America

I love America. I love the freedoms that we enjoy and I feel so blessed to be able to live here. I do have extremely strong political values, and they have grown even stronger since my brother joined the military. When he went to Iraq, I realized just how much people in this country are willing to sacrifice in order for us to be a free nation.... I just wanted to share a few quotes that I came across....

"Human freedom is not a gift of man. It is an achievement by man, and as it was gained by vigilance and struggle, so it may be lost in indifference."
~Harry F. Bird

"Democracy is based upon the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in every day people."
~ Harry Emerson Fosdick


"Guard against the postures of pretended patriotism."
~ George Washington

"The cost of freedom is always high; but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender, or submission."
~JFK

"Not active trade and victorious armies, but religion and morality are the safeguards of freedom."
~Robert Payne Smith

And recently, here are a few of my favorites. I don't mean to offend anyone with these statements, but I do wish to express my opinions....

“To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.”-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Joseph Milligan, April 6, 1816

“Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but only those specifically enumerated.”-Thomas Jefferson

James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, elaborated upon this limitation in a letter to James Robertson:“With respect to the two words ‘general welfare,’ I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators.”

“…[T]he government of the United States is a definite government, confined to specified objects. It is not like the state governments, whose powers are more general. Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government.”-James Madison