Nation Founding

...a nation can be born in a day if the ideals of the people can be changed.

Source: Vachel Lindsay, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan Collected Works, 1925
Taken From: Strauss and Howe, The Fourth Turning, 1997 pg231

Best and Worst

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity?

Source: The Collected Poems of WB Yeats
Taken From: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948

Equality

Equality is reassurance your neighbor
will not get too far ahead of you.

Source: Lilija Valis, Freedom on the Fault Line, 2011

O Peace!

O peace! how many wars were waged in thy name.

Alexander Pope (3rd most quoted writer behind Shakespeare & Tennyson)

The True Gentleman

The True Gentleman

The True Gentleman is the man whose conduct proceeds
from good will and an acute sense of propriety
and whose self-control is equal to all emergencies;
who does not make the poor man conscious of his poverty,
the obscure man of his obscurity,
or any man of his inferiority or deformity;
who is himself humbled if necessity compels him to humble another;
who does not flatter wealth,
cringe before power,
or boast of his own possessions or achievements;
who speaks with frankness but always with sincerity and sympathy;
whose deed follows his word;
who thinks of the rights and feelings of others rather than his own;
and who appears well in any company;
a man with whom honor is sacred and virtue safe.

John Walter Wayland (1899 , The True Gentleman)

Methods and Principles

As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (source unknown)

O gold!

O Gold! I still prefer thee unto paper,
Which makes bank credit like a bank of vapour.

Lord Byron (1821, Don Juan, Canto the Twelfth)

Soldier of the Queen

When you're wounded and left on
Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what
remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your
brains
An' Go to your Gawd like a soldier.
Go, go, go like a soldier,
So-oldier of the Queen!

Rudyard Kipling (Excerpt from The Young British Soldier)

History Lesson

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.

Aldous Huxley

Good Intentions

What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it his heaven.

Johnann Christian Friedreich Holderlin (1957)

Polictics

Politics is a means of preventing people from taking part in what properly concerns them.

Paul Valery

The End Place

And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

T. S. Eliot -- "Little Gidding" (the last of his Four Quartets), 1942

Master and King

I see no good in having several lords:
Let one alone be master, let one alone be King.

Homer via Ulysses in the Illiad

On Bread and Circuses

Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.

Roman Poet Juvenal – 77 AD

Tu ne cede malis

Tu ne cede malis, sed contra audentior ito
Translation:  Do not give in to evil, but proceed ever more boldly against it.

Virgil, Aeneid 
Also used by Ludwig von Mises as his personal motto.