Dakota Beacon

A stimulating e-mail from an old friend last week inspired me. He cited various quotations of famous men. How wonderfully conversant these quotes were to my way of thinking. They recalled old-school values and a heritage spanning centuries.

I began my own search for quotations. The following is a selection of a few of the many aphorisms worth reciting. Anyone can find gratification and affirmation by noodling around the internet. Suggested sites include brainyquote.com, rightwingnews.com, quoteload.com, and refseek.com.

Insights from our Founding Fathers include:

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” – John Adams

“The right of a nation to kill a tyrant in case of necessity can no more be doubted than to hang a robber, or kill a flea.” – John Adams

“The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.” – Thomas Jefferson

“Firearms stand next in importance to the Constitution itself. They are the American people’s liberty teeth and keystone under independence.” — George Washington

Some men held a very realistic view of war. “War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.” — General William T. Sherman

 For an intellectual, George Orwell got it right. “People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”

General Curtis LeMay put it rather starkly considering our contemporary sensibilities. “If you kill enough of them, they stop fighting.”

“History teaches that war begins when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap.” — Ronald Reagan

Conservatives hold some classic views on wealth and poverty. “The world’s biggest problem is the unequal distribution of capitalism. If there were capitalism everywhere, you wouldn’t have food shortages.” — Rush Limbaugh

“Millions of individuals making their own decisions in the marketplace will always allocate resources better than any centralized government planning process.” — Ronald Reagan

“I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I travelled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.” — Ben Franklin

“Compassion is defined not by how many people are on the government dole but by how many people no longer need government assistance.” — Rush Limbaugh

“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” — Winston Churchill

Here are some additional views of government by some famous people. “The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.” — Alexis de Tocqueville

“Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks seeks equality in restraint and servitude.” – Alexis de Tocqueville

“I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.” — William F. Buckley

“Be thankful we’re not getting all the government we’re paying for.” -- Will Rogers

“It is not strange…to mistake change for progress.” — Millard Fillmore (13^th US President)

“Remember that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take away everything you have.” — Quoted by both Barry Goldwater and Gerald Ford

“That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves.” — Thomas Jefferson

“I hope we have once again reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There’s a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: as government expands, liberty contracts.” — Ronald Reagan

Mark Twain generated many homespun quips. “Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.” Also, “Don’t let schooling interfere with your education.”

And to sum it up with the best quote from the greatest Book ever written: “…and there is no new thing under the sun.” – Ecclesiastes 1:9

Dennis M. Patrick can be contacted at (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).