Quotes

America, Courage, Freedom and Spirit

• “Only the brave, who have stood the line, can comment on  what has been done out here. And the glimmer of democracy and liberty in this once biblical land is a wonderful thing to behold.  There are many who would say we are failing – but they are the doubters and the weak.  Your son had courage and was one who believed in the true value of freedom.” – LTC John Holden, a British officer in the Queen’s Royal Artillery in a letter upon the death of my friend, Major David G. Taylor
• If you want a symbolic gesture, don’t burn the flag; wash it. – Norman Thomas
• When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe – Thomas Jefferson
• Americans are so enamored of equality, they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom. – Alexis de Tocqueville
• What we need are critical lovers of America – patriots who express their faith in their country by working to improve it. – Hubert H. Humphrey
• [P]atriotism… is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime. – Adlai Stevenson
• There is nothing patriotic about hating your country, or pretending that you can love your country but despise your government. – Bill Clinton
• And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man. – The real JFK
• In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by [the U.S.] must be in the wrong. – George Orwell
• The republic was not established by cowards, and cowards will not preserve it. – Elmer Davis
• I just want to say this. I want to say it gently but I want to say it firmly: There is a tendency for the world to say to America, “the big problems of the world are yours, you go and sort them out,” and then to worry when America wants to sort them out. – Tony Blair
• Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and success of liberty. – The real JFK
• Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves. – Abraham Lincoln
• Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat. – Theodore Roosevelt
• There is a rank due to the United States, among nations, which will be withheld, if not absolutely lost, by the reputation of weakness. – George Washington
• Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all others. – Winston Churchill
• The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty. Plainly, the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of liberty. – Abraham Lincoln
• Everything our leaders do must be judged by whether it helps or hurts us in defeating terrorists and their state sponsors. – Newt Gingrich
• In the truest sense, freedom cannot be bestowed; it must be achieved. – Franklin D. Roosevelt
• America has now produced at least two generations of post-WWII children who have grown up with a sense of entitlement to perpetual adolescence. There are vast wellsprings of immaturity, irresponsibility and selfishness in these generations, and their children are the proof. – Laura Hirschfeld Hollis
• Nowhere at present is there such a measureless loathing of their country by educated people as in America. – Eric Hoffer
• [T]here is not in all America a more dangerous trait than the deification of mere smartness unaccompanied by any sense of moral responsibility. – Theodore Roosevelt
• Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it. – George Bernard Shaw
• The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise to the occasion. We cannot escape history. We will be remembered in spite of ourselves. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor, to the last generation. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, our last best hope of Earth. – Abraham Lincoln
• Contemplate the mangled bodies of your countrymen, and then say, ‘What should be the reward of such sacrifices?’…If you love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen. – Samuel Adams
• History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid. – Dwight David Eisenhower

Democrats and Liberalism

• I can remember when Democrats believed that it was the duty of America to fight for freedom over tyranny. – Zell Miller
• In Congress, Democrats have decided to chip away at the war with various symbolic postures but not to oppose it outright: That way, if things go well, they can muscle in on the credit, but if things go badly, they’ll be able to say they told you so without getting stuck with the blame. – Mark Steyn
• When the San Francisco Democrats treat foreign affairs as an afterthought… they [behave] less like a dove or a hawk than like an ostrich—convinced it would shut out the world by hiding its head in the sand… When the Soviet Union walked out of arms control negotiations, and refused even to discuss the issues, the San Francisco Democrats didn’t blame Soviet intransigence. They blamed the United States. But then, they always blame America first. When Marxist dictators shoot their way to power in Central America, the San Francisco Democrats don’t blame the guerrillas and their Soviet allies, they blame United States policies of 100 years ago. But then, they always blame America first. The American people know better. – former UN ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick
• Some people say it is ‘name-calling’ if you refer to someone as a liberal. There is nothing inherently negative about the word ‘liberal.’ If it has acquired negative overtones, that is because of what liberals have done and the consequences that followed. – Thomas Sowell
• When I talk to liberals, I don’t expect them to understand my positions on various issues. I spend most of my time trying to help them understand their own. – Mike Adams
• We’ve finally given liberals a war against fundamentalism, and they don’t want to fight it. They would, except it would put them on the same side as the United States. – Ann Coulter

Immigration

• If you can speak three languages you’re trilingual. If you can speak two languages you’re bilingual. If you can speak only one language you’re an American. – Author Unknown
• Becoming a citizen of this country should not begin by breaking our laws. – Michael Molesworth, NY Times Letter to the Editor
• We are really enabling immigrants to avoid learning English and assimilating into our culture because we give them everything they need so they don’t have to learn to speak English or become part of the traditional melting pot. By enabling these people, we build an enclave for them that looks like the one they ran away from at home… – Michael Reagan
• In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person’s becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American…There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag… We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language… and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people. – Theodore Roosevelt
• Rome fell September 4, 476 AD. It was overrun with illegal immigrants: Visigoths, Franks, Anglos, Saxons, Ostrogoths, Burgundians, Lombards, Jutes and Vandals, who at first assimilated and worked as servants, but then came so fast they did not learn the Latin Language or the Roman form of government. Highly trained Roman Legions moving rapidly on their advanced road system were strained fighting conflicts worldwide. Rome had a trade deficit, having outsourced most of its grain production to North Africa, and when Vandals captured that area, Rome did not have the resources to retaliate. Attila the Hun was committing terrorist attacks. The city of Rome was on welfare with citizens being given free read. One Roman commented: “Those who live at the expense of the public funds are more numerous than those who provide them.” Tax collectors were “‘more terrible than the enemy.” Gladiators provided violent entertainment in the Coliseum. There was injustice in courts, exposure of unwanted infants, infidelity, immorality and perverted bathhouses. 5th-Century historian Salvian wrote: “O Roman people be ashamed… Let nobody think otherwise, the vices of our bad lives have alone conquered us”. – William Federer

Introspection

• What cannot be altered, must be endured. – Unknown
• A man’s worth is no greater than the worth of his ambitions. – Marcus Aurelius
• Abstract ethics or soapbox lectures demanding superhuman perfection mean little without deeds. – Victor Davis Hanson
• There are no failures of talent, only failures of character. I think that’s often true too. Sure there a lot of talented people who don’t achieve artistic or worldly success, but I think there’s usually a reason – a failure inside them. The important thing is: if you fail once, or if your luck is bad this time, the dream is still there. A dream is only over if you give it up – or if it comes true. That is called irony. – Neil Peart
• The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane. – Marcus Aurelius
• A friend to all is a friend to none. – Italian Proverb
• To limit another is a kind of murder; to limit the self is a kind of suicide – Ayn Rand
• Flattery makes friends and truth makes enemies. – Spanish Proverb
• We never really grow up, we only learn how to act in public. – Bryan White
• You can fight without ever winning, but never ever win without a fight. – ‘Resist’, by Rush
• People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use. – Soren Kierkegaard
• Someone who does not know the difference between good and evil is worth nothing. – Miecyslaw Kasprzyk, Polish rescuer of Jews during the Holocaust
• Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen. – Albert Einstein
• Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals could believe them. – George Orwell
• Stupid is forever, ignorance can be fixed. – Don Wood
• Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former. – Albert Einstein
• I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. ‘Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death. – Thomas Paine
• 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. – Albert Einstein
• At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid. – Friedrich Nietzsche
• All that is necessary for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing. – Edmund Burke
• The world has no room for cowards. We must all be ready somehow to toil, to suffer, to die. And yours is not the less noble because no drum beats before you when you go out into your daily battlefields, and no crowds shout about your coming when you return from your daily victory or defeat. – Robert Louis Stevenson
• Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work. – Thomas Edison

Islamo-Jihad

• When I am free to walk the streets of Mecca or Medina as the agnostic I am and receive nothing but curious glances, I will believe Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance. – Bob at The Drawn Cutlass blog
• I know that the West’s struggle against communism in the twentieth century was merely a blip on the historical radar, whereas the struggle of Islam against all other cultures has been a constant of human history for almost 1400 years. – Peter Saint-Andre
• The terrorists were at war with us, but we were not at war with them. – Condoleezza Rice
• …Bin Ladin and Islamist terrorists mean exactly what they say: to them America is the font of all evil, the ‘head of the snake,’ and it must be converted or destroyed. It is not a position with which Americans can bargain or negotiate. With it there is no common ground – not even respect for life on which to begin a dialogue. It can only be destroyed or utterly isolated. – 9/11 Commission Report
• The era of moral relativism between those who practice or condone terrorism, and those nations who stand up against it, must end. Moral relativism does not have a place in this discussion and debate. There is no moral way to sympathize with grossly immoral actions. And by trying to do that, unfortunately, a fertile field has been created in which terrorism has grown. – Rudolph Guiliani
• There are people here in the U.S. who would justify suicide bombings because Palestinians don’t have tanks and planes while insisting that the Palestinians want peace. Well, if they are only using suicide bombers because they don’t have tanks and planes, logic suggests that if they had tanks and planes they would use them. In other words, they’re at war with Israel, they’re just poorly equipped. If a career armed robber doesn’t have a gun and uses a crowbar instead, that doesn’t change the fact that he’s a robber. If he told the judge “I don’t have guns and squad cars like the police, I have to use a crowbar,” we wouldn’t nod with appreciation at the impeccable logic. But if you make this point about Palestinians, eyes roll at your simplistic view of such a complicated situation. — Jonah Goldberg
• [T]here have been more cease-fires in the Middle East than anywhere else. If cease-fires actually promoted peace, the Middle East would be the most peaceful region on the face of the earth instead of the most violent. – Thomas Sowell
• Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us. – Golda Meir
• We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you. – Former leader of Hezbollah, Hussein Massawi
• The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism. – PLO executive committee member Zahir Muhsein
• Sons of Islam everywhere, the jihad is a duty – to establish the rule of Allah on earth and to liberate your countries and yourselves from America’s domination and its Zionist allies, it is your battle – either victory or martyrdom. – Sheikh A. Yassin
• There is this underlying truth to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: if the Palestinians laid down their weapons, there would be no war, but if the Israelis laid down their weapons, there would be no Israel. – Ed Morrissey

Media

• We put couples with incomes of $ million a year on the covers of our magazines. The noncoms and officers who barely scrape by on military pay but stand on guard in Afghanistan and Iraq and on ships and in submarines and near the Arctic Circle are anonymous as they live and die….I am no longer comfortable being a part of the system that has such poor values, and I do not want to perpetuate those values by pretending that who is eating at Morton’s is a big subject. – Ben Stein
• Entertainers wrongly assume that their fame, money, and influence arise from broad knowledge rather than natural talent, looks, or mastery of a narrow skill. – Victor Davis Hanson
• Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper. – George Orwell
• I hate newspapermen. They come into camp and pick up their camp rumors and print them as facts. I regard them as spies, which, in truth, they are. If I killed them all there would be news from Hell before breakfast. – William Tecumseh Sherman
• A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself. – Joseph Pulitzer
• Some people believe, and I am among them, that the power of the media today constitutes the most significant exercise of unaccountable power in our society. It is unaccountable to anyone, except for those who exercise the power. I believe that the domain of culture is as important as the domain of government or the economy. – Jeane Kirkpatrick
• People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news. – A. J. Liebling
• Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists. – Norman Mailer
• A politicized press speaking the language of news is an instrument of propaganda, and such an institution does not foster democracy, but erodes it. – Paul Weaver
• Advertisements… contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper. – Thomas Jefferson

Military

• I attended a New England prep school (Loomis Chaffee) and an Ivy League College (Cornell). Since I joined the Marine Corps, I have associated with a better class of person. – Lt. Col. David Dawson
• There are two types of people in this country; those who provide freedom and those who enjoy it. – Anonymous
• A young man who does not have what it takes to perform military service is not likely to have what it takes to make a living. Today’s military rejects include tomorrow’s hard-core unemployed. – The real JFK
• 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 allows the protester to burn the flag. – Charles M. Province
• 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. – Thomas Paine
• We must dare to think “unthinkable” thoughts… We must learn to welcome and not to fear the voices of dissent… Because when things become unthinkable, thinking stops and action becomes mindless. – J. William Fulbright
• I feel that retired generals should never miss an opportunity to remain silent concerning matters for which they are no longer responsible. – General H. Norman Schwarzkopf
• It is proper to demand more from the man with exceptional advantages than from the man without them. A heavy moral obligation rests upon the man of means and upon the man of education to do their full duty by their country. On no class does this obligation rest more heavily than upon the men with a collegiate education, the men who are graduates of our universities. Their education gives them no right to feel the least superiority over any of their fellow-citizens… – Teddy Roosevelt
• It’s obvious to me that this country is rapidly dividing itself into two camps – the wimps and the warriors – the ones who want to argue and assess and appease, and the ones who want to carry this fight to our enemies and kill them before they kill us. – Zell Miller

Politics

• I don’t think I have a place in history yet. I got elected to the U.S. Senate. I haven’t done anything yet. – Barack Obama
• Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book. – Ronald Reagan
• Political tags – such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth – are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. – Robert Heinlein
• Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. – Ronald Reagan
• When I am abroad, I always make it a rule never to criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home. – Sir Winston Churchill

Social Discourse

• I knew that there is a manifest, marked distinction, which ill men with ill designs, or weak men incapable of any design, will constantly be confounding, that is, a marked distinction between change and reformation. The former alters the substance of the objects themselves; and gets rid of all their essential good, as well as of all the accidental evil, annexed to them. Change is novelty; and whether it is to operate any one of the effects of reformation at all, or whether it may not contradict the very principle upon which reformation is desired, cannot be certainly known beforehand. Reform is, not a change in the substance, or in the primary modification, of the object, but, a direct application of a remedy to the grievance complained of. So far as that is removed, all is sure. It stops there; and, if it fails, the substance which underwent the operation, at the very worst, is but where it was. – Edmund Burke
• A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage. – Alexander Tyler
• Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery. – Winston Churchill
• The trouble with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money. – Margaret Thatcher
• The difference between a welfare state and a totalitarian state is a matter of time. – Ayn Rand
• A government big enough to give you everything you want, is big enough to take away everything you have. – Thomas Jefferson
• In the end more than they wanted freedom, they wanted security. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free. – Edward Gibbon
• Those who would trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state have told us that they have a utopian solution of peace without victory. They call their policy ‘accommodation.’ And they say if we only avoid any direct confrontation with the enemy, he will forget his evil ways and learn to love us. All who oppose them are indicted as warmongers. They say we offer simple answers to complex problems. Well, perhaps there is a simple answer—not an easy one, but a simple one—if you and I have the courage to tell our elected officials that we want our national policy based upon what we know in our hearts is morally right… [E]very lesson in history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face. – Ronald Reagan
• Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. – C. S. Lewis
• How can there possibly be liberty and justice for all, when, in the name of justice, people claim rights to income, food, housing, education, health care, transportation, ad infinitum? We can’t. Positive rights to receive such things, absent an obligation to earn them, must violate others’ liberty, by taking some of their income without their consent. They are really just wishes, convertible into benefits for some only by employing the government to violate others’ rights not to have what is theirs taken. –Prof. Gary Galles of Pepperdine University
• 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
• Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it. – Thomas Sowell
• 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
• Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself. – Jean Francois Revel
• The truly and deliberately evil men are in a very small minority; it is the appeaser who unleashes them on mankind; it is the appeaser’s intellectual abdication that invites them to take over. – Ayn Rand
• 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 Jay Nock
• Do not handicap your children by making their lives easy. – Robert Heinlein
• Only the guy who isn’t rowing has time to rock the boat. – Jean-Paul Sartre
• “‘What is the moral difference, if any, between the soldier and the civilian?”"The difference,’” Rico answers, “lies in the field of civic virtue. A soldier accepts responsibility for the safety of the body politic of which he is a member, defending it, if need be, with his life. The civilian does not.” – Starship Troopers, Robert Heinlein
• It’s not as if this barricade blocks the only road, It’s not as if you’re all alone in wanting to explode. – ‘The Pass’, by Rush
• I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious. – Thomas Jefferson
• Publicly inconsolable about the fact that racism continues, these activists seem privately terrified that it has abated. – Dinesh D’Souza
• Everybody has asked the question. . .”What shall we do with the Negro?” I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are wormeaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! I am not for tying or fastening them on the tree in any way, except by nature’s plan, and if they will not stay there, let them fall. And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone! – Frederick Douglass
• The task of weaning various people and groups from the national nipple will not be easy. The sound of whines, bawls, screams and invective will fill the air as the agony of withdrawal pangs finds voice. – Linda Bowles
• There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs – partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do do not want to lose their jobs. – Booker T. Washington
• Men exist for each other. Then either improve them, or put up with them. – Marcus Aurelius
• On the Contrary, when People are universally ignorant, and debauched in their Manners, they will sink under their own weight without the Aid of foreign Invaders. – Samuel Adams
• Nothing is more certain than that a general profligacy and corruption of manners make a people ripe for destruction. – John Witherspoon
• [D]emocracy will soon degenerate into anarchy, such anarchy that every man will do what is right in his own eyes… – John Adams
• The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not. – Thomas Jefferson
• It does not take a majority to prevail… but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men. – Samuel Adams
• The people are responsible for the character of their Congress. If that body be ignorant, reckless, and corrupt, it is because the people tolerate ignorance, recklessness, and corruption. If it be intelligent, brave, and pure, it is because the people demand these high qualities… If the next centennial does not find us a great nation… it will be because those who represent the enterprise, the culture, and the morality of the nation do not aid in controlling the political forces. – James A. Garfield
• Outcomes are more important than blind faith in the principles of non-intervention, sovereignty and multilateralism. – Alexander Downer, Australian Foreign Minister
• Those of us on the Free Iraq-Free Darfur side are consistent: There are no bad reasons to clobber thug regimes, and the postmodern sovereignty beloved by the UN is strictly conditional. At some point, the Left has to decide whether it stands for anything other than self-congratulatory passivity and the fetishisation of a failed and corrupt transnationalism. – Mark Steyn
• The worst difficulties from which we suffer do not come from without. They come from within. They do not come from the cottages of the wage-earners. They come from a peculiar type of brainy people always found in our country, who, if they add something to its culture, take much from its strength. Our difficulties come from the mood of unwarrantable self-abasement into which we have been cast by a powerful section of our own intellectuals. They come from the acceptance of defeatist doctrines by a large proportion of our politicians…. Nothing can save England if she will not save herself. If we lose faith in ourselves, in our capacity to guide and govern, if we lose our will to live, then indeed our story is told. – Winston Churchill
• If the point of academia was to mirror the wider American public sphere precisely, then the conservative critique of the leftward tilt of academic life becomes devastatingly on-target. The academic humanities and social sciences, whatever they are and should be, bear little resemblance to the distribution of opinion and argument in American public culture. – Professor Timothy Burke, Swarthmore
• I want to know. I look at Iowa, I look at Illinois – I want to see the murders. I want to see the looting. I want to see all the stuff that happened in New Orleans. I see devastation in Iowa and Illinois that dwarfs what happened in New Orleans. I see people working together. I see people trying to save their property…I don’t see a bunch of people running around waving guns at helicopters, I don’t see a bunch of people running shooting cops. I don’t see a bunch of people raping people on the street. I don’t see a bunch of people doing everything they can…whining and moaning-where’s FEMA, where’s BUSH. I see the heartland of America. When I look at Iowa and when I look at Illinois, I see the backbone of America. – Rush Limbaugh

War and Peace

• The Nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools. -Thucydides
• Appeasement is merely fear disguised as peace. – Unknown
• You have no enemies, you say?
  Alas, my friend, the boast is poor;
  He who has mingled in the fray
  Of duty, that the brave endure,
  Must have made foes!
  If you have none,
  Small is the work that you have done.
  You’ve hit no traitor on the hip,
  You’ve dashed no cup from perjured lip,
  You’ve never turned the wrong to right,
  You’ve been a coward in the fight. — Charles MacKay (1814-1889)
• 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 carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, 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 the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. – Marcus Tullius Cicero
• If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without bloodshed; 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. – Winston Churchill
• Consensus is the negation of leadership. – Margaret Thatcher
• A universal peace, it is to be feared, is in the catalogue of events, which will never exist but in the imaginations of visionary philosophers, or in the breasts of benevolent enthusiasts. – James Madison
• [I]f we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity, it must be known, that we are at all times ready for War. – George Washington
• Christ said: Blessed are the peace-makers, not blessed are the peace-sayers. If the world fell into the hands of totalitarian factions, there is still the possibility that they might fight amongst themselves. Surrender to them would not encourage the kingdom of peace and love – and those that desire it, or with passionate intensity permit it, know not what they do… – Michael Novak
• War hath no fury like a non combatant. – Charles Edward Montague
• Being defeated is often only a temporary condition. Giving up is what makes it permanent. – Marilyn vos Savant
• The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it. – George Orwell
• There was no persuasive moral case against the Iraq war. There were creditable moral reasons for entertaining doubts about it; and some people have articulated such doubts in a creditable way; but this is something different from a compelling case that the war was wrong. Speaking from my own experience of the debates, both before and since the war the majority of those who opposed it, or at least the majority of its most vocal opponents, opposed it in anything but a creditable way. – Professor Norm Geras, Marxist
• In wartime, the degree of patriotism is directly proportional to distance from the front. – Phillip Caputo
• War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want. – General William T. Sherman
• The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving. – Ulysses S. Grant
• Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names. – The real JFK
• The enemy is anybody who’s going to get you killed, no matter which side he’s on. – Joseph Heller
• Don’t be a fool and die for your country. Let the other sonofabitch die for his. – George S. Patton
• Peace is a condition in which no civilian pays any attention to military casualties which do not achieve a page one lead story – unless that civilian is a close relative of one of the casualties. But, if there ever was a time in history when ‘peace’ meant that there was no fighting going on, I have been unable to find out about it. – Robert A. Heinlein, ‘Starship Troopers’
• The unforgivable crime is soft hitting. Do not hit at all if it can be avoided; but never hit softly. – Theodore Roosevelt
• You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Do not ever count on having both at once. – Robert Heinlein
• If you love peace more than freedom, you lose. – Dick Armey
• It is useless for sheep to pass resolutions in favor of vegetarianism while wolves remain of a different opinion. – William Ralph Inge
• Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other; Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, ‘he that is not with me is against me. – George Orwell
• War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person 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. – John Stuart Mills
• One ought never to turn one’s back on a threatened danger and try to run away from it. If you do that, you will double the danger. But if you meet it promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half. – Winston Churchill
• It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes. A principle which if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world. – Thomas Jefferson
• Anyone who clings to the historically untrue – and thoroughly immoral – doctrine ‘that violence never settles anything’ I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and of the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee, and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedom. – Robert A. Heinlein, ‘Starship Troopers’
• In the real world, those in positions of power – as opposed to those without influence who thereby have the luxury of frivolously adopting self-righteous postures while never having to pay the consequences of them – sometimes have to make compromises, supporting what seems at the time like lesser evils against greater threats…. Even if the Allies were soft on fascism in the thirties, that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have fought it in the forties. On the contrary, if it was a moral error to have been soft on fascism in the thirties or to have sold arms to Saddam in the eighties, then, if anything, the agents of those errors have even stronger duties than would otherwise be the case to reverse the effects of the errors as soon as possible. – Daniel Kofman, in his essay in ‘A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq’

Pat Dollard