Category: Quote of the Day

"We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth and power as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of …

"The price of freedom is the willingness to do sudden battle, anywhere, anytime, and with utter recklessness." – Robert A. Heinlein

"Political speeches are like chuckar hunts. They go on for a long time but rarely accomplish much." – #1 Son

"[W]hen you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing- when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors- when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you- when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice- you may know that your society is doomed." – Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 1957

“If we ever forget that we’re one nation under God, then we will be a nation gone under.” – Ronald Wilson Reagan

"This nation…has no right to expect that it always will have wise and humane rulers, sincerely attached to the principles of the Constitution…[If] the calamities of war befall us, the dangers to human liberty are frightful to contemplate." – U.S. Supreme Court, Ex Parte Milligan decision, 1866

“Experience should teach us to be on our most guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.” – Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis

"The groups conserving civilized values and preparing for the renaissance will have to enjoy notable freedom from the immediate anxieties which would otherwise exhaust their energies; and this could happen only by means of an initial endowment made soon enough (that is, before the dark age begins) by the planners of the survival groups. This initial endowment could not be in money, since money would obviously be among the first casualties when the systems break down. Instead, it would have to be an endowment of concrete things; tools, implements, motor-generator sets, non-perishable good which a monastic community would make more …

Josey Wales: “When I get to likin’ someone, they ain’t around long.” Lone Watie: “I notice when you get to dislikin’ someone they ain’t around for long, neither.” – The Outlaw Josey Wales

"To govern according to the sense and agreement of the interests of the people is a great and glorious object of governance. This object cannot be obtained but through the medium of popular election, and popular election is a mighty evil." – Edmund Burke

“Great cities, the emblems of Western Civilization, began as a walled defenses against marauding enemies. In a world turned upside-down, they are now our great vulnerability. They are suicidal concentrations of expensive economic, cultural and political assets waiting, exposed, for destruction. The only way to ignore nuclear terrorism will be to “redeploy” preemptively out of the crosshairs. Within years our cities will die – abandoned or incinerated.” – “Flamethrower”, at the FreeRepubliic Forums

"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 to A. L. C. Destutt de Tracy, 1820. FE 10:175

“In a time of drastic change it is the learners who survive; the ‘learned’ find themselves fully equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.” – Eric Hoffer

"Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book." – Ronald Wilson Reagan

"The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." – George Will