The record of history is crystal clear. There is no alternative way, so far discovered, of improving the lot of ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities unleashed with a free enterprise system
- Milton Friedman on the Phil Donahue show

"...What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it his heaven"
-F.A. Hayek - The Road to Serfdom

The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected. The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.
-James Madison in Federalist paper #45

More Quoths

The Obamanation

On the Nobel Peace Prize

The most popular headline at the Real Clear Politics Web site the other day was: "Is Obama Becoming A Joke?" With brilliant comedic timing, the very next morning the Norwegians gave him the Nobel Peace Prize.
-Mark Steyn

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has embarrassed itself and cheapened a great award that had real meaning. ...
The members of the committee have also put the young American president in a terrible place. They make it look like all the talk of "The One," the heartthrob of the European elite, the darling of the international left, is true. They make him look prefabricated and inauthentic, an empty structure held up by essentially silly people.
-Peggy Noonan

He is an American president queasy about the projection of American power. He is an American president who rejects the notion of American exceptionalism. He is an American president eagerly in pursuit of legitimacy to be granted him not by those who voted for him but by those who do not cast a vote and who chafe at American leadership. It is his devout wish that America become one of many nations, influencing the world indirectly or not influencing it at all, rather than "the indispensable nation," as Madeleine Albright characterized it. He is the encapsulation, the representative, the wish fulfillment, the very embodiment, of the multilateralist impulse. He is, almost literally, a dream come true for the sorts of people who treasure and value the Nobel Peace Prize.
- John Podhoretz

George Bush liberates 50 million Muslims. Ronald Reagan liberates hundreds of millions of Europeans, saves parts of Latin America. Any awards? No. Just derision. Obama gives speeches trashing his own country and he gets a prize for it.
-Rush Limbaugh

The award of this year’s Nobel peace prize to President Obama will be met with widespread incredulity, consternation in many capitals and probably deep embarrassment by the President himself. ,,, Rarely has an award had such an obvious political and partisan intent. ...Instead, the prize risks looking preposterous in its claims, patronising in its intentions and demeaning in its attempt to build up a man who has barely begun his period in office, let alone achieved any tangible outcome for peace. ... The pretext for the prize was Mr Obama’s decision to “strengthen international diplomacy and co-operation between peoples”.
-Michael Binyon, London Times

"..like Obama getting the Nobel Prize."
-David Beckham's coach, Fabio Capello after Beckman was named "man of the match" in England's World Cup qualifying soccer game this week despite playing for just 30 minutes.

You talk about systemic risk. The systemic risk today is the Congress of the United States
-Republican Sen. Judd Gregg, Oct 2009

In the annals of what used to be known as American capitalism, yesterday will go down as a sorry day: The Treasury and Federal Reserve announced wage controls on private American companies. So once again our politicians are blaming bankers, rather than addressing the incentives the politicians themselves created for bankers to take excessive risks
-Wall St Journal Editorial on Oct 23, 2009

Public approval ratings of Barack Obama may be falling quickly right now—but his rating of the American public is probably falling even faster.
-Arthur C. Brooks, Wall St. Journal, Aug 2009

Obama doesn't lie. He implies, he misdirects, he misleads -- so fluidly and incessantly that he risks transmuting eloquence into mere slickness.
Slickness wasn't fatal to "Slick Willie" Clinton because he possessed a winning, near irresistible charm. Obama's persona is more cool, distant, imperial. The charming scoundrel can get away with endless deception; the righteous redeemer cannot.
- Charles Krauthammer, Sept 2009

he's a phony, knows nothing about economics, is historically illiterate, and woefully small minded for the size of the task
-Geoffrey P. Hunt, American Thinker, Aug 2009

"...the one unifying theme of his presidency so far has been Obama's relentless campaigning for a job he already has.
-Jonah Goldberg, July 2009.

The worst thing that could happen, from the standpoint of those seeking more government power over the economy, would be for the economy to begin recovering on its own while months were being spent debating the need for a "stimulus" bill.
-Thomas Sowell, Sept 2009

"...by a 2-1 margin, voters believe that no matter how bad things are Congress can always make matters worse"
- Scott Rasmussen after polling on Obamacare in Aug 2009

The mainstream perception that conservatives are close-minded and dogmatic while liberals are open-minded and free- thinking has it almost exactly backward. Liberal dogma is settled: The government should do good, where it can, whenever it can. That is President Obama's idea of pragmatism and bipartisanship: He's open to all ideas, from either side of the aisle, about how best to expand government and get the state more involved in our lives.
-Jonah Goldberg, May, 2009.

America is on an unsustainable fiscal path that threatens our future. ...The consequences of all this will not be benign. A world saturated with U.S. currency will eventually look elsewhere to invest, causing the dollar's value to drop; foreign creditors, their confidence shaken by our fiscal profligacy, will demand higher payments to keep holding our debt. The net effect will be "stagflation," that pernicious combination of slower growth, higher inflation and interest rates, and lower living standards Americans suffered through in the 1970s.
Evan Bayh Dem Sen Indiana, Sep 2009

Conservatives are taking too much solace in the precipitous drop in Barack Obama's approval ratings, and too many of us are overconfident that his administration is merely a replay of the hapless presidency of Jimmy Carter that was easily swept out in a landslide election ... Today's situation is far different, far more conducive to our political adversary's political power, than that which faced Carter. And Obama is an entirely different breed of cat. He's more ruthless, more tactically savvy, and has far more dangerous objectives.
- Quin Hillyer, Sept 2009

...do they have an aspiration that they dare not speak? Do they hope state capitalism will be irreversible -- that wherever government has asserted the primacy of politics, the primacy will be permanent?
-George Will, Aug 2009.

The superficiality, the unseriousness, the hubris, the obliviousness to post-9/11 realities: They were trademarks of the Obama campaign, and they are the tattoos on his governance
- Michelle Malkin on the White House-engineered photo-op of low-flying Air Force aircraft that caused terror in New York City

On Socialism, Big Government, Multiculturalism, Politicians, Modern Liberalism, etc, etc

Part of the genius of Marxism, and a reason for its enduring appeal, is that it fed man's neurotic fear of social catastrophe while providing an avenue for moral transcendence. It's just the same with global warming...
-BRET STEPHENS, Wall St. Journal

...health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture
-Mark Steyn Aug, 2009.

Liberals love to think of themselves as sophisticated, nuanced intellectuals, but the truth is they have a kindergartner’s view of the world. If it has been defined as "nice" to people they like, they're for it. If it has been defined as "mean" to people they like, they’re against it -- and that is about as deep as it gets. Unfortunately, that lack of adult perspective isn't so cute in political leaders who are making life and death decisions that may still have ramifications fifty years from now.
- columnist John Hawkins, May 2009

The state's crisis has been caused by "moderation," understood as splitting the difference between extreme liberalism and hyperliberalism, a "reasonableness" that merely moderates the speed at which the ever-expanding public sector suffocates the private sector.
-George Will on California. May, 2009

... the Cold War's most dangerous legacy remains the bundle of radioactive lies that poisoned so many lands and deformed so many minds. The Soviets fueled national-socialist movements around the globe, telling the poor that if they embraced violent revolution and systematically purged capitalism, tradition and religion from their societies, they would hasten their ascent to the sunny uplands of history. The reverse was true: Whole generations were either slaughtered or left to live as dehumanized industrial cogs, or to labor as serfs tending crops amidst the bleached bones of their fellow countrymen.
-Jonah Goldberg, Apr 2009

Government can't tax things like businesses or corporations, it can only tax people. When it says it's going to 'make business pay,' it is really saying it is going to make business help it collect taxes."
-The Gipper

Mr. Obama is proving that one can be elected president without knowing how to behave presidentially. His servile gesture was fully fitting with the tone of his humility tour of Europe.
- Washinton Times editorial [Apr 8, 2009] commenting on Obama's bow to Saudi King Abdullah at the Group of 20 summit in London

One of the things that I'm trying to break is a pattern in Washington where everybody is always looking for somebody else to blame.
-Barack Obama, apparantly momentarily forgetting to blame Bush or the Republicans [also trying to quit smoking]

The ideal tyranny is that which is ignorantly self-administered by its victims. The most perfect slaves are, therefore, those which blissfully and unawaredly enslave themselves. A truth's initial commotion is directly proportional to how deeply the lie was believed. It wasn't the world being round that agitated people, but that the world wasn't flat. When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic.
-author Dresden James

One way or another, we're going to try to figure out how to get these resources back.
-Sen. Chris Dodd (D- CT), who only a month ago made sure that these particular bonuses were exempt from regulation in the stimulus bill (Dodd is also the recipient of the most campaign cash from AIG) [HYPOCRITE OF THE YEAR AWARD]

By abandoning principle for efficiency, the neo-Statist...is no more bound to the Constitution than the Statist. He marches more slowly … but he marches with him nonetheless.
-Mark Levin in Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto

Now, where do some of these attacks originate? They're coming from the very people whose past policies, all done in the name of compassion, brought us the current recession. Their policies drove up inflation and interest rates, and their policies stifled incentive, creativity and halted the movement of the poor up the economic ladder. Some of their criticism is perfectly sincere. But let's also understand that some of their criticism comes from those who have a vested interest in a permanent welfare constituency and in government programs that reinforce the dependency of our people. Well, I would suggest that no one should have a vested interest in poverty or dependency, that these tragedies must never be looked at as a source of votes for politicians or paychecks for bureaucrats. They are blights on our society that we must work to eliminate, not institutionalize.
-Ronald Reagan

It’s tough to know sometimes whether we are supposed to stand and fight in a place where we are surrounded by those who seek to destroy us by destroying what we believe. Or whether we should surround ourselves with like-minded individuals who will tell us what we want to hear. But there’s no real chance of destroying what we believe. - Mike Adams, Sept 2009

"...democracies are vulnerable to proliferating parochial interests that use government to claim an ever larger share of private wealth. Slow but clear decline follows once narrow interests take the wider polity hostage"
-Wall St Journal paraphrasing a phenomena shown by late economist Mancur Olson starting with "The Logic of Collective Action" (1965)

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling," wrote Oscar Wilde, and I would like to suggest that the same can be said for bad politics. . . .
- Irving Kristol, 1972

The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.
- Margaret Thatcher

Marxists claim that workers are oppressed in capitalist societies. Workers in communist societies always try to sneak out into capitalist societies. No one in South Korea is trying to sneak into North Korea. The Berlin Wall was not built to keep West Germans from sneaking into East Germany's collective farms. Cubans in Florida do not steal boats to seek asylum in Cuban collective farms.
-Steven Plaut in the American Thinker, Mar 2009

Even if the stimulus is a magnificent success, the money still has to be paid back. The plan of record apparently is that we keep borrowing, spending and stimulating, faster and faster, until suddenly, on some signal from heaven or Timothy Geithner, we all stop spending and start saving in recordbreaking amounts. Oh sure, that will work.

There is another way. If it's not the actual, secret plan, it will be an overwhelming temptation: Don't pay the money back. So far, even as one piggy bank after another astounds us with its emptiness, there have been only the faintest whispers about the possibility of an actual default by the U.S. government. Somewhat louder whispers can be heard, though, about the gradual default known as inflation. Just three or four years of currency erosion at, say, 10 percent a year would slice the real value of our debt -- public and private, U.S. bonds and jumbo mortgages -- in half.

Anyone who regards the prospect of double-digit inflation with insouciance is either too young to have lived through it the last time (the late 1970s) or too old to remember. Among other problems, inflation works only as a surprise or betrayal. It can never be part of any public, official plan. Plan for 10 percent inflation, and you'll get 20. Plan for 20 and you'll need a wheelbarrow to pay for your morning Starbucks. But if that's not the plan, what is?
-Liberal columnist Michael Kinsley, writing in the Washington Post, on the hidden dangers of deficit spending. Feb 2009

What's particularly odious about Obama's scare tactics is that he's using them for the mother of all bait- and-switches. He justifiably scares people about the magnitude of the financial crisis, but uses that fear not to sell them on a solution to the crisis but to trick them into signing up for a new Great Society
-Jonah Goldberg , Feb 2009.

This growth is a lovely thought, but how? The only impetus for growth in this budget comes from the government spending more money that it is taking out of the job-producing private economy. With $1 trillion of new entitlements, $1.4 trillion in new taxes, and $5 trillion in new debt, America's entrepreneurs aren't getting any help soon from Washington.
-Feb 27, 2009 Wall St Journal Editorial on the first Obama budget.

Americans are only beginning to understand the magnitude of Mr. Obama's ambitions, and how much of their own income will be required to fulfill them. Republicans have an obligation to insist on a long and considerable debate on all of this, lest Americans discover in a year or two that they live in a very different country. .
- Feb 27, 2009 Wall St Journal Editorial on the first Obama budget

Most people on the left are not opposed to freedom. They are just in favor of all sorts of things that are incompatible with freedom.
-Thomas Sowell 2008

There is an old Russian fable, with different versions in other countries, about two poor peasants, Ivan and Boris. The only difference between them was that Boris had a goat and Ivan didn't. One day, Ivan came upon a strange-looking lamp and, when he rubbed it, a genie appeared. She told him that she could grant him just one wish, but it could be anything in the world.
Ivan said, "I want Boris' goat to die."
-Thomas Sowell

"The truth is ... that there is no 'fairness' whatever in the 'fairness' doctrine. On the contrary, it is a chilling federal attempt to compel some undefined 'balance' of what ideas radio and television new programs are to include. ... The 'fairness doctrine' undercuts free, independent, sound and responsive journalism -- substituting governmental dictates. That is deceptive, dangerous and, in a democracy, repulsive."
-Washington Post editorial, June 24, 1987

According to the Medicare trustees, the program's excess costs over the next 75 years -- that is, the difference between expected outlays and revenues -- is more than $36 trillion, which even they acknowledge is several trillion too low given current trends. Even if Congress doubled all individual and corporate tax rates, it still wouldn't raise enough revenue to pay for Medicare and Medicaid. The Obama- Baucus solution to this slow-motion catastrophe is to add tens of millions more people to the federal balance sheet.
- Wall St Journal Editorial - Nov 2008

...the ignorance of Ph.D.s is still ignorance and high-IQ groupthink is still groupthink, which is the antithesis of real thinking
Tom Sowell on intellectuals

The timid civilized world has found nothing with which to oppose the onslaught of a sudden revival of barefaced barbarity, other than concessions and smiles
-A Solzhenitsyn in his acceptance speech for the 1970 Nobel literature prize

You can’t be for big government, big taxes, and big bureaucracy and still be for the little guy
—Ronald Reagan

What this plan seems to amount to in practice are the Government's rights to refuse treatment, and the patient's responsibilities to live up to what the state decides are model standards.
-The Telegraph on Gordon Brown's rights and responsibilities of the English health system (" ... people who have unhealthy habits such as smoking, heart sufferers who are obese or those who fall ill because of failure to take regular exercise might be refused medical care") - 2008

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.
-Ronald Reagan

Much of what government does is based on the premise that people can't do things for themselves. So government must do it for them. More often than not, the result is a ham-handed, bumbling, one-size-fits-all approach that leaves the intended beneficiaries worse off. Of course, this resulting failure is never blamed on the political approach -- on the contrary, failure is taken to mean the government solution was not extravagant enough.
-John Stossel, Oct 2009

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
-Baltimore's political satirist, the late H.L. Mencken

Just because the Clintons say something doesn't mean it's untrue.
-Jonah Goldberg

It's truly amazing that Americans who are dissatisfied with the current level of socialized medicine in the U.S. are asking for more of what created the problem in the first place.
- Walter Williams Oct 2008

Its information is not reliable, it has too much chrome and glitz, its doors rattle, it breaks down almost immediately, and it's sold without warranty. It's flashy but it's basically junk.
-Michael Crichton, in 1993, predicting the fall of the American media

What I do know is my level of confidence in mainstream media of all stripes has been shaken to the core over the past 10 or 15 years. My level of trust in what I read, hear or see is somewhere close to zero and my suspicion continues to grow that television networks, newspaper groups and radio empires are advancing agendas that do not include honest, accurate and unbiased reports.
-Journalist Bill McIntyre on media bias

There are good reasons to begin with a presumption against government action. As coercive monopolies that spend other people's money taken by force, governments are uniquely unqualified to solve problems. They are riddled by ignorance, perverse incentives, incompetence and self-serving
-John Stossel

Though we may have speeded up a little the conquest of want, disease, ignorance, squalor, and idleness, we may in the future do even worse in that struggle when the chief dangers will come from inflation, paralyzing taxation, coercive labor unions, and ever increasing dominance of government in education, and a social service bureaucracy with far-reaching arbitrary powers - dangers from which the individual cannot escape by his own efforts and which the momentum of the overextended machinery of government is likely to increase rather than mitigate.
- F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty

To many who have watched the transition from socialism to fascism at close quarters the connection between the two systems has become increasingly obvious, but in the (Western) democracies the majority of people still believe that socialism and freedom can be combined. They do not realize that democratic socialism, the great utopia of the last few generations, is not only unachievable, but that to strive for it produces something utterly different - the very destruction of freedom itself. As has been aptly said: ‘What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it his heaven.'
- F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom

... we are a confection of normal (greedy, lustful, duplicitous, corrupt, inspired—in short, human) individuals living under a spectacularly effective compact called the Constitution, and lucky to get it.
-former liberal David Mamet

No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session
- Nineteenth Century New York Judge Gideon Tucker

Liberals sell the welfare state one brick at a time, deflecting inquiries about the size and cost of the palace they’re building
-William Voegeli author of “The Trouble with Limited Government" “

I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground that ‘all powers not delegated to the United States, by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states or to the people.’ To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power, not longer susceptible of any definition.”
—Thomas Jefferson

We came unarmed (this time)
- Sign spotted in the Sept 12 March on Washington

Many on the political left are so entranced by the beauty of their vision that they cannot see the ugly reality they are creating in the real world.
-Thomas Sowell

Hayek concluded that the private-property rights that come with the rule of law, freedom of contract, and freedom of association is still the one mechanism design that mobilizes and utilizes the dispersed information in an economy
-Wall Street Journal Editorial, Oct 16, 2007.

In political life today, you are considered compassionate if you demand that government impose your preferences on others.
- John Stossel 2007

In their assessment of what is going on in the world, they seem to start off with a default assumption that we are in the wrong. The "we" can take different forms: the United States government, the vast mass of middle-class Americans, white people, affluent people, churchgoing people or the advanced English-speaking countries. Such people are seen as privileged and selfish, greedy and bigoted, rash and violent. If something bad happens, the default assumption is that it's their fault. They always blame America -- or the parts of America they don't like -- first.
-Michael Barone, U.S. News & World Report

Republicans have too eclectic a collection of beliefs to beat the Democrats on a purely ideological basis. Moreover, the liberal vision is a more attractive vision because it assumes away many of the painful and even brutal aspects of human life, especially the fatal dangers of relying on words when dealing with people who only respect force that is backed up by a willingness to use it..... Facts are the only real antidote to a seductive vision.
-Thomas Sowell after the 2006 mid-term elections

Wonderful theory. Wrong species.
- Edward O. Wilson, the world's foremost expert on ants, on Marxism

The republic was not established by cowards, and cowards will not preserve it.
—Elmer Davis

Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.
-George Washington

They are going out of fashion where they are needed most and coming into fashion where they are needed least.
-Wall St Journal's Bret Stevens on Nukes

No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this earth!
We are a nation that has a government -- not the other way around.
-Ronald Reagan

I did very little. All I did was to try to prevent some of the things that might undo it.
-John James Cowperthwaite - on his refusal to collect economic statistics about Hong Kong during his tenure as Financial Secretary, lest they produce an impulse toward central planning among the bureaucrats

Perhaps, one of the most important accomplishments of my administration has been minding my own business
-President Calvin Coolidge

Only people not being able to find comfort in their own mind seek to silence others.
- Per Bylund

"...the smaller the society, the smaller the number of individuals composing a majority, and the more easily will they concert and execute their plans of oppression"
-James Madison in the Federalist Papers warning that local government is especially prone to tyranny

"The country is behind you 50 percent."
-Bob Hope joking to the troops in Vietnam

"Liberty is the prevention of control by others. This requires self-control and, therefore, religious and spiritual influences; education, knowledge, well-being."
—Lord Acton

"Most of the work of government does not need to be done. And, if you can remember that, if we could all remember that, this country would be better off."
—Lyn Nofziger

There is no such thing as life imprisonment without the possibility of a liberal president being elected and issuing a pardon or an amnesty.
- Thomas Sowell on the Zacarias Moussaoui trial

Civilizations die from suicide, not murder
-Arnold Toynbee

I have been asked to talk about what I consider the most important challenge facing mankind, and I have a fundamental answer. The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda.
- Michael Crichton, 2003

... family dissolution in the modern world leads to “a welfare state to take care of the women and children and a police state to handle the teenaged boys
-George Gilder

The Senate voted yesterday to allow illegal aliens to collect Social Security benefits based on past illegal employment
- Washington Times, May 20, 2006

...this was in the Soviet Union. Soviet engineers couldn’t make Jell -O. They’d show up at the World’s Fair and stare at a flush toilet like it was a rocket ship.
-Ann Coulter

Some argue that we should encourage democratic change in right-wing dictatorships, but not in communist regimes. Well, to accept this preposterous notion -- as some well-meaning people have -- is to invite the argument that once countries achieve a nuclear capability, they should be allowed an undisturbed reign of terror over their own citizens. We reject this course.''
- Ronald Reagan - June 1982 speech to the British Parliament

"I urge you to beware the temptation of pride, the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil. ...
- Ronald Reagan - Speech to the National Association of Evangelicals, March 1983.

"I believe that communism is another sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages even now are being written.''
-- Ronald Reagan - Speech to the National Association of Evangelicals, March 1983.

The poor are the very lifeblood of the left, attracting activists, support among the intelligentsia, and -- perhaps most important -- allowing the left to indulge in self-congratulation as people who "care."
-Tom Sowell 2006

The beauty of being a liberal is that history always begins this morning.
- Ann Coulter 2004

I for one hope that the next time a nation experimenting with socialism or communism fails, which will happen the next time a nation experiments with socialism or communism, Ken Galbraith will feel the need to explain what happened. It's great fun to read. It helps, of course, to suppress wistful thought about those who endured, or died trying, the passage toward collective living to which Professor Galbraith has beckoned us for over 40 years.
- William F. Buckley in his review of liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith's last book, "The Culture of Contentment."

"A republic -- if you can keep it."
- Benjamin Franklin's response at the close of the 1787 Constitutional Convention to the question "What the Founders had given us?"

"The left takes its vision seriously -- more seriously than it takes the rights of other people. They want to be our shepherds. But that requires us to be sheep." -- Thomas Sowell

"No one can read our Constitution without concluding that the people who wrote it wanted their government severely limited; the words 'no' and 'not' employed in restraint of government power occur 24 times in the first seven articles of the Constitution and 22 more times in the Bill of Rights."
- Edmund A. Opitz

Finally, we might decide that civilization itself is worth preserving. In that case we have to work out what to save and which people would be needed in a drastically reduced population -- weighing the value of scientists and musicians against that of politicians, for example
- Dr. Sue Blackmore looking on the bright side in Britain's Guardian- 2006

"...The Iron Curtain that scarred a continent is gone, as is the Evil Empire responsible for it. The feeling of foreboding -- the sense of shrunken possibilities -- that afflicted Americans 20 years ago has been banished by a new birth of the American belief in perpetually expanding horizons.
Reagan was the last president for whom the Depression -- the years when America stopped working -- was a formative experience. Remarkably, the 1930s formed in him a talent for happiness. It was urgently needed in the 1980s, when the pessimism of the intelligentsia was infecting people with the idea that America had passed its apogee and was ungovernable.
- George Will in memory of Ronald Reagan - June 6, 2004

I've always wondered why Republicans insist on acting like Democrats in hopes of retaining political power, while Democrats act like us in order to win.
-Dick Armey, after the 2006 midterm elections

They will not improve your healthcare. They will take your healthcare and sell it to someone else for a mere vote.
- The Raven, Sept 2009

The broad masses of a population are more amenable to the appeal of rhetoric than to any other force.
- Adolf Hitler

It's like taking a bucket of water from the deep end of a pool and dumping it into the shallow end
-George Mason University economist Russell Roberts on the 2008 "Economic Stimulus"

"...As an aide to President Carter, I smelled trouble. We weren't running against a Republican: we were running against the republic.
"Can anyone look at the record of this administration and say, Well done?" he asked the Republican National Convention which had just nominated him for President. Or at the state of our economy when the Carter administration took office with where we are today and say, "Keep up the good work!"
- Chris Matthews in memory of Ronald Reagan - June 6, 2004

"Collectivism, as an intellectual power and a moral ideal, is dead. But freedom and individualism, and their political expression, capitalism, have not yet been discovered."
- Ayn Rand

Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm -- but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves
-T.S. Eliot

Another current catch-phrase is the complaint that the nations of the world are divided into 'haves' and the 'have-nots.' Observe that the 'haves' are those who have freedom, and that it is freedom that the 'have-nots' have not."
-- Ayn Rand

I can hardly imagine any laws so bad, to which I would not rather be subject than to the caprice of a man
- John Stuart Mill

A pure democracy can admit no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will be felt by a majority, and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party. Hence it is, that democracies have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in thier deaths."
- James Madison.

Capitalism is founded on freedom, with the brakes applied to it only a little, so that it does not run out of control downhill. On the other hand, communism-turned-socialism in the US is founded on control and restriction, with a little of the brakes released, so that it does not do more than crawl downhill.
- Jim Arlandson 2005

Isn't it somewhat remarkable that we can go back a a few hundred years and find no shortage of quotations from our founding fathers warning us against the dangers of democracy, yet today teachers and politicians use thword as if it were an offering of gold."
"Our founding fathers detested the idea of a democracy and labored long to prevent America becoming one. Once again -- the word 'democracy' does not appear in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, or the constitution of any of the fifty states. Not once. Furthermore, take a look at State of the Union speeches. You won't find the 'D' word uttered once until the Wilson years."
"I can’t think of anything that would do more toward putting us back on the road to liberty and personal responsibility than for the average American, and for the news media, to come to the understanding that we are not a democracy, nor were we supposed to be."
- Neal Boortz

Liberals love to boast that they are not “religious,” which is what one would expect to hear from the state-sanctioned religion. Of course liberalism is a religion. It has its own cosmology, its own miracles, its own beliefs in the supernatural, its own churches, its own high priests, its own saints, its own total worldview, and its own explanation of the existence of the universe. In other words, liberalism contains all the attributes of what is generally known as “religion.”
-Ann Coulter 2006

"'Democracy' does not mean freedom."
- Mark Da Cunha

"Democracy is four wolves and a sheep voting on dinner."
-- Robert A. Heinlein

The case has been made that the Palestinian choice of government undermines the logic of the Bush Administration's democracy agenda. But democracy always involves the risk that the bad guys might come to power: Look at Germany in 1933. By contrast, failing to promote democracy only guarantees that the bad guys -- the Gadhafis, the Assads, the Husseins -- will stay in power.
- Wall Street Journal Editorial - 2006

Socialism is a wonderful idea. It is only as a reality that it has been disastrous
Attempts to redistribute wealth repeatedly led to the redistribution of poverty.
Nowhere have people been willing to work as well for the common good as they do for their own benefit.
Any system which allows some people to exercise unbridled power over other people is an open invitation to abuse.
- Thomas Sowell, 2002

"The liberalism of the liberal crack-up is what is "extremist." Even a sensible idea or a fine principle is exaggerated to the point that it becomes preposterous and untenable"
- Emmett Tyrrell

Those who want to take our money and gain power over us have discovered the magic formula: Get us envious or angry at others and we will surrender, in installments, not only our money but our freedom. The most successful dictators of the 20th century -- Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao -- all used this formula and now class warfare politicians here are doing the same.
- Thomas Sowell, 2004

"People who are very aware that they have more knowledge than the average person are often very unaware that they do not have one-tenth of the knowledge of all of the average persons put together. In this situation, for the intelligentsia to impose their notions on ordinary people is essentially to impose ignorance on knowledge."
-Thomas Sowell

To me, consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies. So it is something in which no one believes and to which no one objects
If you just set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything at any time, and you would achieve nothing
- Margaret Thatcher

"Don't forget that pure democracy is a form of collectivism -- it readily sacrifices individual rights to majority wishes. Since it involves no constitutional bill of rights, or at least, no working and effective one, the majority-of-the-moment can and does vote away the rights of the minority-of-the-moment, even of a single individual. This has been called 'mob rule,' the 'tyranny of the majority' and many other pejorative names. It is one of the greatest threats to liberty, the reason why America's founding fathers wrote so much so disparagingly of pure democracy."
- Bert Rand

Rather than serving as a cleansing force, science has in some instances been seduced by the more ancient lures of politics and publicity.
-Michael Crichton

"Collectivism holds that the individual has no rights, that his life and work belong to the group (to "society," to the tribe, the state, the nation) and that the group may sacrifice him at its own whim to its own interests. The only way to implement a doctrine of that kind is by means of brute force -- and statism has always been the poltical corollary of collectivism."
-Ayn Rand

The typical liberal politician is soft on criminals, weak on defense, and ready to tax the daylights out of those who produce, in order to dispense largesse to parasites, rich and poor alike. The public isn't buying it. Indeed, liberal politicians aren't trying to sell it very much.
- Thomas Sowell, 2003

"I have wondered at times about what the Ten Commandment's would have looked like if Moses had run them through the U.S. Congress"
"I've laid down the law, though, to everyone from now on about anything that happens: no matter what time it is, wake me, even if it's in the middle of a Cabinet meeting"
-Ronald Reagan

"Intellectuals cannot operate at room temperature." Hype, moral melodrama, and sweeping visions are the way that intellectuals approached the problems of the world. "Nowhere at present is there such a measureless loathing of their country by educated people as in America."
- Eric Hoffer , Thomas Sowell, 2003

-When it becomes dominated by a collectivist creed, democracy will inevitably destroy itself.
-To be controlled in our economic pursuits means to be controlled in everything
- F. A. Hayek

A careful definition of words would destroy half the agenda of the political left and scrutinizing evidence would destroy the other half.
- Thomas Sowell, 2003

That’s the wonderful thing about multiculturalism: you can choose which side of the war you want to fight on. When the draft card arrives, just tick “home team” or “enemy,” according to taste.
-Mark Steyn 2006

"..Evolution has conditioned us to believe the worst." In Darwinian natural selection, pessimism, wariness, suspicion and discontent may be survival traits. Perhaps our relaxed and cheerful progenitors were eaten by saber-toothed tigers. Only the anxiety-prone gene pool prospered.
- George Will on Easterbrook's Book, "The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse," 2004

"You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot help the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by encouraging class hatred. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot build character and courage by taking away man's initiative and incentive. And you cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they should do for themselves."
-Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele - GOP Convention 2004

"Collectivism is the real-world manifestation of the subjective, emotion-based feral animal origins of humanity, like some recurring echo emanating from the primitive reptile brain that physically exists in all of us. It is the antithesis of rational objectivity, something that no amount of fancy verbiage from Marx or Chomsky or Himmler or Plato or Rousseau can disguise in their respective paeans to force and unity over intellect and evolution. Collectivism is a fancy word for tribalism. It is a hold over, an atavistic throw back ..."
- Perry de Havilland

How do you tell a communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti- Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin.
-Ronald Reagan - 1987

When America frees ordinary people from the domination of their betters, and prevents them for being used as guinea pigs for the vision of the anointed, the more America insults the very presumptions that enable the anointed to think of themselves as special, as one-up on the rest of us.
-Thomas Sowell; July 2, 2004

[Liberals] live in a different reality from that of the rest of us. Psychologically, they do not see what you see. They see the present and the past through a special lens. What is overwhelmingly clear to them is an imagined future collectivist utopia where antagonisms of class and race have been eliminated, the economic and social inequalities that have driven people to crime have been removed, poverty does not exist and social justice reigns, world brotherhood has replaced war and international strife, and an economy planned by people like them has produced economic abundance without pollution or waste. Coupled with this vision of the future is loathing of the real present which falls woefully short of these goals and hatred for anyone or anything that stands in the way of their illusion of the radiant future.
-John Earl Haynes, 2003

"Most modern intellectuals congratulate themselves for having achieved the allegedly momentus insight that capitalism and altruism are ultimately incompatible. Yet they're still too damned ignorant to realize, or too damned stubborn to acknowledge, that altruism is definitely NOT the only moral code available to mankind; it is, in fact, the bloodiest and most regressive one of all. Such stunted thinking on the part of the intelligentsia has resulted in their committing the intellectual atrocity of rejecting the capitalism and freedom instead of the altruism and coercion."
- Rick Gaber

Those who are unable to produce their own wealth aim to confiscate the wealth of others
- Per Bylund

People in government--people in a huge, sprawling government--often get carried away. And they don't always even mean to. But they are little tiny parts of a large and overwhelming thing. If government is a steamroller, and that is in good part how I see it, the individuals who work in it are the atoms in the steel. The force of forward motion carries them along. There is inevitably an unaccountability, and in time often an indifference about what the steamroller rolls over. All the busy little atoms are watching each other, competing with each other, winning one for their little cluster. And no one is looking out and being protective of what the steamroller is rolling over--traditions, shared beliefs, individual rights, old assumptions, whatever is being rolled over today.
-Peggy Noonan - 2006

They have accepted an understanding of political life that is all about the competition for power, the deal making that divides up the public pie so that more voters slop up the goodies at your trough than at the other guy's. Though skilled at building coalitions, they have become utterly incompetent at the work of building, serving and preserving a community.
- Alan Keyes on today's politicians, 2006

Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it
- Ronald Reagan

What is the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector? The taxidermist takes only your skin
- Mark Twain

Knowledge is one of the few things that can be given to others without reducing the amount you have left.
- Thomas Sowell - 2005

We have now been through at least two generations of constant denigration of American society, two generations in which cheap glory could be gained by flouting rules and mocking values.
- Thomas Sowell, 2006

For half a century, liberals have corrupted the courts by turning them into an instrument of radical social change on questions -- school prayer, abortion, busing, death penalty -- that properly belong to the elected branches of government.
-Charles Krauthammer

Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state lives at the expense of everyone
-Frederic Bastiat

[Democrats] have managed to pioneer an even more egregious abuse of the American political system: the manipulation of ignorance ... they have been reduced to a state of unshakable hysteria, beginning with the conviction that George W. Bush is the most vicious, evil, conniving president in American history.
-Tony Snow

It continues to defy explanation why liberals, who theoretically love liberty, equality, tolerance and moderation, should find so much to despise in their own country, which represents the fullest expression of those virtues anywhere on the globe."
--Mona Charen

The only way Congress can give one American something is to first, through the use of intimidation, threats and coercion, take it from another American. So-called rights to medical care, food and decent housing impose an obligation on some other American who, through the tax code, must be denied his right to his earnings.
- Walter Williams

"Some ideas seem so plausible that they can fail nine times in a row and still be believed the tenth time. Other ideas seem so implausible that they can succeed nine times in a row and still not be believed the tenth time. Government controls in the economy are among the first kinds of ideas and the operation of a free market is among the second kinds of ideas."
--Thomas Sowell 2005

When conservative judges strike down laws, it's because of what's in the Constitution. When liberal judges strike down laws (or impose new laws, such as tax increases), it's because of what's in The New York Times.
- Ann Coulter 2005

"...professors require their students to repeat back to them on test papers and in theses what the professors believe. Unless students hate Republicans, revile George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, renounce God, support abortion and gay rights, they can sometimes expect a lower, even a failing grade.
-Cal Thomas, Sept '09

Modern liberalism: "made in much the same way as a sausage -- it's a blend of fascist, Communist, and socialist ideologies from twentieth century Europe, with a pinch of Nazism, all ground together, yet retaining the flavor of its various parts"
- Michael Savage, Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder

Democracy and capitalism seem to have triumphed. But, appearances can be deceiving. Instead of celebrating capitalism's virtues, we offer it grudging acceptance, contemptuous tolerance but only for its capacity to feed the insatiable maw of socialism. We do not conclude that socialism suffers from a fundamental and profound flaw. We conclude instead that its ends are worthy of any sacrifice — including our freedom. Revel notes that Marxism has been "shamed and ridiculed everywhere except American universities" but only after totalitarian systems "reached the limits of their wickedness."
- Janice Rogers Brown, Associate Justice, California Supreme Court, Apr 2000

If the Supreme Court is to be invariably and inescapably political you realize we have rendered the Constitution useless
- Justice Scalia 2005

Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm -- but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.
- T. S. Elliot

What is one to say about these media--Democratic spokesmen for contemporary American liberalism? That they have embarrassed and discredited themselves. That they cannot be taken seriously as critics. It would be good to have a responsible opposition party in the United States today. It would be good to have a serious mainstream media. Too bad we have neither.
-William Kristol 2006

"...most liberals experience their differences with the rest of society as a sign of their advanced intelligence and consciousness. At best, they are perplexed at how long it is taking everyone else to catch-up with their enlightened state of understanding.
-Thomas Lifson 2005

The Federalists drafted the greatest political philosophy ever written by man and created the first constitutional republic. The anti-Federalists -- or "pre-Democrats, as I call them -- were formed to oppose the Constitution, which, to a great extent, remains their position today.
-Ann Coulter

What is a moderate interpretation [of the Constitution]? Halfway between what it says and halfway between what you want it to say?
- Anthony Scalia noting that the left uses code words "mainstream" or "moderate" to describe their judges. [2006]

Orwellian NEWSPEAK from "The Party"

"The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. ... We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?"
--George Orwell, "1984"

"..the era of Big Government is over."
- Bill Clinton's 1996 State of the Union address

"There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there. Since we can't keep track of all of them here at the White House, we're asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov."
-Big Brother

New Transparancy, Obama style !!

"As administrator, I will ensure EPA's efforts to address the environmental crises of today are rooted in three fundamental values: science-based policies and program, adherence to the rule of law, and overwhelming transparency." - Environmental Protection Agency Administrator, Lisa Jackson

"...the days of science taking a backseat to ideology are over." - Obama

-KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL - on the silencing of man-made global warming critic Alan Carlin, a 35-year Environmental Protection Agency veteran. p> Although I did not use the word 'terrorism,' I referred to 'man-caused' disasters. That is perhaps only a nuance, but it demonstrates that we want to move away from the politics of fear toward a policy of being prepared for all risks that can occur.
-Janet Napolitano when asked why the word "terrorism" never passed her lips during her first Congressional testimony as Secretary

The Administration [ie The Party] has stopped using the phrase, and I think that speaks for itself. I have not heard it used. I have not gotten any directive about using it or not using it. It is just not being used.
- Hillary Clinton on the the phrase "war on terrorism" [now an "overseas contingency operations"]

The Constitution enumerates three requirements of those who would be president (they must be natural-born citizens, at least 35 and a resident within the country for 14 years) and now the government's thrashing about in the economy imposes a fourth: Presidents must be able to speak pluperfect nonsense with a straight face, lest the country understand what the government is doing.
- George Will on Obama, Apr 2009

Liberals never, ever drop a heinous idea; they just change the name. "Abortion" becomes "choice," "communist" becomes "progressive," "communist dictatorship" becomes "people's democratic republic"
-Ann Coulter

So, the next time you hear the phrase, 'social justice', take time to question the one who is using it.... chances are they have no idea that the vision of justice that has taken their hearts captive was perpetrated by a terrorist who is using their good will to spread his hatred and to bring forth a more authoritative government where the individual is held captive to a few elitists with ultimate power.
-Rebecca Hagelin, Heritage Foundation

Environmental Movements

President Obama is calling the climate bill that the House passed last week an "extraordinary" achievement, and so it is. The 1,200-page wonder manages the supreme feat of being both hugely expensive while doing almost nothing to reduce carbon emissions
-Wall St Journal Editorial - July 3, 2009

Here they go again -- our faithful representatives in Washington, that is. They're about to pass, without reading its 1,200-plus pages, an incredibly expensive and destructive cap and trade bill, which has little prayer of accomplishing what it sets out to accomplish but satisfies their urgent need to pay homage to their liberal ideology and secular humanist worldview.
-David Limbaugh, June 2009 on Congress' Global Warming initiative

The only predictions that have been made are apocalyptic, so the hypothesis has to be accepted before it can be tested.
-James Kerian, a mechanical engineer opining on man-made global warming in the Wall St. Journal - July 2008

...as a practical matter, would be the aim of global warming policy? Our political system permits only one answer: to please the special interests that even now are gathering at the trough for subsidies in the name of climate change.
- Wall St. Journal's Holman W. Jenkins, Jr

I suppose, fundamentally, it's the fact that someone is speaking about a science that I have been very heavily involved with and have labored so hard in, and been humiliated by, in the sense that the climate is so difficult to understand, Mother Nature is so complex, and so the uncertainties are great, and then to hear someone speak with such certainty and such confidence about what the climate is going to do is -- well, I suppose I could be kind and say, it's annoying to me.
-John Christy of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize) - on Al Gore's movie, "An Inconvenient Truth"

My concern is that we may be moving away from an irrational lack of concern about climate change to an equally irrational panic about it.....Many of my colleagues ask, "What's the problem? Hasn't it been a good thing to raise public concern?" The problem is that in this panic we are going to spend our money unwisely, we will take actions that are counterproductive, and we will fail to do many of those things that will benefit the environment and ourselves.
-Daniel B. Botkin, president of the Center for the Study of the Environment

Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is generally to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.
Web site Greenie Watch - http://antigreen.blogspot.com/

When politicians and journalists declare that the science of global warming is settled, they show a regrettable ignorance about how science works.
-Nigel Calder, former editor of New Scientists

"Between the year A.D. 1 and the year 1850, volcanos and fluctuations in the heat from the sun were responsible for temperature changes, but these changes were much less pronounced than the warming caused by man-made pollution in the years since the mid-19th century. This gets to the point of the hysteria. Scientific Man in all his manufactured glory can't bear the thought that he might not, after all, be as powerful as a volcano or a solar flare. How many learned degrees does a volcano have, after all? The idea that forces of the universe greater even than Scientific Man may be responsible for the cyclical changes is unbearable. Hence 'global warming' has become the religion—the opiate, you might say—of Scientific Man, a doctrine supported by quackery, supposition and speculation, and as closely held and as ferociously defended as the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection at a gathering of devout Christians. You could ask the Rt. Rev. Al Gore, the presiding archbishop of the First Church of the Boiling Globe. The bishops and monsignors of the church treat dissent harshly, though not yet at the stake."
—Wesley Pruden

A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject - Winston Churchill

The truth is, no country is going to cut its growth or consumption substantially in the light of a long-term environmental problem
-British Prime Minister Tony Blair on Kyoto - 2005

There are ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically....The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality
- Newsweek - April 28, 1975 - on the conviction that politicians would fail to prevent global COOLING and the coming Ice Age.

Terrorism

Lowering the price to be paid by aggressors virtually guarantees more aggression.
- Thomas Sowell

---

And what changed policy was September the 11th. That changed policy. But actually, before September the 11th, this global movement with a global ideology was already in being. September the 11th was the culmination of what they wanted to do.

But actually, you know -- and this is probably where the policymakers such as myself were truly in error -- is that even before September the 11th this was happening in all sorts of different ways in different countries.

I mean, in Algeria for example, tens and tens of thousands of people lost their lives.

This movement has grown. It is there. It will latch onto any cause that it possibly can and give it a dimension of terrorism and hatred.

You can see this. You can see it in Kashmir, for example. You can see it in Chechnya, you know? You can see it in Palestine.

Now, what is its purpose?

Its purpose is to promote its ideology based on a perversion of Islam and to use any methods at all, but particularly terrorism, to do that. Because they know that the value of terrorism to them is -- as I was saying a moment or two ago -- it's not simply the act of terror, it's the chain reaction that terror brings with it.

Terrorism brings the reprisal; the reprisal brings the additional hatred; the additional hatred breeds the additional terrorism, and so on.

In a small way, we lived through that in Northern Ireland over many, many decades.

Now, what happened after September the 11th -- and this explains, I think, the president's policy but also the reason why I have taken the view and still take the view that Britain and America should remain strong allies, shoulder to shoulder, in fighting this battle, is that we are never going to succeed unless we understand they are going to fight hard.

The reason why they are doing what they are doing in Iraq at the moment -- and, yes, it's really tough as a result of it -- is because they know that if right in the center of the Middle East, in an Arab Muslim country, you've got a nonsectarian democracy -- in other words people weren't governed either by religious fanatics or secular dictators -- you've got a genuine democracy of the people: How does their ideology flourish in such circumstances?

So they have imported the terrorism into that country, preyed on whatever reactionary elements there are to boost it. And that's why we have the issue there.

That's why the Taliban are trying to come back in Afghanistan. That is why the moment it looked as if you could get progress in Israel and Palestine, it had to be stopped.

That's the moment when, as they say there was a problem in Gaza, so they realized: Well, there's a possibility now we can set Lebanon against Israel.

Now, it's a global movement. It's a global ideology.

And if there's any mistake that's ever made in these circumstances, it's if people are surprised that it's tough to fight, because you're up against an ideology that's prepared to us any means at all, including killing any number of wholly innocent people.

And I don't dispute part of the implication of your question at all in the sense that you look at what is happening in the Middle East, and what is happening in Iraq and Lebanon and Palestine, and of course there's a sense of shock and frustration and anger at what is happening, and grief at the loss of innocent lives.

But it is not a reason for walking away. It's a reason for staying the course and staying it no matter how tough it is: because the alternative is actually letting this ideology grip larger and larger numbers of people.

And it is going to be difficult. Look, we've got a problem even in our own Muslim communities in Europe who will half buy into some of the propaganda that's pushed at it -- the purpose of America is to suppress Islam; you know, Britain's joined with America in the suppression of Islam.

And one of the things we've got to stop doing is stop apologizing for our own positions. Muslims in America, as far as I'm aware of, are free to worship.

- Tony Blair - July 2006

Tell them I will do whatever they want.
Libya's Col Gadhafi message to the White House through Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi

His vote against the first Gulf War was, he says, a sign of his support for the first Gulf War. Whereas his vote in favor of the Iraq war was a sign of his opposition to the Iraq war. And his vote against funding America's troops in Iraq is a sign of his support for America's men and women in uniform. On the same principle, I think the best way voters this November can demonstrate their support for John Kerry is by voting against him.'
- Mark Steyn, 2004

There is a myth that though we love freedom, others don't; that our attachment to freedom is a product of our culture; that freedom, democracy, human rights, the rule of law are American values or Western values; that Afghan women were content under the lash of the Taliban; that Saddam was somehow beloved by his people; that Milosevic was Serbia's savior. Members of Congress, ours are not Western values. They are the universal values of the human spirit, and anywhere--anywhere, anytime ordinary people are given the chance to choose, the choice is the same: freedom, not tyranny; democracy, not dictatorship; the rule of law, not the rule of the secret police.
- Tony Blair 2003

Then September 11 happened. And bizarrely the reaction of just about every prominent western leader was to visit a mosque: President Bush did, the Prince of Wales did, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom did, the Prime Minister of Canada did… . The Premier of Ontario didn’t, and so twenty Muslim community leaders had a big summit to denounce him for failing to visit a mosque
-Mark Steyn 2006

Apparently due to the success of George Bush at keeping the United States secure, he, not Osama bin Laden, can now more often be the target of a relieved Left — deserving of assassination in an Alfred Knopf novel, an overseer of Nazi policies according to a U.S. senator, a buffoon, and rogue in the award-winning film of Michael Moore. Yes, because we did so well against the real enemies, we soon had the leisure to invent new imaginary ones in Bush/Cheney, Halliburton, the Patriot Act, John Ashcroft, and Scooter Libby.
-Victor Davis Hanson - 2006

Hillary

She hasn't run a corner store, she hasn't run a state, she hasn't run a city... and the idea that she could learn to be president...as an internship, just doesn't make any sense
-Mitt Romney

The only way to make a difference is to acquire power"
-Hillary Clinton to a friend before starting law school

We must stop thinking of the individual and start thinking about what is best for society
-Hillary as first lady.

We just can't trust the American people to make those types of choices.... Government has to make those choices for people
-Hillary to Rep. Dennis Hastert in 1993 discussing her health care plan.

...a power-hungry utopian socialist who believes that political elites (i.e., she) should decide how the rest of us live
- American Spectator's Steven M. Warshawsky on Hillary

Humor and such

Being with a woman all night never hurt no professional baseball player. It's staying up all night looking for a woman that does him in.
- NY Yankee Coach Casey Stengel

Standing next to somebody who says: 'What was that?'
Edward Teller when asked the best place to be if an H -bomb goes off

Freepers

Political web sites tend to attract those who have never accomplished much of anything. They suck up to a supervisor they hate. The do work they dislike doing and take orders from people they see as powerful. They see themselves as impotent pawns. But in the anonymous world of web sites they can lash out at those they fear.
-Common Tator (Free Republic) - 2005

Education

The chief object of education is not to learn things but to unlearn things.
—G. K. Chesterton

Fraudulent grades exacerbate other problems. When a black kid has all A's and B's and makes the dean's list, what will he and his parents blame for his failure to get a decent SAT score, get into college or get a job? They're going to blame it on racial discrimination. All they'll see is that white kids with A's and B's do well and their kids with the same grades do not.
- Walter Williams, 2004

On the 2008 Election

What really eats at me is that I'm constantly put in the position of not voting for or against a candidate but for or against the Constitution. For or against giving up more power and rights. For or against the road to serfdom.
-Yours truly [The Raven] - Oct 30, 2008

Voters need to remember on Nov. 4 that when Marx's books are selling well and communists are happy, we are headed for trouble
- INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY editorial October 16, 2008

When the Communist Party USA approvingly says Obama would "advance progressive politics for the long term" -- run.
-Larry Elder

The sequence is always the same. High- tax, big-spending policies force the economy to lose momentum. Then growth in government spending outstrips revenues. Fiscal and trade deficits soar. Public debt, excessive taxation and unemployment follow. The central bank tries to solve the problem by printing money. International competitiveness is lost and the currency depreciates. The system stagnates. And then a frightened electorate returns conservatives to power.
Adam Lerrick, professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University - two weeks before the 2008 elections.

It may seem hardly worthwhile going to the polls to vote this election year, since ACORN and the media have already decided that Barack Obama is to be the next President of the United States.
-Thomas Sowell Oct 2008

Fannie and Freddie are fundamentally sound, they are not in danger of going under. They're not the best investments these days from the long-term standpoint going back. I think they are in good shape going forward."
- Chairman of the House Finance - Barney Frank [D ] three months before Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac collapsed and he blamed the Republicans

"Like a lot of my Democratic colleagues I was too slow to appreciate the recklessness of Fannie and Freddie. I defended their efforts to encourage affordable homeownership when in retrospect I should have heeded the concerns raised by their regulator in 2004. Frankly, I wish my Democratic colleagues would admit when it comes to Fannie and Freddie, we were wrong." - Representative Artur Davis [D] of Alabama on the mortgage/financial crisis of 2008

"[H]as there ever been a presidential nominee with a wider gap between his estimation of himself and the sum total of his lifetime achievements? "
- Charles Krauthammer

We suspect that Mr. Obama will discover that when you put "tax fairness" ahead of economic progress, you produce neither.
-Arthur Laffer

"There are two questions we will never have to ask ourselves, 'Who is this man?' and 'Can we trust this man with the presidency?'"
- Fred Thompson - Republican Convention on John McCain, Sept. 2.

"Listening to [Obama] speak, it's easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform - not even in the state senate … This is a man who can give an entire speech about the wars America is fighting, and never use the word "victory" except when he's talking about his own campaign. But when the cloud of rhetoric has passed ... when the roar of the crowd fades away ... when the stadium lights go out, and those Styrofoam Greek columns are hauled back to some studio lot - what exactly is our opponent's plan? What does he actually seek to accomplish, after he's done turning back the waters and healing the planet? The answer is to make government bigger ... take more of your money ... give you more orders from Washington ... and to reduce the strength of America in a dangerous world. America needs more energy ... our opponent is against producing it. Victory in Iraq is finally in sight ... he wants to forfeit."
-Sarah Pain, in her acceptance speech, Sept 2008

The [strategic oil] reserve should only be used in the event of an emergency, [and not] to provide a small, short-term decrease in gas prices
-B Obama

White house hopeful Barack Obama called on Monday for tapping the nation's strategic oil reserve in an effort to drop soaring gas prices
- News item Aug 2008

For the first few months of the campaign, the question about Obama was: Who is he? The question now is: Who does he think he is?
-Charles Krauthammer, 2008

-------------------------------------------------------

Recommended reading for the aspiring progressive:

Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg [Can't happen here? It already did and the Democrats did it. - But they run the schools so you'll need to read about it here]

A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles, Thomas Sowell [origins of Democrat's thought process - and the opposite & correct thought process]

Basic Economics: A Citizens Guide to the Economy, Thomas Sowell [excellent voter's guide]

Why Government Is the Problem, Milton Friedman

The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism and The Constitution of Liberty, Friedrich A. Hayek [primers for the socialists]

Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism - Joshua Muravchik [Everywhere socialism has been tried has ended in disaster and millions murdered for what?]

Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First - Mona Charen [great read - the title says it all]

In Denial: Historians, Communism, & Espionage - John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr [The liberal dream didn't work - but they don't want you to know]

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature - Steven Pinker [Liberals always have a theory for why humans do bad things...here's why they're wrong]

The Road to Serfdom - Friedrich A. Hayek [Wonderful reading. Written a while back, but still true]

Free to Choose - Milton Friedman [Liberals always have a theory for why capitalism is bad...here's why they're wrong]

Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies-M. Stanton Evans [Simply unbelievable what the left's propaganda machine can do]

The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World -Bjorn Lomborg [the only voice on the other side of environmentalism]

Dependent on DC: The Rise of Federal Control over the Lives of Ordinary Americans - Charlotte Twight [How we got where we are....big government and incrementalism]

Men in Black - Mark Levin [The Great One is on target with the Supremes]

The New Thought Police - Tammy Bruce [ A little insight in how the libs operate the propaganda machine

Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith [Murder mystery in the USSR under Stalin with harsh details of day-to-day life in the dictatorship]

The Best Recipe - Editors of Cook's Illustrated Magazine [The authors use trial and error to optimize favorite meals.....right down to the hamburgers and spaghetti sauce...absolutely wonderful results]

My Travels - Countries I've Visited

visited 49 states (98%)
Create your own visited map of The United States or another interesting project

Dawn Patrol Map Link