Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Lessons from Champions of Freedom


Allow me to share the thoughts of leaders, who in their life-time, were uncommon champions of human liberty and changed the destiny of their nations forever. 

As our country (Malaysia) goes through the cantankerous tantrums of its teenage years, let us ponder on the words of Abraham Lincoln (1809 -1865), the 16th US president. 
His heroic efforts during the Civil War helped preserve the Union, preventing the southern states from secession.  He conceived the Proclamation of Emancipation which ended slavery, years after his assassination.

The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty. 
Plainly, the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of liberty.
 
How many legs does a dog have, if you call the tail a leg?  Four. 
Calling a tail a leg does not make it a leg.
 
This country with its institutions belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or exercise their revolutionary right to overthrow it.
 

We the people are the rightful masters of both congress and the courts, not to over throw the constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the constitution.
 

To sin by silence when they should protest, makes cowards of men.
He has a right to criticise, who has a heart to help.

“With malice to none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right,
let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up our nations' wounds...”

Winston Churchill (1874-1965) had this to say about criticisms, fanatics and lies.
Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary.
It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. 
It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.

A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject

A lie gets halfway round the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on

A man does what he must, in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures – and that is the basis of all human morality

John F Kennedy (1917 -1963)
I have just received the following wire from my generous daddy: “Dear Jack, don’t buy a single vote more than is necessary. I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide.”

Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future.

We want to build a world of peace, where the weak are secure and the strong are just.

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable

NelsonMandela (1918 -    )
I detest racialism, because I regard it as a barbaric thing, whether it comes from a black man or a white man.

It always seems impossible until it is done

source :   www.brainyquote.com

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