Obama weak in history class

Jack Kelly, over at Real Clear Politics does a good job pointing out a few, shall we say, historical inaccuracies in Obama's speech last week.

In his victory speech after the North Carolina primary, Sen. Barack Obama said something that is all the more remarkable for how little it has been remarked upon.

In defending his stated intent to meet with America's enemies without preconditions, Sen. Obama said: "I trust the American people to understand that it is not weakness, but wisdom to talk not just to our friends, but to our enemies, like Roosevelt did, and Kennedy did, and Truman did."

That he made this statement, and that it passed without comment by the journalists covering his speech indicates either breathtaking ignorance of history on the part of both, or deceit.

I assume the Roosevelt to whom Sen. Obama referred is Franklin D. Roosevelt. Our enemies in World War II were Nazi Germany, headed by Adolf Hitler; fascist Italy, headed by Benito Mussolini, and militarist Japan, headed by Hideki Tojo. FDR talked directly with none of them before the outbreak of hostilities, and his policy once war began was unconditional surrender.

FDR died before victory was achieved, and was succeeded by Harry Truman. Truman did not modify the policy of unconditional surrender. He ended that war not with negotiation, but with the atomic bomb.

So the leading Democrat candidate for President of the United States of America has no understanding of his country's foreign policy from WWII until the present? This is the same guy who attended a church for 20 years and never knew about the hateful, seditious things his preacher was saying about his country. The same guy who is on cordial terms with two unrepentent, home-grown terrorists. The same guy who doesn't know how many states the USA is composed of.

In a sane world he'd be laughed out of the race.

In a sane world . . .

On Christianity

Gates of Vienna has an excellent essay on the impact of Christianity through history upon our present-day civilization. Here's a taste:

The Italian Renaissance philosopher Machiavelli was more attached to Roman than to Christian culture, and held the view that Christianity was totally unsuited as the basis for any empire. His ideas were echoed by the 18th century English historian Edward Gibbon, who stated in his work The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that the preceding advances of Christianity were responsible for the downfall because it made the Romans too soft. But the eastern half of the Empire, centered around Constantinople, was just as much Christian, and yet survived for another thousand years after the fall of Rome in the West. The collapse of civil society in Western Europe in the 21st century has been preceded by the retreat of Christianity. There is a strange kind of irony in this that might have surprised Mr. Gibbon.

It's a keeper.

History Quote

“Evil is powerless if the good are unafraid. That’s why the Marxist vision of man without God must eventually be seen as an empty and a false faith—the second oldest in the world—first proclaimed in the Garden of Eden with whispered words of temptation: ‘Ye shall be as gods.’ The crisis of the Western world, Whittaker Chambers reminded us, exists to the degree in which it is indifferent to God... This is the real task before us: to reassert our commitment as a nation to a law higher than our own, to renew our spiritual strength. Only by building a wall of such spiritual resolve can we, as a free people, hope to protect our own heritage and make it someday the birthright of all men.”

—Ronald Reagan

Heritage Quote

When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary.

-- Thomas Paine, 1776 - Common Sense

Heritage Quote

My confidence is that there will for a long time be virtue and good sense enough in our countrymen to correct abuses.

-- Thomas Jefferson, 1788 - letter to Edward Rutledge

Heritage Quote

If Virtue & Knowledge are diffused among the People, they will never be enslav'd. This will be their great Security.

-- Samuel Adams, 1779 - letter to James Warren

Heritage Quote

Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and morality are indespensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism who should labor to subvert these great Pilliars of human happiness.

-- George Washington, 1796 - Farewell Address

Heritage Quote

I pronounce it as certain that there was never yet a truly great man that was not at the same time truly virtuous.

-- Benjamin Franklin, 1728 - The Busy-body, No. 3

Heritage Quote

How many observe Christ's birth-day! How few, his precepts! O! 'tis easier to keep Holidays than Commandments.

-- Benjamin Franklin, 1743 - Poor Richards Almanack

Heritage Quote

Public virtue cannot exist in a nation without private, and public virtue is the only foundation of republics. There must be a positive passion for the public good, the public interest, honour, power and glory, established in the minds of the people, or there can be no republican government, nor any real liberty: and this public passion must be superiour to all private passions.

-- John Adams, 1776 - letter to Mercy Warren

Heritage Quote

"We have therefore to resolve to conquer or die: Our won Country's Honor, all call upon us for vigorous and manly exertion, and if we now shamefully fail, we shall become infamous to the whole world. Let us therefore rely upon the goodness of the Cause, and the aid of the supreme Being, in whose hands Victory is, to animate and encourage us to great and noble Actions."

-- George Washington, 1776 - General Orders

Heritage Quote

"I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death."

-- Thomas Paine, 1776 - The American Crisis, no 1

Heritage Quote

"These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman."

-- Thomas Paine, 1776 - The American Crisis, No. 1

Heritage Quote

"An honorable Peace is and always was my first wish! I can take no delight in the effusion of human Blood; but, if this War should continue, I wish to have the most active part in it."

-- John Paul Jones, 1782 - letter to Gouverneur Morris

Heritage Quote

"I wish to have no connection with any ship that does not sail fast; for I intend to go in harm's way."

-- John Paul Jones, 1778 - letter to M. Le Ray de Chaumont

Old Ironsides

Heritage Quote

"Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God. I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"

-- Patrick Henry, 1775 - Speech to the Virginia Convention

Heritage Quote

"With hearts fortified with these animating reflections, we most solemnly, before God and the world, declare, that, exerting the utmost energy of those powers, which our beneficent Creator hath graciously bestowed upon us, the arms we have compelled by our enemies to assume, we will, in defiance of every hazard, with unabating firmness and perseverance employ for the preservation of our liberties; being with one mind resolved to die freemen rather than to live as slaves."

-- John Dickinson and Thomas Jefferson, 1775 - Declaration of the Cause and Necessity of Taking up Arms

Heritage Quote

"It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives."

-- John Adams, 1756 - Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law

Heritage Quote

"No people will tamely surrender their Liberties, nor can any be easily subdued, when knowledge is diffusd and Virtue is preservd. On the Contrary, when People are universally ignorant, and debauchd in their Manners, they will sink under their own weight without the Aid of foreign Invaders. "

-- Samuel Adams, 1775 - letter to James Warren

Heritage Quote

"Cherish, therefore, the spirit of our people, and keep alive their attention. Do not be too severe upon their errors, but reclaim them by enlightening them. If once they become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress, and Assemblies, Judges, and Governors, shall all become wolves."

-- Thomas Jefferson, 1787 - letter to Edward Carrington

Heritage Quote

"Law and liberty cannot rationally become the objects of our love, unless they first become the objects of our knowledge."

-- James Wilson, 1790 - Of the Study of the Law in the United States

Heritage Quote

"It is an object of vast magnitude that systems of education should be adopted and pursued which may not only diffuse a knowledge of the sciences but may implant in the minds of the American youth the principles of virtue and of liberty and inspire them with just and liberal ideas of government and with an inviolable attachment to their own country."

-- Noah Webster, 1790 - On Education of Youth in America

Heritage Quote

"A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."

-- James Madison, 1822 - letter to W.T. Barry

Heritage Quote

"Children should be educated and instructed in the principles of freedom."

-- John Adams, 1787 - Defense of the Constitutions

Heritage Quote

"As riches increase and accumulate in few hands, as luxury prevails in society, virtue will be in a greater degree considered as only a graceful appendage of wealth, and the tendency of things will be to depart from the republican standard. This is the real disposition of human nature; it is what neither the honorable member nor myself can correct. It is a common misfortunate that awaits our State constitution, as well as all others."

-- Alexander Hamilton (speech to the New York Ratifying Convention, June 1788)

Heritage Quote

"I acknowledge, in the ordinary course of government, that the exposition of the laws and Constitution devolves upon the judicial. But I beg to know upon what principle it can be contended that any one department draws from the Constitution greater powers than another in marking out the limits of the powers of the several departments."

-- James Madison (speech in the Congress of the United States, 17 June 1789)

Heritage Quote

"Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people, being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties, and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in the various parts of the country, and among the different orders of people, it shall be the duty of legislators and magistrates... to cherish the interest of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them."

-- John Adams (Thoughts on Government, 1776)

Pearl Harbor Day

65 years ago today, on 7 December 1941 the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked America's military installations in Hawaii -- primarily the naval base at Pearl Harbor.

I have a post related to this in mind, but am swamped at work, so cannot put it together right now. Until then, I leave you with some links to good sources of information about that day of infamy.

Pearl Harbor Raid, 7 December 1941

Attack on Pearl Harbor - Wikipedia

USS Arizona National Memorial - Pearl Harbor 65th Anniversary:
"A NATION REMEMBERS" (U.S. National Park Service)

My Story: Pearl Harbor

Heritage Quote

"[T]he flames kindled on the 4 of July 1776, have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism; on the contrary, they will consume these engines and all who work them."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to John Adams, 12 September 1821)

Heritage Quote

"Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition."

-- Thomas Jefferson (Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XIX,,

Heritage Quote

"No people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the invisible hand, which conducts the Affairs of men more than the People of the United States. Every step, by which they have advanced to the character of an independent nation, seems to have been distinguished by some token of providential agency."

-- George Washington (First Inaugural Address, 30 April 1789)

An inside look . . .

. . . into the collapse of the Soviet Union 15 years ago. Der Speigel posts an article by Christian Neef that provides a look inside the Kremlin during the endtimes of the USSR. Here is how he begins:

As has so often been in the case in history, there was little separating victory and defeat, joy and fear, euphoria and depression. And yet there couldn't have been a greater difference between the events in Berlin and in Moscow in October 1990.

The Presidential Council, a key group of advisors to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, met at the Kremlin at 10 a.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 17. It was a sunny day. But it was far from a routine meeting. As Anatoly Chernyayev later said, it reminded him "of the situation in October 1917 in St. Petersburg, when the Bolsheviks were threatening to storm the Winter Palace." In 1990 foreign policy expert Chernyayev was something on the order of Gorbachev's Henry Kissinger.

A storm also seemed to be on the horizon on that Oct. 17, but this time it was Gorbachev's archenemy, Boris Yeltsin, who was behind the sense of foreboding. Yeltsin, the then speaker of the Russian parliament, who had left the Communist Party three months earlier and had since emerged as the shining light of the great Soviet republic, had given the Kremlin an ultimatum the night before: His republic would no longer consider itself subservient to the Soviet leadership. Yeltsin was threatening Gorbachev with secession.

This article provides a fascinating perspective of the collapse of the Soviet superpower.

Recommended.

[Via Betsy Newmark.]

Heritage Quote

"[T]o exclude foreign intrigues and foreign partialities, so degrading to all countries and so baneful to free ones; to foster a spirit of independence too just to invade the rights of others, too proud to surrender our own, too liberal to indulge unworthy prejudices ourselves and too elevated not to look down upon them in others; to hold the union of the States on the basis of their peace and happiness; to support the Constitution, which is the cement of the Union, as well in its limitations as in its authorities; to respect the rights and authorities reserved to the States and to the people as equally incorporated with and essential to the success of the general... as far as sentiments and intentions such as these can aid the fulfillment of my duty, they will be a resource which can not fail me."

-- James Madison (Second Inaugural Address, March 1813)

Heritage Quote

"All of us who were engaged in the struggle must have observed frequent instances of superintending providence in our favor. To that kind providence we owe this happy opportunity of consulting in peace on the means of establishing our future national felicity. And have we now forgotten that powerful friend? Or do we imagine that we no longer need his assistance? I have lived, Sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth-that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the Ground without his Notice, is it probable that an Empire can rise without his Aid?"

-- Benjamin Franklin (To Colleagues at the Constitutional Convention)

History Quote

"All of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea -- whether it is to sail or to watch it -- we are going back from whence we came."

-- John F. Kennedy, Speech given at Newport at the dinner before the America's Cup Races, September 1962

Heritage Quote

"[N]either the wisest constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt."

-- Samuel Adams (essay in The Public Advertiser, Circa 1749)

History Quote

"The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the Nation’s greatness, but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable, especially when that questioning is disinterested, for they determine whether we use power or power uses us."

-- John F. Kennedy, Amherst College, Oct 26, 1963

Heritage Quote

"The Constitution on which our Union rests, shall be administered by me [as President] according to the safe and honest meaning contemplated by the plain understanding of the people of the United States at the time of its adoption - a meaning to be found in the explanations of those who advocated, not those who opposed it, and who opposed it merely lest the construction should be applied which they denounced as possible."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to Mesrs. Eddy, Russel, Thurber, Wheaton and Smith, 27 March 1801)

History Quote

"And so, my fellow americans: ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man."

John F. Kennedy, Inaugural address, January 20, 1961

Heritage Quote

"I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death."

-- Thomas Paine (The Crisis, no 1, 19 December 1776)

History Quote

"We stand for freedom. That is our conviction for ourselves; that is our only commitment to others."

-- John F. Kennedy

Heritage Quote

"This was the object of the Declaration of Independence. Not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take. Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to Henry Lee, 8 May 1825)

History Quote

"There are risks and costs to a program of action. But they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction."

-- John F. Kennedy

[Via The Quotations Page.]

Heritage Quote

"Sometimes it is said that man can not be trusted with government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question."

-- Thomas Jefferson (First Inaugural Address, 4 March 1801)

Heritage Quote

"The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create whatever the form of government, a real despotism. A just estimate of that love of power, and proneness to abuse it, which predominates in the human heart is sufficient to satisfy us of the truth of this position."

-- George Washington (Farewell Address, 19 September 1796)

Heritage Quote

"It is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage, and such only, as he believes to be acceptable to him. This duty is precedent both in order of time and degree of obligation, to the claims of Civil Society. Before any man can be considered as a member of Civil Society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governor of the Universe."

-- James Madison (A Memorial and Remonstrance, 1785)

Heritage Quote

"To grant that there is a supreme intelligence who rules the world and has established laws to regulate the actions of his creatures; and still to assert that man, in a state of nature, may be considered as perfectly free from all restraints of law and government, appears to a common understanding altogether irreconcilable. Good and wise men, in all ages, have embraced a very dissimilar theory. They have supposed that the deity, from the relations we stand in to himself and to each other, has constituted an eternal and immutable law, which is indispensably obligatory upon all mankind, prior to any human institution whatever. This is what is called the law of nature....Upon this law depend the natural rights of mankind."

-- Alexander Hamilton

History Quote

"If everyone is thinking alike, someone isn't thinking."

-- George Patton

Heritage Quote

"It is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favors."

-- George Washington (Thanksgiving Proclamation, 3 October 1789)

History Quote

"When men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon."

-- Thomas Paine

Heritage Quote

"It is the duty of all men in society, publicly, and at stated seasons, to worship the SUPREME BEING, the great Creator and Preserver of the universe. And no subject shall be hurt, molested, or restrained, in his person, liberty, or estate, for worshipping GOD in the manner most agreeable to the dictates of his own conscience; or for his religious profession or sentiments; provided he doth not disturb the public peace, or obstruct others in their religious worship."

-- John Adams (Thoughts on Government, 1776)

History Quote

"War is an art and as such is not susceptible of explanation by fixed formula."

-- George Patton

Heritage Quote

"I suppose, indeed, that in public life, a man whose political principles have any decided character and who has energy enough to give them effect must always expect to encounter political hostility from those of adverse principles."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to Richard M. Johnson, 10 March 1808)

History Quote

"What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly."

-- Thomas Paine

Heritage Quote

"As the cool and deliberate sense of the community ought in all governments, and actually will in all free governments ultimately prevail over the views of its rulers; so there are particular moments in public affairs, when the people stimulated by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn. In these critical moments, how salutary will be the interference of some temperate and respectable body of citizens, in order to check the misguided career, and to suspend the blow mediated by the people against themselves, until reason, justice and truth, can regain their authority over the public mind?"

-- James Madison (likely) (Federalist No. 63, 1788)

Heritage Quote

"Government implies the power of making laws. It is essential to the idea of a law, that it be attended with a sanction; or, in other words, a penalty or punishment for disobedience."

-- Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 15, 1787)

Heritage Quote

"The bosom of America is open to receive not only the Opulent and respectable Stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all Nations and Religions; whom we shall welcome to a participation of all our rights and privileges, if by decency and propriety of conduct they appear to merit the enjoyment."

-- George Washington (Address to the Members of the Volunteer Association of Ireland, 2 December 1783)

Heritage Quote

"[H]onesty will be found on every experiment, to be the best and only true policy; let us then as a Nation be just."

-- George Washington (Circular letter to the States, 14 June 1783)

History Quote

"The things that will destroy America are prosperity at any price, peace at any price, safety first instead of duty first, the love of soft living and the get rich quick theory of life."

-- Theodore Roosevelt

Heritage Quote

"Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for, I have grown not only gray, but almost blind in the service of my country."

-- George Washington (upon fumbling for his glasses before delivering the Newburgh Address, 15 March 1783)

Heritage Quote

"Whatever may be the judgement pronounced on the competency of the architects of the Constitution, or whatever may be the destiny of the edifice prepared by them, I feel it a duty to express my profound and solemn conviction ... that there never was an assembly of men, charged with a great and arduous trust, who were more pure in their motives, or more exclusively or anxiously devoted to the object committed to them."

-- James Madison (in a, Circa 1835)

Heritage Quote

"It is too probable that no plan we propose will be adopted. Perhaps another dreadful conflict is to be sustained. If, to please the people, we offer what we ourselves disprove, how can we afterwards defend our work? Let us raise a standard to which the wise and the honest can repair. The event is in the hand of God. "

-- George Washington (as quoted by Gouverneur Morris in Farrand's Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, 25 March 1787)

Heritage Quote

"Illustrious examples are displayed to our view, that we may imitate as well as admire. Before we can be distinguished by the same honors, we must be distinguished by the same virtues. What are those virtues? They are chiefly the same virtues, which we have already seen to be descriptive of the American character -- the love of liberty, and the love of law."

-- James Wilson (Of the Study of the Law in the United States, Circa 1790)

Heritage Quote

"The dons, the bashaws, the grandees, the patricians, the sachems, the nabobs, call them by what names you please, sigh and groan and fret, and sometimes stamp and foam and curse, but all in vain. The decree is gone forth, and it cannot be recalled, that a more equal liberty than has prevailed in other parts of the earth must be established in America."

-- John Adams (letter to Patrick Henry, 3 June 1776)

Heritage Quote

"I consider the government of the U.S. as interdicted by the Constitution from intermeddling with religious institutions, their doctrines, discipline, or exercises."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to Samuel Miller, 23 January 1809)

Heritage Quote

"The local interest of a State ought in every case to give way to the interests of the Union. For when a sacrifice of one or the other is necessary, the former becomes only an apparent, partial interest, and should yield, on the principle that the smaller good ought never to oppose the greater good."

-- Alexander Hamilton (speech to the New York Ratifying Convention, June 1788)

Heritage Quote

"I am persuaded that a firm union is as necessary to perpetuate our liberties as it is to make us respectable; and experience will probably prove that the National Government will be as natural a guardian of our freedom as the State Legislatures."

-- Alexander Hamilton (speech to the New York Ratifying Convention, June 1788)

Heritage Quote

"Not all the treasures of the world, so far as I believe, could have induced me to support an offensive war, for I think it murder; but if a thief breaks into my house, burns and destroys my property, and kills or threatens to kill me, or those that are in it, and to "bind me in all cases whatsoever" to his absolute will, am I to suffer it?"

-- Thomas Paine (The American Crisis, No. 1, 19 December 1776)

Heritage Quote

"Besides, to lay and collect internal taxes in this extensive country must require a great number of congressional ordinances, immediately operation upon the body of the people; these must continually interfere with the state laws and thereby produce disorder and general dissatisfaction till the one system of laws or the other, operating upon the same subjects, shall be abolished."

-- Federal Farmer (Antifederalist Letter, 10 October 1787)

Heritage Quote

"Nothing has yet been offered to invalidate the doctrine that the meaning of the Constitution may as well be ascertained by the Legislative as by the Judicial authority."

-- James Madison (speech in the Congress of the United States, 18 June 1789)

Heritage Quote

"Laws for the liberal education of the youth, especially of the lower class of the people, are so extremely wise and useful, that, to a humane and generous mind, no expense for this purpose would be thought extravagant."

-- John Adams (Thoughts on Government, 1776)

Heritage Quote

"Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint."

-- Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 15)

Heritage Quote

"One of the most essential branches of English liberty is the freedom of one's house. A man's house is his castle."

-- James Otis (On the Writs of Assistance, 1761)

Heritage Quote

"The constitutions of most of our States assert that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves in all cases to which they think themselves competent, or they may act by representatives, freely and equally chosen; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed; that they are entitled to freedom of person, freedom of religion, freedom of property, and freedom of the press."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to John Cartwright, 1824)

Heritage Quote

"My anxious recollections, my sympathetic feeling, and my best wishes are irresistibly excited whensoever, in any country, I see an oppressed nation unfurl the banners of freedom."

-- George Washington (letter to Pierre Auguste Adet, January 1st 1796)

Heritage Quote

"The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite."

-- James Madison (Federalist No. 45)

Heritage Quote

"Cherish, therefore, the spirit of our people, and keep alive their attention. Do not be too severe upon their errors, but reclaim them by enlightening them. If once they become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress, and Assemblies, Judges, and Governors, shall all become wolves."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to Edward Carrington, 16 January 1787)

Heritage Quote

“The great object of my fear is the federal judiciary. That body, like gravity, ever acting, with noiseless foot, and unalarming advance, gaining ground step by step, and holding what it gains, is ingulfing insidiously the special governments into the jaws of that which feeds them.”

— Thomas Jefferson

Heritage Quote

"It has ever been my hobby-horse to see rising in America an empire of liberty, and a prospect of two or three hundred millions of freemen, without one noble or one king among them. You say it is impossible. If I should agree with you in this, I would still say, let us try the experiment, and preserve our equality as long as we can. A better system of education for the common people might preserve them long from such artificial inequalities as are prejudicial to society, by confounding the natural distinctions of right and wrong, virtue and vice."

-- John Adams (letter to Count Sarsfield, 3 February 1786)

Heritage Quote

"Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph."

-- Thomas Paine (American Crisis, No. 1, 19 December 1776)

Heritage Quote

"A fine genius in his own country is like gold in the mine."

-- Benjamin Franklin (Poor Richard's Almanack, 1733)

Heritage Quote

"The boisterous sea of liberty is never without a wave."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to Richard Rush, 20 October 1820)

Heritage Quote

"If, for instance, the president is required to do any act, he is not only authorized, but required, to decide for himself, whether, consistently with his constitutional duties, he can do the act."

-- Joseph Story (Commentaries on the Constitution, 1833)

Heritage Quote

"That diabolical Hell conceived principle of persecution rages amoung some and to their eternal Infamy the Clergy can furnish their Quota of Imps for such business,"

-- James Madison (letter to William Bradford, 24 January 1774)

Heritage Quote

"The idea of restraining the legislative authority in the means of providing for the national defense is one of those refinements which owe their origin to a zeal for liberty more ardent than enlightened. "

-- Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 26)

Heritage Quote

"The great desideratum in Government is, so to modify the sovereignty as that it may be sufficiently neutral between different parts of the Society to controul one part from invading the rights of another, and at the same time sufficiently controuled itself, from setting up an interest adverse to that of the entire Society."

-- James Madison (letter to Thomas Jefferson, 24 October 1787)

Heritage Quote

"It appears to me, then, little short of a miracle, that the Delegates from so many different States ... should unite in forming a system of national Government, so little liable to well founded objections."

-- George Washington (letter to Marquis de Lafayette, 7 February

Heritage Quote

"The invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the Constituents."

-- James Madison (letter to Thomas Jefferson, 17 October 1788)

Heritage Quote

"Laws are made for men of ordinary understanding and should, therefore, be construed by the ordinary rules of common sense. Their meaning is not to be sought for in metaphysical subtleties which may make anything mean everything or nothing at pleasure."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to William Johnson, 1823)

Heritage Quote

“My confidence is that there will for a long time be virtue and good sense enough in our countrymen to correct abuses.”

— Thomas Jefferson

Heritage Quote

"The great object of my fear is the federal judiciary. That body, like gravity, ever acting, with noiseless foot, and unalarming advance, gaining ground step by step, and holding what it gains, is ingulfing insidiously the special governments into the jaws of that which feeds them."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to Judge Spencer Roane, 9 March 1821)

Heritage Quote

"The duty of an upright administration is to pursue its course steadily, to know nothing of these family dissentions, and to cherish the good principles of both parties."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to George Logan, 1805)

Heritage Quote

"[W]hen the resolution of enslaving America was formed in Great Britain, the British Parliament was advised by an artful man, - who was governor of Pennsylvania, to disarm the people; that it was the best and most effectual way to enslave them; but that they should not do it openly, but weaken them, and let them sink gradually, by totally disusing and neglecting the militia."

-- George Mason (speech in the Virginia Ratifying Convention, 14 June 1778)

Heritage Quote

"[T]he importance of piety and religion; of industry and frugality; of prudence, economy, regularity and an even government; all ... are essential to the well-being of a family."

-- Samuel Adams (letter to Thomas Wells, 22 November 1780)

Heritage Quote

"I wish to have no connection with any ship that does not sail fast; for I intend to go in harm's way."

-- John Paul Jones (letter to M. Le Ray de Chaumont, 16 November 1778)

Heritage Quote

"I wish from my soul that the legislature of this State could see a policy of a gradual Abolition of Slavery."

-- George Washington (letter to Lawrence Lewis, 4 August 1797)

Heritage Quote

"Laws that forbid the carrying of arms... disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes... Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man."

-- Cesare Beccaria (On Crimes and Punishment, quoted by Thomas Jefferson in Commonplace Book)

Heritage Quote

"Nothing so strongly impels a man to regard the interest of his constituents, as the certainty of returning to the general mass of the people, from whence he was taken, where he must participate in their burdens."

-- George Mason (speech in the Virginia Ratifying Convention, 17 June 1788)

Heritage Quote

"It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more. You will think me transported with Enthusiasm but I am not. I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure, that it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States. Yet through all the Gloom I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see that the End is more than worth all the Means. And that Posterity will tryumph in that Days Transaction, even altho We should rue it, which I trust in God We shall not."

-- John Adams (letter to Abigail Adams, 3 July 1776)

Heritage Quote

"It seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force. If there be any truth in the remark, the crisis at which we are arrived may with propriety be regarded as the era in which that decision is to be made; and a wrong election of the part we shall act may, in this view, deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind."

-- Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 1, 27 October 1787)

Heritage Quote

"[L]et them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it."

-- Thomas Jefferson (First Inaugural Address, 4 March 1801)

Heritage Quote

"No people will tamely surrender their Liberties, nor can any be easily subdued, when knowledge is diffusd and Virtue is preservd. On the Contrary, when People are universally ignorant, and debauchd in their Manners, they will sink under their own weight without the Aid of foreign Invaders."

-- Samuel Adams (letter to James Warren, 4 November 1775)

Clash of civilizations

Jonathan Last has a good editorial in the Philadelphia Inquirer wherein he describes the centuries-long history of war between Islam and the West.

Harvard professor Samuel Huntington first made this case in 1993, in his famous article "The Clash of Civilizations" in the journal Foreign Affairs. "Conflict along the fault line between Western and Islamic civilizations has been going on for 1,300 years," he wrote. After the founding of Islam, Muslims spread their faith by the sword. Islam conquered North Africa and pushed into Europe, where it ruled in Sicily, Spain, Portugal, and parts of France. Twice, the forces of Islam laid siege to Vienna. For 1,000 years, Islam advanced and Christendom retreated.

As Pope Benedict XVI explains in his book Without Roots, the very concept of "Europe" emerged as a reaction to the surge of Islam. Not until the failure of the second Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683 did the Islamic tide recede definitively. For the next 300 years, Western civilization was ascendant and the Islamic world stagnated.

He goes on to provide many examples of past and present conflict. Then he asks a couple of questions:

If we accept that this is a clash between civilizations, two questions face us: How does this change our thinking? And the painful one: What do we do about it?

Good questions, indeed. Recommended.

Heritage Quote

"[T]he propitious smiles of Heaven, can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right, which Heaven itself has ordained."

-- George Washington (First Inaugural Address, April 1789)

Heritage Quote

"It already appears, that there must be in every society of men superiors and inferiors, because God has laid in the constitution and course of nature the foundations of the distinction."

-- John Adams (Thoughts on Government, 1776)

Heritage Quote

"The greatest good we can do our country is to heal its party divisions and make them one people."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to John Dickinson, 23 July 1801)

Heritage Quote

"As parents, we can have no joy, knowing that this government is not sufficiently lasting to ensure any thing which we may bequeath to posterity: And by a plain method of argument, as we are running the next generation into debt, we ought to do the work of it, otherwise we use them meanly and pitifully. In order to discover the line of our duty rightly, we should take our children in our hand, and fix our station a few years farther into life; that eminence will present a prospect, which a few present fears and prejudices conceal from our sight."

-- Thomas Paine (Common Sense, 1776)

Heritage Quote

"[E]very Man who comes among us, and takes up a piece of Land, becomes a Citizen, and by our Constitution has a Voice in Elections, and a share in the Government of the Country."

-- Benjamin Franklin (letter to William Straham, 19 August 1784)

Heritage Quote

"If men of wisdom and knowledge, of moderation and temperance, of patience, fortitude and perseverance, of sobriety and true republican simplicity of manners, of zeal for the honour of the Supreme Being and the welfare of the commonwealth; if men possessed of these other excellent qualities are chosen to fill the seats of government, we may expect that our affairs will rest on a solid and permanent foundation."

-- Samuel Adams (letter to Elbridge Gerry, 27 November 1780)

Heritage Quote

I pronounce it as certain that there was never yet a truly great man that was not at the same time truly virtuous."

-- Benjamin Franklin (The Busy-body, No. 3, 18 February 1728)

Heritage Quote

More permanent and genuine happiness is to be found in the sequestered walks of connubial life than in the giddy rounds of promiscuous pleasure.

-- George Washington (letter to the Marquis de la Rourie, 10 August 1786)

Heritage Quote

"I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country."

-- Nathan Hale (before being hanged by the British, 22 September 1776)

Heritage Quote

"We know the Race is not to the swift nor the Battle to the Strong. Do you not think an Angel rides in the Whirlwind and directs this Storm?"

-- John Page (letter to Thomas Jefferson, 20 July 1776)

Heritage Quote

"It will not be denied that power is of an encroaching nature and that it ought to be effectually restrained from passing the limits assigned to it. After discriminating, therefore, in theory, the several classes of power, as they may in their nature be legislative, executive, or judiciary, the next and most difficult task is to provide some practical security for each, against the invasion of the others."

-- James Madison (Federalist No. 48, 1 February 1788)

Heritage Quote

"No Taxation without Representation!"

Anonymous slogan in response to British Tax Policy, Circa 1765

Heritage Quote

"I trust that the proposed Constitution afford a genuine specimen of representative government and republican government; and that it will answer, in an eminent degree, all the beneficial purposes of society."

-- Alexander Hamilton (speech to the New York Ratifying Convention, June 1788)

Heritage Quote

"[T]he present Constitution is the standard to which we are to cling. Under its banners, bona fide must we combat our political foes - rejecting all changes but through the channel itself provides for amendments."

-- Alexander Hamilton (letter to James Bayard, April 1802)

Heritage Quote

"Strangers are welcome because there is room enough for them all, and therefore the old Inhabitants are not jealous of them; the Laws protect them sufficiently so that they have no need of the Patronage of great Men; and every one will enjoy securely the Profits of his Industry. But if he does not bring a Fortune with him, he must work and be industrious to live."

-- Benjamin Franklin (Those Who Would Remove to America, February 1784)

Heritage Quote

"What is to be the consequence, in case the Congress shall misconstrue this part [the necessary and proper clause] of the Constitution and exercise powers not warranted by its true meaning, I answer the same as if they should misconstrue or enlarge any other power vested in them...the success of the usurpation will depend on the executive and judiciary departments, which are to expound and give effect to the legislative acts; and in a last resort a remedy must be obtained from the people, who can by the elections of more faithful representatives, annul the acts of the usurpers."

-- James Madison (Federalist No. 44, 25 January 1788)

Heritage Quote

"To give to every citizen the information he needs for the transaction of his own business; To enable him to calculate for himself, and to express and preserve his ideas, his contracts and accounts, in writing; To improve, by reading, his morals and faculties; To understand his duties to his neighbors and country, and to discharge with competence the functions confided to him by either; To know his rights; to exercise with order and justice those he retains; to choose with discretion the fiduciary of those he delegates; and to notice their conduct with diligence, with candor, and judgment; And, in general, to observe with intelligence and faithfulness all the social relations under which he shall be placed."

-- Thomas Jefferson (Report of the Commissioners for the University of Virginia, 4 August 1818)

Food for thought

"Rome fell September 4, 476AD. It was overrun with illegal immigrants: Visigoths, Franks, Anglos, Saxons, Ostrogoths, Burgundians, Lombards, Jutes and Vandals, who at first assimilated and worked as servants, but then came so fast they did not learn the Latin Language or the Roman form of government. Highly trained Roman Legions moving rapidly on their advanced road system, were strained fighting conflicts worldwide. Rome had a trade deficit, having outsourced most of its grain production to North Africa, and when Vandals captured that area, Rome did not have the resources to retaliate. Attila the Hun was committing terrorist attacks. The city of Rome was on welfare with citizens being given free bread. One Roman commented: 'Those who live at the expense of the public funds are more numerous than those who provide them.' Tax collectors were 'more terrible than the enemy.' Gladiators provided violent entertainment in the Coliseum. There was injustice in courts, exposure of unwanted infants, infidelity, immorality and perverted bathhouses. 5th-Century historian Salvian wrote: 'O Roman people be ashamed... Let nobody think otherwise, the vices of our bad lives have alone conquered us'."

---William Federer

Heritage Quote

"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. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea, if there be sufficient virtue and intelligence in the community, it will be exercised in the selection of these men. So that we do not depend on their virtue, or put confidence in our rulers, but in the people who are to choose them."

-- James Madison (speech at the Virginia Ratifying Convention, 20 June 1788)

Heritage Quote

"Our unalterable resolution would be to be free. They have attempted to subdue us by force, but God be praised! in vain. Their arts may be more dangerous then their arms. Let us then renounce all treaty with them upon any score but that of total separation, and under God trust our cause to our swords."

---Samuel Adams

Heritage Quote

"[A] rigid economy of the public contributions and absolute interdiction of all useless expenses will go far towards keeping the government honest and unoppressive."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to Marquis de Lafayette, 4 November
1823)

Heritage Quote

"Republics are created by the virtue, public spirit, and intelligence of the citizens. They fall, when the wise are banished from the public councils, because they dare to be honest, and the profligate are rewarded, because they flatter the people, in order to betray them."

-- Joseph Story (Commentaries on the Constitution, 1833)

Heritage Quote

"The injury which may possibly be done by defeating a few good laws, will be amply compensated by the advantage of preventing a number of bad ones."

-- Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 73, on the Veto Power, 21 March 1788)

Heritage Quote

"A local spirit will infallibly prevail much more in the members of Congress than a national spirit will prevail in the legislatures of the particular States."

-- James Madison (Federalist No. 46, 29 January 1788)

Heritage Quote

"The history of ancient and modern republics had taught them that many of the evils which those republics suffered arose from the want of a certain balance, and that mutual control indispensable to a wise administration. They were convinced that popular assemblies are frequently misguided by ignorance, by sudden impulses, and the intrigues of ambitious men; and that some firm barrier against these operations was necessary. They, therefore, instituted your Senate."

-- Alexander Hamilton (speech to the New York Ratifying Convention, June 1788)

Heritage Quote

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. . ."

The Declaration of Independence, 4 July 1776

Heritage Quote

"Work as if you were to live 100 Years, Pray as if you were to die To-morrow."

-- Benjamin Franklin (Poor Richard's Almanack, 1757)

Heritage Quote

"The citizens of the United States of America have the right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were by the indulgence of one class of citizens that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support."

-- George Washington (letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, 9 September 1790)

Heritage Quote

"The aim of every political constitution is, or ought to be, first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virture to pursue, the common good of the society; and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous whilst they continue to hold their public trust."

-- Alexander Hamilton and James Madison (Federalist No. 57, 19 February 1788)

Heritage Quote

"If, from the more wretched parts of the old world, we look at those which are in an advanced stage of improvement, we still find the greedy hand of government thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry, and grasping the spoil of the multitude. Invention is continually exercised, to furnish new pretenses for revenues and taxation. It watches prosperity as its prey and permits none to escape without tribute."

-- Thomas Paine (Rights of Man, 1791)

Heritage Quote

"A fondness for power is implanted, in most men, and it is natural to abuse it, when acquired."

-- Alexander Hamilton (The Farmer Refuted, 23 February 1775)

Heritage Quote

"As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust: So there are other qualities in human nature, which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence. Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form. Were the pictures which have been drawn by the political jealousy of some among us, faithful likenesses of the human character, the inference would be that there is not sufficient virtue among men for self-government; and that nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another."

-- James Madison (Federalist No. 55, 15 February 1788)

Heritage Quote

"Harmony in the married state is the very first object to be aimed at."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to Mary Jefferson Eppes, 7 January 1798)

Heritage Quote

"I can truly say I had rather be at Mount Vernon with a friend or two about me, than to be attended at the Seat of Government by the Officers of State and the Representatives of every Power in Europe."

-- George Washington (letter to David Stuart, 15 June 1790)

Heritage Quote

"The members of the legislative department...are numerous. They are distributed and dwell among the people at large. Their connections of blood, of friendship, and of acquaintance embrace a great proportion of the most influential part of the society...they are more immediately the confidential guardians of their rights and liberties."

-- James Madison (Federalist No. 50, 5 February 1788)

History Quote

"We will have peace with the Arabs when they will love their children more than they hate us.�

-- Golda Meir, 1972

Heritage Quote

"I am free to acknowledge that His Powers are full great, and greater than I was disposed to make them. Nor, Entre Nous, do I believe they would have been so great had not many of the members cast their eyes towards General Washington as President; and shaped their Ideas of the Powers to be given to a President, by their opinions of his Virtue."

-- Pierce Butler (letter to Weedon Butler, 5 May 1778)

Heritage Quote

"The multiplication of public offices, increase of expense beyond income, growth and entailment of a public debt, are indications soliciting the employment of the pruning knife."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to Spencer Roane, 9 March 1821)

Heritage Quote

"What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value."

-- Thomas Paine (The American Crisis, No. 1, 19 December 1776)

Heritage Quote

"When you assemble from your several counties in the Legislature, were every member to be guided only by the apparent interest of his county, government would be impracticable. There must be a perpetual accomodation and sacrifice of local advantage to general expediency."

-- Alexander Hamilton (speech at the New York Ratifying Convention, June 1788)

Heritage Quote

"Liberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker. But if we had not, our fathers have earned and bought it for us, at the expense of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood."

-- John Adams (A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, 1765)

Heritage Quote

Every new regulation concerning commerce or revenue; or in any manner affecting the value of the different species of property, presents a new harvest to those who watch the change and can trace its consequences; a harvest reared not by themselves but by the toils and cares of the great body of their fellow citizens. This is a state of things in which it may be said with some truth that laws are made for the few not for the many.

-- James Madison (likely) (Federalist No. 62, 1788)

Heritage Quote

"Wish not so much to live long as to live well."

-- Benjamin Franklin (Poor Richard's Almanack, June 1746)

Solzhenitsyn on the West

Alexander Solzhenitsyn gave an address at Harvard on 8 June 1978 about why the West was not prevailing over tyranny. Though these words were spoken 28 years ago, they are so very pertinent to the world we find ourselves in today that I just had to share them with you.

This speech really resonates.

I've reprinted it in the extended entry.

(NOTE: I failed to note the blog where I first stumbled upon a reference to this speech, but I'll gladly give credit, if you just let me know.)

A World Split Apart
Commencement Address Delivered At Harvard University June 8, 1978

By Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn

I am sincerely happy to be here with you on the occasion of the 327th commencement of this old and illustrious university. My congratulations and best wishes to all of today's graduates.

Harvard's motto is "VERITAS." Many of you have already found out and others will find out in the course of their lives that truth eludes us as soon as our concentration begins to flag, all the while leaving the illusion that we are continuing to pursue it. This is the source of much discord. Also, truth seldom is sweet; it is almost invariably bitter. A measure of truth is included in my speech today, but I offer it as a friend, not as an adversary.

Three years ago in the United States I said certain things that were rejected and appeared unacceptable. Today, however, many people agree with what I said ...

The split in today's world is perceptible even to a hasty glance. Any of our contemporaries readily identifies two world powers, each of them already capable of destroying each other. However, the understanding of the split too often is limited to this political conception: the illusion according to which danger may be abolished through successful diplomatic negotiations or by achieving a balance of armed forces. The truth is that the split is both more profound and more alienating, that the rifts are more numerous than one can see at first glance. These deep manifold splits bear the danger of equally manifold disaster for all of us, in accordance with the ancient truth that a kingdom - in this case, our Earth - divided against itself cannot stand.

Contemporary Worlds

There is the concept of the Third World: thus, we already have three worlds. Undoubtedly, however, the number is even greater; we are just too far away to see. Every ancient and deeply rooted self-contained culture, especially if it is spread over a wide part of the earth's surface, constitutes a self-contained world, full of riddles and surprises to Western thinking. As a minimum, we must include in this China, India, the Muslim world, and Africa, if indeed we accept the approximation of viewing the latter two as uniform.

For one thousand years Russia belonged to such a category, although Western thinking systematically committed the mistake of denying its special character and therefore never understood it, just as today the West does not understand Russia in Communist captivity. And while it may be that in past years Japan has increasingly become, in effect, a Far West, drawing ever closer to Western ways (I am no judge here), Israel, I think, should not be reckoned as part of the West, if only because of the decisive circumstance that its state system is fundamentally linked to its religion.

How short a time ago, relatively, the small world of modern Europe was easily seizing colonies all over the globe, not only without anticipating any real resistance, but usually with contempt for any possible values in the conquered people's approach to life. It all seemed an overwhelming success, with no geographic limits. Western society expanded in a triumph of human independence and power. And all of a sudden the twentieth century brought the clear realization of this society's fragility.

We now see that the conquests proved to be short lived and precarious (and this, in turn, points to defects in the Western view of the world which led to these conquests). Relations with the former colonial world now have switched to the opposite extreme and the Western world often exhibits an excess of obsequiousness, but it is difficult yet to estimate the size of the bill which former colonial countries will present to the West and it is difficult to predict whether the surrender not only of its last colonies, but of everything it owns, will be sufficient for the West to clear this account.

Convergence

But the persisting blindness of superiority continues to hold the belief that all the vast regions of our planet should develop and mature to the level of contemporary Western systems, the best in theory and the most attractive in practice; that all those other worlds are but temporarily prevented (by wicked leaders or by severe crises or by their own barbarity and incomprehension) from pursuing Western pluralistic democracy and adopting the Western way of life. Countries are judged on the merit of their progress in that direction. But in fact such a conception is a fruit of Western incomprehension of the essence of other worlds, a result of mistakenly measuring them all with a Western yardstick. The real picture of our planet's development bears little resemblance to all this.

The anguish of a divided world gave birth to the theory of convergence between the leading Western countries and the Soviet Union. It is a soothing theory which overlooks the fact that these worlds are not evolving toward each other and that neither one can be transformed into the other without violence. Besides, convergence inevitably means acceptance of the other side's defects, too. and this can hardly suit anyone.

If I were today addressing an audience in my country, in my examination of the overall pattern of the world's rifts I would have concentrated on the calamities of the East. But since my forced exile in the West has now lasted four years and since my audience is a Western one, I think it may be of greater interest to concentrate on certain aspects of the contemporary West, such as I see them.

A Decline In Courage

A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society. There are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life.

Political and intellectual functionaries exhibit this depression, passivity, and perplexity in their actions and in their statements, and even more so in their self-serving rationales as to how realistic, reasonable, and intellectually and even morally justified it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice. And the decline in courage, at times attaining what could be termed a lack of manhood, is ironically emphasized by occasional outbursts and inflexibility on the part of those same functionaries when dealing with weak governments and with countries that lack support, or with doomed currents which clearly cannot offer resistance. But they get tongue-tied and paralyzed when they deal with powerful governments and threatening forces, with aggressors and international terrorists.

Must one point out that from ancient times a decline in courage has been considered the first symptom of the end?

Well-Being

When the modern Western states were being formed, it was proclaimed as a principle that governments are meant to serve man and that man lives in order to be free and pursue happiness. (See, for example, the American Declaration of Independence.) Now at last during past decades technical and social progress has permitted the realization of such aspirations: the welfare state.

Every citizen has been granted the desired freedom and material goods in such quantity and in such quality as to guarantee in theory the achievement of happiness, in the debased sense of the word which has come into being during those same decades. (In the process, however, one psychological detail has been overlooked: the constant desire to have still more things and a still better life and the struggle to this end imprint many Western faces with worry and even depression, though it is customary to carefully conceal such feelings. This active and tense competition comes to dominate all human thought and does not in the least open a way to free spiritual development.)

The individual's independence from many types of state pressure has been guaranteed; the majority of the people have been granted well-being to an extent their fathers and grandfathers could not even dream about; it has become possible to raise young people according to these ideals, preparing them for and summoning them toward physical bloom, happiness, and leisure, the possession of material goods, money, and leisure, toward an almost unlimited freedom in the choice of pleasures. So who should now renounce all this, why and for the sake of what should one risk one's precious life in defense of the common good and particularly in the nebulous case when the security of one's nation must be defended in an as yet distant land?

Even biology tells us that a high degree of habitual well-being is not advantageous to a living organism. Today, well-being in the life of Western society has begun to take off its pernicious mask.

Legalistic Life

Western society has chosen for itself the organization best suited to its purposes and one I might call legalistic. The limits of human rights and rightness are determined by a system of laws; such limits are very broad. People in the West have acquired considerable skill in using, interpreting, and manipulating law (though laws tend to be too complicated for an average person to understand without the help of an expert). Every conflict is solved according to the letter of the law and this is considered to be the ultimate solution.

If one is risen from a legal point of view, nothing more is required, nobody may mention that one could still not be right, and urge self-restraint or a renunciation of these rights, call for sacrifice and selfless risk: this would simply sound absurd. Voluntary self-restraint is almost unheard of: everybody strives toward further expansion to the extreme limit of the legal frames. (An oil company is legally blameless when it buys up an invention of a new type of energy in order to prevent its use. A food product manufacturer is legally blameless when he poisons his produce to make it last longer: after all, people are free not to purchase it.)

I have spent all my life under a Communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society based on the letter of the law and never reaching any higher fails to take full advantage of the full range of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes man's noblest impulses.

And it will be simply impossible to bear up to the trials of this threatening century with nothing but the supports of a legalistic structure.

The Direction Of Freedom

Today's Western society has revealed the inequality between the freedom for good deeds and the freedom for evil deeds. A statesman who wants to achieve something highly constructive for his country has to move cautiously and even timidly; thousands of hasty (and irresponsible) critics cling to him at all times; he is constantly rebuffed by parliament and the press. He has to prove that his every step is well founded and absolutely flawless. Indeed, an outstanding, truly great person who has unusual and unexpected initiatives in mind does not get any chance to assert himself; dozens of traps will be set for him from the beginning. Thus mediocrity triumphs under the guise of democratic restraints.

It is feasible and easy everywhere to undermine administrative power and it has in fact been drastically weakened in all Western countries. The defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals. It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.

On the other hand, destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society has turned out to have scarce defense against the abyss of human decadence, for example against the misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, such as motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror. This is all considered to be part of freedom and to be counterbalanced, in theory, by the young people's right not to look and not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil.

And what shall we say about the dark realms of overt criminality? Legal limits (especially in the United States) are broad enough to encourage not only individual freedom but also some misuse of such freedom. The culprit can go unpunished or obtain undeserved leniency - all with the support of thousands of defenders in the society. When a government earnestly undertakes to root out terrorism, public opinion immediately accuses it of violating the terrorist's civil rights. There is quite a number of such cases.

This tilt of freedom toward evil has come about gradually, but it evidently stems from a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which man - the master of the world - does not bear any evil within himself, and all the defects of life are caused by misguided social systems, which must therefore be corrected. Yet strangely enough, though the best social conditions have been achieved in the West, there still remains a great deal of crime; there even is considerably more of it than in the destitute and lawless Soviet society. (There is a multitude of prisoners in our camps who are termed criminals, but most of them never committed any crime; they merely tried to defend themselves against a lawless state by resorting to means outside the legal framework.)

The Direction Of The Press

The press, too, of course, enjoys the widest freedom. (I shall be using the word "press" to include all the media.) But what use does it make of it?

Here again, the overriding concern is not to infringe the letter of the law. There is no true moral responsibility for distortion or disproportion. What sort of responsibility does a journalist or a newspaper have to the readership or to history? If they have misled public opinion by inaccurate information or wrong conclusions, even if they have contributed to mistakes on a state level, do we know of any case of open regret voiced by the same journalist or the same newspaper? No; this would damage sales. A nation may be the worse for such a mistake, but the journalist always gets away with it. It is most likely that he will start writing the exact opposite to his previous statements with renewed aplomb.

Because instant and credible information is required, it becomes necessary to resort to guesswork, rumors, and suppositions to fill in the voids, and none of them will ever be refuted; they settle into the readers' memory. How many hasty, immature, superficial, and misleading judgments are expressed everyday, confusing readers, and then left hanging?

The press can act the role of public opinion or miseducate it. Thus we may see terrorists heroized, or secret matters pertaining to the nation's defense publicly revealed, or we may witness shameless intrusion into the privacy of well-known people according to the slogan "Everyone is entitled to know everything." (But this is a false slogan of a false era; far greater in value is the forfeited right of people not to know, not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk. A person who works and leads a meaningful life has no need for this excessive and burdening flow of information.)

Hastiness and superficiality - these are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century and more than anywhere else this is manifested in the press. In-depth analysis of a problem is anathema to the press; it is contrary to its nature. The press merely picks out sensational formulas.

Such as it is, however, the press has become the greatest power within Western countries, exceeding that of the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary. Yet one would like to ask: According to what law has it been elected and to whom is it responsible? In the Communist East, a journalist is frankly appointed as a state official. But who has voted Western journalists into their positions of power, for how long a time, and with what prerogatives?

There is yet another surprise for someone coming from the totalitarian East with its rigorously unified press: One discovers a common trend of preferences within the Western press as a whole (the spirit of the time), generally accepted patterns of judgment, and maybe common corporate interests, the sum effect being not competition but unification. Unrestrained freedom exists for the press, but not for readership, because newspapers mostly transmit in a forceful and emphatic way those opinions which do not too openly contradict their own and that general trend.

A Fashion In Thinking

Without any censorship in the West, fashionable trends of thought and ideas are fastidiously separated from those that are not fashionable, and the latter, without ever being forbidden have little chance of finding their way into periodicals or books or being heard in colleges. Your scholars are free in the legal sense, but they are hemmed in by the idols of the prevailing fad. There is no open violence, as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to accommodate mass standards frequently prevents the most independent-minded persons from contributing to public life and gives rise to dangerous herd instincts that block dangerous herd development.

In America, I have received letters from highly intelligent persons - maybe a teacher in a faraway small college who could do much for the renewal and salvation of his country, but the country cannot hear him because the media will not provide him with a forum. This gives birth to strong mass prejudices, to a blindness which is perilous in our dynamic era. An example is the self-deluding interpretation of the state of affairs in the contemporary world that functions as a sort of petrified armor around people's minds, to such a degree that human voices from seventeen countries of Eastern Europe and Eastern Asia cannot pierce it. It will be broken only by the inexorable crowbar of events.

I have mentioned a few traits of Western life which surprise and shock a new arrival to this world . The purpose and scope of this speech will not allow me to continue such a survey, in particular to look into the impact of these characteristics on important aspects of a nation's life, such as elementary education, advanced education in the humanities, and art.

Socialism

It is almost universally recognized that the West shows all the world the way to successful economic development, even though in past years it has been sharply offset by chaotic inflation. However, many people living in the West are dissatisfied with their own society. They despise it or accuse it of no longer being up to the level of maturity by mankind. And this causes many to sway toward socialism, which is a false and dangerous current.

I hope that no one present will suspect me of expressing my partial criticism of the Western system in order to suggest socialism as an alternative. No; with the experience of a country where socialism has been realized, I shall not speak for such an alternative. The mathematician Igor Shafarevich, a member of the Soviet Academy of Science, has written a brilliantly argued book entitled Socialism; this is a penetrating historical analysis demonstrating that socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death. Shafarevich's book was published in France almost two years ago and so far no one has been found to refute it. It will shortly be published in English in the U.S.

Not A Model

But should I be asked, instead, whether I would propose the West, such as it is today, as a model to my country, I would frankly have to answer negatively. No, I could not recommend your society as an ideal for the transformation of ours. Through deep suffering, people in our own country have now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive. Even those characteristics of your life which I have just enumerated are extremely saddening.

A fact which cannot be disputed is the weakening of human personality in the West while in the East it has become firmer and stronger. Six decades for our people and three decades for the people of Eastern Europe; during that time we have been through a spiritual training far in advance of Western experience. The complex and deadly crush of life has produced stronger, deeper, and more interesting personalities than those generated by standardized Western well-being. Therefore, if our society were to be transformed into yours, it would mean an improvement in certain aspects, but also a change for the worse on some particularly significant points.

Of course, a society cannot remain in an abyss of lawlessness, as is the case in our country. But it is also demeaning for it to stay on such a soulless and smooth plane of legalism, as is the case in yours. After the suffering of decades of violence and oppression, the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today's mass living habits, introduced as by a calling card by the revolting invasion of commercial advertising, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music.

All this is visible to numerous observers from all the worlds of our planet. The Western way of life is less and less likely to become the leading model.

There are telltale symptoms by which history gives warning to a threatened or perishing society. Such are, for instance, a decline of the arts or a lack of great statesmen. Indeed, sometimes the warnings are quite explicit and concrete. The center of your democracy and of your culture is left without electric power for a few hours only, and all of a sudden crowds of American citizens start looting and creating havoc. The smooth surface film must be very thin, then, the social system quite unstable and unhealthy.

But the fight for our planet, physical and spiritual, a fight of cosmic proportions, is not a vague matter of the future; it has already started. The forces of Evil have begun their decisive offensive. You can feel their pressure, yet your screens and publications are full of prescribed smiles and raised glasses. What is the joy about?

Humanism And Its Consequences

How has this unfavorable relation of forces come about? How did the West decline from its triumphal march to its present debility? Have there been fatal turns and losses of direction in its development? It does not seem so. The West kept advancing steadily in accordance with its proclaimed social intentions, hand in hand with a dazzling progress in technology. And all of a sudden it found itself in its present state of weakness.

This means that the mistake must be at the root, at the very foundation of thought in modern times. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world in modern times. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was born in the Renaissance and has found political expression since the Age of Enlightenment. It became the basis for political and social doctrine and could be called rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the pro-claimed and practiced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of all.

The turn introduced by the Renaissance was probably inevitable historically: the Middle Ages had come to a natural end by exhaustion, having become an intolerable despotic repression of man's physical nature in favor of the spiritual one. But then we recoiled from the spirit and embraced all that is material, excessively and incommensurately. The humanistic way of thinking, which had proclaimed itself our guide, did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man, nor did it see any task higher than the attainment of happiness on earth. It started modern Western civilization on the dangerous trend of worshiping man and his material needs.

Everything beyond physical well-being and the accumulation of material goods, all other human requirements and characteristics of a subtle and higher nature, were left outside the area of attention of state and social systems, as if human life did not have any higher meaning. Thus gaps were left open for evil, and its drafts blow freely today. Mere freedom per se does not in the least solve all the problems of human life and even adds a number of new ones.

And yet in early democracies, as in American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted on the ground that man is God's creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility. Such was the heritage of the preceding one thousand years. Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual be granted boundless freedom with no purpose, simply for the satisfaction of his whims.

Subsequently, however, all such limitations were eroded everywhere in the West; a total emancipation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice. State systems were becoming ever more materialistic. The West has finally achieved the rights of man, and even excess, but man's sense of responsibility to God and society has grown dimmer and dimmer. In the past decades, the legalistic selfishness of the Western approach to the world has reached its peak and the world has found itself in a harsh spiritual crisis and a political impasse. All the celebrated technological achievements of progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the twentieth century's moral poverty, which no one could have imagined even as late as the nineteenth century.

An Unexpected Kinship

As humanism in its development was becoming more and more materialistic, it also increasingly allowed concepts to be used first by socialism and then by communism, so that Karl Marx was able to say, in 1844, that "communism is naturalized humanism."

This statement has proved to be not entirely unreasonable. One does not see the same stones in the foundations of an eroded humanism and of any type of socialism: boundless materialism; freedom from religion and religious responsibility (which under Communist regimes attains the stage of antireligious dictatorship); concentration on social structures with an allegedly scientific approach. (This last is typical of both the Age of Enlightenment and of Marxism.) It is no accident that all of communism's rhetorical vows revolve around Man (with a capital M) and his earthly happiness. At first glance it seems an ugly parallel: common traits in the thinking and way of life of today's West and today's East? But such is the logic of materialistic development.

The interrelationship is such, moreover, that the current of materialism which is farthest to the left, and is hence the most consistent, always proves to be stronger, more attractive, and victorious. Humanism which has lost its Christian heritage cannot prevail in this competition. Thus during the past centuries and especially in recent decades, as the process became more acute, the alignment of forces was as follows: Liberalism was inevitably pushed aside by radicalism, radicalism had to surrender to socialism, and socialism could not stand up to communism.

The communist regime in the East could endure and grow due to the enthusiastic support from an enormous number of Western intellectuals who (feeling the kinship!) refused to see communism's crimes, and when they no longer could do so, they tried to justify these crimes. The problem persists: In our Eastern countries, communism has suffered a complete ideological defeat; it is zero and less than zero. And yet Western intellectuals still look at it with considerable interest and empathy, and this is precisely what makes it so immensely difficult for the West to withstand the East.

Before The Turn

I am not examining the case of a disaster brought on by a world war and the changes which it would produce in society. But as long as we wake up every morning under a peaceful sun, we must lead an everyday life. Yet there is a disaster which is already very much with us. I am referring to the calamity of an autonomous, irreligious humanistic consciousness.

It has made man the measure of all things on earth - imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects. We are now paying for the mistakes which were not properly appraised at the beginning of the journey. On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility.

We have placed too much hope in politics and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. It is trampled by the party mob in the East, by the commercial one in the West. This is the essence of the crisis: the split in the world is less terrifying than the similarity of the disease afflicting its main sections.

If, as claimed by humanism, man were born only to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to death, his task on earth evidently must be more spiritual: not a total engrossment in everyday life, not the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then their carefree consumption. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one's life journey may become above all an experience of moral growth: to leave life a better human being than one started it.

It is imperative to reappraise the scale of the usual human values; its present incorrectness is astounding. It is not possible that assessment of the President's performance should be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or to the availability of gasoline. Only by the voluntary nurturing in ourselves of freely accepted and serene self-restraint can mankind rise above the world stream of materialism.

Today it would be retrogressive to hold on to the ossified formulas of the Enlightenment. Such social dogmatism leaves us helpless before the trials of our times.

Even if we are spared destruction by war, life will have to change in order not to perish on its own. We cannot avoid reassessing the fundamental definitions of human life and society. Is it true that man is above everything? Is there no Superior Spirit above him? Is it right that man's life and society's activities should be ruled by material expansion above all? Is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our integral spiritual life?

If the world has not approached its end, it has reached a major watershed in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will demand from us a spiritual blaze; we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life, where our physical nature will not be cursed, as in the Middle Ages, but even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon, as in the Modern Era.

The ascension is similar to climbing onto the next anthropological stage. No one on earth has any other way left but - upward.

Reprinted from A World Split Apart by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, (Harper & Row Publishers, New York, 1978).

Heritage Quote

"I am not influenced by the expectation of promotion or pecuniary reward. I wish to be useful, and every kind of service necessary for the public good, become honorable by being necessary."

-- Nathan Hale (remark to Captain William Hull, who had attempted to dissuade him from volunteering for a spy mission for General Washington, September 1776)

Heritage Quote

"A people...who are possessed of the spirit of commerce, who see and who will pursue their advantages may achieve almost anything."

-- George Washington (letter to Benjamin Harrison, 10 October 1784)

Heritage Quote

"[H]is was the singular destiny and merit, of leading the armies of his country successfully through an arduous war, for the establishment of its independence; of conducting its councils through the birth of a government, new in its forms and principles, until it had settled down into a quite and orderly train; and of scrupulously obeying the laws through the whole of his career, civil and military, of which the history of the world furnishes no other example."

-- Thomas Jefferson (on George Washington in a letter to Dr. Walter Jones, 2 January 1814)

Heritage Quote

"When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary."

-- Thomas Paine (Common Sense, 1776)

Heritage Quote

"If we move in mass, be it ever so circuitously, we shall attain our object; but if we break into squads, everyone pursuing the path he thinks most direct, we become an easy conquest to those who can now barely hold us in check."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to William Duane, 1811)

Heritage Quote

"[T]here exists in the economy and course of nature, an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness; between duty and advantage; between the genuine maxims of an honest and magnanimous policy, and the solid rewards of public prosperity and felicity."

-- George Washington (First Inaugural Address, 30 April 1789)

Heritage Quote

"Jealousy, and local policy mix too much in all our public councils for the good government of the Union. In a words, the confederation appears to me to be little more than a shadow without the substance...."

-- George Washington (letter to James Warren, 7 October 1785)

Heritage Quote

"The hour is fast approaching, on which the Honor and Success of this army, and the safety of our bleeding Country depend. Remember officers and Soldiers, that you are Freemen, fighting for the blessings of Liberty - that slavery will be your portion, and that of your posterity, if you do not acquit yourselves like men."

-- George Washington (General Orders, 23 August 1776)

Heritage Quote

"If we resort for a criterion to the different principles on which different forms of government are established, we may define a republic to be, or at least may bestow that name on, a government which derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people, and is administered by persons holding their offices during pleasure for a limited period, or during good behavior."

-- James Madison (Federalist No. 39)

Heritage Quote

"[W]e ought to deprecate the hazard attending ardent and susceptible minds, from being too strongly, and too early prepossessed in favor of other political systems, before they are capable of appreciating their own."

-- George Washington (letter to the Commissioners of the District of Columbia, 28 January 1795)

Heritage Quote

"A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."

-- James Madison (letter to W.T. Barry, 4 August 1822)

Heritage Quote

"It will not be too strong to say, that there will be a constant probability of seeing the station [of President] filled by characters pre-eminent for ability and virture."

-- Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 68, 14 March 1788)

Heritage Quote

"Here comes the orator! With his flood of words, and his drop of reason."

-- Benjamin Franklin (Poor Richard's Almanack, 1735)

Heritage Quote

"It is evident from the state of the country, from the habits of the people, from the experience we have had on the point itself, that it is impracticable to raise any very considerable sums by direct taxation."

-- Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 12, 27 November 1787)

Heritage Quote

"In the first place, there is not a syllable in the plan under consideration which directly empowers the national courts to construe the laws according to the spirit of the Constitution, or which gives them any greater latitude in this respect than may be claimed by the courts of every State."

-- Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 81, 1788)

Heritage Quote

"Let the pulpit resound with the doctrine and sentiments of religious liberty. Let us hear of the dignity of man's nature, and the noble rank he holds among the works of God... Let it be known that British liberties are not the grants of princes and parliaments."

-- John Adams (Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, 1765)

Heritage Quote

"I am not a Virginian, but an American."

-- Patrick Henry (speech in the First Continental Congress, 6 September 1774)

Heritage Quote

"I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I travelled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer."

-- Benjamin Franklin (On the Price of Corn and Management of the Poor, November 1766)

Heritage Quote

"[T]he great Searcher of human hearts is my witness, that I have no wish, which aspires beyond the humble and happy lot of living and dying a private citizen on my own farm."

-- George Washington (letter to Charles Pettit, 16 August 1788)

Heritage Quote

"This balance between the National and State governments ought to be dwelt on with peculiar attention, as it is of the utmost importance. It forms a double security to the people. If one encroaches on their rights they will find a powerful protection in the other. Indeed, they will both be prevented from overpassing their constitutional limits by a certain rivalship, which will ever subsist between them."

-- Alexander Hamilton (speech to the New York Ratifying Convention, 17 June 1788)

Coincidence?

Or a message from God?

In Ireland, a worker digging with an excavator in a peat bog to package potting soil uncovered an ancient book of psalms, 20 pages long, and very well preserved.

And what was the book opened to?

The book was found open to a page describing, in Latin script, Psalm 83, in which God hears complaints of other nations’ attempts to wipe out the name of Israel.

UPDATE: It turns out that, though the book was open to Psalm 83, the psalms were numbered differently in the eighth century, so the passage that the book was opened to is actually Psalm 84 in modern bibles. Allahpundit over at Hot Air has more on this story.

“The Director of the National Museum of Ireland … would like to highlight that the text visible on the manuscript does not refer to wiping out Israel but to the ‘vale of tears’,� the museum said.

The vale of tears is in Psalm 84 in the King James version.

Still apropos, I'm thinking . . .

Heritage Quote

"Happily for America, happily, we trust, for the whole human race, they pursued a new and more noble course. They accomplished a revolution which has no parallel in the annals of human society."

-- James Madison (Federalist No. 14, 20 November 1787)

Israel: A historical perspective

Michael Medved, over at Townhall.com provides a history of Israel in defense of that nation's right to exist.

In order to place these realities in proper perspective, it’s first necessary to reject some thirty years of wildly irresponsible anti-Israel propaganda. First of all, it’s not true in any sense that the modern Jewish State ever supplanted or destroyed an existing nation of “Palestine.� From the time of definitive destruction of the ancient Jewish commonwealth in 70 A.D., the land that comprises the current State of Israel never enjoyed independent existence but, rather, passed back and forth among competing world empires—Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Crusader, Mamaluke, Ottoman and British. Over the course of more than 1,800 years, no nation with the name “Palestine� appeared on any maps, anywhere. The distinguished Arab-American historian Philip Hitti, professor at Princeton University, testified to the Anglo American Committee in 1946: ‘There is no such thing as ‘Palestine’ in history, absolutely not.�

It well worth reading.

Heritage Quote

"Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute."

-- Rep. Robert Goodloe Harper, Chairman, Ways and Means Committee (Address, 18 June 1798)

Heritage Quote

"It is impossible for the man of pious reflection not to perceive in it [the Constitution] a finger of that Almighty hand which has been so frequently and signally extended to our relief in the critical stages of the revolution."

-- James Madison (Federalist No. 37, 11 January 1788)

Heritage Quote

"Man, once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the spot of every wind. With such persons, gullability, which they call faith, takes the helm from the hand of reason and the mind becomes a wreck."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to James Smith, 8 December 1822)

Heritage Quote

"Responsibility, in order to be reasonable, must be limited to objects within the power of the responsible party, and in order to be effectual, must relate to operations of that power, of which a ready and proper judgment can be formed by the constituents."

-- Alexander Hamilton and James Madison (Federalist No. 63, 1788)

Heritage Quote

"The republican is the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind."

-- Thomas Jefferson (Letter to William Hunter, 11 March 1790)

War can further the cause of peace

Thomas Sowell has an insightful op-ed up at Townhall in which he points out that war and the threat of war promotes peace, yet peace movements encourage war. Sounds like he's got it backwards, doesn't it? Well, here is some of his thinking on the subject:

Take the Middle East. People are calling for a cease-fire in the interests of peace. But there have been more cease-fires in the Middle East than anywhere else. If cease-fires actually promoted peace, the Middle East would be the most peaceful region on the face of the earth instead of the most violent.

Was World War II ended by cease-fires or by annihilating much of Germany and Japan?

Highly recommended reading.

Heritage Quote

"The moral precepts delivered in the sacred oracles form a part of the law of nature, are of the same origin and of the same obligation, operating universally and perpetually."

-- James Wilson (Of the Law of Nature, 1804)

Heritage Quote

"Happily for America, happily, we trust, for the whole human race, they pursued a new and more noble course. They accomplished a revolution which has no parallel in the annals of human society."

-- James Madison (Federalist No. 14, 20 November 1787)

History lesson

Rachel Neuwirth has an interesting essay up at The American Thinker about learning from our past.

Today the buzzword crowd seems more concerned about restraining Israel than in defeating the Islamic terrorists that want to complete Hitler’s goal of exterminating all Jews. How times have changed. Then, the survival of millions of Jews was of little concern to the nations. Today the same powers fear that the Jews are defending themselves too vigorously.

Go read the whole thing. It's worth the time.

Heritage Quote

"The circumstances that endanger the safety of nations are infinite, and for this reason no constitutional shackles can wisely be imposed on the power to which the care of it is committed. "

-- Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 23, 17 December 1787)

Heritage Quote

"Human nature itself is evermore an advocate for liberty. There is also in human nature a resentment of injury, and indignation against wrong. A love of truth and a veneration of virtue. These amiable passions, are the "latent spark"... If the people are capable of understanding, seeing and feeling the differences between true and false, right and wrong, virtue and vice, to what better principle can the friends of mankind apply than to the sense of this difference?"

-- John Adams (the Novanglus, 1775)

Heritage Quote

"The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them."

-- Thomas Jefferson (Summary View of the Rights of British America, August 1774)

Heritage Quote

"There can be no greater error than to expect, or calculate upon real favours from Nation to Nation. 'Tis an illusion which experience must cure, which a just pride ought to discard."

-- George Washington (Farewell Address, 19 September 1796)

Heritage Quote

"Whatever enables us to go to war, secures our peace."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to James Monroe, 24 October 1823)

Heritage Quote

"Those gentlemen, who will be elected senators, will fix themselves in the federal town, and become citizens of that town more than of your state."

-- George Mason (speech in the Virginia Ratifying Convention, 14 June 1788)

Heritage Quote

"Remember, my Eliza, you are a Christian."

-- Alexander Hamilton (speaking to his grieving wife before facing Aaron Burr in a duel, 7/12/1804)

Heritage Quote

"The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them."

-- Thomas Jefferson (Rights of British America, 1774)

Heritage Quote

"A penny saved is twopence clear."

-- Benjamin Franklin (Poor Richard's Almanack, 1737)

Heritage Quote

"Knowledge is, in every country, the surest basis of public happiness."

-- George Washington, First Annual Message January 8, 1790

Heritage Quote

"No people will tamely surrender their Liberties, nor can any be easily subdued, when knowledge is diffusd and Virtue is preservd. On the Contrary, when People are universally ignorant, and debauchd in their Manners, they will sink under their own weight without the Aid of foreign Invaders."

-- Samuel Adams, letter to James Warren November 4, 1775

Heritage Quote

"Such will be the relation between the House of Representatives and their constituents. Duty gratitude, interest, ambition itself, are the cords by which they will be bound to fidelity and sympathy with the great mass of the people."

-- James Madison (Federalist No. 57, 19 February 1788)

Heritage Quote

"Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to Charles Yancey, 6 January 1816)

Heritage Quote

"All good men wish the entire abolition of slavery, as soon as it can take place with safety to the public, and for the lasting good of the present wretched race of slaves. The only possible step that could be taken towards it by the convention was to fix a period after which they should not be imported."

-- Oliver Ellsworth (The Landholder, 10 December 1787)

Heritage Quote

"It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigor. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution."

-- Thomas Jefferson (Notes on Virginia Query 19, 1781)

Heritage Quote

"Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof - Lev. XXV, v. X"

Inscription on the Liberty Bell, from Leviticus 25:10

Independence Day Quotes

230 years ago a group of brave men signed the Declaration of Independence and started a war that would change the world and create an entirely new and unique nation.

In honor of those men, and all of the men and women who have fought for the freedoms and security of this nation (and there have been many through the decades), I have pulled together a few quotes from America's Founders.

"But the most grievous innovation of all, is the alarming extension of the power of courts of admiralty. In these courts, one judge presides alone! No juries have any concern there! The law and the fact are both to be decided by the same single judge."

— John Adams
(Adams stated this during Boston town meeting in 1772. This travesty of justice was initiated by the Stamp Act of 1765, which authorized admiralty courts to enforce its provisions.)

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"Liberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker. But if we had not, our fathers have earned and bought it for us, at the expense of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood."

— John Adams, A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Laws, 1765

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"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!

— John Adams, letter to Abigail Adams, April 26, 1777

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"He who is void of virtuous attachments in private life, is, or very soon will be, void of all Regard for his country."

— Samuel Adams, letter to James Warren (Nov. 4, 1775)

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"You can usually tell how tyrannical a person’s heart is by how fast they move to legislate." — Anonymous

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"Do not pray for easy lives; pray to be stronger men. Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers; pray for powers equal to your tasks. Then the doing of your work shall be no miracle, but you yourself shall be a miracle. Every day you shall wonder at yourself, at the richness of life which has come to you by the grace of God."

— Phillips Brooks (1835-1893)

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"Liberty is a word which, according as it is used, comprehends the most good and the most evil of any in the world. Justly understood it is sacred next to those which we appropriate in divine adoration; but in the mouths of some it means anything."

— Oliver Ellsworth, A Landholder No. III, November 19, 1787

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"We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."

— attributed to Benjamin Franklin, at the signing of the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776

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"They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."

— Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759

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"I regret that I have but one life to lose for my country."

— Nathan Hale, before being hanged by the British, September 22, 1776

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"The law… dictated by God Himself is, of course, superior in obligation to any other. It is binding over all the globe, in all countries, and at all times. No human laws are of any validity if contrary to this."

— Alexander Hamilton

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The fabric of American empire ought to rest on the solid basis of THE CONSENT OF THE PEOPLE. The streams of national power ought to flow from that pure, original fountain of all legitimate authority."

— Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 22 December 14, 1787

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"My hand trembles, but my heart does not."

— attributed to Stephen Hopkins, Rhode Island delegate, July 4, 1776

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"I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of men."

— Thomas Jefferson, letter to Benjamin Rush, September 23, 1800

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"Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe."

— Thomas Jefferson, letter to Charles Yancey, January 6, 1816

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"Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves, therefore, are its only safe depositories."

— Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XIV, 1781

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"The first object of my heart is my own country. In that is embarked my family, my fortune, and my own existence."

— Thomas Jefferson

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Conscience is the most sacred of all property."

— James Madison, Essay on Property, March 29, 1792

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"The strength and spring of every free government, is the virtue of the people; virtue grows on knowledge, and knowledge on education."

— Moses Mather, America’s Appeal to the Impartial World, 1775

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"Where there is no law, there is no liberty; and nothing deserves the name of law but that which is certain and universal in its operation upon all the members of the community."

— Benjamin Rush, letter to David Ramsay, circa April 1788

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"Human happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected."

— George Washington

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"Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism."

— George Washington, Farewell Address, September 19, 1796

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"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, First Inaugural Address, April 30, 1789

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"The propitious smiles of Heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right which Heaven itself has ordained."

— George Washington, 1789

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"The virtues of men are of more consequence to society than their abilities; and for this reason, the heart should be cultivated with more assiduity than the head."

— Noah Webster, On the Education of Youth in America, 1788

Please join me in honoring those who have, and those who are currently are, engaged in the struggle to secure and maintain the tremendous personal rights and freedoms that every citizen of this nation can claim. We are truly blessed here in America, and we should never take that for granted.

Happy birthday, America! May God continue to bless you and keep you strong!

Heritage Quote

"The Sun never shined on a cause of greater worth."

-- Thomas Paine (Common Sense, 1776)

Heritage Quote

"Contemplate the mangled bodies of your countrymen, and then say, 'What should be the reward of such sacrifices?' ... If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animating contest of freedom, go from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen!"

--Samuel Adams (The Federalist Digest, Federalist Edition #01-37)

Heritage Quote

"Tis our true policy to steer clear of permanent Alliances, with any portion of the foreign world."

-- George Washington (Farewell Address, 19 September 1796)

Heritage Quote

"It should be the highest ambition of every American to extend his views beyond himself, and to bear in mind that his conduct will not only affect himself, his country, and his immediate posterity; but that its influence may be co-extensive with the world, and stamp political happiness or misery on ages yet unborn."

--George Washington

Heritage Quote

"Where liberty dwells, there is my country."

-- Benjamin Franklin (letter to Benjamin Vaughn, 14 March 1783)

Heritage Quote

"Nothing more than a change of mind, my dear."

-- James Madison (responding to his niece asking what was wrong, 28 June 1836)

Heritage Quote

"The deliberate union of so great and various a people in such a place, is without all partiality or prejudice, if not the greatest exertion of human understanding, the greatest single effort of national deliberation that the world has ever seen."

-- John Adams (quoted in a letter from Rufus King to Theophilus Parsons, 20 February 1788)

Heritage Quote

"This gave me occasion to observe, that when Men are employ'd they are best contented. For on the Days they work'd they were good-natur'd and chearful; and with the consciousness of having done a good Days work they spent the Evenings jollily; but on the idle Days they were mutinous and quarrelsome, finding fault with their Pork, the Bread, and in continual ill-humour."

-- Benjamin Franklin (Autobiography, 1771)

Heritage Quote

"The State governments possess inherent advantages, which will ever give them an influence and ascendancy over the National Government, and will for ever preclude the possibility of federal encroachments. That their liberties, indeed, can be subverted by the federal head, is repugnant to every rule of political calculation."

-- Alexander Hamilton (speech to the New York Ratifying Convention, 17 June 1788)

Heritage Quote

"[I]t is the reason alone, of the public, that ought to control and regulate the government."

-- James Madison (Federalist No. 49, 5 February 1788)

Heritage Quote

"I now make it my earnest prayer, that God would have you, and the State over which you preside, in his holy protection, that he would incline the hearts of the Citizens to cultivate a spirit of subordination and obedience to Government, to entertain a brotherly affection and love for one another, for their fellow Citizens of the United States at large, and particularly for their brethren who have served in the Field, and finally, that he would most graciously be pleased to dispose us all, to do Justice, to love mercy, and to demean ourselves with that Charity, humility and pacific temper of mind, which were the Characteristicks of the Divine Author of our blessed Religion, and without an humble imitation of whose example in these things, we can never hope to be a happy Nation. "

-- George Washington (circular letter of farewell to the Army, 8 June 1783)

Heritage Quote

"Perhaps the strongest feature in his character was prudence, never acting until every circumstance, every consideration, was maturely weighed; refraining if he saw a doubt, but, when once decided, going through with his purpose, whatever obstacles opposed."

-- Thomas Jefferson (on George Washington in a letter to Dr. Walter Jones, 2 January 1814)

Heritage Quote

"Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?"

-- James Madison (Federalist No. 51, 8 February 1788)

Heritage Quote

"With hearts fortified with these animating reflections, we most solemnly, before God and the world, declare, that, exerting the utmost energy of those powers, which our beneficent Creator hath graciously bestowed upon us, the arms we have compelled by our enemies to assume, we will, in defiance of every hazard, with unabating firmness and perseverance employ for the preservation of our liberties; being with one mind resolved to die freemen rather than to live as slaves."

-- John Dickinson and Thomas Jefferson (Declaration of the Cause and Necessity of Taking up Arms, 6 July 1775)

Heritage Quote

"Industry is increased, commodities are multiplied, agriculture and manufacturers flourish: and herein consists the true wealth and prosperity of a state."

-- Alexander Hamilton (Report on a National Bank, 13 December 1790)

Heritage Quote

"The happiest moments of my life have been the few which I have past at home in the bosom of my family."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to Francis Willis Jr., 18 April 1790)

Heritage Quote

"The Declaration of Independence...[is the] declaratory charter of our rights, and the rights of man."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to Samuel Adams Wells, 1819)

Heritage Quote

"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."

-- Thomas Jefferson (Notes on the State of Virginia, Query 17, 1782)

Heritage Quote

"The name of American, which belongs to you, in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of Patriotism, more than any appellation derived from local discriminations."

-- George Washington (Farewell Address, 1796)

Heritage Quote

"It is necessary for every American, with becoming energy to endeavor to stop the dissemination of principles evidently destructive of the cause for which they have bled. It must be the combined virtue of the rulers and of the people to do this, and to rescue and save their civil and religious rights from the outstretched arm of tyranny, which may appear under any mode or form of government."

-- Mercy Warren (History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination
of the American Revolution, 1805)

Heritage Quote

"Whoever attentively considers the different departments of power must perceive, that, in a government in which they are separated from each other, the judiciary, from the nature of its functions, will always be the least dangerous to the political rights of the Constitution; because it will be least in a capacity to annoy or injure them."

-- Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 78, 1788)

Heritage Quote

"In our progress toward political happiness my station is new; and if I may use the expression, I walk on untrodden ground. There is scarcely any part of my conduct wch. may not hereafter be drawn into precedent."

-- George Washington (letter to Catherine MacAulay, 9 January 1790)

Heritage Quote

"It would reduce the whole instrument to a single phrase, that of instituting a Congress with power to do whatever would be for the good of the United States; and as they would be the sole judges of the good or evil, it would be also a power to do whatever evil they please. Certainly no such universal power was meant to be given them. It [the Constitution] was intended to lace them up straightly within the enumerated powers and those without which, as means, these powers could not be carried into effect."

-- Thomas Jefferson (Opinion on a National Bank, 15 February 1791)

Heritage Quote

"In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution."

-- Thomas Jefferson (fair copy of the drafts of the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, 1798)

Heritage Quote

"Our peculiar security is in the possession of a written Constitution. Let us not make it a blank paper by construction."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to Wilson Nicholas, 1803)

Heritage Quote

"First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen, he was second to none in humble and enduring scenes of private life. Pious, just humane, temperate, and sincere; uniform dignified, and commanding; his example was as edifying to all around him as were the effects of that example lasting; correct throughout, vice shuddered in his presence and virtue always felt his fostering hand. The purity of his private charter gave effulgence to his public virtues;. Such was the man for whom our nation morns"

-- John Marshall (official eulogy of George Washington, delivered by Richard Henry Lee, 26 December 1799)

June 6, 1944: Operation Overlord

Sixty-two years ago today, tens of thousands of Allied soldiers invaded the beaches of Normandy to liberate an occupied Europe.

There are many sites that provide information of that day, like this one, this one, and this one.

To honor those soldiers from England, America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand who put their lives in jeopardy in order to defeat the tyrannical Nazis and restore freedom to Europe, please spend some time today learning more about this day in history.

Heritage Quote

The whole of that Bill [of Rights] is a declaration of the right of the people at large or considered as individuals...[I]t establishes some rights of the individual as unalienable and which consequently, no majority has a right to deprive them of.

-- Albert Gallatin (letter to Alexander Addison, 7 October 1789)

Heritage Quote

In observations on this subject, we hear the legislature mentioned as the people's representatives. The distinction, intimated by concealed implication, through probably, not avowed upon reflection, is, that the executive and judicial powers are not connected with the people by a relation so strong or near or dear. But is high time that we should chastise our prejudices; and that we should look upon the different parts of government with a just and impartial eye.

-- James Wilson (Lectures on Law, 1791)

Heritage Quote

"There are certain social principles in human nature, from which we may draw the most solid conclusions with respect to the conduct of individuals and of communities. We love our families more than our neighbors; we love our neighbors more than our countrymen in general. The human affections, like solar heat, lose their intensity as they depart from the centre... On these principles, the attachment of the individual will be first and for ever secured by the State governments. They will be a mutual protection and support."

-- Alexander Hamilton (speech at the New York Ratifying Convention, June 1788)

Heritage Quote

"Liberty is a word which, according as it is used, comprehends the most good and the most evil of any in the world. Justly understood it is sacred next to those which we appropriate in divine adoration; but in the mouths of some it means anything, which enervate a necessary government; excite a jealousy of the rulers who are our own choice, and keep society in confusion for want of a power sufficiently concentered to promote good."

-- Oliver Ellsworth (A Landholder, No. III, 19 November 1787)

Heritage Quote

"Nothing...is unchangeable but the inherent and unalienable rights of man."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to John Cartwright, 1824)

Heritage Quote

"I will venture to assert that no combination of designing men under heaven will be capable of making a government unpopular which is in its principles a wise and good one, and vigorous in its operations."

-- Alexander Hamilton (speech to the New York Ratifying Convention, June 1788)

Heritage Quote

"These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman."

-- Thomas Paine (The American Crisis, No. 1, 19 December 1776)

Heritage Quote

"Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclination, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."

-- John Adams (in Defense of the British Soldiers on trial for the Boston Massacre, 4 December 1770)

Heritage Quote

"Let the thirteen States, bound together in a strict and indissoluble Union, concur in erecting one great American system, superior to the control of all transatlantic force or influence, and able to dictate the terms of the connection between the old and the new world!"

-- Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 11, 1787)

Heritage Quote

"They define a republic to be a government of laws, and not of men."

-- John Adams (Novanglus No. 7, 6 March 1775)

Heritage Quote

"Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression."

-- James Madison (letter to Thomas Jefferson, 17 October 1788)

Heritage Quote

"Our unalterable resolution would be to be free. They have attempted to subdue us by force, but God be praised! in vain. Their arts may be more dangerous then their arms. Let us then renounce all treaty with them upon any score but that of total separation, and under God trust our cause to our swords."

-- Samuel Adams (letter to James Warren, 16 April 1776)

Heritage Quote

"I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground that 'all powers not delegated to the United States, by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states or to the people.' To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power, not longer susceptible of any definition."

-- Thomas Jefferson (Opinion on the Constitutionality of a National Bank, 15 February 1791)

Heritage Quote

"All see, and most admire, the glare which hovers round the external trappings of elevated office. To me there is nothing in it, beyond the lustre which may be reflected from its connection with a power of promoting human felicity."

-- George Washington (letter to Catherine Macaulay Graham, 9 January 1790)

Heritage Quote

"Love your neighbor as yourself and your country more than yourself."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to Thomas Jefferson Smith, 21 February 1825)

Heritage Quote

"The construction applied...to those parts of the Constitution of the United States which delegate Congress a power...ought not to be construed as themselves to give unlimited powers, nor a part to be so taken as to destroy the whole residue of that instrument."

-- Thomas Jefferson (Draft Kentucky Resolutions, 1798)

Heritage Quote

"If a well-regulated militia be the most natural defense of a free country, it ought certainly to be under the regulation and at the disposal of that body which is constituted the guardian of the national security. If standing armies are dangerous to liberty, an efficacious power over the militia in the same body ought, as far as possible, to take away the inducement and the pretext to such unfriendly institutions. If the federal government can command the aid of the militia in those emergencies which call for the military arm in support of the civil magistrate, it can the better dispense with the employment of a different kind of force. If it cannot avail itself of the former, it will be obliged to recur to the latter. To render an army unnecessary will be a more certain method of preventing its existence than a thousand prohibitions upon paper."

-- Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 29, 10 January 1788)

Heritage Quote

"Wise politicians will be cautious about fettering the government with restrictions that cannot be observed, because they know that every break of the fundamental laws, though dictated by necessity, impairs that sacred reverence which ought to be maintained in the breast of rulers towards the constitution of a country. "

-- Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 25, 21 December 1787)

Heritage Quote

"Have you something to do to-morrow; do it to-day."

-- Benjamin Franklin (Poor Richards Almanack, 1742)

Heritage Quote

"Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition."

-- Thomas Jefferson (Notes on Virginia, Query 19, 1781)

Heritage Quote

"Having been poor is no shame, but being ashamed of it, is."

-- Benjamin Franklin (Poor Richards Almanack, 1749)

Heritage Quote

"War, like most other things, is a science to be acquired and perfected by diligence, by perserverance, by time, and by practice."

-- Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 25, 21 December 1787)

Heritage Quote

"Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards."

-- Benjamin Franklin (Poor Richard's Almanack, 1738)

Heritage Quote

"The foundation of national morality must be laid in private families. . . . How is it possible that Children can have any just Sense of the sacred Obligations of Morality or Religion if, from their earliest Infancy, they learn their Mothers live in habitual Infidelity to their fathers, and their fathers in as constant Infidelity to their Mothers?"

-- John Adams (Diary, 2 June 1778)

Heritage Quote

"At the establishment of our constitutions, the judiciary bodies were supposed to be the most helpless and harmless members of the government. Experience, however, soon showed in what way they were to become the most dangerous; that the insufficiency of the means provided for their removal gave them a freehold and irresponsibility in office; that their decisions, seeming to concern individual suitors only, pass silent and unheeded by the public at large; that these decisions, nevertheless, become law by precedent, sapping, by little and little, the foundations of the constitution, and working its change by construction, before any one has perceived that that invisible and helpless worm has been busily employed in consuming its substance. In truth, man is not made to be trusted for life, if secured against all liability to account."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to Monsieur A. Coray, 31 October 1823)

Heritage Quote

"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 (Declaration of the Causes and Necessities of Taking up Arms, 6 July 1775)

Heritage Quote

"All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree."

-- James Madison (speech at the Constitutional Convention, 7/11/1787)

Heritage Quote

"[T]here is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a plan adopted for the abolition of it."

-- George Washington (letter to Robert Morris, 12 April 1786)

Heritage Quote

"[T]he foundation of a great Empire is laid, and I please myself with a persuasion, that Providence will not leave its work imperfect."

-- George Washington (letter to Chevalier de LaLuzerne, 1 August 1786)

Heritage Quote

The executive branch of this government never has, nor will suffer, while I preside, any improper conduct of its officers to escape with impunity. -- George Washington (letter to Gouverneur Morris, 22 December 1795)

Heritage Quote

"Human Felicity is produced not so much by great Pieces of good Fortune that seldom happen, as by little Advantages that occur every Day."

-- Benjamin Franklin (Autobiography, 1771)

Heritage Quote

"It is the right as well as the duty of all men in society, publicly and at stated seasons, to worship the Supreme Being, the great Creator and Preserver of the universe. And no subject shall be hurt, molested, or restrained in his person, liberty, or estate, for worshipping God in the manner and season most agreeable to the dictates of his own conscience; or for his religion profession of sentiments; provided he doth not disturb the public peace, or obstruct others in their religious worship...."

Massachusetts Bill of Rights, Part the First, 1780

Heritage Quote

"The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave."

-- Patrick Henry (speech in the Virginia Convention, 23 March 1775)

Heritage Quote

"There is a time for all things, a time to preach and a time to pray, but those times have passed away. There is a time to fight, and that time has now come."

-- Peter Muhlenberg (from a Lutheran sermon read at Woodstock, Virginia, January 1776)

Heritage Quote

"There is no good government but what is republican. That the only valuable part of the British constitution is so; for the true idea of a republic is "an empire of laws, and not of men." That,as a republic is the best of governments, so that particular arrangement of the powers of society, or in other words, that form of government which is best contrived to secure an impartial and exact execution of the law, is the best of republics."

-- John Adams (Thoughts on Government, 1776)

Heritage Quote

"The American war is over; but this is far from being the case with the American revolution. On the contrary, nothing but the first act of the drama is closed. It remains yet to establish and perfect our new forms of government, and to prepare the principles, morals, and manners of our citizens for these forms of government after they are established and brought to perfection."

-- Benjamin Rush (letter to Price, 25 May 1786)

Heritage Quote

"The instrument by which it [government] must act are either the AUTHORITY of the laws or FORCE. If the first be destroyed, the last must be substituted; and where this becomes the ordinary instrument of government there is an end to liberty!"

-- Alexander Hamilton (Tully, No. 3, 28 August 1794)

Heritage Quote

"Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever persuasion, religious or political."

-- Thomas Jefferson (First Inaugural Address, 4 March 1801)

Heritage Quote

"For the same reason that the members of the State legislatures will be unlikely to attach themselves sufficiently to national objects, the members of the federal legislature will be likely to attach themselves too much to local objects."

-- James Madison (Federalist No. 47, 1 February 1788)

Heritage Quote

"In America, no other distinction between man and man had ever been known but that of persons in office exercising powers by authority of the laws, and private individuals. Among these last, the poorest laborer stood on equal ground with the wealthiest millionaire, and generally on a more favored one whenever their rights seem to jar."

-- Thomas Jefferson (Answers to de Meusnier Questions, 1786)

Heritage Quote

"The steady character of our countrymen is a rock to which we may safely moor; and notwithstanding the efforts of the papers to disseminate early discontents, I expect that a just, dispassionate and steady conduct, will at length rally to a proper system the great body of our country. Unequivocal in principle, reasonable in manner, we shall be able I hope to do a great deal of good to the cause of freedom & harmony."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to Elbridge Gerry, 29 March 1801)

Heritage Quote

"A constitution founded on these principles introduces knowledge among the people, and inspires them with a conscious dignity becoming freemen; a general emulation takes place, which causes good humor, sociability, good manners, and good morals to be general. That elevation of sentiment inspired by such a government, makes the common people brave and enterprising. That ambition which is inspired by it makes them sober, industrious, and frugal."

-- John Adams (Thoughts on Government, 1776)

Heritage Quote

"The fundamental source of all your errors, sophisms and false reasonings is a total ignorance of the natural rights of mankind. Were you once to become acquainted with these, you could never entertain a thought, that all men are not, by nature, entitled to a parity of privileges. You would be convinced, that natural liberty is a gift of the beneficent Creator to the whole human race, and that civil liberty is founded in that; and cannot be wrested from any people, without the most manifest violation of justice."

-- Alexander Hamilton (The Farmer Refuted, 23 February 1775)

Heritage Quote

"The scheme, my dear Marqs. which you propose as a precedent, to encourage the emancipation of the black people of this Country from that state of Bondage in wch. they are held, is a striking evidence of the benevolence of your Heart. I shall be happy to join you in so laudable a work."

-- George Washington (letter to Marquis de Lafayette, 5 April 1785)

Heritage Quote

"We are either a United people, or we are not. If the former, let us, in all maters of general concern act as a nation, which have national objects to promote, and a national character to support. If we are not, let us no longer act a farce by pretending to it."

-- George Washington (letter to James Madison, 30 November 1785)

Heritage Quote

"Experience is the oracle of truth; and where its responses are unequivocal, they ought to be conclusive and sacred."

-- Alexander Hamilton and James Madison (Federalist No. 20, 11 December 1787)

Heritage Quote

"The rights of neutrality will only be respected when they are defended by an adequate power. A nation, despicable by its weakness, forfeits even the privilege of being neutral."

-- Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 11, 1787)

Heritage Quote

"A dying man can do nothing easy."

-- Benjamin Franklin (after his daughter asked him to move, 17 April 1790)

Heritage Quote

"We have seen the mere distinction of color made in the most enlightened period of time, a ground of the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man."

-- James Madison (speech at the Constitutional Convention, 6 June 1787)

Heritage Quote

"Another not unimportant consideration is, that the powers of the general government will be, and indeed must be, principally employed upon external objects, such as war, peace, negotiations with foreign powers, and foreign commerce. In its internal operations it can touch but few objects, except to introduce regulations beneficial to the commerce, intercourse, and other relations, between the states, and to lay taxes for the common good. The powers of the states, on the other hand, extend to all objects, which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, and liberties, and property of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the state."

-- Joseph Story (Commentaries on the Constitution, 1833)

Heritage Quote

"May the father of all mercies scatter light, and not darkness, upon our paths, and make us in all our several vocations useful here, and in His own due time and way everlastingly happy. "

-- George Washington (letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, August 1790)

Heritage Quote

"A free people [claim] their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate."

-- Thomas Jefferson (Rights of British America, 1774)

Heritage Quote

"The passions, therefore, not the reason, of the public would sit in judgment. But it is the reason, alone, of the public, that ought to control and regulate the government. The passions ought to be controlled and regulated by the government."

-- James Madison (Federalist No. 49, 5 February 1788)

Heritage Quote

"I am principled against this kind of traffic in the human species...and to disperse the families I have an aversion."

-- George Washington (letter to Robert Lewis, 18 August 1799)

Heritage Quote

"Now is the seedtime of continental union, faith and honor. The least fracture now, will be like a name engraved with the point of a pin on the tender rind of a young oak; the wound would enlarge with the tree, and posterity read in it full grown characters."

-- Thomas Paine (Common Sense, 1776)

Heritage Quote

"Freedom had been hunted round the globe; reason was considered as rebellion; and the slavery of fear had made men afraid to think. But such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing."

-- Thomas Paine (Rights of Man, 1791)

Heritage Quote

"The most sacred of the duties of a government [is] to do equal and impartial justice to all citizens."

-- Thomas Jefferson (Note in Destutt de Tracy, 1816)

Heritage Quote

"If, then, the control of the people over the organs of their government be the measure of its republicanism, and I confess I know no other measure, it must be agreed that our governments have much less of republicanism than ought to have been expected; in other words, that the people have less regular control over their agents, than their rights and their interests require."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to John Taylor, 28 May 1816)

Heritage Quote

"The operations of the federal government will be most extensive and important in times of war and danger; those of the State governments, in times of peace and security."

-- James Madison (Federalist No. 45, 1788)

Heritage Quote

"We ought to consider what is the end of government before we determine which is the best form. Upon this point all speculative politicians will agree that the happiness of society is the end of government, as all divines and moral philosophers will agree that the happiness of the individual is the end of man....All sober inquirers after truth, ancient and modern, pagan and Christian, have declared that the happiness of man, as well as his dignity, consists in virtue."

-- John Adams (Thoughts on Government, 1776)

Heritage Quote

"Measures which serve to abridge the free competition of foreign Articles, have a tendency to occasion an enhancement of prices."

-- Alexander Hamilton (Report on Manufactures, 5 December 1791)

Heritage Quote

"[I]f you speak of solid information and sound judgement, Colonel Washington is, unquestionably the greatest man on that floor."

-- Patrick Henry (on George Washington, October 1775)

Agrarian heritage quote

"Finally, there seem to be but three Ways for a Nation to acquire Wealth. The first is by War as the Romans did in plundering their conquered Neighbours. This is Robbery. The second by Commerce which is generally Cheating. The third by Agriculture the only honest Way; wherein Man receives a real Increase of the Seed thrown into the Ground, in a kind of continual Miracle wrought by the Hand of God in his favour, as a Reward for his innocent Life, and virtuous Industry."

-- Benjamin Franklin (Positions to be Examined, 4 April 1769)

Heritage Quote

"Knowledge is, in every country, the surest basis of public happiness."

-- George Washington (First Annual Message, 8 January 1790)

Heritage Quote

"There is not a more important and fundamental principle in legislation, than that the ways and means ought always to face the public engagements; that our appropriations should ever go hand in hand with our promises. To say that the United States should be answerable for twenty-five millions of dollars without knowing whether the ways and means can be provided, and without knowing whether those who are to succeed us will think with us on the subject, would be rash and unjustifiable. Sir, in my opinion, it would be hazarding the public faith in a manner contrary to every idea of prudence."

-- James Madison (Speech in Congress, 22 April 1790)

Heritage Quote

"Children should be educated and instructed in the principles of freedom."

-- John Adams (Defense of the Constitutions, 1787)

Heritage Quote

"Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God. I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"

-- Patrick Henry (Speech to the Virginia Convention, 23 March 1775)

Heritage Quote

"Observe good faith and justice towards all Nations. Cultivate peace and harmony with all."

-- George Washington (Farewell Address, 19 September 1796)

Heritage Quote

"The Judiciary...has no influence over either the sword or the purse; no direction either of the strength or of the wealth of the society, and can take no active resolution whatever. It may truly be said to have neither force nor will."

-- Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 78, 1788)

Heritage Quote

"It is much to be wished that slavery may be abolished. The honour of the States, as well as justice and humanity, in my opinion, loudly call upon them to emancipate these unhappy people. To contend for our own liberty, and to deny that blessing to others, involves an inconsistency not to be excused."

-- John Jay (letter to R. Lushington, 15 March 1786)

Heritage Quote

"It is yet to be decided whether the Revolution must ultimately be considered as a blessing or a curse: a blessing or a curse, not to the present age alone, for with our fate will the destiny of unborn millions be involved."

-- George Washington (Circular to the States, 1783)

Heritage Quote

"That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot by any compact deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety."

The Virginia Bill of Rights, 12 June 1776

Heritage Quote

"[D]emocracy will soon degenerate into an anarchy, such an anarchy that every man will do what is right in his own eyes and no man's life or property or reputation or liberty will be secure, and every one of these will soon mould itself into a system of subordination of all the moral virtues and intellectual abilities, all the powers of wealth, beauty, wit and science, to the wanton pleasures, the capricious will, and the execrable cruelty of one or a very few."

-- John Adams (An Essay on Man's Lust for Power, 29 August 1763)

Heritage Quote

"In a society under the forms of which the stronger faction can readily unite and oppress the weaker, anarchy may as truly be said to reign as in a state of nature."

-- James Madison (Federalist No. 52, 8 February 1788)

Heritage Quote

"Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined."

-- Patrick Henry (speech in the Virginia Ratifying Convention, 5 June 1778)

Heritage Quote

"Promote then as an object of primary importance, Institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened. "

-- George Washington (Farewell Address, 19 September 1796)

Good quotes

NOTE: The link below is from December, but I just found it in my draft archive and want to share it because it is still pertinent - and amusing.

Paul Greenberg at Jewish World Review has a good column up with valorous quotes from our past, and one not-so-valorous from our present.

It's worth it . . .

Heritage Quote

"The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man."

-- James Madison (Federalist No. 10, 23 November 1787)

Heritage Quote

If there is a form of government, then, whose principle and foundation is virtue, will not every sober man acknowledge it better calculated to promote the general happiness than any other form?

-- John Adams (Thoughts on Government, 1776)

Heritage Quote

"On the distinctive principles of the Government ...of the U. States, the best guides are to be found in...The Declaration of Independence, as the fundamental Act of Union of these States."

-- James Madison (letter to Thomas Jefferson, 8 February 1825)

Another history quote

"We, the members of the New Republican Party, believe that the preservation and enhancement of the values that strengthen and protect individual freedom, family life, communities and neighborhoods and the liberty of our beloved nation should be at the heart of any legislative or political program presented to the American people."

Ronald Wilson Reagan (1911 - 2004)

History Quote

"Contemplate the mangled bodies of your countrymen, and then say, 'What should be the reward of such sacrifices?' ... If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animating contest of freedom, go from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen!"

--Samuel Adams

Heritage Quote

"I consider the war of America against Britain as the country's war, the public's war, or the war of the people in their own behalf, for the security of their natural rights, and the protection of their own property."

-- Thomas Paine (On Financing the War, 1782)

Heritage Quote

"It is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage and such only as he believes to be acceptable to him. This duty is precedent, both in order of time and in degree of obligation, to the claims of Civil Society. "

-- James Madison (Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments, Circa 20 June 1785)

Heritage Quote

"In politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecution."

-- Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 1, 27 October 1787)

True Survivor

A tearful, joyous surprise for the survivor of a Nazi concentration camp.

This is a must-read.

[Hat tip to Sarah over at trying to grok.]

Heritage Quote

"For I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to John Adams, 28 October 1813)

Heritage Quote

"We have therefore to resolve to conquer or die: Our won Country's Honor, all call upon us for vigorous and manly exertion, and if we now shamefully fail, we shall become infamous to the whole world. Let us therefore rely upon the goodness of the Cause, and the aid of the supreme Being, in whose hands Victory is, to animate and encourage us to great and noble Actions. "

-- George Washington (General Orders, 2 July 1776)

Heritage Quote

"I believe a time will come when an opportunity will be offered to abolish this lamentable evil. Everything we do is to improve it, if it happens in our day; if not, let us transmit to our descendants, together with our slaves, a pity for their unhappy lot and an abhorrence of slavery."

-- Patrick Henry (letter to Robert Pleasants, 18 January 1773)

Heritage Quote

[T]he great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachment of the others.

-- James Madison (Federalist No. 10, 23 November 1787)

Heritage Quote

"Government, in my humble opinion, should be formed to secure and to enlarge the exercise of the natural rights of its members; and every government, which has not this in view, as its principal object, is not a government of the legitimate kind."

-- James Wilson (Lectures on Law, 1791)

Heritage Quote

"As a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights. Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions."

-- James Madison (National Gazette Essay, 27 March 1792)

Heritage Quote

"He that goes a borrowing goes a sorrowing."

-- Benjamin Franklin (from his writings, 1758)

Heritage Quote

"Each individual of the society has a right to be protected by it in the enjoyment of his life, liberty, and property, according to standing laws. He is obliged, consequently, to contribute his share to the expense of this protection; and to give his personal service, or an equivalent, when necessary. But no part of the property of any individual can, with justice, be taken from him, or applied to public uses, without his own consent, or that of the representative body of the people. In fine, the people of this commonwealth are not controllable by any other laws than those to which their constitutional representative body have given their consent."

-- John Adams (Thoughts on Government, 1776)

History lesson

Edward Bernard Glick provides an essay on the origins of the Hebrew-Arab conflict in Israel. Here's how he starts:

History doesn't solve problems, but it explains them, including the evolution of the intractable Israel-Palestine problem.

Recommended.

Heritage Quote

"The nation which indulges towards another an habitual hatred, or an habitual fondness, is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest."

-- George Washington (letter to Alexander Hamilton, 8 May 1796)

Heritage Quote

"We are not to consider ourselves, while here, as at church or school, to listen to the harangues of speculative piety; we are here to talk of the political interests committed to our charge."

-- Fisher Ames (speech in the United States House of Representatives, 8 April 1789)

Heritage Quote

"The regular distribution of power into distinct departments; the introduction of legislative balances and checks; the institution of courts composed of judges holding their offices during good behavior; the representation of the people in the legislature by deputies of their own election... They are means, and powerful means, by which the excellences of republican govenrment may be retained and its imperfections lessened or avoided."

-- Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 9, 1787)

Heritage Quote

"To render the justice of the war on our part the more conspicuous, the reluctance to commence it was followed by the earliest and strongest manifestations of a disposition to arrest its progress. The sword was scarcely out of the scabbard before the enemy was apprised of the reasonable terms on which it would be resheathed."

-- James Madison (Second Inaugural Address, March 1813)

Heritage Quote

"All the property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages. He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it."

-- Benjamin Franklin (letter to Robert Morris, 25 December 1783)

Heritage Quote

"[W]here there is no law, there is no liberty; and nothing deserves the name of law but that which is certain and universal in its operation upon all the members of the community."

-- Benjamin Rush (letter to David Ramsay, Circa April 1788)

Heritage Quote

"His person, you know, was fine, his stature exactly what one would wish, his deportment easy, erect and noble."

-- Thomas Jefferson (on George Washington in a letter to Dr. Walter
Jones, 2 January 1814)

Heritage Quote

"All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression."

-- Thomas Jefferson (First Inaugural Address, 4 March 1801)

Heritage Quote

"His Example is now complete, and it will teach wisdom and virtue to magistrates, citizens, and men, not only in the present age, but in future generations, as long as our history shall be read."

-- John Adams (message to the U.S. Senate, 19 December 1799)

Andrew Jackson

Dean Barnett provides us a glimpse of the "godfather of democracy", America's seventh president, in a book review about "Old Hickory" himself. Here's an excerpt:

GIVEN THE MARK that he left on the nation, it is something of a surprise that Jackson isn't discussed more often. While Founding Fathers such as Adams, Washington, Hamilton and the sage of Monticello have all received much recent attention, Jackson hasn't. Other than in rap songs that evoke the image of a $20 bill, his name is seldom mentioned.

It has some very interesting tidbits of information. Even if you're not interested in the book, the review is worth reading . . .

Heritage Quote

"Repeal that [welfare] law, and you will soon see a change in their manners. St. Monday and St. Tuesday, will soon cease to be holidays. Six days shalt thou labor, though one of the old commandments long treated as out of date, will again be looked upon as a respectable precept; industry will increase, and with it plenty among the lower people; their circumstances will mend, and more will be done for their happiness by inuring them to provide for themselves, than could be done by dividing all your estates among them."

-- Benjamin Franklin (letter to Collinson, 9 May 1753)

Heritage Quote

"It is a happy circumstance in human affairs that evils which are not cured in one way will cure themselves in some other."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to John Sinclair, 1791)

Heritage Quote

"They are of the People, and return again to mix with the People, having no more durable preeminence than the different Grains of Sand in an Hourglass. Such an Assembly cannot easily become dangerous to Liberty. They are the Servants of the People, sent together to do the People's Business, and promote the public Welfare; their Powers must be sufficient, or their Duties cannot be performed. They have no profitable Appointments, but a mere Payment of daily Wages, such as are scarcely equivalent to their Expences; so that, having no Chance for great Places, and enormous Salaries or Pensions, as in some Countries, there is no triguing or bribing for Elections."

-- Benjamin Franklin (letter to George Whatley, 23 May 1785)

Heritage Quote

"I give my signature to many Bills with which my Judgment is at variance.... From the Nature of the Constitution, I must approve all parts of a Bill, or reject it in total. To do the latter can only be Justified upon the clear and obvious grounds of propriety; and I never had such confidence in my own faculty of judging as to be over tenacious of the opinions I may have imbibed in doubtful cases."

-- George Washington (letter to Edmund Pendleton, 23 September
1793)

Heritage Quote

"The great desiderata are a free representation and mutual checks. When these are obtained, all our apprehensions of the extent of powers are unjust and imaginary."

-- Alexander Hamilton (Speech to the New York Ratifying Convention, June 1788)

Heritage Quote

"Wherever indeed a right of property is infringed for the general good, if the nature of the case admits of compensation, it ought to be made; but if compensation be impracticable, that impracticability ought to be an obstacle to a clearly essential reform."

-- Alexander Hamilton (Vindication of the Funding System, 1792)

Happy Valentine's Day

Bob Weir has an article up about the original Valentine and how this tradition got started.

Many years ago, way before Al Gore invented the Internet, relationships were not so easy to come by. During the third century there was a priest named Valentine who lived in Rome while it was being ruled by an emperor named Claudius. Known as “Claudius the Cruel,� he did all he could to live up to his name.

He provides interesting background.

Heritage Quote

"It is an object of vast magnitude that systems of education should be adopted and pursued which may not only diffuse a knowledge of the sciences but may implant in the minds of the American youth the principles of virtue and of liberty and inspire them with just and liberal ideas of government and with an inviolable attachment to their own country."

-- Noah Webster (On Education of Youth in America, 1790)

Heritage Quote

"A general dissolution of principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy. While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but when once they lose their virtue then will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader."

-- Samuel Adams (letter to James Warren, 12 February 1779)

Heritage Quote

"It is too early for politicians to presume on our forgetting that the public good, the real welfare of the great body of the people, is the supreme object to be pursued; and that no form of government whatever has any other value than as it may be fitted for the attainment of this object."

-- James Madison (Federalist No. 45, 26 January 1788)

Heritage Quote

"It is certainly true that a popular government cannot flourish without virtue in the people."

-- Richard Henry Lee (letter to Colonel Martin Pickett, 5 March
1786)

Heritage Quote

"As to Taxes, they are evidently inseparable from Government. It is impossible without them to pay the debts of the nation, to protect it from foreign danger, or to secure individuals from lawless violence and rapine."

-- Alexander Hamilton (Address to the Electors of the State of New York, March 1801)

Heritage Quote

"In such a performance you may lay the foundation of national happiness only in religion, not by leaving it doubtful "whether morals can exist without it," but by asserting that without religion morals are the effects of causes as purely physical as pleasant breezes and fruitful seasons."

-- Benjamin Rush (letter to John Adams, 20 August 1811)

Heritage Quote

"To all of which is added a selection from the elementary schools of subjects of the most promising genius, whose parents are too poor to give them further education, to be carried at the public expense through the college and university. The object is to bring into action that mass of talents which lies buried in poverty in every country, for want of the means of development, and thus give activity to a mass of mind, which, in proportion to our population, shall be double or treble of what it is in most countries."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to Jose Correa de Serra, 25 November
1817)

Heritage Quote

"His integrity was most pure, his justice the most inflexible I have ever known, no motives of interest or consanguinity, of friendship or hatred, being able to bias his decision. He was indeed, in every sense of the words, a wise, a good, and a great man."

-- Thomas Jefferson (on George Washington in a letter to Dr. Walter Jones, 2 January 1814)

Heritage Quote

"The natural aristocracy I consider as the most precious gift of nature for the instruction, the trusts, and government of society. And indeed it would have been inconsistent in creation to have formed man for the social state, and not to have provided virtue and wisdom enough to manage the concerns of the society. May we not even say that that form of government is the best which provides the most - for a pure selection of these natural aristoi into the offices of government?"

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to John Adams, 28 October 1813)

Heritage Quote

"A feeble executive implies a feeble execution of the government. A feeble execution is but another phrase for a bad execution; and a government ill executed, whatever may be its theory, must be, in practice, a bad government.

-- Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 69, 14 March 1788)

Heritage Quote

"Your love of liberty - your respect for the laws - your habits of industry - and your practice of the moral and religious obligations, are the strongest claims to national and individual happiness."

-- George Washington (letter to the Residents of Boston, 27 October 1789)

Heritage Quote

"In the next place, the state governments are, by the very theory of the constitution, essential constituent parts of the general government. They can exist without the latter, but the latter cannot exist without them."

-- Joseph Story (Commentaries on the Constitution, 1833)

Heritage Quote

"States, like individuals, who observe their engagements, are respected and trusted: while the reverse is the fate of those who pursue an opposite conduct."

-- Alexander Hamilton (Report on Public Credit, 9 January 1790)

Heritage Quote

"A good government implies two things; first, fidelity to the objects of the government; secondly, a knowledge of the means, by which those objects can be best attained."

-- Joseph Story (Commentaries on the Constitution, 1833)

Heritage Quote

"I will not believe our labors are lost. I shall not die without a hope that light and liberty are on a steady advance."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to John Adams, 12 September 1821)

Heritage Quote

"The pyramid of government-and a republican government may well receive that beautiful and solid form-should be raised to a dignified altitude: but its foundations must, of consequence, be broad, and strong, and deep. The authority, the interests, and the affections of the people at large are the only foundation, on which a superstructure proposed to be at once durable and magnificent, can be rationally erected."

-- James Wilson

Heritage Quote

"The natural cure for an ill-administration, in a popular or represenative constitution, is a change of men."

-- Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 21, 1787)

Heritage Quote

"The true test is, whether the object be of a local character, and local use; or, whether it be of general benefit to the states. If it be purely local, congress cannot constitutionally appropriate money for the object. But, if the benefit be general, it matters not, whether in point of locality it be in one state, or several; whether it be of large, or of small extent."

-- Joseph Story (Commentaries on the Constitution, 1833)

Heritage Quote

"I have often expressed my sentiments, that every man, conducting himself as a good citizen, and being accountable to God alone for his religious opinions, ought to be protected in worshipping the Deity according to the dictates of his own conscience."

-- George Washington (letter to the General Committee of the United Baptist Churches in Virginia, May 1789)

We must never forget

Today is the 61st anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

Heritage Quote

"The love of justice and the love of country plead equally the cause of these people, and it is a moral reproach to us that they should have pleaded it so long in vain."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to Edward Coles, 25 August 1814)

Heritage Quote

"No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause, because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity."

-- James Madison (Federalist No. 10, 23 November 1787)

Heritage Quote

"My confidence is that there will for a long time be virtue and good sense enough in our countrymen to correct abuses."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to Edward Rutledge, 1788)

Heritage Quote

[T]he Constitution ought to be the standard of construction for the laws, and that wherever there is an evident opposition, the laws ought to give place to the Constitution. But this doctrine is not deducible from any circumstance peculiar to the plan of convention, but from the general theory of a limited Constitution.

-- Alexander Hamilton (Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 81 1788)

Sir Winston -- randomly

"One ought never to turn one's back on a threatened danger and try to run away from it. If you do that, you will double the danger. But if you meet it promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half. "

"It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried."

"I have always felt that a politician is to be judged by the animosities he excites among his opponents."

"An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile - hoping it will eat him last."

"A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject."

"A love for tradition has never weakened a nation, indeed it has strengthened nations in their hour of peril."

"All great things are simple, and many can be expressed in single words: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope."

-- Sir Winston Churchill, British statesman, 1874 - 1965.

Heritage Quote

"And as to the Cares, they are chiefly what attend the bringing up of Children; and I would ask any Man who has experienced it, if they are not the most delightful Cares in the World; and if from that Particular alone, he does not find the Bliss of a double State much greater, instead of being less than he expected."

-- Benjamin Franklin (Reply to a Piece of Advice)

Heritage Quote

"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 was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."

-- John Adams (Address to the Military, 11 October 1798)

Holocaust memories

Back in August, the Houston Chronicle ran an article about Riva Kremer, a survivor of the holocaust in Nazi Germany.

I know Mrs. Kremer through my in-laws who knew her daughter and son-in-law, Linda and Morris Penn. I can't help but think that Linda's death from kidney failure was due, in part, from the treatment she received as a child in the Nazi concentration camps. The Penn's were reticent when asked about their separate (Morris escaped from a concentration camp and was a part of the partisan forces that fought a guerilla war against the German conquerors, while Linda was emprisoned in several different concentration camps throughout the war. They did not meet until after the war was over.) experiences during WWII, but they did, over the years, tell my wife and I enough for us to get some idea of the evil visited upon them and many others by the Nazis. And about the strength and courage that they had to have in order to survive.

Despite some revisionists out there, the holocaust did indeed happen. And it was worse than we can imagine. Much, much worse. We, as a species, must never forget what evil we are capable of doing. And we must fight it. Within ourselves, and within others.

I strongly recommend you read the article.

Heritage Quote

"A Man may, if he know not how to save, keep his Nose to the Grindstone, and die not wirth a Groat at last."

-- Benjamin Franklin (Poor Richard's Almanack, 1742)

Heritage Quote

"The plain import of the clause is, that congress shall have all the incidental and instrumental powers, necessary and proper to carry into execution all the express powers. It neither enlarges any power specifically granted; nor is it a grant of any new power to congress. But it is merely a declaration for the removal of all uncertainty, that the means of carrying into execution those, otherwise granted, are included in the grant."

-- Joseph Story (Commentaries on the Constitution, 1833)

Heritage Quote

"Natural rights [are] the objects for the protection of which society is formed and municipal laws established."

-- Thomas Jefferson (Letter to James Monroe, 1791)

Heritage Quote

I have been happy... in believing that... whatever follies we may be led into as to foreign nations, we shall never give up our Union, the last anchor of our hope, and that alone which is to prevent this heavenly country from becoming an arena of gladiators.

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to Elbridge Gerry, 13 May 1797)

Heritage Quote

"The state governments have a full superintendence and control over the immense mass of local interests of their respective states, which connect themselves with the feelings, the affections, the municipal institutions, and the internal arrangements of the whole population. They possess, too, the immediate administration of justice in all cases, civil and criminal, which concern the property, personal rights, and peaceful pursuits of their own citizens."

-- Joseph Story (Commentaries on the Constitution, 1833)

Heritage Quote

"It is the duty of parents to maintain their children decently, and according to their circumstances; to protect them according to the dictates of prudence; and to educate them according to the suggestions of a judicious and zealous regard for their usefulness, their respectability and happiness."

-- James Wilson (Lectures on Law, 1791)

Heritage Quote

"His mind was great and powerful, without being of the very first order; his penetration strong, though not so acute as that of Newton, Bacon, or Locke; and as far as he saw, no judgment was ever sounder"

-- Thomas Jefferson (on George Washington in a letter to Dr. Walter Jones, 2 January 1814)

Heritage Quote

"The foundation of our Empire was not laid in the gloomy age of Ignorance and Superstition, but at an Epocha when the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined, than at any former period."

-- George Washington (Circular to the States, 8 June 1783)

Heritage Quote

"The only foundation of a free Constitution, is pure Virtue, and if this cannot be inspired into our People, in a great Measure, than they have it now. They may change their Rulers, and the forms of Government, but they will not obtain a lasting Liberty."

-- John Adams (letter to Zabdiel Adams, 21 June 1776)

Heritage Quote

"The Sun never shined on a cause of greater worth."

-- Thomas Paine (Common Sense, 1776)

Heritage Quote

"This new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe. Hither have they fled, not from the tender embraces of the mother, but from the cruelty of the monster; and it is so far true of England, that the same tyranny which drove the first emigrants from home, pursues their descendants still."

-- Thomas Paine (Common Sense, 1776)

Heritage Quote

"In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever character composed, passion never fails to wrest the sceptre from reason. ... Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob."

-- Alexander Hamilton and James Madison (Federalist No. 55, 15 February 1788)

Heritage Quote

"Happy, thrice happy shall they be pronounced hereafter, who have contributed any thing, who have performed the meanest office in erecting this stupendous fabrick of Freedom and Empire on the broad basis of Independency; who have assisted in protecting the rights of humane nature and establishing an Asylum for the poor and oppressed of all nations and religions."

-- George Washington (General Orders, 18 April 1783)

History Quote

"Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual."

—Mark Twain

Heritage Quote

"Men, to act with vigour and effect, must have time to mature measures, and judgment and experience, as to the best method of applying them. They must not be hurried on to their conclusions by the passions, or the fears of the multitude. They must deliberate, as well as resolve."

-- Joseph Story (Commentaries on the Constitution, 6 January 1833)

Heritage Quote

"We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to Samuel Kercheval, 7/12/1816)

Heritage Quote

"If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace."

-- Thomas Paine (The American Crisis, No. 1, 19 December 1776)

Heritage Quote

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Tenth Amendment to the Constitution (Bill of Rights), 15 December 1791

Heritage Quote

"Without Freedom of Thought there can be no such Thing as Wisdom; and no such Thing as Public Liberty, without Freedom of Speech."

-- Benjamin Franklin (writing as Silence Dogood, No. 8, 9 July 1722)

Heritage Quote

"We established however some, although not all its [self-government] important principles . The constitutions of most of our States assert, that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves, in all cases to which they think themselves competent, (as in electing their functionaries executive and legislative, and deciding by a jury of themselves, in all judiciary cases in which any fact is involved,) or they may act by representatives, freely and equally chosen; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to John Cartwright, 1824)

Heritage Quote

"All see, and most admire, the glare which hovers round the external trappings of elevated office. To me there is nothing in it, beyond the lustre which may be reflected from its connection with a power of promoting human felicity."

-- George Washington (letter to Catherine MacAuly Graham, 9 January 1790)

Heritage Quote

"The happy State of Matrimony is, undoubtedly, the surest and most lasting Foundation of Comfort and Love; the Source of all that endearing Tenderness and Affection which arises from Relation and Affinity; the grand Point of Property; the Cause of all good Order in the World, and what alone preserves it from the utmost Confusion; and, to sum up all, the Appointment of infinite Wisdom for these great and good Purposes."

-- Benjamin Franklin (Rules and Maxims for Promoting Matrimonial Happiness, 8 October 1730)

Heritage Quote

"I hope some future day will bring me the happiness of seeing my family again collected under our own roof, happy in ourselves and blessed in each other."

-- Abigail Adams (letter to John Adams, 15 March 1784)

Heritage Quote

"[T]he States can best govern our home concerns and the general government our foreign ones. I wish, therefore...never to see all offices transferred to Washington, where, further withdrawn from the eyes of the people, they may more secretly be bought and sold at market."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to Judge William Johnson, 12 June 1823)

Heritage Quote

"How many observe Christ's birth-day! How few, his precepts! O! 'tis easier to keep Holidays than Commandments."

-- Benjamin Franklin (Poor Richards Almanack, 1743)

Heritage Quote

"[A] good moral character is the first essential in a man, and that the habits contracted at your age are generally indelible, and your conduct here may stamp your character through life. It is therefore highly important that you should endeavor not only to be learned but virtuous."

-- George Washington (letter to Steptoe Washington, 5 December)

Heritage Quote

"Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between church and State."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to a Committee of the Danbury Baptist Association, Connecticut, January 1st 1802)

Heritage Quote

"No man in his senses can hesitate in choosing to be free, rather than a slave."

-- Alexander Hamilton (A Full Vindication of the Measures of the Congress, &c., 15 December 1774)

Heritage Quote

"Jefferson was against any needless official apparel, but if the gown was to carry, he said: "For Heaven's sake discard the monstrous wig which makes the English judges look like rats peeping through bunches of oakum."

-- Thomas Jefferson (commenting on judges' apparel)

Heritage Quote

"Citizens by birth or choice of a common country, that country has a right to concentrate your affections. The name of American, which belongs to you, in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of Patriotism, more than any appellation derived from local discriminations."

—George Washington

Heritage Quote

"Let us recollect that peace or war will not always be left to our option; that however moderate or unambitious we may be, we cannot count upon the moderation, or hope to extinguish the ambition of others."

-- Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 34, 4 January 1788)

Heritage Quote

"[B]ut whatever be their degree of talent it is no measure of their rights. Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the person or property of others. On this subject they are gaining daily in the opinions of nations, and hopeful advances are making towards their re-establishment on an equal footing with the other colors of the human family."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to Henri Gregoire, 25 February 1809)

Heritage Quote

"Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves, therefore, are its only safe depositories."

-- Thomas Jefferson (Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XIV, 1781)

Heritage Quote

"Tis well."

-- George Washington (14 December 1799)

Heritage Quote

"When divorces can be summoned to the aid of levity, of vanity, or of avarice, a state of marriage frequently becomes a state of war or strategem."

-- James Wilson (Lectures on Law, 25 November 1791)

Heritage Quote

"This country and this people seem to have been made for each other, and it appears as if it was the design of Providence that an inheritance so proper and convenient for a band of brethren, united to each other by the strongest of ties, should never be split into a number of unsocial, jealous, and alien sovereignties."

-- John Jay (Federalist No. 2)

Heritage Quote

"There is something so far-fetched and so extravagant in the idea of danger to liberty from the militia that one is at a loss whether to treat it with gravity or with raillery; whether to consider it as a mere trial of skill, like the paradoxes of rhetoricians; as a disingenuous artifice to instil prejudices at any price; or as the serious."

-- Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 29, 10 January 1788)

Heritage Quote

"Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right, from the frame of their nature, to knowledge, as their great Creator, who does nothing in vain, has given them understandings, and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge; I mean, of the characters and conduct of their rulers."

-- John Adams (Dissertation on Canon and Feudal Law, 1765)

Heritage Quote

"Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free."

-- Thomas Jefferson (Autobiography, 1821)

Heritage Quote

"The prosperity of commerce is now perceived and acknowledged by all enlightened statesmen to be the most useful as well as the most productive source of national wealth, and has accordingly become a primary object of its political cares."

-- Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 12, 27 November 1787)

7 Dec 1941 - Day of Infamy

Today marks the 64th anniversary of the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor -- launching America into four years of war that touched every habitable continent on Earth.

Democracy in Europe and Japan florished as a result of America's involvement in the fighting during WWII, and the nation-building afterward. We are well on our way to repeating that accomplishment in the Middle East -- starting with Afghanistan and Iraq.

With all of its blemishes, America still rocks.

Heritage Quote

"In my judgement it is not only ripe for the measure, but in danger of becoming rotten for the want of it."

-- John Witherspoon (debate over the Declaration, July 1776)

Heritage Quote

"So that the executive and legislative branches of the national government depend upon, and emanate from the states. Every where the state sovereignties are represented; and the national sovereignty, as such, has no representation."

-- Joseph Story (Commentaries on the Constitution, 1833)

Heritage Quote

Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.

-- Benjamin Franklin (letter to Jean-Baptiste Leroy, 13 November 1789)

Heritage Quote

"We have heard of the impious doctrine in the old world, that the people were made for kings, not kings for the people. Is the same doctrine to be revived in the new, in another shape - that the solid happiness of the people is to be sacrificed to the views of political institutions of a different form? It is too early for politicians to presume on our forgetting that the public good, the real welfare of the great body of the people, is the supreme object to be pursued; and that no form of government whatever has any other value than as it may be fitted for the attainment of this object."

-- James Madison (Federalist No. 45)

Heritage Quote

"The first and governing maxim in the interpretation of a statute is to discover the meaning of those who made it."

-- James Wilson (Of the Study of Law in the United States, Circa 1790)

Heritage Quote

"The law of nature and the law of revelation are both Divine: they flow, though in different channels, from the same adorable source. It is indeed preposterous to separate them from each other."

-- James Wilson (of the Law of Nature, 1804)

Heritage Quote

"Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people, being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties, and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in the various parts of the country, and among the different orders of people, it shall be the duty of legislators and magistrates... to cherish the interest of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them."

-- John Adams (Thoughts on Government, 1776)

Heritage Quote

"A free people [claim] their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate."

-- Thomas Jefferson (Rights of British America, 1774)

Heritage Quote

"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. As enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself."

—Marcus Tullius Cicero

Heritage Quote

"When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Law of Nature and Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."

The Declaration of Independence, 4 July 1776

Heritage Quote

"The greatest good we can do our country is to heal its party divisions and make them one people."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to John Dickinson, 1801)

Timeline - Iraq

Just for the record, Greyhawk over at the Mudville Gazette has posted the historical timeline of Iraq.

It's good reference material, and has a lot of links. Recommended for those who want to refresh their memories and look at Iraq from a historical perspective.

Heritage Quote

"It is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favors."

-- George Washington (Thanksgiving Proclamation, 3 October 1789)

Thanksgiving Heritage Quote

"Whereas it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor...

"Now, therefore, I do recommend and assign Thursday, the 26th day of November next, to be devoted by the people of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being who is the Beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be; that we may then all unite in rendering unto Him our sincere and humble thanks for His kind care and protection of the people of this country previous to their becoming a nation; for the signal and manifold mercies and the favorable interpositions of His providence in the course and conclusion of the late war; for the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty which we have since enjoyed; for the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national one now lately instituted; for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed, and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and, in general, for all the great and various favors which He has been pleased to confer upon us.

"And also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplication to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations, and beseech Him to pardon our national and other transgressions; to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually; to render our national government a blessing to all the people by constantly being a government of wise, just and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed; to protect and guide all sovereigns and nations (especially such as have shown kindness to us), and to bless them with good governments, peace, and concord; to promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the increase of science among them and us; and, generally, to grant unto all mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as He alone knows to be best.

"Given under my hand, at the city of New York, the 3d day of October, AD 1789."

-- President George Washington, Thanksgiving Day Proclamation, 3 October 1789

Heritage Quote

"It is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage, and such only, as he believes to be acceptable to him. This duty is precedent both in order of time and degree of obligation, to the claims of Civil Society. Before any man can be considered as a member of Civil Society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governor of the Universe."

-- James Madison (A Memorial and Remonstrance, 1785)

Heritage Quote

"It is the duty of all men in society, publicly, and at stated seasons, to worship the SUPREME BEING, the great Creator and Preserver of the universe. And no subject shall be hurt, molested, or restrained, in his person, liberty, or estate, for worshipping GOD in the manner most agreeable to the dictates of his own conscience; or for his religious profession or sentiments; provided he doth not disturb the public peace, or obstruct others in their religious worship."

-- John Adams (Thoughts on Government, 1776)

Heritage Quote

"In the formation of our constitution the wisdom of all ages is collected--the legislators of antiquity are consulted, as well as the opinions and interests of the millions who are concerned. It short, it is an empire of reason."

-- Noah Webster (An Examination into the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution, 1787)

Heritage Quote

"Liberty is not to be enjoyed, indeed it cannot exist, without the habits of just subordination; it consists, not so much in removing all restraint from the orderly, as in imposing it on the violent."

-- Fisher Ames (Essay on Equality, 15 December 1801)

Heritage Quote

"Next Monday the Convention in Virginia will assemble; we have still good hopes of its adoption here: though by no great plurality of votes. South Carolina has probably decided favourably before this time. The plot thickens fast. A few short weeks will determine the political fate of America for the present generation, and probably produce no small influence on the happiness of society through a long succession of ages to come."

-- George Washington (letter to Marquis de Lafayette, 28 May 1788)

Heritage Quote

"As the cool and deliberate sense of the community ought in all governments, and actually will in all free governments ultimately prevail over the views of its rulers; so there are particular moments in public affairs, when the people stimulated by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn. In these critical moments, how salutary will be the interference of some temperate and respectable body of citizens, in order to check the misguided career, and to suspend the blow mediated by the people against themselves, until reason, justice and truth, can regain their authority over the public mind?"

-- James Madison (likely) (Federalist No. 63, 1788)

Heritage Quote

"[T]he President, who errs as other men do, but errs with integrity."

-- Thomas Jefferson (on George Washington in a letter to William Branch Giles, 31 December 1795)

Who's lying?

Go ahead and Google "Clinton Iraq 1998". You'll find numerous (3,700,000 on my search) references to speeches by former President Clinton, many past and present Senators (several of whom are calling President Bush a liar), the Iraq Liberation Act -- H.R. 4655, and much more . . .

Here, and here are a couple of other articles you can read, too.

Do the research yourself, and then make up your own mind about whether or not we were lied to -- and by whom . . .

Heritage Quote

"The constitution of the United States is to receive a reasonable interpretation of its language, and its powers, keeping in view the objects and purposes, for which those powers were conferred. By a reasonable interpretation, we mean, that in case the words are susceptible of two different senses, the one strict, the other more enlarged, that should be adopted, which is most consonant with the apparent objects and intent of the Constitution."

-- Joseph Story (Commentaries on the Constitution, 1833)

Heritage Quote

"We fight not to enslave, but to set a country free, and to make room upon the earth for honest men to live in."

-- Thomas Paine, September 11, 1777

Heritage Quote

"I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death."

-- Thomas Paine, December 19, 1776

Kepp up the good work in the war on Islamofascism, Mr. President!

History Quote

"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse. A man who has nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety is a miserable creature who has no chance at being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."

--John Stuart Mill

Heritage Quote

"Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for, I have grown not only gray, but almost blind in the service of my country."

-- George Washington (upon fumbling for his glasses before delivering the Newburgh Address, 15 March 1783)

Heritage Quote

"The house of representatives...can make no law which will not have its full operation on themselves and their friends, as well as the great mass of society. This has always been deemed one of the strongest bonds by which human policy can connect the rulers and the people together. It creates between them that communion of interest, and sympathy of sentiments, of which few governments have furnished examples; but without which every government degenerates into tyranny."

-- James Madison (Federalist No. 57, 19 February 1788)

Heritage Quote

"Be in general virtuous, and you will be happy."

-- Benjamin Franklin (letter to John Alleyne, 9 August 1768)

Heritage Quote

"If individuals be not influenced by moral principles; it is in vain to look for public virtue; it is, therefore, the duty of legislators to enforce, both by precept and example, the utility, as well as the necessity of a strict adherence to the rules of distributive justice."

-- James Madison (in response to Washington's first Inaugural address, 18 May 1789)

Heritage Quote

"The citizens of America have too much discernment to be argued into anarchy. and I am much mistaken if experience has not wrought a deep and solemn conviction in the public mind that greater energy of government is essential to the welfare and prosperity of the community."

-- Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 26)

Heritage Quote

"Born in other countries, yet believing you could be happy in this, our laws acknowledge, as they should do, your right to join us in society, conforming, as I doubt not you will do, to our established rules. That these rules shall be as equal as prudential considerations will admit, will certainly be the aim of our legislatures, general and particular."

-- Thomas Jefferson, 1801, letter to Hugh White

Heritage Quote

"As our president bears no resemblance to a king so we shall see the Senate has no similitude to nobles."

—Tench Coxe

Heritage Quote

"The bosom of America is open to receive not only the Opulent and respectable Stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all Nations and Religions; whom we shall welcome to a participation of all our rights and privileges, if by decency and propriety of conduct they appear to merit the enjoyment."

-- George Washington (Address to the Members of the Volunteer Association of Ireland, 2 December 1783)

Heritage Quote

"In a general sense, all contributions imposed by the government upon individuals for the service of the state, are called taxes, by whatever name they may be known, whether by the name of tribute, tythe, tallage, impost, duty, gabel, custom, subsidy, aid, supply, excise, or other name."

-- Joseph Story (Commentaries on the Constitution, 1833)

Heritage Quote

"It is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage, and such only, as he believes to be acceptable to him. This duty is precedent both in order of time and degree of obligation, to the claims of Civil Society. Before any man can be considered as a member of Civil Society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governor of the Universe."

-- James Madison, 1785 - A Memorial and Remonstrance

Heritage Quote

"It is a singular advantage of taxes on articles of consumption that they contain in their own nature a security against excess. They prescribe their own limit, which cannot be exceeded without defeating the end purposed - that is, an extension of the revenue."

-- Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 21)

Heritage Quote

"A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to John Adams, 8 September 1817)

Another History Quote

"Don’t fire unless fired upon. But if they want a war let it begin here. "

-- Parker, Captain John commander of the militiamen at Lexington, Massachusetts, on sighting British Troops (attributed), April 19, 1775

History Quote

"An unlimited power to tax involves, necessarily, a power to destroy; because there is a limit beyond which no institution and no property can bear taxation."

-- Marshall, John in McCullough v. Maryland, 1819

Heritage Quote

"The diversity in the faculties of men from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government."

-- James Madison (Federalist No. 10, 23 November 1787)

Heritage Quote

"We have abundant reason to rejoice that in this Land the light of truth and reason has triumphed over the power of bigotry and superstition, and that every person may here worship God according to the dictates of his own heart. In this enlightened Age and in this Land of equal liberty it is our boast, that a man's religious tenets will not forfeit the protection of the Laws, nor deprive him of the right of attaining and holding the highest Offices that are known in the United States."

-- George Washington (letter to the Members of the New Church in Baltimore, 27 January 1793)

Heritage Quote

"No country upon earth ever had it more in its power to attain these blessings than United America. Wondrously strange, then, and much to be regretted indeed would it be, were we to neglect the means and to depart from the road which Providence has pointed us to so plainly; I cannot believe it will ever come to pass."

-- George Washington (letter to Benjamin Lincoln, 29 June 1788)

Heritage Quote

"It is too probable that no plan we propose will be adopted. Perhaps another dreadful conflict is to be sustained. If, to please the people, we offer what we ourselves disprove, how can we afterwards defend our work? Let us raise a standard to which the wise and the honest can repair. The event is in the hand of God. "

-- George Washington (as quoted by Gouverneur Morris in Farrand's Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, 25 March 1787)

Heritage Quote

"... [The Judicial Branch] may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment; and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments."

-- Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 78, 1788)

Heritage Quote

"A fine genius in his own country is like gold in the mine."

-- Benjamin Franklin (Poor Richard's Almanack, 1733)

Heritage Quote

"The freedom and happiness of man...[are] the sole objects of all legitimate government."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to Thaddeus Kosciusko, 1810)

Heritage Quote

"Would it not be better to simplify the system of taxation rather than to spread it over such a variety of subjects and pass through so many new hands."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to James Madison, 1784)

Heritage Quote

"And it proves, in the last place, that liberty can have nothing to fear from the judiciary alone, but would have everything to fear from its union with either of the other departments."

-- Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 78, 1788)

Introspection

Gagdad Bob, over at One Cosmos, looks at the subject of history from a more philosophical perspective. Here's a taste:

To contemporary observers, the life of Jesus, or of the Hebrew prophets, was invisible. This is highly instructive. That is, the most important and influential events in human history were completely undetected and overlooked by contemporary sophisticates. Rather, they were noticed only by a handful of provincial rubes who "saw" and "heard," not with their eyes and ears, but in a trans-cerebral, intuitive manner.

Then he ties it into the present, and what we see (or fail to see), in terms of history, happening around us.

Heritage Quote

"Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint."

-- Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 15)

Heritage Quote

"Law and liberty cannot rationally become the objects of our love, unless they first become the objects of our knowledge."

-- James Wilson (Of the Study of the Law in the United States, Circa 1790)

Heritage Quote

It is a principle incorporated into the settled policy of America, that as peace is better than war, war is better than tribute.

-- James Madison (letter to the Dey of Algiers, August 1816)

Heritage Quote

"[I]f the public are bound to yield obedience to laws to which they cannot give their approbation, they are slaves to those who make such laws and enforce them."

-- Candidus (in the Boston Gazette, 20 January 1772)

Heritage Quote

"Not all the treasures of the world, so far as I believe, could have induced me to support an offensive war, for I think it murder; but if a thief breaks into my house, burns and destroys my property, and kills or threatens to kill me, or those that are in it, and to "bind me in all cases whatsoever" to his absolute will, am I to suffer it?"

-- Thomas Paine (The American Crisis, No. 1, 19 December 1776)

Another Heritage Quote

"We have abundant reason to rejoice that in this Land the light of truth and reason has triumphed over the power of bigotry and superstition, and that every person may here worship God according to the dictates of his own heart."

—George Washington

Heritage Quote

"[T]he flames kindled on the 4 of July 1776, have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism; on the contrary, they will consume these engines and all who work them."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to John Adams, 12 September 1821)

Heritage Quote

"Remember democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."

-- John Adams (letter to John Taylor, 15 April 1814)

And I understand that John Adams was an optimist . . .

[Shamelessly robbed from The Federalist Patriot.]

Heritage Quote

"[J]udges...should be always men of learning and experience in the laws, of exemplary morals, great patience, calmness, coolness, and attention. Their minds should not be distracted with jarring interests; they should not be dependent upon any man, or body of men."

—John Adams

Heritage Quote

"It is a very dangerous doctrine to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions. It is one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy."

—Thomas Jefferson

Heritage Quote

Here is a good philosophy in regards to charity . . .

"It is a duty certainly to give our sparings to those who want; but to see also that they are faithfully distributed, and duly apportioned to the respective wants of those receivers. And why give through agents whom we know not, to persons whom we know not, and in countries from which we get no account, where we can do it at short hand, to objects under our eye, through agents we know, and to supply wants we see?"

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to Michael Megear, 29 May 1823)

. . . probably because it invariably blesses the giver much more when he or she sees what it brings to the receiver. At least, that has been my experience.

Heritage Quote

"Far from being rivals or enemies, religion and law are twin sisters, friends, and mutual assistants. Indeed, these two sciences run into each other. The divine law, as discovered by reason and the moral sense, forms an essential part of both."

-- James Wilson

Heritage Quote

"Cherish, therefore, the spirit of our people, and keep alive their attention. Do not be too severe upon their errors, but reclaim them by enlightening them. If once they become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress, and Assemblies, Judges, and Governors, shall all become wolves."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to Edward Carrington, 16 January 1787)

Another Heritage Quote

"We have abundant reason to rejoice that in this Land the light of truth and reason has triumphed over the power of bigotry and superstition, and that every person may here worship God according to the dictates of his own heart."

—George Washington

Heritage Quote

"It is one thing to be subordinate to the laws, and another [for the Executive] to be dependent on the legislative body. The first comports with, the last violates, the fundamental principles of good government; and, whatever may be the forms of the Constitution, unites all power in the same hands."

-- Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 71, 18 March 1788)

Another Heritage Quote

"If the present Congress errs in too much talking, how can it be otherwise in a body to which the people send 150 lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, and talk by the hour?"

—Thomas Jefferson

Heritage Quote

"The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale."

— Thomas Jefferson

Heritage Quote

"The apportionment of taxes on the various descriptions of property is an act which seems to require the most exact impartiality; yet there is, perhaps, no legislative act in which greater opportunity and temptation are given to a predominant party to trample on the rules of justice. Every shilling which they overburden the inferior number is a shilling saved to their own pockets."

-- James Madison (Federalist No. 10, 23 November 1787)

Heritage Quote

"No people will tamely surrender their Liberties, nor can any be easily subdued, when knowledge is diffusd and Virtue is preservd. On the Contrary, when People are universally ignorant, and debauchd in their Manners, they will sink under their own weight without the Aid of foreign Invaders."

-- Samuel Adams (letter to James Warren, 4 November 1775)

Heritage Quote

"The reformation was preceded by the discovery of America, as if the Almighty graciously meant to open a sanctuary to the persecuted in future years, when home should afford neither friendship nor safety."

-- Thomas Paine (Common Sense, 1776)

Heritage Quote

"I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious."

—Thomas Jefferson

Heritage Quote

"A State, I cheerfully admit, is the noblest work of Man: But Man, himself, free and honest, is, I speak as to this world, the noblest work of God..." —James Wilson

Heritage Quote

"There! His Majesty can now read my name without glasses. And he can double the reward on my head!"

-- John Hancock (upon signing the Declaration of Independence, 4 July 1776)

Heritage Quote

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and pursuit of Happiness: that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

Declaration of Independence, 4 July 1776

Heritage Quote

"[H]onesty will be found on every experiment, to be the best and only true policy; let us then as a Nation be just."

-- George Washington (Circular letter to the States, 14 June 1783)

Heritage Quote

"I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country."

-- Nathan Hale (before being hanged by the British, 22 September
1776)

Heritage Quote

"I own myself the friend to a very free system of commerce, and hold it as a truth, that commercial shackles are generally unjust, oppressive and impolitic - it is also a truth, that if industry and labour are left to take their own course, they will generally be directed to those objects which are the most productive, and this in a more certain and direct manner than the wisdom of the most enlightened legislature could point out."

-- James Madison (speech to the Congress, 9 April 1789)

Heritage Quote

"A State, I cheerfully admit, is the noblest work of Man: But Man, himself, free and honest, is, I speak as to this world, the noblest work of God...."

-- James Wilson (Chisholm v. Georgia, 18 February 1793)

Heritage Quote

"Religion and good morals are the only solid foundation of public liberty and happiness."

-- Samuel Adams (letter to John Trumbull, 16 October 1778)

Heritage Quote

"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

—George Washington and the delegates

Heritage Quote

"[T]he present Constitution is the standard to which we are to cling. Under its banners, bona fide must we combat our political foes - rejecting all changes but through the channel itself provides for amendments."

-- Alexander Hamilton (letter to James Bayard, April 1802)

Heritage Quote

"Taxes should be continued by annual or biennial reeactments, because a constant hold, by the nation, of the strings of the public purse is a salutary restraint from which an honest government ought not wish, nor a corrupt one to be permitted, to be free."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to John Wayles Eppes, 24 June 1813)

Heritage Quote

"There is a certain enthusiasm in liberty, that makes human nature rise above itself, in acts of bravery and heroism."

-- Alexander Hamilton (The Farmer Refuted, 23 February 1775)

Heritage Quote

"As riches increase and accumulate in few hands, as luxury prevails in society, virtue will be in a greater degree considered as only a graceful appendage of wealth, and the tendency of things will be to depart from the republican standard. This is the real disposition of human nature; it is what neither the honorable member nor myself can correct. It is a common misfortunate that awaits our State constitution, as well as all others."

-- Alexander Hamilton (speech to the New York Ratifying Convention, June 1788)

Another History Quote

"No abounding of material prosperity shall avail us if our spiritual senses atrophy. The foes of our own household will surely prevail against us unless there be in our people an inner life which finds its outer expression in a morality like unto that preached by the seers and prophets of God when the grandeur that was Greece and the glory that was Rome still lay in the future."

—Theodore Roosevelt

History Quote

"Time after time mankind is driven against the rocks of the horrid reality of a fallen creation. And time after time mankind must learn the hard lessons of history—the lessons that for some dangerous and awful reason we can't seem to keep in our collective memory."

—Hilaire Belloc

Heritage Quote

"The ingredients which constitute energy in the Executive are, first, unity; secondly, duration; thirdly, an adequate provision for its support; fourthly, competent powers. ... The ingredients which constitute safety in the republican sense are, first, a due dependence on the people, secondly, a due responsibility."

-- Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 70, 14 March 1788)

History Quote

Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.

-- Mark Twain

Heritage Quote

"How could a readiness for war in time of peace be safely prohibited, unless we could could prohibit, in like manner, the preparations and establishments of every hostile nation?"

-- James Madison (Federalist No. 41, 1788)

Heritage Quote

"I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to Benjamin Rush, 23 September 1800)

Heritage Quote

"Can it be, that Providence has not connected the permanent felicity of a Nation with its virtue? The experiment, at least, is recommended by every sentiment which ennobles human Nature."

-- George Washington (Farewell Address, 19 September 1796)

Heritage Quote

"The establishment of Civil and Religious Liberty was the Motive which induced me to the Field -- the object is attained -- and it now remains to be my earnest wish & prayer, that the Citizens of the United States could make a wise and virtuous use of the blessings placed before them."

-- George Washington (letter to the Reformed German Congregation
of New York City, 27 November 1783)

Quote

"Faith declares what the senses do not see, but not the contrary of what they see. It is above them, not contrary to them."

—Blaise Pascal

Heritage Quote

"Work as if you were to live 100 Years, Pray as if you were to die To-morrow."

-- Benjamin Franklin (Poor Richard's Almanack, 1757)

Ancient History Quote

"Self control is the chief element in self respect, and self respect is the chief element in courage."

-- Thucydides

Heritage Quote

"Laws that forbid the carrying of arms... disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes... Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man."

-- Cesare Beccaria (On Crimes and Punishment, quoted by Thomas
Jefferson in Commonplace Book)

Heritage Quote

"The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse."

-- James Madison (speech in the Virginia constitutional convention, 2 December 1829)

Heritage Quote

"Strive to be the greatest man in your country, and you may be disappointed. Strive to be the best and you may succeed: he may well win the race that runs by himself."

-- Benjamin Franklin (Poor Richard's Almanack, 1747)

Heritage Quote

"The powers of congress must be defined, but their means must be adequate to the purposes of their constitution. It is possible there may be abuses and misapplications; still, it is better to hazard something than to hazard at all."

-- Oliver Ellsworth (letter to Governor Trumbull, 7/10/1783)

Heritage Quote

"Nothing has yet been offered to invalidate the doctrine that the meaning of the Constitution may as well be ascertained by the Legislative as by the Judicial authority."

-- James Madison (speech in the Congress of the United States, 18 June 1789)

Ancient Historian Quote

"Let him who desires peace prepare for war."

-- Vegetius

Ancient Historian Quote

"The desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise."

-- Tacitus

Heritage Quote

"A judiciary independent of a king or executive alone, is a good thing; but independence of the will of the nation is a solecism, at least in a republican government."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to Thomas Ritchie, 25 December 1820)

Heritage Quote

"That diabolical Hell conceived principle of persecution rages amoung some and to their eternal Infamy the Clergy can furnish their Quota of Imps for such business . . ."

-- James Madison (letter to William Bradford, 24 January 1774)

Heritage Quote

"Slavery is such an atrocious debasement of human nature, that its very extirpation, if not performed with solicitous care, may sometimes open a source of serious evils."

-- Benjamin Franklin (An Address to the Public, November 1789)

Heritage Quote

"The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for, among old parchments, or musty records. They are written, as with a sun beam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power."

-- Alexander Hamilton (The Farmer Refuted, 23 February 1775)

Heritage Quote

"It seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force. If there be any truth in the remark, the crisis at which we are arrived may with propriety be regarded as the era in which that decision is to be made; and a wrong election of the part we shall act may, in this view, deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind."

-- Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 1, 27 October 1787)

Heritage Quote

"Liberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker. But if we had not, our fathers have earned and bought it for us, at the expense of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood."

--John Adams

Heritage Quote

"One loves to possess arms, though they hope never to have occasion for them."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to George Washington, 19 June 1796)

Heritage Quote

"Our properties within our own territories [should not] be taxed or regulated by any power on earth but our own."

-- Thomas Jefferson (Rights of British America, 1774)

Heritage Quote

"The proposed Constitution, so far from implying an abolition of the State governments, makes them constituent parts of the national sovereignty, by allowing them a direct representation in the Senate, and leaves in their possession certain exclusive and very important portions of sovereign power. This fully corresponds, in every rational import of the terms, with the idea of a federal government."

-- Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 9, 1787)

Heritage Quote

"We should never despair, our Situation before has been unpromising and has changed for the better, so I trust, it will again. If new difficulties arise, we must only put forth new Exertions and proportion our Efforts to the exigency of the times."

-- George Washington (letter to Philip Schuyler, 7/15/1777)

Heritage Quote

"Our obligations to our country never cease but with our lives."

-- John Adams (letter to Benjamin Rush, 18 April 1808)

Brit Grit

And now it has come to us to stand alone in the breach, and face the worst that the tyrant's might and enmity can do. Bearing ourselves humbly before God, but conscious that we serve an unfolding purpose, we are ready to defend our native land against the invasion by which it is threatened. We are fighting by ourselves alone; but we are not fighting for ourselves alone. Here in this strong City of Refuge which enshrines the title-deeds of human progress and is of deep consequence to Christian civilization; here, girt about by the seas and oceans where the Navy reigns; shielded from above by the prowess and devotion of our airmen-we await undismayed the impending assault. Perhaps it will come tonight. Perhaps it will come next week. Perhaps it will never come. We must show ourselves equally capable of meeting a sudden violent shock or-what is perhaps a harder test-a prolonged vigil. But be the ordeal sharp or long, or both, we shall seek no terms, we shall tolerate no parley; we may show mercy-we shall ask for none.

-- Sir Winston Churchill, BBC Broadcast, 14 July 1940

Amen.

The pursuit of happiness

Darrin McMahon, a professor of history at Florida State, gives us a historical perspective about happiness in an op-ed at OpinionJournal. His column provides a different interpretation of the phrase "pursuit of happiness" that he believes would more accurately reflect our founding fathers' definition.

I've reprinted the whole article in the extended entry. It's an interesting piece.

A Right, From the Start

"The pursuit of happiness" is about more than private pleasures.


BY DARRIN M. MCMAHON

Friday, July 1, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

As Americans gather round the barbecue this Fourth of July and send their fireworks into the night, they will honor more than just the Declaration of Independence. With laughter and good cheer, they will also celebrate that document's most famous line: "the pursuit of happiness." The words continue to give voice to a great American aspiration. Yet few today even know what the Founding Fathers meant by that curious phrase.

The fault is not entirely our own. Although Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration's primary author, conceived of the pursuit of happiness as an "unalienable right" and a "self evident truth," his meaning was never immediately clear. Eighteenth-century observers themselves interpreted the phrase in various ways. By seeing where they differed, we catch a glimpse of a central tension of the American experiment: the potential conflict of competing pursuits. But by seeing where they agreed, we can also grasp how the Founders sought to reconcile that conflict through an appeal to a common assumption: the indivisibility of public and private good.

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For anyone who went to church in the 18th century, the "pursuit of happiness" was a familiar phrase. American preachers had delivered sermons on the subject for nearly a century, teaching that a benevolent God intended human beings to seek fulfillment in this life on the way to the next. Like the pious author of the 1767 "True Pleasure, Chearfulness, and Happiness, The Immediate Consequence of Religion," they agreed that to allege that "God himself does not delight to see his creatures happy" was blasphemous. Had not Christ performed his first miracle at a wedding feast, lubricating the festivities at Cana by turning water into wine? For Benjamin Franklin that argument was conclusive. "Wine," he observed, "is living proof that god loves us and wants us to be happy."

Jefferson was well aware of such sanguine pronouncements, and he fully appreciated their novelty. In preceding times, Christians had tended to regard earthly life as an unhappy interlude before the rapture of heaven. Misery was what Adam's children reaped in the world, the rotten fruit of original sin. Now they were tilling richer soil. Jefferson himself concurred: "The doctrines of Jesus are simple, and tend all to the happiness of man."

Yet the impetus behind the pursuit of happiness was as much classical as Christian. Like so many of his educated countrymen, Jefferson had read widely in the literature of ancient Greece and Rome. And so he knew, with the philosophers Aristotle and Cicero, that happiness was the final end of human existence, the great goal of a life well lived. To pursue happiness was not only a law of human nature but the highest human calling, attained through discipline, self-sacrifice and reasoned moderation. Those who honored authorities beyond the Bible could gather momentum from the force of these ancient pursuits.

John Locke, another of the Founders' moral teachers and an important influence on the Declaration in his own right, agreed that happiness was a natural law. But he conceived of it less in terms of ancient philosophy than in terms of modern science. A friend of Isaac Newton, Locke was among the first to employ the phrase "the pursuit of happiness" in his 17th-century "Essay Concerning Human Understanding," a work that Jefferson knew well. There Locke likened the pursuit of happiness to gravitational attraction, noting that (human) bodies are drawn by the force of pleasure and repulsed by pain. Conceding that what gives pleasure "to different men are very different things," he insisted that pleasure itself was a universal constant, conferred by providence to direct the course of human lives.

Now Locke (like Jefferson) undoubtedly considered property a pleasure-giving thing. Yet contrary to popular belief, he never employed the specific phrase "life, liberty, and property," and there is no evidence to suggest that Jefferson was tempted to do so himself. Other Americans, it is true, invoked "life, liberty, and property," including the First Continental Congress, which worked those exact words into the "Declaration of Colonial Rights and Grievances" of 1774. But Jefferson was too much of a wordsmith to have failed to say precisely what he meant. If he had intended "happiness" to mean property and nothing else, he would have written it that way.

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Did the "happiness" of the Declaration, then, simply mean personal pleasure in keeping with individual taste? In certain respects, yes--for, like Locke, Jefferson believed that happiness was ultimately in the eyes of the beholder. Hence the need for liberty to allow individuals to follow it where they best saw fit. No government could deign to tell its citizens where true happiness lay.

And yet it is essential to appreciate that Jefferson also held strong views on what constituted the highest source of happiness, the purest pleasure of them all. "Happiness is the aim of life," he affirmed, "but virtue is the foundation of happiness." No 18th-century Founder--whether a Christian, a classicist or a cultivator of simple pleasures--would have disagreed.

Here was the common assumption--what Jefferson called a "harmonizing sentiment"--that united Americans in their differences through the magic of e pluribus unum, making one of many. For in Christian, classical or Lockean terms, virtue at its highest meant serving one's fellow citizens, working for the public welfare, furthering the public good. It followed that virtue was the indispensable means to reconcile the conflicts of individual interest. However else they might differ in their understanding of the critical phrase, early Americans could agree that by pursuing the happiness of others, they helped to ensure their own.

Jefferson's colleague Samuel Adams once observed that "we too often mistake our true happiness, and when we arrive to the enjoyment of that which seemed to promise it to us, we find that it is all an imaginary dream, at best fleeting and transitory." Lest our moments of private pleasure be as ephemeral as a rocket's red glare, we might vow this Fourth of July to pursue happiness in keeping with the Founders' full intent. Jefferson himself put it well. The best means to serve "the happiness and freedom of all," he noted in his first inaugural address, was to perform "all the good in my power." As much as the search for individual satisfaction, that too is an American way, the foundation of a truly noble pursuit.

Mr. McMahon, a professor of history at Florida State University, is the author of "Happiness: A History," to be published in January by Grove/Atlantic.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

Posted by USAdave at 03:14 PM | Comments (0)