Mind Your Attention

It is not necessary to restrict yourself to lofty subjects or philosophy all the time, but be aware that the common babbling that passes for worthwhile discussion has a corrosive affect on your higher purpose. When we blather about trivial things, we ourselves become trivial, for our attention gets taken up with trivialities. You become what you give your attention to.

-Epictetus

Dangerous Men of Zeal

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficial. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greater dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment of men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.

-Justice Louis Brandeis

The Delicate Dignity of Congress

The representatives of the people, in a popular assembly, seem sometimes to fancy that they are the people themselves; and betray strong symptoms of impatience and disgust at the least sign of opposition from any other quarter: as if the exercise of its rights by either the executive or the judiciary were a breach of their privilege and an outrage to their dignity.

-Alexander Hamilton

Big Enough

A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.

-Barry Goldwater

An Army of Sheep

I am not afraid of an army of lions led by a sheep; I am afraid of an army of sheep led by a lion.

-Alexander the Great

Matters of Mind and Spirit

Those who want government to regulate matters of mind and spirit are like men so afraid of being murdered that they commit suicide to avoid assassination.

-Harry Truman

Love and Envy

There be none of the affections which have been noted to fascinate or bewitch, but love and envy. They both have vehement wishes; they frame themselves readily into imagination and suggestions; and they come easily into the eye, especially upon the presence of objects; which are the points that conduce to fascination, if any such thing there be.

-Francis Bacon

The Germanic Languages

Mastery of the art and spirit of the Germanic languages enables a man to travel all day in one sentence without changing cars.

-Mark Twain

You Cannot Limit the Unlimited

How can there be a definite limit to the supreme power if an indefinite happiness, left to its judgement, is to be its aim? Are the princes to be the fathers of the people, however great be the danger that they will also become its despots?

- G.H. von Berg

Poverty

The thing about poverty is not how little you have: that is not the worst part. The worst part about poverty is living in fear that you will lose what little you have.

-Unknown.

You First

Neither in writing nor in reading wilt thou be able to lay down rules for others before thou shalt have first learned to obey rules thyself. Much more so is this in life.

-Marcus Aurelius

Adding to the Burden

He who relies upon state protection must pay for it by limitations of liberty; by every new demand which he makes on the state, he increases its function and the burden of it on himself. Weary of protecting himself, he begs the state to take care of him; the state, however, only orders him to take care of himself in co-operation with others under its supervision, and it takes its toll from him in money, time, and services for giving him this good advice and this wholesome coercion.

-William Graham Sumner

A Fine Gentleman

[H]e is judicial only in tailors and barbers, but his opinion is ever ready and ever idle. If you will know more of his acts, the broker's shop is the witness of his valor, where lies wounded, dead, rent, and out of fashion, many a spruce suit, overthrown by his fantasticness.

-Sir Thomas Overbury

Dogs

Dogs lives are too short. Their only fault really.

-unknown

Petrification

Petrification is of two sorts. There is petrifaction of the understanding; and also the sense of shame. This happens when a man obstinately refuses to acknowledge plain truths, and persists in maintaining what is self-contradictory. Most of us dread mortification of the body, and would spare no pains to escape anything of that kind. But of mortification of the soul we are utterly heedless. With regard, indeed to the soul, if a man is in such a state as to be incapable of following or understanding anything, I grant you we do think him in a bad way. But mortification of the sense of shame and modesty we go so far as to dub strength of mind!

-Epictetus

Promises of the Moon

The promises made by the Moon are broken by the Sun.

-Anonymous

The Old and the Young

They say... that the old man has nothing... to hope for. Yet he is in better case than the young man, since what the latter merely hopes for, the former has already attained; the one wishes to live long, the other has lived long.

-Cicero