is predicated upon the person's becoming in every facet an American and nothing but an American. — Theodore Roosevelt
In the United States there is no phenomenon more threatening to popular government than the unwillingness of newspapers to give the facts to their readers. — Nelson Antrim Crawford
In the United States today, the average individual, whoever he is, works from January to...late June to provide funds that the government controls. That is to say, government at one level or another, federal, state, or local -- directly through spending and taxes, and indirectly through rules, regulations, and mandates -- controls half the national income and can determine how that is spent. We're 50 percent socialist. Now, is that half freedom or half slavery? Neither of those statements would be wrong. We're partly free and we're partly enslaved. — Milton Friedman, Economist
In the West, a militant secularism has seized state power and the de-Christianization of America is well advanced. In the East, we had best recognize that the rage, militancy and intolerance so often on display are the unmistakable marks of a rising, not a dying, faith. — Pat Buchanan, Nationally Syndicated Columnist, Sep 2006
In this era of big government, we sometimes forget that many of our proudest achievements as a nation came not through government, but through private citizens, individuals whose genius and generosity flourished in this climate of freedom. — Ronald Reagan
"I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." Since I was a small boy, two states have been added to our country, and two words have been added to the Pledge of Allegiance, "under God." Wouldn't it be a pity if someone said that is a prayer, and that would be eliminated from schools, too? — Red Skelton, 1969
I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them. — Thomas Jefferson
Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors. — Thomas Henry Huxley, 1825-1895
I seek not for power, but to pull it down. I seek not for honor of the world, but for the glory of my God, and the freedom and welfare of my country. — General Moroni (Book of Mormon, Alma 60:36)
I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors, and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be new views. — Abraham Lincoln
I stand by all the misstatements that I've made. — Vice President Al Gore to Sam Donaldson, 17 Aug 1993
It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For this very reason peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity, and freedom of worship here. — Patrick Henry, 1765
It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctively native American criminal class - except Congress. — Mark Twain
It feels like coming home. — Bill Clinton, while strolling through Harlem, Feb 2001 -- with his Secret Service escort
It has been pointed out that the days of democracy are numbered once the belly takes command of the head. When the less affluent feel the urge to break a commandment and begin to covet that which their more affluent neighbors possess, they are tempted to use their votes to obtain instant satisfaction. Then equal opportunity at the starting line becomes an extended guarantee of at least a tie at the finish of the race. Under the euphemism 'the greatest good for the greatest number,' we destroy a system which has accomplished just that and move toward the managed economy which strangles freedom and mortgages generations yet to come. — Ronald Reagan
I think at core he's [Bill Clinton] an honest person....I think you can be an honest person and lie about any number of things. — Dan Rather, CBS News anchorman, 18 May 2001
I think government support for biomass energy is a measure of both the corruption and relative stupidity of our elected officials. That, in turn, is evidence of two problems. First off, the average voter isn't bright. Second, the average voter has little incentive to be well informed about what elected officials believe and do. — Randall Parker, 26 May 2008
I think it's time to send a clear message to what has become the most profitable sector in (the) entire economy that they are being watched. — Hillary Clinton, 2 Sep 2005
I think it would be a mistake to make the military a 'first responder' in natural disasters, but FEMA should be reorganized along military lines. And the head of FEMA should always be either a National Guard general or a Coast Guard admiral. There are some jobs which require adult supervision. Too many of these are held by political hacks. — Jack Kelly, Oct 2005
I think there is one more issue here -- that of the left-wing indoctrination of children to be subservient and not stand up to defend each other, much less themselves, from attack. You can readily see this philosophy being expounded on the national campaign trails by those who don't seem to have the clear vision of evil-versus-good and the moral obligation to stand between evil and the innocent; the tendency to define all violence as bad, such that when a country defends itself against suicide bombing of innocent children, it becomes morally equivalent in their minds to targeting a terrorist in his car; the argument that because America did not find a nuclear bomb in Saddam's closet the mass graves of innocent Iraqis don't qualify as sufficient motivation for defense from the outside. This is, in my opinion, a concerted effort to morally enfeeble our children -- and that will not only weaken our country. It will make the world more available for evil to have a triumphant reign. — Dr. Laura Schlessinger
I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious. — Thomas Jefferson
It is a decision of the Supreme Court. So this is almost as if God has spoken. — Nancy Pelosi reacting to the Supreme Court's shameless yet shameful "Kelo" decision on eminent domain (No further word on Ms. Pelosi's condition at this hour)
It is amazing how many people act as if the right to free speech includes the right to be free of criticism for what you say -- which means that other people should not have the same right to free speech that they claim for themselves. — Thomas Sowell
It is amazing how many people seem to think that the government exists to turn their prejudices into laws. — Thomas Sowell
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong. — Voltaire
(1694-1778) French Philosopher and Author
It is God's responsibility to forgive Bin Laden. It is our responsibility to arrange the meeting. — Author Unknown
It is hard to think of any word that has confused more issues than the word "rights." Nowadays, almost anything that anybody wants is called a "right" -- a magic word that does away with the need for evidence, logic or even common sense. — Thomas Sowell
It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in argument. — William Gibbs McAdoo
It is indeed probable that more harm and misery have been caused by men determined to use coercion to stamp out a moral evil than by men intent on doing evil. — Fredrich von Hayek, Nobel Laureate in Economics, The Constitution of Liberty
It is inevitable, that eventually the people will demand absolute security from the state... And absolute security is absolute slavery. — Taylor Caldwell
It isn't best that we all think alike; it is difference of opinion that makes horse races. — Mark Twain
It isn't pollution that's harming the environment. It's the impurities in our air and water that are doing it. — Al Gore
It isn't that liberals are ignorant. It's just that they know so much that isn't so. — Ronald Reagan
It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It is that they can’t see the problem. — G. K. Chesterton
It is our duty to concentrate all our influence to make popular that which is sound and good, and unpopular that which is unsound. — Joseph Smith (History of the Church, 5:286)
It really is difficult to imagine how people who have entirely given up managing their own affairs could make a wise choice of those who are to do that for them. One should never expect a liberal, energetic, and wise government to originate in the votes of a people of servants. — Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)
It is sobering to reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence. — Charles A. Beard
It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government. — Thomas Paine
It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law...that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts. — H.L. Mencken
It is the greatest scam in history. I am amazed, appalled and highly offended by it. Global Warming; It is a SCAM. Some dastardly scientists with environmental and political motives manipulated long term scientific data. And I am telling you Global Warming is a nonevent, a manufactured crisis and a total scam. I say this knowing you probably won't believe me, a mere TV weatherman, challenging a Nobel Prize, Academy Award and Emmy Award winning former Vice President of United States. So be it. — John Coleman, founder of the Weather Channel
It is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us freedom of the press.
It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech.
It is the soldier, not the campus organizer, who has given us the freedom to demonstrate.
It is the soldier, who salutes the flag, who serves beneath the flag,
And whose coffin is draped by the flag, who allows the protester to burn the flag.
— Charles M. Province
It is true that Christianity doesn't fit neatly into political categories. But it's also true that the left doesn't fit even roughly into the Christian one. — Selwyn Duke
It is true that liberty is precious; so precious that it must be carefully rationed. — Vladimir Lenin
It is unconstitutional for students to see the Ten Commandments since they might read, meditate upon, respect, or obey them. — Stone v. Graham, 1980, Ring v. Grand Forks Public School District, 1980, Lanner v. Wimmer, 1981
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 satisfied; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. — C.S. Lewis
It may not always be easy, convenient, or politically correct to stand for truth and right, but it is always the right thing to do. Always. — Elder M. Russell Ballard of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles (October 1997 General Conference)
It's a good thing we have free speech because it helps us find out who the real idiots are. — David Holm
It's a mark of the Dems' sophisticated and nuanced thinking that they can talk one way and act the other. It's only stupid little people who insist on leaders who say and do the same thing. — Michael Goodwin
It’s never too late – in fiction or in life – to revise. — Nancy Thayer
It's often been said that there's no such thing as a stupid question, but whoever thought up that expression obviously never met a devout liberal. Either that or he was a liberal himself. — Edward L. Daley
It's time to reinstitute the Fairness Doctrine. — Senator Richard J. Durbin, 2007
It's useless to hold a person to anything he says while he's in love, drunk or running for office. — Shirley McLaine
It would be an absurdity for jurors to be required to accept the judge's view of the law, against their own opinion, judgment, and conscience. — John Adams
I've observed that the people who preach tolerance most are often the most intolerable. — Selwyn Duke
I've observed that the people who think the least want to change the way others think the most. — Selwyn Duke
I want for our country enough laws to restrain me from injuring others, so that these laws will also restrain others from injuring me. I want enough government, with enough constitutional safeguards, so that this necessary minimum of laws will be applied equitably to everybody, and will be binding on the rulers as well as those ruled. Beyond that I want neither laws nor government to be imposed on our people as a means or with the excuse of protecting us from catching cold, or of seeing that we raise the right kind of crops, or of forcing us to live in the right kind of houses or neighborhoods, or of compelling us to save money or to spend it, or of telling us when or whether we can pray. I do not want government or laws designed for any other form of welfarism or paternalism, based on the premise that government knows best and can run our lives better than we can run them ourselves. And my concept of freedom, and of its overwhelming importance, is implicit in these aspirations and ideals. — Robert Welch (1899-1985) Author, Founder of the John Birch Society
I want people to be able to get what they need to live: enough food, a place to live, and an education for their children. Government does not provide these as well as private charities and businesses. — Davy Crockett (1786-1836) American hunter, frontiersman, soldier and politician
I want the people of America to be able to work less for the government and more for themselves. I want them to have the rewards of their own industry. This is the chief meaning of freedom. Until we can reestablish a condition under which the earnings of the people can be kept by the people, we are bound to suffer a very severe and distinct curtailment of our liberty. — President Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933)
I would define a conservative, first as one who believes in the Constitution as it is written. That takes care of free speech, freedom of religion, the right to petition the government, the right to keep and bear arms and, in the words of William O. Douglas in one of his saner moments, ‘the right to be let alone. Second, a conservative believes in small, limited government at every level. Along with this he believes strongly in individual responsibility. That is, a person or a family should take care of itself and turn for help to government only when all other means have been exhausted. It also means that society, before government, has a duty to take care of its own. Government should be a resource of last resort. Third, a conservative believes taxes should be levied for the purpose of financing the limited responsibilities of government such as providing for the common defense, catching and incarcerating criminals, minting money and filling potholes. Taxes should not be levied for the purpose of redistributing wealth... One other thing I think a conservative believes is that the parents, not government, are and should be responsible for the upbringing and behavior of their children. — Lyn Nofziger
I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it. — Thomas Jefferson
I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. — Barry Goldwater, US Senator and presidential candidate, 1964
Jesus would never use government surrogates to force the people to 'help others'. — Philip Freneau
Journalism: A profession whose business is to explain to others what it personally does not understand. — Lord Northcliffe
Just because something is tradition doesn't make it right. — Anthony J. D'Angelo
Know which officials are voted into office and which are appointed, and by whom. — Marilyn vos Savant
Law and liberty cannot rationally become the objects of our love, unless they first become the objects of our knowledge. — James Wilson (Of the Study of the Law in the United States, Circa 1790)
Legislatures represent people, not acres or trees. — Earl Warren
Let me be a free man, free to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to trade where I choose, free to choose my own teachers, free to follow the religion of my fathers, free to talk, think and act for myself -- and I will obey every law or submit to the penalty. — Nez Percé Chief Joseph (1840-1904)
[L]etting the government do the work is a good way to make bad decisions. — John Stossel
Liberal (n.) a man with his mind open at both ends. — Colin Bowles
Liberal (n.) a person so open-minded their brains have fallen out. — Author Unknown
Liberalism can't exist in sunlight. It's like Dracula. It's gotta hang around in a coffin all day and comes out only at night when nobody can see. — Rush Limbaugh, 16 Dec 2009
Liberalism is a mental disorder. — Michael Savage
Liberalism is an ideology built on lies. It doesn't work. It can't work. It requires making false promises and breaking promises. — Rush Limbaugh, 26 Mar 2008
Liberalism is a spiritual disease induced by the dislocation from reality that results from the denial of Truth, of objective reality. — Selwyn Duke
Liberalism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, can help themselves. — Author Unknown
Liberals can believe what they want to believe, but let us not flinch from identifying liberalism as the opposition party to God. — Ann Coulter, 2006
Liberals cannot win when Americans are allowed to vote, so they jam their insane ideas down our throats through the courts. In Bush's second term, there is no more important committee than the one charged with overseeing his judicial nominations. If Republicans blow this once-a-century opportunity to end the tyranny of the judiciary, they deserve to lose. — Ann Coulter
Liberals can't win on abortion, gay marriage and bans on the Pledge of Allegiance by allowing Americans to vote. That's why they need the courts to keep inventing rights to abortion, gay marriage and bans on the Pledge of Allegiance. Normal liberals know that, which is why they duck honest argument. — Ann Coulter
Liberals create economic circumstances that force businesses to lay people off, and then liberals blame capitalism for failing. When the economy is strong, liberals want to grow government. When the economy is weak, they want to grow government. There is no business cycle in government. There is just growth. — Rush Limbaugh, 5 Sep 2008
Liberals' creation myth is Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, which is about one notch above Scientology in scientific rigor. It's a make-believe story, based on a theory that is a tautology, with no proof in the scientist's laboratory or the fossil record - and that's after 150 years of very determined looking. We wouldn't still be talking about it but for the fact that liberals think evolution disproves God. — Ann Coulter (Godless: The Church of Liberalism, 2006)
Liberals can't just come out and say they want to take more of our money, kill babies, and discriminate on the basis of race. — Ann Coulter
Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views. — William F. Buckley, Jr.
Liberals hate America, they hate flag-wavers, they hate abortion opponents, they hate all religions except Islam, post 9/11. Even Islamic terrorists don't hate America like Liberals do. They don't have the energy. If they had that much energy, they'd have indoor plumbing by now. — Ann Coulter
Liberals love to divide us by economic class, and discuss policies in terms of which class will benefit or suffer by their passage. The problem is that class is a moving target. What are the magical income levels that define poor, middle, and rich? Further, Democrats assume that no one has the ability to rise above the economic situation into which they were born. People climb up the income ladder everyday when they work at it. — Herman Cain
Liberals may think of themselves as people who believe in certain principles but, if you observe their actual behavior, you are likely to discover that most liberals have a certain set of attitudes, rather than principles. Liberals may denounce 'greed,' for example, but in practice it all depends on whose greed. Nothing the government does is ever likely to be called 'greed' by liberals. ... Even when the lands seized under 'eminent domain' laws are turned over to casinos, hotels, or shopping malls -- places that will pay more taxes than working class homeowners -- liberals can never seem to work up the outrage that they display when denouncing 'greed' on the part of businesses whose prices are higher than liberals think they should be. It is not the principle of sacrificing other people's economic interests to your own that causes liberals to denounce greed. It is a question of who does it and what the liberals' attitudes are to those segments of the population." — Thomas Sowell
Liberals subscribe to Darwinism not because it's "science," which they hate, but out of wishful thinking. Darwinism lets them off the hook morally. Do whatever you feel like doing - screw your secretary, kill Grandma, abort your defective child - Darwin says it will benefit humanity! Nothing is ever wrong as long as you follow your instincts. Just do it - and let Mother Earth sort out the winners and losers. — Ann Coulter (Godless: The Church of Liberalism, 2006)
Liberals want benefits. Conservatives (real Americans) want opportunities. — Jim
Prentiss
Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of the government. The history of government is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is the history of the limitation of government, not the increase of it. — Woodrow Wilson
Liberty is an inherently offensive lifestyle. Living in a free society guarantees that each one of us will see our most cherished principles and beliefs questioned and in some cases mocked. That psychic discomfort is the price we pay for basic civic peace. It's worth it. It's a pragmatic principle. Defend everyone else's rights, because if you don't there is no one to defend yours. — MaxedOutMama
Liberty is often a heavy burden on a man. It involves the necessity for perpetual choice which is the kind of labor men have always dreaded. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Liberty is the only thing you cannot have unless you are willing to give it to others. — William Allen White
Liberty lies in the rights of that person whose views you find most odious. — John Stuart Mill
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it. — George Bernard Shaw
Liberty without learning is always in peril and learning without liberty is always in vain. — John F. Kennedy
Life is being trivialized and subjected to the vacillating whims of convenience and political correctness. Children are considered a choice rather than a blessing....Almost every trend indicates that we are on a slippery slope downward from God's plan for his children. — Elder M. Russell Ballard, member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
Listening to liberals invoke the sanctity of 'science' to promote their crackpot ideas creates the same uneasy feeling as listening to Bill Clinton cite Scripture. — Ann Coulter, 2006
Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary. — Reinhold Niebuhr
Many politicians... are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool... who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim. — Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859)
McVeigh's decision to go vegetarian groups him with some of the world's greatest visionaries. — Bruce Friedrich praising Oklahoma City bomber and mass-murderer Timothy McVeigh, for choosing a vegetarian last meal
Men cannot be governed and remain men. Domesticate the wolf and he changes both physically and mentally. His muzzle shrinks, his teeth diminish, he loses size, speed, and strength, He grows spots. His ears flop. His brain withers. He becomes a dog. Men are on the verge of becoming dogs -- the changes are underway already -- unless we do something to stop it. — The Ceo Lia Wheeler, Phoebus Krumm
Michael Moore simultaneously represents everything I detest in a human being and everything I feel obligated to defend in an American. Quite simply, it is that stupid moron's right to be that utterly, completely wrong. — Dennis Miller
Morality is not defined by individual choice. — Rush Limbaugh
Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favor. — Robert Frost
Most of the major ills of the world have been caused by well-meaning people who ignored the principle of individual freedom, except as applied to themselves, and who were obsessed with fanatical zeal to improve the lot of mankind. — Henry Grady Weaver
Most of the work of government does not need to be done. And, if you can remember that, if we could all remember that, this country would be better off. — Lyn Nofziger
Most people can't think, most of the remainder won't think, the small fraction who do think mostly can't do it very well. The extremely tiny fraction who think regularly, accurately, creatively, and without self-delusion -- in the long run, these are the only people who count. — Robert Heinlein
Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility. — Sigmund Freud (Austrian neurologist and father of psychoanalysis)
Most mass transit systems cause more greenhouse gas emissions per passenger mile than the average automobile. For example, the Washington Metro produces almost 20 percent more CO2 per passenger mile than the average car. The cost of cutting a ton of emissions through more fuel-efficient cars is near zero. The cost of doing so through rail transit is nearly $5,000 per ton. — Randal O'Toole, Cato Institute
Much of what government does is based on the premise that people can't do things for themselves. So government must do it for them. More often than not, the result is a ham-handed, bumbling, one-size-fits-all approach that leaves the intended beneficiaries worse off. Of course, this resulting failure is never blamed on the political approach -- on the contrary, failure is taken to mean the government solution was not extravagant enough. — John Stossel
Much of what we call "social problems" consist of the fact that intellectuals have theories that do not fit the real world. From this they conclude that it is the real world which is wrong and needs changing. — Thomas Sowell
My husband may have his faults, but he has never lied to me. — Hillary Clinton
NASA scientists announced that recent observations of Mars suggest that the planet is undergoing a climatic shift. Images over the past three Martian years indicate that the southern polar cap is slowly shrinking, indicating Mars is undergoing "global warming." No word from the Left yet as to whether President Bush's rejection of the Kyoto Treaty is responsible for this. — The Federalist Patriot, 23 Sep 2005
Nations cannot endure in sin. — Ezra Taft Benson (Ensign, Nov 1975, p 32)
Necessity is the plea of every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants, it is the creed of slaves. — William Pitt, 1783
Never allow a crisis to go to waste. They are opportunities to do big things. — Rahm Emanuel, White House Chief of Staff for Obama
Never could an increase of comfort or security be a sufficient good to be bought at the price of liberty. — Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) French-born British writer
Never in the history of the world has there been a situation so bad that the government couldn't make it worse. — Author Unknown
Newspaper editors are men who separate the wheat from the chaff, and then print the chaff. — Adlai Stevenson
New studies outlining college students' ignorance of history are forcing us to re-examine our aphorisms...Santayana: 'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it a highly sought-after voting bloc.' —
Mallard Fillmore
Ninety-eight percent of the adults in this country are decent, hard-working, honest Americans. It's the other lousy two percent that get all the publicity. But then -- we elected them. — Lily Tomlin
Ninety-one percent of poor Americans own a color TV. Twenty-nine percent of poor Americans own two or more! — Heritage Foundation
No government can exist in peace, except such laws are framed and held inviolate as will secure to each individual the free exercise of conscience, the right and control of property, and the protection of life. — Doctrine and Covenants 134:2
No idea is as bad as the evil it takes to suppress it. — J.F. Schulman
No longer content to ruin their own children, liberals insist on being subsidized by the taxpayer to ruin everyone else's children, too. — Ann Coulter, 2006
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are
free. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
No one has the right to destroy another person's belief by demanding empirical evidence. — Ann Landers, Director, Handgun Control, Inc.
No public man can be just a little crooked. — Herbert Hoover (1874-1964) US president
Nothing is more essential to the establishment of manners in a State than that all persons employed in places of power and trust must be men of unexceptionable characters. — Samuel Adams
Nothing is more fraudulent than calls for a "dialogue on race." Those who issue such calls are usually quick to cry "racism" at any frank criticism. They are almost invariably seeking a monologue on race, to which others are supposed to listen. — Thomas Sowell, black economist
Nothing is so galling to a people not broken in from birth as a paternal, or, in other words, a meddling government, a government which tells them what to read, and say, and eat, and drink and wear. — Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859)
Nothing so infuriates champions of 'diversity' as much as an opinion diverse from their own. — Author Unknown
Not long ago, I heard a CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Company) news anchor announce that Canada had "created 56,100 new jobs in the previous month." It sounded like good news. But looking at the numbers, I found that of those 56,100 new jobs, 4,200 were self-employed, 8,900 were in private businesses, and the remaining 43,000 were on the public payroll. In other words, 77 percent of the new jobs were government jobs paid for by the poor slobs working away in the remaining 23 percent. So it wasn't good news, it was bad news about the remorseless transfer of human resources from the vital dynamic sector to the state. — Mark Steyn, 29 Sep 2007 at Hillsdale College
Not too long ago, two friends of mine were talking to a Cuban refugee, a businessman who had escaped from Castro, and in the midst of his story one of my friends turned to the other and said, 'We don't know how lucky we are.' And the Cuban stopped and said, 'How lucky you are! I had someplace to escape to.' In that sentence he told us the entire story. If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth. — Ronald Reagan
Nowhere in this country are racial quotas likely to get voter support. But such quotas exist because elected officials do not have to risk their careers by voting for quotas because they can leave that to judges. — Thomas Sowell
Nuclear energy is the only non-greenhouse-gas-emitting power source that can effectively replace fossil fuels and satisfy global demand....There is now a great deal of scientific evidence showing nuclear power to be an environmentally sound and safe choice. — Patrick Moore, PhD, co-founder Greenpeace (Testimony to the U.S. Congressional Subcommittee on Energy and Resources, 28 Apr 2005)
Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. — George Washington, Farewell Address, 1796 - http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/washing.htm
One by one, the Democratic Party keeps having to abandon all the insane positions that have made it the funny, silly party we've come to know and love. — Ann Coulter, 2006
Once created, federal programs are nearly impossible to eliminate. — Rep. Ron Paul
One human life is as precious as a million lives, for each is infinite in value. — Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits (Jewish Views on Abortion, p 4)
One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them. — Thomas Sowell
One of the traditional methods of imposing statism, or socialism, on a people has been by way of medicine. It's very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project. Most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can't afford it. — Ronald Reagan, US President
One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in this world are to be cured by legislation. — Thomas Bracket Reed, 1886
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors. — Plato
One of the problems with being middle-of-the-road is that you can get run over from either direction. — Richard C. Miller
[One] reason the Democratic Party has trouble knowing what it stands for, and thus articulating its purpose, is that it is so spooked by polls, focus groups and past defeats that it's afraid to take any vivid and differentiating stands, and seeks refuge in the muck of small issues. But small issues are small. And in this case don't even offer a philosophical pattern. 'We stand for lower college loan costs and better prescription drug benefits.' That's something you'd die on the battlefield for, isn't it? — Peggy Noonan
One way to prevent progress is arguing that any first step will be unfair to somebody. — Ashleigh Brilliant
Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have need of masters. — Benjamin Franklin
Only if you sacrifice for a cause will you love it. — Victor L. Brown (Ensign, Nov 1975, p 66)
O sir, we should have fine times, indeed, if, to punish tyrants, it were only sufficient to assemble the people! Your arms, wherewith you could defend yourselves, are gone; and you have no longer an aristocratical, no longer a democratical spirit. Did you ever read of any revolution in a nation, brought about by the punishment of those in power, inflicted by those who had no power at all? — Patrick Henry, speech in the Virginia Ratifying Convention, 1778
Our job is to give people not what they want, but what we decide they ought to have. — Richard Salent, former president of CBS News
Our massive strategy was to use the Fairness Doctrine to challenge and harass right-wing broadcasters and hope the challenges would be so costly to them that they would be inhibited and decide it was too expensive to continue. — Bill Ruder, President John F. Kennedy's Secretary of Commerce
Our out-of-control budget also erodes personal freedom. When government grows, as Thomas Jefferson once famously put it, 'liberty yields.' Dollar by trillion dollar we are voluntarily giving up our liberties for a government that promises us, in return, a blanket of protection from cradle to coffin. Republicans are steering us in the direction of the 'workers' paradise' of a European socialist welfare state. The reply from the Democrats is faster, faster. — Stephen Moore, 2004
Our problem is not a temporary explosion of spending either because of a war or hurricanes or disasters. It's our entitlements which are draining our economy and which everybody, particularly the liberals, will not index for income. — Charles Krauthammer
Partisans of same sex marriage demand to know how two 'gay' men pledging themselves to one another can possibly hurt a 'straight' couple. Indirectly. If marriage is to include 'gay' men and women, by what standard can we exclude non-gay threesomes? Nothing in the Supreme Court's or other courts' rulings have provided a principled grounds upon which to forbid adult incest, polygamy or polyandry. Homosexuals bristle at this argument. But they must answer a question: How does a homosexual father convince his daughter that polygamy is out of the question? Marriage must, if the word is to retain its meaning, be only between one man and one woman. For as critics on both sides of the debate acknowledge, we're having a hard time upholding the integrity of marriage among the heterosexual population. At this moment, we ought to be reinvesting marriage with the honor it once commanded, not bleeding it of substance. Such a drastic social experiment should not be undertaken on the strength of a 4-to-3 vote of one state's high court. If a constitutional amendment is required, so be it. — Mona Charen
PC [Political Correctness] is the verbal equivalent of burning books. It is mind and thought control, pure and simple. — Gary Sepp
"[P]eople do not ask for socialism because they know that socialism will improve their conditions, and they do not reject capitalism because they know that it is a system prejudicial to their interests. They are socialists because they believe that socialism will improve their conditions, and they hate capitalism because they believe that it harms them. They are socialists because they are blinded by envy and ignorance. — Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), Economist
People who believe in religious values, strong moral principles, right and wrong, limited government, constitutionally delegated powers, rule of law, low taxation, individual responsibility, free markets and free enterprise, private property, due process, marriage, human rights and similar beliefs are the heart of the American way, centrist and moderate, though routinely characterized as fascist or the radical right by the collectivists running the news media. — Alan Korwin, 2 Aug 2007
Perhaps the biggest mystery of all is why anyone would want more money and more power in the hands of the federal government, which is really the basis of Obama's campaign. — Burt Prelutsky, 2008
Political correctness can best be described as Cultural Marxism, in which Marxist tactics and strategies are applied to cultural, rather than economic forms. The hallmark of political correctness is that it requires a suspension of reality and it engenders a victim mentality that seeks to convince people of their victim status and the need for "protection" from their "oppressors." — Bryan Hyde
Political correctness is a doctrine fostered by a delusional, illogical, liberal minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end. — Author Unknown
Political correctness is just tyranny with manners. — Charlton Heston
Political Correctness remains just what it was intended to be: a sophisticated and dangerous form of censorship and oppression, imposed upon the citizenry with the ultimate goal of manipulating, brainwashing and destroying our society. — Author Unknown
Political history is far too criminal and pathological to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villains from fiction. — W.H. Auden
Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge where there is no river. — Nikita Khrushchev
Politicians thrive by selling cosmetic solutions to problems. But successfully solving those problems puts bureaucrats out of business. — Charlton Heston, 2002
Politics gives guys so much power that they tend to behave badly around women. And I hope I never get into that. — Bill Clinton, as a student, to a female acquaintance
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, misdiagnosing it, and then misapplying the wrong remedies. — attributed to Groucho Marx
Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power. — George Bernard Shaw
President [George W.] Bush has asked Congress to enact a constitutional amendment making it national law that marriage is a union between a man and a woman. The perceived need for a constitutional amendment should be an embarrassment for all of us -- it's simply more evidence of our moral decline. If it were possible for previous generations of Americans to know about this marriage controversy, they'd probably be embarrassed and shocked, and might ask, 'What in the hell has happened to America?' — Walter Williams
President [George W.] Bush has never said that fetal stem cells cannot be used for research. He said 'federal money' cannot be used to fund such research. If leading scientists believed fetal stem-cell research would prove to be so fruitful in curing Alzheimer's, why is the private money not pouring in hand over fist? Do you realize how many billions a cure for Alzheimer's would be worth, let alone all the other cures some are claiming fetal stem-cell research would lead to? Forget Alzheimer's -- do you know how much middle-aged men would pay for a GENUINE baldness cure? — Ann Coulter
Private contractors are taking over many jobs formerly on the federal payroll. Government workers have known better days. There was great esprit de corps among federal workers who flocked to Washington, DC during the Great Depression to help President Franklin D. Roosevelt. — Helen Thomas, 2005 (Only a liberal could think that private contractors are a bad thing)
Protecting privacy only seems to matter to liberals when it comes to 14-year-old girls seeking abortions behind their parents' backs, illegal aliens seeking sanctuary from the police, and registered sex offenders objecting to community registration requirements. — Michelle Malkin, Oct 2005
Public officials are elected primarily for one purpose -- to solve public problems. You have a right to ask any candidate about his understanding of the problems facing us, his acceptance of responsibility for solving those problems, and whether he has a fresh approach or just offers the same old bargain-basement politics. — Ronald Reagan
Republicans will continue to win as long as Democrats remain the first party of big government. That wouldn't be so bad, if only Republicans would stop being the second party of big government. — Paul Jacob
Religion and good morals are the only solid foundation of public liberty and happiness. — Samuel Adams (letter to John Trumbull, 16 Oct 1778)
Religion is the only solid base of morals and that morals are the only possible support of free governments. — Gouverneur Morris
Repeal that [welfare] law, and you will soon see a change in their manners. St. Monday and St. Tuesday, will soon cease to be holidays. Six days shalt thou labor, though one of the old commandments long treated as out of date, will again be looked upon as a respectable precept; industry will increase, and with it plenty among the lower people; their circumstances will mend, and more will be done for their happiness by inuring them to provide for themselves, than could be done by dividing all your estates among them. — Benjamin Franklin (letter to Collinson, 9 May 1753)
Research shows that the presence of women [in government] raises the standards of ethical behavior and lowers corruption. — Hillary Clinton
Say what you like about the Islamic world, but they show tremendous initiative and energy and inventiveness, at least when it comes to threatening death to the infidels every 48 hours for one perceived offense or another. If only it could be channeled into, say, a small software company, what an economy they'd have. — Mark Steyn
Security is a false god; begin making sacrifices to it and you are lost. — Paul Bowles
Security is a kind of death. — Tennessee Williams
Security is mostly superstition. — Helen Keller
Self-preservation and self-development are common aspirations among all people. And if everyone enjoyed the unrestricted use of his faculties and the free disposition of the fruits of his labor, social progress would be ceaseless, uninterrupted, and unfailing. But there is also another tendency that is common among people. When they can, they wish to live and prosper at the expense of others....This fatal desire has its origin in the very nature of man -- in that primitive, universal, and insuppressible instinct that impels him to satisfy his desires with the least possible pain. — Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850)
Seventy-four percent of 1998 high school seniors were considered by educators to be too ignorant of the political system to make reasonable ballot choices. — Robert S Wieder, Raw Data: Significa, Insignifica, Stats and Facts, Apr, 2000
Seventy percent of all shows have sexual content, up from 56% in the first study in 1998 and 64% in 2002. Two-thirds (68%) of all shows include talk about sex, and 35% of all shows include sexual behaviors. The proportion of shows with sexual content in prime-time on the major broadcast networks has also increased. Nearly eight in ten such shows (77%) include sexual content, compared to 67% in 1998 and 71% in 2002. In those shows that do include sexual content, the number of sexual scenes per hour is also up, to an average of 5.0 scenes an hour in the full composite week sample. In fact, because of increases in both the percent of shows that have some sexual content and the number of sexual scenes in those shows, the total number of sexual scenes in the program sample has nearly doubled since this study was first conducted in 1998 (up 96% from 1,930 to 3,783). Among the top 20 most-watched shows by teens, 70% include some kind of sexual content, and nearly half (45%) include sexual behavior. — The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, Sex on TV 4, 9 Nov 2005
Should Palin and McCain prevail come November, feminism can curtsy and treat herself to a hard-earned vacation. The greatest achievement of feminism won't be that a woman reached the vice presidency, but that a woman no longer needed feminists to get there. — Kathleen Parker, Syndicated Columnist, on feminism and vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, Sep 2008
Since a politician never believes what he says, he is quite surprised to be taken at his word. — Charles de Gaulle
Since the Global Warming science is all settled [as claimed by Al Gore], we can now de-fund all those studies that are costing billions? — Author Unknown
Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us? — William O. Douglas (1898-1980), US Supreme Court Justice
Sixty-eight percent of Americans say the media are having a detrimental effect on moral values in America. — Poll conducted by Fabrizio, McLaughlin & Associates for the Culture and Media Institute, released March 9, 2007
Socialism never works no matter how much money you pour into it. — Jason Lewis, 11 Apr 2008
So here's my advice to persons who want to see a woman elected as president: cut the whining, stop playing the gender card, and start acting like a man. — Carey Roberts
Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals could believe them. — Michael Levine
Some people have faith in science and use religious principles in its practice while demanding the scientific methodology of religion. Why would you expect that what is taught our children in the schools about evolution be the standard against which we should measure the scriptures? Scientific theories are just that. They are theories, not facts. The scriptures contain “the word of God revealed to many.” I don’t think that there is much question about whether to believe God or science. The problem arises when we try to put unsupportable interpretations on the word of God and unsubstantiated belief in the theories of scientists. Scientific theories change so fast that college text books of fifty years ago have no value in today’s curricula. — Ask Gramps, www.ldsliving.com
Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it. — Mark Twain
Sometimes, when I look at my children, I say to myself, 'Lillian, you should have remained a virgin.' — Lillian Carter (mother of PUY President Jimmy Carter)
Stubbornness does have its helpful features. You always know what you are going to be thinking tomorrow. — Glen Beaman
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself. — Mark Twain
Swing voters are more appropriately known as the 'idiot voters' because they have no set of philosophical principles. By the age of fourteen, you're either a Conservative or a Liberal if you have an IQ above a toaster. — Ann Coulter
Talk radio is running America... We have to deal with that problem. — Trent Lott, US Senator, 2007
Television is an invention that permits you to be entertained in your living room by people you wouldn't have in your home. — David Frost
Ten people who speak make more noise than ten thousand who are silent. — Napoleon Bonaparte
That book [the Bible], sir, is the rock on which our Republic rests. When that book falls, I assure you that the liberties you enjoy will go with it. — Andrew Jackson
That government is best which governs least. — Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) (Civil Disobedience (1849)
That's my job. I'm a newsman. That's what I try to do, is make news. — CNN's Wolf Blitzer revealing to Bill Clinton the true nature of 24-hour news
The American people must be willing to give up a degree of personal privacy in exchange for safety and security. — Louis Freeh, Director of the FBI, 1993
The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism, but under the name of liberalism they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program until one day America will be a socialist nation without ever knowing how it happened. — Norman Thomas, Socialist Party presidential candidate 1936-68, Cofounder of the American Civil Liberties Union
The attempt to silence a man is the greatest honor you can bestow on him. It means that you recognize his superiority to yourself. — Joe Sobran
The battle over judicial appointments today is a battle over how much power judges should have in our system of government. If judges are masters over the charter they have sworn to protect, then 'we the people' are not. — Orrin Hatch, US Senator
The best mind-altering drug is the truth. — Lily Tomlin
The best minds are not in government. If any were, business would hire them away. — Ronald Reagan
The best thing we could do with the immigration crisis is eliminate the welfare state in America. — Jason Lewis, 11 Apr 2008
The bigger the government, the less I do for myself, for my family and for my community. That is why we Americans give more charity and devote more time to volunteering than Europeans do. The European knows: The government, the state, will take care of me, my children, my parents, my neighbors and my community. I don't have to do anything. The bigger question in many Europeans' lives is, 'How much vacation time will I have and where will I spend that vacation?' That is what happens when the state gets bigger -- you become smaller. — Dennis Prager
The Bill of Rights is a literal and absolute document. The First Amendment doesn't say you have a right to speak out unless the government has a 'compelling interest' in censoring the Internet. The Second Amendment doesn't say you have the right to keep and bear arms until some madman plants a bomb. The Fourth Amendment doesn't say you have the right to be secure from search and seizure unless some FBI agent thinks you fit the profile of a terrorist. The government has no right to interfere with any of these freedoms under any circumstances. — Harry Browne (1933-2006), www.DownsizeDC.org
"[The Bill of Rights is] designed to protect individuals and minorities against the tyranny of the majority, but it's also designed to protect the people against bureaucracy, against the government. — Judge Lawrence Tribe
The brilliant idea that was America has always suffered vastly more damage at the hands of those who profess loudly to be its saviors, than from any threat, internal or external, that those saviors have claimed to be saving us from. — L. Neil Smith
...the [LDS] Church has not found it possible to follow along the lines of the present general tendency in the matter of property rights, taxes, the curtailment of rights and liberties of the people, nor in general the economic policies of what is termed the "New Deal"....unless the people of America forsake the sins and the errors, political and otherwise, of which they are now guilty and return to the practice of the great fundamental principles of Christianity, and of Constitutional government, there will be no exaltation for them spiritually, and politically we shall lose our liberty and free institutions....We believe that our real threat comes from within and not from without, and it comes from the underlying spirit common to Naziism, Fascism, and Communism, namely the spirit which would array class against class, which would set up a socialistic state of some sort, which would rob the people of the liberties which we possess under the Constitution, and would set up such a reign of terror as exists now in many parts of Europe....We confess to you that it has not been possible for us to unify our own people even upon the necessity of such a turning about, and therefore we cannot unfortunately, and we say it regretfully, make any practical suggestion to you as to how the nation can be turned about. — Heber J. Grant, J. Reuben Clark, Jr., and David O. McKay (signed as the First Presidency, in letter to the US Treasury, 30 Sep 1941)
The Constitution is a piece of paper and can't defend itself. We have to defend it. If we don't stand and do something, we have rule my man, not rule by law. The courts can do whatever they want. The legislatures can do whatever they want. So, if we don't stand up and defend and make [sure] that Constitution [is read] properly, we're in trouble. — Alan Gotlieb, 27 Jul 2008
The constitution is a radical document. It is the job of government to reign in people's rights. — Bill Clinton, US President, MTV, 1992
The Constitution plainly is not adequate to protect the individual against the growing bureaucracy....The individual is almost certain to be plowed under, unless he has a well-organized active political group to speak for him....But if a powerful sponsor is lacking, individual liberty withers.... — William O. Douglas, Justice of US Supreme Court, 1968
The Democrats ran on 'Honesty' and I told 'em at the time they would never get anywhere. It was too radical for politics. The Republicans ran on 'Common Sense' and the returns showed that there were 8 million more people in the United States who had 'Common Sense' enough not to believe that there was 'Honesty' in politics. — Will Rogers
The deterioration of every government begins with the decay of the principles on which it was founded. — Charles-Louis De Secondat
The dominant purpose of the First Amendment was to prohibit the widespread practice of government suppression of embarrassing information. — Justice William O. Douglas (1898-1980), US Supreme Court Justice (New York Times v. Unites States)
The end of law is not to abolish or restrain but to preserve freedom. — John
Locke
The family is a creation of God. It is the basic creation. The way to strengthen the nation is to strengthen the homes of the people. — Gordon B. Hinckley (Ensign, May 1998, p 51)
The first casualty of political conquest is the truth. — Author Unknown
The first duty of a newspaper is to be accurate. If it is accurate, it follows that it is fair. — Herbert Swope
The first rule of conservatism is to accept the fact that if you are true to yourself, Susan Sarandon will never hug you in public. — Former Rep. Dick Armey
The government which governs least governs best. — Thomas Jefferson
[T]he greater part of the population is not very intelligent, dreads responsibility, and desires nothing better than to be told what to do. Provided the rulers do not interfere with its material comforts and its cherished beliefs, it is perfectly happy to let itself be ruled. — Aldous Huxley, Proper Studies
The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding. — Louis Brandeis, US Supreme Court Justice (1928)
The greatest good we can do our country is to heal its party divisions and make them one people. — Thomas Jefferson
The great paradox of the civil rights revolution is that instead of enforcing and expanding equality before the law, the revolution created differential rights based on race, gender and, any day now, sexual orientation. The great liberal revolution, centuries in the making, that brought forth equality in law has been overthrown. In its place we see rising a new feudal legal order of status-based rights. — Paul Craig Roberts
The great thing about democracy is that it gives every voter a chance to do something stupid. — Art Spander
The Grecians and Romans were strongly possessed of the spirit of liberty but not the principle, for at the time they were determined not to be slaves themselves, they employed their power to enslave the rest of mankind. — Thomas Paine (The American Crisis, No. 5, 21 Mar 1778)
The Greeks...labored under the delusion that their democracy was a guarantee of peace and plenty, not realizing that unrestrained majority rule always destroys freedom, puts the minority at the mercy of the mob, and works at cross-purposes to the effective use of human energy and individual initiative. — Henry Grady Weaver (The Mainspring of Human Progress)
The happiest excitement in life is to be convinced that one is fighting for all one is worth on behalf of some clearly seen and deeply felt good. — Ruth Benedict
The high cost and inequitable character of our medical care system are the direct result of our steady movement toward reliance on third-party payment. A cure requires reversing course, re-privatizing medical care by eliminating most third-party payment, and restoring the role of insurance to providing protection against major medical catastrophes. — Milton Friedman, economist
The height of statesmanship is to come home with a dam, even if you have nowhere to put it. — Will Rogers (1879-1935)
The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it. — Woodrow Wilson
The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality. — Dante
The incomplete thinker has an agenda that is the embodiment of his visceral passions and uses conclusions arrived at through incomplete thought to justify it. The complete thinker draws conclusions based on complete thought and has a justifiable agenda that is the embodiment of them. — Selwyn Duke
The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries. — Sir Winston Churchill
The judiciary of the United States is the subtle corps of sappers and miners constantly working under ground to undermine the foundations of our confederated fabric. They are construing our constitution from a co-ordination of a general and special government to a general and supreme one alone. — Thomas Jefferson
The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic. — HL Mencken
The leftist thought police are a menace to civilization and free speech. They are turning us into an ideological state, a place where ideology isn’t rejected when it departs from Truth but Truth is rejected when it departs from ideology. — Selwyn Duke
The less government interferes with private pursuits, the better for general prosperity. — Martin Van Buren (1782-1862) 8th President of the United States
The liberal is continually angry, as only a self-important man can be, with his civilization, his culture, his country and his folks back home. His is an infantile world view. At the core of a liberal is the spoiled child -- miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic and useless. Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling brats. — P.J. O'Rourke
The liberal view is America in a permanent state of decline. They want everybody to believe that everybody else in this country is barely hanging on, and that the only solution is more and more of what has created the poverty circumstances. Because it is liberalism that creates poverty, promotes poverty, extends poverty, and spreads it -- and they want eight more years of power to keep doing it. — Rush Limbaugh, 6 Jun 2008
The life of an ant and that of my child should be granted equal consideration. — Michael W. Fox, senior scholar, Humane Society of the US
The long fight to save wild beauty represents democracy at its best. It requires citizens to practice the hardest of virtues -- self-restraint. — Edwin Way Teale
The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors. It is a melancholy truth that a suppression of the press could not more completely deprive the nation of its benefits than is done by its abandoned prostitution to falsehood. — Thomas Jefferson
The market focuses on television news...have been so severe to create a vacuum on news coverage. This is exceedingly dangerous to democracy. If most of the people get most of their news from the televisions, as polls continue to show, most of the people in the United States are inadequately informed and totally uninformed.... — Walter Cronkite, 2 Oct 1999
The media are so full of themselves -- among other things that they are full of -- that they act as if the government exists to provide them with something to publicize. The time is long overdue to put these people in their place. — Thomas Sowell
The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth. — H.L. Mencken
The metaphor, 'Separation of Church and State', was extracted, out of context, from a letter from Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptists in reply to a letter from them expressing concern that the Federal Government might intrude in religious matters by favoring one denomination over another. Jefferson's reply was that the First Amendment would preclude such intrusion. — Ron Paul US Congress, 2002
The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. — Cornelius Tacitus (55-117 AD)
The more one considers the matter, the clearer it becomes that redistribution is, in effect, far less a redistribution of free income from the richer to the poorer, as we imagined, than a redistribution of power from the individual to the State. — Bertrand de Jouvenel (1903-1987) (The Ethics of Redistribution [1952] p 72)
The most expensive commodity we have in this country is ignorance. It's not gasoline, not rice, not wheat, not corn. The most expensive commodity we have is the ignorance of way too many Americans. It is ignorance that allows liberalism to prosper. — Rush Limbaugh, 3 Apr 2008
The most fundamental right is the right to be left alone. — Justice William Brandeis, US Supreme Court
The most merciful thing that a large family does to one of its infant members
is to kill it. — Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood
The nation is built upon the foundation of its homes and the home upon its families. — Spencer W Kimball (Ensign, Nov 1974, p 9)
The natural effort of every individual to better his own condition is so powerful that it is alone, and without any assistance, not only capable of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity, but of surmounting a hundred impertinent obstructions with which the folly of human laws too often encumbers its operations. — Adam Smith (1723-1790) Scottish philosopher and economist
The natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on Earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but only to have the law of nature for his rule. — Samuel Adams (1722-1803)
The new morality preached from the media's pulpit is nothing more than the old immorality. — Elder M. Russell Ballard, Oct 2003
The only "crisis" in health care in this country is that doctors are paid too little. It's only a matter of time before the best and brightest students forget about medical school and go to law school instead. How long can a society based on suing the productive last? You can make 30 times as much money as doctors by becoming a trial lawyer suing doctors. You need no skills, no superior board scores, no decade of training and no sleepless residency. But you must have the morals of a drug dealer. The Democratic Party treats doctors like they're Klan members. They wail about how much doctors are paid and celebrate the trial lawyers who do absolutely nothing to make society better, but swoop in and steal from the most valuable members of society. — Ann Coulter, Sep 2007
The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. — Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
The only religious belief driving opinions about evolution is atheism. God can do anything, including evolution. But the value of Darwinism for atheists is that it is the only way they can explain why we are here. (It's an accident!) If evolution doesn't work out for them, they'll have to expand on theories about extraterrestrials or comets bringing life to earth. — Ann Coulter (Godless: The Church of Liberalism, 2006)
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. — John Bartlett
The only way to make a difference is to acquire power. — Hillary Clinton, in her senior year of college (yeah, acquire power like Mother Teresa did)
The other day I found myself, for the umpteenth time, driving in Vermont behind a Kerry/Edwards supporter whose vehicle also bore the slogan 'Free Tibet.' It must be great to be the guy with the printing contract for the 'Free Tibet' stickers. Not so good to be the guy back in Tibet wondering when the freeing thereof will actually get under way. For a while, my otherwise not terribly political wife got extremely irritated by these stickers, demanding to know at a pancake breakfast at the local church what precisely some harmless hippy-dippy old neighbor of ours meant by the slogan he'd been proudly displaying decade in, decade out: 'But what exactly are you doing to free Tibet?' she demanded. 'You're not doing anything, are you?' 'Give the guy a break,' I said back home. 'He's advertising his moral virtue, not calling for action. If Rumsfeld were to say, 'Free Tibet? Jiminy, what a swell idea! The Third Infantry Division [will] go in on Thursday,' the bumper-sticker crowd would be aghast. — Mark Steyn
The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men. — Plato
The people know it is impossible to rightly govern without God and the Bible. — George Washington
The people who are the most bigoted are the people who have no convictions at all. — Gilbert Keith Chesterton
The phrase “separation between the church and state” appears nowhere in any of our founding documents. It is neither in the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution. It is however, in the Humanist Manifesto and the Russian Constitution. It was a major plank in the Communist Manifesto. But it is not now, nor has it ever been an American ideal. Why don't more of our leaders know that? — Dave Daubenmire
The point to remember is that what the government gives it must first take away. — John Strider Coleman
The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined [and] will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation and foreign commerce, — James Madison, Federalist Paper #45
The preposterous conceit that the fossil record has produced a mosaic of organisms consistent with evolution except for the occasional "gap" is absurd. Evolution is nothing but a gap. It's a conjecture about how species might have arisen that is contradicted by the fossil record and by nearly everything we have learned about molecular biology since Darwin's day. — Ann Coulter (Godless: The Church of Liberalism, 2006)
The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale. — Thomas Jefferson
The principles of Jefferson are the axioms of a free society. — Abraham Lincoln
The problem with political jokes is that too often they get elected. — Slick Times
The problem with sitting on the fence is that ya gotta get off sometime. — Blaine Nay
The problem with Socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money. — Margaret Thatcher, British Prime Minister
The public cannot be too curious concerning the characters of public men. — Samuel Adams
There ain't no ticks like poly-ticks. Bloodsuckers all. — Davy Crockett (1786-1836) American frontiersman
The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits. — Plutarch (abt 45-125 AD) Priest of the Delphic Oracle
The real gamble in this election is playing the same Washington game with the same Washington players and expecting a different result. The real gamble in this election is playing the same Washington game with the same Washington players and expecting a different result. — Barack Obama, a candidate for the US presidency at the time. Once elected, however, he selected mostly retreads from the Clinton administration for his own administration
The real guarantee of freedom is an equilibrium of social forces in conflict, not the triumph of any one force. — Max Eastman (1883-1969) (Reflections on the Failure of Socialism, 1955)
The reality is that those who value other things above their own freedom will one day lose that very freedom -- along with their valuables. — Karen Mehall
There are many ways to victimize people. The most insidious is to convince them that they're victims. — Tom Robbins
There are really only two ways to interpret the Constitution -- try to discern as best we can what the Framers intended or make it up. No matter how ingenious, imaginative or artfully put, unless interpretive methodologies are tied to the original intent of the Framers, they have no more basis in the Constitution than the latest football scores. To be sure, even the most conscientious effort to adhere to the original intent of the framers of our Constitution is flawed, as all methodologies and human institutions are; but at least originalism has the advantage of being legitimate and, I might add, impartial. — Clarence Thomas, US Supreme Court Justice
There are some bills we don't need to read, we already know how we're going to vote. — Henry Brown, US Congressman
The record is clear: when a Republican is in the White House, conservatives not only lose their backbone, they also lose their brain cells. They walk around in a daze without the ability to even see what is going on right before their eyes. They become "mind-numbed robots" with no commitment to principle whatsoever. — Chuck Baldwin, 5 Oct 2007
The reason there are so few female politicians is that it is too much trouble to put makeup on two faces. — Maureen Murphy
The reason this country continues its drift toward socialism and big nanny government is because too many people vote in the expectation of getting something for nothing, not because they have a concern for what is good for the country. A better educated electorate might change the reason many persons vote. If children were forced to learn about the Constitution, about how government works, about how this nation came into being, about taxes and about how government forever threatens the cause of liberty perhaps we wouldn't see so many foolish ideas coming out of the mouths of silly old men. — Lyn Nofziger (1924-2006) American journalist, political consultant, author, Press Secretary for President Reagan
There is a just God that presides over the destinies of nations. The battle Sir, is not to the strong alone. Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it almighty God. I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death. — Patrick Henry, 1775
There is a point where political correctness becomes an acid that erodes freedom. — Bill O'Reilly
There is no public morality without private virtue. — Eran A. Call (Oct 1997 LDS General Conference)
There is no safety for honest men except by believing all possible evil of evil men. — Edmund Burke
There is no such thing as a liberal...There hasn't been for a long, long time. I never use the word and you shouldn't either - nobody should. 'Liberal' is what socialists call themselves when they don't want you to understand that they plan to take away your rights, your property, and eventually your life. — Alexander Hope
There is no such thing as public opinion. There is only published opinion. — Winston Churchill
There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him. — Robert Heinlein
There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences. — PJ O'Rourke
There is simply no historical foundation for the proposition that the Framers intended to build the 'wall of separation' that was constitutionalized in Everson....But the greatest injury of the 'wall' notion is its mischievous diversion of judges from the actual intentions of the drafters of the Bill of Rights....[N]o amount of repetition of historical errors in judicial opinions can make the errors true. The 'wall of separation between church and state' is a metaphor based on bad history....It should be frankly and explicitly abandoned....Our perception has been clouded not by the Constitution but by the mists of an unnecessary metaphor. It would come as much of a shock to those who drafted the Bill of Rights, as it will to a large number of thoughtful Americans today, to learn that the Constitution, as construed by the majority, prohibits the Alabama Legislature from endorsing prayer. George Washington himself, at the request of the very Congress which passed the Bill of Rights, proclaimed a day of public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God. History must judge whether it was the Father of his Country in 1789, or a majority of the Court today, which has strayed from the meaning of the Establishment Clause. — William Rehnquist, US Supreme Court, Wallace v. Jaffree (472 U.S. 38, 48, n. 30 [1984])
There is something about a Republican that you can only stand him just so long; and on the other hand, there is something about a Democrat that you can’t stand him quite that long. — Will Rogers
There is too much power in Washington and too much power in government, and not enough power at the grassroots and not enough power with the average American. — Newt Gingrich
There is truly a profound struggle occurring over the future direction of the country...hardest fought of these struggles is over the future of the judiciary. — Hillary Clinton
The republican is the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind. — Thomas Jefferson (Letter to William Hunter, 11 Mar 1790)
There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. — Ayn Rand
There's something terribly wrong when an American soldier overseas can't receive Scriptures in the mail, but a Muslim chaplain can preach freely among al-Qa'ida and Taliban enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay. — Michelle Malkin
The sadness of the women's movement is that they don't allow the necessity of love. See, I don't personally trust any revolution where love is not allowed. — Maya Angelou
The same prudence which in private life would forbid our paying our own money for unexplained projects, forbids it in the dispensation of the public moneys. — Thomas Jefferson
These folks in the environmental green movement are busy bodies. They think they were put on earth to tell you how to lead your life, and they'll do and say anything to get that power. — Jason Lewis, 20 Jun 2008
The size of the federal budget is not an appropriate barometer of social conscience or charitable concern. — Ronald Ragan, 5 Oct 1981
The smallest bookstore still contains more ideas of worth than have been presented in the entire history of television. — Andrew Ross
The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. — Ayn Rand
The so-called 'stimulus plan' [of Feb 2009] cooked up mostly by House Democrats is, in reality, a plan to stimulate government and make it an even greater presence (and burden) in our lives. The appeal to speed and urgency by President Obama is an invitation to overlook details of the bill, which would accelerate the transformation of America from a capitalistic system that exalts the individual to a socialistic system that exalts the state. — Cal Thomas, Syndicated Columnist
The sole object and only legitimate end of government is to protect the citizen in the enjoyment of life, liberty, and property, and when the government assumes other functions it is usurpation and oppression. — Alabama Constitution, Article 1, Section 35
The sooner all the animals are extinct, the sooner we'll find their money. — Ed Bluestone
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive....I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere. — Thomas Jefferson
The State is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else. — Frederic Bastiat, 19th century French economist
The Ten Commandments, despite the fact that they are the basis of civil law and are depicted in engraved stone in the United States Supreme Court, may not be displayed at a public courthouse. — Harvey v. Cobb County. 1993
The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty first, the love of soft living and the get-rich-quick theory of life. — Theodore Roosevelt
The topic of stupid people can no longer be ignored, because for the first time in history stupid people have more political power than anyone else, and the consequence of allowing them all that power now looms like the shadow of doom over America. — Dave Duffy
The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they're ignorant; it's just that they know so much that isn't so. — Ronald Reagan
The truth which makes men free is, for the most part, the truth which men prefer not to hear. — Herbert Sebastian Agar
The ultimate result of shielding men from folly is to fill the world with fools. — Herbert Spencer
The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced. — Frank Zappa
The United States realizes that a citizen must be protected whether he wants to be or not -- controlled, regulated, and intimidated in every aspect of everything he does, for his own good. He must not be permitted to ride a bicycle without a helmet, smoke if he chooses, or go to a bar where smoking is permitted. He cannot be trusted to run his life. — Fred Reed
The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule. — H.L. Mencken
The US Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. — Benjamin Franklin
The [US] Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals...it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government...it is not a charter for government power, but a charter of the citizen's protection against the government. — Ayn Rand (1905-1982)
The US military has had considerably more success in turning Iraq around than liberals have had in turning the ghettos around with their 40-year 'War on Poverty.' So far, fewer troops have been killed by hostile fire since the end of major combat in Iraq than civilians were murdered in Washington, DC, last year (239 deaths in Iraq compared to 262 murders in DC). How many years has it been since we declared the end of major U.S. combat operations against Marion Barry's regime? How long before we just give up and pull out of that hellish quagmire known as Washington, DC? — Ann Coulter, Dec 2003
The virtuous need but few laws; for it is not the law which determines their actions, but their actions which determine the law. — Theophrastus
The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience. — Albert Camus
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and hence clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. — H.L. Mencken, In Defense of Women, 1920
The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois. — Gustave Flaubert
The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it. — Albert Einstein
The world may long remember our generation as the last of the educated mind and the educated heart, so sensitive in understanding, so wretched over failures, so modest about our triumphs, so permissive with everyone who wanted to do his own thing that we let civilization go to hell without any curiosity about what would replace it. — Mrs. C. Girard Davidson, a Portland, Oregon, housewife, speaking to a Congressional committee (Quoted by Vaughn J. Featherstone, Ensign, Nov 1975, p 7)
The worst evils which mankind has ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments. The state can be, and has often been . . . the main source of mischief and disaster. — Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), Economist
They are always under the dominion of the superstition of government, and forgetting that a government produces nothing at all, they leave out of sight the first fact to be remembered in all social discussion -- that the state cannot get a cent for any man without taking it from some other man, and this latter must be a man who has produced and saved it. This latter is the Forgotten Man. — William Graham Sumner
They're terrible people, liberals. They believe -- this can really summarize it all -- these are people who believe you can deliver a baby entirely except for the head, puncture the skull, suck the brains out and pronounce that a constitutional right has just been exercised. That really says it all. — Ann Coulter
They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. — Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759
This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer. — Will Rogers
This isn't the Democratic party of our fathers and grandfathers. This is the party of Woodstock hippies. I was at Woodstock -- I built the stage. And when everything fell apart, and people were fighting for peanut-butter sandwiches, it was the National Guard who came in and saved the same people who were protesting them. So when Hillary Clinton a few years ago wanted to build a Woodstock memorial, I said it should be a statue of a National Guardsman feeding a crying hippie. — John Ratzenberger, actor
This is the number one responsibility of the Latter-day Saints -- to get in the struggle to preserve freedom. Everywhere that Communism succeeds, missionary work, temple work, everything the Church does, dies. Your number one responsibility is to preserve freedom. — David O. McKay
Those in need are expected to do all they can to provide for themselves. Then families are expected to assist in taking care of their less-fortunate members. And then the resources of the Church are made available. — Gordon B. Hinckley (Ensign, May 2004, p 57)
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. — George Santayana
Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything. — Josef Stalin
Those who do not learn from the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat them. — Jorge Santayana
Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it. — Thomas Paine
Those who have the best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are furthest from seeing the world as it is; in general the greater the understanding the greater the delusion; the more intelligent the less sane... The heresy of heresies was common sense. — George Orwell (1984)
'Tis substantially true, that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. The rule indeed extends with more or less force to every species of free Government. — George Washington
Today, candor compels us to admit that our vaunted two-party system is a snare and a delusion, a fraud upon the nation. Our two parties have become nothing but two wings of the same bird of prey. — Pat Buchanan
Today, the animating principles of the American idea are entirely absent from public discourse. To the new Administration, American exceptionalism means an exceptional effort to harness an exceptionally big government in the cause of exceptionally massive spending. The can-do spirit means ... A high-school student in Dillon, South Carolina (writing) to the President to ask him to do something about the peeling paint in her classroom. He read the letter out approvingly in a televised address to Congress. Imagine if ... the national bureaucracy in Washington becomes responsible for grade-school paint jobs from Maine to Hawaii. What size of government would be required for such a project? And is it compatible with a constitutional republic? — Mark Steyn
To ignore the facts does not change the facts. — Author Unknown
Tolerance is the last virtue of a dying society. — Aristotle
To model our political system upon speculations of lasting tranquility, is to calculate on the weaker springs of the human character. — Alexander Hamilton
Too many in the media act as if decency is a violation of the First Amendment. — Thomas Sowell
Too often we and our enemies are portrayed as moral equivalents. — Michael Barone, 13 Jun 2006
To put blind faith in government is as stupid as putting blind faith in what a used-car salesman tells you. It is also un-American. In our great country, sovereignty rests with the people, and the proper attitude of a citizen toward government at all levels is courteous skepticism. Elected officials and bureaucrats are your servants, not your masters. — Charley Reese
To the liberal, Utopia always lies just within sight but just beyond reach. It is always around the next corner, where you find the next governmental contrivance, in the form of a law, regulation, mandate, tax, or federal program. — Selwyn Duke
To those who cite the First Amendment as reason for excluding God from more and more of our institutions every day, I say: The First Amendment of the Constitution was not written to protect the people of this country from religious values; it was written to protect religious values from government tyranny. — Ronald Reagan, US President
Truth can stand by itself. Subject opinion to coercion: whom will you make your inquisitors? Fallible men; men governed by bad passions, by private as well as public reasons. And why subject it to coercion? To produce uniformity. But is uniformity of opinion desirable? ....we cannot effect this by force. Reason and persuasion are the only practicable instruments....To make way for these, free enquiry must be indulged; and how can we wish others to indulge it while we refuse it ourselves. — Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia: Religion, 1784
Truth does not become more true by virtue of the fact that the entire world agrees with it, nor less so even if the whole world disagrees with it. — Maimonides (1135-1204)
Truth has no special time of its own. Its hour is now - always. — Albert Schweitzer
Truth never damages a cause that is just. — Mohandas K. Gandhi
Tyrants always start out with small measures that appear reasonable. Revealing their complete agenda from the start would encounter too much resistance. — Walter Williams
Tyranny is always better organized than freedom. — Charles Peguy
Up until the 1960s there was no separation of church and state in its [current] sense. The First Amendment states: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or exercising the free exercise thereof." The amendment was made to protect the church from the state, not vice versa. The phrase "separation of church and state" was coined by Thomas Jefferson in a letter to a church. He assured them that the government was not going to establish a state religion because a "wall of separation has been erected between church and state." — Sterling Strait, Anchorage, Alaska, Apr 2001
Using standard media terminology, socialist or communist collectivists are mischaracterized as liberal or politically left, while mainstream, centrist, American-oriented individuals are described as "right" leaning. In reality, right describes fascists, and few in the country (outside of some government bureaucrats and other misfits) fit that description. — Alan Korwin, 2 Aug 2007
Vote for the man who promises least; he'll be the least disappointing. — Bernard Baruch
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse. A man who has nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety is a miserable creature who has no chance at being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. — John Stuart Mill
War is God's way of teaching Americans geography. — George Bernard Shaw
We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive. — C.S. Lewis
Wealth is based on productivity, and productivity is expandable. In fact, productivity is fabulously expandable. — PJ O'Rourke
We are in danger of forgetting that the Bill of Rights reflects experience with police excesses. It is not only under Nazi rule that police excesses are inimical to freedom. It is easy to make light of insistence on scrupulous regard for the safeguards of civil liberties when invoked on behalf of the unworthy. It is too easy. History bears testimony that by such disregard are the rights of liberty extinguished, heedlessly at first, then stealthily and then brazenly and brazenly in the end. — Felix Frankfurter, US Supreme Court Justice
We are now reaping the benefits of a welfare state. For more years than most can remember, we have been told by those holding office that they will take care of us. We have provided food, clothing and shelter to the extent that the recipients became entirely dependent on government resources to live. They have reached the point that no longer do they have the knowledge to take care of themselves. They will sit there and drown or go hungry, and curse the fact that the government has not gotten them out of this mess. When it is all said and done, there is but one person who is responsible for me, and that is me. The responsibility falls to me to take care of my family, not the government. Society, not government, has an obligation to provide care and sustenance to those who, because of age or physical impairment cannot take care of themselves, but able-bodied people who stand around and complain that no one is doing anything for them deserve whatever the fates cast in their direction. Life is hard, and you either get tougher or you get washed away -- it is as simple as that. Politicians will never, ever take care of you -- they only want one thing from you, and that is to stay in power as long as they can. In a situation like Katrina, they will stand in front of the cameras and microphones and denigrate everyone above them in government to take the eye off of their pathetic efforts. This is a situation that they have created, and now the good citizens of the area will have to step in and clean up the mess that has been created by the politicians. It won't happen overnight, but it will happen -- there are too many good people who live in that area for it not to happen. I love the people of New Orleans and the surrounding parishes, but I despise the politicians....I just hope that when the area is rebuilt, they stay away from the massive welfare system they had before -- absolutely no good comes from welfare. It depletes available resources, making it ever more difficult for what passes as government to respond to the true needs of the community. — Robert Johnson, retired New Orleans Police Captain, commenting on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Sep 2005
We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home. — Edward R. Murrow
We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans. — President Bill Clinton (USA Today, 11 March 1993, page 2A)
We can't expect the American people to jump from capitalism to communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving them small doses of socialism, until they awaken one day to find that they have communism. — Nikita Khrushchev, Soviet dictator
(We)...can't just let business as usual go on, and that means something has to be taken away from some people. — Hillary Clinton, 4 Jun 2007
We don't need to ban water from planes; we need to keep terrorists off them. To most effectively do so, we need to get over our obsession with "bad" things (laptops, lighters, bottled water) and start looking for bad people. — Robert Poole, Reason Foundation
We don't teach our children that healthy relationships involve drunken, naked parties in a hot tub with strangers -- but that's what they see on TV. We don't teach them to express their anger by seeing how much blood they can draw with a round of ammo, but that's what they learn in the most popular video games. And we don't teach our kids that the height of success is inheriting a family fortune to buy Gucci bags without ever working a day in your life, but that's how Paris Hilton gets by on TV. You can say that kids know this isn't real, but when they're fed a steady diet of these depictions over and over again from the time they're very young, this behavior becomes acceptable -- even normal. — Senator Barack Obama, speaking at the 9 Nov 2005 Kaiser Family Foundation press conference to release its latest study of sex on television
We have a deficit of moral courage in the United States Congress. We have many learned individuals who know what is right but have not the courage to stand against the moral corruption that is now attempting to undermine our republic. — Dr. Tom Coburn
We have a national shortage on responsibility. — Jason Lewis, 10 Apr 2008
We have a species of parasites in America -- some call them Democrats, who think that America's greatness comes from government. — Neil Boortz
We have confused the free with the free and easy. — Adlai E. Stevenson
We have failed our children if we have not passed on to them a realistic perspective of government. We must insure that they know that it is not okay to raid people’s paychecks and steal their property, even if doing so seems to be in the best interest of society. We must not take it for granted that our children know the importance of spiritual things and understand the foundations of traditional morality. We must insure that they do. Walt Disney would not know the company he founded only a generation ago. He would roll over in his grave at what those at the helm of Disney today have made of his dream. Henry Ford would turn away in disgust at what the Ford Foundation is doing with his fortune. I am certain that the Founding Fathers would be distressed at the way we have allowed their carefully constructed, much debated words...twisted so as to kick God and the Bible out of our schools and to protect the purveyors of obscenity. They would wonder in disbelief at the income taxes we allow to be confiscated from our paychecks today and the property that is stolen without compensation by means of egregious land use regulations. In their day, they would have hung the government official who told them that they could not build a deck on the back of their house without a government permit or could not own a gun without the government’s consent.... Today, 'church going' Walt [Disney] would not even be welcome to sit on the board of directors of his own company. Today, neither George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, nor James Madison could be elected to Congress in any of the states from which they hailed two centuries ago. That’s what happens when a generation or two fails to pass on to their children and those who work under them the values and traditions that form the very underpinnings of their society. Precious things slip away, for the price of liberty really is eternal vigilance. — Bill Sizemore
We have rights, as individuals, to give as much of our own money as we please to charity; but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of public money. — Davy Crockett (1786-1836) American frontiersman, soldier and politician
We have room for but one flag, the American flag... We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language... and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people. — Theodore Roosevelt, 1907
We have staked the whole future of our new nation not upon the power of government; far from it. We have staked the future of all our political constitutions upon the capacity of each of ourselves to govern ourselves according to the moral principles of the Ten Commandments. — James Madison, the primary author of the US Constitution
We have to build a political consensus and that requires people to give up a little bit of their own...in order to create this common ground. — Hillary Clinton, 4 Jun 2007
We in America have reached the point where the nation's laws cannot protect our children. The bizarre parsing and twisting of each constitutional right has eroded our fundamental right to live in a country where violent behavior is prosecuted to the full extent of the law. — Bill O'Reilly
[W]e insist on the principle that no danger or crisis, foreign or domestic, will be solved by Americans surrendering more of their constitutional liberties, in the foolish hope that a bigger government will provide greater security. — Larry P. Arnn (1952- ) President of Hillsdale College, Mchigan
We journalists make it a point to know very little about an extremely wide variety of topics; this is how we stay objective. — Dave Barry
Welfare's purpose should be to eliminate, as far as possible, the need for its own existence. — Ronald Reagan
Well, I'm looking at it, as a matter of fact, Chris, because I think there ought to be an opportunity to present the other side. And unfortunately, talk radio is overwhelmingly one way. — Senator Dianne Feinstein to Chris Wallace of Fox News, 2007
We must become involved in civic affairs. As citizens of this republic we cannot do our duty and be idle spectators. — Ezra Taft Benson (Ensign, Nov 1987, page 102)
We need to make it clear that the free use of the public airwaves continues to come with certain obligations ... to reflect not the basest elements of American culture but the profound and the proud. — Barack Obama, US Senator from Illinois (Advertising Age, 9 Nov 2005)
We need to re-regulate the media. — Howard Dean, President of the Democrat Party, 2007
[W]e ought to vote to dissolve the Congress and go home and wait for the next election. — Trent Lott, US Senator (Amen!)
We pay too little attention to the reserve power of the people to take care of themselves. We are too solicitous for government intervention, on the theory, first, that the people themselves are helpless, and second, that the government has superior capacity for action. Often times both of these conclusions are wrong. — John Calvin Coolidge, Jr., US President
We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good. — Hillary Clinton, 29 Jun 2004
Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want bread. — Thomas Jefferson
We should remember the way the ACLU works to get their agenda into law. They have never taken a single issue to the public and worked through the democratic system of voting. Rather, they find a sympathetic liberal activist judge to make law from the bench. — Donald E. Wildmon, American Family Association
We want the best for everybody, folks, and that means not subsidizing idleness so that people become dependent on government -- and vote Democrat forever. — Rush Limbaugh, 19 Nov 2009
We who are liberal and progressive know that the poor are our equals in every sense except that of being equal to us. — Lionel Trilling
What can you say about a society that says that God is dead and Elvis is alive? — Irv Kupcinet
What do Barack Obama and Osama bin Laden have in common? They both have friends who bombed the Pentagon. — Rush Limbaugh, 7 Oct 2008
What do you get when you hold a conference with 1,200 people who are all afraid of offending one another? I'll tell you what you don't get. You don't get unity, and you don't get agreement on anything....We Christians may interpret the Bible differently; we may apply it to life differently; we may have arguments over exegesis. But the Bible has to be the ultimate authority. Otherwise we end up worshiping the goddess of tolerance and believing that tolerance takes precedence over truth....This kind of so-called "tolerance" can never bring people together, but only...pull them farther apart. — Charles Colson, commenting on the "Spiritual Activism Conference" which took place in Washington, DC in Jul 2006
Whatever Congress wishes to give, it has to first take other people's money. Thus, at the root of the welfare state is the immorality of intimidation, threats and coercion backed up with the threat of violence by the agents of the U.S. Congress. In order for Congress to do what some Americans deem as good, it must first do evil. It must do that which if done privately would mean a jail sentence; namely, take the property of one American to give to another. — Walter E. Williams
What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried? — Abraham Lincoln
What is euphemistically called government-corporate ‘partnership’ is just government coercion, political favoritism, collectivist industrial policy, and old-fashioned federal boondoggles nicely wrapped up in a bright-colored ribbon. It doesn’t work. — Ronald Reagan, US President
What is the real cause of this trend toward the welfare state, toward more socialism? In the last analysis, in my judgment, it is personal unrighteousness. When people do not use their freedoms responsibly and righteously, they will gradually lose these freedoms....If man will not recognize the inequalities around him and voluntarily, through the gospel plan, come to the aid of his brother, he will find that through “a democratic process” he will be forced to come to the aid of his brother. The government will take from the “haves” and give to the “have nots.” Both have last their freedom. Those who “have,” lost their freedom to give voluntarily of their own free will and in the way they desire. Those who “have not,” lost their freedom because they did not earn what they received. They got “something for nothing,” and they will neither appreciate the gift nor the giver of the gift. Under this climate, people gradually become blind to what has happened and to the vital freedoms which they have lost. — Howard W. Hunter on Socialism and Freedom(Devotional Address, Brigham Young University, 8 Mar 1966)
What right does Congress have to go around making laws just because they deem it necessary? — Marion Barry, former mayor of Washington, DC
What was new about [the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki] was the technology, not the morality. More people were killed with ordinary bombs in German cities or in Tokyo. Vastly more people were killed with ordinary bullets and cannon on the Russian front. Morality is about what you do to people, not the technology you use. — Thomas Sowell
When a portion of wealth is transferred from the person who owns it -- without his consent and without compensation, and whether by force or by fraud -- to anyone who does not own it, then I say that property is violated; that an act of plunder is committed. — Frederick Bastiat (1801-1850), French economist, The Law, Jun 1850
When a student addresses an assembly of his peers, he effectively becomes a government representative; it is therefore unconstitutional for that student to engage in prayer. — Harris v. Joint School District, 1994
Whenever we are attacked, people are willing to give up someone else's liberties for their own security. — Judge Andrew Napolitano
When I was a child, I was told anyone could be president. I'm beginning to believe it. — Author Unknown
When surveys of the national media have shown that half of journalists are religiously unaffiliated and 86 percent never attend church or synagogue, it's not a surprise that they just don't get it. — Brent Bozell
When the government subsidizes something, there's unlimited demand. — Jason Lewis, 10 Apr 2008
When white man discovered this country, Indians were running it: no taxes or debt, women did all the work, and the men went fishing. And the white man thought he could improve on a system like that! — Author Unknown
When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion - when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you - when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - you may know that your society is doomed. — Ayn Rand (1905-1982) (Atlas Shrugged)
Where I live in Manhattan and where I work at ABC, people say 'conservative' the way people say 'child molester.' Leftist thinking is just the culture that I live in and the culture the reporters who populate the mainstream media live in. — John Stossel
Which is the greater problem facing Americans today: Ignorance or apathy? Too many people reply, "I don't know, and I don't care." — Author Unknown
While we spend men and money to fight for freedom in other lands, the courts and Congress continue to nibble away at it here at home. — Lyn Nofziger
Who or what is this "Hollywood" that is so out of touch with our values? Why is it they endeavor to subvert us with clandestine propaganda? How do they intend to capture and convert us? Is it by what they show and say or is there a more subversive and dastardly agenda in what they prepensely leave out? God is omnipresent, so why is He so difficult to find in the movies? — Keith Merrill, Academy Award-winning movie director
Why don't we see Peace Activists demonstrating in Iran, Syria, Iraq, Sudan, North Korea, in the places that really need peace activism the most? Peace activists always seem to demonstrate here in America, where it's safe. Americans who oppose the liberation of Iraq are coming down on the side of their own worst enemy. — Raymond S. Kraft, Sep 2006
Why is it that hose who clamor the loudest for diversity seem to believe that diversity does not include straight white Christians? — Blaine Nay
Why not go to war just for oil? We need oil. What do Hollywood celebrities imagine fuels their private jets? How do they think their cocaine is delivered to them? — Ann Coulter
Why should jurists feel compelled to defer to unconstitutional precedent that was born of the casting aside of constitutional precedent? — Selwyn Duke
Without data, we're just another schmuck with an opinion. — D. Chris Anderson, PhD
Women who have given children up for adoption feel bittersweet. Women who have had abortions just feel bitter. — Fredrica Matthews-Green, radio commentator, National Public Radio
Yes, the Left does love diversity of everything but opinion. — Al Rantel, 2004
You are not what you believe in, you are what you will fight for! — Boston T. Party
You cannot begin to solve a problem until you admit you have a problem. — Bernard Goldberg, Arrogance, p 238
You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot help small men by tearing down big men. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer. You cannot help the poor man by destroying the rich. You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred. You cannot establish security on borrowed money. You cannot build character and courage by taking away men's initiative and independence. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves. — Reverend William JH Boetcke (1873-1962) German-born Presbyterian clergyman, 1916 (often erroneously attributed to Abraham Lincoln)
You cannot claim both full equality and special dispensation. — William Raspberry
You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it. —
Dr. Adrian Pierce Rogers (1931-2005)
You can't get rid of poverty by giving people money. — P.J. O'Rourke
You can't add a runway to an airport in America without years of carefully researched environmental impact statements. But you [the courts] can radically reorder the fundamental social unit of society [the family] without political process or serious research. — Orson Scott Card
You can’t reason a man out of a position he has not reasoned himself into. —
Oscar Wilde
You can't reason a man out of what he wasn't reasoned into. — Jonathon Swift
You don't change the course of history by turning the faces of portraits to the wall. — Jawaharlal Nehru
You had better be ready to change your mind when needed. — Henry B. Wilson
You have no rights except those you are willing to take. — Jack A Sol
You know, I wanted to sit on a jury once and I was taken off the jury. And the judge said to me, 'Can you tell the truth and be fair?' And I said, 'That's what journalists do.' And everybody in the courtroom laughed. It was the most hurtful moment I think I've ever had. — Diane Sawyer, Good Morning America, 12 Jul 2007
You know the one thing that's wrong with this country? Everyone gets a chance to have their fair say. — Bill Clinton, US President, 29 May 1993
You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our Founding Fathers used in the struggle for Independence. — Charles Austin Beard, historian
Your money does not cause my poverty. Refusal to believe this is at the bottom of most bad economic thinking. — P. J. O'Rourke
You use the name of Deity in the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution of the United States, and yet you cannot use it in the schoolroom. — Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of Great Britain
You've got to stand for something, or you'll fall for anything. — Aaron Tippin
You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too. — John Kenneth Galbraith
You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats, procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing. — Thomas Sowell
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