I started compiling a list of random quotes that I found on the internet a few years back. When combined, the roughly sum up my views on politics, government, and life:
“Sic semper tyrannis!”
-John Wilkes Booth
“Before you, in proud humility, is the embodiment of manhood; men whom neither toils and sufferings, nor the fact of death, nor disaster, nor hopelessness could bend from their resolve.” -Union Gen. Joshua Chamberlain, commenting to his staff on the surrendered Confederates at Appomattox (1865)
“The sole object of this war is to restore the union. Should I be convinced it has any other object, or that the government designs using its soldiers to execute the wishes of the Abolitionists, I pledge to you my honor as a man and a soldier that I would resign my commission and carry my sword to the other side.” -Gen. Ulysses S. Grant (1862)
“The contest is not over, the strife is not ended. It has only entered upon a new and enlarged arena.” -Jefferson Davis
“All the South has ever desired is that the Union, as established by our forefathers, should be preserved; and that the Government, as originally organized, should be administered in purity and truth.” -Gen. Robert E. Lee (1866)
“Governor, if I had foreseen the use these people desired to make of their victory, there would have been no surrender at Appomattox, no, sir, not by me. Had I seen these results of subjugation, I would have preferred to die at Appomattox with my brave men, my sword in this right hand.” -Gen. Robert E. Lee (1870)
“It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.” -Gen. Robert E. Lee
“The Northern onslaught upon slavery is no more than a piece of specious humbug disguised to conceal its desire for economic control of the United States.
Union means so many millions a year lost to the South; secession means loss of the same millions to the North. The love of money is the root of this as many, many other evils. The quarrel between the North and South is, as it stands, solely a fiscal quarrel.” -Charles Dickens (December, 1861)
“Being prepared for war is the best way to maintain peace.” -George Washington
“Every citizen should be a soldier. This was the case with the Greeks and Romans, and must be that of every free state.” -Thomas Jefferson
“That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or laborer's cottage is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.” -George Orwell
“They that would give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” -Ben Franklin
“Give me liberty or give me death!” -Patrick Henry
“I regret that I have but one life to give for my country” -Nathan Hale
“If you're not ready to die for it, put the word 'freedom' out of your vocabulary.” -Malcolm X
“If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest for freedom, go home and leave us in peace. We seek not your council nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.” -Samuel Adams
“War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.” -John Stuart Mill
“In war there is no substitute for victory.” -Gen. Douglas MacArthur
“Duty is ours; consequences are God's.” -Gen. Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson
“Victory is for those with the persistence and fortitude to resist the temptation to withdraw or whose resolve has been tempered, when conditions worsen and the cost rises. It is not for the weak hearted, nor those who are softened by the ease and comfort of a gilded cage, provided by the enemy at the cost of liberty. It is for those who continue to fight the good fight, even after others who have gone before, having faced overwhelming numbers and firepower found themselves unable to complete the mission.” -Jay Buckner
“If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free.” -P.J. O'Rourke
“Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.” -P.J. O'Rourke
“A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money.” -G. Gordon Liddy
“A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.” -George Bernard Shaw
“Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics will not take an interest in you.” -Pericles (430 B.C.)
“No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session.” -Mark Twain (1866)
“Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.” -Mark Twain
“Don't let schooling interfere with your education.” -Mark Twain
“Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.” -Mark Twain
“Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.” -C.S. Lewis
“In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.” -Thomas Jefferson
“The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.” -Thomas Jefferson
“Never trouble another for what you can do for yourself.” -Thomas Jefferson
“I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.” -Thomas Jefferson
“Enlighten the people, generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like spirits at the dawn of day.” -Thomas Jefferson
“We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.” -Winston Churchill
“Any fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the opposite direction.” -Albert Einstein
“All you need to know about Arafat was that he insisted on wearing a pistol when he addressed the UN General Assembly. And all you need to know about the UN, I suppose, is that they let him.” -James Lileks
“Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.” -Frederic Bastiat
“Government, in its last analysis, is organized force.” -Woodrow Wilson
“Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one. Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence...” -Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776)
“He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.” -Thomas Paine
“On every question of construction carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one on which it was passed.” -Thomas Jefferson
“Any people, anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suites them better. This is a most valuable and most sacred right - a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people, that can may revolutionize and make their own of so many of the territory as they inhabit.” -Abraham Lincoln (January 12, 1848)
"Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled” -Article II of the Articles of Confederation of the United States of America
“Our Union is a confederation of independent States, whose policy is peace with each other and all the world.” -James K. Polk
“Resolved, that the several States composing, the United States of America, are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government; but that, by a compact under the style and title of a Constitution for the United States, and of amendments thereto, they constituted a general government for special purposes — delegated to that government certain definite powers, reserving, each State to itself, the residuary mass of right to their own self-government; and that whensoever the general government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force: that to this compact each State acceded as a State, and is an integral part, its co-States forming, as to itself, the other party: that the government created by this compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself; since that would have made its discretion, and not the Constitution, the measure of its powers; but that, as in all other cases of compact among powers having no common judge, each party has an equal right to judge for itself, as well of infractions as of the mode and measure of redress.” -Thomas Jefferson, the Kentucky Resolution of 1798
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government” -Declaration of Independence
“We, the people of the Confederate States, each State acting in its sovereign and independent character, in order to form a permanent federal government, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity “invoking the favor and guidance of Almighty God” do ordain and establish this Constitution for the Confederate States of America.” -Preamble of the constitution of the Confederate States of America
