"The fight is won or lost far away from witnesses. It is won behind the lines,
in the gym and out there on the road, long before I dance under those lights."
-- Muhammad Ali
"We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall
fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall
fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air,
we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall
fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we
shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in
the hills; we shall never surrender."
-- Sir Winston Spencer Churchill, speech on Dunkirk, House of Commons
"If liberty and equality...are chiefly to be found in democracy,
they will be best attained when all persons alike share in the
government to the utmost."
-- Aristotle "Politics"
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good
men to do nothing."
--Sir Edmund Burke, attributed
"It is the highest impertinence and presumption, therefore,
in kings and ministers to pretend to watch over the economy of
private people, and to restrain their expense. ... They are
themselves always, and without exception, the greatest spendthrifts
in the society. Let them look well after their own expense, and they
may safely trust private people with theirs."
-- Adam Smith "Wealth of Nations"
"A thing moderately good is not so good as it ought to be. Moderation
in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice."
-- Thomas Paine, "The Rights of Man, Part II" [1792]
"Not by force of arms are civilizations held together, but by subtle
threads of moral and intellectual principle."
-- Russell Kirk
"Government is a trust, and the officers of the government are trustees;
and both the trust and trustees are created for the benefit of the people."
-- Henry Clay, Speech at Ashland, Kentucky [1829]
"I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom
of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than
by violent and sudden usurpations."
-- James Madison, Speech in the Virginia Convention; June 16, 1788
"The long-range solution [to high unemployment] is to increase the
incentive for ordinary people to save, invest, work, and employ others
. . . . We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork."
-- Milton Friedman, U.S. News and World Report; March 7, 1977
"A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one
another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits
of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor and
bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government."
-- Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address; March 4, 1801
"When more of the people's sustenance is exacted through the form of
taxation than is necessary to meet the just obligations of government and
expenses of its economical administration, such exaction becomes ruthless
extortion and a violation of the fundamental principles of a free government"
-- Grover Cleveland, Second Annual Message; December, 1886
"The power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbor and perhaps
my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest
functionaire possesses who wields the coercive power of the state,
and on whose discretion it depends whether and how I am to be allowed to
live or to work."
-- Fredrich von Hayeck, The Road to Serfdom; 1944
"I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but
the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise
their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from
them, but to inform their discretion."
-- Thomas Jefferson, Letter to William Charles Jarvis; September 28, 1820
"They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little
temporary saftey, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
--Ben Franklin
"The principle of spending money to paid by posterity under
the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale."
--Thomas Jefferson
"Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys
to teenage boys."
-- P.J. O'Rourke
"Americans have the right and advantage of being armed--unlike citizens
of other countries whose governments are afraid to trust the people with arms."
--James Madison
Politics ought to be the part-time profession of every citizen who would
protect the rights and privileges of free people and who would preserve what
is good and fruitful in our national heritage."
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower
"The government of the United States, under Lyndon Johnson, proposes to concern
itself over the quality of American life. And this is something very new in the
political theory of free nations. The quality of life has heretofore depended on
the quality of the human beings who gave tone to that life, and they were its
priests and its poets, not its bureaucrats."
-- William Buckley, Jr
"Always give your best, never get discouraged, never be petty; always remember,
others may hate you. Those who hate you don't win unless you hate them. And then
you destroy yourself."
-- Richard Nixon
"This idea that government was beholden to the people, that it had no other
source of power is still the newest, most unique idea in all the long history of
man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in
our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution
and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan
our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves."
-- Ronald Reagan's Speech at the 1964 National Convention: A Time for Choosing
"There can be no fifty-fifty Americanism in this country.There is room here
for only 100 per cent Americanism, only for those who are Americans and nothing else."
"We Americans understand freedom; we have earned it, we have lived for it,
and we have died for it. This nation and its people are freedom's models in a
searching world. We can be freedom's missionaries in a doubting world."
-- Barry Goldwater, Speech to the Republican National Convention; June 16,1964
"The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings;
the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries."
-- Winston Churchill
"Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will
surprise you with their ingenuity."
-- George Smith Patton
"Government is like a big baby -- an alimentary canal with a big appetite
at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other."
-- Ronald Reagan as quoted in The New York Times Magazine, November 14, 1965
"These are the times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not the
still calm of life, or in the repose of a pacific station, that great challenges
are formed . . . great necessities call out great virtues."
-- Abigail Adams, letter to John Quincy Adams; January 19, 1780
"The judge's authority derives entirely from the fact that he is applying the
law and not his personal values."
-- Robert Bork, opening statement at congressional hearings concerning his
nomination to the Supreme Court; 1987
"A system of licensing and registration is the perfect device to deny
gun ownership to the bourgeoisie."
-- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
"I'm very sorry the government taxes their tips, that's fucked up.
That ain't my fault. It would seem to me that waitresses are one
of the many groups the government fucks in the ass on a regular
basis. Look, if you ask me to sign something that says the
governemnt shouldn't do that, I'll sign it; put it to a vote, I'll
vote for it; but what I won't do is play ball. And as for this
non-college bullshit, I got two words for that: learn to fuckin'
type, 'cause if you're expecting me to help out with the rent
you're in for a big fuckin' surprise."
-- Mr. Pink
"Anyone can put their ideas up on the web; it's the ultimate vanity press."