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1. "I am convinced that the moment is coming when, with its message of eternal, universal values, it [the Christian church in Russia] will come to the aid of our society. For in these words: "Thou shalt not kill; Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," lie those very moral principles that will enable us to survive even the most critical situations." ~ Boris Yeltsin, "Against the Grain: An Autobiography" (1990)
2. "Remember also that the smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights, cannot claim to be defenders of minorities." ~ Ayn Rand: Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966)
3. "Dates are convenient hooks on which we can hang our memories of events. But history is all about people - people like you and me who did things to change the world." ~ Joan Lowery Nixon
4. "Time is the most precious gift in our possession, for it is the most irrevocable. This is what makes it so disturbing to look back upon the time which we have lost. Time lost is time when we have not lived a full human life, time unenriched by experience, creative endeavor, enjoyment, and suffering. Time lost is time not filled, time left empty." ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer
5. "Freedom is not an ideal, it is not even a protection, if it means nothing more than freedom to stagnate, to live without dreams, to have no greater aim than a second car and another television set." ~ Adlai Stevenson: "Putting First Things First", Foreign Affairs (January 1960)
6. "The WWII generation shares so many common values: duty, honor, country, personal responsibility and the marriage vow " For better or for worse--it was the last generation in which, broadly speaking, marriage was a commitment and divorce was not an option" ~ Tom Brokaw
7. "The Little House books are stories of long ago. The way we live and your schools are much different now, so many changes have made living and learning easier. But the real things haven't changed. It is still best to be honest and truthful; to make the most of what we have; to be happy with simple pleasures and to be cheerful and have courage when things go wrong." ~ Laura Ingalls Wilder: Letter to children (February 1947)
8. "To surrender the city to you is beyond my authority or anyone else's who lives in it, for all of us, after taking the mutual decision, shall die out of free will without sparing our lives." ~ Constantine XI Palaiologos, Last Byzantine Emperor: Reply to Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II's offer to spare the emperor's life in exchange for the surrender of Constantinople in 1453.
9. "A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom." ~ Thomas Paine: Common Sense (1776)
10. "Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary." ~ Boris Pasternak
11. "Don't give up. There are too many nay-sayers out there who will try to discourage you. Don't listen to them. The only one who can make you give up is yourself. ~ Sidney Sheldon
12. "The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves - in their separate, and individual capacities. In all that the people can individually do as well for themselves, government ought not to interfere." ~ Abraham Lincoln
13. "It's not that your most important work is meaningless; it's that your most trivial movements are also significant." ~ David Jeremiah
14. "Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe." ~ Frederick Douglass (1886)
15. "Every law is an evil, for every law is an infraction of liberty: And I repeat that government has but a choice of evils: In making this choice, what ought to be the object of the legislator? He ought to assure himself of two things; 1st, that in every case, the incidents which he tries to prevent are really evils; and 2ndly, that if evils, they are greater than those which he employs to prevent them." ~ Jeremy Bentham (1830)
16. "A foreign policy aimed at the achievement of total security is the one thing I can think of that is entirely capable of bringing this country to a point where it will have no security at all. And a ruthless, reckless insistence on attempting to stamp out everything that could conceivably constitute a reflection of improper foreign influence in our national life, regardless of the actual damage it is doing to the cost of eliminating it, in terms of other American values, is the one thing I can think of that should reduce us all to a point where the very independence we are seeking to defend would be meaningless, for we would be doing things to ourselves as vicious and tyrannical as any that might be brought to us from outside." ~ George F. Kennan: Radcliffe Commencement Address (16 June 1954), published as "The Illusion of Total Security" in The Atlantic Monthly, # 194 (August 1954)
17. "As for courage and will - we cannot measure how much of each lies within us, we can only trust there will be sufficient to carry through trials which may lie ahead." ~ Andre Norton
18. "The highest point a man can obtain is not Knowledge, or Virtue, or Goodness, or Victory, but something even greater, more heroic and more despairing: Sacred Awe!" ~ Nikos Kazantzakis: Zorba the Greek (1946)
19. "To know the mighty works of God, to comprehend His wisdom and majesty and power; to appreciate, in degree, the wonderful workings of His laws, surely all this must be a pleasing and acceptable mode of worship to the Most High, to whom ignorance cannot be more grateful than knowledge." ~ Nicolaus Copernicus
20. "No man has the right to dictate what other men should perceive, create or produce, but all should be encouraged to reveal themselves, their perceptions and emotions, and to build confidence in the creative spirit." ~ Ansel Adams
21. "Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust." ~ John Rawls
22. "Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God’s new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight,
Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right,
And the choice goes by forever ’twixt that darkness and that light.
"Hast thou chosen, O my people, on whose party thou shalt stand,
Ere the Doom from its worn sandals shakes the dust against our land?
Though the cause of Evil prosper, yet ’tis Truth alone is strong,
And, albeit she wander outcast now, I see around her throng
Troops of beautiful, tall angels, to enshield her from all wrong."
~ James Russell Lowell: The Present Crisis, lines 21-30
23. "It is obvious that all civil government, as far as it can be denominated free, is the creature of the people. It originates with them. It is conducted under their direction, and has in view nothing but their happiness. All its different forms are no more than so many different modes in which they chuse to direct their affairs, and to secure the quiet enjoyment of their rights. In every free state every man is his own Legislator. All taxes are free-gifts for public services. All laws are particular provisions or regulations established by common consent for gaining protection and safety. And all magistrates are trustees or deputies for carrying these regulations into execution." ~ Richard Price
24. "The mind petrifies if a circle be drawn around it, and it can hardly be denied that dogma draws a circle round the mind." ~ George Moore
25. "The measure of success is not whether you have a tough problem to deal with, but whether it is the same problem you had last year." ~ John Foster Dulles
26. "Truth is the most powerful thing in the world, since even fiction itself must be governed by it, and can only please by its resemblance." ~ Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury (1711)
27. "In the First Amendment the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government." ~ Hugo Black: Concurring in New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971)
28. "Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock." ~ Ben Hecht
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