"The most important knowledge is knowledge of our own ignorance."
-Thomas Sowell

Materialism

"The idea of accumulating "stuff" must have hit early on in the evolution of humans. Anthropologists tell us we were herders, and [probably] harem-based, and both of these imply possession. Intelligence may have evolved so we could evaluate trades. Anyway however it happened, it is now true; we are materialistic. Any human society which has attempted to deny this has failed, and the human society which is most successful is the United States, which celebrates materialism and features it as a core value. One of the first things that must happen to transform a failed state is some sort of rule of law, including some rights to personal possession."
-Ole Eichhorn

"In countries where governments have a lot of power, the worst tend to get on top."
-Friedrich Hayek

"We remain, as we have been in most of our history, a nation of hustlers (as historian Walter A. McDougall so strikingly put it)--a people who strive mightily to get ahead and advance their interests, enjoying the sometimes vulgar opportunities a dynamic economy provides."
-Michael Barone

"God is not finished with us, either as individuals or as a species...For all that we know of ourselves and the world, we still seem to be at a place in our understanding that is little better than pagan cosmologies from Mesapotamia."
-Gerard Van der Leun

Becoming an American

"... if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the man's becoming in very fact an American and nothing but an American ... There can be no divided allegiances here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag,... we have room for but one language here, and that is the English language ... and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people."
-Teddy Roosevelt

"The laws of his [Issac Newton's] universe were so simple, so elegant, so economical and therefore so beautiful that they could only be divine."
-Charles Krauthammer

"I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody."
-Bill Cosby

"A successful tool is used to do something undreamed of by its author."
- Johnson

"If good and evil are believed to be relative, if all morality is seen as mere relativity, then that person has no tuning peg upon which his soul can be pitched."
-excerpt from reader comment at www.americandigest.org

"Americans will not long endure a government whose goal is a "balance of power." We don't want power to be balanced. We want to feel like our power is enormously lopsided, but that it is used exclusively for either a noble cause or our own direct national defense."
-Orson Scott Card

"Somehow liberals have been unable to acquire from life what conservatives seem to be endowed with at birth: namely, a healthy skepticism of the powers of government agencies to do good."
-Daniel P. Moynihan

"Law 1: There's an infinity of ways to make a simple problem seem difficult; only a handful to make a difficult problem seem simple."
-Jack Crenshaw

"You come into the world with nothing, and the purpose of your life is to make something out of nothing"
-Henry Louis Mencken

"Liberals want "freedom of information" and conservatives want the "marketplace of ideas," those are both at least neighboring territories, and blogs go a little ways toward making them more of a reality. Corporations, big media, the government -- any entrenched power -- can't help but be nervous, and will eventually seek ways to fight them."
-Lein Shory