masterwordsmith-unplugged

"During recent centuries, many aspiring rulers have curried the common man's favor by promising them other men's property."
Peter Kershaw

"Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men."
Martin Luther King, Jr.

"We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people."
Martin Luther King, Jr.

"He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it."
Martin Luther King, Jr. (Stride Toward Freedom)

"Ninety percent of politicians give the other ten percent a bad name."
Henry Kissinger

"If the wind will not serve, take to the oars."
Latin proverb

"Many people today don't want honest answers insofar as honest means unpleasant or disturbing, they want a soft answer that turneth away anxiety."
Louis Kronenberger

"Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grandchildren are once more slaves."
D.H. Lawrence, Classical American Literature, 1922

"Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man."
C.S. Lewis, 20th-century British novelist and scholar

"When you get into politics, you find that all your worst nightmares about it turn out to be true, and the people who are attracted to large concentrations of power are precisely the ones who should be kept as far away from it as possible."
Ken Livingstone, Member of Parliament

"Whenever the legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience."
John Locke

"Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear -- kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor -- with the cry of grave national emergency ... Always there has been some terrible evil to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant sums demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real."
General Douglas MacArthur, 1957

"With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance."
Norman Mailer

"Don't think there are no crocodiles because the water is calm."
Malayan Proverb

"Those are my principles, if you don't like them I have others."
Groucho Marx

"Every society honors its live conformists, and its dead troublemakers."
Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

"Most people want security in this world, not liberty."
H.L. Mencken, Minority Report, 1956

"The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it."
H.L. Mencken

"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
James D. Miles

"I do not know what I seem to the world, but to myself I appear to have been like a boy playing upon the seashore and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay before me all undiscovered."
Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727)

"In Germany they first came for the Communists and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me--and by that time no one was left to speak up."
Pastor Martin Niemoller, 1892-1984

"God grant me the courage not to give up what I think is right, even though I think it is hopeless."
Admiral Chester W. Nimitz

"Nothing is politically right which is morally wrong."
Daniel O'Connell