Thought for Today

"The prospect of universal destruction will deter only if it is convincing. If a potential aggressor is assured he will be spared nuclear retaliation should he employ 'only' biological or chemical weapons, then the incentive to use them will increase. The old concept of a balance of power, as Churchill pointed out in his Iron Curtain speech just after the dawn of the atomic age, is no longer sound. For the strategic objective must be to amass such an aggregation of power on the side of peace and stability, including nuclear power, that it will deter the forces of aggression. Peace through strength, in short. For that kind of deterrence to be convincing, strategic ambiguity must be preserved, not lessened. There is nothing wrong with talking about America's nuclear forces – so long as nothing very specific is said about how they would or would not be employed. Let aggressors have to guess. There's a reason for that old Irish toast, 'Confusion to our enemies!'"

~~~~~ Paul Greenberg

Thought for Today

"Tea partiers must be racist, Democrats imply, because why else would anyone oppose Barack Obama's agenda? But Mr. Obama's skin color was well known in 2008, when he was elected president by a comfortable margin, and at his inauguration, when he began his presidency with the highest approval rating (68 percent) since John F. Kennedy. What wasn't known by most then was that Mr. Obama is a left wing radical who is spending us into bankruptcy."

~~~~~ Jack Kelly

Thought for Today

"I didn't know before I got there and they told me all this – that Rome had Senators. Now I know why it declined."

~~~~~ Will Rogers

Thought for Today

"If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable."

~~~~~ Louis D. Brandeis

Thought for Today

"The example of changing a constitution by assembling the wise men of the state, instead of assembling armies, will be worth as much to the world as the former examples we had give them. The constitution, too, which was the result of our deliberation, is unquestionably the wisest ever yet presented to men."

~~~~~ Thomas Jefferson

Thought for Today

"Men are apt to mistake the strength of their feeling for the strength of their argument. The heated mind resents the chill touch and relentless scrutiny of logic."

~~~~~ William E. Gladstone

Thought for Today

"With every deed you are sowing a seed, though the harvest you may not see."

~~~~~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Thought for Today

"There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the labor of thinking."

~~~~~ Thomas Alva Edison

Thought for Today

"History will remember how often and adamantly President Barack Obama insisted that the socialized medicine law he signed last week would reduce the federal deficit. It will be his defining lie."

~~~~~ Terence Jeffrey

Thought for Today

"When we build, let us think that we build forever."

~~~~~ John Ruskin

Thought for Today

"The leftists in the media would do well to remember that their liberty to be a free press comes from the same constitutional amendment as the tea party crowd's liberty to gather together. And our elected leaders would do well to remember that the First Amendment exists to protect average people from the government, not the other way around."

~~~~~ Ken Blackwell

Thought for Today

"One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It's very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project. ... Now, the American people, if you put it to them about socialized medicine and gave them a chance to choose, would unhesitatingly vote against it."

~~~~~ Ronald Reagan

Thought for Today

"As the night follows the day, the VAT cometh. With the passage of Obamacare, creating a vast new middle-class entitlement, a national sales tax of the kind near-universal in Europe is inevitable. ... As Obama has repeatedly insisted, the real money is in health care costs -- which are now locked in place by the new Obamacare mandates. That's where the value-added tax comes in. For the politician, it has the virtue of expediency: People are used to sales taxes, and this one produces a river of revenue. Every 1 percent of VAT would yield up to $1 trillion a decade (depending on what you exclude -- if you exempt food, for example, the yield would be more like $900 billion). It's the ultimate cash cow. Obama will need it. By introducing universal health care, he has pulled off the largest expansion of the welfare state in four decades. And the most expensive. Which is why all of the European Union has the VAT. Huge VATs. Germany: 19 percent. France and Italy: 20 percent. Most of Scandinavia: 25 percent. American liberals have long complained that ours is the only advanced industrial country without universal health care. Well, now we shall have it. And as we approach European levels of entitlements, we will need European levels of taxation."

~~~~~ Charles Krauthammer

Thought for Today

"Honor, justice, and humanity, forbid us tamely to surrender that freedom which we received from our gallant ancestors, and which our innocent posterity have a right to receive from us. We cannot endure the infamy and guilt of resigning succeeding generations to that wretchedness which inevitably awaits them if we basely entail hereditary bondage on them."

~~~~~ Thomas Jefferson

Thought for Today

"No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear."

~~~~~ Edmund Burke (1729-1797)

Thought for Today

"I prefer the wicked rather than the foolish. The wicked sometimes rest."

~~~~~~ Alexandre Dumas pere (1802-1870)

Thought for Today

"The function of the true state is to impose the minimum restrictions and safeguard the maximum liberties of the people, and it never regards the person as a thing."

~~~~~ Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

Thought for Today

"If there is anything good to say about Democrat control of the White House, Senate and House of Representatives, it's that their extraordinarily brazen, heavy-handed acts have aroused a level of constitutional interest among the American people that has been dormant for far too long."

~~~~~ Walter E. Williams

Thought for Today

"I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of 'Admin.' The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid 'dens of crime' that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps.In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern."

~~~~~~ C. S. Lewis (1898-1963)

Thought for Today

"Human beings will generally exercise power when they can get it, and they will exercise it most undoubtedly in popular governments under pretense of public safety."

~~~~~ Daniel Webster

Thought for Today

"Welfare is another of our major problems. We are a humane and generous people and we accept without reservation our obligation to help the aged, disabled, and those unfortunates who, through no fault of their own, must depend on their fellow man. But we are not going to perpetuate poverty by substituting a permanent dole for a paycheck. There is no humanity or charity in destroying self-reliance, dignity, and self-respect ... the very substance of moral fiber."

~~~~~ Ronald Reagan

Thought for Today

"The more we come to rely on government, the fewer freedoms we will enjoy. Government will start dictating what we can own, eat and drive, how much of our money they will let us keep, how we run our businesses, how many – if any – guns we can own, and what we may and may not say. Oh, wait! They are already doing that. To preserve freedom we must fight for it."

~~~~~ Cal Thomas

Thought for Today

"Nothing is more essential to the establishment of manners in a State than that all persons employed in places of power and trust must be men of unexceptionable characters."

~~~~~ Samuel Adams

Thought for Today

"Free people, remember this maxim: we may acquire liberty, but it is never recovered if it is once lost."

~~~~~ Jean Jacques Rousseau

Thought for Today

"If I had my way, any man guilty of golf would be ineligible for
any office of trust in the United States."

~~~~~ H.L. Mencken

Thought for Today

"While Barack Obama was making his latest pitch for a brand new, even more unsustainable entitlement at the health care 'summit,' thousands of Greeks took to the streets to riot. An enterprising cable network might have shown the two scenes on a continuous split-screen - because they're part of the same story. It's just that Greece is a little further along in the plot: They're at the point where the canoe is about to plunge over the falls. America is further upstream and can still pull for shore, but has decided, instead, that what it needs to do is catch up with the Greek canoe."

~~~~~ Mark Steyn

Thought for Today

"We are repeatedly being told that we need to have a government-controlled medical care system, because other countries have it – as if our policies on something as serious as medical care should be based on the principle of monkey see, monkey do."

~~~~~ Thomas Sowell

Thought for Today

"Personal responsibility is a real problem for those who want to collectivize society and take away our power to make our own decisions, transferring that power to third parties like themselves, who imagine themselves to be so much wiser and nobler than the rest of us. Aimless apologies are just one of the incidental symptoms of an increasing loss of a sense of personal responsibility -- without which a whole society is in jeopardy. The police cannot possibly maintain law and order by themselves. Millions of people can monitor their own behavior better than any third parties can. Cops can cope with that segment of society who have no sense of personal responsibility, but not if that segment becomes a large part of the whole population. Yet increasing numbers of educators and the intelligentsia seem to have devoted themselves to undermining or destroying a sense of personal responsibility and making 'society' responsible instead."

~~~~~ Thomas Sowell

Thought for Today

"Perhaps you and I have lived with this miracle too long to be properly appreciative. Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. Those who have known freedom and then lost it have never known it again. Knowing this, it is hard to explain those who even today would question the people's capacity for self-rule. Will they answer this: if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?"

~~~~~ Ronald Reagan

Thought for Today

"He who wants to do a great deal of good at once will never do anything. Life is made up of little things. True greatness consists in being great in little things."

~~~~~ Charles Simmons

Thought for Today

"Some of mankind's most terrible misdeeds have been committed under the spell of certain magic words or phrases."

~~~~~ James Bryant Conant