My Favorite Quotes Patriotic, Integrity, etc. (Part 2)

Written by Webster Kehr, Independent Cancer Research Foundation, Inc. | Last updated on | Filed under: Quotes

Quotes: Patriotic, Integrity, etc. (Part 2)

A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you have.
Barry Goldwater, Presidential candidate

I don’t want yes men around me. I want everyone to tell the truth, even if it costs them their jobs.
Samuel Goldwyn

I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. What I can do, I should do and, with the help of God, I will do!
Everett Hale

Education would be much more effective if its purpose was to ensure that by the time they leave school every boy and girl should know how much they do not know, and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it.
Sir William Haley

Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it.
Judge Learned Hand

You cannot discover new oceans until you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.
Hawai’ian saying

The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.
Friedrich Hegel

Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny.
Robert Heinlein

Even in an evil world we can so live our lives as to merit the protecting care of our Father in Heaven. We can be as the righteous living among the evils of Sodom and Gomorrah. Abraham pleaded that these cities might be spared for the sake of the righteous. (see Genesis 18:20-32)
Gordon B. Hinckley

It is easier to find a score of men wise enough to discover the truth than to find one intrepid enough, in the face of opposition, to stand up for it.
A. A. Hodge

A man is usually more careful of his money than of his principles.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., speech, Boston, 8 January 1897

A ship in port is safe, but that’s not what ships are built for.
Grace Hopper. (The computer term “bug” is also due to Grace Hopper)

Honesty pays, but it don’t seem to pay enough to suit some people.
Frank McKinney “Kin” Hubbard

Why worry about what threatens our heads or purses? Let us think instead of what threatens our souls.
Victor Hugo

What does a man seek in this world? A position, or a throne? Man seeks peace of mind and the fear of Almighty God. As long as one knows that there is a judgement day, he tries to keep his conscience clear and do what he can.
King Hussein – Late King Of Jordan

Facts don’t cease to exist because they are ignored.
Aldous Huxley

The majority never has right on its side. Never I say! That is one of the social lies that a free, thinking man is bound to rebel against. Who makes up the majority in any given country? Is it the wise men or the fools? I think we must agree that the fools are in a terrible overwhelming majority, all the wide world over. But, damn it, it can surely never be right that the stupid should rule over the clever!
Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People

When the character of a man is not clear to you, look at his friends.
Japanese Proverb

Men willingly believe what they wish.
Julius Caesar

We have met the enemy and he is us.
Walt Kelly (1913-1973), American cartoonist and social commentator

During recent centuries, many aspiring rulers have curried the common man’s favor by promising them other men’s property.
Peter Kershaw

Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.
Martin Luther King, Jr.

We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people.
Martin Luther King, Jr.

He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.
Martin Luther King, Jr. (Stride Toward Freedom)

Ninety percent of politicians give the other ten percent a bad name.
Henry Kissinger

If the wind will not serve, take to the oars.
Latin proverb

Many people today don’t want honest answers insofar as honest means unpleasant or disturbing, they want a soft answer that turneth away anxiety.
Louis Kronenberger

Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grandchildren are once more slaves.
D.H. Lawrence, Classical American Literature, 1922

Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.
C.S. Lewis, 20th-century British novelist and scholar

When you get into politics, you find that all your worst nightmares about it turn out to be true, and the people who are attracted to large concentrations of power are precisely the ones who should be kept as far away from it as possible.
Ken Livingstone, Member of Parliament

Whenever the legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience.
John Locke

Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear — kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor — with the cry of grave national emergency … Always there has been some terrible evil to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant sums demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.
General Douglas MacArthur, 1957

With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.
Norman Mailer

Don’t think there are no crocodiles because the water is calm.
Malayan Proverb

Those are my principles, if you don’t like them I have others.
Groucho Marx

Every society honors its live conformists, and its dead troublemakers.
Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook, 1960

Most people want security in this world, not liberty.
H.L. Mencken, Minority Report, 1956

The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.
H.L. Mencken

You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him.”
James D. Miles

I do not know what I seem to the world, but to myself I appear to have been like a boy playing upon the seashore and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay before me all undiscovered.
Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727)

In Germany they first came for the Communists and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me–and by that time no one was left to speak up.
Pastor Martin Niemoller, 1892-1984

God grant me the courage not to give up what I think is right, even though I think it is hopeless.
Admiral Chester W. Nimitz

Nothing is politically right which is morally wrong.
Daniel O’Connell

There is a constituency in the Congress that sees the tax code as a way to do favors for people which is a way to get elected that’s not as obvious as actually writing them a check from the American people.
Paul O’Neill, U.S. Treasury Secretary

During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.
George Orwell

Right thinking will be rewarded, wrong thinking punished.
George Orwell, “1984”

All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.
George Orwell

Justice without force is impotent; force without justice is tyranny.
Pascal

Freedom is rarely lost in a single stroke. The danger lies in losing it bit by bit.
Dennis Patrick

If everybody is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.
General George Patton

No man has ever won a war by dying for his country, he won the war by making the other, poor, dumb bastard die for his.
George Patton, June, 1944

The main difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is that the Democrats would take us over the cliff at 80 miles an hour; the Republicans would stay within the speed limit — but we’re still heading over the cliff.
Howard Phillips

Write on my gravestone: “Infidel, Traitor.”–infidel to every church that compromises with wrong; traitor to every government that oppresses the people.
Wendell Phillips

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
Max Planck

The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.
Plato

Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,
As, to be hated, needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.
Alexander Pope (An Essay on Man: Epistle 2)

Under capitalism man exploits man; under socialism the reverse is true.
Polish Proverb

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.
Ambrose Redmoon

Liberty doesn’t work as well in practice as it does in speeches.
Will Rogers

I prefer liberty with danger to peace with slavery.
J.J. Rousseau

You can recognize a pioneer by the arrows in his back.
Beverly Rubik

A hammer breaks glass, but forges steel.
Russian proverb

If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.
Carl Sagan, famous astronomer

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayna

Let me give you a definition of ethics: It is good to maintain and further life, it is bad to damage and destroy life.
Albert Schweitzer (“Religion and Modern Civilization” Christian Century, November 28, 1934)

Nothing is less worthy of honor than an old man who has no other evidence of having lived long, except his age.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4? B.C. – A. D. 65)

There is no evil that does not offer inducements. Avarice promises money; luxury, a varied assortment of pleasure; ambition, a purple robe and applause. Vices tempt you by the rewards which they offer.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4? B.C. – A. D. 65)

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
George Bernard Shaw

Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.
George Bernard Shaw

If you have integrity, nothing else matters. If you don’t have integrity, nothing else matters.
Alan Simpson

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
Upton Sinclair

The world is not the way they tell you it is.
Adam Smith

When the mass media in some foreign countries serve as megaphones for the rhetoric of their government, the result is ludicrous propaganda. When the mass media in our country serve as megaphones for the rhetoric of the U.S. government, the result is responsible journalism.
Norman Solomon

One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.
Josef Stalin

My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.
Adlai Stevenson, speech, Detroit, 1952

The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual crime.
Max Stirner

Integrity pays, but not in cash.
Jennifer Stone

When a true genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign; that all the dunces are in confederacy against him.
Jonathan Swift

There is no such thing as a free press. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who would dare to write his honest opinion. The business of the journalist is to destroy truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell himself, his country, and his race, for his daily bread. We are tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are jumping jacks; they pull our strings, we dance; our talents, our possibilities, and our lives are the property of these men. We are intellectual prostitutes.
John Swinton (1829-1901) pre-eminent New York journalist & head of the editorial staff at the New York Times. Quoted one night between 1880-1883.
Quoted by Upton Sinclair in his 1919 book:
The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism, page 400
Even though Upton Sinclair was famous by 1919, because he was criticizing corruption in the media, he had to self-publish this book.

God looks at the clean hands, not the full ones.
Publilius Syrus

Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different.
Albert Szent-Gyorgyi (1893-1986), Nobel prize in Medicine – 1937

We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are.
Talmudic Saying

By and by, you will find they will tear the Constitution to shreds, as they have begun now; they won’t have to begin; they have started long ago to rend the Constitution of our country in pieces; …but we will stand by and maintain its principles and the rights of all men of every color, and every clime.
John Taylor, 1884

After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood.
Fred Thompson

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.
Henry David Thoreau

Why are we surprised when fig trees bear figs?
Margaret Titzel

Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.
Alexis de Tocqueville

There is one universal law … That law is justice. Justice forms the cornerstone of each nation’s law.
Alexis de Tocqueville

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
Tolstoy

Of the 22 civilizations that have appeared in history, 19 of them collapsed when they reached the moral state America is in today.
Arnold Toynbee, who died in 1975, long before things got bad.
This quote was quoted by U.S. Senator Zell Miller (D-Georgia) and at one time was on his official Senate web site.

Education … has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.
G.M. Trevelyan

No matter how far you’ve gone down the wrong road, turn back.
Turkish Proverb

Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
Mark Twain

It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.
Mark Twain

If you tell the truth you don’t have to remember anything.
Mark Twain

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 Treasury. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the Public Treasury with a result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy always followed by dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years.
Sir Alexander Fraser Tyler “Decline and Fall of the Athenian Republic”

Why may not the Bible and especially the New Testament be read and taught as a divine revelation in school? Where else can the purest principles of morality be learned so clearly or so perfectly as from the New Testament?
U.S. Supreme Court, 1844, Vidal v. Girard’s Executors, Justice Story delivered the Supreme Court’s unanimous opinion

Our laws and our institutions must necessarily be based upon and embody the teachings of the Redeemer of mankind. It is impossible that it should be otherwise; and in this sense and to this extent our civilization and our institutions are emphatically Christian…this is a Christian nation.
U.S. Supreme Court, 1892, Church of the Holy Trinity vs. U.S.

Politicians have always coveted the liberties we hold.
Walter Williams

America is at that awkward stage. It’s too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards.
Claire Wolfe, 101 Things To Do Until the Revolution

Quotes – Insanity
Quotes – Patriotic, Integrity (Part 1)
Quotes – Founding Fathers and Presidents