Love, Fear

It used to be possible for me to gauge the depth of my love for someone by the intensity of the fear created in my contemplation of their death.
--Suzanne Clothier

Empathy

The thing Romney needs to do to beat Obama is show up in this debate and not have another empathy comment. Those comments are really hurting him far more than any 47% comments. The government's not here for empathy, it's here for the law. If we use empathy for everything we want to do, that's how countries go bankrupt and bad policy is created.
--Ryan Rhodes (Tea Party activist from Iowa)

Notice

This world is too bad. We must notice it.
--Bertrand Russell

Agenda

Environmentalists have always had an agenda to put nature above man. If they can find an end to their means, they don't care how it happens. If they can do it under the guise of global warming and climate change, they will do it.
--Donna Holt (leader of the Virginia Campaign for Liberty, a Tea Party affiliate)

Liberty

For the same reason, the more extensive a country, the more insignificant is each individual in his own eyes. This may be unfavorable to liberty.
--James Madison

Curse

I would trust politicians more if they would curse like normal human beings on occasion.
--Jon Valjon

Dogmatic

Dogmatic ideological parties tend to splinter the political and social fabric of a nation.
--George Romney (letter to Barry Goldwater, December 21, 1964)

Not You

One of the things you realize fairly quickly in this job is that there is a character people see out there called Barack Obama. That's not you. Whether it is good or bad, it is not you.
--Barack Obama

Each Other's Hands

The bloodiest and most difficult-to-forgive mistakes get made when we forget that we are all, whatever the role we choose in this particular transaction, in each other's hands.
--David Roth

Dimensions

Trying to hate Obamacare while taking pride in Romneycare is more than even a national politician can do without access to higher spatial dimensions.
--Stevens R. Miller

Time

A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.
--Bertrand Russell

Stole It

Now look, over there: That teacher/fireman/NFL referee has something you don't have! That person stole it from you. Go get 'em. We'll wait right here on our piles of money while you and him fight.
--Charles P. Pierce

Values

The most fateful change that unfolded during the past three decades was not an increase in greed. It was the expansion of markets, and of market values, into spheres of life where they don't belong.
--Michael Sandel

Blood

The only thing that seems to mobilize the Arab street is a movie, a cartoon or an insult, but not the pool of blood in Syria.
--Syrian activist on Twitter

Idiot

What he did was to say it worked in Massachusetts, but it can't work nationally. The problem he has is that's a totally illogical position, and he looks like an idiot.
--Jonathan Gruber (MIT economist who helped develop the health-care plan in that state)

Every Particle

There is no such thing as a person whose real self you like every particle of. This is why a world of liking is ultimately a lie. But there is such a thing as a person whose real self you love every particle of. And this is why love is such an existential threat to the techno-consumerist order: it exposes the lie.
--Jonathan Franzen

One Another

We must love one another or die.
--W.H. Auden ("September 1, 1939")

Liberty

Ignorance is the first threat to liberty. The second is to treat ourselves as economic units rather than as spiritual beings.
--Vartan Gregorian

Fairly

Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are good is like expecting the bull not to charge because you are a vegetarian.
--Anonymous

Dreams

We are all saddened when we look at the world and see what few accomplishments we have made, compared to what we feel are the potentialities of human beings. People in the past, in the nightmare of their times, had dreams for the future.
--Richard Feynman (1964)