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.
Douglas Noel Adams – Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, 1987
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.
Douglas Noel Adams
Is there not some chosen curse,
Some hidden thunder in the stores of heaven,
Red with uncommon wrath, to blast the man
Who owes his greatness to his country’s ruin?
Joseph Addison, Cato (act I, sc. 1)
Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt will always glorify the hunters.
African proverb
I cannot afford to waste my time making money.
Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz (1807-73), Swiss-American zoologist, geologist
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.
George K. Anderson, from The Legend of the Wandering Jew
I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.
Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906)
The quest for riches darkens the sense of right and wrong
Antiphanes, ancient Greek dramatist
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.
The Atlanta Journal
Practicing the Golden Rule is not a sacrifice, it’s an investment.
Byllye Avery
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.
Roger Babson, economist
Every great panic we have ever had has been foreshadowed by a general decline in observance of religious principles.
Roger Babson, economist, predicted the 1929 stock market crash
Nothing doth more hurt in a state than that cunning men pass for wise.
Francis Bacon
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.
Chuck Baldwin
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.
Ezra Taft Benson
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.
Ezra Taft Benson
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?
Ezra Taft Benson
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.
Helen K. Billings, PhD (1901-1995)
[“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:”]
For Wales? Why, Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world … but for Wales!
Robert Bolt in “A Man for All Seasons”
Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
Napoleon Bonaparte
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.
General Omar Bradley, U.S. Army
If you think we are free today, you know nothing about tyranny and even less about freedom.
Tom Braun, Radio Show, Spirit of ’76 — Voice of Warning
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.
Harry Browne
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.
Giordano Bruno
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.
Warren Buffet, CEO, Berkshire Hathaway
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.
Alan Bullock, in Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives
First they burn books, then they burn people.
Bumper Sticker
It is necessary only for the good man to do nothing for evil to triumph.
Edmund Burke
Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.
Samuel Butler
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.
Albert Camus
Integrity has no need of rules.
Albert Camus
I’ll tell you a big secret, my friend: Don’t wait for the Last Judgment. It happens every day.
Albert Camus (1913-1960) The Fall, 1956
The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants.
Albert Camus
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.
Doug Casey
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.
Helena Cassadine
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.
Marcus Porcius Cato – (Roman Statesman – 190 B.C.)
When morality comes up against profit, it is seldom that profit loses.
Shirley Chisholm
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.
Noam Chomsky, _Turning the Tide_, page 52. Footnote [21] cites Connell-Smith, _Inter-American System_, 161f
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.
Winston Churchill
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.
Marcus Tullius Cicero, Roman Orator – 106-43 B.C.
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.
J. Reuben Clark, Jr.
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.
J. Reuben Clark, Jr. – 1938
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.
J. Reuben Clark
It’s discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.
Noël Coward, Blithe Spirit
The big thieves hang the little ones.
Czech proverb
Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory.
Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519)
Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first.
Charles De Gaulle
…the world is governed by very different personages to what is imagined by those who are not themselves behind the scenes.
Benjamin Disraeli (1801-1884) Prime Minister of Britain
Much less evil would be done on earth if evil could not be done in the name of good.
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (Aphorisms)
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
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.
Albert Einstein
It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.
Albert Einstein
What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, 19th-century American essayist and poet
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.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
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.
Francois Fenelon
Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time, and it annoys the pig.
Folk saying
Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.
Malcolm S. Forbes
The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.
J. K. Galbraith
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.
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
on-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good.
Mahatma Gandhi
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.
John W. Gardner
[This quote is by the great emancipator, William Lloyd Garrison, on slavery]
I am aware, that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! No! Tell a man whose house is on fire, to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen;–but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—AND I WILL BE HEARD. The apathy of the people is enough to make every statue leap from its pedestal, and to hasten the resurrection of the dead.
William Lloyd Garrison, January 1, 1831
The Liberator, Vol. I., No. 1
In two words, the Savior describes the world we live in: Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness.
Jesus Christ (Matthew 23:27)
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.
William Gladstone
Quotes – Insanity
Quotes – Patriotic, Integrity (Part 2)
Quotes – Founding Fathers and Presidents