(Most recent additions are near the top, except for the originals, which are below the double bar.)

There's a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people.

-- Commander Bill Adama (portrayed by Edward James Olmos), in the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica

A newspaper press is a machine for spitting out cheap and smeary newsprint at speed: if you try to make it output fine art lithos, you'll get junk. If you try to make it output newspapers, you'll get the basis for a free society.

-- Cory Doctorow. This comes from a longer, excellent piece on why digital-rights management is bad for everyone, including the businesses pushing it. But I liked this little bit.

"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. ... corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."

-- Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 21, 1864

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public."

-- Theodore Roosevelt, 1918

"The beginning of empire is the end of commonwealth."

-- Leon Fuerth, national security adviser to former vice president Al Gore

"It not infrequently happens that, transported by the indignation arising from any attempt to destroy a free government, its friends, by the measures they take to defend and support it, sap those principles on which it is founded."

-- Representative James Hughes of Kentucky. Was he speaking regarding the reactions to the events of Sep 11, which have been justified by the extraordinary nature of those attacks? No, he was speaking in 1807, regarding a bill in the Senate to suspend habeaus corpus (sound familiar?) after the Burr conspiracy was unearthed. As quoted in What Kind of Nation by James F. Simon (Chapter 10, p. 226). Once again those unlearned in history seemed doomed to relive it.

"The government of the United States has been emphatically termed a government of laws and not of men. It will certainly cease to deserve this high appellation, if the laws furnish no remedy for the violation of a vested right."

-- Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall, speaking in 1803, as quoted in What Kind of Nation by James F. Simon (Chapter 8,. 185).

"In heart and sentiment, as well as by birth and interest, I am an American, attached to the genuine principles of the Constitution, as sanctioned by the will of the people, for their general liberty, prosperity, and happiness."

-- John Marshall, future Supreme Court Chief Justice, as quoted in What Kind of Nation? by James F. Simon (p. 70)

"But there is also something radically democratic about firearms in particular that explains their singularly explosive growth in the West. Guns destroy the hierarchy of the battlefield, marginalizing the wealthy mailed knight and rendering even the carefully trained bowman ultimately irrelevant."

-- Victor Davis Hanson in "WHY THE WEST HAS WON (and will): Freedom is the Ultimate Weapon", American Spectator (2002 Feb 24)

"Indigenous armies in Vietnam and Central America have had success against Europeans-but largely to the degree that they were supplied with automatic weapons, high explosives and ammunition produced to Western specifications."

-- Victor Davis Hanson in "WHY THE WEST HAS WON (and will): Freedom is the Ultimate Weapon", American Spectator (2002 Feb 24)

"The fact that content at any particular time is free tells us nothing about whether using that content is 'theft.' Similarly, an argument for increasing control by content owners needs more than 'they didn’t pay for this use' to back up the argument."

-- Lawrence Lessig in "Control & Creativity: The future of ideas is in the balance", American Spectator (2002 Feb 24)

"Something very dangerous is going on here. Private property, including intellectual property, is essential to our way of life. It provides an incentive for investment and innovation; it stimulates the flourishing of our culture; it protects the moral entitlements of people to the fruits of their labors. But reducing too much to private property can be bad medicine."

-- Judge Alex Kozinski, as quoted by Lawrence Lessig in "Control & Creativity: The future of ideas is in the balance", American Spectator (2002 Feb 24)

"Distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are based upon a doctrine of equality."

-- Harlan Stone, Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, in the majority decision of the Hirabayashi decision on the relocation and internment of American citizens solely on the basis of their Japanese ancestry. OK, so somehow Stone was arguing in support of the policy. But the sentiment expressed is still a good one. As quoted in All the Laws but One, by Chief Justice Rehnquist.

"As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country."

-- Abraham Lincoln, as quoted by William Safire in his  New York Times column (2000 Feb 20)  It sounds like old Abe understood the 21st century, too.

"As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy."

-- Abraham Lincoln

"You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today."

-- Abraham Lincoln

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• "The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity."
-- W.B. Yeats, "The Second Coming"

 
• "...And that's the deciding factor. We can't win against obsession. They care, we don't. They win."

-- Ford Prefect, from Life, the Universe, and Everything by Douglas Adams.

 
• "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent."

-- Salvador Harding, from Foundation, by Isaac Asimov

 
• "...Other ages, of which the present is one, are unbalanced and prone to faction..."

-- Screwtape, to his nephew Wormwood, from The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis

 
• "It's easy to be a pacifist when the war is over."

-- Joanne Jacobs, San Jose Mercury News Op-Ed, 1995 August 7, on the difficulty of judging the Hiroshima bombing

 
• "[T]he habit of lightly changing the laws is an evil..."

-- Aristotle, Politics line 1269a:15 (trans. by Benjamin Jowett) Can you say, "California ballot initiatives"?

 
• "If the copying machines that came along later had been here during the war, I'm not sure the Allies would have won.  We'd all have drowned in paper."

-- Alan Dickey, architect of the Pentagon, regarding the WW II military bureaucracy.

• "You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be."

-- Winston Churchill, to Parlaiment, 1940 May 3

• "We must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations."

-- Winston Churchill, to Parlaiment, 1940 June 4, commenting on the euphoria following the successful evacuation of 300,000 Allied troops at Dunkirk.

• "There are certain simple, practical tests by which the virtue and reality of any political democracy may be measured. Does the Government in any country rest upon a free, constitutional basis, assuring the people the right to vote according to their will, for whatever candidates they choose? Is there the right of free expression of opinion, free support, free opposition, free advocacy and free criticism of the Government of the day?

Are there Courts of Justice free from interference by the Executive or from threats of mob violence, and free from all association with particular political parties? Will these Courts administer public and well-established laws associated in the human mind with the broad principles of fair play and justice? Will there be fair play for the poor as well as for the rich? Will there be fair play for private persons as well as for Government officials? Will the rights of the individual, subject to his duties to the state, be maintained, asserted and exalted? In short, does the Government own the people, or do the people own the Government? There is the test."
-- Winston Churchill, to the Hague, 1946 May 9.  Perhaps no single statement best sums up the Enlightenment ideal of just Government.

• "The power to tax involves the power to destroy."

-- John Marshall, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, in McCullogh v. Maryland (1819)

• "There wasn't any point when it became -- this.  We fought in Korea.  We fought in China.  In Germany and Yugoslavia and Iran.  It spread, farther and farther.  Finally the bombs were falling here.  It came like the plague.  The war grew.  It didn't begin."

-- Political Commissioner Douglas, United States Army, in "Breakfast at Twilight", by Phillip K. Dick.  Commissioner Douglas is explaining how the Cold War turned into Dick's nightmare vision of 1980.  It nearly happened that way.

 
• "For politicians, the drug debate is driven by the three R's -- retribution, revenge, retaliation -- and that leads to the fourth R, re-election."

-- Dr. James Alan Fox, dean of the college of criminal justice at Northeastern University, as quoted in the New York Times Online article  "The War on Drugs Retreats, Still Taking Prisoners"

 
• "One must not judge everyone in the world by his qualities as a soldier; otherwise we should have no civilization."

-- Field Marshal Erwin Rommel (surprise!), as quoted in Dirty Little Secrets by J. Dunnigan and A. Nofi (p. 50).

• "The only successful Russian admiral was John Paul Jones."

-- Josef Stalin, as quoted in Dirty Little Secrets by J. Dunnigan and A. Nofi (p. 172).  Apparently, Jones served in the Czar's navy after the United States won independence.

• "There were those of us who fought against it, but in the end we could not keep up with the expense involved in [listed with increasing disgust] the arms race, the space race, and the peace race. At the same time our people grumbled for more nylons and washing machines."

-- Ambassador de Sadesky, from Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.  The Ambassador is explaining why the Russians felt themselves driven to build The Doomsday Device.  It might sound familiar to Mikhail Gorbachev.

 
• "At the core, the American citizen soldiers knew the difference between right and wrong, and they didn't want to live in a world in which wrong prevailed.  So they fought, and they won."

--  Stephen Ambrose, Citizen Soldiers.

• "We Americans are the only ones who didn't get creamed at some point during all of this [the wars and revolutions of the 20th Century]. We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and values systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right."

-- Neil Stephenson,  "In the Beginning was the Command Line", on why the world is so anti-intellectual these days.

• "None of us were heroes.  We were just there and trying to do the best we knew how under the circumstances."

-- Fred Olson, infantryman, on his WW II experience, as quoted in The Men of Company K by Harold Leinbaugh and John Campell (1985).  Olson has captured, in part, what made the United States of America unique in that war.

 
• "A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week."

--General George S. Patton

 
• "They passed a law. Oh, it started very small ... They began by controlling books of cartoons and then detective books and, of course, films, one way or another, one group or another, political bias, religious prejudice, union pressures; there was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves ... [w]ith a screw tightened here, a bolt fastened there, a push, a pull, a yank, art and literature were soon like a great twine of taffy strung about, being twisted in braids and tied in knots and thrown in all directions, until there was no more resiliency and no more savor to it."

-- Mr. William Stendahl, a character in "Usher II", from The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury, on why modern America became unlivable, from the vantage point of AD 2002. Sound familiar?

 
• "The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but cannot do at all, or cannot so well do, for themselves in their separate and individual capacities.  In all that the people can individually do as well for themselves, government ought not to interfere."

-- Abraham Lincoln, 1854 July 1.  Have you ever seen a more succinct statement of centrist American philosophy?

 
• "Individuals entering into society, must give up a share of liberty to preserve the rest."

-- from the text of the  Letter of Transmittal of the new Constitution, from the Constitutional Convention to the Congress of the United States of America, 1787 September 17

 
• "[T]he Constitution, which we now present, is the result of a spirit of amity, and of that mutual deference and concession which the peculiarity of our political situation rendered indispensable."

-- also from the  Letter of Transmittal

 
• "A *person* is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it."

-- Agent J, from  Men in Black , as to why the Men in Black can't tell the people about aliens.

 
• "The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye. The more light you shine on it, the more it will contract."

-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

 
• "The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make us wonder at the possibility that there may be something to them [which] we are missing."

-- Gamel Nasser

 
• "A liberal is a man or a woman or a child who looks forward to a better day, a more tranquil night, and a bright, infinite future."

-- Leonard Bernstein , The New York Times, Oct. 30, 1988

 
• " Liberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of the alternative."

-- John Kenneth Galbraith, Quoted in the New York times, Oct. 8 1989

 
• "Liberalism is trust of the people tempered by prudence; Conservatism is distrust of the people tempered by fear."

-- William E. Gladstone , Speech, May 31, 1866

 
• "A conservative is one who admires radicals centuries after they're dead."

-- Leo C. Rosten

 
• "Ask five economists and you'll get five different answers (six if one went to Harvard)."

-- Edgar R. Fiedler

 
• "Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone ."

-- Keynes

 
• "History will be kind to me for I intend to write it."

-- Winston Churchill

 
• "Justice is incidental to law and order."

-- J. Edgar Hoover

 
• "Nearly all men can stand adveristy, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power."

-- Abraham Lincoln

 
• "Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those others that have been tried from time to time."

-- Winston Churchill

 
• "Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories."

-- Arthur C. Clarke

 
• "But we have learned that you cannot live from history. Americans have no history and they live wonderfully well."

-- Radovan Delibasic, a Serb from Kosovo Polje.

 
• "Totalitarianism was the political continuation of war by other means. It uniformed and militarised its mass electoral following, while depriving voters generally of their electoral rights, exciting their lowest political instincts and marginalising and menacing all internal opposition."

-- John Keegan, The First World War

 
• "If you are the 800-pound gorilla, you're concentrating on your bananas, and everyone else is concentrating on you."

-- Michael Mandelbaum, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, on America's diplomatic challenge as the sole superpower.  As quoted in  The New York Times .

 
• "Then, by God, run for office! You have such a fervent, passionate, evangelical faith in this country -- why in the name of God don't you have any faith in the system of government you're so hell-bent to protect?"

-- President Lyman to General Scott in Seven Days in May .  The general has just explained why he feels that, in order to save the country, he must stage a coup d'etat.  The President responds with the logic that, somehow, always slips past such self-appointed saviors.

 
• "The great strength of America is that it draws in continually the best of everywhere."

-- Jagdish Bhagwati, a Columbia University professor of international economics, on  the oft-unsung benefits of immigration.  As quoted in  The New York Times .

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