Quote-a-palooza
"The most important consequence of marriage is, that the husband and the wife become in law only one person... Upon this principle of union, almost all the other legal consequences of marriage depend." - James Wilson
"The prevailing spirit of the present age seems to be the spirit of skepticism and captiousness, of suspicion and distrust in private judgment; a dislike of all established forms, merely because they are established, and of old paths, because they are old." - Samuel Johnson
"[I]n all likelihood religion will grow as a social force in American culture and politics over the coming decades. The reason: A secular nation needs secular citizens. And nonreligious Americans are outstandingly weak when it comes to the most efficacious way to achieve this: by having kids. If you picked 100 adults out of the population who attended their house of worship nearly every week or more often, they would have 223 children among them, on average, according to the 2006 General Social Survey. Among 100 people who attended less than once per year or never, you would find just 158 kids. This 41% fertility gap between religious and secular people is especially meaningful because people tend to worship more or less like their parents. According to data collected in 1999 by Gallup, 60% of adults who were taken to church at least once per month as children grew up to attend at least this often; only 15% stopped attending as adults. The demographic implications are even more profound for the political left, where a disproportionate number of secularists are located. Religious people who call themselves politically 'conservative' or 'very conservative' are having, on average, an astounding 78% more kids than secular liberals. Studies show that people are even more likely to vote like their parents than they are to worship like them. The secular left, therefore, has to rely on the tough slog of bringing people from the political and religious middle over to their views. The religious right simply has to keep having lots of babies." - Arthur Brooks
"In every state of the union, medical insurance is regulated. In some, it's heavily, heavily regulated. Oregon legislators, for instance, just added a few new mandatory benefits to all health insurance policies: contraceptives, prosthetics and orthotics, and treatments for injuries caused by intoxication... Do you really wonder why health insurance costs so much? I don't. The American health care system is addicted to regulation. Our legislators are the pushers. We need to go cold turkey." - Paul Jacob
"How ironic that even as America returns to its spiritual roots, our courts lag behind. They talk of our constitutional guarantee of religious liberty as if it meant freedom from religion, freedom from- actually a prohibition on- all values rooted in religion. Well, yes, the Constitution does say that 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.' But then it adds: 'or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.' The First Amendment protects the rights of Americans to freely exercise their religious beliefs in an atmosphere of toleration and accommodation...[C]ertain court decisions have, in my view, wrongly interpreted the First Amendment so as to restrict, rather than protect, individual rights of conscience. What greater legacy could we leave our children than a new birth of religious freedom in this one nation under God?" - Ronald Reagan