Balance II

"The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types -- the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution."

--Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) British essayist, critic, poet, and novelist

Source: Illustrated London News, 1924

Ends II

"We all have to be concerned about terrorism, but you will never end terrorism by terrorizing others."
--Martin Luther King III

Efficiency

"Only a large-scale popular movement toward decentralization and self-help can arrest the present tendency toward statism... A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers."

--Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) Author

Source: Forward to 'Brave New World', 1932

Decent

"Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under".
--H.L. Mencken

Purpose V

" 'Parent choice' proceeds from the belief that the purpose of education is to provide individual students with an education. In fact, educating the individual is but a means to the true end of education, which is to create a viable social order to which individuals contribute and by which they are sustained. 'Family choice' is, therefore, basically selfish and anti-social in that it focuses on the 'wants' of a single family rather than the 'needs' of society."

--Association of California School Administrators

Bothersome

"When law enforcers are shown to have such unswerving integrity, only the most churlish among us would question the methods they use to "get their man." Constitutional guarantees are regarded as bothersome "technicalities" that impede honest law enforcers in the performance of their duties."
--Donna Woolfolk Cross (1947- ) American writer

Lunch

"I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men."
--Leonardo da Vinci

Arms

"Support your right to arm bears."
--Cleveland Amory

Sense II

"Few of us can surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that The State has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied."
--Arthur Miller

Thinkers

"Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming where everyone is interdependent."
--John Dewey (1859-1952)
American philosopher, psychologist, professor, and progressive educational reformer.

Concensus II

"Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled."
--Michael Crichton, Caltech Michelin Lecture, January 17, 2003

Elevate

"It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives."
--John Adams, Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, 1756

Thinking II

"When men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon."
--Thomas Paine

Miracles II

"...if it is a Miracle, any sort of evidence will answer, but if it is a Fact, proof is necessary." --Mark Twain

Average

"The average, healthy, well-adjusted adult gets up at seven-thirty in the morning feeling just plain terrible" --Jean Kerr (1923~) American Humorist, Author, Playwright

Journeys

"The best that we can do is to be kindly and helpful toward our friends and fellow passengers who are clinging to the same speck of dirt while we are drifting side by side to our common doom." --Clarence S. Darrow (1857-1938)

Preexisting

"The Framers of the Bill of Rights did not purport to "create" rights. Rather they designed the Bill of Rights to prohibit our Government from infringing rights and liberties presumed to be preexisting." --Justice William J. Brennan (1906-1997) U. S. Supreme Court Justice

Guillontines

"Democracy, though slowly attained and never by revolutionary jumps, is the best government on earth when it tries to make all its citizens aristocrats. But not when it guillontines whoever is individual, superior, or just different." --Peter Robert Edwin Viereck (1916-2006) American Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, political thinker, professor of history at Mount Holyoke College

Bridges

"Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even where there is no river." --Nikita Khrushchev(1894-1971) Premier of the Soviet Union

Inflation

"Inflation hasn't ruined everything. A dime can still be used as a screwdriver." --Author Unknown

"Renditions"

"The propitious smiles of Heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right, which Heaven itself has ordained." --George Washington, First Inaugural Address, April 30, 1789

Web

"Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect." --Chief Seattle

Citizenship

"Here is the Golden Rule of sound citizenship, the first and greatest lesson in the study of politics: You get the same order of criminality from any State to which you give power to exercise it; and whatever power you give the State to do things FOR you carries with it the equivalent power to do things TO you." --Albert Nock (1870-1945) Source: The Criminality of the State, America Mercury Magazine, March, 1939

Courage V

"A person who doubts himself is like a man who would enlist in the ranks of his enemies and bear arms against himself. He makes his failure certain by himself being the first person to be convinced of it." --Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870) French Novelist, Dramatist

Descended II

"It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man." --H. L. Mencken

Idealism

"Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power." --Aldous Huxley(1894-1963) Author

Flies

"Time's fun when you're having flies." --Kermit The Frog

Theology

"The truth is that Christian theology, like every other theology, is not only opposed to the scientific spirit; it is also opposed to all other attempts at rational thinking. Not by accident does Genesis 3 make the father of knowledge a serpent -- slimy, sneaking and abominable. Since the earliest days the church as an organization has thrown itself violently against every effort to liberate the body and mind of man. It has been, at all times and everywhere, the habitual and incorrigible defender of bad governments, bad laws, bad social theories, bad institutions. It was, for centuries, an apologist for slavery, as it was the apologist for the divine right of kings."

--H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)

American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic

Power IV

"The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power."

--George Orwell

Own

"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is hard business. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself." --Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)