Quotes and Conundrums


"Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed".

H. L. Mencken


"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

John F. Kennedy


"It's one thing not to see the forest for the trees, but then to go on to deny the reality of the forest is a more serious matter."

Paul Weiss


"Never blame a legislative body for not doing something. When they do nothing, they don't hurt anybody. When they do something is when they become dangerous."

Will Rogers


"You know they say necessity is the mother of invention. Don't know who the father is - probably remorse."

Red Green


"A slipping gear could let your M203 grenade launcher fire when you least expect it. That would make you quite unpopular in what's left of your unit."

PS magazine,
the Army's magazine of preventive maintenance


"The right of self-defense is the first law of nature: in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. Wherever standing armies are kept up, and when the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any color or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction."

Henry St. George Tucker
in Blackstone's Commentaries


"In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. Therefore... in the Old Silurian Period, the Mississippi River was upward of one million three hundred thousand miles long... seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesome returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact."

Mark Twain



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