"We all do no end of feeling and we mistake it for thinking. And out of it we get an aggregation which we consider a boon. It's name is public opinion. It is held in reverence. It settles everything. Some think it is the voice of God."
-- Mark Twain

"Freedom in not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs have in Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be empowered. It's not entitlement. An entitlement is what people on welfare get, and how free are they? It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights - the "right" to health care, the "right" to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery - hay and a barn for human cattle."
-- P.J. O'Rourke

" A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. ...[Eventually], the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public Treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy...The world's greatest civilizations have progressed through this sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith; from spritual faith to great courage; from great courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to complancency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependence; from dependency back again to bondage."
-- Alexander Fraser Tytler

"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 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 carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, 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 the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murder is less to fear. - Marcus Tullius Cicero

I am a conservative, not a republican, who prays that the U.S. will return to constitutional government, i.e. one with LIMITED powers as envisioned by the founding fathers and not one which is ruled by 9 men in black robes. The United States Supreme Court was never meant to be the final arbiter of the meaning of the constitution, they gave themselves that power. The people are to be the final arbiter by their election of their representatives.