Free Republic

1. “I say it is impossible that so sensible a people .....(trunc) if they had really known that they might have had as much pure light of the sun for nothing.” — Benjamin Franklin 2. “An extra yawn one morning in the springtime, an extra snooze one night in the autumn is all that we ask in return for dazzling gifts. We borrow an hour one night in April; we pay it back with golden interest five months later.” — Winston Churchill 3. “There are very few things in the world I hate more than Daylight Savings Time. It is...

Hollywood actor Richard Gere joined some 30 Nobel Laureates for a gathering of the world's top thinkers in the ancient Jordanian city of Petra. The conference, bringing together luminaries such as former peace prize winner the Dalai Lama, has set itself the none too modest task of finding solutions to the world's problems. "A process begins here -- a process that all of you will shape -- and by your effort, help shape our world," host King Abdullah II of Jordan said in his opening speech. Highlighting the conflict in the Middle East, he said the world needed to make...

Reflections of Great Minds on Government 1) Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. . . But I repeat myself. Mark Twain 2) I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle. Winston Churchill 3) A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul. George Bernard Shaw 4) A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to...

Creative genius and crime express themselves early in men but both are turned off almost like a tap if a man gets married and has children, a study says. Satoshi Kanazawa, a psychologist at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, compiled a database of the biographies of 280 great scientists, noting their age at the time when they made their greatest work. The data remarkably concur with the brutal observation made by Albert Einstein, who wrote in 1942: "A person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of 30 will never do so." "Scientific...