Quotes and Conundrums

"Our society contains no method of serious self-criticism for the simple reason that it is now a self-justifying system which generates its own logic."

John Ralston Saul

"Any idea, no matter how good, will inevitably be taken to such extremes that eventually everyone decides it was a bad idea."

Kevin McGehee

"Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself."

Mark Twain

"A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic."

Joseph Stalin

"Believe those who are seeking the truth, doubt those who have found it."

Andre Gide

"A child of five could understand this. Fetch me a child of five."

Groucho Marx

"Liberalism today plays much the same role in social life that Christianity played in late Victorian Britain; increasing numbers of people have come to suspect that it is not valid, even as they find themselves utterly unable to imagine any alternative source of truth."

David Frum

"The people of the various provinces are strictly forbidden to have in their possession any swords, short swords, bows, spears, firearms, or other types of arms. The possession of unnecessary implements makes difficult the collection of taxes and dues and tends to foment uprisings."

Toyotomi Hideyoshi
(1536-1598)

"Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry."

Winston Churchill

"Economics, like thermodynamics, rests on three principles: You get what you pay for, you can't get something for nothing, and if supply and demand can't be balanced by prices, you get shortages. Politics is the art of denying these principles and public policy is the science of implementing programs based on the denials until crisis arrives."

Bill Frezza

"Usurpers always choose troubled times to enact, in the atmosphere of general panic, laws which the public would never adopt when passions were cool. One of the surest ways of distinguishing the work of a lawgiver from that of a tyrant is to note the moment he chooses to give a people its constitution."

Jean-Jaques Rousseau


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