"You cannot legislate the poor into
freedom by legislating the industrious out of it. You
don't multiply wealth by dividing it. Government cannot
give anything to anybody that it doesn't first take from
somebody else. Whenever somebody receives something
without working for it, somebody else has to work for it
without receiving. The worst thing that can happen to a
nation is for half of the people to get the idea they
don't have to work because somebody else will work for
them, and the other half to get the idea that it does no
good to work because they don't get to enjoy the fruits of
their labor."
Adrian Rogers, 1984
A nation can survive its fools and even
the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from
within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he
is known and he carries his banners openly against the
city.
But the traitor moves among those within
the gates freely, his sly whispers rustling through all
alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.
For the traitor appears no traitor; he
speaks in the accents familiar to his victim, and he
wears their face and their garments and he appeals to
the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men.
He rots the soul of a nation; he works
secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the
pillars of a city; he infects the body politic so that
it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be
feared. The traitor is the plague. —
Marcus Tullius
Cicero, from a speech given to the Roman Senate,
recorded in approximately 42 B.C. by Sallust.