"It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt."
— Abraham Lincoln

"Life's hard. It's even harder when you're stupid."
— John Wayne

"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
— Abraham Lincoln

"If we ever forget that we're one nation under God, then we will be one nation gone under."
— Ronald Reagan

"The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help."
— Ronald Reagan

"Recession is when your neighbor loses his job. Depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his."
— Ronald Reagan

"Always give your best, never get discouraged, never be petty; always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself."
— Richard Nixon

"I predict future happiness for Americans, if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them."
— Thomas Jefferson

"A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away."
— Barry Goldwater

"Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views."
— William F. Buckley Jr.

"Liberals, it has been said, are generous with other peoples' money, except when it comes to questions of national survival when they prefer to be generous with other peoples' freedom and security."
— William F. Buckley Jr.

"Liberals measure compassion by how many people are given welfare. Conservatives measure compassion by how many people no longer need it.

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— Rush Limbaugh

"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."
— John Adams

"To the majority of those on the job his presence had been magical. Years afterward, the wife of one of the steam-shovel engineers, Mrs. Rose van Hardevald, would recall, "We saw him...on the end of the train. Jan got small flags for the children, and told us about when the train would pass...Mr. Roosevelt flashed us one of his well-known toothy smiles and waved his hat at the children..." In an instant, she said, she understood her husband's faith in the man. "And I was more certain than ever that we ourselves would not leave until it [the canal] was finished." Two years before, they had been living in Wyoming on a lonely stop on the Union Pacific. When her husband heard of the work at Panama, he had immediately wanted to go, because, he told her, "With Teddy Roosevelt, anything is possible." At the time neither of them had known quite where Panama was located."
— David McCullough (The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal 1870-1914)

"We cannot do everything at once, but we can do something at once."
— Calvin Coolidge

"Don’t expect to build up the weak by pulling down the strong."
— Calvin Coolidge

""The nation which forgets it defenders will be itself forgotten.""
— Calvin Coolidge

"Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one."
— Thomas Paine

"The U.S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself."
— Benjamin Franklin