U

• We have, I fear, confused power with greatness.

• You cannot adopt politics as a profession and remain honest.

V

• The less Government interferes with private pursuits, the better for the general prosperity.

• The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.

• Tomorrow will be another day.

• It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.
• The history of the great events of this world are scarcely more than the history of crime.
• It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.
• Superstition: Any practice or form of religion to which we are not accustomed. Any worship that us not offered up to the true God is false and superstitious. The only true God is the God of our priests; the only true worship is that which seems the most fitting to them; and to which they have accustomed us from our earliest childhood; any other worship is clearly superstitious, false, and even ridiculous.
• Theology: A science profound, supernatural, and divine, which teaches us to reason on that which we do not understand and to get our ideas mixed up on that which we do. Thus it is evident that theology is the noblest and most valuable science there is, all the others confining themselves to known and consequently despicable objects. Without theology empires could not subsist, the church would perish, and nations would not know what to think about wars, gratuitous predestination, and the BULL Unigenitus, concerning which last it is of vital importance that people have the most precise conception.

• The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

W

• I'd rather have a free bottle in front of me than a prefrontal lobotomy.

• To a largely black audience: "Sure, I look like a white man. But my heart is as black as anyone's here."

• Why is this thus? What is the reason for this thusness?
• There's a good deal of human nature in man.

• Wild flowers don't grow in rows.
• What you seize is what you get.
• Visitors go to where the humanity is.

• You can't hold a man down without staying down with him.

• Government is not reason, it is not eloquence--it is force!
• The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations is, in extending our commercial relations to have with them as little political connection as possible.
• Europe has a set of primary interests which to us have none or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise of us to implicate ourselves by artificial ties in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics or the ordinary combinations or collisions of her friendships or enmities.

• When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers therefore are the founders of human civilization.
• Man is a special being, and if left to himself, in an isolated condition, would be one of the weakest creatures; but associated with his kind, he works wonders.
• Of all the contrivances for cheating the laboring classes of mankind, none has been more effectual than that which deludes them with paper money. This is the most effectual of inventions to fertilize the rich man's field by the sweat of the poor man's brow. Ordinary tyranny, oppression, excessive taxation, these bear lightly on the happiness of the mass of the community, compared with the fraudulent currencies and the robberies committed by depreciated paper. Our own history has recorded for our instruction enough, and more than enough, of the demoralizing tendency, the injustice, and the intolerable oppression on the virtuous and well disposed, of a degraded paper currency, authorized by law, or any way countenanced by government.

• Power is always insolent and despotic.

• Conscience forces us to confront intuitive realities without which we cannot live responsibly and without which we cannot expect to behave morally.
• If your character (personality) is a significant cause of what you do, which it is when you consciously decide to take an action, then you are responsible. It doesn't change things that your character or personality was shaped by forces beyond yourself.
• Look at what has become of guilt. We live in an age when guilt is not only mocked, it is trivialized. More people use the terms "sin" and "guilt" in relation to food, I suspect, than in relation to anything else. What is sin? A piece of cheesecake, of course.
• Feeling guilty is the beginning. Feeling guilty is the source of powerful behaviors and of the deepest levels motivating change. A guilty conscience is both the outward manifestation of feelings and the arbiter that involves the mind in controlling the emotions, and is therefore the central locus for moral activity in human life.
• Guilt that is emotional and intellectual is therefore a desirable necessity of human existence, abandoned only at the peril of abandoning everything that is worthwhile in our lives.

• Bill Weld will not tip-toe around Washington DC on bended knee.

• If the thesis that war is unchristian has so little Christian support, modern man had better base his actions on secular morals untarnished by piety, and consider that the Christian church is simply one more of the atavisms that need to be rooted out if man is to survive at all.
• If Christians do merely what the laws of their respective lands require, then it is not clear whether it means anything more to be a Christian than to be a law-abiding citizen.
• Occasionally the local church may attack some straw issue like prohibition or gambling, or support some platitudinous position on health or flood relief, but the major history of the major churches is a great wasteland of indecision on the problems of life and death. Religion is not, thus, believed to entail any practical consequences, since as a matter of fact everything seems to be permitted. If war is unchristian, uncharitable, or at least unpleasant, this dictum does not seem to be of sufficient Christian concern.
• ... churches now, as in the past, function as a major sanction for military recruitment, and perhaps as the major rock of strength for those whose consciences may bother them about the killing business.
• We praise soldiers for doing by deceit and treachery what would meet with capital punishment among civilians.
• How does one explain to the decedents of the Hiroshima victims that the nuclear oven which obliterated their relatives was on a higher moral plane than that which obliterated the helpless Jews in Nazi Germany?
• For every claim that men are warlike there is counter evidence of the masses of citizens who are so far removed from this sentiment that they must be drafted before they will fight at all.
• Each escalation in a war, each new village bombed, and each new attack on an enemy fortification does result in an escalation of inhumanity, or in an inoculation against sensitivity. In the same bland voice with which the news announcer reports the imminence of the Christmas season, he reports the wiping out of enemy villages.
• Much of the shock which persons may feel when confronted with the pacifist position is due not so much to the position itself as to the fact that some persons have such sensitive moral feelings as to be willing to stand against government or social criticism ... as if there were something uncouth about a public proclamation of principle.
• Part of the whole military deception consists of the uniform with its badges and medals, and the status that comes with the wearing of them. The status that comes with clothes is particularly appealing to the lower classes, the psychologically insecure, and the mentally unfit.
• The issues are so confounded by sophistry that the military enterprise is carried out on the assumption that soldiers have a right to kill anyone whose innocence has not been demonstrated.
• If America is considered to be a case of a peace-loving nation, then peace-loving nations are better prepared for war and they wage war more frequently than other kinds of nations. Not only this, but peace-loving nations win wars and fight them less on their own territory. Peace-loving nations have more troops stationed on other people's land, and are more involved in the politics of other countries than the so-called warlike nations.
• What rationale can there be for a nation which has just lost multi-millions of its citizens in a first-strike in feeling justified in a reciprocal strike? Is there some issue so important that the annihilation of two nations is preferable to the survival of either?
• A politician who was so obtuse and bellicose as to recommend solving the problem of the Negro demand for equality by well-placed atom bombs would be considered both socially dangerous and psychically sick. The current myopia, however, permits these same persons to propose a similar step in Russia, China, Cuba, or Vietnam without much of a response of revulsion from otherwise sensitive persons. As some military men have insisted, the death of the enemy is mere statistics, the death of our own soldiers is a tragedy.
• If modern warfare appears more bloody than in the middle ages, it is probably due in addition to the more effective weapons, to the concept of "absolute" war. In this thesis the entire nation is at war, and this tends to eliminate the distinction between combatants and non-combatants. If civilians, men, women, and children, are all combatants, it makes no sense to compare medieval and modern war. The Hague Conventions deplored the wholesale bombing of cities in 1899 as inhuman, since the residents were not combatants--while in World War II both sides practiced wholesale bombing of cities, in part on the theory that every member of the enemy country is a potential threat.

• Wherever riches have increased, the essence of religion has decreased in the same proportion. Therefore I do not see how it is possible in the nature of things for any revival of religion to continue long. For religion must necessarily produce both industry and frugality, and these cannot but produce riches. But as riches increase so will pride, anger, and love of the world in all its branches. How then is it possible that Methodism, that is, a religion of the heart, though it flourishes now as a green bay tree, should continue in this state? For the Methodists in every place grow diligent and frugal; consequently they increase in goods. Hence they proportionately increase in pride, in anger, in the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes and the pride of life. So, although the form of religion remains, the spirit is swiftly vanishing away. Is there no way to prevent this--this continual decay of pure religion?

• Is that your sword, or are you just pleased to see me?
• I wouldn't let him touch me with a ten foot pole.
• I'm feeling a little tired today. One of those fellows'll have to go home.
• When I'm good I'm very good, but when I'm bad I'm better.

• If one attaches no meaning to the words good and just and right except that such is the divine command, then to say that God is good and his commandments just is only saying in a circuitous way that he is what he is, and wills what he wills, which might equally be said of any being in the universe.
• Honesty is the best policy; but he who is governed by that maxim is not an honest man.

• A "fraternity" is the antithesis of fraternity.

• It requires a very unusual mind to understand the analysis of the obvious.
• The thorough skeptic is a dogmatist. He enjoys the delusion of complete futility.

• If anything is sacred, the human body is sacred.

• Cynic. A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
• The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all. Authority over him and his art is ridiculous.

• 99% of lawyers give the rest a bad name.
• 42.7% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
• All those who believe in psychokinesis, raise my hand.
• The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
• Hard work pays off in the future, laziness pays off now.

• The Jews and Arabs should settle their dispute in the true spirit of Christian charity.

• On democracy versus dictatorship: "I don't find gang rape any better than individual rape."
• What have future generations ever done for me?
• A person is not prejudiced or unprejudiced. Rather, a person always exhibits prejudiced behavior to the extent that he substitutes general information (prejudgment or stereotypes)--which is less costly--for more costly specific information. What distinguishes different people are their comparative degrees of prejudiced behavior when facing similar situations; some people will get more information than others prior to a decision.
• In the mind of the employer, skin color may be a first indicator of expected worker productivity. To observe a process that selects in part by skin color and to attribute the selection to taste (in this case to employer "racism") would be misleading. It would be like concluding that auto insurance companies charge drivers under twenty-five years of age higher premiums because companies dislike them. Or that life insurance companies charge women lower premiums because the companies like women better than men.

• All those who believe in telekinesis, raise my hand!

• Campaign slogan of 1916: "He kept us out of war."
• The masters of the government of the United States are the combined capitalists and manufacturers of the United States.

• Never rise to speak till you have something to say; and when you have said it, cease.

• The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.

• ... modern art has become completely literary; the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text.

• Men having Power too often misapplied it; that though we made Slaves of the Negroes, and the Turks made Slaves of the Christians, I believed that Liberty was the natural Right of all Men equally.

• Help put the X back in Xmas.
• Now museum, not you don't.

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