“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” ~ Benjamin Franklin
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Archive for the ‘Pearls of Wisdom’ Category:
The Sum of Good Government
Still one thing more, fellow citizens, a wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government; and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.
~ Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address
Gradual and Silent Encroachment
“Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of freedoms of the people by gradual and silent encroachment of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.”
~ James Madison
Source: Virginia Convention on the ratification of the Constitution, Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, Jonathan Elliot, ed., v.3 p.87 (Philadelphia, 1836), 6 June 1788
TJB on Life
“Until one has loved an animal, a part of one’s soul remains unawakened.”
~ Anatole France (French Writer, member of the French Academy and Nobel Prize for Literature in 1921, 1844-1924)
“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”
~ Mahatma Ghandi (1869-1948)
Madison on Debt
“I go on the principle that a public debt is a public curse, and in a Republican government a greater curse than any other.”
~ James Madison (Our Fourth President)
Montaigne’s Axiom
“Men are most apt to believe what they least understand.”
~ Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592), French Philosopher and Essayist
The Gettysburg Address
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate-we can not consecrate-we can not hallow-this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.
It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us-that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion-that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain-that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom-and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
~ A. Lincoln
Do Something–Anything
“No one could make a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.”
~ Edmund Burke (1729-1797), British Statesman
