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"Some men change their party for the sake of their principles; others their principles for the sake of their party." -- Winston Churchill
“Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice.” -- Thomas Paine
"The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing." -- Socrates
"To know and not to do is not to know." -- Chinese proverb, regularly repeated by Ralph Nader
"The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home." -- James Madison
"The defeats and victories of the fellows at the top aren't always defeats and victories for the fellows at the bottom.” -- Bertolt Brecht
"We need a Jeffersonian revolution. If it doesn't happen, our democracy will continue to weaken and things will get worse. Right now, we have a two-party electoral dictatorship with each party looking for the highest corporate bidder." -- Ralph Nader
"A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both." -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
"A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury." -- Alexander Tyler
“We are not blind! We are men and
women with eyes and brains… and we
don’t have to be driven hither and thither
by the blind workings of The Market, or of
History, or of Progress, or of any other
abstraction.” -- Fritz Schumacher
“This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember it or overthrow it.” –- Abraham Lincoln
"A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself." -- Joseph Pulitzer (1904)
“The minute you read something that you can't understand, you can almost be sure that it was drawn up by a lawyer.” -- Will Rogers
“Laws control the lesser man... Right conduct controls the greater one.” -- Mark Twain
"One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in this world are to be cured by legislation." -- Thomas Brackett Reed
"Naturally the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." -- Hermann Goering, Hitler's designated successor
"Preventive war was an invention of Hitler. Frankly, I would not even listen to anyone seriously that came and talked about such a thing." -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
“The purpose of the law is not to prevent a future offense, but to punish the one actually committed.” -- Ayn Rand
"Ultimately, we need to restore the understanding that in a democracy the rights of citizens to govern themselves are more important than the rights of corporations to make money." -- Lee Drutman and Charlie Cray
"It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds." -- Samuel Adams
"When people who are honestly mistaken learn the truth, they will either cease being mistaken, or cease being honest." -- Anonymous
"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter, and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves." -- Abraham Lincoln
"The things that will destroy America are prosperity at any price, peace at any price, safety first instead of duty first, the love of soft living and the get rich quick theory of life." -- Teddy Roosevelt
"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote." -- Ben Franklin
"Only a government that is rich and safe can afford to be a democracy, for democracy is the most expensive and nefarious kind of government ever heard of on earth." -- Mark Twain
"Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce." -- James A. Garfield
"If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy." -- James Madison
"The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don't turn against him; they crush those beneath them." -- Emily Bronte
"The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws." -- Ayn Rand
"Patriotism is the conviction that your country is superior to all others because you were born in it." -- George Bernard Shaw
"Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." -- George Orwell
"Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist." -- Kenneth Boulding, Economist
"Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." -- Benito Mussolini
"Corporation, n., An ingenious device for obtaining profit without individual responsibility." -- Ambrose Bierce (The Devil's Dictionary, 1906)
“The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who, in time of great moral crises, maintain their neutrality.” -- Dante Alighieri, The Inferno
"We are at the parting of the ways. We have, not one or two or three, but many, established and formidable monopolies in the United States. We have, not one or two, but many, fields of endeavor into which it is difficult, if not impossible, for the independent man to enter. We have restricted credit, we have restricted opportunity, we have controlled development, and we have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated, governments in the civilized world — no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and the duress of small groups of dominant men." -- Woodrow Wilson (1913)
"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored." -- Aldous Huxley
"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs." -- Thomas Jefferson (1802)
"Banking was conceived in iniquity and was born in sin. The bankers own the earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create money, and with the flick of the pen they will create enough deposits to buy it back again. However, take it away from them, and all the great fortunes like mine will disappear and they ought to disappear, for this would be a happier and better world to live in. But, if you wish to remain the slaves of bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, let them continue to create money and control credit." -- Sir Josiah Stamp, president of the Bank of England (1927)
"What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?" -- Bertolt Brecht
“It was not accidental; it was a carefully contrived occurrence. The international Bankers sought to bring about a condition of despair here so that they might emerge as rulers of us all.” -- Louis McFadden referring to the Great Depression (1930s)
"So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of all money?" -- Ayn Rand
"We shall have World Government, whether or not we like it. The only question is whether World Government will be achieved by conquest or consent." -- James Warburg (1950)
“If we don't change our direction we're likely to end up where we're headed.” -- Chinese Proverb
"There are a lot of exiles in this world. Each one has his own reason; we have ours. Long before we left America, the America we knew left us. We travel not to get away from it, but to find it." -- Bill Bonner
"While each of us is entitled to his own opinions, none of us is entitled to his own facts." -- Patrick Moynahan, Senator from New York
"Find out just what the people will submit to and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress." -- Frederick Douglass
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." -- George Santayana
"You don't stick a knife in a man's back nine inches, and then pull it out six inches, and say you're making progress." -- Malcolm X
"A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable." -- Thomas Jefferson (1817)
"No one can be good for long if goodness is not in demand." -- Bertolt Brecht
"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius, and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction." -- Albert Einstein
"In the beginning of change, the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for it then costs nothing to be a patriot." -- Mark Twain
"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." -- Albert Einstein
"The world is full enough of hurts and mischance without wars to multiply them." -- J.R.R. Tolkien
"The first step in the evolution of ethics is a sense of solidarity with other human beings." -- Albert Schweitzer
"Agnosticism simply means that a man shall not say he knows or believes that for which he has no grounds for professing to believe." -- Thomas Henry Huxley
"Freedom is participation in power." -- Roman orator, Cicero
"The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government - lest it come to dominate our lives and interests." -- Patrick Henry
"The Human Race has improved everything except the Human Race.'' -- Adlai Stephenson
"Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed." -- Mahatma Gandhi
"We were created to love and be loved." -- Mother Teresa of Calcutta
"If you tremble indignation at every injustice then you are a comrade of mine." -- Ernesto 'Che' Guevara
"Try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of value." -- Albert Einstein
"Bad men cannot make good citizens. It is when a people forget God that tyrants forge their chains. A vitiated state of morals, a corrupted public conscience, is incompatible with freedom. No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue; and by a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles." -- Patrick Henry
"I find war detestable but those who praise it without participating in it even more so." -- Romain Rolland
"Warmaking doesn't stop warmaking. If it did, our problems would have stopped millennia ago." -- Colman McCarthy
"Good government is no substitute for self-government." -- Mahatma Gandhi
"A truth's initial commotion is directly proportional to how deeply the lie was believed. It wasn't the world being round that agitated people, but that the world wasn't flat. When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic." -- Dresden James
"Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men." -- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Cowardice asks the question, 'Is it safe?' Expediency asks the question, 'Is it politic?' But conscience asks the question, 'Is it right?' And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular but because conscience tells one it is right." -- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
"May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house." -- George Carlin