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| Pope Pius XII | | One Galileo in two thousand years is enough. | |
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| Plato | | Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind. | |
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| Plato | | Excess generally causes reaction, and produces a change in the opposite direction, whether it be in the seasons, or in individuals, or in governments. | |
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| Plato | | Do not expect justice where might is right. | |
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| Plato | | We see many instances of cities going down like sinking ships to their destruction. There have been such wrecks in the past and there surely will be others in the future, caused by the wickedness of captains and crews alike. For these are guilty men, whose sin is supreme ignorance of what matters most. | |
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| Plato | | A tyrant…is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader. | |
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| Plato | | One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors. | |
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| Plato | | Democracy leads to anarchy, which is mob rule. | |
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| Plato | | The people have always some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness… This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs, when he first appears he is a protector. | |
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| Plato | | Freedom in a democracy is the glory of the state, and, therefore, in a democracy only will the freeman of nature deign to dwell. | |
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| Plato | | Only the dead have seen the end of war. | |
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| Plato | | Democracy…is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike. | |
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| Plato | | Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something. | |
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| Plato | | Strange times are these in which we live when old and young are taught in falsehood's school. And the one man who dares to tell the truth is called at once a lunatic and fool. | |
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| Plato | | The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs, is to be ruled by evil men. | |
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| Plato | | Your silence gives consent. | |
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| Plato | | Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws. | |
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| Plato | | When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing more to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader. | |
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| Plato | | The worst of all deceptions is self-deception. | |
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| Plato | | Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. | |
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| Plato | | Kings … will … take possession of the children, who will be unaffected by the habits of their parents; these they will train in their own habits and laws. | |
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| Titus Maccius Plautus | | Not by age but by capacity is wisdom acquired. | |
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| Titus Maccius Plautus | | Patience is the best remedy for every trouble. | |
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| Titus Maccius Plautus | | No man is wise enough by himself. | |
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| Pledge of Allegiance | | I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. | |
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| Plutarch | | Perseverance is more prevailing than violence; and many things which cannot be overcome when they are together, yield themselves up when taken little by little. | |
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| Plutarch | | The first destroyer of the liberties of a people is he who first gave them bounties and largess. | |
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| Plutarch | | An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics. | |
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| Plutarch | | The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits. | |
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| Plutarch | | What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality. | |
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| Plutarch | | The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled. | |
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| The Liberty Pole | | [T]he next time you read or hear about a murder victim, a rape victim or an assault victim, I want you to preface it with the word 'unarmed' so that murder victims become 'unarmed murder victims'; this is especially true in rape. How many times have you read, 'An unidentified woman, heavily armed with a semi-automatic weapon was raped by a man wielding a knife.' No answer is necessary, right? | |
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| Political Affairs | | Great popular support and enthusiasm for the United Nations policies should be built up, well organized and fully articulate. But it is necessary to do more than that. The opposition must be rendered so impotent that it will be unable to gather any significant support in the Senate against the United Nations Charter and the treaties which will follow. | |
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| Robert Pollack | | The freedom to make and admit mistakes is at the core of the scientific process. If we are asked to forswear error, or worse, to say that error means fraud, then we cannot function as scientists. | |
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| Lansing Pollock | | When libertarian moral theory is combined with economic theory a compelling conception of the good society emerges. | |
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| Robert C. Pollock | | We get lost in a fog of abstractions and easily forget that man is a bloodhound sniffing out the real. | |
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| Daniel D. Polsby | | [A] public policy of simply discouraging people from owning or using firearms is not, in and of itself, a constitutionally permissible
objective, any more than discouraging people from religious observance would be permissible to some oh-so-progressive government
that considered religion as hopelessly declassé as progressives nowadays consider the right to keep and bear arms .... And any statute or regulation
that burdens the right to keep and bear arms on the ground that guns are a public health hazard should enjoy the same frosty reception in court that
would be given a statute or regulation that burdened the free exercise of religion as a mental hazard. | |
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| Polybius | | [There can be no] rational administration of government when good men are held in the same esteem as bad ones. | |
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| John Norton Pomeroy | | The object of this clause [the right of the people to keep and bear arms] is to secure a well-armed militia.... But a militia
would be useless unless the citizens were enabled to exercise themselves in the use of warlike weapons. To preserve this privilege, and to secure to
the people the ability to oppose themselves in military force against the usurpations of government, as well as against enemies from without, that
government is forbidden by any law or proceeding to invade or destroy the right to keep and bear arms. | |
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| Lowell Ponte | | We turn sacred cows into hamburger. | |
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| Alexander Pope | | Give me again my hollow tree
A crust of bread, and liberty! | |
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| Alexander Pope | | Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread. | |
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| Alexander Pope | | Party is the madness of many for the gain of a few. | |
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| Alexander Pope | | A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday. | |
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| Sir Karl Popper | | There is an almost universal tendency, perhaps an inborn tendency, to suspect the good faith of a man who holds opinions that differ from our own opinions… It obviously endangers the freedom and the objectivity of our discussion if we attack a person instead of attacking an opinion or, more precisely, a theory. | |
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| Sir Karl Popper | | We must plan for freedom, and not only for security, if for no other reason than only freedom can make security more secure. | |
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| Bruce D. Porter | | Throughout the history of the United States, war has been the primary impetus behind the growth and development of the central state. It has been the lever by which presidents and other national officials have bolstered the power of the state in the face of tenacious popular resistance. | |
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| Judge Richard Posner | | MacKinnon's treatment of the central issue of pornography as she herself poses it -- the harm that pornography does to women -- is shockingly causal. Much of her evidence is anecdotal, and in a nation of 260 Million people, anecdotes are a weak form of evidence. | |
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| Judge Richard Posner | | I do not know what has caused MacKinnon to become, and, more surprisingly, to remain, so obsessed with pornography, and so zealous for censorship. But let us not sacrifice our civil liberties on the altar of her obsession. | |
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| Richard Posner | | Now that eighteen-year-olds have the right to vote, it is obvious that they must be allowed the freedom to form their political views on the basis of uncensored speech before they turn eighteen, so that their minds are not a blank when they first exercise the franchise. And since an eighteen-year-old’s right to vote is a right personal to him rather than a right to be exercised on his behalf by his parents, the right of parents to enlist the aid of the state to shield their children from ideas of which the parents disapprove cannot be plenary either. People are unlikely to become well-functioning, independent-minded adults and responsible citizens if they are raised in an intellectual bubble. | |
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| Richard Posner | | It is the censor's business to make a judgment about the propriety of the content or message of the proposed expressive activity. The regulation here does not authorize any judgment about the content of any speeches. ... A park is a limited space, and to allow unregulated access to all comers could easily reduce rather than enlarge the park's utility as a forum for speech. Just imagine two rallies held at the same time in the same park area using public-address systems that drowned out each other's speakers. | |
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| Richard Posner | | Violent video games played in public places are a tiny fraction of the media violence to which modern American children are exposed. Tiny -- and judging from the record of this case not very violent compared to what is available to children on television and in movie theaters today. | |
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| Judge Richard Allen Posner | | Police may have no right to privacy in carrying out official duties in public. But the civilians they interact with do. | |
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| Judge Richard Allen Posner | | If you permit the audio recordings, they'll be a lot more eavesdropping. ... There's going to be a lot of this snooping around by reporters and bloggers. ... Yes, it's a bad thing. There is such a thing as privacy. | |
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| Neil Postman | | Make no mistake about it: the labeling of someone’s language as ‘sexist’ involves a political judgment and implies the desirability of a particular sociological doctrine. One may be in favor of that doctrine (as I believe I am) but it is quite another matter to force writers by edicts and censorship into accepting it. | |
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| David M. Potter | | The American notion of freedom transcended the political realm and in fact extended to every major category of human relationships, including those between employer and employee, clergyman and layman, husband and wife, parent and child, public official and citizen. Americans believed that, as of July 4, 1776, all men were created equal, and that any impairment of a man’s equality was destructive of his liberty also. | |
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| Anne Bowen Poulin | | It is clear in our criminal justice system that the jury has the power to nullify -- that is, the power to acquit or to convict on reduced charges despite overwhelming evidence against the defendant. ... In a criminal trial, the court cannot direct a verdict of guilty, no matter how strong the evidence. In addition, if the jury acquits, double jeopardy bars the prosecution from appealing the verdict or seeking retrial. Similarly, if the jury convicts the defendant of a less serious offense than the one charged, the prosecution cannot again try the defendant on the more serious charge. This result occurs regardless of whether the jury consciously rejects the law, embraces a merciful attitude, or is simply confused concerning the law or facts. Thus, nullification -- with or without authority, intended or not -- is part of our system. | |
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| Anne Bowen Poulin | | The power of nullification plays an important role in the criminal justice system. ... Because an accused criminal is restricted in the defenses he or she can raise, the law recognizes only certain defenses and justification, and correspondingly, limited evidence. The jury’s power to nullify provides an accommodation between the rigidity of the law and the need to hear and respond to positions that do not fit legal pigeonholes, such as claims of spousal abuse before the battered-spouse syndrome received acceptance. Jury nullification permits the jury to respond to a position that does not have the status of a legally recognized defense. The power to nullify guarantees that the jury is free to speak as the conscience of the community. | |
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| Ezra Pound | | Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand. | |
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| Ezra Pound | | The phase of the usury system which we are trying to analyze is more or less Patterson's perception that the Bank of England could have benefit of all the interest on all the money that it creates out of nothing. ... Now the American citizen can, of course, appeal to his constitution, which states that Congress shall have power to coin money or regulate the value thereof and of foreign coin. Such appeal is perhaps quixotic. | |
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| Ezra Pound | | I think an alliance with Stalin's Russia is rotten. | |
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| Ezra Pound | | Wars in old times were made to get slaves. The modern implement of imposing slavery is debt. | |
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| Ezra Pound | | Sovereignty inheres in the right to issue money. And the American sovereignty belongs by right to the people, and their representatives in Congress have the right to issue money and to determine the value thereof. And 120 million, 120 million suckers have lamentably failed to insist on the observation of this quite decided law. ... Now the point at which embezzlement of the nation's funds on the part of her officers becomes treason can probably be decided only by jurists, and not by hand-picked judges who support illegality. | |
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| Ezra Pound | | Liberty is not a right but a duty. | |
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| Ezra Pound | | That text is known to them that have the patience to read it, possibly one one-hundredth of one percent of the denizens. They forget it, all save a few Western states. I think somebody in Dakota once read it. The Constitution. | |
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| Roscoe Pound | | Jury lawlessness is the greatest corrective of law in its actual administration. | |
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| Paula Poundstone | | The wages of sin are death, but by the time taxes are taken out, it's just sort of a tired feeling. | |
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| Daniel Pouzzner | | Those who believe themselves to be masters of all they survey are mistaken. There is no such thing as absolute power and the delusion that one is in possession of such power constitutes absolute corruption. This delusion leads, resolutely, to the downfall of its adherents. | |
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| L. A. Powe, Jr. | | The purpose of the Bill of Rights was to limit what the federal government could do. Any interpretation of a provision of the Bill of Rights as a grant of federal power is ipso facto wrong. | |
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| General Colin Powell (False) | | Over the years, the United States has sent many of its fine young men and women into great peril to fight for freedom beyond our borders. The only amount of land we have ever asked for in return is enough to bury those that did not return. | |
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| General Colin Powell | | So our record of living our values and letting our values be an inspiration to others I think is clear.
And I don't think I have anything to be ashamed of or apologize for with respect to what America has done for the world.
We have gone forth from our shores repeatedly over the last hundred years and we've done this as recently as the last year in Afghanistan and put wonderful young men and women at risk, many of whom have lost their lives, and we have asked for nothing except enough ground to bury them in, and otherwise we have returned home ... to live our own lives in peace. | |
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| General Colin Powell | | One of the fondest expressions around is that we can't be the world's policeman. But guess who gets called when somebody needs a cop. | |
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| John Enoch Powell | | I will not surrender responsibility for my life and my actions. | |
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| Lewis F. Powell | | The guarantee of equal protection cannot mean one thing when applied to one individual and something else when applied to a person of another color. If both are not accorded the same protection, then it is not equal. | |
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| Thomas Pownhall | | Let therefore every man, that, appealing to his own heart, feels the least spark of virtue or freedom there, think that it is an honor which he owes himself, and a duty which he owes his country, to bear arms. | |