- “I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. ‘Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.” –Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, No. 1, 1776
I love the man . . .
Depravity . . .
- “[T]here is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust.” –James Madison
Appreciate your own political system . . .
- “[W]e ought to deprecate the hazard attending ardent and susceptible minds, from being too strongly, and too early prepossessed in favor of other political systems, before they are capable of appreciating their own.” –George Washington, letter to the Commissioners of the District of Columbia, 1795
Law and liberty . . .
- “Law and liberty cannot rationally become the objects of our love, unless they first become the objects of our knowledge.” –James Wilson, Of the Study of the Law in the United States, 1790
Inflation and Deficits
- “As the late Nobel Laureate Professor Milton Friedman said, ‘[I]nflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, in the sense that it cannot occur without a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.’ Thinking of inflation as rising prices permits politicians to deceive us and escape culpability. They shift the blame saying that inflation is caused by greedy businessmen, rapacious unions or Arab sheiks. Instead, it is increases in the money supply that cause inflation, and who is in charge of the money supply? It’s the government operating through the Federal Reserve Bank and the U.S. Treasury. … The founders of our nation feared paper currency because it gave government the means to steal from its citizens. When inflation is unanticipated, as it so often is, there’s a redistribution of wealth from creditors to debtors. If you lend me $100, and over the term of the loan prices double, I pay you back with dollars worth only half of the purchasing power they had when I borrowed the money. Since inflation redistributes (steals) wealth from creditors to debtors, we can identify inflation’s primary beneficiary by asking: Who is the nation’s largest debtor? If you said, ‘It’s the U.S. government,’ go to the head of the class. … Profligate spending burdens future generations by making them recipients of a smaller amount of capital and hence less wealth.” –George Mason University economics professor Walter E. Williams
We warned of things to come . . .
- “We warned of things to come, of the danger inherent in unwarranted government involvement in things not its proper province. What we warned against has come to pass. And today more than two-thirds of our citizens are telling us, and each other, that social engineering by the federal government has failed. The Great Society is great only in power, in size and in cost. And so are the problems it set out to solve. Freedom has been diminished and we stand on the brink of economic ruin. Our task now is not to sell a philosophy, but to make the majority of Americans, who already share that philosophy, see that modern conservatism offers them a political home. We are not a cult, we are members of a majority. Let’s act and talk like it. The job is ours and the job must be done. If not by us, who? If not now, when? Our party must be the party of the individual. It must not sell out the individual to cater to the group. No greater challenge faces our society today than ensuring that each one of us can maintain his dignity and his identity in an increasingly complex, centralized society. Extreme taxation, excessive controls, oppressive government competition with business, galloping inflation, frustrated minorities and forgotten Americans are not the products of free enterprise. They are the residue of centralized bureaucracy, of government by a self-anointed elite. Our party must be based on the kind of leadership that grows and takes its strength from the people.” –Ronald Reagan
Machinery of goverment . . .
- “I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.” –Thomas Jefferson
Re: Education . . .
- “It is an object of vast magnitude that systems of education should be adopted and pursued which may not only diffuse a knowledge of the sciences but may implant in the minds of the American youth the principles of virtue and of liberty and inspire them with just and liberal ideas of government and with an inviolable attachment to their own country.” –Noah Webster, On Education of Youth in America, 1790
As riches increase . . .
- “As riches increase and accumulate in few hands, as luxury prevails in society, virtue will be in a greater degree considered as only a graceful appendage of wealth, and the tendency of things will be to depart from the republican standard. This is the real disposition of human nature.” –Alexander Hamilton
Wise Insights . . .
- “Let no man turn aside, ever so slightly, from the broad path of honour, on the plausible pretence that he is justified by the goodness of his end. All good ends can be worked out by good means.” –English novelist Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
- “One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.” –Greek philosopher Plato (c. 428-348 B.C.)
- “It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.” — English writer G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
