Civic Quote 1 Quote 2

Code of Laws
“It is not wisdom but authority that makes a law.”
—Thomas Hobbes
“At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.”
—Aristotle

Craftsmanship
“Without craftsmanship, inspiration is a mere reed shaken in the wind.”
—Johannes Brahms
“Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets.”
—Tom Stoppard

Foreign Trade
“Every nation lives by exchanging.”
—Adam Smith
“That’s the positive aspect of trade I suppose. The world gets stirred up together.”
—Isabel Hoving

Military Tradition
“Bravery is being the only one who knows you’re afraid.”
—Colonel David Hackworth
“I don’t underrate the value of military knowledge, but if men make war in slavish obedience to rules, they will fail.”
—Ulysses S. Grant

State Workforce
“A strong economy begins with a strong, welleducated workforce.”
—Bill Owens
“It is equally important to have a happy and engaged workforce as it is to have a profitable bottom line.”
—Vern Dosch

Early Empire
“Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future, too.”
—Marcus Aurelius
“It was luxuries like air conditioning that brought down the Roman Empire. With air conditioning their windows were shut; they couldn’t hear the barbarians coming.”
—Garrison Keillor

Mysticism
“Mysticism is the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for a universal one.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
“I like to say I practice militant mysticism. I’m absolutely sure of some things that I don’t quite know.”
—Rob Bell

Games and Recreation
“If bread is the first necessity of life, recreation is a close second.”
—Edward Bellamy
“People who cannot find time for recreation are sooner or later to find time for illness.”
—John Wanamaker

Political Philosophy
“Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable the art of the next best.”
—Otto von Bismarck
“Divide and rule, a sound motto. Unite and lead, a better one.”
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Drama and Poetry
“The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.”
—G. K. Chesterton
“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”
—William Shakespeare

Military Training
“If it’s natural to kill, how come men have to go into training to learn how?”
—Joan Baez
“Those who in quarrels interpose, must often wipe a bloody nose.”
—John Gay

Defensive Tactics
“Invincibility lies in the defense; the possibility of victory in the attack.”
—Sun Tzu
“Defense is superior to opulence.”
—Adam Smith

Recorded History
“I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.”
—Mark Twain
“History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.”
—Napoleon Bonaparte

Theology
“We can no more have exact religious thinking without theology, than exact mensuration and astronomy without mathematics, or exact ironmaking without chemistry.”
—John Hall
“Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.”
—Alan W. Watts

Naval Tradition
“A good navy is not a provocation to war. It is the surest guaranty of peace.”
—Theodore Roosevelt
“The Navy has both a tradition and a future and we look with pride and confidence in both directions.”
—Arleigh Burke

Feudalism
“In democracy it’s your vote that counts; in feudalism it’s your count that votes.”
—Mogens Jallberg
“With the advance of feudalism came the growth of iron armor, until, at last, a fightingman resembled an armadillo.”
—John Boyle O’Reilly

Civil Service
“It’s all papers and forms, the entire civil service is like a fortress made of papers, forms and red tape.”
—Alexander Ostrovsky
“The taxpayer that's someone who works for the federal government but doesn't have to take the civil service examination.”
—Ronald Reagan

Mercenaries
“In peace one is despoiled by mercenaries; in war by one’s enemies.”
—Niccolo Machiavelli
“Being a mercenary, though … Hey, we just go wherever there’s a mixture of money and trouble.”
—Howard Tayler

Medieval Faires
“All that glisters is not gold; often have you heard that told.”
—William Shakespeare
“There are very honest people who do not think that they have had a bargain unless they have cheated a merchant.”
—Anatole France

Guilds
“Every man should make his son learn some useful trade or profession, so that in these days of changing fortunes … they may have something tangible to fall back upon.”
—Phineas T. Barnum
“You can’t go around arresting the Thieves’ Guild. I mean, we’d be at it all day!”
—Terry Pratchett

Divine Right
“I conclude then this point touching upon the power of kings with this axiom of divinity, That as to dispute what God may do is blasphemy … so it is sedition to dispute what a king may do.”
—King James I
“Listen, strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government … You can’t expect to wield supreme power just ‘cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!”
—Monty Python

Exploration
“The day we stop exploring is the day we commit ourselves to live in a stagnant world, devoid of curiosity, empty of dreams.”
—Neil deGrasse Tyson
“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
—T.S. Eliot

Humanism
“The four characteristics of humanism are curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.”
—E.M. Forster
“You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is like an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty”
—Mahatma Gandhi

Diplomatic Service
“In diplomacy there are two kinds of problems: small ones and large ones. The small ones will go away by themselves, and the large ones you will not be able to do anything about.”
—Patrick McGuinness
“A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman’s birthday but never remembers her age.”
—Robert Frost

Reformed Church
“I don't like to commit myself about Heaven and Hell, you see, I have friends in both places.”
—Mark Twain
“The three great elements of modern civilization: gun powder, printing, and the Protestant religion.”
—Thomas Carlyle

Mercantilism
“In a market economy, however, the individual has some possibility of escaping from the power of the state.”
—Peter Berger
“Having seen a nonmarket economy, I suddenly understood much better what I liked about a market economy.”
—Esther Dyson

The Enlightenment
“New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.”
—John Locke
“Whatever is contrary to nature is contrary to reason, and whatsoever is contrary to reason is absurd.”
—Baruch Spinoza

Colonialism
“Remember that politics, colonialism, imperialism and war also originated in the human brain.”
—Vilayanur Ramachandran
“Colonialism. The enforced spread of the rule of reason. But who is going to spread it among the colonizers?”
—Anthony Burgess

Civil Engineering
“Improvement makes straight roads; but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of Genius.”
—William Blake
“A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”
—Douglas Adams

Nationalism
“It is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way round.”
—Ernest Gellner
“Human nature, as manifested in tribalism and nationalism, provides the momentum of the machinery of human evolution.”
—Arthur Keith

Opera and Ballet
“Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, he sings.”
—Robert Benchley
“It [ballet] projects a fragile kind of strength and a certain inflexible precision.”
—Ayn Rand

Natural History
“Had I been present at the Creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe.”
—Nelson Algren
“In all works on Natural History, we constantly find details of the marvelous adaptation of animals to their food, their habits, and the localities in which they are found.”
—Alfred Wallace

Scorched Earth
“War is hell.”
—William Tecumseh Sherman
“I only understand friendship or scorched earth.”
—Roger Ailes

Urbanization
“It’s the Industrial Revolution and the growth of urban concentrations that led to a sense of anonymity.”
—Vint Cerf
“What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.”
—Joseph Brodsky

Capitalism
“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”
—Winston Churchill
“Always try to rub up against money, for if you rub against money long enough, some of it may rub off on you.”
—Damon Runyon

Conservation
“Water and air, the two essentials on which life depends, have become global garbage cans.”
—Jacques Yves Cousteau
“Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.”
—Edward Wilson

Mass Media
“The effect of the mass media is not to elicit belief but to maintain the apparatus of addiction.”
—Christopher Lasch
“If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're misinformed.”
—Mark Twain

Mobilization
“When they are preparing for war, those who rule by force speak most copiously about peace until they have completed the mobilization process.”
—Stefan Zweig
“In order to rally people, governments need enemies … if they do not have a real enemy, they will invent one in order to mobilize us.”
—Nhat Hanh

Nuclear Program
“The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking…the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.”
—Albert Einstein
“The children of the nuclear age, I think, were weakened in their capacity to love. Hard to love, when you’re bracing yourself for impact.”
—Martin Amis

Ideology
“It has been demonstrated that no system, not even the most inhuman, can continue to exist without an ideology.”
—Joe Slovo
“Slowly, ideas lead to ideology, lead to policies that lead to actions.”
—Nandan Nilekani

Suffrage
“Why is a woman to be treated differently? Woman suffrage will succeed, despite this miserable guerilla opposition.”
—Victoria Woodhull
“Men, their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less.”
—Susan B. Anthony

Totalitarianism
“Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.”
—Hannah Arendt
“The ultimate end of any ideology is totalitarianism.”
—Tom Robbins

Class Struggle
“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war … and we’re winning.”
—Warren Buffett
“The class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat.”
—Karl Marx

Cold War
“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.”
—Winston Churchill
“The Cold War is not thawing; it is burning with a deadly heat.”
—Richard Nixon

Professional Sports
“If winning isn’t everything, why do they keep score?”
—Vince Lombardi
“Sports do not build character. They reveal it.”
—Heywood Broun

Cultural Heritage
“A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.”
—Marcus Garvey
“You don’t stumble upon your heritage. It’s there, just waiting to be explored and shared.”
—Robbie Robertson

Rapid Deployment
“A good plan violently executed right now is far better than a perfect plan executed next week.”
—George S. Patton
“Never mind the maneuvers, just go straight at them.”
—Horatio Nelson

Space Race
“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
—John F. Kennedy
“NASA spent millions of dollars inventing the ballpoint pen so they could write in space. The Russians took a pencil.”
—Will Chabot

Environmentalism
“I shall return again to the light of the sun, to prepare a home for thy descendants.”
—Argonautica, Apollonius Rhodius

Globalization
“It has been said that arguing against globalization is like arguing against the laws of gravity.”
—Kofi Annan
“One day there will be no borders, no boundaries, no flags and no countries and the only passport will be the heart.”
—Carlos Santana

Social Media
“Which of all my important nothings shall I tell you first?”
—Jane Austen
“Distracted from distraction by distraction!”
—T.S. Eliot

Near Future Governance
“Justice is the bond of men in states, for the administration of justice, which is the determination of what is just, is the principle of order in political society.”
—Aristotle

Venture Politics
“Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.”
—John Stuart Mill

Distributed Sovereignty
“Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision: for the day of the Lord is near in the valley of decision.”
—Joel 3:14

Optimization Imperative
“We find every where men of mechanical genius, of great general acuteness, and discriminative understanding, who make no scruple in pronouncing the Automaton a pure machine, unconnected with human agency in its movements, and consequently, beyond all comparison, the most astonishing of the inventions of mankind.”
—Edgar Allen Poe

Information Warfare
“It has been said aforetime that he who knows both sides has nothing to fear in a hundred fights…”
—Sun Tzu
“If the enemy know not where he will be attacked, he must prepare in every quarter, and so be everywhere weak.”
—Sun Tzu

Global Warming Mitigation
“Fetter this malefactor to the jagged rocks
In adamantine bonds infrangible.”
—Aeschylus

Cultural Hegemony
“Ah, my Belovéd, fill the cup that clears
To-day of past Regrets and future Fears—
To-morrow?—Why, To-morrow I may be
Myself with Yesterday’s Sev’n Thousand Years.”
—Edward FitzGerald

Smart Power Doctrine
“The time will come and is inevitably coming when all institutions based on force will disappear through their uselessness, stupidity, and even inconvenience becoming obvious to all.”
—Leo Tolstoy

Exodus Imperative
“This, O Best Beloved, is another story of the High and Far Off Times.”
—Rudyard Kipling

Future Civic
“You can never plan the future by the past.”
—Edmund Burke
“I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.”
—Albert Einstein

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