Aphorisms: the best of the least

The Seattle Times ^ | Monday, December 26, 2005 | By John Leo

[LibertarianInExile]

"When you have robbed a man of everything, he is no longer in your power--he is free again." - Aleksander Solzhenitsyn

"Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have." - Harry Emerson Fosdick

"Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even where there is no river." - Nikita S. Khrushchev

[x]

Some of these are pretty awful.

Or maybe it's just that the authors aren't safely dead, but are still around and annoying.

A few probably will survive, maybe attributed to Lincoln or Churchill or "Unknown."

[struwwelpeter]

"Russia is the only country where the past is unpredictable." -- Unknown author

"I do not rule Russia; ten thousand clerks do." -- Tsar Nikolai I

"For us in Russia communism is a dead dog. For many people in the West, it is still a living lion." -- Alexander Solzhenitsyn

"Membership of the United Nations gives every member the right to make a fool of himself, and that is a right of which the Soviet Union in this case has taken full advantage." -- Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr

"Wars are caused by undefended wealth." -- Ernest Hemingway

"Whatever enables us to go to war, secures our peace" -- Thomas Jefferson

"Army food: the spoils of war" -- Unknown author

"In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock." -- Orson Welles

"To lie about a far country is easy" -- Unknown author

"If people don't like Marxism, they should blame the British Museum." -- Mikhail Gorbachev

[yankeedame]

"Whichever side denounces the other for politicizing the issue is losing the argument," said Rep. Barney Frank.

Akin to the old aphorism, "Who ever raises his voice first is losing the argument."

[GSlob]

Brevity is the soul of aphorism, and that one could be shortened:
"Multiculturalism is a baboonery."

[Objectivist23]

"Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat."--John F. Lehman, Jr., Secretary of the Navy from 1981 to 1987

"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so."
-- Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See

“I think you should defend to the death their right to march, and then go down and meet them with baseball bats.” -- Woody Allen, on the KKK

The Lord's Prayer is 66 words, the Gettysburg Address is 286 words,there are 1,322 words in the Declaration of Independence, but government regulations on the sale of cabbage total 26,911 words.
-- From an article on the growth of federal regulations
in the Oct. 24th issue of National Review

"It matters not whether you win or lose; what matters is whether I win or lose." --Darrin Weinberg

"A positive attitude will not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort."
--Herm Albright

Lazlo's Chinese Relativity Axiom: No matter how great your triumphs or how tragic your defeats---approximately one billion Chinese couldn't care less.

[Appalled but Not Surprised]

Or I need this(fill in the blank), like Bill Clintonneeded another BJ.>>

Except that Clinton ALWAYS needed another BJ. That was the *problem.*

[scouse]

"In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock." -- Orson Welles.

I watched that movie only yesterday.

[dhuffman@awod.com]

So that's what Hillery Ramrod Clinton(spit) is 'good for'.

[papertyger]

Good equipment forgives alotta sins -- My Dad

[Pirate21]

"diversity" is: celebrating that people are different, while pretending not to notice any such differences.

Who said/wrote that? I may like to use it some time and should give proper credit.

[LibertarianInExile]

It sounds vaguely like John Derbyshire's recounting of The Bell Curve (regarding diversity),

"We are, as Herrnstein and Murray said, living under a regime of cognitive dissonance, pretending to believe one thing while striving not to notice the opposite thing."

but it's better said. Almost like an Ambrose Bierce definition if you put it this way:

Diversity, n.: Religion which celebrates people as different while pretending not to notice any such differences.

[appeal2]

He needed it another, but he really didn't need another. After all how much is enough.