Monday, March 31, 2014

Clear II

"I hear much of people's calling out to punish the guilty, but very few are concerned to clear the innocent."
--Daniel Defoe [Daniel Foe] (1660-1731)
English writer, famous pamphleteer, journalist and novelist,
wrote the novel Robinson Crusoe
Source: An Appeal to Honor and Justice, 1715

Sunday, March 30, 2014

Flock

"In your reaction to an imagined attack on your country or an insult to its government, you draw closer to the herd for protection, you conform in word and deed, and you insist vehemently that everybody else shall think, speak, and act together. And you fix your adoring gaze upon the State, with a truly filial look, as upon the Father of the flock."
--Randolph Bourne, The State

Saturday, March 29, 2014

Angels

"Women are Angels
And when someone breaks our wings....
We simply continue to fly.........on a broomstick...
We are flexible like that."

--Author Unknown

Friday, March 28, 2014

Core II

"The core issue facing the American people is this: Have the guardians become the terrorists?"
--Jacob G. Hornberger
American author, journalist, politician, founder and president of the Future of Freedom Foundation Source: Terrorism--Public and Private, The Tyrrany of Gun Control, 77 (Future of Freedom Foundation 1997).

Thursday, March 27, 2014

Tell II

. . . And holding out his shoe, asked them whether it was not new and well made.  "Yet," added he, "none of you can tell where it pinches me."
--Plutarch, Lives (vol. II, Life of Aemilius Paulus)~

Wednesday, March 26, 2014

Berserk

"If you want to win anything-a race, your self, your life-you have to go a little berserk."
--George Sheehan

Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Fallible

To vest a few fallible men -- prosecutors, judges, jurors -- with vast powers of literary or artistic censorship, to convert them into what J.S. Mill called the "moral police" is to make them despotic arbiters of literary products... If one day they ban mediocre books as obscene, another day they may do otherwise to a work of a genius. Originality, not too plentiful, should be cherished, not stifled. An author's imagination may be cramped if he must write with an eye on prosecutors or juries…
--Jerome D. Frank (1889-1957)
Source: US v. Roth (US 2nd Circuit Court Of Appeals, 1956) (Concurring Opinion)

Monday, March 24, 2014

Permission

"We are fast approaching the stage of ultimate inversion: the stage where government is free to do as it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission."
--Ayn Rand

Sunday, March 23, 2014

Reason IV

If Not For You

I would've died that day if not for you.
I would've given up on life if not for your kind eyes.
I would've used my teeth in fear if not for your gentle hands.
I would have left this life believing that all humans don't care

Believing there is no such thing as fur that isn't matted,
skin that isn't flea bitten, good food and enough of it,
beds to sleep on, someone to love me,
to show me I deserve love just because I exist.

Your kind eyes, your loving smile, your gentle hands
Your big heart saved me...
You saved me from the terror of the pound,
Soothing away the memories of my old life.

You have taught me what it means to be loved.
I have seen you do the same for other dogs like me.
I have heard you ask yourself in times of despair
Why you do it-

When there is no more money, no more room, no more homes
You open your heart a little bigger,
stretch the money a little tighter
Make just a little more room...to save one more like me.

I tell you with the gratitude and love that shines in my eyes
In the best way I know how
Reminding you why you go on trying.
I am the reason

The dogs before me are the reason
As are the ones who come after.
Our lives would've been wasted, our love never given
We would die if not for you.


--Author Unknown

Saturday, March 22, 2014

Risks

"If no one ever took risks, Michelangelo would have painted the Sistine floor."
--Neil Simon (1927~) American Playwright

Friday, March 21, 2014

Skins

"The function of the prosecutor under the federal Constitution is not to tack as many skins of victims as possible against the wall. His function is to vindicate the rights of the people as expressed in the laws and give those accused of crime a fair trial."
--Justice William O. Douglas (1898-1980),
U. S. Supreme Court Justice

Thursday, March 20, 2014

Probability

"The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just."
--Abraham Lincoln

Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Spectacles

"[D]emocracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths." --James Madison, Federalist No. 10, 1787

Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Skinning

"When you are skinning your customers you should leave some skin on to
grow again so that you can skin them again."
--Nikita Khrushchev,

Monday, March 17, 2014

Retribution

"To declare that in the administration of criminal law the end justifies the means -- to declare that the Government may commit crimes in order to secure conviction of a private criminal -- would bring terrible retribution."
--Justice Louis D. Brandeis (1856-1941)
US Supreme Court Justice
Source: Dissenting Opinion, Olmstead v. United States (1912)

Sunday, March 16, 2014

Happy

"When I was 12, I went hunting with my father and we shot a bird. He was laying there and something struck me. Why do we call this fun to kill this creature who was as happy as I was when I woke up this morning."
--Marv Levy

Saturday, March 15, 2014

Closely

"In recent years it has been suggested that the Second Amendment protects the "collective" right of states to maintain militias, while it does not protect the right of "the people" to keep and bear arms. If anyone entertained this notion in the period during which the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were debated and ratified, it remains one of the most closely guarded secrets of the eighteenth century, for no known writing surviving from the period between 1787 and 1791 states such a thesis."
--Steven P. Halbrook
Attorney, author
Source: That Every Man Be Armed: The Evolution Of A Constitutional Right, P. 83 (The Independence Institute 1984.).

Friday, March 14, 2014

Reverse II

"The reverse side also has a reverse side...."
--Japanese Proverb.

Thursday, March 13, 2014

Shabby

"Bourgeois patriotism, as I view it, is only a very shabby, very narrow, very mercenary, and deeply antihuman passion, having for its object the preservation and maintenance of the power of the national state.  That is, the mainstay of all the priveleges of the exploiters throughout the nation."
--Mikhail Bakunin, Letters to a Frenchman

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Ancestry

"The man who has nothing to boast of but his illustrious ancestry is like the potato - the best part under ground."
--Thomas Overbury

Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Disinterested

"Tis folly in one Nation to look for disinterested favors from another; that it must pay with a portion of its Independence for whatever it may accept under that character; that by such acceptance, it may place itself in the condition of having given equivalents for nominal favours and yet of being reproached with ingratitude for not giving more. There can be no greater error than to expect, or calculate upon real favours from Nation to Nation. 'Tis an illusion which experience must cure, which a just pride ought to discard."
--George Washington (Farewell Address, 19 September 1796)
Reference: Washington's Maxims, 71.

Monday, March 10, 2014

Know II

"He didn't know the right people.
That's all a police record means
in this rotten crime-ridden country."
--Raymond Chandler
(1888-1959) American writer of detective novels

Sunday, March 09, 2014

Kings II

The practice of Kings marrying only in the families of Kings has been that of Europe for some centuries. Now, take any race of animals, confine them in idleness and inaction, whether in a sty, a stable, or a state-room, pamper them with high diet, gratify all their sexual appetites, immerse them in sensualities, nourish their passions, let everything bend before them, and banish whatever might lead them to think, and in a few generations they become all body and no mind; and this, too, by a law of nature, by that very law by which we are in the constant practice of changing the characters and propensities of the animals we raise for our own purposes. Such is the regimen in raising Kings, and in this way they have gone on for centuries.
--Thomas Jefferson, letter to Governor John Langdon, March 5, 1810

Saturday, March 08, 2014

Wretchedness

"It is the wretchedness of being rich that you have to live with rich people."
--Logan Pearsall Smith, Afterthoughts (1931) "In the World"

Friday, March 07, 2014

Father

"It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was."
--Anne Sexton

Thursday, March 06, 2014

Dependence

"Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one's government is not necessarily to secure freedom."
--F.A. Hayek

Wednesday, March 05, 2014

Stand II

Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free, and life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands.  But if we fall, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age... Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.'
--Sir Winston Churchill

Tuesday, March 04, 2014

Competent

"Lawyers are being graduated from our law schools by the thousands who have little knowledge of the Constitution. When  organizations seek a lawyer to instruct them on the Constitution, they find it nearly impossible to secure one competent."
--Source: Report of the Committee on American Citizenship,
presented at the meeting of the American Bar Association, Denver, Colorado, July 14-16, 1926.

Monday, March 03, 2014

Poses

"In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant."
--Charles de Gaulle

Sunday, March 02, 2014

Complicity

"You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Saturday, March 01, 2014

Historians

"Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter."
--African proverb