Quotes

One does not discover new lands without consenting to leave sight of the shore for a very long time.

Andre Gide

Little known Constitutional fact: the phrase "executive privilege," does not exist anywhere in the Constitution!

Justice Scalia (before George W Bush was "elected" President)

Evolution is so obsolete, gotta stamp your hands and clap your feet! Gotta dance like a monkey, dance like a monkey, child.

New York Dolls

Fighting Fascism is Always Cool.

Amsterdam Weekly, volume three, issue 18

Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.

Ernest Hemingway

What do we mean by patriotism in the context of our times? I venture to suggest that what we mean is a sense of national responsibility … a patriotism which is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime.

Adlai Stevenson

Patriotism is a lively sense of collective responsibility. Nationalism is a silly cock crowing on its own dunghill and calling for larger spurs and brighter beaks. I fear that nationalism is one of England’s many spurious gifts to the world.

Richard Aldington

Liberals feel unworthy of their possessions. Conservatives feel they deserve everything they’ve stolen.

Mort Sahl

The tide has been running against freedom... In our vision of a good and decent future, free and peaceful, there must be room for the liberation of the energy and talent of the individual... Equality, rightly understood, as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences. Wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our own time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism.

Barry Goldwater, 1964 nomination speech

I didn’t vote for him but he’s my president, and I hope he does a good job.

John Wayne, 1960

I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative.

John Stuart Mill

Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.

George Orwell

Nationalism … is the worship of the collective power of a local human community. Unlike the faith in progress through science, nationalism is not a new religion; it is a revival of an old one. This was the religion of the city-states of the pre-Christian Greco-Roman world. It was resuscitated in the West at the Renaissance, and this resuscitation of the Greco-Roman political religion has been far more effective than the resuscitation of the Greco-Roman style of literature, visual art, and architecture. Modern Western nationalism, inspired by Greco-Roman political ideals and institutions, has inherited the dynamism and fanaticism of Christianity. Translated into practice in the American and French Revolutions, it proved to be highly infectious. Today, fanatical nationalism is perhaps 90 percent of the religion of perhaps 90 percent of mankind.

A J Toynbee