Quotations

Every man dies. Not every man truly lives.
-- William Wallace

The fantastic advances in the field of electronic communication constitute a greater danger to the privacy of the individual.
-- Earl Warren

The first measure of a free society is not that its government performs the will of the majority. We had that in 1930s Germany and in the South until the '60s. The first measure of a free society is that its government protects the just freedoms of its minorities. The majority is quite capable of protecting itself.
-- Jim Warren, stated often beginning around the mid-1980s

To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace.
-- George Washington, 'Letter to John Banister,' Valley Forge, April

The very atmosphere of firearms anywhere and everywhere restrains evil interference -- they deserve a place of honor with all that's good.
-- George Washington (?)

In every generation there are those who want to rule well -- but they mean to rule. They promise to be good masters -- but they mean to be masters.
-- Daniel Webster

Only in a police state is the job of a policeman easy.
-- Orson Welles

Nothing except a battle lost can be half as melancholy as a battle won.
-- The Duke of Wellington, in a dispatch in 1815.

"Come, fellow Vindicators! We must stop Doctor Destroyer's latest plot, which is in conflict with our cultural paradigm, as interpreted by the Vindicators' microculture and within each of our own ideocultural isolates!"
-- Robert A. West

Liberty is the only thing you can't have unless you give it to others.
-- William Allen White

Men marry because they are tired; women because they are curious. Both are disappointed.
-- Oscar Wilde

Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.
-- Oscar Wilde

It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.
-- Oscar Wilde

She knows power, and all ways of raising and using it. She can make use of people -- use them with consummate skill, such that they often do not realize they are being used -- but, because her view of people is conditioned by despair, she does not think to look for the good in them. She can use a person, command him or dominate him or persuade him through hope of reward, but she cannot inspire him, doesn't look to raise him above himself... It is curiously small of her.
-- Walter Jon Williams' Metropolitan

A person's intent matters. It must. I desire power for myself, yes -- I will admit it. But further I will say that I want nothing for myself that I do not desire for humanity at large, and that I desire power only for its ends, not for the thing in itself. The rest of power's trappings are wearisome - the fawning, the flattery, the raking in of tribute and booty... It was a mark of my family's merit that such pathetic, unreal aspects of power were all they cared about, while the reality of it, the ability to fundamentally alter the world and all nature, matter to them not at all.
-- Walter Jon Williams' Metropolitan

Though it is true that a man who is a servant of his passions is not free, neither is a man in flight from those same passions. And, since the passions are an inevitable consequence of our own humanity, it is impossible to eliminate them so long as we wish to remain human. ...it isn't passions that make us weak, but rather uncontrollable passions. Harness the passions and reason together, and the person, the real person, becomes free... and capable of liberating others, which is the only defensible use of power.
-- Walter Jon Williams' Metropolitan

The Paternalistic State does give its people a sense of security. But a snug, secure populace tends to resist movement -- especially forward movement.
-- F. Paul Wilson

Few of our ancestors were perfect ladies and gentlemen; the majority, in fact, weren't even mammals.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

I have always been among those who believed that the greatest freedom of speech was the greatest safety, because if a man is a fool the best thing to do is to encourage him to advertise the fact by speaking.
-- Woodrow Wilson

I would rather belong to a poor nation that was free than to a rich nation that had ceased to be in love with liberty.
-- Woodrow Wilson

The surest cure for vanity is loneliness.
-- Thomas Wolfe

The problem with changing culture from the top is that the people at the top got there by being good at the culture they're supposed to change.
-- an employee of the World Bank

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