masterwordsmith-unplugged

"There is a constituency in the Congress that sees the tax code as a way to do favors for people which is a way to get elected that's not as obvious as actually writing them a check from the American people."
Paul O'Neill, U.S. Treasury Secretary

"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
George Orwell

"Right thinking will be rewarded, wrong thinking punished."
George Orwell, "1984"

"All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others."
George Orwell

"Justice without force is impotent; force without justice is tyranny."
Pascal

"Freedom is rarely lost in a single stroke. The danger lies in losing it bit by bit."
Dennis Patrick

"If everybody is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking."
General George Patton

"No man has ever won a war by dying for his country, he won the war by making the other, poor, dumb bastard die for his."
George Patton, June, 1944

"The main difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is that the Democrats would take us over the cliff at 80 miles an hour; the Republicans would stay within the speed limit -- but we're still heading over the cliff."
Howard Phillips

"Write on my gravestone: "Infidel, Traitor."--infidel to every church that compromises with wrong; traitor to every government that oppresses the people."
Wendell Phillips

"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
Max Planck

"The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men."
Plato

"Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,
As, to be hated, needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace."
Alexander Pope (An Essay on Man: Epistle 2)

"Under capitalism man exploits man; under socialism the reverse is true."
Polish Proverb

"Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear."
Ambrose Redmoon

"Liberty doesn't work as well in practice as it does in speeches."
Will Rogers

"I prefer liberty with danger to peace with slavery."
J.J. Rousseau

"You can recognize a pioneer by the arrows in his back."
Beverly Rubik

"A hammer breaks glass, but forges steel."
Russian proverb

"If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe."
Carl Sagan, famous astronomer

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
George Santayna

"Let me give you a definition of ethics: It is good to maintain and further life, it is bad to damage and destroy life."
Albert Schweitzer ("Religion and Modern Civilization" Christian Century, November 28, 1934)

"Nothing is less worthy of honor than an old man who has no other evidence of having lived long, except his age."
Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4? B.C. - A. D. 65)

"There is no evil that does not offer inducements. Avarice promises money; luxury, a varied assortment of pleasure; ambition, a purple robe and applause. Vices tempt you by the rewards which they offer."
Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4? B.C. - A. D. 65)

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
George Bernard Shaw

"Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance."
George Bernard Shaw

"If you have integrity, nothing else matters. If you don't have integrity, nothing else matters."
Alan Simpson

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
Upton Sinclair

"The world is not the way they tell you it is."
Adam Smith

"When the mass media in some foreign countries serve as megaphones for the rhetoric of their government, the result is ludicrous propaganda. When the mass media in our country serve as megaphones for the rhetoric of the U.S. government, the result is responsible journalism."
Norman Solomon

"One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic."
Josef Stalin

"My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular."
Adlai Stevenson, speech, Detroit, 1952

"The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual crime."
Max Stirner

"Integrity pays, but not in cash."
Jennifer Stone

"When a true genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign; that all the dunces are in confederacy against him."
Jonathan Swift

"There is no such thing as a free press. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who would dare to write his honest opinion. The business of the journalist is to destroy truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell himself, his country, and his race, for his daily bread. We are tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are jumping jacks; they pull our strings, we dance; our talents, our possibilities, and our lives are the property of these men. We are intellectual prostitutes."
John Swinton (1829-1901) pre-eminent New York journalist & head of the editorial staff at the New York Times. Quoted one night between 1880-1883.
Quoted by Upton Sinclair in his 1919 book:
The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism, page 400
Even though Upton Sinclair was famous by 1919, because he was criticizing corruption in the media, he had to self-publish this book.

"God looks at the clean hands, not the full ones."
Publilius Syrus

"Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different."
Albert Szent-Gyorgyi (1893-1986), Nobel prize in Medicine - 1937

"We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are."
Talmudic Saying

"By and by, you will find they will tear the Constitution to shreds, as they have begun now; they won't have to begin; they have started long ago to rend the Constitution of our country in pieces; ...but we will stand by and maintain its principles and the rights of all men of every color, and every clime."
John Taylor, 1884

"After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood."
Fred Thompson

"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root."
Henry David Thoreau

"Why are we surprised when fig trees bear figs?"
Margaret Titzel

"Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great."
Alexis de Tocqueville

"There is one universal law ... That law is justice. Justice forms the cornerstone of each nation's law."
Alexis de Tocqueville

"Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself."
Tolstoy

"Of the 22 civilizations that have appeared in history, 19 of them collapsed when they reached the moral state America is in today."
Arnold Toynbee, who died in 1975, long before things got bad. This quote was quoted by U.S. Senator Zell Miller (D-Georgia) and at one time was on his official Senate web site.

"Education ... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading."
G.M. Trevelyan

"No matter how far you've gone down the wrong road, turn back."
Turkish Proverb

"Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself."
Mark Twain

"It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare."
Mark Twain

"If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything."
Mark Twain

"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 Treasury. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the Public Treasury with a result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy always followed by dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years."
Sir Alexander Fraser Tyler "Decline and Fall of the Athenian Republic"

"Why may not the Bible and especially the New Testament be read and taught as a divine revelation in school? Where else can the purest principles of morality be learned so clearly or so perfectly as from the New Testament?"
U.S. Supreme Court, 1844, Vidal v. Girard's Executors, Justice Story delivered the Supreme Court's unanimous opinion

"Our laws and our institutions must necessarily be based upon and embody the teachings of the Redeemer of mankind. It is impossible that it should be otherwise; and in this sense and to this extent our civilization and our institutions are emphatically Christian...this is a Christian nation."
U.S. Supreme Court, 1892, Church of the Holy Trinity vs. U.S.

"Politicians have always coveted the liberties we hold."
Walter Williams