All courtesy of Brainyquote:

A well-instructed people alone can be permanently a free people.

All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree.

America was indebted to immigration for her settlement and prosperity. That part of America which had encouraged them most had advanced most rapidly in population, agriculture and the arts.

Americans have the right and advantage of being armed – unlike the citizens of other countries whose governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.

By rendering the labor of one, the property of the other, they cherish pride, luxury, and vanity on one side; on the other, vice and servility, or hatred and revolt.

I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent
encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpation’s.

It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.

Madison was one of the founding fathers whose contributions to the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, and the nation, were prodigious.  He was the author and primary proponent of the Bill of Rights.

Madison served in Congress, as Secretary of State to Jefferson, and was the first Congressman to be elected President.

His wife Dolley set the standard for future first ladies (serving in that role unofficially for Thomas Jefferson during his administration as well).

-A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers.

-Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one’s government is not necessarily to secure
freedom.

-Even the striving for equality by means of a directed economy can result only in an officially enforced inequality

-an authoritarian determination of the status of each individual in the new hierarchical order.

Above from Brainyquote.

-To be controlled in our economic pursuits means to be controlled in everything.

-The system of private property is the most important guaranty of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not.

Above from Famous-quote.net.

-“It is rarely remembered now that socialism in its beginnings was frankly authoritarian. It began quite openly as a reaction against the liberalism of the French Revolution. The French writers who laid its foundation had no doubt that their ideas could be put into practice only by a strong dictatorial government. The first of modern planners, Saint-Simon, predicted that those who did not obey his
proposed planning boards would be “treated as cattle.”

-“Who can seriously doubt that the power which a millionaire, who may be my employer, has over me is very much less thanthat which the smallest bureaucrat possesses who wields the coercive power of the state and on whose discretion it depends how I am allowed to live and work?”

-“To act on the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking, knowledge which in fact we do not possess, islikely to make us do much harm.”

From Thinkexist.com.

-One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.

-We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.

-The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.

-Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

George Orwell

What has always fascinated me about Orwell, is that his seminal works; Animal Farm, about the corruption of the Russian Revolution into the Leninist/Stalinist system of the Soviet Union, and 1984, describing a Totalitarian government (many points of which have come to pass); have come to be touchstones of the political Right, but he was an avowed Socialist and Leftist.

From Wikipedia:

It was the Spanish Civil War that played the most important part in defining his socialism. Having witnessed the success of the anarcho-syndicalist communities, and the subsequent brutal suppression of the anarcho-syndicalists and other revolutionaries by the Soviet-backed Communists, Orwell returned from Catalonia a staunch anti-Stalinist and joined the Independent Labour Party.

I am not a very Holiday oriented person.  I mark them passing, but they are, for me, essentially extensions of the weekend.  Days with less work, and a little more peacful, with a reduction in the amount of phone calls and emails.  Of course, I go through the motions for the family, as it is important to have these touchstones.

This year, though, I find myself truly happy to see the passing of the year, and the dawn of a new one.

2007 was, personally and professionally, a simply horrible year.  Maybe not the worst of my life, but certainly not the best.

It began, in earnest, when on Jan 2, I found out that a friend and mentor had passed away.  As January progressed, we discovered at work that making the transition to a new software platform for the business would be slightly more painfaul than the two weeks of chaos we had been promised… It was more like three or four months.

Things went that way through the summer, until late this fall, we found that my brother had a serious medical problem, that might have been cancerous as well.

As the year ended, my Brother is fine, and mending, but my friend and mentor is still gone, and his legacy is fading fast.  It looks like issues at work have bottomed out, and may start to improve, though I am finding that there are other opportunities out there.

2008 will have it’s own issues and problems.  It started last night, with the Fireworks “computer error” at the space needle (Y2K08), and near the end we will have another Presidential election to live through.

But, it’s another chance to try to get things right.  Good luck to everyone for a better year!

Negotiations are a euphemism for capitulation if the shadow of power is not cast across the bargaining table.

-George Schultz

Sanctions and negotiations can be very ineffective, and indeed foolish, unless the people you are talking with and negotiating with and trying to reach agreements with are people who can be trusted to keep their word.

-Caspar Weinberger

We don’t point a pistol at our own forehead. That is not the way to conduct negotiations.

-Benjamin Netanyahu

The above courtesy of Brainyquote.

The quote I was looking for went something like this:

The Weak do not negotiate – they are dictated to by the Strong. 

Negotiations are only possible in two situations:

Between Equals, or qualitatively/quantitatively matched forces.  On occasion, it is in the interests of a stronger party to grant “equal status” to a negotiating partner. 

Between a smaller/weaker party and a larger/stronger enemy, if the latter has losts its will.

     In the second instance, there are two permutations: 

          1.  The smaller/weaker party is simply using the negotiations to “freeze the field”, and consolidate gains, with the potential of returning to the field in the future.

          2.  The smaller/weaker party is simply using the negotiations as a distraction, while continuing to conflict in other venues, or behind the scenes.

Unfortunately for America, we seem to be stuck in the Second situation, since WWII.  The only real exception has been Iraq and Afghanistan, but the Democrat Party would desperately love to that route on those conflicts as well.

The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.

-Winston Churchill

People being people, most things that have happended in history are cyclical, and, within bounds, can be applied to the present and future.

History is full of lessons, that we fail to heed at the price of learning them directly.

Courtesy of DANEgerus:

“In the end more than they wanted freedom, they wanted security. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free.”

– Edward Gibbon