William Pitt the Younger

Necessity is the plea of every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.


Thomas Jefferson

The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it always to be kept alive.


Grover Cleveland, the "Veto President"

A man is known by the company he keeps, and also by the company from which he is kept out.


Cicero

When a government becomes powerful, it is destructive, extravagant and violent; it is a usurer which takes bread from innocent mouths and deprives honorable men of their substance for votes with which to perpetuate itself.


Barry Goldwater

...extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.


St. Therese of Lisieux

The splendor of the rose and the whitness of the lily do not rob the little violet of it’s scent nor the daisy of its simple charm. If every tiny flower wanted to be a rose, spring would lose its lovliness.


Edmund Burke

...the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists; and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defense of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honor which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness.


G K Chesterton

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.


Dante Alighieri

From Paradisio: Like a geometer wholly dedicated
to squaring the circle, but who cannot find,
think as he may, the principle indicated--

so did I study the supernal face.
I yearned to know just how our image merges
into that circle, and how it there finds place;

but mine were not the wings for such a flight.
Yet, as I wished, the truth I wished for came
cleaving my mind in a great flash of light.

Here my powers rest from their high fantasy,
but already I could feel my being turned--
instinct and intellect balanced equally

as in a wheel whose motion nothing jars--
by the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars.


Bishop Fulton Sheen

Life is like a cash register, in that every account, every thought, every deed, like every sale, is registered and recorded.

H. L. Mencken

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.