I took a short break from FR. I actually registered on or around 10 November 2000.

Four quotes worth reading and knowing:

"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."

John Stuart Mill

“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 treasure. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency, to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage.”

- Alexander Tyler, on the Fall of the Athenian Republic

"If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen."

-Samuel Adams

Writing about the NY Democrat party chairman's comment that President Bush is "simple": If simple means honest, steady and dedicated as well ready to defend this country and intensely patriotic and complex means deceptive, cowardly and thin-skinned as well as duplicitious and ready to sell this country out to the UN and EU...dunno but I'll take simple every single time.

12 posted on 09/27/2004 5:52:09 PM PDT by shawngf