Quotes » Good and Evil

Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

This is sometimes attributed to Benjamin Franklin, but WikiQuote claims that this may be a misattribution or paraphrase.

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

This is sometimes attributed to Edmund Burke, though according to WikiQuote, this is again a misattribution (or paraphrase). WikiQuote also lists a large number of variants to this quote.

We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.

Benjamin Franklin, exact wording via WikiQuote.

In Germany, the Nazis came first for the Communists and I did not speak up, because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews and I did not speak up, because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for trade unionists and I did not speak up, because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics. I was a Protestant and so I did not speak up.
Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak for anyone.

It was originally said by Martin Niemoller, a German Protestant minister who was jailed for trying to help Jews. I then saw it in my 9th grade history textbook on page 781, and consulted another website for copying and pasting from.

We tell the white men of Mississippi that the men of the North will convert the State of Mississippi into a frog pond before they will allow such laws [the black codes, which were said to help to restore slavery in all but its name] to disgrace one foot of the soil in which the bones of our soldiers sleep and over which the flag of freedom waves.

Quotation from the Chicago Tribune, found on page 395 of The American Promise, Second Compact Edition.

Out in California, a team of researchers appointed by Secretary of State Bruce McPherson verified Hursti's findings, spotted an additional 16 vulnerabilities described as potentially more serious than the Hursti hack ... and certified the Diebold systems anyway.

Brad Friedman in Review: Hacks, lies and videotape

Asked how he felt about discarding tens of millions of dollars worth of touch-screen machines just years after they were acquired, Mr. Crist said, The price of freedom is not cheap. The importance of a democratic system of voting that we can trust, that we can have confidence in, is incredibly important.

Florida Shifting to Voting System With Paper Trail from the New York Times

I'm an old computer nerd, Diener said. I can do anything with computers. Nothing's wrong with computers. But this is the worst way to run an election.

Can You Count on Voting Machines? from the New York Times Magazine

Yet when I visited one Cleveland polling station at daybreak, the two checkers signed zero tapes without actually checking the zero totals. And then, of course, there were the server crashes, and the recording errors on 20 percent of the paper recount ballots.

Can You Count on Voting Machines? from the New York Times Magazine

It's just unbelievable. She pointed to Precinct 150, a district on the south end of Sarasota County. Buchanan received 346 votes, Jennings received 275 and the undervote was 133. I mean, people would walk in and vote for everything except this race? she said. Why?

Jennings says he believes the reason is simple: Sarasota's touch-screen machines malfunctioned — and lost votes that could have tipped the election in her favor. Her staff has received hundreds of complaints from voters reporting mysterious behavior on the part of the machines. The specific model that Sarasota used was the iVotronic, by the company ES&S. According to the complaints, when voters tried to touch the screen for Jennings, the iVotronic wouldn't accept it, or would highlight Buchanan's name instead. When they got to the final pages of the ballot, where they reviewed their picks, the complainants said, the Jennings-Buchanan race was missing — even though they were sure they'd voted in it. The reports streamed in not merely from technophobic senior citizens but also from tech-savvy younger people, including a woman with a Ph.D. in computer science and a saleswoman who actually works for a firm that sells touch-screen devices. (Even Vern Buchanan's wife reported having trouble voting for her husband.)

[...]

As evidence, she brandishes pieces of evidence she says are smoking guns. One is a memo from ES&S executives, issued in August 2006, warning that they had found a bug in the iVotronic software that produced a delay in the screen; after a voter made her choice, it would take a few seconds for the screen to display it.

Can You Count on Voting Machines? from the New York Times Magazine

On the grounds that there could be no nice decision drawn between the theoretical ideals of the radicals and their actual violations of our national laws, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer led an assault on alleged conspirators

The American Promise, Second Compact Edition, on the aftermath of WWI (page 570)

Three IWW members were arrested and later convicted of murder, but another, an ex-soldier, was carried off by a mob who castrated him and then, after hanging him from a bridge, riddled his body with bullets. His death was officially ruled a suicide.

The American Promise, Second Compact Edition, on the aftermath of WWI (page 571)