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"Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny." |
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"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle." |
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"When you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform." |
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"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." |
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"If you can't appreciate what you've got, you better get what you can appreciate!" |
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"It is unseemly, even pathetic, for the would-be leaders of a great power to pine for the pity gleaned on the day America lay bleeding and wounded." |
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"The world apparently likes the U.S. when it is on its knees. From that the Democrats deduce a foreign policy— remain on our knees, humble and supplicant, and enjoy the applause and "support" of the world." |
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"Sympathy is fine. But if we "squander" it when we go to war to avenge our dead and prevent the next crop of dead, then to hell with sympathy. The fact is that the world hates us for our wealth, our success, our power. They hate us into incoherence. The Europeans...disdain us for our excessive religiosity (manifest, they imagine, by evolution being expelled from schools while prayer is being ushered back in)—while the Arab world despises us as purveyors of secularism. We cannot win for losing. We are widely reviled as enemies of Islam, yet in the 1990s we engaged three times in combat—in the Persian Gulf and in the Balkans—to rescue Kuwait, Bosnia, and Kosovo, Muslim peoples all. And in the last two cases, there was nothing in it for the U.S.; it was humanitarianism and good international citizenship of the highest order. |
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"The search for logic in anti-Americanism is fruitless. It is in the air the world breathes. Its roots are envy and self-loathing— by peoples who, yearning for modernity but having failed at it, find their one satisfaction in despising modernity's great exemplar. On Sept. 11, they gave it a rest for a day. Big deal." |
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"Negotiate! What is to negotiate?" |
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"All of it began the first time some of you who know better, and are old enough to know better, let young people think that they have the right to choose the laws they would obey as long as they were doing it in the name of social protest." |
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"Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction." |
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"Every once in a while, somebody has to get the bureaucracy by the neck and shake it loose and say 'stop doing what you're doing.'" |
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"It's so hard for government planners, no matter how sophisticated, to ever substitute for millions of individuals working night and day to make their dreams come true. The fact is, bureaucracies are a problem around the world." |
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"[Democracy is] one of the most powerful political movements of our age... Freedom is the recognition that no single person, no single authority or government has a monopoly on the truth, but that every individual life is infinitely precious, that every one of us put in this world has been put there for a reason and has something to offer." |
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"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." |
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"If some among you fear taking a stand because you are afraid of reprisals from customers, clients, or even government, recognize that you are just feeding the crocodile hoping he'll eat you last." |
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"You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We can preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we can sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children's children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done." |
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"Let me remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Likewise, moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue." |
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"Freedom has only one enemy it cannot defeat, and that is negligence." |
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"As for butter versus margarine, I trust cows more than chemists." |
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"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind." |
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"War is an ugly thing but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feelings which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself." |
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"Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends than that good men should look on and do nothing." |
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"Understood as a central consolidated power, managing and directing the various general interests of the society, all government is evil...The best government is that which governs least." |
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"It is difficult beyond description to conceive that space can have no end; but it is more difficult to conceive an end. It is difficult beyond the power of man to conceive an eternal duration of what we call time; but it is more impossible to conceive a time when there shall be no time." |
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"The word of God is the creation we behold and it is in this word, which no human invention can counterfeit or alter, that God speaketh universally to man." |
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"Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamities are heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer." |
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"If there must be trouble let it be in my day, that my child may have peace." |
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"THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated." |
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"Peace is not an absence of war." |
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"SO LONG as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation, which, in the face of civilization, artificially creates hell on earth and complicates a destiny that is divine with human fatality; so long as the three problems of the age -- the degredation of man by poverty, the ruin of woman by starvation, and the dwarfing of childhood by physical and spiritual night -- are not solved; so long as, in certain regions, social asphyxia shall be possible; in other words, so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot be useless." |
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"I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than the ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." |
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"The main business of natural philosophy is to argue from phenomena without feigning hypotheses, and to deduce causes from effects, till we come to the very first cause, which certainly is not mechanical...What is there in places almost empty of matter, and whence is it that the sun and planets gravitate towards one another, without dense matter between them? Whence is it that nature doth nothing in vain; and whence arises all that order and beauty we see in the world? To what end are comets, and whence is it that planets move all one and the same way in orbs concentric, while comets move all manner of ways in orbs very eccentric, and what hinders the fixed stars from falling upon one another? How came the bodies of animals to be contrived with so much art, and for what ends were their several parts? Was the eye contrived without skill in optics, or the ear without knowledge of sounds? How do the motions of the body follow from the will, and whence is the instinct in animals?... And these things being rightly dispatched, does it not appear from phenomena that there is a being incorporeal, living, intelligent, omnipresent, who, in infinite space, as it were in his sensory, sees the things themselves intimately, and thoroughly perceives them; and comprehends them wholly by their immediate presence to himself?" |
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"If perhaps there are babblers who, although completely ignorant of mathematics, nevertheless take it upon themselves to pass judgement on mathematical questions and, improperly distorting some passages of the Scripture to their purpose, dare to find fault with my system and censure it, I disregard them even to the extent of despising their judgement as uninformed." |
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"Look around you and look at history. You will see the achievements of man's mind. You will see man's unlimited potentiality for greatness, and the faculty that makes it possible. You will see that man is not a helpless monster by nature, but he becomes one when he discards that faculty: his mind." |
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"Men have free will. There is no guarantee that they will choose to be rational, at any one time or in any one generation." |
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"Since reason is man's basic tool of survival, rationality is his highest moral virtue. To use his mind, to perceive reality and to act accordingly, is man's moral imperative." |
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"Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government and form a new one. This is a most valuable and sacred right - a right which we hope will liberate the world." |
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"I believe there are more instances of the freedoms of the people being abridged through gradual and silent encroachments by those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpation." |
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"They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." |
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"The state is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe air after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest." |
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"The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free." |
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"To laugh often and love much; to win the respect of intelligent persons and the affection of children; to earn the approbation of honest critics and to endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to give of one's self; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to have played and laughed with enthusiasm and sung with exultation; to know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived - this is to have succeeded" |
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"Some people say there are too many thorns among the roses. Others are thankful for the roses among the thorns." |
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"No matter what the object is, whether business, pleasures, or the fine arts; whoever pursues them to any purpose must do so con amore." |
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"I do believe that where there is a choice only between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence." |
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"We make war that we may live in peace." |
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"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened." |
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"We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give." |
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"There are a terrible lot of lies going around the world, and the worst of it is half of them are true." |
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"For myself I am an optimist - it does not seem to be much use being anything else." |
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"Never give in--never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy." |
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"Arm yourselves, and be ye men of valour, and be in readiness for the conflict; for it is better for us to perish in battle than to look upon the outrage of our nation and our altar." |
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Lady Nancy Astor: "Winston, if I were your wife I'd put poison in your coffee." Winston Churchill: "Nancy, if I were your husband I'd drink it." |
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"We have sustained a total and unmitigated defeat, and France has suffered even more than we have." debate on the Munich Agreement in the House of Commons. Lady Nancy Astor heckled him by calling out "Nonsense." |
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"Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few. " |
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After receiving a Minute issued by a priggish civil servant, objecting to the ending of a sentence with a preposition and the use of a dangling participle in official documents, Churchill red pencilled in the margin: "This is the sort of pedantry up with which I will not put." |
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"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!" |
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"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death." |
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"It is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us freedom of the press. It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech. It is the soldier, not the campus organizer, who has given us the freedom to demonstrate. It is the soldier, who salutes the flag, who serves beneath the flag, and whose coffin is draped by the flag, who won the freedoms enjoyed for protesters to burn the flag." |
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"Work spares us from three evils: boredom, vice, and need." |
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"Terrorist attacks are not caused by the use of strength -- they are invited by the perception of weakness " |
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"It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who errs, and comes up short again and again (but)....who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat." |
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"We can afford to differ on the currency, the tariff, and foreign policy; but we can not afford to differ on the question of honesty if we expect our republic permanently to endure. Honesty is...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. 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. 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. We need absolute honesty in public life; and we shall not get it until we remember that truth-telling must go hand in hand with it, and that it is quite as important not to tell an untruth about a decent man as it is to tell the truth about one who is not decent." |
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"Don't ask someone which computer they drive. If they're a Mac driver, they'll tell you. If not, why embarrass them?" |
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"The best diplomat I know is a fully-activated phaser-bank!" |
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"I've never understood the female capacity to avoid a direct answer to any question." |
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"I'm used to the idea of dying. But I have no desire to die for the likes of you." |
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"In this zinc-plated, vacuum-tube culture!?... I am attempting to create a mnemonic-memory device using stone tablets and bear claws." |
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"Mr. Spock, the women on your planet are logical. That is the only planet in this galaxy that can make that claim." |
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"We must acknowledge once and for all that the purpose of diplomacy is to prolong a crisis." |
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"Diplomats and bureaucrats may function differently, but they achieve exactly the same results." |
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"Sometimes you eat the bear, sometimes the bear eats you." |
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"How 'bout them Cowboys!" |
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"You know that face on Mars? NASA did the dumbest thing. They said it wasn't a face, it was a pile of rocks. If they'd said it was a face, they'd have full funding!" |
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"Some try to tell me thoughts they cannot defend. Just what you want to be, you will be in the end." |
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"Haven't you heard? There's no such thing as happiness. You just have to be happy without it." |
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"All I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by." |
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"For everything there is a season, And a time for every matter under heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; A time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal; A time to break down, and a time to build up; A time to weep, and a time to laugh; A time to mourn, and a time to dance; A time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together; A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; A time to seek, and a time to lose; A time to keep, and a time to throw away; A time to tear, and a time to sew; A time to keep silence, and a time to speak; A time to love, and a time to hate; A time for war, and a time for peace." |
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The Road Not Taken TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that, the passing there Had worn them really about the same, And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I- I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. |
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Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening WHOSE woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow. My little horse must think it queer To stop without a farmhouse near Between the woods and frozen lake The darkest evening of the year. He gives his harness bells a shake To ask if there is some mistake. The only other sound's the sweep Of easy wind and downy flake. The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep. |
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Here Freedom Flies In Your Heart Like An Eagle Dusty old helmet, rusty old gun, They sit in the corner and wait - Two souvenirs of the Second World War That have withstood the time, and the hate. Mute witness to a time of much trouble. Where kill or be killed was the law - Were these implements used with high honor? What was the glory they saw? Many times I've wanted to ask them - And now that we're here all alone, Relics all three of a long ago war - Where has freedom gone? Freedom flies in your heart like an eagle. Let it soar with the winds high above Among the spirits of soldiers now sleeping, Guard it with care and with love. I salute my old friends in the corner, I agree with all they have said - And if the moment of truth comes tomorrow, I'll be free, or By God, I'll be dead! |
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If If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you. If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowances for their doubting too. If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, or being lied about, don't deal in lies, or being hated, don't give way to hating - and yet don't look too good nor talk too wise. If you can dream and not make dreams your master. If you can think and not make thoughts your aim. If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same. If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, or watch the things you gave your life to, broken and stoop to build'em up with worn out tools. If you can make one heap of all your winnings and risk it on one turn of pitch and toss and lose and start again at your beginnings and never breathe a word about your loss. If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew to serve your turn long after they are gone and so hold on when there is nothing in you except the will which says to them "Hold On"! If you can talk with the crowds and keep your virtue, or walk with kings nor lose the common touch, if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, if all men count with you, but none too much. If you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds' worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and Everything that's in it, And - which is more You'll be a Man, my son! |
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To Be Or Not To Be To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep; No more; and by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause: there's the respect That makes calamity of so long life; For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, The pangs of despised love, the law's delay, The insolence of office and the spurns That patient merit of the unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscover'd country from whose bourn No traveller returns, puzzles the will And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pitch and moment With this regard their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action.-- Soft you now! The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons Be all my sins remember'd. |
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A Poet's Advice A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feelings through words. This may sound easy, it isn't A lot of people think or believe or know they feel -- but that's thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling -- not knowing or believing or thinking. Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you're a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself. To be nobody-but-yourself -- in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else -- means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting. As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn't a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time -- and whenever we do, we are not poets. If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you've written one line of one poem, you'll be very lucky indeed. And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world -- unless you're not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight til you die. Does this sound dismal? It isn't. It's the most wonderful life on earth. Or so I feel. |
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A Time For Choosing I am going to talk of controversial things. I make no apology for this. It's time we asked ourselves if we still know the freedoms intended for us by the Founding Fathers. James Madison said, "We base all our experiments on the capacity of mankind for self government." 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. You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down. Up to man's age-old dream-the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. Regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would sacrifice freedom for security have embarked on this downward path. Plutarch warned, "The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits." The Founding Fathers knew a government can't control the economy without controlling people. And they knew when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. So we have come to a time for choosing. Public servants say, always with the best of intentions, "What greater service we could render if only we had a little more money and a little more power." But the truth is that outside of its legitimate function, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector. Yet any time you and I question the schemes of the do-gooders, we're denounced as being opposed to their humanitarian goals. It seems impossible to legitimately debate their solutions with the assumption that all of us share the desire to help the less fortunate. They tell us we're always "against," never "for" anything. We are for a provision that destitution should not follow unemployment by reason of old age, and to that end we have accepted Social Security as a step toward meeting the problem. However, we are against those entrusted with this program when they practice deception regarding its fiscal shortcomings, when they charge that any criticism of the program means that we want to end payments... We are for aiding our allies by sharing our material blessings with nations which share our fundamental beliefs, but we are against doling out money government to government, creating bureaucracy, if not socialism, all over the world. We need true tax reform that will at least make a start toward restoring for our children the American Dream that wealth is denied to no one, that each individual has the right to fly as high as his strength and ability will take him.... But we can not have such reform while our tax policy is engineered by people who view the tax as a means of achieving changes in our social structure... Have we the courage and the will to face up to the immorality and discrimination of the progressive tax, and demand a return to traditional proportionate taxation? . . . Today in our country the tax collector's share is 37 cents of every dollar earned. Freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp. Are you willing to spend time studying the issues, making yourself aware, and then conveying that information to family and friends? Will you resist the temptation to get a government handout for your community? Realize that the doctor's fight against socialized medicine is your fight. We can't socialize the doctors without socializing the patients. Recognize that government invasion of public power is eventually an assault upon your own business. If some among you fear taking a stand because you are afraid of reprisals from customers, clients, or even government, recognize that you are just feeding the crocodile hoping he'll eat you last. If all of this seems like a great deal of trouble, think what's at stake. We are faced with the most evil enemy mankind has known in his long climb from the swamp to the stars. There can be no security anywhere in the free world if there is no fiscal and economic stability within the United States. Those who ask us to trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state are architects of a policy of accommodation. They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong. There are no easy answers, but there are simple answers. We must have the courage to do what we know is morally right. Winston Churchill said that "the destiny of man is not measured by material computation. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we are spirits-not animals." And he said, "There is something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty." You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children's children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done. |