“You don’t have to be straight to be in the military; you just have to be able to shoot straight.”

– Barry Goldwater (Five-term U.S. senator and Republican 1964 presidential candidate, 1909-1998)

“Happy the man who has learned the cause of things and has put under his feet all fear, inexorable fate, and the noisy strife of the hell of greed.”

– Virgil (Classical Roman poet, 70 BCE – 19 BCE)

“If one man offers you democracy and another offers you a bag of grain, at what stage of starvation do you prefer the grain to the vote?”

– Bertrand Russell (English mathematician and philosopher, 1872-1970)

“I refuse to accept the idea that the “is-ness” of man’s present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the “ought-ness” that forever confronts him.”

– Martin Luther King, Jr. (U.S. clergyman and civil-rights leader, 1929-1968)

“No cause is hopeless if it is just. Errors, no matter how popular, carry the seeds of their own destruction.”

– John W. Scoville

“Do not trust to the cheering, for those very persons would shout as much if you and I were going to be hanged.”

– Oliver Cromwell (English military and political leader, 1599-1658)

“Greatness is a two-faced coin — and its reverse is humility.”

– Marguerite Steen (British writer, 1894-1975)

“If you fail to work in public life, as well as in private, for honesty and uprightness and virtue, if you condone vice because the vicious man is smart, or if you in any other way cast your weight into the scales in favor of evil, you are just so far corrupting and making less valuable the birthright of your children…. It is not what we have that will make us a great nation; it is the way in which we use it.”

– Theodore Roosevelt (26th U.S. president, 1858-1919)

“Systems die; instincts remain.”

– Oliver Wendell Holmes (U.S. physician and author, 1809-1894)

“Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them become what they are capable of becoming.”

– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (German writer, 1749-1832)

“If prosperity is regarded as the reward of virtue, it will be regarded as the symptom of virtue.”

– G. K. Chesterton (English journalist and author, 1874-1936)

“The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think.”

– H. L. Mencken (U.S. journalist, essayist, magazine editor, and culture critic, 1880-1956)

“Those who bear equally the burdens of government should equally participate of its benefits.”

– Thomas Jefferson (3rd U.S. president, 1743-1826)

“Thinking is the talking of the soul with itself.”

– Plato (Greek philosopher, ca 428 – ca 348 B.C.)

“Peace is not merely a vacuum left by the ending of wars. It is the creation of two eternal principles: justice and freedom.”

– James T. Shotwell (Canada-born U.S. history professor and diplomacy advocate, 1874-1965)

“Let him who expects one class of society to prosper in the highest degree, while the other is in distress, try whether one side of his face can smile while the other is pinched.”

– Thomas Fuller (English clergyman and author, 1608-1661)

“The life of a man consists not in seeing visions and in dreaming dreams, but in active charity and in willing service.”

– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (U.S. poet, 1802-1882)

“All humanity is one undivided and indivisible family, and each one of us is responsible for the misdeeds of all the others.”

– Mahatma Gandhi (Indian political and spiritual leader and civil rights pioneer, 1869-1948)

“To think of learning as a preparation for something beyond learning is a defeat of the process. The most important attitude that can be formed is that of desire to go on learning.”

– Daniel Bell (U.S. sociologist, Harvard professor, and resident scholar at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, born 1919)

“The virtue of man ought to be measured not by his extraordinary exertions, but by his everyday conduct.”

– Blaise Pascal (French mathematician, physicist, and religious philosopher, 1623-1662)