Quotes from Lynne Cheney

Dogs don't bark at parked cars.

Casper Wyo., population 18,000 when I was born, was large enough to hold the surprises of civilization, but small enough that the prairie was close by - for some in our town, right out the front door - stretching on forever, under the great curving sky.

I soon discovered, after I became chairman of the NEH, that, for a number of academics, the truth was not merely irrelevant - it no longer existed.

You know, my mother had a rule which was 'people are just people.'

Expecting to be able to get rid of the competitive drive, first of all, flies in the face of human nature - and little girls certainly have this drive, as much as little boys do, or at least the little girls I have observed in my immediate family have it.

There can be differences of opinion without there being personal differences.

Madison was also developing another idea: that the absence of clashing ideas and competing interests leads to overreaching and corruption.

Gallatin had warned Jefferson that " government prohibitions do always more mischief than had been calculated; and it is not without much hesitation that a statesman should hazard to regulate the concerns of individuals as if he could do it better than themselves.

In the ensuing debate Madison declared that "opinions are not the objects of legislation," and he worried aloud, "How far will this go? It may extend to the liberty of speech and of the press." Finally,

The best way to avoid danger is to be in a capacity to withstand it."45

common defense, security of liberty, and general welfare.'"7

He had already decided to study law, not because he intended to be a lawyer, but because, he told Bradford, "the principles and modes of government are too important to be disregarded by an inquisitive mind

Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect," Madison told Bradford, writing with the authority of a man who knew firsthand the price of being bound to a received viewpoint—and the liberation of breaking free.

Well, my father's people were Mormon, and had immigrated not long after Brigham Young had settled Utah.