"A good newspaper,  I suppose,  is a nation talking to itself."
                                                      Arthur Miller

"I'm with you on the free press.  It's the newspapers I can't stand."
                                                       Tom Stoppard

"Half the American populaton no longer reads newspapers;  plainly, they are the clever half." 
                                                       Gore Vidal

"The farther backward you can look,  the farther forward you are likely to see."
                                                       Winston Chruchill

"What is history but the story of how politicians have squandered the blood and treasure of the human race."
                                                       Thomas Sowell

"Not to know what has transacted in former times is to continue always as a child."
                                                        Marcus Tullius Cicero

"Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed,  and are right."
                                                         H.L.Mencken

"The human race devides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire."
                                                        Robert Heinlein

"The greatest crimes of the twentieth century were committed not by money-grubbing capitalists but by dedicated idealist.  Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler were contemptuous of money.  The passage from the nineteenth to the twentieth century has been a passage from considerations of money to considerations of power.  How naive the cliche that money is the root of evil!"
                                                        Eric Hoffer

"Never murder a man who is committing suicide."
                                                       Woodrow Wilson

"If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization,  then be prepared to accept barbarism."
                                                       Thomas Sowell

"Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one's government is not necessarily to secure freedom."
                                                       F. A. Hayek

"The chief obstacle to the progress of the human race is the human race."
                                                       Don Marquis

"The intention makes the crime."
                                                       Aristotle

"A war is not won if the defeated enemy has not been turned into a friend."
                                                       Eric Hoffer

"The fact that slaughter (battle) is a horrifying spectacle must make us take war more seriously,  but (it does) not provide an excuse for gradually blunting our swords in the name of humanity.  Sooner or later someone will come along with a sharp sword and hack off our arms."
                                                      Carl von Clausewitz

"A tyrant...is always stirring up some war or other in order that the people may require a leader."
                                                      Plato 
"Cultures contain many cues and inducements to dissuade the individual from approaching ultimate limits, in much the same way that a special warning strip of land around the edge of a baseball field lets a player know that he is about to run into a concrete wall when he is preoccupied with catching the ball. The wider that strip of land and the more sensitive the player is to the changing composition of the ground under his feet as he pursues the ball, the more effective the warning. Romanticizing or lionizing as "individualistic" those people who disregard social cues and inducements increases the danger of head-on collisions with inherent social limits. Decrying various forms of social disapproval is in effect narrowing the warning strip." 
- Thomas Sowell

"The only index by which to judge a government or a way of life is by the quality of the people it acts upon. No matter how noble the objectives of a government, if it blurs decency and kindness, cheapens human life, and breeds ill will and suspicion- it is an evil government." 
- Eric Hoffer 

"Everything that we think God has in his mind necessarily proceeds from our own mind; it is what we imagine to be in God's mind, and it is really difficult for human intelligence to guess at a divine intelligence. What we usually end up with by this sort of reasoning is to make God the color-sergeant of our army and to make Him as chauvinistic as ourselves." 
- Lin Yutang 

"Unjust laws have to be fought ideologically; they cannot be fought or corrected by means of mere disobedience and futile martyrdom." 
- Ayn Rand 
"There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as moral indignation, which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue." 
- Erich Fromm 

"Every man...should periodically be compelled to listen to opinions which are infuriating to him. To hear nothing but what is pleasing to one is to make a pillow of the mind." 
- St. John Ervine 

"...the ultimate decision about what is accepted as right and wrong will be made not by individual human wisdom but by the disappearance of the groups that have adhered to the "wrong" beliefs." 
- F.A. Hayek 

"Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul" 
- Mark Twain

"There can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permitted to a mob." 
- Ayn Rand

"If all mankind were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind." 
- John Stuart Mill

"Beware lest in your anxiety to avoid war you obtain a master." 
- Demosthenes 

"The present is saturated with the past and pregnant with the future." 
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz 

"...Knowledge is power, but only wisdom is liberty." 
- Will Durant

"We cannot prove that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point, that we have seen our best days. But so said all before us, and with just as much reason. On what principle is it that, when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?" 
- Thomas Macaulay

"The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all." 
- Thomas Jefferson 

"It stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there's someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master." 
- Ayn Rand