Favorite Quotes

"Politicians never accuse you of 'greed' for wanting other people's money --- only for wanting to keep your own money." [Joseph Sobran]


These quotes -- gathered from various sources around the net and from newspapers, should open a few eyes on what lies at the core of the liberal thought process. If you have any submissions you would like to add to the page, send them on!


"America's abundance was created not by public sacrifices to 'the common good,' but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America's industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance -- and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way." [Ayn Rand]


GOVERNMENT


"Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar." [Ask Barbra Streisand who the hell said this. I don't know. I think it was Don Knotts.]


"In general the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to the other." [Voltaire]


The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. [H.L. Mencken]


The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it's good-by to the Bill of Rights. [H.L. Mencken]


"The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can't get and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods."[H. L. Mencken]


"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]


Does "Global Warming" come to mind? --- oh, and Hillary says there is a "hidden" child care crisis. Could she have meant to say "imaginary" child care crisis?


"I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution or that have failed their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is "needed" before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents "interests, " I shall reply that I was informed that their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can." [Barry Goldwater]


"In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, 'Make us your slaves, but feed us.'" [Dosteovsky's 'Grand Inquisitor']


This is a perfect illustration of the current state of political affairs in America.


"If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen." [Samuel Adams]


HONESTY IN GOVERNMENT


Teddy Roosevelt said this on May 12, 1900 .. .while he was still governor of New York. Too bad we don't have more people who feel this way today.


"We can afford to differ on the currency, the tariff, and foreign policy; but we cannot afford to differ on the question of honesty if we expect our republic permanently to endure ...


"Honesty is not so much a credit as an absolute prerequisite to efficient service to the public. Unless a man is honest, we have no right to keep him in public life; it matters not how brilliant his capacity


"The weakling and the coward cannot be saved by honesty alone; but without honesty, the brave and able man is merely a civic wild beast who should be hunted down by every lover of righteousness.


"No man who is corrupt, no man who condones corruption in others, can possibly do his duty by the community...


"'Liar' is just as ugly a word as 'thief,' because it implies the presence of just as ugly a sin in one case as in the other. If a man lies under oath or procures the lie of another under oath, if he perjures himself or suborns perjury, he is guilty under the statute law.


"Under the higher law, under the great law of morality and righteousness, he is precisely as guilty if, instead of lying in a court, he lies in a newspaper or on the stump; and in all probability, the evil effects of his conduct are infinitely more widespread and more pernicious."


HYPHENATED AMERICANISM


"There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to runin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation of all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities." [Teddy Roosevelt in a speech before the Knights of Columbus]


WHY I THINK VOTING SHOULD BE RESTRICTED


This is one of my favorites. From Alexander Tyler. No, he wasn't writing about the United States. This quote is well over one hundred years old. Tyler was writing about the fall of the Athenian Republic.


"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage."


INDIVIDUALISM


"The main plank in the National Socialist program is to abolish the liberalistic concept of the individual and the Marxist concept of humanity and to substitute for them the folk community, rooted in the soil and bound together by the bond of its common blood." [Adolph Hitler, quoted in Hitler, A Study in Tyranny, by Alan Bullock (Harper Collins, NY)]


"It is thus necessary that the individual should come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of his nation; that the position of the individual ego is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole ... that above all the unity of a nation's spirit and will are worth far more than the freedom of the spirit and will of an individual. .... This state of mind, which subordinates the interests of the ego to the conservation of the community, is really the first premise for every truly human culture .... we understand only the individual's capacity to make sacrifices for the community, for his fellow man." [Adolph Hitler, 1933]


There is the great, silent, continuous struggle: the struggle between the State and the Individual; between the State which demands and the individual who attempts to evade such demands. Because the individual, left to himself, unless he be a saint or hero, always refuses to pay taxes, obey laws, or go to war. [Benito Mussolini]


Fascist ethics begin ... with the acknowledgment that it is not the individual who confers a meaning upon society, but it is, instead, the existence of a human society which determines the human character of the individual. According to Fascism, a true, a great spiritual life cannot take place unless the State has risen to a position of pre-eminence in the world of man. The curtailment of liberty thus becomes justified at once, and this need of rising the State to its rightful position. [Mario Palmieri, "The Philosophy of Fascism" 1936]


"Comrades! We must abolish the cult of the individual decisively, once and for all." [Nikita Khrushchev , February 25, 1956 20th Congress of the Communist Party]


"All our lives we fought against exalting the individual, against the elevation of the single person, and long ago we were over and done with the business of a hero, and here it comes up again: the glorification of one personality. This is not good at all." [Vladimir Lenin, as quoted in Not by Politics Alone]


"We must stop thinking of the individual and start thinking about what is best for society." [Hillary Clinton, 1993]


"We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans ..." [President Bill Clinton, 'USA Today' March 11, 1993: Page 2A]


"The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities." [Ayn Rand]


When will the world learn that a million men are of no importance compared with one man? [Henry David Thoreau]


HILLARY DOESN'T KNOW WHO IS PRESIDENT ---- AND WHO IS NOT.


"I'm not going to have some reporters pawing through our papers. We are the president." [Hillary Clinton commenting on the release of subpoenaed documents ]


VOLUNTEERISM


We must organize all labor, no matter how dirty and arduous it may be, so that every (citizen) may regard himself as part of that great army of free labor.... The generation that is now fifteen years old .. must arrange all their tasks of education in such a way that every day, and in every city, the young people shall engage in the practical solution of the problems of common labor, even the smallest, most simple kind. [Vladimir Lenin]


Does this remind you of the compulsory volunteerism movement endorsed by Clinton in our public schools? N.B.


"Fascism finds it necessary, at the outset, to take away from the ordinary human being what he has been taught and has grown to cherish the most; personal liberty. And it can be affirmed, without falling into exaggeration, that a curtailment of personal liberty not only has proved to be, but necessarily must be, a fundamental condition of the triumph of Fascism." [Mario Palmeiri]


"I am here because I want to redefine the meaning of citizenship in America... If you're asked in school 'What does it mean to be a good citizen?' I want the answer to be, 'Well, to be a good citizen, you have to obey the law, you've got to go to work or be in school, you've got to pay your taxes and --- oh, yes, you have to serve..." [Bill Clinton at Volunteerism Summit]


"All the people I know who are driving for a form of national service, primarily want it to be compulsory. They realize that's a terrible problem politically, so they're not willing to say it. It is endangerment of freedom and the potential for indoctrination that skeptics do not like in the national service concept. However benign the program, some think it will not succeed on any meaningful scale unless is is compulsory." [Martin Anderson, Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution]


"In his April 5 radio address outlining the goals of the summit, the President endorsed compulsory volunteerism -- and even called for extending it to middle schools. In other words, the man who so famously avoided the dangerous duty of fighting in Vietnam as a young man now proposes drafting a new generation of young people to perform a different set of difficult tasks." [Editorial, New York Post, April 27, 1997]


MISC.


"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]


"In general the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to the other." [Voltaire]


"Do we really think that a government-dominated education is going to produce citizens capable of dominating their government, as the education of a truly vigilant self-governing people requires?" [Alan Keyes]