Realmscapes

Quote for 2008, On the Pursuit of Happiness

"My friend, the Constitution only guarantees the American people the right to pursue happiness; you have to catch it yourself."

   --Benjamin Franklin

Quote for 2008, On Church and State

"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."

   --John Adams, 2nd President of the United States (F-MA)

Quote for 2008, On Accountability

"If there were a Republican to blame this [sub-prime mortgage mess] on, he would be sitting before congressional committees six weeks ago."

   --Rush Limbaugh

Quote for 2008, On Debating the Liberal Mind

"I'll give you one of my favorite pieces of advice, Mary, and that's, 'Don't get in an argument with fools, because after awhile nobody will be able to tell who's the fool, you or the fool.'

"I know the desire is to inform 'em, and the desire is to educate them and to change their mind on things, and there's a way to do it, but debate will not do it. You know, ridiculing them, asking them provocative questions and so forth to which the answers are obvious, but even then it's going to be very tough because you're not talking about people who have arrived at an opinion after an intellectual process. You know how hard it is to argue with emotion. Okay, you say you love country music. I say, 'I'm not a big fan of it,' and then I say, 'You're wrong.' How can anybody be 'wrong' liking a kind of music? You can't be. Your tastes can be questioned, but you can't be said to be wrong in those kinds of likes, and that's what we're talking about with people liking Democrats. They like Democrats because Democrats put down who they think are the enemy, and if they ever did take a moment to think about it or educate themselves they'd realize how wrong they are. But then we get to the problem they don't want to know that they're wrong because that's crushing. You have to understand, there are a lot of people out there who don't want to be right. They don't care about being right or wrong. They want to feel good, and anything you do that gets in the way of that makes you the enemy."

   --Rush Limbaugh

Quote for 2008, On Memorial Day

Quote for 2008, On War

"War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend..."

  Faramir, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

Quote for 2008, Week 2

"To please God [is] to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness..."

   C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

Quote for 2007, Week 52

"How can a tree stand tall
   if the rain won't fall
      to wash its branches down?"

   "Lift the Wings" (song from Riverdance)

Quote for 2007, Week 46

"The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist."

   "Verbal" Kint, The Usual Suspects

Quote for 2007, Week 44

"[Baseball] is really humbling. If you think you have it all figured out, it will put you on your ass really quickly."

   Theo Epstein, after winning the 2007 World Series

Quote for 2007, Week 41

Be true to yourself.
Make each day your masterpiece.
Help others.
Drink deeply from good books, especially the Bible.
Make friendship a fine art.
Build a shelter against a rainy day.
Pray for guidance and give thanks for your blessings every day.

   Joshua Wooden, to his son John upon graduating grammar school

Quote for 2007, Week 40

"How dare you [the "Michigan militia"] suggest that we in the freest nation on Earth live in tyranny? How dare you call yourselves patriots and heroes...? There is nothing patriotic about hating your country, or pretending that you can love your country but despise your government. There is nothing heroic about turning your back on America, or ignoring your own responsibilities. If you want to preserve your own freedom, you must stand up for the freedom of others with whom you disagree. But you also must stand up for the rule of law. You cannot have one without the other."

  Bill Clinton

Quote for 2007, Week 39

Every September, I recall that is more than half a century (62 years) since I landed at Nagasaki with the 2nd Marine Division in the original occupation of Japan following World War II. This time every year, I have watched and listened to the light-hearted "peaceniks" and their light-headed symbolism-without-substance of ringing bells, flying pigeons, floating candles, and sonorous chanting and I recall again that "Peace is not a cause - it is an effect."

In July, 1945, my fellow 8th RCT Marines [I was a BARman] and I returned to Saipan following the successful conclusion of the Battle of Okinawa. We were issued new equipment and replacements joined each outfit in preparation for our coming amphibious assault on the home islands of Japan.

B-29 bombing had leveled the major cities of Japan, including Kobe, Osaka, Nagoya, Yokohama, Yokosuka, and Tokyo.

We were informed we would land three Marine divisions and six Army divisions, perhaps abreast, with large reserves following us in. It was estimated that it would cost half a million casualties to subdue the Japanese homeland.

In August, the A-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima but the Japanese government refused to surrender. Three days later a second A-bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki. The Imperial Japanese government finally surrendered.

Following the 1941 sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, a Japanese admiral said, "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant..." Indeed, they had. Not surprisingly, the atomic bomb was produced by a free people functioning in a free environment. Not surprisingly because the creative process is a natural human choice-making process and inventiveness occurs most readily where choice-making opportunities abound. America!

Tamper with a giant, indeed! Tyrants, beware: Free men are nature's pit bulls of Liberty! The Japanese learned the hard way what tyrants of any generation should know: Never start a war with a free people - you never know what they may invent!

As a newly assigned member of a U.S. Marine intelligence section, I had a unique opportunity to visit many major cities of Japan, including Tokyo and Hiroshima, within weeks of their destruction. For a full year I observed the beaches, weapons, and troops we would have assaulted had the A-bombs not been dropped. Yes, it would have been very destructive for all, but especially for the people of Japan.

When we landed in Japan, for what came to be the finest and most humane occupation of a defeated enemy in recorded history, it was with great appreciation, thanksgiving, and praise for the atomic bomb team, including the aircrew of the Enola Gay. A half million American homes had been spared the Gold Star flag, including, I'm sure, my own.

Whenever I hear the apologists expressing guilt and shame for A-bombing and ending the war Japan had started (they ignore the cause-effect relation between Pearl Harbor and Nagasaki), I have noted that neither the effete critics nor the puff-adder politicians are among us in the assault landing-craft or the stinking rice paddies of their suggested alternative, "conventional" warfare. Stammering reluctance is obvious and continuous, but they do love to pontificate about the Rights that others, and the Bomb, have bought and preserved for them.

The vanities of ignorance and camouflaged cowardice abound as license for the assertion of virtuous "rights" purchased by the blood of others - those others who have borne the burden and physical expense of Rights whining apologists so casually and self-righteously claim.

At best, these fakers manifest a profound and cryptic ignorance of causal relations, myopic perception, and dull I.Q. At worst, there is a word and description in The Constitution defining those who love the enemy more than they love their own countrymen and their own posterity. Every Yankee Doodle Dandy knows what that word is.

In 1945, America was the only nation in the world with the Bomb and it behaved responsibly and respectfully. It remained so until two among us betrayed it to the Kremlin. Still, this American weapon system has been the prime deterrent to earth's latest model world- tyranny: Seventy years of Soviet collectivist definition, coercion, and domination of individual human beings.

The message is this: Trust Freedom. Remember, tyrants never learn. The restriction of Freedom is the limitation of human choice, and choice is the fulcrum-point of the creative process in human affairs. As earth's choicemaker, it is our human identity on nature's beautiful blue planet and the natural premise of man's free institutions, environments, and respectful relations with one another. Made in the image of our Creator, free men choose, create, and progress - or die.

Free men should not fear the moon-god-crowd oppressor nor choose any of his ways. Recall with a confident Job and a victorious David, "Know ye not that you are in league with the stones of the field?"

Semper Fidelis
Jim Baxter, Sgt. USMC (WW II and Korean War)

Quote for 2007, Week 38

"Anyone can negatively criticize - it is the cheapest of all comment because it requires not a modicum of the effort that suggestion requires."

   Chuck Jones

Quote for 2007, Week 37

"Truth is eternal, knowledge is changeable. It is disastrous to confuse them."

   Madeleine L'Engle

Quote for 2007, Week 36

"Until you are wholeheartedly engaged in the small things the Lord has already asked you to do, He is not going to bless your 'passion' [...] because it will only draw you away from Him."

   George Escobar

Quote for 2007, Week 32

"[A] man that flies from his fear may find that he has only taken a short cut to meet it."

   Sador, The Children of Húrin

Quote for 2007, Week 31

"We learn more by looking for the answer to a question and not finding it than we do from learning the answer itself."

   Lloyd Alexander

Quote for 2007, Week 30

"Light changes many thoughts."

   Aragorn, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

Quote for 2007, Week 29

"To lift us, God puts us low. To give us sight, He first must blind. To give new life, He must shatter the old life."

   David S Schuller

Quote for 2007, Week 28

"You did well to [rebuke] him as you did; there is but little of this faithful dealing with men now-a-days, and that makes religion to stink so in the nostrils of many, as it doth; these talkative fools whose religion is only in word, and are debauched and vain in their conversation that (being so much admitted into the fellowship of the godly) do puzzle the world, blemish Christianity, and grieve the sincere."

   John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress

Quote for 2007, Week 27

"Without God democracy will not and cannot long endure. And that, simply, is the heart of my message: if we ever forget that we are One Nation Under God, then we will be a nation gone under."

   Ronald Reagan

Quote for 2007, Week 26

"Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish."

   Albert Einstein

Quote for 2007, Week 25

...
And only by one's going slightly taut
In the capriciousness of summer air
Is of the slightest bondage made aware.

   Robert Frost, "The Silken Tent"

Quote for 2007, Week 24

I walked through a county courthouse square
On a park bench, an old man was sittin' there.
I said, "Your old court house is kinda run down,
He said, "Naw, it'll do for our little town".
I said, "Your old flag pole is leaned a little bit,
And that's a ragged old flag you got hangin' on it".
He said, "Have a seat", and I sat down,
"Is this the first time you've been to our little town"
I said, "I think it is"
He said "I don't like to brag, but we're kinda proud of
That Ragged Old Flag

"You see, we got a little hole in that flag there,
When Washington took it across the Delaware.
and It got powder burned the night Francis Scott Key sat watching it,
writing "Say Can You See"
It got a rip in New Orleans, with Packingham & Jackson
tugging at its seams.
and It almost fell at the Alamo
beside the Texas flag,
But she waved on though.
She got cut with a sword at Chancellorsville,
And she got cut again at Shiloh Hill.
There was Robert E. Lee and Beauregard and Bragg,
And the south wind blew hard on
That Ragged Old Flag

"On Flanders Field in World War I,
She got a big hole from a Bertha Gun,
She turned blood red in World War II
She hung limp, and low, a time or two,
She was in Korea, Vietnam, She went where she was sent
by her Uncle Sam.
She waved from our ships upon the briny foam
and now they've about quit wavin' back here at home
in her own good land here She's been abused,
She's been burned, dishonored, denied an' refused,
And the government for which she stands
Has been scandalized throughout out the land.
And she's getting thread bare, and she's wearin' thin,
But she's in good shape, for the shape she's in.
Cause she's been through the fire before
and i believe she can take a whole lot more.

"So we raise her up every morning
And we bring her down slow every night,
We don't let her touch the ground,
And we fold her up right.
On second thought
I do like to brag
Cause I'm mighty proud of
That Ragged Old Flag"

   Johnny Cash, "Ragged Old Flag"

Quote for 2007, Week 23

"...Despair is a greater sin than any of the sins which provoke it."

   C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (#29)

Quote for 2007, Week 22

"Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them."

   Nathaniel Hawthorne

Quote for 2007, Week 21

"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."

   Ray Bradbury

Quote for 2007, Week 20

"A blank page is God's way of showing you how hard it is to be God."

   Anonymous

Quote for 2007, Week 19

"When you dive into a pit easy, there is nothing to do but to crawl out hard."

   Jim Carmody, The Left Hand of God

Quote for 2007, Week 18

"It doesn't matter how many times they knock you down. It matters how many times you can get up"

   David Ortiz

Quote for 2007, Week 17

"Dreams are just goals we have put out of our reach."

Quote for 2007, Week 16

"We succeed only as we identify in life, or in war, or in anything else, a single overriding objective, and make all other considerations bend to that one objective."

   Dwight D Eisenhower

Quote for 2007, Week 15

"Why do you seek the living amongst the dead? He is not here; He is risen!"

   the angel at the tomb of Christ

Quote for 2007, Week 14

"It's Opening Day, and we can all be kids once more."

   Terry Cashman, from "Opening Day"

Quote for 2007, Week 13

"Whenever you write, whatever you write, never make the mistake of assuming the audience is any less intelligent than you are."

   Rod Serling

Quote for 2007, Week 12

"Mas’r Legree, as ye bought me, I’ll be a true and faithful servant to ye.  I’ll give ye all the work of my hands, all my time, all my strength; but my soul I won’t give up to mortal man.  I will hold on to the Lord, and put his commands before all,-die or live; you may be sure on ‘t. Mas’r Legree, I an’t a grain afeard to die.  I’d as soon die as not.  Ye may whip me, starve me, burn me,-it’ll only send me sooner where I want to go."

   Tom, Uncle Tom's Cabin

Quote for 2007, Week 11

"Men willingly believe what they wish."

   Julius Caesar

Quote for 2007, Week 10

"Hate doesn't do anybody any good. It doesn't. It's not a motivator. It doesn't inspire. It just enrages and angers and paralyzes."

   Rush Limbaugh

Quote for 2007, Week 8

It's President's Day so here are words from some of our greatest Presidents.. and because it's an oppurtunity to celebrate the Presidency of the great Ronald Reagan, he gets three--and gets to go first:

"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free."

"Abortion is advocated only by persons who have themselves been born."

"Above all, we must realize that no arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women. It is a weapon our adversaries in today's world do not have."

   Ronald Reagan

"There is nothing that gives a man consequence, and renders him fit for command, like a support that renders him independent of everybody but the State he serves."

   George Washington

"We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind of self-government; upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God."

   James Madison

"One man with courage makes a majority."

   Andrew Jackson

"It is men who wait to be selected, and not those who seek, from whom we may expect the most efficient service."

   Ulysses S Grant

"Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat."

   Teddy Roosevelt

"We must remember that any oppression, any injustice, any hatred, is a wedge designed to attack our civilization."

   Franklin D Roosevelt

"Carry the battle to them. Don't let them bring it to you. Put them on the defensive. And don't ever apologize for anything."

   Harry S Truman

"There is nothing wrong with America that the faith, love of freedom, intelligence and energy of her citizens cannot cure."

   Dwight D Eisenhower

"The greatness comes not when things go always good for you. But the greatness comes when you're really tested, when you take some knocks, some disappointments, when sadness comes. Because only if you've been in the deepest valley can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain."

   Richard Nixon

"God is not on the side of any nation, yet we know He is on the side of justice. Our finest moments [as a nation] have come when we faithfully served the cause of justice for our own citizens, and for the people of other lands."

   George W Bush

Quote for 2007, Week 7

"The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just."

   Abraham Lincoln

Quote for 2007, Week 6

"No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft."

   H.G. Wells

Quote for 2007, Week 5

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."

   Edmund Burke

Quote for 2007, Week 4

"Looking for God...by exploring space is like reading or seeing all Shakespeare's plays in the hope that you will find Shakespeare as one of the characters..."

   C.S. Lewis, "The Seeing Eye", Christian Reflections

Quote for 2007, Week 3

"...the suffering of one man is the suffering of all. Distances are irrelevant to injustice. If not stopped soon enough, evil eventually reaches out to engulf all men, whether they have opposed it or ignored it."

   General Obi-Wan Kenobi, Star Wars: A New Hope

Quote for 2007, Week 2

“‘Circumstantial evidence is a very tricky thing,’ answered Holmes thoughtfully; ‘it may seem to point very straight to one thing, but if you shift your point of view a little, you may find it pointing in an equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different’ . . . ‘There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact’.”

   Sherlock Holmes, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - "The Boscombe Valley Mystery"

Quote for 2007, Week 1

"God creates out of nothing. Therefore, until a man is nothing, God can make nothing out of him."
     Dr Martin Luther