US Federal Debt July 2, 2016 $19,385,011,022,974.42. The estimated population of the United States is 323,268,727 so each citizen's share of this debt is $59,965.62. The National Debt has continued to increase an average of $2.42 billion per day since September 30, 2012!



"Sarchasm: the gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the recipient who doesn't get it. (Tom Witte, Gaithersburg)" Washington Post August 2, 1998, Style.

George Washington (1732-1799) "Government is not reason; it is not eloquent -- it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master." Albert Einstein (1879-1955) "The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it." "If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor." "Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid." John Adams (1735-1826) Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. Thomas Sowell (1930 -) "One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them." Noam Chomsky (1928 -) “If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all” Guardian (UK), Nov. 23, 1992) Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) "Chance favors the prepared mind." Winston Churchill (1874-1965) "If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a small chance of survival. There may even be a worse case: you may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves." - "The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter." "The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries." "Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never - in nothing, great or small, large or petty - never give in, except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy." E. E. Cummings (1894-1962) "To be nobody but yourself in a world that's doing its best to make you somebody else, is to fight the hardest battle you are ever going to fight. Never stop fighting." Jodie Foster (1962 - ) "Normal is not something to aspire to, it's something to get away from." Bertrand Russell (1872-1970 ) "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts." "The fundamental cause of trouble in the world is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt." Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) "Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies." Frank Leahy (1907-1973) "Egotism is the anesthetic that dulls the pain of stupidity." Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887) "A person without a sense of humor is like a wagon without springs. It's jolted by every pebble on the road." James Michael Curley (1874-1958) “Never complain, never explain.” Sigmund Freud (1856-1939 ) "The reason for so much bad science is not that talent is rare, not at all; what is rare is character." Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) “I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.” "When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." Andre Gide: (1869-1951) "Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again." "Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it." Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) "And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt." A woman responding to a threat from Cuban-backed terrorists in El Salvador, 1982 “You can kill me, you can kill my family, kill my neighbors, but you can’t kill us all.” Aung San Suu Kyi (1945- ) "The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear." Dorothy Thompson (1894-1961) "Only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live." Jean de La Fontaine (1621-1695) "Nothing is more dangerous than a friend without discretion; even a prudent enemy is preferable." Lady Marguerite Gardiner (1789-1849) "There are no persons capable of stooping so low as those who desire to rise in the world." Louis D. Brandeis (1856-1941) "Those who won our independence believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty." "Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.” Will Rogers: (1879-1938) "When people start taking the comedian seriously and the politician as a joke, everything changes." "This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer." Adlai E. Stevenson Jr. (1900-1965) "My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular." [Under this definition, Cambridge Massacchusetts, and the state of Massachusetts are not free societies. ed.] Edward R. Murrow (1908-1965) "We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home." Maria Bartiromo (1967 - ) "My [commencement 2011] speech at St. John's [University, New York] three themes: work hard, no shortcuts, love what you do, and always do the right thing." Ayn Rand (1905-1982) "Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swaps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists ... it is real ... it is possible ... it's yours." Dwight Eisenhower (1890-1969) "Leadership consists of nothing but taking responsibility for everything that goes wrong and giving your subordinates credit for everything that goes well." Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) "The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone." Dr. Seuss (1904-1991 Theodor Seuss Geisel) "Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind." Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945, Hitler's Minister of Propaganda) "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State." Howie Carr (1952 - Boston Herald Columnist, WRKO Radio Talk Show Host) "The [MA] courts are more corrupt than the legislature." (November 18, 2010, 6:15 PM on his radio show.) Eric Hoffer (1902-1983) " In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists." William F. Buckley, Jr. (1925-2008) "I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University. Voltaire (François Marie Arouet, 1694-1778) "Common sense is not so common." Doubt is not a pleasant mental state, but certainty is a ridiculous one." "Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world." Martha Coakley (1953 - Democrat, MA Attorney General, 2010) "In Massachusetts, technically, it is not illegal to be illegal." Deval Patrick (1956 - Democrat, MA Governor, 2010) "I am not a politician." Michael Bloomberg (1942 - Democrat, Republican, Independent 3-Term Mayor of New York City and Billionaire) "Last time I checked, the pharmaceutical industry doesn't make a lot of money." George W. Bush (1946 - ) "Intentions get overwhelmed by perceptions." John Tudor "Technology makes it possible for people to gain control over everything, except over technology." Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) "The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom." Robert Heinlein (1907-1988) "There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him." H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) "There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and that is character." "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and hence clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." "No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes she were not." "For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." "It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull." "Democracy is the theory that people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard." "Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage." Michel de Montaigne: (1533-1592) "The most manifest sign of wisdom is a continual cheerfulness." Aldous Huxley : (1894-1963) "I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself." T. S. Eliot: (1888-1965) "Half the harm that is done in this world Is due to people who want to feel important They don’t mean to do harm ­ But the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it Because they are absorbed in the endless struggle To think well of themselves." Burt Prelutsky (1940- Columnist) "Surely something must be terribly wrong with a man who seems to be far more concerned with a Jew building a house in Israel than with a Muslim building a nuclear bomb in Iran." Nicholas Murray Butler (1862-1947, President Columbia University) "An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less." Henry Kissinger Henry Kissinger : the gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the recipient who doesn't get it. (Tom Witte, Gaithersburg)"August 2, 1998, Style.: (1923 - ) "In this world it is often dangerous to be an enemy of the United States, but to be a friend is fatal."

Socrates: (469 BC-399BC) "He is richest who is content with the least."

Leo Tolstoy: (1828-1910) "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." "Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly." "Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself." "Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold."

P.J. O'Rourke (A Parliament of Whores) "Imagine if all of life were determined by majority rule. Every meal would be a pizza. Every pair of pants, even those in a Brooks Brothers suit, would be stone-washed denim. Celebrity diet and exercise books would be the only thing on the shelves at the library. And - since women are a majority of the population- we'd all be married to Mel Gibson."

Marcel Proust (1871-1922) "Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom."

Orson Welles (as Harry Lime in The Third Man, 1949) "In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had 500 years of democracy and peace -- and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

Tacitus: (c. 56 AD-c. 117) "The more corrupt the state, the more it legislates."

Ralph Waldo Emerson: (1803-1882) "Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing."

Doug Hoffman : (2009 Conservative Party Candidate for US Rep. NY 23rd District) "Congress fiddles while our economy burns. They lack common sense."

Rich Lowry: (On ObamaCare) "A shimmering mirage of wishful thinking and willful dishonesty."

President Obama (as he loses public support.) "We cannot wait any longer [. . .] There comes a time to remember the fierce urgency of right now."

Rush Limbaugh : (On first hour of his show broadcast October 23, 2009) Obama "is delusional." He's "seriously dangerous." He's "insane." Reacting to Obama's comments that the US Constitution is an obstacle to "redistribution of wealth." Obama also referred to "the so called founders."

Marek Edelman, (1919?-2009 leader of Warsaw Ghetto uprising.) "Man is evil, by nature man is a beast. People have to be educated from childhood, from kindergarten, that there should be no hatred."

Adis Medunjanin (24, in January 2010, Queens, NY man accused of training with al Qaeda): "We love death more than you love life."

Edward Moore Kennedy (1932-2009): "Do we operate under a system of equal justice or one for the average citizen and one for the high and mighty?"

Robert Novak: (1931-2009) “Always love your country — but never trust your government!

Calvin Coolidge: (1872-1933) “Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan ‘press on’ has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.”

Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood) in Dead Pool : "Opinions are like a**holes. Everybody's got one."

Lyndon Johnson : (1908-1973) “The difference between liberals and cannibals is that cannibals don’t eat their friends and family members.”

Margaret Thatcher : (1925 -) "The problem with socialism is that eventually, you run out of others people's money."

John Adams : (1735-1826) "Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."

Abraham Lincoln: (1809-1865) "America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."

Thomas Jefferson : (1743-1826) "Merchants have no country." “In questions of power, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”

James Madison : (1751-1836) “I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.”

Mark Twain : (1835-1910) "Politicians are like diapers. They both need changing often and for the same reason." "It's not what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you think you know for sure that just ain't so." "Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect." "Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great."

Maggie Gallagher : (1960-) "Politicians can pass a bill saying a chicken is a duck and that doesn't make it true. Truth matters."

Humpty Dumpty ( In Alice in Wonderland ) "When I use a word, it means exactly what I want it to. No more no less."

Groucho Marx: (Julius Henry, 1890-1977) "Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read."