"If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace."
--Thomas Paine

"It is well that
war is so terrible,
lest we grow too fond of it."
-- Robert E. Lee

"I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious."
–Thomas Jefferson

"It has been a source of great pain to me to have met with so many among [my] opponents who had not the liberality to distinguish between political and social opposition; who transferred at once to the person, the hatred they bore to his political opinions."
--Thomas Jefferson

"Every child in America should be acquainted with his own country. He should read books that furnish him with ideas that will be useful to him in life and practice. As soon as he opens his lips, he should rehearse the history of his own country."
--Noah Webster

"There is nothing absurd or impracticable in the idea of a league or alliance between independent nations for certain defined purposes precisely stated in a treaty regulating all the details of time, place, circumstance, and quantity; leaving nothing to future discretion; and depending for its execution on the good faith of the parties."
--Alexander Hamilton

"American power, and the willingness to use it successfully for moral aims and our national interest, alone will win far more allies than sitting through yet another sanctimonious U.N. debate and an open-air auction for support."
~~Victor Davis Hanson, National Review 3-14-2003

A bad peace is even worse than war.
-- Tacitus

Once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war.
-- Ernest Hemingway

"America is best described by one word, freedom."
~~Dwight D. Eisenhower

We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.
–George Orwell

"Laws are made for men of ordinary understanding and should, therefore, be construed by the ordinary rules of common sense."
Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Johnson, June 12, 1823

"[T]he propitious smiles of Heaven, can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right, which Heaven itself has ordained."
--George Washington