Send a message to our troups
Operation Dear Abby gives you a chance to thank the
brave men and women of our military. Agree or disagree with
why they are in harms way, they need to know we appreciate them.
"If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater 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."
"The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants,
and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good
conscience."
"The aim of art, the aim of a life, can only be to increase the sum of freedom
and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world. It cannot, under
any circumstances, be to reduce or suppress that freedom, even temporarily."
"We stared down the U.S.S.R. till the thing fell apart from its own internal contradictions. That was the great conservative achievement of the later 20th century. Possibly there'll be another one in the 21st century, but not for a few decades yet. In the meantime, government power will steadily increase, individual liberty will steadily decrease, our economy will get still more gummed up with litigation and regulation, more and more kids will attend college to less and less purpose, we shall lose a couple more tall buildings to crazy terrorists, we shall go trash a couple more no-account "countries" in retaliation, and the Republic will stagger along somehow, electing a Tweedledum or a Tweedledee to supreme executive office every four or eight years."
"A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be."
"All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development accorded the individual."
"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."
"Anyone who doesn't take truth seriously in small matters cannot be trusted in large ones either."
"As far as I'm concerned, I prefer silent vice to ostentatious virtue."
"As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."
"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen."
"Everything should be as simple as it is, but not simpler."
"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough."
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education."
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
"It's just obvious that you can't have free immigration and a welfare state."
"The society that puts equality before freedom will end up with neither. The society that
puts freedom before equality will end up with a great measure of both."
"For all the trite (and baseless) complaints about partisan warfare in Washington, trans-partisan allegiance to the Washington establishment,
to its self-serving rules, and to one another is the far more significant attribute in shaping behavior."
"Even the striving for equality by means of a directed economy can result only in an officially enforced inequality - an authoritarian determination of the status of each individual in the new hierarchical order."
"Freedom granted only when it is known beforehand that its effects will be beneficial is not freedom."
"I do not think it is an exaggeration to say history is largely a history of inflation, usually inflations engineered by governments for the gain of governments."
"If we wish to preserve a free society, it is essential that we recognize that the desirability of a particular object is not sufficient justification for the use of coercion."
"Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one's government is not necessarily to secure freedom."
"To act on the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking, knowledge which in fact we do not possess, is likely to make us do much harm."
"We must face the fact that the preservation of individual freedom is incompatible with a full satisfaction of our views of distributive justice."
"We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish."
"I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them."
"I never believed there was one code of morality for a public and another for a private man."
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under
robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be
satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
"I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen. Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else."
"Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism."
"The labor of keeping house is labor in its most naked state, for labor is toil that
never finishes, toil that has to be begun again the moment it is completed, toil that
is destroyed and consumed by the life process."
"The question of who is right and who is wrong has seemed to me always too small to be worth a moment's thought, while the question of what is right and what is wrong has seemed all-important."
"Someone asked me years ago if it were true that I disliked Jews, and I replied that it was certainly true, not at all because they are Jews but because they are folks, and I don't like folks."
"America wasn't founded so that we could all be better. America was founded so we could all be anything we damned well pleased."
"Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power."
"Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys."
"The Clinton administration launched an attack on people in Texas because those people were religious nuts with guns. Hell, this country was founded by religious nuts with guns. Who does Bill Clinton think stepped ashore on Plymouth Rock?"
"Whatever it is that the government does, sensible Americans would prefer that the government do it to somebody else. This is the idea behind foreign policy."
"Congress couldn't slash spending if the members' lives depended on it."
"The moral and constitutional obligations of our representatives in Washington are to protect
our liberty, not coddle the world, precipitating no-win wars, while bringing bankruptcy and
economic turmoil to our people."
"When one gets in bed with government, one must expect the diseases it spreads."
"You wanna get rid of drug crime in this country? Fine, let's just get rid of all the drug laws."
"The Irish are a delightful race, mildly crazy, sometimes drunken, and literarily gifted, all of which recommended them to me."
"Now, the word "intelligence" sounds much better than "bureaucratized clandestine confusion," which is more accurate."
"...the government is out of control. Everything is illegal and watched.
It's getting so you can't shoot cats from a car window with a twelve-gauge any more.
Who wants to live in that kind of world?"
"Finding the occasional straw of truth awash in a great ocean of confusion and bamboozle
requires intelligence, vigilance, dedication and courage. But if we don't practice these
tough habits of thought, we cannot hope to solve the truly serious problems that face us
-- and we risk becoming a nation of suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan who comes
along."
"At the heart of science is an essential tension between two seemingly contradictory attitudes
-- an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the
most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are
winnowed from deep nonsense."
"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend
to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth.
The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply too painful to acknowledge -- even to ourselves --
that we've been so credulous. (So the old bamboozles tend to persist as the new bamboozles rise.)"
"Man is condemned to be free. Condemned because he did not create himself, yet is
nevertheless at liberty, and from the moment he is thrown into this world he is
responsible for everything he does."
"Man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only."
"Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes,
and a tolerable administration of justice: all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things."
"There are some things so foolish only the highly educated believe."
"If your vote mattered, they wouldn't let you do it."
"The United States is a country with two political parties, the stupid party and the evil party.
Any law that passed with bipartisan support is therefore guaranteed to be both stupid and evil."
"...as John McCain declared, "This is what the legislative process is all about"
-- and in the sense that it's a sloppily drafted bottomless pit of unintended
consequences on a potentially cosmic scale whose sweeping "reforms" will inevitably
require even more sweeping reforms of the reforms in a year or two's time, he's
quite right."
"Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness."
"Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."
"The Nation which indulges toward another an habitual hatred or an habitual fondness is in some degree a slave.
It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest."
"An unlimited power to tax involves, necessarily, the power to destroy."
"Justice, sir, is the great interest of man on earth. It is the ligament which holds civilized beings and civilized nations together."
"There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters."
Anonymous
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only
exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from
the public treasury. From that time on the majority always votes for the
candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the
results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always
followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's great
civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through
this sequence: bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great
courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from
abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to complacency; from
complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependency; from dependency back
again to bondage."
- Attributed to Sir Alex Fraser Tytler.