The Notes (19 page)
I
n our city we have drunk the dregs of the cup of infamy; we have been betrayed by pub. officials & sold out by those we trusted. But in our city we have never had anyone so vicious, so venomous, so putrescent or so vile as Harrison Gray Otis of the L.A. Times. The one blot on the escutcheon of L.A.—the bar sinister upon your city is Harrison Gray Otis of the L.A. Times. There he sits in senile dementia, with gangrene heart & rotting brain, grimacing at our every attempt at reform & chattering away in impotent rage while he goes down to his foul grave in snarling infamy.
Will Rogers
Y
ou are sentenced to prison as long as it’s made comfortable for you & your desire to remain. In checking out let the warden know, so he will know how many there will be for supper.
E
ven when you make out a tax return on the level you don’t know if you are a crook or a martyr.
E
very time a lawyer writes something, he is not writing for posterity. He’s writing so endless others of his craft can make a living out of trying to figure out what he said. Course perhaps he hadn’t really said anything, that’s what makes it hard to explain.
T
he minute you read something & you can’t understand it, you can be sure it was written by a lawyer. Then if you give it to another lawyer to read & he don’t know just what it means then you can be sure it was drawn up by a lawyer. If it’s in a few words and its plain & understandable only one way it was written by a non-lawyer.
Norman Thomas
S
ocialism is a scare word to many but it has a high degree of acceptance by people who hotly deny it. Nov. 21 1957, N.Y. Times (could be ’54).
Thomas Jefferson
I
place economy among the 1st & most important virtues, & public debt as the greatest of dangers to be feared. To preserve our independence we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. If we run into such debt we must be taxed in our meat & drink, in our necessities & in our comforts, in our labor & amusements. If we can prevent the govt. from wasting the labor of the people
under the pretense of caring for them
, they will be happy.
Samuel Gompers
O
nly resentment is aroused & the end is not gained. Only thru moral suasion & appeal to men’s reason can a movement succeed.
Lord Macaulay to Hon. H. S. Randall—N.Y. (Grandson, Thom. Jeff.), May 23 1857
A
s I said before, when society has entered on this downward progress either civilization or lib. must perish. Either some Caesar or Napoleon will seize the reins of govt. with a strong hand, or your rep. will be fearfully plundered & laid waste by barbarians in the 20th century as the Roman emp. was in the 5th; with this diff., that the Huns & vandals who ravaged the Roman Emp. came from without & that your Huns & vandals will be engendered form within your country by your own institutions.
Poem
His horse went dead & his mule went lame,
And he lost 6 cows in the poker game.
Then a hurricane came on a summer’s day
And blew the house where he lived away
An earthquake came when that was gone
And swallowed the land the house stood on
And then the tax collector came around
& charged him up with the hole in the ground.
Whittaker Chambers
M
y eye came to rest on the delicate convolutions of her ear. Those intricate perfect ears the thought passed through my mind—no those ears were not (as the comms. say) created by any chance coming together of atoms in nature. I didn’t know it at the time but God had laid his finger on my forehead.
Thomas Jefferson
T
he God who gave us life gave us liberty—can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?
George Washington
D
espair my fellow countrymen of ever teaching citizenship save on the basis of immorality & abandon all hope of teaching morality on any other foundation than religion for the nation that forgot God has never been allowed to endure.
Patrick Henry
P
erfect freedom is necessary to the health & vigor of both commerce & citizenship & both will have freedom concurrently or neither will have it at all.
W
e have it within our power to begin the world over again.
T
hose who expect to reap the blessing of freedom must undertake to support it.
I
have no light to illuminate the pathway of the future save that which falls over my shoulder from the past.
John Dickinson, Signer, Declaration of Independence
I
t is not our duty to leave wealth to our children, but it is our duty to leave liberty to them. We have counted the cost of this content & we find nothing so dreadful as voluntary slavery.
Abe Lincoln
I
should be the most presumptuous blockhead upon this footstool if I for one day thought that I could discharge the duties which have come upon me, since I came to this place, without the aid & enlightenment of one who is stronger & wiser than all others.
Antigone to the Legislature: Sophocles
Y
ou who are mortal cannot change the infallible, unwritten laws of heaven They did not begin today or yesterday, but they are everlasting & none can tell the hour that saw their birth. I would not from fear of any human edict, incur the God-inflicted penalty of disobeying divine law.
William Penn