The Notes (4 page)

I
place ec. among the 1st & most important virtues and pub. debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared. We must make our election between ec. & liberty or profusion & servitude.

I
f we let Wash. tell us when to sow & when to reap the Nation shall soon want for bread.

A
rebuke to Cong. “How could it be otherwise in a body to which the people send 150 lawyers whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing & talk by the hour.”

T
he basis of our govt. being the opinion of the people, the very 1st object should be to keep that right; & were it left to me to decide whether we should have govt. without newspapers or newspapers without govt., I should unhesitatingly prefer the latter.

W
ise & frugal govt. which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry & improvement & shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.

Abe Lincoln

1864
—By general law life & limb must be protected, yet often a limb must be amputated to save a life, but a life is never wisely given to save a limb. I felt that measures otherwise unconst. might become lawful by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the nation. Right or wrong I assumed that ground & now avow it.

Montesquieu, 1748—Forms of Govt.

E
ach has a special relationship to its people. When that relationship is changed that form of govt. is doomed. 1—Dictatorship—Fear (can’t survive if people no longer fear the dictator). 2—Monarchy—respect & affection for the Crown. 3—Rep. Govt.—There must be virtue among the people.

Winston Churchill

S
ome people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a healthy horse pulling a sturdy wagon.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1935

T
he Fed. govt. must & shall quit this business of relief. Continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual & moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to Nat. fibre. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.

F.D.R., Pittsburgh, Oct. 19, 1932

M
ost of this new govt. created credit has been taken to finance the govt.’s continuing deficits. The truth is that the burden is absorbing their resources. All this is highly undesirable & wholly unnecessary. It arises from one cause only and that is the unbalanced bud. and the continued failure of this admin. to take effective steps to balance it. If that budget had been fully & honestly balanced in 1930 as it could have been, some of the 1931 collapse would have been avoided. Even if it had been balanced in 1931 as it could have been, much of the extreme dip in 1932 would have been obviated. . . . Would it not be infinitely better to clear this whole subject of obscurity—to present the facts squarely to the Cong. and the people of the U.S. & secure the one sound foundation of permanent econ. recovery—a complete & honest balance of the Fed. Bud.?

John F. Kennedy Re: His Tax Cut

O
ur true choice is not between tax reduction on the 1 hand & the avoidance of large Fed. deficits on the other. Our economy stifled by restrictive tax rates will never produce enough revenue to balance the budget. Just as it will never produce enough jobs or enough profits.

Woodrow Wilson