Category: Thought

“You can get much farther with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.”

“We do not want to fritter away our short lives in chains, even if they are golden chains of prosperity and power.”

“It has been my observation that going into government, especially in a high-visibility job, lowers a person’s IQ by at least 50 points.”

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what a people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”

“How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?”

“Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”

“The U.S. Constitution poses no serious threat to our form of government.”

“Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.”

“Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. . . . Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.”

“People are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.”