Category: Quote of the Day

“What the herd hates most is the one who thinks differently; it is not so much the opinion itself, but the audacity of wanting to think for themselves, something that they do not know how to do.” – Arthur Schopenhauer

“Resolve not to be poor: whatever you have, spend less. Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult.” –  Samuel Johnson, Letter to Boswell, 7 December 1782, in James Boswell’s ‘The Life of Samuel Johnson’ (1791) vol. 4, p. 157

“The extravagant expenditure of public money is an evil not to be measured by the value of that money to the people who are taxed for it.” – President Chester A. Arthur, October 5, 1829 – November 16, 1886 — Our Twenty-First president, 1881–1885. (A Daguerreotype by Rufus Anson, with applied color.)

“Life and liberty are secure only so long as the right of property is secure. All property is an extension of a person’s life, energy, effort, and ingenuity. Therefore, to destroy or confiscate such property (and every person has a ‘property’ in his own ‘person’) is, in reality, an attack on the essence of life itself.” – Mark Skousen

“And he spake a parable unto them to this end, that men ought always to pray, and not to faint; Saying, There was in a city a judge, which feared not God, neither regarded man: And there was a widow in that city; and she came unto him, saying, Avenge me of mine adversary. And he would not for a while: but afterward he said within himself, Though I fear not God, nor regard man; Yet because this widow troubleth me, I will avenge her, lest by her continual coming she weary me. And the Lord said, Hear what the …

“A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches, and loving favour rather than silver and gold. The rich and poor meet together: the Lord is the maker of them all. A prudent man foreseeth the evil, and hideth himself: but the simple pass on, and are punished. By humility and the fear of the Lord are riches, and honour, and life. Thorns and snares are in the way of the froward: he that doth keep his soul shall be far from them. Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, …

“Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites. … Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.” – Edmund Burke

“Even the striving for equality by means of a directed economy can result only in an officially enforced inequality – an authoritarian determination of the status of each individual in the new hierarchical order.” – Friedrich August von Hayek

“None but an armed nation can dispense with a standing army. To keep ours armed and disciplined is therefore at all times important.” – Thomas Jefferson

“It is curious to look back and realize upon what trivial and apparently coincidental circumstances great events frequently turn as easily and naturally as a door on its hinges.” – H. Rider Haggard

“The great object of my fear is the federal judiciary. That body, like gravity, ever acting, with noiseless foot, and unalarming advance, gaining ground step by step, and holding what it gains, is engulfing insidiously the special governments into the jaws of that which feeds them.” – Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to Judge Spencer Roane, March 9, 1821

“But of the times and the seasons, brethren, ye have no need that I write unto you. For yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night. For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape. But ye, brethren, are not in darkness, that that day should overtake you as a thief. Ye are all the children of light, and the children of the day: we are not of the night, nor of darkness. Therefore …

“And I will execute judgments upon Moab; and they shall know that I am the Lord. Thus saith the Lord God; Because that Edom hath dealt against the house of Judah by taking vengeance, and hath greatly offended, and revenged himself upon them; Therefore thus saith the Lord God; I will also stretch out mine hand upon Edom, and will cut off man and beast from it; and I will make it desolate from Teman; and they of Dedan shall fall by the sword. And I will lay my vengeance upon Edom by the hand of my people Israel: and …

“The Republican form of government is the highest form of government: but because of this it requires the highest type of human nature — a type nowhere at present existing.” – Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), in The Americans.

“The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy.” – Elbridge Gerry