Thought for Today

"The Constitution, which at any time exists 'till changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole People, is sacredly obligatory upon all."

~~~~~ George Washington

Thought for Today

"The state tends to expand in proportion to its means of existence and to live beyond its means, and these are, in the last analysis, nothing but the substance of the people. Woe to the people that cannot limit the sphere of action of the state! Freedom, private enterprise, wealth, happiness, independence, personal dignity, all vanish."

~~~~~ Frederic Bastiat

Thought for Today

"Whensoever the General Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force."

~~~~~ Thomas Jefferson

Thought for Today

"Right reason is stronger than force."

~~~~~ President James A. Garfield

Thought for Today

"It isn't to evil dictators with a lust for power that Americans have been slowly surrendering their autonomy. It is to well-intentioned authorities who believe sincerely that our freedoms must be circumscribed for our own good. ... First Lady Michelle Obama announced what The New York Times called 'a sweeping initiative ... aimed at revamping the way American children eat and play – reshaping school lunches, playgrounds, and even medical checkups – with the goal of eliminating childhood obesity.' Nothing in the Constitution authorizes the federal government to take charge of 'revamping the way American children eat and play.' It is only our passivity that makes such an encroachment possible. This used to be the land of the free. Is it still?"

~~~~~ Jeff Jacoby

Thought for Today

"There is no more dangerous experiment than that of undertaking to be one thing before a man's face and another behind his back."

~~~~~ General Robert E. Lee (1807-1872)

Thought for Today

"Commit yourself to a dream. Nobody who tries to do something great but fails is a total failure. Why? Because he can always rest assured that he succeeded in life's most important battle – he defeated the fear of trying."

~~~~~ Robert H. Schuller

Thought for Today

"By gnawing through a dike, even a rat may drown a nation."

~~~~~ Edmund Burke

Thought for Today

Advice from Ben Franklin to our PEPOTUS (Poor Excuse for a President Of The United States):

"They that are on their guard and appear ready to receive their adversaries, are in much less danger of being attacked than the supine, secure and negligent."

~~~~~ Benjamin Franklin

Thought for Today

"People wish to live and prosper at the expense of others. This is no rash accusation. Nor does it come from a gloomy and uncharitable spirit. The annals of history bear witness to the truth of it: the incessant wars, mass migrations, religious persecutions, universal slavery, dishonesty in commerce, and monopolies. This fatal desire has its origin in the very nature of man – in that primitive, universal, and insuppressible instinct that impels him to satisfy his desires with the least possible pain."

~~~~~ Frederic Bastiat (1802-1850)

Thought for Today

"Time, whose tooth gnaws away at everything else, is powerless against truth."

~~~~~ Thomas Henry Huxley

Thought for Today

"No man is worth his salt who is not ready at all times to risk his well-being, to risk his body, to risk his life, in a great cause."

~~~~~ Theodore Roosevelt

Thought for Today

"The march of invention has clothed mankind with powers of which a century ago the boldest imagination could not have dreamt."

~~~~~ Henry George

Thought for Today

"The habit of common and continuous speech is a symptom of mental deficiency. It proceeds from not knowing what is going on in other people's minds."

~~~~~ Walter Bagehot (1826-1877)

Thought for Today

"Conservatism is the antithesis of the kind of ideological fanaticism that has brought so much horror and destruction to the world. The common sense and common decency of ordinary men and women, working out their own lives in their own way – this is the heart of American conservatism today. Conservative wisdom and principles are derived from willingness to learn, not just from what is going on now, but from what has happened before."

~~~~~ Ronald Reagan

Thought for Today

"Neither the wisest constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt."

~~~~~ Samuel Adams, essay in "The Public Advertiser," 1749

Thought for Today

"There is something that is much more scarce, something finer far, something rarer than ability. It is the ability to recognize ability."

~~~~~ Elbert Hubbard

Thought for Today

"Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm."

~~~~~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Thought for Today

"The President could wait months before deciding to give a general the troops he asked for to fight the war in Afghanistan but there was never to be enough time for the health care bill to be exposed in the light of day to the usual Congressional hearings and debate. Moreover, despite all the haste, the health care program would not actually go into effect until after the 2012 presidential election. In other words, the public was not supposed to find out whether the government's takeover of medical care actually made things better or worse until after it was too late."

~~~~~ Thomas Sowell

Thought for Today

"The problem is not the 'crises' Obama inherited. It's the ones he's creating. He has lived in such a socialist policy shell all his life that he doesn't have a clue that he's on a different planet than most of us. If he were just slightly less narcissistic, he might be able to figure this out. But ... no matter what adjustments he promises to make following the Boston Massacre, he still intends to govern like a socialist. He only wants to do a better job of figuring out how to do it less visibly, hoping we won't 'get it' before it's too late."

~~~~~ David Limbaugh

Thought for Today

"The bigger a state becomes the more liberty diminishes."

~~~~~ Jean Jacques Rousseau

Thought for Today

"The Democrats have no natural majority because they have no fundamental principles – at least none that they are willing to state out loud. They are like a drunken vagrant who emerges from the alley to cause havoc every few years. They are the perpetual toothache of American politics. To be sure, the fact that 52 percent of Massachusetts voters are racist, sexist tea-baggers – i.e., voted for a Republican – means only that the Democrats just went from having the largest congressional majority in a generation to the second largest. But this was 'Teddy Kennedy's seat.' And it was in Massachusetts. Now, no Democrat is safe. But the country just got a lot safer."

~~~~~ Ann Coulter

Thought for Today

"It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man who knows what the law is today can guess what it will be to-morrow."

~~~~~ Federalist No. 62

Thought for Today

"Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered, yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly."

~~~~~ Thomas Paine

Thought for Today

"I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious."

~~~~~ Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Ludlow, 1824

What would Thomas Jefferson think of our situation in the year 2010?

Thought for Today

"Liberty is the only thing you cannot have unless you are willing to give it to others."

~~~~~ William Allen White

Thought for Today

"Increasing numbers of Americans are saying that they are having trouble recognizing the country in which they were born and grew up. They will have even more trouble recognizing America if the Washington juggernaut does not lose a substantial part of its power in this year's elections."

~~~~~ Thomas Sowell

Thought for Today

"The people know their rights, and they are never slow to assert and maintain them, when they are invaded."

~~~~~ Abraham Lincoln

Thought for Today

"You may think that the Constitution is your security – it is nothing but a piece of paper. You may think that the statutes are your security – they are nothing but words in a book. You may think that elaborate mechanism of government is your security – it is nothing at all unless you have sound and uncorrupted public opinion to give life to your Constitution, to give vitality to your statutes, to make efficient your machinery."

~~~~~ Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes

Thought for Today

"The word 'capitalism' is used in two contradictory ways. Sometimes it's used to mean the free market, or laissez faire. Other times it's used to mean today's government-guided economy. Logically, 'capitalism' can't be both things. Either markets are free or government controls them. We can't have it both ways. The truth is that we don't have a free market -- government regulation and management are pervasive -- so it's misleading to say that 'capitalism' caused today's problems. The free market is innocent. But it's fair to say that crony capitalism created the economic mess. ... What is crony capitalism? It's the economic system in which the marketplace is substantially shaped by a cozy relationship among government, big business and big labor. Under crony capitalism, government bestows a variety of privileges that are simply unattainable in the free market, including import restrictions, bailouts, subsidies and loan guarantees. ... Crony capitalism, better known as government bailouts, saved General Motors and Chrysler from extinction, with Barack Obama cronies the United Auto Workers getting preferential treatment over other creditors and generous stock holdings (especially outrageous considering that the union helped bankrupt the companies in the first place with fat pensions and wasteful work rules). Banks and insurance companies (like AIG) are bailed out because they are deemed too big to fail. Favored farmers get crop subsidies. If free-market capitalism is a private profit-and-loss system, crony capitalism is a private-profit and public-loss system. Companies keep their profits when they succeed but use government to stick the taxpayer with the losses when they fail. Nice work if you can get it. ... It's time we acknowledged the difference between the free market, which is based on freedom and competition, and crony capitalism, which is based on privilege."

~~~~~ John Stossel