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Will Rogers | | Ammunition beats persuasion when you are looking for freedom. | |
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Will Rogers | | There is two types of Larceny, Petty and Grand. They are supposed to be the same in the eyes of the law, but judges always put a little extra on you for Petty, which is kind of a fine for stupidness. | |
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Will Rogers | | Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there. | |
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Will Rogers | | Of course nothing is ever done about a [presidential] commission report, except, they say, once a man at the state prison for the criminally insane actually read one once clear through. Then he did something about it. He made a bonfire that lasted a week. | |
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Will Rogers | | Ohio claims they are due a president as they haven't had one since Taft. Look at the United States, they have not had one since Lincoln. | |
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Will Rogers | | We are the only nation in the world that waits till we get into a war before we start getting ready for it. | |
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Will Rogers | | If we ever pass out as a great nation we ought to put on our tombstone, 'America died from a delusion that she has moral leadership'. | |
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Will Rogers | | It sure did kick up some excitement in the Senate when one Senator called the other Senators 'sons of Wild jackasses.' Well, if you thought it made the Senators hot, you wait till you see what happens when the jackasses hear how they have been slandered. | |
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Will Rogers | | The short memories of the American voters is what keeps our politicians in office. | |
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Will Rogers | | I'm not a member of any organized political party. I'm a Democrat. | |
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Will Rogers | | Ancient Rome declined because it had a Senate, now what's going to happen to us with both a House and a Senate? | |
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Will Rogers | | A foreigner coming here and reading the Congressional Record would say that the President of the United States was elected solely for the purpose of giving Senators somebody to call a horse thief. | |
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Will Rogers | | Elections are a good deal like marriages, there's no accounting for anyone's taste. Every time we see a bridegroom we wonder why she ever picked him, and it's the same with Public Officials. | |
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Will Rogers | | Tomorrow is Labor Day, I suppose set by Act of Congress. Everything we do nowadays is either by, or against, Acts of Congress. How Congress knew anything about Labor is beyond us. | |
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Will Rogers | | Never blame a legislative body for not doing something. When they do nothing, that don't hurt anybody. When they do something is when they become dangerous. | |
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Will Rogers | | Liberty doesn't work as well in practice as it does in speeches. | |
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Will Rogers | | That's what a Congressman or a Senator is for -- to see that too much money don't accumulate in the national Treasury. | |
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Will Rogers | | Nothing makes a man, or a body of men, as mad as the truth. If there is no truth in it, they laugh it off. | |
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Will Rogers | | This thing about getting rid of a man in the Cabinet is all right, but there is one bad feature to it that few people realize. That is, that unfortunately every one of them is replaced by someone else. If it wasn't for that, this resignation business would be great. | |
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Will Rogers | | The difference between death and taxes is death doesn't get worse every time Congress meets. | |
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Will Rogers | | There is good news from Washington today. The Congress is deadlocked and can't act. | |
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Will Rogers | | Diplomats are just as essential in starting a war as soldiers are in finishing it. | |
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Will Rogers | | You shake a slogan at an American and it's just like showing a hungry dog a bone. | |
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Will Rogers | | If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. | |
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Will Rogers | | The minute you read something that you can't understand, you can almost be sure it was drawn up by a lawyer. | |
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Will Rogers | | Will somebody please tell me what they do with all the Vice-Presidents a bank has? Why the United States is the biggest business institution in the world, and they got only one Vice-President and nobody has ever found anything for him to do. | |
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Will Rogers | | You see, in Washington they have these bodies, Senate and the House of Representatives. That is for the convenience of the visitors. If there is nothing funny happening in one, there is sure to be in the other, and in case one body passes a good bill, why, the other can see it in time and kill it. | |
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Will Rogers | | I doubt if a charging elephant, or a rhino, is as determined or hard to check as a socially ambitious mother. | |
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Will Rogers | | Diplomacy is the art of saying nice doggy until you can find a rock. | |
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Will Rogers | | Don't let yesterday use up too much of today. | |
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Will Rogers | | You can have all the advanced war methods you want, but, after all, nobody has ever invented a war that you don't have to have somebody in the guise of soldiers to stop the bullets. | |
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Will Rogers | | On account of being a democracy and run by the people, we are the only nation in the world that has to keep a government four years, no matter what it does. | |
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Will Rogers | | Income taxes have made more liars out of the American people than golf. | |
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Will Rogers | | How is the government going to get the extra taxes? Out of the rich -- or just out of the poor, as usual? | |
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Will Rogers | | Instead of giving money to found colleges to promote learning, why don't they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as good as the Prohibition one did, why, in five years we would have the smartest race of people on earth! | |
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Will Rogers | | If we took Congress seriously, we would be worrying all the time. | |
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Will Rogers | | Farmers, get out your sense of humor! Congress meets to relieve you again next week. | |
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Will Rogers | | I don't make jokes -- I just watch the government and report the facts. | |
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Will Rogers | | Things in our country run in spite of the government, not by the aid of it. | |
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Will Rogers | | The more you read and observe about this Politics thing, you got to admit that each party is worse than the other. The one that's out always looks the best. | |
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Will Rogers | | One of these days they are going to remove so much of the 'hooey' and the thousands of things the schools have become clogged up with, and we will find that we can educate our broods for about one-tenth of the price and learn 'em something that they might accidentally use after they escape. | |
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Will Rogers | | Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects. | |
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Felix Rohatyn | | Fairness does not require the redistribution of wealth; it requires the creation of wealth, geared to an economy that can provide employment for everyone able and willing to work. | |
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Ernst Rohm | | Since I am an immature and wicked man, war and unrest appeal to me more than good bourgeois order. Brutality is respected, the people need wholesome fear. They want to fear someone. They want someone to frighten them and make them shudderingly submissive. | |
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Milton Rokeach | | The relative openness or closedness of a mind cuts across specific content; that is, it is not restricted to any one particular ideology, or religion, or philosophy, or scientific viewpoint. | |
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Madame Jeanne-Marie Roland | | O liberty! O liberty! What crimes are committed in thy name! | |
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Jon Roland | | The test for whether one is living in a police state is that those who are charged with enforcing the law are allowed to break the laws with impunity. | |
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Art Rolnick | | We make money the old fashioned way. We print it. | |
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George L. Roman | | I am convinced that we can do to guns what we've done to drugs: create a multi-billion dollar underground market over which we have absolutely no control. | |
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Roman Proverb | | Felix qui nihil debet. (Happy is he who owes nothing.) | |
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Benjamin A. Rooge | | Give me control over a man's economic actions, and hence over his means of survival, and except for a few occasional heroes, I'll promise to deliver to you men who think and write and behave as I want them to. | |
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Eleanor Roosevelt | | Anyone who knows history, particularly the history of Europe, will, I think, recognize that the domination of education or of government by any one particular religious faith is never a happy arrangement for the people. | |
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Eleanor Roosevelt | | We do not move forward by curtailing people’s liberty because we are afraid of what they may do or say. | |
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Eleanor Roosevelt | | Those of us who believe in the right of any human being to belong to whatever church he sees fit, and to worship God in his own way, cannot be accused of prejudice when we do not want to see public education connected with religious control of the schools, which are paid for by taxpayers' money. | |
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Eleanor Roosevelt | | Smearing good people like Lauchlin Currie [former administrative assistant to President Roosevelt], Alger Hiss and others is, I think, unforgiveable... Anyone knowing Mr. Currie or Mr. Hiss, who are the two people whom I happen to know fairly well, would not need any denial on their part to know they are not Communists. Their records prove it. | |
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Eleanor Roosevelt | | Spiritual leadership should remain spiritual leadership and the temporal power should not become too important in any church. | |
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Eleanor Roosevelt | | The things you refuse to meet today always come back at you later on, usually under circumstances which make the decision twice as difficult as it originally was. | |
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Eleanor Roosevelt | | It is not that you set the individual apart from society but that you recognize in any society that the individual must have rights that are guarded. | |
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Franklin D. Roosevelt | | Are we going to take the hands of the federal government completely off any effort to adjust the growing of national crops, and go right straight back to the old principle that every farmer is a lord of his own farm and can do anything he wants, raise anything, any old time, in any quantity, and sell any time he wants? | |
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Franklin D. Roosevelt | | The creed of our democracy is that liberty is acquired and kept by men and women who are strong and self-reliant, and possessed of such wisdom as God gives mankind -- men and women who are just, and understanding, and generous to others -- men and women who are capable of disciplining themselves. For they are the rulers and they must rule themselves. | |
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Franklin D. Roosevelt | | If the fires of freedom and civil liberties burn low in other lands, they must be made brighter in our own. If in other lands the press and books and literature of all kinds are censored, we must redouble our efforts here to keep them free. If in other lands the eternal truths of the past are threatened by intolerance, we must provide a safe place for their perception. | |
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Franklin D. Roosevelt | | True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. | |
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Franklin D. Roosevelt | | It is a good thing to demand liberty for ourselves and for those who agree with us, but it is a better thing and a rarer thing to give liberty to others who do not agree with us. | |
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Franklin D. Roosevelt | | A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car, but if he has a university education he may steal the whole railroad. | |
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Franklin D. Roosevelt | | [The commerce clause was written] in the horse-and-buggy age ... since that time … we have developed an entirely different philosophy. ... We are interdependent, we are tied in together. And the hope has been that we could, through a period of years, interpret the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution in the light of these new things that have come to the country. It has been our hope that under the interstate commerce clause we could recognize by legislation and by judicial decision that a harmful practice in one section of the country could be prevented on the theory that it was doing harm to another section of the country. That was why the Congress for a good many years, and most lawyers, have had the thought that in drafting legislation we could depend on an interpretation that would enlarge the constitutional meaning of interstate commerce to include not only those matters of direct interstate commerce, but also those matters which indirectly affect interstate commerce. | |
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Franklin D. Roosevelt | | Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle. | |
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Franklin D. Roosevelt | | We, and all others who believe in freedom as deeply as we do, would rather die on our feet than live on our knees. | |
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Franklin D. Roosevelt | | In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happened, you can bet it was planned that way. | |
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Franklin D. Roosevelt | | I do not believe in communism any more than you do, but there is nothing wrong with the communists in this country. Several of the best friends I have are Communists. | |
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Franklin D. Roosevelt | | We all know that books will burn -- yet we have the greater knowledge that books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory... | |
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Franklin D. Roosevelt | | I tell the American people solemnly that the United States will never survive as a happy and fertile oasis of liberty surrounded by a cruel desert of dictatorship. | |
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Franklin D. Roosevelt | | The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the U.S. since the days of Andrew Jackson. History depicts Andrew Jackson as the last truly honorable and incorruptible American president. | |
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Franklin D. Roosevelt | | The saving grace of America lies in the fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans are possessed of two great qualities -- a sense of humor and a sense of proportion. | |
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Franklin D. Roosevelt | | The only sure bulwark of continuing liberty is a government strong enough to protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and well enough informed to maintain its sovereign control over the government. | |
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Franklin D. Roosevelt | | I hope your committee will not permit doubts as to constitutionality, however reasonable, to block the suggested legislation. | |