Words From the Past

Words From the Past Archive

• Cherish, therefore, the spirit of our people, and keep alive their attention. Do not be too severe upon their errors, but reclaim them by enlightening them. If once they become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress, and Assemblies, Judges, and Governors, shall all become wolves. — Thomas Jefferson, letter to Edward Carrington, January 16, 1787 (from here)
• When there is no enemy within, the enemies outside cannot hurt you. — African Proverb quotes (from here)
  

  So why do we let enemies come within?

  The enemy is within the gates; it is with our own luxury, our own folly, our own criminality that we have to contend. –Marcus Tullius Cicero (Ancient Roman Lawyer, Writer, Scholar, Orator and Statesman, 106 BC-43 BC) (quote from here)

• In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress. – John Adams US diplomat & politician (1735 – 1826) (from here)
• It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. — Theodore Roosevelt from THE MAN IN THE ARENA
• Here, in response to a request from the new father of a baby boy named Thomas Jefferson Smith, Jefferson listed a “decalogue of canons for observation in practical life.”
  

  1. Never put off till tomorrow what you can do to-day.
  2. Never trouble another for what you can do yourself.
  3. Never spend your money before you have it.
  4. Never buy what you do not want, because it is cheap; it will be dear to you.
  5. Pride costs us more than hunger, thirst and cold.
  6. We never repent of having eaten too little.
  7. Nothing is troublesome that we do willingly.
  8. How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened.
  9. Take things always by their smooth handle.
  10. When angry, count ten, before you speak; if very angry, a hundred.

  Thomas Jefferson (from here)

• We have no government armed in power capable of contending in human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other. — John Adams, 1798, Address to the militia of Massachusetts (from here)
• I agree that the measure of success is not merchandise but character. But I do criticize those sentiments, held in too many respectable quarters, that our economic system is fundamentally wrong, that commerce is only selfishness, and that our citizens, holding the hope of all that America means, are living in industrial slavery. I appeal to Amherst men to reiterate and sustain the Amherst doctrine, that the man who builds a factory builds a temple, that the man who works there worships there, and to each is due, not scorn or blame, but reverence and praise. — Calvin Coolidge (from his second speech to the Amherst Alumni Association in 1916)
• There is no art which one government sooner learns of another than that of draining money from the pockets of the people. — Adam Smith from the The Wealth of Nations
• They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. — Benjamin Franklin (from here)
• The Constitution vests the power of declaring war with Congress; therefore no offensive expedition of importance can be undertaken until after they shall have deliberated upon the subject, and authorized such a measure. — George Washington (from here)
• Among the natural rights of the Colonists are these: First, a right to life; Secondly, to liberty; Thirdly, to property; together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can. These are evident branches of, rather than deductions from, the duty of self-preservation, commonly called the first law of nature. — Samuel Adams from The Rights of the Colonists
• Meticulous attention should be paid to the special relations and obligations of public servants to the public itself and to the Government…The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. A strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to obstruct the operations of government until their demands are satisfied. Such action looking toward the paralysis of government by those who have sworn to support it is unthinkable and intolerable. –Franklin D. Roosevelt (from here)
• A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both. These basic precepts are not lofty abstractions, far removed from matters of daily living. They are laws of spiritual strength that generate and define our material strength. Patriotism means equipped forces and a prepared citizenry. Moral stamina means more energy and more productivity, on the farm and in the factory. Love of liberty means the guarding of every resource that makes freedom possible–from the sanctity of our families and the wealth of our soil to the genius of our scientists. — Dwight D. Eisenhower from his First Inaugural address (20 January 1953)
• A slender acquaintance with the world must convince every man, that actions, not words, are the true criterion of the attachment of friends; and that the most liberal professions of good-will are very far from being the surest marks of it. — George Washington—(from here)
• A popular Government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives. — James Madison (from here)
• If you love knowledge, you will be a master of knowledge. What you have come to know, pursue by exercise; what you have not learned, seek to add to your knowledge, for it is as reprehensible to hear a profitable saying and not grasp it as to be offered a good gift by one’s friends and not accept it. Believe that many precepts are better than much wealth, for wealth quickly fails us, but precepts abide through all time. – Socrates (from here)
• Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.  — John Adams, ‘Argument in Defense of the Soldiers in the Boston Massacre Trials,’ December 1770, US diplomat & politician (1735 – 1826) (from here)
• What is worst of all is to advocate Christianity, not because it is true, but because it might prove useful… To justify Christianity because it provides a foundation of morality, instead of showing the necessity of Christian morality from the truth of Christianity, is a very dangerous inversion; and we may reflect that a good deal of the attention of totalitarian states has been devoted with a steadfastness of purpose not always found in democracies, to providing their national life with a foundation of morality — the wrong kind, perhaps, but a good deal more of it. It is not enthusiasm, but dogma, that differentiates a Christian from a pagan society. — T. S. Elliot (from here)
• European merchants supply the best weaponry, contributing to their own defeat. — Saladin (from here)
• To preserve the fiction that Social Security is insurance, federal government interest-bearing bonds of a corresponding amount have been deposited in a so-called trust fund. That is, one branch of government, the Treasury, has given an interest-bearing IOU to another branch, The Social Security Administration. Each year thereafter, the Treasury gives the Social Security Administration additional IOUs to cover the interest due. The only way the Treasury can redeem its debt to the Social Security Administration is to borrow money from the public, run a surplus in its other activities or have the Federal Reserve print the money–the same alternatives that would be open to it to pay the Social Security Adminstration if there were no trust fund. But the accounting slight-of-hand of a bogus trust fund is counted on to conceal this fact from a gullible public.” –Milton Friedman, “Social Security Socialism,” Wall Street Journal, Jan. 26, 1999, A18. (H/T to  Liberty and Tyranny by  Mark Levin).
• Undoubtedly the duty here prescribed is incumbent on all mankind; at least on every one of those to whom are entrusted the oracles of God. For it is here enjoined to everyone without exception that names the name of Christ. And the person whom everyone is commanded to please, is his neighbour; that is, every child of man. Only we are to remember here what the same Apostle speaks upon a similar occasion. “If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men.” In like manner we are to please all men, if it be possible, as much as lieth in us. But strictly speaking it is not possible; it is what no man ever did, nor ever will perform. But suppose we use our utmost diligence, be the event as it may, we fulfill our duty. (continued here) – SERMON ONE HUNDRED: On Pleasing All Men by John Wesley
• Capitalism….is by nature a form or method of economic change and not only never is but never can be stationary….  The fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers, goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates…. [T]he history of the productive apparatus of a typical farm, from the beginnings of the rationalization of crop rotation, plowing and fattening to the mechanized thing of today–linking up with elevators and railroads–is a history of revolutions. So is the history of the productive apparatus of the iron and steel industry from the charcoal furnace to our own type of furnace, or the history of the apparatus of power production from the overshot water wheel to the modern power plant, or the history of transportation from the mailcoach to the airplane. The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation….that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in. . . . (from Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy by Joseph Schumpeter; H/T to  Liberty and Tyranny by  Mark Levin; quoted from here).
• I entirely concur in the propriety of resorting to the sense in which the Constitution was accepted and ratified by the nation. In that sense alone it is the legitimate Constitution. And if that be not the guide in expounding it, there can be no security for a consistent and stable, more than for a faithful exercise of its powers. If the meaning of the text be sought in the changeable meaning of the words composing it, it is evident that the shape and attributes of the Government must partake of the changes to which the words and phrases of all living languages are constantly subject. What a metamorphosis would be produced in the code of law if all its ancient phraseology were to be taken in its modern sense And that the language of our Constitution is already undergoing interpretations unknown to its founders, will I believe appear to all unbiased Enquirers into the history of its origin and adoption. — James Madison from A Letter To Henry Lee
• I knew that there is a manifest, marked distinction, which ill men with ill designs, or weak men incapable of any design, will constantly be confounding, that is, a marked distinction between change and reformation. The former alters the substance of the objects themselves; and gets rid of all their essential good, as well as of all the accidental evil, annexed to them. Change is novelty; and whether it is to operate any one of the effects of reformation at all, or whether it may not contradict the very principle upon which reformation is desired, cannot be certainly known beforehand. Reform is, not a change in the substance, or in the primary modification, of the object, but, a direct application of a remedy to the grievance complained of. So far as that is removed, all is sure. It stops there; and, if it fails, the substance which underwent the operation, at the very worst, is but where it was. – Edmund Burke (1729–1797).  A Letter to a Noble Lord. The Harvard Classics.  1909–14.
• But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. — James Madison from The Federalist No. 51
• A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the worlds greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:From bondage to spiritual faith;From spiritual faith to great courage;From courage to liberty;From liberty to abundance;From abundance to complacency;From complacency to apathy;From apathy to dependence;From dependence back into bondage.– falsely attributed to “The Fall of The Athenian Republic” to Alexander Tyler (a Scottish history professor at The University of Edinborough) (see here)
• Someone in the Middle Ages said, “God nothing does, nor suffers to be done, but what we would ourselves, if we could see through all events of things as well as He.”  –Dr. J. Vernon McGee (from here)
• The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane. — Mark Twain (from here)
• Origin & History of the word serf

  late 15c., “slave,” from M.Fr. serf, from L. servum (nom. servus) “slave” (see serve). Fallen from use in original sense by 18c. Meaning “lowest class of cultivators of the soil in continental European countries” is from 1610s. Use by modern writers with reference to medieval Europeans first recorded 1761 (contemporary Anglo-L. records used nativus, villanus or servus). Serfdom first attested 1850.
• When it is asked, why we ought to obey the will of the Deity, this question, which would be impious and absurd in the highest degree, if asked from any doubt that we ought to obey him, can admit but of two different answers. It must either be said that we ought to obey the will of the Deity because he is a Being of infinite power, who will reward us eternally if we do so, and punish us eternally if we do otherwise: or it must be said, that independent of any regard to our own happiness, or to rewards and punishments of any kind, there is a congruity and fitness that a creature should obey its creator, that a limited and imperfect being should submit to one of infinite and incomprehensible perfections. Besides one or other of these two, it is impossible to conceive that any other answer can be given to this question. If the first answer be the proper one, virtue consists in prudence, or in the proper pursuit of our own final interest and happiness; since it is upon this account that we are obliged to obey the will of the Deity. If the second answer be the proper one, virtue must consist in propriety, since the ground of our obligation to obedience is the suitableness or congruity of the sentiments of humility and submission to the superiority of the object which excites them.  – Adam Smith from The Theory of Moral Sentiments
• It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, “Peace! Peace!” — but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death! — Patrick Henry (from here)
• Here we may reign secure, and in my choyceTo reign is worth ambition though in Hell:Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav’n.–So Satan spoke in Paradise Lost by John Milton.
• Oh, what a tangled web we weave,When first we practise to deceive!  — from Marmion by Sir Walter Scott: Canto the Sixth (see this page for info on Sir Walter Scott)
• Realizing the power to tax is the power to destroy, and that the power to take a certain amount of property or of income is only another way of saying that for a proportion of his time a citizen must work for the government, the authority to impose a tax upon the people must be carefully guarded. It condemns the citizen to servitude. — Calvin Coolidge (from here)
• The first effect of not believing in God is to believe in anything. — by Emile Cammaerts (quote from here)
• If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. — by C. S. Lewis (quote from here)
• The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one.  We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing.  With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor.  Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name—liberty.  And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names—liberty and tyranny.  — President Abraham Lincoln, Address at Sanitary Fair, Baltimore, April 18, 1864
• A few people have even objected to prayers being said in the Congress. That’s just plain wrong. The Constitution was never meant to prevent people from praying; its declared purpose was to protect their freedom to pray.  — from President Ronald Reagan‘s Radio Address to the Nation on Prayer, September 18, 1982
• No place so sacred from such fops is barred,Nor is Paul’s Church more safe than Paul’s Churchyard:Nay, fly to altars; there they’ll talk you dead,For fools rush in where angels fear to tread  –  from An Essay on Criticism by Alexander Pope
• A thing moderately good is not so good as it ought to be. Moderation in temper is always a virtue, but moderation in principle is always a vice. — Unsourced. Attributed to Thomas Paine
• The very first thing the President did was to show me the new Presidential Seal, which he had just redesigned. He explained, ‘The seal has to go everywhere the President goes. It must be displayed upon the lectern when he speaks. The eagle used to face the arrows but I have re-designed it so that it now faces the olive branches… what do you think?’ I said, ‘Mr. President, with the greatest respect, I would prefer the American eagle’s neck to be on a swivel so that it could face the olive branches or the arrows, as the occasion might demand.’ — What Winston Churchill said in an exchange (March 4, 1946) with Harry S. Truman aboard the Presidential train in Washington, D.C.‘s Union Station before journeying to Fulton, Missouri; as quoted in “The Genius and Wit of Winston Churchill” by Robin Lawson (from here)
• This reminds me of a conversation which I once had with the Hon. Frederick Douglass. At one time Mr. Douglass was traveling in the state of Pennsylvania, and was forced, on account of his colour, to ride in the baggage-car, in spite of the fact that he had paid the same price for his passage that the other passengers had paid. When some of the white passengers went into the baggage-car to console Mr. Douglass, and one of them said to him: “I am sorry, Mr. Douglass, that you have been degraded in this manner,” Mr. Douglass straightened himself up on the box upon which he was sitting, and replied: “They cannot degrade Frederick Douglass. The soul that is within me no man can degrade. I am not the one that is being degraded on account of this treatment, but those who are inflicting it upon me.” — from Up From Slavery: An Autobiography, by Booker T. Washington
• If any man err from the right way, it is his own misfortune, no injury to thee; nor therefore art thou to punish him in the things of this life because thou supposest he will be miserable in that which is to come. — John Locke (from A Letter Concerning Toleration)  (text available from here)
• Knowledge without wisdom is a load of books on the back an ass. — Japanese proverb (from here)
• Decency, security, and liberty alike demand that government officials shall be subjected to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen. In a government of laws, existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means-to declare that the government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal-would bring terrible retribution. Against that pernicious doctrine this court should resolutely set its face. — Louis Dembitz Brandeis
• Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad. — appeared originally in the Greek play Medea by Euripides.
• About the time we think we can make ends meet, somebody moves the ends. — President Herbert Hoover.
• The best of men are but men at best.  — General John Lambert (1619-83)
• But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint. — Edmund Burke
• In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it. — John 1:1-5
• Government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have. — Gerald R. Ford
• Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future. — John Kennedy
• Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. — Hanlon’s razor