"Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."
John Adams
"Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds."
Henry Brooks Adams
"Every man must get to Heaven his own way."
Frederick The Great
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Thomas Jefferson
"It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning."
Henry Ford
"Laughter is the shortest distance between two people."
Victor Borge
"I choose free libraries as the best agencies for improving the masses of the people, because they give nothing for nothing. They only help those who help themselves. They never pauperize. They reach the aspiring and open to these chief treasures of the world -- those stored up in books. A taste for reading drives out lower tastes."
Andrew Carnegie
"People naturally fear misfortune and long for good fortune, but if the distinction is carefully studied, misfortune often turns out to be good fortune and good fortune to be misfortune. The wise man learns to meet the changing circumstances of life with an equitable spirit, being neither elated by success nor depressed by failure."
Buddha
"Liberty, of course, is not for slaves; I do not advocate inflicting it on men against their conscience. On the contrary, I am strongly in favor of letting them crawl and grovel all they please - before the Supreme Court of the United States, ...., the Anti- Saloon League, or whatever other fraud or combination of frauds they choose to venerate. I am thus unable to make the grade as a Liberal, for Liberalism always involves freeing men against their will - often, indeed to their obvious damage. ....
"Here and there one finds a man or woman with a great passion for liberty - and a hard job getting it. It is, to me at least, a vast pleasure to go to the rescue of such a victim in the herd, to give him some aid and comfort in this struggle against the forces that seek to regiment and throttle him. It is a double pleasure to succor him when the sort of liberty he strives for is apparently unintelligible and valueless - for example, liberty to address conventions of the I.W.W., to read the novels of such bad authors as D. H. Lawrence and Petronius AArbiter, to work twelve hours a day, to rush the can, to carry red flags in parades, to patronize osteopaths and Christian Science healers, to belong to the best clubs.
"Such nonsensical varieties of liberty are especially sweet to me. I have wrecked my health and dissipated a fortune defending them - never, so far as I know, successfully. Why then, go on? Ask yourself why a grasshopper goes on jumping. "
H. L. Mencken
"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 murder is less to fear."
Marcus Tullius Cicero
"Every moral act of love, of mercy, and of sacrifice brings to pass the end of the world where hatred, cruelty, and selfishness reign supreme."
Berdyaev
"You may be sorry that you spoke, sorry you stayed or went, sorry you won or lost, sorry so much was spent. But as you go through life, you'll find - you're never sorry you were kind."
Herbert Prochnow
"The tragedy-in-process that moves our country toward socialism is based on the success of liberalism in teaching people to look to big government rather than to themselves for the satisfaction of their needs - and to man's law, rather than to God's commandments, for moral direction. The ultimate tragedy will consist of a massive redistribution of wealth and power - not as is commonly believed from one citizen to another, but from all citizens to the government."
Linda Bowles