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Patriotic, Integrity, etc. Quotes
"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."
"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."
"Is there not some chosen curse,
"Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt will always glorify the hunters."
"I cannot afford to waste my time making money."
"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."
"I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires."
“The quest for riches darkens the sense of right and wrong.”
"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."
"Practicing the Golden Rule is not a sacrifice, it's an investment."
“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.”
“Every great panic we have ever had has been foreshadowed by a general decline in observance of religious principles.”
"Nothing doth more hurt in a state than that cunning men pass for wise."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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?"
"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."
["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:"]
"Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake."
"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."
"If you think we are free today, you know nothing about tyranny and even less about freedom."
"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.'"
"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."
"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."
"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."
"First they burn books, then they burn people."
"It is necessary only for the good man to do nothing for evil to triumph."
"Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them."
"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."
"Integrity has no need of rules."
"I'll tell you a big secret, my friend: Don't wait for the Last Judgment. It happens every day."
"The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"When morality comes up against profit, it is seldom that profit loses."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
“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.”
"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."
"It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit."
"The big thieves hang the little ones."
"Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory."
"Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first."
"...the world is governed by very different personages to what is imagined by those who are not themselves behind the scenes."
"Much less evil would be done on earth if evil could not be done in the name of good."
"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."
"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."
"It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity."
"What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us."
"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."
"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."
"Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time, and it annoys the pig."
"Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one."
"The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking."
"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."
"Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good."
"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."
[This quote is by the great emancipator, William Lloyd Garrison, on slavery]
"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."
"A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you have."
"I don't want yes men around me. I want everyone to tell the truth, even if it costs them their jobs."
"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!"
"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."
"Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it."
"You cannot discover new oceans until you have the courage to lose sight of the shore."
"The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history."
"Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny."
"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)"
"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 man is usually more careful of his money than of his principles."
"A ship in port is safe, but that's not what ships are built for."
"Honesty pays, but it don't seem to pay enough to suit some people."
"Why worry about what threatens our heads or purses? Let us think instead of what threatens our souls."
"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."
"Facts don't cease to exist because they are ignored."
"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!"
"When the character of a man is not clear to you, look at his friends."
"Men willingly believe what they wish."
"We have met the enemy and he is us."
"During recent centuries, many aspiring rulers have curried the common man's favor by promising them other men's property."
"Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men."
"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."
"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."
"Ninety percent of politicians give the other ten percent a bad name."
"If the wind will not serve, take to the oars."
"Many people today don't want honest answers insofar as honest means unpleasant or disturbing, they want a soft answer that turneth away anxiety."
"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."
"Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance."
"Don't think there are no crocodiles because the water is calm."
"Those are my principles, if you don't like them I have others."
"Every society honors its live conformists, and its dead troublemakers."
"Most people want security in this world, not liberty."
"The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it."
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
"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."
"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."
"God grant me the courage not to give up what I think is right, even though I think it is hopeless."
"Nothing is politically right which is morally wrong."
"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."
"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
"Right thinking will be rewarded, wrong thinking punished."
"All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others."
"Justice without force is impotent; force without justice is tyranny."
"Freedom is rarely lost in a single stroke. The danger lies in losing it bit by bit."
"If everybody is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking."
"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."
"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."
"Write on my gravestone: "Infidel, Traitor."--infidel to every church that compromises with wrong; traitor to every government that oppresses the people."
"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."
"The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men."
"Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,
"Under capitalism man exploits man; under socialism the reverse is true."
"Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear."
"Liberty doesn't work as well in practice as it does in speeches."
"I prefer liberty with danger to peace with slavery."
"You can recognize a pioneer by the arrows in his back."
"A hammer breaks glass, but forges steel."
"If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe."
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
"Let me give you a definition of ethics: It is good to maintain and further life, it is bad to damage and destroy life."
"Nothing is less worthy of honor than an old man who has no other evidence of having lived long, except his age."
"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."
"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."
"Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance."
"If you have integrity, nothing else matters. If you don't have integrity, nothing else matters."
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
"The world is not the way they tell you it is."
"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."
"One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic."
"My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular."
"The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual crime."
"Integrity pays, but not in cash."
"When a true genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign; that all the dunces are in confederacy against him."
"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."
"God looks at the clean hands, not the full ones."
"Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different."
"We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are."
"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."
"After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood."
"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root."
"Why are we surprised when fig trees bear figs?"
"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."
"There is one universal law ... That law is justice. Justice forms the cornerstone of each nation's law."
"Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself."
"Of the 22 civilizations that have appeared in history, 19 of them collapsed when they reached the moral state America is in today."
"Education ... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading."
"No matter how far you've gone down the wrong road, turn back."
"Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself."
"It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare."
"If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything."
"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."
"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?"
"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."
"Politicians have always coveted the liberties we hold."
"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards."
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