Below are some of my favorite quotes
Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
-Soren Kierkegaard
The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins.
-Soren Kierkegaard
Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.
-Soren Kierkegaard
"At a minimum, a head of state should have a head,"
-Vladimir Putin (in response to Hillary Clinton's accusation that he had no soul)
All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning.
Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant's revolving door.
Albert Camus
By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.
Albert Camus
Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.
Albert Camus
Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep.
Albert Camus
In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant.
- Charles de Gaulle
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.
George Bernard Shaw
The American Presidency is not a journey in personal discovery
Gov. Sarah Palin
Our original shimmering self gets buried so deep we hardly live out of it at all… rather, we learn to live out of all the other selves which we are constantly putting on and taking off like coats and hats against the world’s weather.
-Frederick Buechner
And, after all, what is a fashion? From the artistic point of view, it is usually a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.
-Oscar Wilde
People create their own questions because they are afraid to look straight. All you have to do is look straight and see the road, and when you see it,
don't sit looking at it - walk.
Ayn Rand
The ladder of success is best climbed by stepping on the rungs of opportunity.
Ayn Rand
There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.
Ayn Rand
It is a grave error to suppose that a dictatorship rules a nation by means of strict,
rigid laws which are obeyed and enforced with rigorous, military precision.
Such a rule would be evil, but almost bearable; men could endure the harshest edicts, provided these edicts were known,
specific and stable; it is not the known that breaks men's spirits, but the unpredictable. A dictatorship has to be capricious;
it has to rule by means of the unexpected, the incomprehensible, the wantonly irrational; it has to deal not in death,
but in sudden death; a state of chronic uncertainty is what men are psychologically unable to bear.
-Ayn Rand
"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe.
If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened.
But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself."
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Just as man can't exist without his body, so no rights can exist
without the right to translate one's rights into reality,
to think, to work and keep the results,
which means: the right of property.
Ayn Rand
Only the descent into the hell of self-knowledge can pave the way to godliness.
-Immanuel Kant
'Knowledge dominance' does scare us as Marines.
General George Armstrong Custer probably thought he had knowledge dominance, too.
Any time you thing you're smarter than your adversary,
you're probably about a half-mile from the Little Big Horn."
— Colonel Art Corbett, USMC
"We don't have that problem in Russia."
Why not?
"Because when we get that close we close our eyes."
— Unknown
“Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”
—Mao Tse-Tung
There is a story of a Bolshevik revolutionary who was standing on a soap box speaking to a small crowd in Times Square.
After describing the glories of Socialism and Communism, he said: “Come the revolution and everyone will eat peaches and cream.”
A little old man at the back of the crown yelled out: “I don’t like peaches and cream.”
The Bolshevik thought about that for a moment and then replied:
“Come the revolution, Comrade, you will like peaches and cream.”
"When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty."
George Bernard Shaw
"When you have a hammer, all problems start to look like nails.
But nations without great military power face the opposite danger: When you don't have a hammer, you don't want anything to look like nails."
Robert Kagan
"Of course the people don't want war . . . But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship . . . Voice or no voice, the people can always to brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy.
All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.
It works the same in any country."
— Field Marshal Herman Goering
Never touch a novel. They .. describe happiness that never exists . . . Do Not dream.
-Robert E. Lee
Being in the army is like being in the Boy Scouts, except that the Boy Scouts have adult supervision.
--Blake Clark--
There's no honorable way to kill, no gentle way to destroy. There is nothing good in war. Except its ending.
War is a competition of incompetence - the least incompetent usually win.
- Pakistani General Tiger, after losing Bangladesh
“He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt.
He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice.”
Albert Einstein
“Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.”
Groucho Marx
“Military glory - that attractive rainbow that rises in showers of blood”
Abraham Lincoln
“The military caste did not originate as a party of patriots, but as a party of bandits”
Henry Louis Mencken
“Over grown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty,
and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.”
George Washington
"To have good soldiers, a nation must always be at war."
- Napoleon Bonaparte
"Laws are inoperative in war"
- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.): Pro Milone.
"War is the continuation of policy(politics) by other means."
- Karl von Clausewitz
