Wisdom of Dead White Men Afflicted with White Privilege
“Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.” Benjamin Franklin
“Shame on the men who can court exemption from present trouble and expense at the price of their own posterity's liberty!” Samuel Adams
“If ever a time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in Government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin.” Samuel Adams
“No people will tamely surrender their Liberties, nor can any be easily subdued, when knowledge is diffused and Virtue is preserved. On the Contrary, when People are universally ignorant, and debauched in their Manners, they will sink under their own weight without the Aid of foreign Invaders.” Samuel Adams
“The liberties of our country, the freedoms of our civil Constitution are worth defending at all hazards; it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors. They purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood. It will bring a mark of everlasting infamy on the present generation – enlightened as it is – if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of designing men.” Samuel Adams
“The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the republican model of government, are justly considered deeply, perhaps as finally, staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people." George Washington
“Posterity. You will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom! I hope you will make good use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in Heaven, that I ever took half the Pains to preserve it.” John Adams
“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution is designed only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for any other.”
“Bad men cannot make good citizens. It is impossible that a nation of infidels or idolaters should be a nation of freemen. It is when a people forget God that tyrants forge their chains. A vitiated state of morals, a corrupted public conscience, is incompatible with freedom. No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue; and by a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.” Patrick Henry
“Resistance to tyranny becomes the Christian and social duty of each individual. ... Continue steadfast and, with a proper sense of your dependence on God, nobly defend those rights which heaven gave, and no man ought to take from us.” John Hancock
“When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary.” Thomas Paine
"Those who expect to reap the blessing of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it." Thomas Paine
"One man with courage is a majority." Thomas Jefferson
“When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty.” Thomas Jefferson
“When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny.” "To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical." Thomas Jefferson
"What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?” Thomas Jefferson
“I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.” Thomas Jefferson
“There are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people, by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power, than by sudden and violent usurpations.” James Madison
“I go on this great republican principle, that the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom. Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks — no form of government can render us secure.” James Madison
"An elective despotism was not the government we fought for; but one in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among the several bodies of magistracy as that no one could transcend their legal limits without being effectually checked and restrained by the others." James Madison
“If the federal government should overpass the just bounds of its authority and make a tyrannical use of its powers, the people, whose creature it is, must appeal to the standard they have formed, and take such measures to redress the injury done to the Constitution as the exigency may suggest and prudence justify.” Alexander Hamilton
“America will never be destroyed from the outside If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.” Abraham Lincoln
"It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog." Samuel Clemens
“No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the congress is in session.” Samuel Clemems
"Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." Samuel Clemens
"If we ever pass out as a great nation we ought to put on our tombstone, 'America died from a delusion that she has moral leadership.’" Will Rogers
“The odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre man who can most easily adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” H.L. Mencken
“History fails to record a single precedent in which nations subject to moral decay have not passed into political and economic decline. There has been either a spiritual awakening to overcome the moral lapse, or a progressive deterioration leading to ultimate national disaster.” Douglas MacArthur
Great men, great wisdom. We ignore it at our peril.
Great Quotes! however:
“There are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people, by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power, than by sudden and violent usurpations.” James Madison
In this go-around with zero and the RINORAT GOP-e, we have BOTH in the course of six years!