Entitlement

Where we once thought ourselves collectively strong, we now regard ourselves as individually entitled.  

Source: Strauss and Howe, The Fourth Turning, 1997, pg 1

Entitlement

Demagogic leaders have told the common man that he is entitled to much more than he is getting; they have not told him the less pleasant truth that, unless there is to be expropriation ... the increase must come out of greater productivity.

Source: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948 

On Sacredness

It is likely ... that human society cannot exist without some resource of sacredness.  Those states which have sought openly to remove it have tended in the end to assume divinity themselves.

Source: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948

On Time Preference

[The] point here is that no society is healthful which tells its members to take no thought of the morrow because the state underwrites their future.

Source: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948 

Inherent?

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery. 

Winston Churchill

Government Efficiency or Mutual Exploitation?

Each of us wishes to receive a maximum of benefits from government for the minimum cost.  This goal suggests maximum government efficiency, on the one hand, but it also suggests mutual exploitation on the other. Each of us favors an arrangement in which our fellow citizens pay for our benefits.

Morris Fiorina  (Congress: Keystone of the Washington Establishment, 1989)

Future Impossibilities

I will not be around at that time.

Taken from What is Money? Pt 11 The Great Default by Gary North
The quote is the paraphrased response of Major Leaders in the West when warned about the impossibility of funding social programs like Medicare/Social Security per Peter Peterson circa 1995-2000

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

Goldwater on the Right to Try

I was a speechwriter for Barry Goldwater in the 1964 campaign. During the campaign, I recall very clearly, there was a moment, at a conference to determine the campaign's "farm strategy," when a respected and very conservative senator arose to say, "Barry, you've got to make it clear that you believe that the American farmer has a right to a decent living."

Senator Goldwater replied, with the tact for which he is renowned, "But he doesn't have a right to it. Neither do I. We just have a right to try for it." And that was the end of that.

Karl Hess writing about Barry Goldwater, originally published in Playboy 1969 under the title The Death of Politics

Jefferson on Happyness

"If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them, they must become happy." 

Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Cooper (1802)