(Art Merrill, Read It Here's editor has departed for Honduras. The site will continue to provide top tier information for the Prescott area in his absence. Here's his last editorial.)

Here are some thoughtful quotes to consider in 2008 as we enter the fifth year of our open-ended “war on terror.”

The first quote is for our servicemen and women whose sacrifices and commitment to duty are beyond  question. The second, by the same soldier, is to honor those who gave all. The third is a hope for their safe homecoming.

The remaining quotes are old alerts that there is nothing new in this war, and the terrible irony is that, while our government tells us Americans are dying for our liberties over there, we are, in fact, losing those liberties identified in the First, Second and Fourth Amendments to the Constitution to a creeping tyranny our Founders warned us might happen.

They had spent most of 1787 debating and hammering out our Constitution while a newborn America anxiously watched the C-SPAN of that time, a myriad of small print media, to see what kind of document would transpire. When Benjamin Franklin stepped outside after the ratifying of the Constitution, the story goes, someone shouted out, “What have ye wrought?”

“A republic,” he replied, “if you can keep it.”

I am a soldier; I fight where I am told, and I win where I fight.
George Patton

It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather, we should thank God that such men lived.
George Patton

There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at without result.
Winston Churchill

I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.
Dwight Eisenhower

 A tyrant is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.
Plato 

If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.
James Madison

Talk of imminent threat to our national security through the application of external force is pure nonsense. Indeed, it is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear.
Douglas MacArthur

 Overgrown military establishments are, under any form of government, inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.
George Washington

Of course the people don't want war...that is understood. But voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.
Hermann Goering

The victor will never be asked if he told the truth.
Adolf Hitler

But could not our situation be compared to one of a menacing epidemic? People are unable to view this situation in its true light, for their eyes are blinded by passion. General fear and anxiety create hatred and aggressiveness. The adaptation to warlike aims and activities has corrupted the mentality of man; as a result, intelligent, objective and humane thinking has hardly any effect and is even suspected and persecuted as unpatriotic.
Albert Einstein

Wars are seldom caused by spontaneous hatreds between people, for peoples in general are too ignorant of one another to have grievances and too indifferent to what goes on beyond their borders to plan conquests. They must be urged to the slaughter by politicians who know how to alarm them.
Henry Mencken

As government expands, liberty contracts.
Ronald Reagan

The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power.
Daniel Webster

Rome remained free for four hundred years and Sparta eight hundred, although their citizens were armed all that time; but many other states that have been disarmed have lost their liberties in less than forty years.
Nicolo Machiavelli

Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel.
Patrick Henry

Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it. The history of liberty is a history of resistance.
Woodrow Wilson

Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
Benjamin Franklin

If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for 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 ye were our countrymen.
Samuel Adams

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
Thomas Jefferson

 I know not what course others may take, but as for me: give me Liberty, or give me death.
Patrick Henry

- Art Merrill, Editor

Comments (1)

... : C. Ashley & Jo Ann Johnson Thank you, Art, for the work to create this editorial. Thank you, Erica, for publishing it. These are important reminders well presented. January 24, 2008

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