Quotes by American Authors - Page 47

We belong far less to where we've come from than where we want to go.
Franz Werfel
The landscape started hard, sharp black mountains over my shoulder and thirsty young saguaros hugging patchy dirt. Gradually it let go, began to green on me a little. I crossed a river, watched succulents get fatter and farmland start to wave, hoarding the blue above and the few clouds it had to spare.I knew the route somehow, knew the curves, the directions, the exact way to go. I knew it the way you know the stars are still up in the sky even though white sun obscures them. Everything that had happened before Lukeville and Sonoita began to liquify in memory, feeling more like fiction than personal history. Funerals and pain, girlfriends and mothers, roommates and priests all tumble away with the desert behind me. The only thing that's real is the road I see ahead. The only person in my life is the man sitting silently beside me. The place I'm going is the only place I've ever wanted to go.
Laurie Perez
If you travel in space for three years and come back, four hundred years will have passed on Earth. I am only an armchair astronomer, but I have the odd sense that I have returned from a journey to a world where nothing quite makes sense.
Jodi Picoult
We can only climb the mountains because there’s a valley that makes the mountain a mountain.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Whether we like it or not, we all come from someplace. And at some point in our lives, we have to make peace with that place.
Jeffrey Stepakoff
I know the police cause you troubleThey cause trouble everywhereBut when you die and go to heavenYou find no policeman there
Woody Guthrie
In poor countries, officials receive explicit bribes; in D.C. they get the sophisticated, implicit, unspoken promise to work for large corporations
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Even if these researchers do see the need to address the problem immediately, though they have obligations and legitimate interests elsewhere, including being funded for other research. With luck, the ideas discussed in Good Calories, Bad Calories may be rigorously tested in the next twenty years. If confirmed, it will be another decade or so after that, at least, before our public health authorities actively change their official explanation for why we get fat, how that leads to illness, and what we have to do to avoid or reverse those fates. As I was told by a professor of nutrition at New York University after on of my lectures, the kind of change I'm advocating could take a lifetime to be accepted.
Gary Taubes
This revolutionary idea of Western citizenship—replete with ever more rights and responsibilities—would provide superb manpower for growing legions and a legal framework that would guarantee that the men who fought felt that they themselves in a formal and contractual sense had ratified the conditions of their own battle service. The ancient Western world would soon come to define itself by culture rather than by race, skin color, or language. That idea alone would eventually bring enormous advantages to its armies on the battlefield. (p. 122)
Victor Davis Hanson
For an entire wing of the G.O.P., a dysfunctional government, whose only visible activity is mismanaging crises, is not an embarrassment but the vindication of a worldview.
Amy Davidson
You know something is wrong when the government declares opening someone else’s mail is a felony but your internet activity is fair game for data collecting.
E.A. Bucchianeri
I may be Anti-Big Government, but only because I am Pro-Human.
Gary Hopkins
Housing is a human right. There can be no fairness or justice in a society in which some live in homelessness, or in the shadow of that risk, while others cannot even imagine it.
Jordan Flaherty
The main objects of all science, the freedom and happiness of man. . . . [are] the sole objects of all legitimate government.(A plaque with this quotation, with the first phrase omitted, is in the stairwell of the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.)
Thomas Jefferson
When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost... All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
H.L. Mencken
Let the warning of the tyrants of the past be recognized for it shall be the same one ringing out when the tyrants of the present are unleashed.
Sai Marie Johnson
If no divine law is recognized above the law of the State, then the law of man has become absolute in men's eyes--there is then no logical barrier to totalitarianism.
Greg L. Bahnsen
Taxation is theft, purely and simply even though it is theft on a grand and colossal scale which no acknowledged criminals could hope to match. It is a compulsory seizure of the property of the State’s inhabitants, or subjects.
Murray N. Rothbard
The government system we have now is set up just like that of Rome and is changing into a system I call Corpocracism (Babylon, United States). Corpocracism is a word derived from some entities of feudalism, democracy, capitalism, classism, and corporatism to form a government system into a dictatorship and police state. This system is being brought about by a group of people in our own government, corporations, financial institutions and foreign entities. It is an ideology of hypocrisy that is leading to an JerUSAlem (America) that will sale off every aspect of its nations people to be captive to foreign entities such as corporations, governments, lawyers, financial institutions, banks, individuals and groups of individuals.
Brian David Mattson
[I]t kind of terrified me to imagine myself spending the rest of my life tinkering on the margins of the small arguments.
Lawrence Lessig
The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, intact for over 200 years, guaranteed that the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath of affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. After September 11th, 2001, those were just words on an old piece of paper, no longer a restriction of the Government’s overreaching power to shake down its subjects.
Kenneth Eade
The country he had left thirty years ago had been a realistic place. There were political realities there, then and now, that precluded blind faith, that discouraged one from thinking that everything, always, would work out fairly and equitably. But he had come to believe such things in the United States. Things had worked out. Difficulties had been overcome. He had worked hard and achieved success. The machinery of government functioned.
Dave Eggers
Not only is democracy mystical nonsense, it is also immoral. If one man has no right to impose his wishes on another, then ten million men have no right to impose their wishes on the one, since the initiation of force is wrong (and the assent of even the most overwhelming majority can never make it morally permissible). Opinions—even majority opinions—neither create truth nor alter facts. A lynch mob is democracy in action. So much for mob rule.
Morris Tannehill
The USA government states that the New Mexico Trinity nuclear bomb site is still highly radioactive and 'harmless'. It is interesting to note in the era of Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity (EHS) that it is USA government policy that radio frequency (RF) and electricity are also 'harmless'.
Steven Magee
On a basic level, he had seen first-hand how his government used the element of fear to accomplish its objectives; the same element of fear that had been used as an excuse to engage its huge war machine in conflicts for the profits of America’s oligarchy.
Kenneth Eade
The USA government sure do like their propaganda feeds! Unfortunately, too much propaganda does create the scenario where no one believes anything that they say. It's just like Pinocchio.
Steven Magee
USA corporations are legally regulated by laws which their managers know are rarely enforced. This criminal activity is what the USA government calls: Deregulation.
Steven Magee
The biggest criminals that I have met in life are working for the government. They make mass murderers look like amateurs.
Steven Magee
The big question about the American depression is not whether war with Germany and Japan ended it. It is why the Depression lasted until that war. From 1929 to 1940, from Hoover to Roosevelt, government intervention helped to make the Depression Great.
Amity Shlaes
Every step which leads from capitalism toward planning is necessarily a step nearer to absolutism and dictatorship.
Ludwig von Mises
The USA government encourages gun ownership at the same time as they have allowed environmental radiation levels to become ridiculously high powered and this continues to increase annually. It will be interesting to see where this government experiment eventually takes the USA!
Steven Magee
The Government goes after the little guys, not their own.
Kenneth Eade
I have no faith in the USA corporate government systems of protection of public health and safety.
Steven Magee
Computers are one of the products in the USA that appear to be unregulated by the government which leaves consumers unprotected from flawed devices.
Steven Magee
If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.
James Madison
You know that when ex-military personnel start assassinating their own government's agents that something funky is going on.
Steven Magee
I sincerely hope that President Barack Obama’s government will be remembered as the peak of deregulated corporate corruption and not the ongoing rise of it.
Steven Magee
Government scientists are commonly as corrupt as the corporate government that employs them.
Steven Magee
It is clear that the protective functions of workplace health and safety have transferred to the workers through the process of corporate government deregulation and reduced funding of relevant government departments.
Steven Magee
Whether voting Republican or Democrat, the result is the same: A corrupt corporate government.
Steven Magee
When avarice takes the lead in a state, it is commonly the forerunner of its fall.
Alexander Hamilton
The general public has failed to realize that the USA government has built a High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) in most cities with the mass deployment of smart radio frequency transmitting utility meters.
Steven Magee
...it...planted seeds of doubt as to whether we think diabolically enough when we wonder what our government is doing behind our backs.
Alexandra Zapruder
I dread having to call the police, as I have no idea if they will send good cop, bad cop, lying cop, incompetent cop, aggressive cop, assaulting cop, corrupt cop, or the worst one of them all, the terminator cop.
Steven Magee
An Indian Affairs agent said, 'The question will suggest itself, which of these people are the savages?
David Grann
When a plutocracy is disguised as a democracy, the system is beyond corrupt.
Suzy Kassem
[T]here are some human rights that are so deep that we can't negotiate them away. I mean people do heinous, terrible things. But there are basic human rights I believe that every human being has. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the United Nations says it for me. And it says there are two basic rights that can't be negotiated that government doesn't give for good behavior and doesn't take away for bad behavior. And it's the right not to be tortured and not to be killed. Because the flip side of this is that then when you say OK we're gonna turn over -- they truly have done heinous things, so now we will turn over to the government now the right to take their life. It involves other people in doing essentially the same kind of
Helen Prejean
I've always regarded it as a test of character to dislike the Kennedys. I don't really respect anyone who falls for Camelot.
Christopher Hitchens
Affronts to her reputation pierced her to the heart, though I couldn’t understand why, since she had very little character left to defend.
Melika Dannese Lux
What do you believe reveals more about a man’s character, his arrogance or his attempt to disguise it?
Aaron B. Powell
I was beginning to think that Simon just had a bad case of OCD, ADD, and PMS. With a little BS and OMG mixed in.
Dannika Dark
The true test of character is to live win-win even when promoted to positions where win-lose is possible.
Orrin Woodward
The character to follow thru on commitments made to others is built by following thru on commitments made to self.
Orrin Woodward
One of the Christian's biggest fears is appearing 'too Christian'. God forbid, because that's often characterized as god-awful! We want to be one, but without being 'one of them'.
Criss Jami
Some women don't care what you can do for them. They care about what you could make of them in the inside.
Shannon L. Alder
After all, hadn't she been the one to pursue him? And Madame Dupuy had done it with a vigor that most women would have been too ashamed to display.
Rose Wynters
Your words may be heard but your attitude will be felt. Your attitude reveals your character so never try to deceive anyone with mere words. Word/Talk is cheap but character is key. It costs nothing to be authentic. Learn to be a man or woman of substance!
Kemi Sogunle
We stand strong, or we cower. We emerge victorious, tempered by our trials , or fractured by a permanent, damming fault line.
Karen Marie Moning
His character is like an emerald—multifaceted and enhanced by inclusions.
Melika Dannese Lux
If something bad smells in the basement, it will eventually make its way to the attic.
Anthony Liccione