User:BrendelSignature/Quotes

I decided that my userspace was a good space to present some of my favorite quotes (which are currently spread on many different papers of notes stored in my office. This is, and will always be, a work in progress (note that more technical quotes are kept on the talk page):

Without effective government, Americans would not be able to enjoy their... constitutional guranteed individual rights. Personal liberty, as Americans value and experience it, presupposes social cooperation managed by government officials. -Stephen Holmes and Cass R. Sunstein, 1999

Poverty is the great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some vritues impracticble, and others extremely difficult. -Samuel Johnson, 1709-1794

[The state's repsonsiblities are]... that of protecting the society from the violence and invasion of other independent socities... that of protecting, as far as possible, every member of the society from the injustice or oppression from every other member of it... that of erecting and maintaining those publick institutions which, though they may be in the highest degree advantageous to a great society, are of such a nature, that the profit could never repay the expence to any individual or small number of individuals. -Adam Smith, 1776

Taxes... are the dues that we pay for the privileges of membership in an organised society. -Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1936

Necessitous men are not free men.’ Liberty requires opportunity to make a living – a living decent according to the standard of the time, a living which gives a man not only enough to live by, but something to live for." - Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1937

We cannot measure... national acheivement by the gross national product. For gross national product includes air pollution and advertising for cigaretter, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage... It swells with equipment for the police to put down riots in our cities; and though it is not diminished by the damage these riots do, still it goes up as slums are rebuilt on their ashes... [but] there is much that it does not comprehend. It does not allow neither for the justice in our courts, nor for the justice of our dealings with each other... It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worhtwhile. -Robert Kennedy, 1967

To criticise inequality and to desire equality is not... ot cherish the romantic ellusion that men are equal in character and intelligence. It is to hold that, while their natural endowments differ profoundly, it is the mark of a civilised society to aim at eliminating such inequalities as havde their source, not in individual differences, but in its own organisation. -R. H. Tawney, 1964

People today live much longer than 100 years ago. That is a wonderful outcome that we should all applaud. To talk about the 'problem' of ageing is grotesquely to miss the point. -Nicholas Barr, 2004