Quote-a-palooza
“If the present Congress errs in too much talking, how can it be otherwise in a body to which the people send 150 lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, & talk by the hour? That 150 lawyers should do business together ought not to be expected.” —Thomas Jefferson
“In the end more than they wanted freedom, they wanted security. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free.” —Edward Gibbon
“The arguments against redefining marriage, the central institution of society, are profound and decent, no matter what the sexual orientation of those who offer those arguments. The sexual confusion we will bequeath to future generations, especially among children, if the same sex is regarded from childhood as equally desirable as marriage partners, endangers society immeasurably more than global warming... In the meantime, however, those who argue for redefining marriage have their bases covered with ad hominem attacks. According to same-sex marriage activists, if you’re a heterosexual who opposes same-sex marriage, you’re a homophobe, and if you’re a homosexual who opposes same-sex marriage, you’re a phony and a hypocrite. Defenders of marriage should not lend credibility to these characterizations.” —Dennis Prager
“Do you allow your pre-teen daughters to wear T-shirts with suggestive messages? Well, plenty of parents do. Just stroll through any clothing store catering to the younger set, and you will find ‘Hottie’ and ‘Sexy’ on shirts too small to fit anyone older than 12. Bare midriffs are marketed to girls as young as 7 and 8... It isn’t that the adults here have no standards. Are we in any doubt about what would happen to a kid who wore a T-shirt that said ‘Girls can’t do math’? It’s not that these people are impossible to offend, it’s that the wrong things offend them... If parents were doing their jobs, none of this would be a problem. The trashy clothes would hang unsold on the racks, or failing that, would be stopped at the front door before junior or little miss left the house. But parents are abdicating massively... [and] these kids desperately need higher standards of comportment.” —Mona Charen
“This election was not a rejection of conservative principles per se, but a rejection of corrupt, complacent and incompetent government... It is also notable that the Democrats who won or who ran competitive races sounded more like Ronald Reagan than Lyndon Johnson. This election does not show that voters have abandoned their belief in limited government; it shows that the Republican Party has abandoned them. In fact, these results represent the total failure of big government Republicanism. The Republican Party now has an opportunity to rediscover its identity as a party for limited government, free enterprise and individual responsibility. Most Americans still believe in these ideals, which reflect not merely the spirit of 1994 or the Reagan Revolution, but the vision of our founders.” —Sen. Tom Coburn
“It’s time we asked ourselves if we still know the freedoms intended for us by the Founding Fathers. James Madison said, ‘We base all our experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government.’ This idea that government was beholden to the people, that it had no other source of power, is still the newest, most unique idea in all the long history of man’s relation to man. This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.” —Ronald Reagan
“[C]onservatives of every stripe can console themselves by considering the limited scope of the Democrats’ midterm sweep. Despite the pervasive weariness with the war and the high tide of irritation at Bush’s steadfastness; despite the general disgust at the policy paralysis and ethical laxity in the wake of muscle-bound one-party control—the result was only the average loss of House and Senate seats of the party in power midway in the second term of a president. A political shakeup every dozen years is a necessary cathartic for the two-party system. What’s more, the rightward cast of many Democrats in the freshman class is hardly bad news for conservativism. And the heartening victory of Joe Lieberman over the angry far left in liberal Connecticut augurs a renewal of a brief period of bipartisanship at the water’s edge.” —William Safire
“Members of Congress may flatter themselves by saying, in effect, ‘It’s not us—it’s the guy in the White House.’ But if those now in Congress think this election was only about Bush, and not also about them, they’re dead wrong. Let’s start with the fact that Congress and the media are among the least popular institutions in American life. Exit polls may show President Bush’s favorability rating at just 42%, but that of Congress is even lower, at 35%. It isn’t hard, moreover, to explain why the GOP-led Congress is so reviled. Since 2003, it set three admittedly ambitious reform goals for itself—immigration, Social Security and taxes. It accomplished exactly none of them, in summer making only a stab at immigration. Republicans made gains in 2002 and 2004 even as they veered from the fiscally responsible and reform-minded path they’d been on. They became arrogant, and now the trends look ominous... [Republicans] might want to dust off that long-forgotten Contract with America, and get back to basics.” —Investor’s Business Daily