POLITICS AND GOVERNMENT
Liberal friendly quotes:
"A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs
who, however, has never learned to walk forward."
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt, radio speech, October 26, 1939.
"Me, I think government is a tool, like a hammer. You can
use a hammer to build with or you can use a hammer to destroy
with. Whether government is good or bad depends on what you use
it for and how well you use it. On the whole, it's a poor idea
to put people in charge of government who don't believe in using
it.
"I believe government should be used in order to form a more
perfect Union, to establish justice, ensure domestic tranquillity,
provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and
secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity."
-- Molly Ivins, Nothin' But Good Times Ahead, p. 56
"Government can easily exist without law, but law cannot
exist without government."
--Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays
"The radical of one century is the conservative of the
next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out
the conservative adopts them."
-- Mark Twain, Notebook, 1898
"No country can be well governed unless its citizens as a
body keep religiously before their minds that they are the guardians
of the law, and that the law officers are only the machinery for
its execution, nothing more."
-- Mark Twain, The Gilded Age
"Citizenship should be placed above everything else,
even learning. Is there in any college of the land a chair of
citizenship where good citizenship and all that it implies is
taught? There is not one -- that is, not one where sane citizenship
is taught. There are some which teach insane citizenship, bastard
citizenship, but that is all. Patriotism! Yes; but patriotism
is usually the refuge of the scoundrel. He is the man who talks
the loudest."
-- Mark Twain, speech, 5/14/1908
"The most certain test by which we judge whether a country
is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities."
-- Lord Acton, The History of Freedom in Antiquity
And from the other side...
"No man ever went broke underestimating the intelligence
of the American voter."
-- H.L. Mencken, attributed
"In political matters feeling often decides more correctly than reason."
-- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
Next Section: Pragmatism vs. Principle
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