Category: Verbatim

Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They’re inexpensive and easy to procure.

— Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989), American poet, writer

“History teaches that grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure.”

— Thurgood Marshall, US Supreme Court Justice (1908-1993)

No one can rule guiltlessly, and least of all those whom history compels to hurry.

— Edgar Snow (1905-1972), American writer

We are the first nation in the history of the world to go to the poorhouse in an automobile.

— Will Rogers,

Submitted by Tom Erickson

It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics.

— Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

Submitted by “Jerome”

If, in my retirement to the humble station of a private citizen, I am accompanied with the esteem and approbation of my fellow citizens, trophies obtained by the bloodstained steel, or the tattered flags of the tented field, will never be envied. The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.

— Thomas Jefferson, second President of the United States

Radicalism: the conservatism of tomorrow injected into the affairs of today.

— Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?), American writer, journalist

Ninety percent of the politicians give the other 10 percent a bad name.

— Henry Kissinger (1923- ), German-born American diplomat

There is a higher law than the law of government. That’s the law of conscience.

— Stokely Carmichael (1942-1998), leader of the Black Panther Party

“I did not want my tombstone to read, ‘She kept a really clean house.’ I think I’d like them to remember me by saying, ‘She opened government to everyone.'”

— Ann Richards (1933 – 2006), Texas governor, shortly before leaving office in January 1995

Bonus Quote du Jour from Gov. Richards: “Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, only backwards and in high heels.”