| Quotes | ||||||||
| "To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." - Theodore Roosevelt, 26th US President | ||||||||
| "Why of course the people don't want war. But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the 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 be 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 danger. It works the same in any country." - Nazi leader Hermann Goering | ||||||||
| "Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of State and corporate power." -Benito Mussolini | ||||||||
| "The new administration seems to be paying no attention to the problem of terrorism. What they will do is stagger along until there's a major incident and then suddenly say, 'Oh, my God, shouldn't we be organized to deal with this?' - Paul Bremer, February 26th, 2001 | ||||||||
| "But all in all, it's been a fabulous year for Laura and me." - George W. Bush, White House Press Release, December 21th, 2001 | ||||||||
| "I call upon all nations to do everything they can to stop these terrorist killers. Thank you. Now watch this drive." - George W. Bush, August 4th, 2002 | ||||||||
| "I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way -- all of them who have tried to secularize America -- I point the finger in their face and say "you helped this happen." - Jerry Falwell, September 13, 2001 | ||||||||
| "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war." - Ann Coulter, from her syndicated column, September 13th, 2001 | ||||||||
| "My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times building." - Ann Coulter, in a New York Observer interview, August 26th, 2002 | ||||||||
| "We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too. Otherwise, they will turn out to be outright traitors." - Ann Coulter, at the Conservative Political Action Conference, February 26th, 2002 | ||||||||
| "It is not our job to seek peaceful coexistence with the Left. Our job is to remove them from power permanently." - Jack Abramhoff, College Republicans National Commitee Annual Report, 1983 |
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| "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." - Grover Norquist (leading Republican strategist) |
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| "We are trying to change the tones in the state capitals, and turn them toward bitter nastiness and partisanship." - Grover Norquist, Denver Post 2003 | ||||||||
| "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did." - Congressman Richard Baker (R-LA), following the Katrina disaster, 2005 |
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| "And I said on my program, if the Americans go in and overthrow Saddam Hussein and it's clean, he has nothing, I will apologize to the nation, and I will not trust the Bush Administration again, all right? But I'm giving my government the benefit of the doubt." - Bill O'Reilly, on Good Morning America, March 18th, 2003 |
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| "There's nothing good about drug use. We know it. It destroys individuals. It destroys families. Drug use destroys societies. Drug use, some might say, is destroying this country. And we have laws against selling drugs, pushing drugs, using drugs, importing drugs. And the laws are good because we know what happens to people in societies and neighborhoods, which become consumed by them. And so if people are violating the law by doing drugs, they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted and they ought to be sent up." - Rush Limbaugh, October 5th, 1995 |
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| "What this says to me is that too many whites are getting away with drug use. Too many whites are getting away with drug sales. Too many whites are getting away with trafficking in this stuff. The answer to this disparity is not to start letting people out of jail because we're not putting others in jail who are breaking the law. The answer is to go out and find the ones who are getting away with it, convict them and send them up the river, too." - Rush Limbaugh, October 5th, 1995 | ||||||||
| "I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the name of our sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious of traitors." - George H.W. Bush in a speech at the CIA, April 26th, 1999 | ||||||||
| "As Mankind becomes more liberal, they will be more apt to allow that all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community are equally entitled to the protections of civil government. I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations of justice and liberality. - George Washington | ||||||||
| "The Bible is not my book nor Christianity my profession. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma." - Joseph Lewis quoting Abraham Lincoln in a 1924 speech in New York | ||||||||
| "My earlier views of the unsoundness of the Christian scheme of salvation and the human origin of the scriptures have become clearer and stronger with advancing years, and I see no reason for thinking I shall ever change them." - Abraham Lincoln in a letter to Judge J.S. Wakefield, after the death of Willie Lincoln | ||||||||
| The Founding Fathers on Religion... | ||||||||
| "Twenty times in the course of my late reading, have I been upon the point of breaking out,'this would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it.'" - John Adams letter to Charles Cushing, October 19, 1756 | ||||||||
| "The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion." - Treaty of Tripoli, Article 11 (written during the Administration of George Washington and signed into law by John Adams) | ||||||||
| "Cabalistic Christianity, which is Catholic Christianity, and which has prevailed for 1,500 years, has received a mortal wound, of which the monster must finally die. Yet so strong is his constitution, that he may endure for centuries before he expires." - John Adams letter to Thomas Jefferson, July 16, 1814 | ||||||||
| "[The clergy] believe that any portion of power confided to me, will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly: for I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." - Thomas Jefferson letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush, September 23, 1800 | ||||||||
| "In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own." - Thomas Jefferson letter to Horatio G. Spafford, March 17, 1814 | ||||||||
| "One day the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in the United States will tear down the artificial scaffolding of Christianity. And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as His father, in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter." - Thomas Jefferson letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823 | ||||||||
| "Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise." - James Madison letter to William Bradford, April 1, 1774 | ||||||||
| "[The] civil rights of none shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner or on any pretext infringed." - James Madison introducing the Bill of Rights at the First Federal Congress, Congressional Register, June 8, 1789 | ||||||||
| "Scarcely was I arrived at fifteen years of age, when, after having doubted in turn of different tenets, according as I found them combated in the different books that I read, I began to doubt of Revelation itself." "...Some books against Deism fell into my hands....It happened that they wrought an effect on me quite contrary to what was intended by them; for the arguments of the Deists, which were quote to be refuted, appeared to me much stronger than the refutations, in short, I soon became a thorough Deist." - From Benjamin Franklin's autobiography | ||||||||
| "Denominated a Deist, the reality of which I have never disputed, being conscious that I am no Christian." - Ethan Allen, from Religion of the American Enlightenment | ||||||||
| "My own mind is my own church. All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit." "Whenever we read the obscene stories (of the Bible), the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the Word of God." "...when I see throughout the greater part of this book (the Bible) scarcely anything but a history of the grossest vices and a collection of the most paltry and contemptible tales, I cannot dishonor my Creator by calling it by His name." "(The devout) despises the choicest gift of God to man, the Gift of Reason; and having endeavored to force upon himself the belief of a system against which reason revolts, he ungratefully calls it 'human reason' as if man could give reason to himself." "Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is no more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory in itself than this thing called Christianity." - Thomas Paine, excerpts from The Age of Reason |
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