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Read through the most famous quotes by topic #states
The accumulation of birthdays is the leading cause of death in the United States and other large land masses. Now while that may not be 100% accurate, it is at least 88% accurate. Actually, the last sentence itself might not have been 100% accurate, but I’m 88% sure it was. Maybe I should just brush up on fractions and percentages before making statements that are liable to hurt the funeral industry, because if birthdays aren’t killing people then it’s bad for the mortality business. And if you can’t trust somebody to die, then you can’t trust somebody. But I’m somebody you can trust. I’m at least 88% trustworthy, at least 88% of the time. ↗
The state does not oppose the freedom of people to express their particular cultural attachments, but nor does it nurture such expression—rather [...] it responds with 'benign neglect' [....] The members of ethnic and national groups are protected against discrimination and prejudice, and they are free to maintain whatever part of their ethnic heritage or identity they wish, consistent with the rights of others. But their efforts are purely private, and it is not the place of public agencies to attach legal identities or disabilities to cultural membership or ethnic identity. This separation of state and ethnicity precludes any legal or governmental recognition of ethnic groups, or any use of ethnic criteria in the distribution of rights, resources, and duties. ↗
#discrimination #ethnicity #individuals #liberalism #liberties
It’s a path that grows government, restricts freedom and liberty and compromises those values, those Judeo-Christian, Western civilization values that made us such a great and exceptional nation in the first place. ↗
Boys forget what their country means by just reading 'The Land of the Free' in history books. Then they get to be men. They forget even more. Liberty’s too precious a thing to be buried in books. ↗
I wish it were different. I wish that we privileged knowledge in politicians, that the ones who know things didn't have to hide it behind brown pants, and that the know-not-enoughs were laughed all the way to the Maine border on their first New Hampshire meet and greet. I wish that in order to secure his party's nomination, a presidential candidate would be required to point at the sky and name all the stars; have the periodic table of the elements memorized; rattle off the kings and queens of Spain; define the significance of the Gatling gun; joke around in Latin; interpret the symbolism in seventeenth-century Dutch painting; explain photosynthesis to a six-year-old; recite Emily Dickinson; bake a perfect popover; build a shortwave radio out of a coconut; and know all the words to Hoagy Carmichael's "Two Sleepy People," Johnny Cash's "Five Feet High and Rising," and "You Got the Silver" by the Rolling Stones. After all, the United States is the greatest country on earth dealing with the most complicated problems in the history of the world--poverty, pollution, justice, Jerusalem. What we need is a president who is at least twelve kinds of nerd, a nerd messiah to come along every four years, acquire the Secret Service code name Poindexter, install a Revenge of the Nerds screen saver on the Oval Office computer, and one by one decrypt our woes. ↗
Never has America lost a war ... But name, if you can, the last peace the United States won. Victory yes, but this country has never made a successful peace because peace requires exchanging ideas, concepts, thoughts, and recognizing the fact that two distinct systems of life can exist together without conflict. Consider how quickly America seems to be facing its allies of one war as new enemies. ↗
How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape. ↗
#fundamentalism #religion #secularism #separation-of-church-and-state #united-states
The mistake our politicians so often make with these industry leaders is in thinking they are interested in, or respectful of, the power of government. All they want is to keep stealing. If you can offer them the government’s seal of approval on that, they’ll take it. But if you can’t, well, they’ll take that too. ↗
Prolific irony - For 8 years, the finger on the button that could end the world belonged to a president who couldn't pronounce the word "nuclear. ↗
#americans #atomic-bomb #george-bush #nuclear #nuclear-weapons
The media are desperately afraid of being accused of bias. And that's partly because there's a whole machine out there, an organized attempt to accuse them of bias whenever they say anything that the Right doesn't like. So rather than really try to report things objectively, they settle for being even-handed, which is not the same thing. One of my lines in a column—in which a number of people thought I was insulting them personally—was that if Bush said the Earth was flat, the mainstream media would have stories with the headline: 'Shape of Earth—Views Differ.' Then they'd quote some Democrats saying that it was round. ↗
#conservatism #conservatism-in-the-us #democratic-party-united-states #economics #flat-earth
