Republic Quotes - Page 19

• What frightens me about America today is that in the large majority there is no active sense of the value of the individual: few citizens feel that they are the Republic, responsible for what happens. And when the individual in a democracy ceases to feel his importance, then there is grave danger that he will give over his freedom, if not to a Fascist State, then to the advertising men or Publicity Agents or to the newspaper he happens to read.

  May Sarton

  Men, America, Giving

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• This great republic is a mockery of freedom as long as you are doomed to dig and sweat to earn a miserable living while the masters enjoy the fruit of your toil.

  Helen Keller

  Sweat, Long, Fruit

  Helen Keller (1967). “Helen Keller, her Socialist years: writings and speeches”

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• The State, every government whatever its form, character or color - be it absolute or constitutional, monarchy or republic, Fascist, Nazi or bolshevik - is by its very nature conservative, static, intolerant of change and opposed to it.

  Emma Goldman

  Character, Government, Color

  Emma Goldman (1998). “Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader”

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• This is the face of our political class: arrogant, authoritarian, and on the level of some banana republic south of the border. Welcome to the New America, where leader-worship has taken the place of politics, Team Red and Team Blue battle it out to see who gets to be El Supremo for the next four years, and politics resembles a prolonged soccer game.

  Justin Raimondo

  Soccer, Team, Taken

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• One of my first role models was Eugene Lang, a wealthy businessman who went back to his elementary school in East Harlem and addressed the sixth-grade class. He looked out at that sea of faces and said, "If any of you wants to go to college, I will pay for it." When I read that, I burst into tears. It was so generous and so basic. Not fluffy. I can't understand why we scrimp on education and shortchange our kids. Why would the citizenry do that to the people who are going to inherit its republic?

  Bette Midler

  Kids, School, College

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• Who are we? And for what are we going to fight? Are we the titled slaves of George the Third? The military conscripts of Napoleon the Great? Or the frozen peasants of the Russian Czar? No -- we are the free born sons of America; the citizens of the only republic now existing in the world; and the only people on earth who possess rights, liberties, and property which they dare call their own.

  Andrew Jackson

  Military, Fighting, Son

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• No class is safe unless government is so arranged that each class has in its hands the means of protecting itself. That is the idea of republics.

  Wendell Phillips

  Mean, Government, Hands

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• Wherever the appearance of a conventional aristocracy exists in America, it must arise from wealth, as it cannot from birth. An aristocracy of mere wealth is vulgar everywhere. In a republic, it is vulgar in the extreme.

  Harriet Martineau

  America, Aristocracy, Birth

  Harriet Martineau (1837). “Society in America”, p.117

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• For two years now, my office has had the honour and the privilege of sponsoring seminars on the functioning of government in this country for Eastern Europeans. These seminars and exchanges have brought together representatives from such nations as Bulgaria, Hungary, the Czech and Slovak Republic, Roumania, Poland, Russia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and the Ukraine, all of them anxious to learn what makes a society as diverse as Canada work and how our institutions make it governable.

  John Allen Fraser

  Country, Government, Ukraine

  "The House of Commons at Work". Book by John Fraser, 1993.

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• This separation was absolute in our original Republic. But the sky-godders do not give up easily. In the 1950s they actually got the phrase In God We Trust onto the currency, in direct violation of the First Amendment.

  Gore Vidal

  Giving Up, Sky, Religion

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• It will be just as easy for nations to get along in a republic of the world as it is for you to get along in the republic of the United States. Now, if Kansas and Colorado have a quarrel over a watershed they don't call out the national guard in each state and go to war over it. They bring suit in the Supreme Court and abide by its decision. There isn't a reason in the world why we can't do that internationally.

  Harry S. Truman

  War, Rivers, Kansas

  "Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Harry S. Truman, 1945, Volume 1". Book by Harry S. Truman, Best Books on, 1961.

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• To the American people I bid a fond farewell. Guard your liberties. It is the trust of each generation to pass a free republic to the next. And if I know you right, you will rouse yourself from slumber to ensure exactly that.

  Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

  Farewell, People, Liberty

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• For the first time since 1979, we are talking to the Islamic Republic of Iran. Obama says talking to him is probably pointless, but it's a hell of a relief from Mitch McConnell.

  Bill Maher

  Islamic, Iran, Talking

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• That public virtue which among the ancients was denominated patriotism, is derived from a strong sense of our own interest in the preservation and prosperity of the free government of which we are members. Such a sentiment, which had rendered the legions of the republic almost invincible, could make but a very feeble impression on the mercenary servants of a despotic prince; and it became necessary to supply that defect by other motives, of a different, but not less forcible nature; honour and religion.

  Edward Gibbon

  Strong, Government, History

  Edward Gibbon (2009). “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Edited and Abridged): Abridged Edition”, p.15, Modern Library

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• The distinctions of personal merit and influence, so conspicuous in a republic, so feeble and obscure under a monarchy, were abolished by the despotism of the emperors; who substituted in their room a severe subordination of rank and office, from the titled slaves who were seated on the steps of the throne, to the meanest instruments of arbitrary power.

  Edward Gibbon

  History, Office, Thrones

  Edward Gibbon (2009). “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Edited and Abridged): Abridged Edition”, p.325, Modern Library

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• An absolute monarch, who is rich without patrimony, may be charitable without merit; and Constantine too easily believed that he should purchase the favour of Heaven if he maintained the idle at the expense of the industrious, and distributed among the saints the wealth of the republic.

  Edward Gibbon

  History, Heaven, Saint

  Edward Gibbon (1998). “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, p.388, Wordsworth Editions

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• If the emperor had capriciously decreed the death of the most eminent and virtuous citizen of the republic, the cruel order would have been executed without hesitation by the ministers of open violence or of specious injustice. The caution, the delay, the difficulty with which he proceeded in the condemnation and punishment of a popular bishop, discovered to the world that the privileges of the church had already revived a sense of order and freedom in the Roman government.

  Edward Gibbon

  Order, Punishment, Government

  Edward Gibbon (2015). “Delphi Complete Works of Edward Gibbon (Illustrated)”, p.908, Delphi Classics

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• Democracy is something America has never really practiced. Because the Founding Fathers hated two things: monarchy and democracy. They wanted a republic, a replica of the Roman or Venetian republics. They didn't even like the etymology of the word "democracy."

  Gore Vidal

  Father, Two, America

  "The End of Gore Vidal". Interview with Lila Azam Zanganeh, www.guernicamag.com. August 15, 2012.

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• John Adams and Thomas Jefferson corresponded for 13 years before they died on the same day. They asked, "How can one have prosperity without commerce? How can one have commerce without luxury? How can one have luxury without corruption? How can you have corruption without the end of the Republic?" And they really didn't know the answer.

  Pete Seeger

  Years, Luxury, Answers

  Source: portside.org

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• Music does affect your opinions. Plato is supposed to have said "It's very dangerous to allow the wrong kind of music into the republic."

  Pete Seeger

  Plato, Doe, Opinion

  "An Interview With Pete Seeger In Beacon, NY". Interview with Pete Mason, nysmusic.com. January 31, 2014.

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• it is a testament to the strength and purity of the democratic sentiment in the country, that the republic has not been overthrown by its newspapers.

  Harriet Martineau

  Country, Purity, Newspapers

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• [To the suggestion that Great Britain might someday want a Republic:] We'll go quietly.

  Queen Elizabeth II

  Suggestions, Want, Might

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• Our Republic is not a pastoral, not a military, not an agricultural, not a nomadic, not a clerical, but a business civilization. Nor is there anything random, casual or accidental about the United States as a business society. It is thoroughly well integrated - organized from top to bottom for the maximum efficiency of commerce and industry, for the maximum efficiency of making money.

  Margaret Halsey

  Military, Civilization, United States

  Margaret Halsey (1952). “The Folks at Home”

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• In matters of philosophy and science authority has ever been the great opponent of truth. A despotic calm is usually the triumph of error. In the republic of the sciences sedition and even anarchy are beneficial in the long run to the greatest happiness of the greatest number.

  William Stanley Jevons

  Running, Philosophy, Errors

  William Stanley Jevons (1970). “The Theory of Political Economy”, Penguin (Non-Classics)

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• To-day Massachusetts; and the whole of the American republic, from the border of Maine to the Pacific slopes, and from the Lakes to the Gulf, stand upon the immutable and everlasting principles of equal and exact justice. The days of unrequited labor are numbered with the past. Fugitive slave laws are only remembered as relics of that barbarism which John Wesley pronounced "the sum of all villainies," and whose knowledge of its blighting effects was matured by his travels in Georgia and the Carolinas.

  Horace Mann

  Past, Lakes, Law

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