Ed > Ed's Quotes

“Unfortunately, our affluent society has also been an effluent society.”
― Hubert H. Humphrey

“The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.”
― Hubert H. Humphrey

“Freedom is hammered out on the anvil of discussion, dissent, and debate.”
― Hubert H. Humphrey

“Certainly one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of the citizens to keep and bear arms. [...] the right of the citizens to bear arms is just one guarantee against arbitrary government and one more safeguard against a tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible.”
― Hubert H. Humphrey

“Compassion is not weakness, and concern for the unfortunate is not socialism.”
― Hubert H. Humphrey

“Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves.”
― Ronald Reagan

“The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help.”
― Ronald Reagan

“I've noticed that everyone who is for abortion has already been born.”
― Ronald Reagan

“We don't have a trillion-dollar debt because we haven't taxed enough; we have a trillion-dollar debt because we spend too much.”
― Ronald Reagan

“Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.”
― Ronald Reagan

“Sometimes when I'm faced with an atheist, I am tempted to invite him to the greatest gourmet dinner that one could ever serve, and when we have finished eating that magnificent dinner, to ask him if he believes there's a cook.”
― Ronald Reagan

“Freedom prospers when religion is vibrant and the rule of law under God is acknowledged.”
― Ronald Reagan

“I hope we once again have reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There's a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts.”
― Ronald Reagan

“A nation that cannot control its borders is not a nation.”
― Ronald Reagan

“We must reject the idea that every time a law's broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.”
― Ronald Reagan

“Government is like a baby: an alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.”
― Ronald Reagan

“No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this earth!”
― Ronald Reagan

“Government does not solve problems. It subsidizes them.”
― Ronald Reagan

“Government always finds a need for whatever money it gets.”
― Ronald Reagan

“I've always believed that a lot of the trouble in the world would disappear if we were talking to each other instead of about each other.”
― Ronald Reagan

“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
― Ronald Reagan

“Before I refuse to take your questions, I have an opening statement. ”
― Ronald Reagan

“The size of the federal budget is not an appropriate barometer of social conscience or charitable concern.”
― Ronald Reagan

“Forgiveness flounders because I exclude the enemy from the community of
humans even as I exclude myself from the community of sinners. But no one
can be in the presence of the God of the crucified Messiah for long without
overcoming this double exclusion — without transposing the enemy from the
sphere of the monstrous… into the sphere of shared humanity and herself from
the sphere of proud innocence into the sphere of common sinfulness. When
one knows [as the cross demonstrates] that the torturer will not eternally
triumph over the victim, one is free to rediscover that person’s humanity and
imitate God’s love for him. And when one knows [as the cross demonstrates]
that God’s love is greater than all sin, one is free to see oneself in the light of
God’s justice and so rediscover one’s own sinfulness.”
― Miroslav Volf

“The difference between justice and forgiveness: To be just is to condemn the fault and, because of the fault, to condemn the doer as well. To forgive is to condemn the fault but to spare the doer. That's what the forgiving God does.”
― Miroslav Volf

“Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow, it empties today of its strength.”
― Corrie Ten Boom, Clippings from My Notebook

“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville

“When the taste for physical gratifications among them has grown more rapidly than their education . . . the time will come when men are carried away and lose all self-restraint . . . . It is not necessary to do violence to such a people in order to strip them of the rights they enjoy; they themselves willingly loosen their hold. . . . they neglect their chief business which is to remain their own masters.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America: Volume 2

“Society will develop a new kind of servitude which covers the surface of society with a network of complicated rules, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate. It does not tyrannise but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville

“It is above all in the present democratic age that the true friends of liberty and human grandeur must remain constantly vigilant and ready to prevent the social power from lightly sacrificing the particular rights of a few individuals to the general execution of its designs. In such times there is no citizen so obscure that it is not very dangerous to allow him to be oppressed, and there are no individual rights so unimportant that they can be sacrificed to arbitrariness with impunity.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville