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I don’t know whether or not you have noticed but there is a presidential campaign looming on the horizon. Actually, I think it has already made its way over the horizon. Nonetheless, it will only gain momentum as November ’08 draws closer. With that thought in mind, I put together a wish list of sorts. It is a list of thoughts and ideas that I would like to hear from someone, anyone for that matter, in the upcoming campaign season. In no particular order, some thoughts it would be nice to hear expressed are. . .
“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclination, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”
John Adams, in Defense of the British Soldiers on trial for the Boston Massacre, December 4, 1770
“History affords us many instances of the ruin of states, by the prosecution of measures ill suited to the temper and genius of their people. The ordaining of laws in favor of one part of the nation, to the prejudice and oppression of another, is certainly the most erroneous and mistaken policy. An equal dispensation of protection, rights, privileges, and advantages, is what every part is entitled to, and ought to enjoy... These measures never fail to create great and violent jealousies and animosities between the people favored and the people oppressed; whence a total separation of affections, interests, political obligations, and all manner of connections, by which the whole state is weakened.”
Benjamin Franklin, Emblematical Representations, Circa 1774
“All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.”
Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801
“Conscience is the most sacred of all property.”
James Madison, Essay on Property, March 29, 1792
“When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary.”
Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776
“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.”
Thomas Jefferson, Letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, 1802
“Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.”
George Washington, Farewell Address, September 19, 1796
“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
Abraham Lincoln, second inaugural address, 1865
Joy and peace,
Ed
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