Politics and Power

The true conservative seeks to protect the system of private property and free enterprise by correcting such injustices and inequalities as arise from it. The most serious threat to our institutions comes from those who refuse to face the need for change. Liberalism becomes the protection for the far-sighted conservative.

I hope your committee will not permit doubts as to constitutionality, however reasonable, to block the suggested legislation [the Bituminous Coal Conservation Act of 1935].

In the field of world policy I would dedicate this nation to the policy of the good neighbor—the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others—the neighbor who respects his obligations and respects the sanctity of his agreements in and with a world of neighbors.

[ Of Alfred E. Smith :] He is the Happy Warrior of the political battlefield.

You will find that [as the First Lady] you are no longer clothing yourself, you are dressing a public monument.

[ To the surgeons about to operate on him after he was shot by John Hinckley :] Please tell me you’re Republicans.

I did say something in our negotiations in Iceland in Russian: Dovorey no provorey . That means trust, but verify.

I have my veto pen drawn and ready for any tax increase that Congress might even think of sending up. And I have only one thing to say to the tax increasers: Go ahead, make my day.

No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth!

Next Tuesday all of you will go to the polls, will stand there in the polling place and make a decision. I think when you make that decision it might be well if you would ask yourself: Are you better off than you were four years ago?

Who is John Galt?

[ Socrates speaking :] Democracy . . . would, it seems, be a delightful form of government, anarchic and motley, assigning a kind of equality indiscriminately to equals and unequals alike!

[ Socrates speaking :] Unless either philosophers become kings in our states or those whom we now call our kings and rulers take to the pursuit of philosophy seriously and adequately, and there is a conjunction of these two things, political power and philosophical intelligence, while the motley horde of the natures who at present pursue either apart from the other are compulsorily excluded, there can be no cessation of troubles, dear Glaucon, for our states, nor, I fancy, for the human race either. Nor, until this happens, will this constitution which we have been expounding in theory ever be put into practice within the limits of possibility and see the light of the sun.

[ Thrasymachus speaking :] I affirm that the just is nothing else than the advantage of the stronger.

[ Socrates speaking, describing the charge against him :] Socrates is guilty of corrupting the minds of the young, and of believing in deities of his own invention instead of the gods recognized by the state.

The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.

A State which was . . . in a permanent state of “cold war” with its neighbors.

One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.

Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as “the truth” exists. . . . The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past . If the Leader says of such and such an event, “It never happened”—well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five—well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs.

The high-water mark, so to speak, of Socialist literature is W. H. Auden, a sort of gutless Kipling.

The Communist and the Catholic are not saying the same thing, in a sense they are even saying opposite things, and each would gladly boil the other in oil if circumstances permitted; but from the point of view of an outsider they are very much alike.

Civilization is nothing else than the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort.

The vote, I thought, means nothing to women, we should be armed.

[ Remark to General Alexander Haig, 7 Aug. 1974 :] You fellows, in your business, have a way of handling problems like this. Somebody leaves a pistol in the drawer. I don’t have a pistol.