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Quotations of the Day: October 2005
October 31, 2005
Once bitten by a snake, one shies at well ropes for the next three years. —Chinese proverb
October 30, 2005
All the perplexities, confusions, and distresses in America arise, not from defects in their constitution or confederation, not from a want of honor or virtue, so much as from downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation. —John Adams
October 29, 2005
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer. —Henry A. Kissinger
October 28, 2005
Discourses on humility are a source of pride in the vain and of humility in the humble. So those on scepticism cause believers to affirm. Few men speak humbly of humility, chastely of chastity, few doubtingly of scepticism. —Blaise Pascal
October 27, 2005
To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. —Theodore Roosevelt
October 26, 2005
It’s easy to be independent when you’ve got money. But to be independent when you haven’t got a thing—that’s the Lord’s test. —Mahalia Jackson
October 25, 2005
A static hero is a public liability. Progress grows out of motion. —Richard E. Byrd
October 24, 2005
My hope is … that we may recover … something of a renewal of that vision of the law with which men may be supposed to have started out with in the old days of the oracles, who communed with the intimations of divinity. —Woodrow Wilson
October 23, 2005
A government without the power of defence! it is a solecism. —James Wilson
October 22, 2005
Those words freedom and opportunity do not mean a license to climb upwards by pushing other people down. Any paternalistic system that tries to provide for security for everyone from above only calls for an impossible task and a regimentation utterly uncongenial to the spirit of our people. —Franklin D. Roosevelt
October 21, 2005
When you stop drinking, you have to deal with this marvelous personality that started you drinking in the first place. —Jimmy Breslin
October 20, 2005
Private property is held sacred in all good governments, and particularly in our own. Yet shall the fear of invading it prevent a general from marching his army over a cornfield or burning a house which protects the enemy? A thousand other instances might be cited to show that laws must sometimes be silent when necessity speaks. —Andrew Jackson
October 19, 2005
Obstinacy in a bad cause is but constancy in a good. —Sir Thomas Browne
October 18, 2005
The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause. —Henri Bergson
October 17, 2005
Most faults are not in our Constitution, but in ourselves. —Ramsey Clark
October 16, 2005
Liberty, the greatest of all earthly blessings—give us that precious jewel, and you may take every thing else!… Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel. —Patrick Henry
October 15, 2005
Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable. —John Kenneth Galbraith
October 14, 2005
A wise government knows how to enforce with temper, or to conciliate with dignity, but a weak one is odious in the former, and contemptible in the latter. —George Grenville
October 13, 2005
There is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous. —Napoleon Bonaparte
October 12, 2005
They [the blacks] had no rights which the white man was bound to respect. —Roger B. Taney
October 11, 2005
I’m so glad I never feel important, it does complicate life! —Eleanor Roosevelt
October 10, 2005
In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed—they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock! —Orson Welles
October 9, 2005
You either get tired fighting for peace, or you die. —John Lennon
October 8, 2005
The people will come to their own at last,— / God is not mocked forever. —John M. Hay
We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time. —T.S. Eliot
October 5, 2005
The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish. —Charlie Chaplin
October 4, 2005
I long ago come to the conclusion that all life is six to five against. —Damon Runyon
October 3, 2005
Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates. —Gore Vidal
