Quotes

One of the fondest memories of my Granddad Nelson was trading quotes regularly over email. Sadly I lost the email archive when I went on my mission, but it has continued to be an interest of mine. I hope you enjoy my collection of quotes. A bit of everything from religion to politics to leadership.

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.

You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not ahve to work beacuase the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it.

The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop.

If you are born poor, it is not your mistake. But if you die poor it is your mistake.

I’d have no desire to penalize a man because he’s worth only fifteen dollars a week. But I’ll be damned if I can see why a man worth forty must be penalized—and penalized in favor of the one who’s less competent

A modern parable: a little girl comes up to her dad and says that all the other kids she races against have better shoes than she does. The dad asks her if she won the race. She responded with of course I won I’m faster and trained really hard. The dad replies that she doesn’t need the fancy shoes then since she still won the race.
The message to learn from this is that we may not have the best of everything but if we work hard and strive to do our best we can still “win the race.”

We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.

The thermometer of success is merely the jealousy of the malcontents.