VALKYRIE ARMS, LTD

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with a result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by dictatorship. The average age of the world s greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence:
    - From bondage to spiritual faith;
    - From spiritual faith to great courage;
    - From courage to liberty;
    - From liberty to abundance;
    - From abundance to selfishness;
    - From selfishness to complacency;
    - From complacency to apathy;
    - From apathy to dependency;
    - From dependency back into bondage.

-- The Decline and Fall of the Athenian Republic
Alexander Fraser Tyler (1748 - 1813)

"Nemo Me Impune Lacessit [Lat.] No one injures me with impunity."

-- Motto of Scotland

"Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes? [Lat.] Who shall guard the guardians?"

"Silent Leges Inter Arma [Lat.] The laws are silent in time of war."

"Ultima Ratio Regum [Lat.] The final argument of kings: war."

"The wicked have only accomplices; voluptuaries have companions in debauch, self-seekers have partners, politicians attract partisans; the generality of idle men have attachments; princes have courtiers, and virtuous men alone have friends."

-- Voltaire - "Philosophical Dictionary" (1764)

"Do not be afraid of enemies; the worst they can do is to kill you. Do not be afraid of friends; the worst they can do is betray you. Be afraid of the indifferent; they do not kill or betray. But only because of their silent agreement, betrayal and murder exist on earth."

-- Bruno Yasienski - "The Plot of the Indifferent" (1937)

"To get the bad customs of a country changed and new ones, though better, introduced, it is necessary first to remove the prejudices of the people, enlighten their ignorance, and convince them that their interests will be promoted by the proposed changes, and this is not the work of a day."

-- Benjamin Franklin (1781)

"There is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than the creation of a new order of things..... Whenever his enemies have occasion to attack the innovator they do so with the passion of partisans, while the others defend him sluggishly so that the innovator and his party alike are vulnerable."

-- Niccolo Machiavelli (1513)

"He who desires or attempts to reform the government of a state, and wishes to have it accepted ... must at least retain the semblence of the old forms; so that it may seem to the people that there has been no change in the institutions ..."

-- Niccolo Machiavelli (1513)

"For government consists in nothing else but so controlling subjects that they shall neither be able to, nor have cause to do [it] harm…"

-- Niccolo Machiavelli

"It is just as difficult and dangerous to try to free a people that wants to remain servile as it is to enslave a people that wants to remain free."

-- Niccolo Machiavelli

"In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant."

-- Charles de Gaulle

"Once you stop fearing government, the government fears you."

-- Robert D. Graham, tax rebel

"Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers."

-- Mignon McLaughlin, writer

"The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don't have to waste your time voting."

-- Charles Bukowski

"No one is bound to obey an unconstitutional law and no courts are bound to enforce it."

-- 16 Am. Jur., Sec. 177 late 2d, Sec. 256

"Wherever is found what is called a paternal government, there is found state education. It has been discovered that the best way to insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery."

-- Benjamin Disraeli

"The ultimate consequence of protecting men from the results of their own folly is to fill the world with fools."

-- Herbert Spencer

"If you love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains set lightly upon you; and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen."

-- Samual Adams, American Revolutionary

"Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it."

-- George Bernard Shaw

"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."

-- William Pitt the Younger, British prime minister

"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt."

-- Bertrand Russell

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen."

-- Albert Einstein

"Man is a creature made at the end of the week's work when God was tired."

-- Mark Twain

"Politics consists in the art of taking votes from the poor and money from the rich under the pretext of protecting each from the other."

-- Anonymous

"Prediction is extremely difficult. Especially about the future."

-- Niels Bohr

"There are two kinds of people: those who do the work and those who take the credit. Try to be in the first group; there is less competition there."

-- Indira Gandhi

"Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and to think what nobody else has thought."

-- Albert Szent-Gyoergi

"Wise men talk because they have something to say. Fools talk because they have to say something."

-- Plato

"Mothers all want their sons to grow up to be president but they don't want them to become politicians in the process."

-- John F. Kennedy

"Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it is the only one you have."

-- Emile Chartier

"Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not. A sense of humor was provided to console him for what he is."

-- Horace Walpole

"I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal."

-- Jane Austen, letter of December 24, 1798

"Do what you can, with what you have, where you are."

-- Theodore Roosevelt

"Information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom."

-- Unknown

"Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear."

-- Ambrose Redmoon

"The greatest mistake you can make in this life is to be continually fearing that you will make one."

-- Elbert Hubbard

"The past gives us experience and memories; the present gives us challenges and opportunities; the future gives us vision and hope."

-- William Arthur Ward (1921-1994), Journalist

"Just remember--when you think all is lost, the future remains."

-- Robert Goddard (1882-1945), Physicist and rocket scientist

"The human race is divided into two classes--those who go ahead and do something, and those who sit still and inquire, 'Why wasn't it done the other way?'"

-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841-1935) U.S. Supreme Court justice

"There is a time to let things happen and a time to make things happen."

-- Hugh Prather Minister and counselor

"Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder."

-- George Washington (1732-1799) 1st U.S. President

This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow as the night the day
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

--Shakespeare

To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.

--Robert Louis Stevenson

Truly superior pilots are those who use their superior judgment to avoid those situations where they might have to use their superior skills.

--Unknown

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

--Theodore Roosevelt - "Citizenship in a Republic" Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910