"The history of the earth! Doth it present anything but crimes of the most heinous nature, committed from one end of the world to the other?"

J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur. Letters from an American Farmer [prompted by American slavery].

"Dissidents understood the power of freedom because it had already transformed our own lives. It liberated us the day we stopped living in a world where ‘truth’ and ‘falsehood’ were, like everything else, the property of the State. And for the most part, this liberation did not stop when we were sentenced to prison."

Natan Sharansky with Ron Dermer The Case for Democracy

"The most important sort of knowledge is to know which things are worth knowing."

G.K. Chesterton in Sign April 1932, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 17 #2-3 (Nov.-Dec. .2013)

“Nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent.”

D.P. Diffiné, “Wal-Mart Open for Business: A 30th Anniversary Salute to Wal-Mart” (1992)

"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, "Founders' Quote Daily" November 23, 2005 from Federalist.com.

"Well, we've said it many times — if a frog had side pockets, he'd carry a handgun."

“Rather’s Familiar Quotations” (from CBS's Dan Rather) in The Atlantic Monthly March 2005

“At that moment, and only for that moment, everything fitted into place. Every tendency in himself, in societies; the past and the future; all he had ever seen or thought or felt or believed, sorted itself out. It was a vision of Good and Evil. Heaven and Hell. Life and death. There were two alternatives; and he had to choose. He chose.”

Malcolm Muggeridge "Winter in Moscow" (1934), in Ian Hunter, ed., The Very Best of Malcolm Muggeridge.

“Some of this history is very interesting, but the motive behind it is not historical. It was Columbus, and not his chambermaid, who sailed to discover America; Napoleon, and not his math teacher, who crushed Europe under his heel.”

William Gairdner, The Trouble with Democracy