Keep your eyes on the stars, and your feet on the ground.
Theodore Roosevelt
(26th President of the United States, 1858-1919)
Category Archives: Quotations Freedom
Hence it is that all armed prophets have conquered, and the unarmed …
Hence it is that all armed prophets have conquered, and the unarmed ones have been destroyed. Nicolo Machiavelli
The Prince, written in 1505, published in 1515.
Emotions neither prove nor disprove facts. There was a time when any …
Emotions neither prove nor disprove facts. There was a time when any rational adult understood this. But years of dumbed-down education and emphasis on how people ‘feel’ have left too many people unable to see through this media gimmick. Thomas Sowell
October 12, 2004
The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, …
The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot for ever fence it out. J.R.R. Tolkien
The Fellowship of the Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien
Get the government out of the protective business, the subsidy business, the …
Get the government out of the protective business, the subsidy business, the improvement business and the development business. E.L. Godkin
John G. Sproat, The Best Men: Liberal Reformers in the Gilded Age (1968). [‘Liberal’ as in classical liberal.]
As the dreadful Clinton experiment has shown, improvisation without a governing philosophy …
As the dreadful Clinton experiment has shown, improvisation without a governing philosophy to hold it in check can easily degenerate into a shiftless, poll-driven opportunism. David Marquand
former moderate Labor Member of Parliament and currently principal of Mansfield College, Oxford, in the New York Times. Reported May 19, 1997 in Forbes.
I [know
I [know] what you will say – that the essence of wisdom is to know when to be doing, and when it is useless to even try. Mary Stewart
Arthur to Merlin. Merlin Trilogy, 1970, p 739
what you will say – that the essence of wisdom is … ]
Abraham Lincoln proclaimed that a house divided can’t remain half slave …
Abraham Lincoln proclaimed that a house divided can’t remain half slave and half free. But if American government today takes almost half of the national income, is it not already almost half slave? Investor’s Business Daily
(Investor’s Business Daily, December 15, 2000)
Face it: Virtually all nationalized health systems, neither nourished nor updated by …
Face it: Virtually all nationalized health systems, neither nourished nor updated by profit-driven private investment, eventually lead to rationing. I just don’t get it. Why the insane rush to pass a bill, any bill, in three weeks? And why such an abject failure by the Obama administration to present the issues to the public in a rational, detailed, informational way? The U.S. is gigantic; many of our states are bigger than whole European nations. The bureaucracy required to institute and manage a nationalized health system here would be Byzantine beyond belief and would vampirically absorb whatever savings Obama thinks could be made. And the transition period would be a nightmare of red tape and mammoth screw-ups, which we can ill afford with a faltering economy.As with the massive boondoggle of the stimulus package, which Obama foolishly let Congress turn into a pork rut, too much has been attempted all at once; focused, targeted initiatives would, instead, have won wide public support. …It isn’t conservative rumors or lies that are stopping healthcare legislation; it’s the justifiable alarm of an electorate that has been cut out of the loop and is watching its representatives construct a tangled labyrinth for others but not for themselves. No, the airheads of Congress will keep their own plush healthcare plan — it’s the rest of us guinea pigs who will be thrown to the wolves….And what do Democrats stand for, if they are so ready to defame concerned citizens as the “mob” — a word betraying a Marie Antoinette delusion of superiority to ordinary mortals. I thought my party was populist, attentive to the needs and wishes of those outside the power structure. And as a product of the 1960s, I thought the Democratic party was passionately committed to freedom of thought and speech.But somehow liberals have drifted into a strange servility toward big government, which they revere as a godlike foster father-mother who can dispense all bounty and magically heal all ills. The ethical collapse of the left was nowhere more evident than in the near total silence of liberal media and Web sites at the Obama administration’s outrageous solicitation to private citizens to report unacceptable “casual conversations” to the White House. If Republicans had done this, there would have been an angry explosion by Democrats from coast to coast. I was stunned at the failure of liberals to see the blatant totalitarianism in this incident, which the president should have immediately denounced. His failure to do so implicates him in it….As a libertarian and refugee from the authoritarian Roman Catholic church of my youth, I simply do not understand the drift of my party toward a soulless collectivism. This is in fact what Sarah Palin hit on in her shocking image of a “death panel” under Obamacare that would make irrevocable decisions about the disabled and elderly. When I first saw that phrase, headlined on the Drudge Report, I burst out laughing. It seemed so over the top! But on reflection, I realized that Palin’s shrewdly timed metaphor spoke directly to the electorate’s unease with the prospect of shadowy, unelected government figures controlling our lives. A death panel not only has the power of life and death but is itself a symptom of a Kafkaesque brave new world where authority has become remote, arbitrary and spectral. And as in the Spanish Inquisition, dissidence is heresy, persecuted and punished. Camille Paglia
Obama supporter, August 12, 2009, Salon (while often wrong, she is certainly right here)
Three millions of people, so dead to all feelings of liberty as …
Three millions of people, so dead to all feelings of liberty as to voluntarily submit to being slaves, would have been fit instruments to make slaves of the rest of us. William Pitt
On the Stamp Act, taxing the US Colonies, in the British Parliament, December 1765 [One can only imagine the comment with rates such as we have today]