Stewart L. Udall
- We have, I fear, confused power with greatness.
Louis Utermeyer
- You cannot adopt politics as a profession and remain honest.
Martin Van Buren
- The less Government interferes with private pursuits,
the better for the general prosperity.
Gore Vidal
- 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.
Vladmar IV
- Tomorrow will be another day.
Voltaire
- 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.
M. H. Vorse
- The art of writing is the art of applying
the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.
Tom Waits
- I'd rather have a free bottle in front of me
than a prefrontal lobotomy.
George Wallace
- To a largely black audience: "Sure, I look like a white man.
But my heart is as black as anyone's here."
Artemus Ward
- Why is this thus? What is the reason for this thusness?
- There's a good deal of human nature in man.
Bob Ward
- Wild flowers don't grow in rows.
- What you seize is what you get.
- Visitors go to where the humanity is.
Booker T. Washington
- You can't hold a man down without staying down with him.
George Washington
- 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.
Daniel Webster
- 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.
Noah Webster
- Power is always insolent and despotic.
Rabbi Harlan J. Wechsler
- 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.
William Weld
- Bill Weld will not tip-toe around Washington DC on bended knee.
D. A. Wells
- 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.
John Wesley
- 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?
Mae West
- 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.
Archbishop Richard Whateley
- 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.
E. B. White
- A "fraternity" is the antithesis of fraternity.
Alfred North Whitehead
- 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.
Walt Whitman
- If anything is sacred, the human body is sacred.
Oscar Wilde
- 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.
Steven Wight
- 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.
Alexander Wiley
- The Jews and Arabs should settle their dispute
in the true spirit of Christian charity.
Walter Williams
- 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.
F. Paul Wilson
- All those who believe in telekinesis, raise my hand!
Woodrow Wilson
- 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.
John Witherspoon
- Never rise to speak till you have something to
say; and when you have said it, cease.
Thomas Wolfe
- 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.
Tom Wolfe
- ... modern art has become completely literary; the paintings
and other works exist
only to illustrate the text.
John Woolman
- 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.
Joe Wynieki
- Help put the X back in Xmas.
- Now museum, not you don't.
Go to X, Y, and Z authors.
Go back to the list of authors.
Back to Libertarian Essays by Roy Halliday
This page was last updated on August 23, 2003.
This site is maintained by Roy Halliday. If you have any comments
or suggestions, please send them to
royhalliday@mindspring.com.