My Favorite Quotes
Patriotic, Integrity, etc. (Part I)
|
Quotes: Patriotic, Integrity, etc. (Part 1)
"If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands."
"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so."
"Is there not some chosen curse,
"Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt will always glorify the hunters."
"I cannot afford to waste my time making money."
"What man has done to man is the saddest chapter in the history of the world. The story of the peoples of the earth is in large measure the tale of how the world whipped the nonconformist with its displeasure and visited upon him dishonor and ignominy, torture and death."
"I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires."
“The quest for riches darkens the sense of right and wrong.”
"The 10 Commandments contain 297 words. The Bill of Rights is stated in 463 words. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address contains 266 words. A recent federal directive to regulate the price of cabbage contains 26,911 words."
"Practicing the Golden Rule is not a sacrifice, it's an investment."
“Only religion can prevent democratic rule from developing into mob rule. A nation can prosper only as its citizens are religious, intelligent, capable of service and eager to render it.”
“Every great panic we have ever had has been foreshadowed by a general decline in observance of religious principles.”
"Nothing doth more hurt in a state than that cunning men pass for wise."
"A caged canary is secure; but it is not free. It is easier for free men to resist terrorism from afar than tyranny from within."
"For the past two centuries, those who do not prize freedom have chipped away at every major clause of our Constitution until today we face a crisis of great dimensions."
"The God of heaven sent some of His choicest spirits to lay the foundation of this government. And he has sent other choice spirits to preserve it."
"Could many of our ills today have resulted from our failure to train a strong citizenry from the only source we have -- the boys and girls of each community? Have they grown up to believe in politics without principle, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without effort, wealth without work, business without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice?"
"When they give a person a Bachelors degree, they take away their mouth, when they give them a Masters degree, they take away their brains, and when they give them a PhD, they give them back their mouth."
["In Robert Bolt’s "A Man for All Seasons," Richard Rich offers the perjured testimony that would send Sir Thomas More to the executioner. As Rich passed by the defendant’s dock, More noticed a new chain of office around Rich’s neck, and asked what it was. Thomas Cromwell answered that Rich was now Attorney General for Wales. Looking at his false accuser with a mixture of pain and amusement, More said:"]
"Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake."
"We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living."
"If you think we are free today, you know nothing about tyranny and even less about freedom."
"The government is good at one thing...it knows how to break your legs, and then hand you a crutch and say 'see if it weren't for the government you wouldn't be able to walk.'"
"It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people."
"In looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if they don't have the first, the other two will kill you."
"No one understood better than Stalin that the true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade, but to produce a uniform pattern of public utterance in which the first trace of unorthodox thought immediately reveals itself as a jarring dissonance."
"First they burn books, then they burn people."
"It is necessary only for the good man to do nothing for evil to triumph."
"Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them."
"In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners."
"Integrity has no need of rules."
"I'll tell you a big secret, my friend: Don't wait for the Last Judgment. It happens every day."
"The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants."
"Throughout history government has served as a vehicle for the organization of hatred and oppression, benefiting no one except those who are ambitious and ruthless enough to gain control of it."
"Ah yes, truth. Funny how everyone is always asking for it but when they get it they don't believe it because it's not the truth they want to hear."
"Those who steal from private individuals spend their lives in stocks and chains; those who steal from the public treasury go dressed in gold and purple."
"When morality comes up against profit, it is seldom that profit loses."
"Shortly before the CIA coup [crushing Guatemala's first and last democracy, which threatened the interests of U.S. corporations, in particular the United Fruit Company], Guatemalan Foreign Minister Toriello commented accurately that US policy amounts to: "Cataloguing as `Communism' every manifestation of nationalism or economic independence, any desire for social progress, any intellectual curiosity, and any interest in progressive or liberal reforms... any Latin American government that exerts itself to bring about a truly national program which affects the interests of the powerful foreign companies, in whose hands the wealth and the basic resources in large part repose in Latin America, will be pointed out as Communist; it will be accused of being a threat to continental security and making a breach in continental solidarity, and so will be threatened with foreign intervention."
"If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without blood shed; if you will not fight when your victory is sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves."
"A nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and he carries his banners openly against the city. But the traitor moves among those within the gates freely, his sly whispers rustling through all alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears no traitor; he speaks in the accents familiar to his victim, and he wears their face and their garments and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation; he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city; he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared. The traitor is the plague."
"I say to you that the price of liberty is and always has been blood, human blood, and if our liberties are lost, we shall never regain them except at the price of blood. They must not be lost."
“Once in debt, interest is your companion every minute of the day and night; you cannot shun it or slip away from it; you cannot dismiss it; it yields neither to entreaties, demands, or orders; and whenever you get in its way or cross its course or fail to meet its demands, it crushes you.”
"You have the highest of human trusts committed to your care. Providence has showered on this favored land blessings without number, and has chosen you as the guardians of freedom, to preserve it for the benefit of the human race. May He who holds in his hands the destinies of nations, make you worthy of the favors He has bestowed, and enabled you with pure hearts and hands and sleepless vigilance, to guard and defend to the end of time, the great charge He has committed to your keeping."
"It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit."
"The big thieves hang the little ones."
"Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory."
"Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first."
"...the world is governed by very different personages to what is imagined by those who are not themselves behind the scenes."
"Much less evil would be done on earth if evil could not be done in the name of good."
"The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it."
"He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice."
"It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity."
"What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us."
"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and
don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the
endless immensity of the sea."
"All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers ... Each one owes infinitely more to the human race than to the particular country in which he was born."
"Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time, and it annoys the pig."
"Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one."
"The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking."
"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use."
"Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good."
"The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exaulted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy ... neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water."
[This quote is by the great emancipator, William Lloyd Garrison, on slavery]
In two words, the Savior describes the world we live in:
"We look forward to the time when the power of love will replace the love of power. Then will our world know the blessings of peace."
|
|
Quotes - Insanity Quotes - Patriotic, Integrity (Part 2) Quotes - Founding Fathers and Presidents
|