"There'll be no chai served at this Tea Party." ~ Sandip Roy

"I despise people who go to the gutter on either the right or the left and hurl rocks at those in the center." ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

"Government intervention is like being in an elephant mating pen.  You are likely to be screwed or stepped on by something really big." ~ Tony Stirk, IPAD discussion forum, 2010

"Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt." ~ Herbert Hoover, in his address to the Nebraska Republican Conference, Lincoln, Nebraska, January 16, 1936

"Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people."  ~  Eleanor Roosevelt

"Hope is the faith that, together, we can make things better. Optimism is a passive virtue, hope is an active one. It takes no courage to be an optimist, but it takes a great deal of courage to have hope. Hope is the knowledge that we can choose; that we can learn from our mistakes and act differently next time. That history is not a trash bag of random coincidences blown open by the wind, but a long slow journey to redemption." ~ Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

"Where, after all, do universal human rights begin?

In small places, close to home - so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works.

Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere.

Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

"I have a new term for those on the fringes of the religious right who have used the Gospels to perpetuate their own aspirations for power, control and oppression: Christianists. They are as anathema to true Christians as the Islamists are to true Islam." ~ Andrew Sullivan, 2003

"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"The quality of a parent is not measured by gender but the content of the heart." - Attorney Theodore Olson, in his opening statement for the California Proposition 8 trial, January 11, 2010