Favorite Quotes:
We cannot talk of freedom unless we have private property.
-- Gavriil Popov, Mayor of Moscow, September 11, 1990.
It is seldom that any liberty is lost all at once.
-- David Hume
...if you were to
destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but
every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once
be dried up. Moreover, nothing then would be immoral, everything would
be lawful, even cannibalism.
-- Fyodor Dostoevsky, "The Brothers Karamazov"
Let parents, then, bequeath to their children not riches, but the
spirit of reverence.
-- Plato, "Laws"
I have prevented my kids from watching MTV at home. It's not
safe for kids.
-- Tom Freston, MTV president, 4/14/95 Buffalo News.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It
is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
-- William Pitt, 1783 speech to the House of Commons.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
-- Benjamin Franklin, 1759.
Do your duty, and leave the rest to heaven.
-- Pierre Corneille
I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the
government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of
taking care of them.
-- Thomas Jefferson
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can
afford to let alone.
-- Henry David Thoreau, "Walden," chapter "Where I Lived, and What
I Lived For," 1854.
No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.
-- Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the
propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and
tyrannical.
-- Thomas Jefferson.
Wherever there is a jackboot stomping on a human face there will be
a well-heeled Western liberal to explain that the face does, after all, enjoy
free health care and 100 percent literacy.
-- John Derbyshire
For us, murder is once for all forbidden.... It makes no
difference whether one take away the life once born, or destroy it as
it comes to birth. He is a man, who is to be a man; the fruit is
always present in the seed.
-- Tertullian (c. 160-230).
We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom
that is in it -- and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a
hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again -- and that
is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one any more.
-- Mark Twain, Following the Equator, 1897.
The holy passion of Friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal
and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked
to lend money.
-- Mark Twain.
We are the first generation of man to try to build a society
without a moral reference point.
-- Arnold Toynbee.
The world expects of Christians that they will raise their voices
so loudly and clearly and so formulate their protest that not even the
simplest man can have the slightest doubt about what they are saying.
Further, the world expects of Christians that they will eschew all fuzzy
abstractions and plant themselves squarely in front of the bloody face
of history. We stand in need of folk who have determined to speak directly
and unmistakably and come what may, to stand by what they have said.
-- Albert Camus.
The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who, in a
period of moral crisis, maintain neutrality.
-- Dante.
When principles that run against your deepest convictions
begin to win the day, then battle is your calling, and peace has
become sin; you must, at the price of dearest peace, lay your
convictions bare before friend and enemy, with all the fire of your
faith.
-- Abraham Kuyper.
Being a lover of freedom, when the [Nazi] revolution came,
I looked to the universities to defend it, knowing that they had
always boasted of their devotion to the cause of truth; but no, the
universities were immediately silenced. Then I looked to the great
editors of the newspapers, whose flaming editorials in days gone had
proclaimed their love of freedom; but they, like the universities,
were silenced in a few short weeks.... Only the Church stood squarely
across the path of Hitler's campaign for suppressing the truth. I
never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a
great affection and admiration for it because the Church alone has had
the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual and moral
freedom. I am forced to confess that what I once despised I now praise
unreservedly.
-- Albert Einstein.
Those who are struggling today, those who are far away and
doing that which is completely contrary to the Christian conscience,
are not first to be blamed. It is my generation, and the generation
that preceded me, who turned away. Today we are left, not only with a
religion and a church without meaning, but ... with a culture without
meaning.
-- Francis Schaeffer.
The study of history is a powerful antidote to
contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our
glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been
tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and
discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false.
-- Paul Johnson.
Preach the gospel at all times; if need be, use words.
-- Francis of Assisi.
We have no government armed with power capable of contending with
human passions unbridled by morality and religion.
-- John Adams.
There are only two possible forms of control: one internal
and the other external; religious control and political control. They
are of such a nature that when the religious barometer rises, the
barometer of [external] falls and likewise, when the religious
barometer falls, the political barometer, that is political control and
tyranny, rises. That is the law of humanity, a law of history. If
civilized man falls into disbelief and immorality, the way is prepared
for some gigantic and colossal tyrant, universal and immense.
-- Juan Donoso-Cortes, Spanish philosopher, statesman, and writer.
Everything that emancipates the spirit without giving us control
over ourselves is harmful.
-- Goethe.
In his 1996 essay, 'Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died,'
novelist Tom Wolfe said philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was right in
his prediction that humanity would muddle through the 20th century,
living off the 'mere pittance' of the morality it had inherited from
Christianity. But that inheritance is now overdrawn, spent.
-- Charles Colson.
We are not to attribute this prohibition of a national religious
establishment to an indifference to religion in general, and especially to
Christianity (which none could hold in more reverence than the framers of the
Constitution) ... Any attempt to level all religions, and to make it a matter
of state policy to hold all in utter indifference, would have created universal
disapprobation, if not universal indignation.
-- Justice Joseph Story, appointed by President James Madison in 1811.
Why is it, I often ask liberals, that they uphold these
few words from Jefferson ('separation of church and state') as holy
writ but ignore almost everything else he wrote? Jefferson...wanted
the state to remain very, very small and occupy only a tiny corner of
a large public square filled with private institutions and citizens
virtually untouched by taxation and government regulation. Liberals
nowadays reason using a far different logic. In their syllogism,
church and state must be separate. The state must own or control
everything. Therefore, the church must retreat to near
nothingness. This is not the America Thomas Jefferson wanted. This is
what he declared independence against.
-- Lowell Ponte.
When you abolish Jesus Christ and the Bible from not only the
classroom but also a two-minute time slot before high school football
games, you are not practicing religious neutrality. You are
substituting a new religion for an old one. When classroom instruction
is anchored in Darwinian evolution, state socialism, and a passionate
amorality, you are looking at a New Established Religion -- secular
humanism. There is no religious neutrality in this, and there never
could be. Secular humanism has supplanted orthodox Christianity as the
unofficially established religion of the United States. Government
schools are the chief hotbed of this new religion. It is relentlessly
anti-Christian. Christian parents who turn their precious children
over to vigorously anti-Christian religionists are not only sinful;
they are foolish.
-- P. Andrew Sandlin.
It has been the error of the schools to teach astronomy, and all
the other sciences and subjects of natural philosophy, as accomplishments
only; whereas they should be taught theologically, or with reference to the
Being who is the author of them: for all the principles of science are of
Divine origin. Man cannot make, or invent, or contrive principles. He can only
discover them; and he ought to look through the discovery to the Author.
When we examine an extraordinary piece of machinery, an astonishing pile of
architecture, a well executed statue or a highly finished painting where
life and action are imitated, and habit only prevents our mistaking a surface
of light and shade for cubical solidity, our ideas are naturally led to think
of the extensive genius and talents of the artist. When we study the elements
of geometry, we think of Euclid. When we speak of gravitation, we think of
Newton. How then is it, that when we study the works of God in the creation,
we stop short, and do not think of God? It is from the error of the schools
in having taught those subjects as accomplishments only, and thereby
separated the study of them from the Being who is the author of them ...
The evil that has resulted from the error of the schools in teaching natural
philosophy as an accomplishment only has been that of generating in the pupils
a species of atheism. Instead of looking through the works of the creation to
the Creator himself, they stop short, and employ the knowledge they acquire to
create doubts of His existence. They labor with studied ingenuity to ascribe
everything they behold to innate properties of matter; and jump over all the
rest, by saying that matter is eternal.
-- Thomas Paine, 1797.
Tolerance is a virtue when you put up with a lesser evil for the
sake of a greater good, such as social peace. It isn't a virtue at all -- it
becomes a vice -- when it means abandoning your moral standards out of
cowardice or pusillanimity.
-- Joseph Sobran.
Were the talents and virtues which heaven has bestowed on
men given merely to make them more obedient drudges, to be sacrificed
to the follies and ambition of a few? Or, were not the noble gifts so
equally dispensed with a divine purpose and law, that they should as
nearly as possible be equally exerted, and the blessings of Providence
be equally enjoyed by all? Away, then, with those absurd systems which
to gratify the pride of a few debase the greater part of our species
below the order of men. What an affront to the King of the universe,
to maintain that the happiness of a monster, sunk in debauchery and
spreading desolation and murder among men, of a Caligula, a Nero, or a
Charles, is more precious in his sight than that of millions of his
suppliant creatures, who do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with
their God! No, in the judgment of heaven there is no other superiority
among men than a superiority in wisdom and virtue.
-- Samuel Adams.
The Ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly
is to fill the world with fools.
-- Herbert Spencer.
A general state education is a mere contrivance for
molding people to be exactly like one another: and as the mold in
which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the
government or the majority of the existing generation; in proportion
as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the
mind, leading by natural tendency to one over the body.
-- John Stuart Mill.
The socialist state requires greater and greater degrees
of force to make it function. If resources and wealth are allocated on
the basis of need rather than production, people will compete to be
more needy rather than more productive.
-- Linda Bowles.
The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism,
but under the name of liberalism they will adopt every fragment of the
socialist program until one day America will be a socialist nation
without ever knowing how it happened.
-- Norman Thomas, one of the founders of the ACLU, who ran for
president multiple times on the Socialist Party ticket.
My business is not to remake myself, but to make the
absolute best of what God made.
-- Robert Browning.
When we propose to ignore in a great man's teaching those
doctrines which it has in common with the thought of his age, we seem
to be assuming that the thought of his age was erroneous. When we
select for serious consideration those doctrines which "transcend" the
thought of his own age and are "for all time", we are assuming that
the thought of our age is correct: for of course by thoughts which
transcend the great man's age we really mean thoughts that agree with
ours. Thus I value Shakespeare's picture of the transformation in old
Lear more than I value his views about the divine right of kings,
because I agree with Shakespeare that a man can be purified by
suffering like Lear, but do not believe that kings (or any other
rulers) have divine right in the sense required. When the great man's
views do not seem to us erroneous we do not value them the less for
having been shared with his contemporaries. Shakespeare's disdain for
treachery and Christ's blessing on the poor were not alien to the
outlook of their respective periods; but no one wishes to discredit
them on that account.
-- C.S. Lewis, The World's Last Night.
The populist, a believer in the ability of people to
handle their own affairs better than an elite, will tend to believe in
present equality. The elitist, with his optimism about the superior
ability of elites to handle people's affairs, will tend to believe in
future equality.
-- Jeffrey Bell, Populism and Elitism: Politics in the Age of Equality.
[Radio] is nothing but a conduit through which prefabricated din
can flow into our homes. And this din goes far deeper, of course, than the
eardrums; it penetrates the mind, filling it with a babble of distractions --
news items, mutually irrelevant bits of information, blasts of corybantic or
sentimental music, continually repeated doses of drama that bring no catharsis,
but merely create a craving for daily or even hourly emotional enemas.
-- Aldous Huxley. (And what would he think of today's TV ???)
The only thing he taught me was how not to be a father ... He
walked out the bloody door and was never around ... For someone who was
praised for peace and love and wasn't able to keep that at home, that's
hypocrisy.
-- Julian Lennon, on his father, John Lennon.
To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must
also be well-mannered.
-- Voltaire.
Gun control? It's the best thing you can do for crooks and
gangsters. I want you to have nothing. If I'm a bad guy, I'm always
gonna have a gun. Safety locks? You will pull the trigger with a lock
on, and I'll pull the trigger. We'll see who wins.
-- Mafia informant Sammy "the Bull" Gravano.
What I want to fix your attention on is the vast overall
movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of
every kind of human excellence -- moral, cultural, social or
intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how 'democracy' (in the
incantatory sense) is now doing for us the work that was once done by
the most ancient dictatorships, and by the same methods? The basic
proposal of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not
be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That
would be 'undemocratic.' Children who are fit to proceed may be
artificially kept back, because the others would get a trauma by being
left behind. The bright pupil thus remains democratically fettered to
his own age group throughout his school career, and a boy who would be
capable of tackling Aeschylus or Dante sits listening to his coeval's
attempts to spell out A CAT SAT ON A MAT. We may reasonably hope for
the virtual abolition of education when 'I'm as good as you' has fully
had its way. All incentives to learn and all penalties for not
learning will vanish. The few who might want to learn will be
prevented; who are they to overtop their fellows? And anyway, the
teachers -- or should I say nurses? -- will be far too busy reassuring
the dunces and patting them on the back to waste any time on real
teaching. We shall no longer have to plan and toil to spread
imperturbable conceit and incurable ignorance among men.
-- C.S. Lewis
Welfare is a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.
-- Franklin Delano Roosevelt
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all
progress depends on the unreasonable man.
-- George Bernard Shaw, "Man and Superman," appendix "Maxims for Revolutionists"
Cosmic visions of society are not just visions about society. They are
visions about those people who hold these visions and the role of such
people in society, whether these people are deemed to be leaders of a
master race, the vanguard of the proletariat, saviors of the planet,
or to have some other similarly self-flattering role as an anointed
visionary group "making a difference" in the unfolding of
history. Heady cosmic visions which give the sense of being one of the
anointed visionaries can hold tyrannical sway in disregard or defiance
of facts.
-- Thomas Sowell, The Quest for Cosmic Justice
Conservatives, when seeking to describe the kind of society they find
congenial, instinctively look to the past, whereas liberals and
radicals look to the future. We cite the past because it seems to
confirm our view of human nature; they cite the future because it
cannot disprove their view of human nature.
-- John O'Sullivan, National Review, 21-April-1997.
Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study
of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of
communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform,
but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality
the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are
being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced
to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense
of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and
in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist
anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated
liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political
correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.
-- Dr. Theodore Dalrymple, FrontPage.com interview, 31-August-2005.
I've always believed there's really no such thing as a double
standard. When people appear to apply a double standard, it means they
are actually applying a hidden single standard--one they don't want to
admit.
-- Joseph Sobran, 25-Feb-2003.
He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.
...
Both teachers and learners go to sleep at their post as soon as there
is no enemy in the field.
-- John Stuart Mill.
When freedom destroys order, the yearning for order will destroy
freedom.
-- Eric Hoffer.
It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by
men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot
be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be
repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such
incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is today, can
guess what it will be to-morrow.
-- James Madison.
A government with all this mass of favours to give or to withhold,
however free in name, wields a power of bribery scarcely surpassed by
an avowed autocracy, rendering it master of the elections in almost
any circumstances but those of rare and extraordinary public
excitement.
-- John Stuart Mill.
To find out who rules over you, simply find out who you are not
allowed to criticize.
-- Voltaire. (quoting Tacitus?)
[Journalists] cannot announce the happiness of mankind at all. They
cannot describe all the forks that are not stolen, or all the
marriages that are not judiciously dissolved. Hence the complete
picture they give of life is of necessity fallacious; they can only
represent what is unusual. However democratic they may be, they are
only concerned with the minority.
-- G.K. Chesterton, in The Ball and the Cross.
Our separation of economy from the home is part of a long
fragmentation process. Each of the modern ideas that might have once
been part of this complete breakfast have come to claim that they are
complete all by themselves. We have separated everything from
everything else. We have accomplished this by separating everything
from the home. Feminism has separated women from the home. Capitalism
has separated men from the home. Socialism has separated education
from the home. Manufacturing has separated craftsmanship from the
home. The news and entertainment industry has separated originality
and creativity from the home, rendering us into passive and malleable
consumers rather than active citizens.
-- G.K. Chesterton.
Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free,
they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free.
-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
That which you inherit from your fathers, You must earn in order to
possess.
-- Goethe, Faust, Act I, Scene 1, Randall Jarrell translation.
Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to
feel important. They don't mean to do harm - but the harm does not
interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they
are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.
-- T. S. Eliot.
There is a great deal of implicit knowledge involved in habits, rules
& traditional customs that, before we understood them, were regarded
as irrational. We are now beginning to understand that such things may
have persisted because they were in fact rational & useful.
-- F.A. Hayek.
Men are free when they are in a living homeland, not when they are
straying and breaking away. Men are free when they are obeying some
deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within. Men are
free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community,
active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not
when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go
west, and shout of freedom. Men are freest when they are most
unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.
-- D.H. Lawrence
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his
salary depends on his not understanding it.
-- Upton Sinclair
It is the privilege of the establishment to experience its power as
idealism.
-- Larissa MacFarquhar
The real damage is done by those millions who want to 'survive.'
The honest men who just want to be left in peace. Those who don't
want their little lives disturbed by anything bigger than
themselves. Those with no sides and no causes. Those who won't
take measure of their own strength, for fear of antagonizing their
own weakness. Those who don't like to make waves - or
enemies. Those for whom freedom, honour, truth, and principles are
only literature. Those who live small, mate small, die small. It's
the reductionist approach to life: if you keep it small, you'll
keep it under control. If you don't make any noise, the bogeyman
won't find you. But it's all an illusion, because they die too,
those people who roll up their spirits into tiny little balls so as
to be safe. Safe?! From what? Life is always on the edge of death;
narrow streets lead to the same place as wide avenues, and a little
candle burns itself out just like a flaming torch does.
-- Sophie Scholl
In the spiritual life, not to advance is to retreat. Those who have
the wind of the Holy Spirit go forward even in sleep. If the ship of
our soul is still tossed with winds and storms, let us awake the Lord,
who sleeps in it, and He will quickly calm the sea.
-- Brother Lawrence. The Practice of the Presence of God In Modern
English. Kindle Edition.
The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood
by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.
-- Robert Conquest.
Aristotle's view that philosophy begins with wonder, and not as in
our day with doubt, is a positive point of departure for
philosophy. Indeed the world will no doubt learn that it does not do
to begin with the negative, and the reason for success up to the present
is that philosophers never quite surrendered to the negative and thus
have never earnestly done what they have said. They merely flirt with doubt.
--- Soren Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers III 3284 (1841) - The Journals of Soren Kierkegaard
Socialism has created the illusion of quenching people's thirst
for justice: Socialism has lulled their conscience into thinking that
the steamroller which is about to flatten them is a blessing in
disguise, a salvation.
--- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of
rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.
--- C.S. Lewis.
It is the truth which is assailed in any age which tests our
fidelity. It is to confess we are called, not merely to profess. If I
profess, with the loudest voice and the clearest exposition, every
portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which
the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not
confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing
Christianity. Where the battle rages the loyalty of the soldier is
proved; and to be steady on all the battle-field besides is mere
flight and disgrace to him if he flinches at that one point.
--- Elizabeth Rundle Charles.
I said at the beginning that it is a lack of confidence, more than
anything else, that kills a civilisation. We can destroy ourselves by
cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.
--- Kenneth Clark, Civilisation (TV series).
The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor
between classes, nor between political parties either—but right
through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line
shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within
hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.
--- Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago.
If you knew how quickly people would forget you after your death, you
would not seek in your life to please anyone but God.
--- Saint John Chrysostom.
We call things racism just to get attention. We
reduce complicated problems to racism, not because it is racism, but
because it works.
--- Alfredo Gutierrez, former Democratic state senator in Arizona,
political consultant, Phoenix Gazette article 14-MAR-1993 by Richard DeUriarte.
Maintained by Clark Coleman (clark.coleman@att.net)
Last modified: Tue Jul 9 15:13:04 2002