Today's Truth

“With all [our] blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people? Still one thing more, fellow citizens – a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.”

Thomas Jefferson - (1743-1826)
US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President

Source: First Inaugural Address - March 4 1891

Today's Truth

"Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges. (The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.)"

Cornelius Tacitus - (55-117 A.D.)
Senator and a historian of the Roman Empire.

Source: Annales (1st century A.D.)

Worth bearing in mind when one considers the plethora of new laws enacted by the New Labour government since 1997.

Today's Truth

"It used to be the boast of free men that, so long as they kept within the bounds of the known law, there was no need to ask anybody's permission or to obey anybody's orders. It is doubtful whether any of us can make this claim today."

Friedrich August von Hayek - (1899-1992)

Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974

Source: The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), p. 208

Today's Truth

"No matter if the science is all phony, there [are] collateral environmental benefits...climate change [provides] the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world."

Christine Stewart (born January 3 1941)
Former Canadian politician and Environment Minister

Source: Calgary Herald, December 14 1998

Nice one, the mask slips and the truth is revealed - a watermelon environmentalist (green on the surface, red under the skin) reveals the true motive behind the Global Warmist strategy.

Today's Truth

"Government does not tax to get the money it needs; government always finds a need for the money it gets."

Ronald Wilson Reagan - (1911–2004)

Hollywood star, President of the Screen Actors Guild, 33rd Governor of California (1967–1975) and 40th President of the United States (1981–1989)

Today's Truth

"The principle of free speech is no new doctrine born of the Constitution of the United States. It is a heritage of English-speaking peoples, which has been won by incalculable sacrifice, and which they must preserve so long as they hope to live as free men."

Robert M. Lafollette, Sr. - (1855-1925)
American politician who served as the 20th Governor of Wisconsin (1901–1906) and Republican Senator from Wisconsin (1906–1925), ran for President of the United States as the nominee of his own Progressive Party in 1924

Source: Speech, 6 October 1917

Today's Truth

"Today, when a concerted effort is made to obliterate this point, it cannot be repeated too often that the Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals -- that it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government -- that it is not a charter for government power, but a charter of the citizen's protection against the government."

Ayn Rand - (1905-1982)

Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright and screenwriter

Certainly something to bear in mind when reading the rather different new European Constitution/Lisbon Treaty.

Today's Truth

"We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debt, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our calling and our creeds... [we will] have no time to think, no means of calling our miss-managers to account but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers... And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for [another]... till the bulk of society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery... And the fore-horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression."

Thomas Jefferson - (1743-1826)
US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President

Source: Letter to Samuel Kercheval, Monticello, July 12, 1816

Today's Truth

"English character and English freedom depend comparatively little on the form which the Constitution assumes at Westminster. A centralised democracy may be as tyrannical as an absolute monarch; and if the vigour of the nation is to continue unimpaired, each individual, each family, each district, must preserve as far as possible its independence, its self-completeness, its powers and its privilege to manage its own affairs and think its own thoughts."

James Anthony Froude - (1818-1894)
British author and historian

Source: Short Studies on Great Subjects - (1872)

Today's Truth

"When a government controls both the economic power of individuals and the coercive power of the state...this violates a fundamental rule of happy living: Never let the people with all the money and the people with all the guns be the same people."

P. J. O'Rourke - (born November 14 1947)
US humorist, journalist, and political commentator

Today's Truth

"Every collectivist revolution rides in on a Trojan horse of 'emergency'. It was the tactic of Lenin, Hitler, and Mussolini. In the collectivist sweep over a dozen minor countries of Europe, it was the cry of men striving to get on horseback. And 'emergency' became the justification of the subsequent steps. This technique of creating emergency is the greatest achievement that demagoguery attains."

Herbert Hoover - (1874 - 1964)
Professional mining engineer, author, United States Secretary of Commerce and the 31st President of the United States

Today's Truth

"The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government mismanagement rather than by any inherent instability of the private economy. ... Roosevelt's policies were very destructive. Roosevelt's policies made the depression longer and worse than it otherwise would have been."

Milton Friedman - (1912-2006)
Nobel Prize-winning American economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan

Today's Truth

"Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state lives at the expense of everyone."

Frederic Bastiat - (1801-1850)

French political economist, classical liberal theorist, statesman, and author.

Source: The Law, (1850)

Today's Truth

"Somehow liberals have been unable to acquire from life what conservatives seem to be endowed with at birth: namely, a healthy skepticism of the powers of government agencies to do good."

Daniel Patrick Moynihan - (1927-2003)

Four term Democratic Party Senator for New York, United States Ambassador to the United Nations and India, member of four successive Presidential administrations from Kennedy to Ford and sociologist.

Source: New York Post, 14 May 1969

Today's Truth

"You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down. Up to man's age-old dream-the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. Regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would sacrifice freedom for security have embarked on this downward path."

Ronald Wilson Reagan - (1911–2004)

Hollywood star, President of the Screen Actors Guild, 33rd Governor of California (1967–1975) and 40th President of the United States (1981–1989)

Source: A Time for Choosing (a.k.a. The Speech), 1964

Today's Truth

"The basic principle of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be "undemocratic". Entrance examinations must be framed so that all, or nearly all, citizens can go to universities, whether they have any power (or wish) to profit by higher education or not. The bright pupil thus remains democratically fettered to his own age group throughout his school career, and a boy who would be capable of tackling Aeschylus or Dante sits listening to his coeval's attempts to spell out A CAT SAT ON A MAT. And what we must realise is that "democracy" in the diabolical sense (I'm as good as you...) is the finest instrument we could possibly have for extirpating political democracies from the face of the earth."

C.S. Lewis - (1898-1963)
British novelist, academic, medievalist, literary critic, essayist, lay theologian and Christian apologist.

Source: The Screwtape Letters, 1942

Today's Truth

"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote."

Benjamin Franklin - (1706-1790)

US Founding Father, author, printer, satirist, political theorist, politician, scientist, inventor, statesman and diplomat.

Today's Truth

"No man will ever bring out of the Presidency the reputation which carries him into it."

Thomas Jefferson - (1743-1826)
US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President

Today's Truth

"In the year of America's birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river. The capital was abandoned. The enemy was advancing. The snow was stained with blood. At a moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words be read to the people:

"'Let it be told to the future world...that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive...that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet [it].'

"America. In the face of our common dangers, in this winter of our hardship, let us remember these timeless words. With hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come. Let it be said by our children's children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God's grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations."

Barack Hussein Obama (born August 4 1961)

Forty-fourth President of the United States of America

As with all the best inauguration speeches, a message to the world as well as to America

Today's Truth

"If the only motive was to help people who could not afford education, advocates of government involvement would have simply proposed tuition subsidies."

Milton Friedman - (1912-2006)
Nobel Prize-winning American economist