If we have no peace,
it is because we have forgotten
that we belong to each other.
- Mother Teresa
Some’ll rob you with a six gun,
Some with a fountain pen.
- Woody Guthrie
I sincerely believe that banking establishments
are more dangerous than standing armies,
- Thomas Jefferson
I hope we shall crush in its birth
the aristocracy of our monied corporations
which dare already to challenge our government
to a trial by strength,
and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
- Thomas Jefferson (from a letter to George Logan, Nov. 12th, 1816)
In the councils of government,
we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence,
whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.
The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power
exists and will persist.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.
- Mark Twain
How does it become a man to behave
towards the American government today?
I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.
- Henry David Thoreau
If the present Congress errs in too much talking,
how can it be otherwise in a body to which the people
send one hundred and fifty lawyers,
whose trade it is to question everything,
yield nothing, and talk by the hour?
- Thomas Jefferson
Politics ought to be the part-time profession of every citizen
who would protect the rights and privileges of free people
and who would preserve what is
good and fruitful in our national heritage.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Cowardice asks the question – is it safe?
Expediency asks the question – is it politic?
Vanity asks the question – is it popular?
But conscience asks the question – is it right?
And there comes a time when one must take a position
that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular;
but one must take it BECAUSE it is right.
- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
One who breaks an unjust law
that conscience tells him is unjust,
and who willingly accepts
the penalty of imprisonment
in order to arouse the conscience
of the community over its injustice,
is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
A people that values its privileges
above its principles
soon loses both.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
We are not going to be able
to operate our Spaceship Earth
successfully nor for much longer
unless we see it as a whole spaceship
and our fate as common.
It has to be everybody or nobody.
- R. Buckminster Fuller
Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy
than to imprison a person
or keep him in prison because he is unpopular.
This is really the test of civilization.
- Winston Churchill
Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit
which prizes liberty as a heritage of all men,
in all lands, everywhere.
Destroy this spirit and you have planted
the seeds of despotism around your own doors.
- Abraham Lincoln
To deprive a man of his natural liberty
and to deny to him the ordinary amenities of life
is worse then starving the body;
it is starvation of the soul, the dweller in the body.
- Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi
The people of the world genuinely want peace.
Some day the leaders of the world are going to
have to give in and give it to them.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible
will make violent revolution inevitable.
- John F. Kennedy
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired,
signifies in the final sense
a theft from those who hunger and are not fed,
those who are cold and are not clothed.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
The new rage is to say that the government
is the cause of all our problems,
and if only we had no government, we’d have no problems.
I can tell you, that contradicts
evidence, history, and common sense.
- William J. Clinton
Republicans are men of narrow vision,
who are afraid of the future.
- Jimmy Carter
Capitalism tries for a delicate balance:
It attempts to work things out so that
everyone gets just enough stuff to keep them from
getting violent and trying to take other people’s stuff.
- George Carlin
When a nation is filled with strife,
then do patriots flourish.
- Lao Tzu
Revolutions go not backward.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
America did not invent human rights.
In a very real sense, it is the other way around.
Human rights invented America.
- Jimmy Carter
May we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Capital as such is not evil; it is its wrong use that is evil.
Capital in some form or other will always be needed.
- Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi
If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it,
people will eventually come to believe it.
- Joseph Goebbels (Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany)
Almost any sect, cult, or religion will
legislate its creed into law
if it acquires the political power.
- Robert A. Heinlein
Politics is such a torment that I advise everyone
I love not to mix with it.
- Thomas Jefferson
We are tired of aristocratic explanations in Harvard words.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
If you have ten thousand regulations
you destroy all respect for the law.
- Winston Churchill
A riot is, at bottom, the language of the unheard.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
War is the ultimate tool of politics.
- R. Buckminster Fuller
Though force can protect in emergency,
only justice, fairness, consideration and cooperation
can finally lead men to the dawn of eternal peace.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
You cannot divorce religious belief and public service.
I’ve never detected any conflict between
God’s will and my political duty.
If you violate one, you violate the other.
- Jimmy Carter
Only Americans can hurt America.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
We shall require a substantially
new manner of thinking
if mankind is to survive.
- Albert Einstein
There are a number of things wrong with Washington.
One of them is that everyone is too far from home.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Information is the currency of democracy.
- Thomas Jefferson
I can not believe that war
is the best solution.
No one won the last war,
and no one will win the next war.
- Eleanor Roosevelt
Politics is like football; if you see daylight, go through the hole.
- John F. Kennedy
Unlike presidential administrations,
problems rarely have terminal dates.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Suppose you were an idiot,
and suppose you were a member of Congress;
but I repeat myself.
- Mark Twain
Nothing is more destructive of respect
for the government and the law of the land
than passing laws which cannot be enforced.
- Albert Einstein
It is error alone which needs the support of government.
Truth can stand by itself.
- Thomas Jefferson
It has become appallingly obvious that
our technology has exceeded our humanity.
- Albert Einstein
A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
- H. L. MenckenThe people of the world genuinely want peace.
Some day the leaders of the world are going to
have to give in and give it to them.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
You can lead a man to Congress,
but you can’t make him think.
- Milton Berle
History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely
only after they have exhausted all other alternatives.
- Abba Eban
