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1. "If we like a man's dream, we call him a reformer; if we don't like his dream, we call him a crank." ~ William Dean Howells
2. "You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You're on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who'll decide where to go." ~ Dr. Seuss
3. "The proper method for hastening the decay of error is not by brute force, or by regulation which is one of the classes of force, to endeavour to reduce men to intellectual uniformity; but on the contrary by teaching every man to think for himself." ~ William Godwin
4. "The most important leadership trait is to be a man or woman of Character. Here, I define Character as (1) being selfless, (2) having moral courage, and (3) having Integrity. Most leadership traits are gifts, either heredity or, if you believe in God, they are God-given. Character is a choice. You choose to be a man or woman of character. Leaders are in the inspiration business and anyone who seeks to inspire must have the character to inspire." ~ Gen. Charles Krulak, USMC
5. "The number one cause of atheism is Christians. Those who proclaim Him with their mouths and deny Him with their actions is what an unbelieving world finds unbelievable." ~ Karl Rahner
6. "Capitalism is based on self-interest and self-esteem; it holds integrity and trustworthiness as cardinal virtues and makes them pay off in the marketplace, thus demanding that men survive by means of virtue, not vices. It is this superlatively moral system that the welfare statists propose to improve upon by means of preventative law, snooping bureaucrats, and the chronic goad of fear." ~ Alan Greenspan: "The Assault on Integrity", 1963
7. "Every child should have mud pies, grasshoppers, water bugs, tadpoles, frogs, mud turtles, elderberries, wild strawberries, acorns, chestnuts, trees to climb. Brooks to wade, water lilies, woodchucks, bats, bees, butterflies, various animals to pet, hayfields, pine-cones, rocks to roll, sand, snakes, huckleberries and hornets; and any child who has been deprived of these has been deprived of the best part of education." ~ Luther Burbank
8. "Most of the things we do, we do for no better reason than that our fathers have done them or our neighbors do them, and the same is true of a larger part than what we suspect of what we think." ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.: "The Path of the Law" (25 March 1897)
9. "Nothing is so well calculated to produce a death-like torpor in the country as an extended system of taxation and a great national debt." ~ William Cobbett
10. "What, if anything, do the infinity of different traditional and individual ideas of a garden have in common? They vary so much in purpose, in size, in style and content that not even flowers, or even plants at all, can be said to be essential. In the last analysis there is only one common factor between all gardens, and this is the control of nature by man. Control, that is, for aesthetic reasons. . . . The essence is control. Without constant watchful care a garden - any garden - rapidly returns to the state of the country all around it." ~ Hugh Johnson
11. "The Christian life is not about pleasing God the finger-shaker and judge. It is not about believing now or being good now for the sake of heaven later. It is about entering a relationship in the present that begins to change everything now. Spirituality is about this process: the opening of the heart to the God who is already here." ~ Marcus J. Borg
12. "A good deal of frustration and unhappiness could be avoided if people would just do what they know they should do." ~ Earl Nightingale
13. "The most wonderful of all things in life is the discovery of another human being with whom one's relationship has a growing depth, beauty and joy as the years increase. This inner progressiveness of love between two human beings is a most marvelous thing; it cannot be found by looking for it or by passionately wishing for it. It is a sort of divine accident, and the most wonderful of all things in life." ~ Hugh Walpole
14. "Adventures come to the adventurous, and mysterious things fall in the way of those who, with wonder and imagination, are on the watch for them; but the majority of people go past the doors that are half ajar, thinking them closed, and fail to notice the faint stirrings of the great curtain that hangs ever in the form of appearances between them and the world of causes behind." ~ Algernon Blackwood
15. "As long as our government is administered for the good of the people, and is regulated by their will; as long as it secures to us the rights of persons and of property, liberty of conscience, and of the press, it will be worth defending." ~ Andrew Jackson: First Inaugural Address (4 March 1829)
16. "A popular Government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives." ~ James Madison, Letter to W.T. Barry
17. "If there is a god, I think he has a sense of humour. He does not require human beings to protect him from satire." ~ James K. Morrow
18. "When more of the people's sustenance is exacted through the form of taxation than is necessary to meet the just obligations of government and expenses of its economical administration, such exaction becomes ruthless extortion and a violation of the fundamental principles of free government." ~ Grover Cleveland, Second Annual Message (Dec 1886)
19. "You cannot judge a man's life by the success of a moment, by the victory of an hour, or even by the results of a year. You must view his life as a whole. You must stand where you can see the man as he treads the entire path that leads from the cradle to the grave — now crossing the plain, now climbing the steeps, now passing through pleasant fields, now wending his way with difficulty between rugged rocks — tempted, tried, tested, triumphant." ~ William Jennings Bryan
20. "He who possesses liberty otherwise than as an aspiration possesses it soulless, dead. One of the qualities of liberty is that, as long as it is being striven after, it goes on expanding. Therefore, the man who stands still in the midst of the struggle and says, "I have it," merely shows by so doing that he has just lost it." ~ Henrik Ibsen
21. "The last, best fruit that comes to perfection, even in the kindliest soul, is tenderness toward the hard; forbearance toward the unforbearing; warmth of heart toward the cold; and philanthropy toward the misanthropic." ~ Johann Paul Friedrich Richter
22. "Up to a point a man's life is shaped by environment, heredity, and movements and changes in the world about him; then there comes a time when it lies within his grasp to shape the clay of his life into the sort of thing he wishes to be. Only the weak blame parents, their race, their times, lack of good fortune, or the quirks of fate. Everyone has it within his power to say , this I am today, that I shall be tomorrow. The wish, however, must be implemented by deeds." ~ Louis L'Amour
23. "If our intention had been merely to bring back a handful of soil and rocks from the lunar gravel pit and then forget the whole thing, we would certainly be history's biggest fools." ~ Wernher von Braun
24. "One of the foundations of our American civilization is equality of opportunity, which presupposes the right of each man to enjoy the fruits of his labor after contributing his fair share to the Government, which protects him and his property. But that is a very different matter from confiscating a part of his wealth, not because the country requires it for the prosecution of a war or some other purpose, but because he seems to have more money than he needs." ~ Andrew Mellon
25. "If you are what you should be, you will set the whole world on fire!" ~ St. Catherine of Siena
26. "I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."
~ Robert Frost
27. "People say, 'Don't live in the past.' But I guess it depends on how interesting your past is." ~ Effa Manley
28. "What you believe matters, however. It’s all anyone has to act on. And since what you do is who you are, your actions define you. If you don’t believe anything is true simply because you can’t logically prove what’s true, you won’t do anything. You won’t be anything. You’ll end up spending your life in a rocking chair looking out at the horizon waiting for an answer that never comes." ~ Russell Banks
29. "The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty." ~ Eugene McCarthy
30. "It is no wrong or injustice that one has many bags of the finest myrrh and garments embroidered with gold, while another has not those things, which are not necessary for our maintenance; he who has them has not thereby obtained control over anything that could be an essential addition to his nature, but has only obtained something illusory or deceptive." ~ Moses Maimonides
31. "Nothing is more fairly distributed than common sense: no one thinks he needs more of it than he already has." ~ René Descartes
