The Last Word

Compiled by Michael Pryor

If the true spirit of 1776 prevailed today, we would see governors vying with one another to cut the high cost of government programs. ... There would be many states to join New Hampshire's solo parade of no general sales or income taxes.                                                             

                                                                        —Former Gov. Mel Thomson

To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first, and call whatever you hit the target.

—Ashleigh Brilliant

Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.

—Albert Einstein

Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.

                                                                                            —Baruch Spinoza

An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.

—Robert A. Heinlein

There are three things men can do with women: love them, suffer for them, or turn them into literature.

—Stephen Stills

The majority of men meet with failure because of their lack of persistence in creating new plans to take the place of those which fail.

—Napoleon

Crime wouldn't pay if the government ran it.

—Anonymous

Not taking and consuming, but giving, risking, and creating are the characteristic roles of the capitalist, the key producer of the wealth of nations.

—George Gilder

The true test of character is not how much we know how to do, but how we behave when we don't know what to do.

—John Holt

I pity the fool.

—Mr. T.

Bluntness is a virtue.

—Allison Ling

Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan ‘press on’ has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.

—Calvin Coolidge

I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read, and all the friends I want to see.

—John Burroughs

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

—James Halliwell

When you choose your friends, don't be short-changed by choosing personality over character.

—W. Somerset Maugham

Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe.

—Edmund Burke

The more laws, the less justice.

—Marcus Tullius Cicero De Officiis

The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.

—John W. Gardner

Society has always seemed to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.

—George Orwell

Humor is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in everyday affairs.

—Christopher Morley

An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.

—Victor Hugo

We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.

—Buddha

I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.

—John Locke