“It is substantially true, that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. The rule, indeed, extends with more or less force to every species of free government.”
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George Washington
“Harmony, liberal intercourse with all nations, are recommended by policy, humanity, and interest.”
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George Washington
“I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station, through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in.”
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George Washington
“It is of infinite moment, that you should properly estimate the immense value of your national Union to your collective and individual happiness; that you should cherish a cordial, habitual, and immovable attachment to it; accustoming yourselves to think and speak of it as of the Palladium of your political safety and prosperity; watching for its preservation with jealous anxiety; discountenancing whatever may suggest even a suspicion, that it can in any event be abandoned; and indignantly frowning upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest, or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts.”
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George Washington
“...overgrown military establishments, which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to Republican Liberty.”
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George Washington
“Happiness depends more upon the internal frame of a person’s own mind, than on the externals in the world.”
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George Washington
“The turning points of lives are not the great moments. The real crises are often concealed in occurrences so trivial in appearance that they pass unobserved.”
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George Washington
“It is absolutely necessary... for me to have persons that can think for me, as well as execute orders.”
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George Washington
“No morn has ever dawned more favourably than ours did; and no day was ever more clouded than the present. Wisdom and good examples are necessary at this time to rescue the political machine from the impending storm.”
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George Washington
“Do not suffer your good nature [...] to say yes when you ought to say no; remember that it is a public not a private cause that is to be injured or benefitted by your choice”
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George Washington
“Man is the religious animal. He is the only religious animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion –- several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat, if his theology isn't straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother's path to happiness and heaven."
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George Washington
“Wherein you reprove another be unblameable yourself, for example is more prevalent than precepts.”
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George Washington
“If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”
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George Washington
“Every man thinks God is on his side. The rich and powerful know he is. Jean Anouilh, French dramatist and playwright”
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George Washington
“The Church says that the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the Church. Ferdinand Magellan, Portuguese and Spanish explorer”
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George Washington