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Sher's Blog Archive Hits This is What Treason Really Looks Like, Ann White House Prayer Meetings as a Substitute for Ethical Behavior This Ain't Your Grandma's Party! Sher's Ratios: Sex to Scandal and Mischief to Money Fourth Grade Economics Midterm My Pitch to the Club for Growth
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Teddy Speaks The function of our Government is to insure to all its citizens, now and hereafter, their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If we of this generation destroy the resources from which our children would otherwise derive their livelihood, we reduce the capacity of our land to support a population, and so either degrade the standard of living or deprive the coming generations of their right to life on this continent. If we allow great industrial organizations to exercise unregulated control of the means of production and the necessaries of life, we deprive the Americans of today and of the future of industrial liberty, a right no less precious and vital than political freedom.” Optimism is a good characteristic, but if carried to an excess, it becomes foolishness. We are prone to speak of the resources of this country as inexhaustible; this is not so. So any nation which in its youth lives only for the day, reaps without sowing, and consumes without husbanding, must expect the penalty of the prodigal whose labor could with difficulty find him the bare means of life. Defenders of the short-sighted men who in their greed and selfishness will, if permitted, rob our country of half its charm by their reckless extermination of all useful and beautiful wild things sometimes seek to champion them by saying the 'the game belongs to the people.' So it does; and not merely to the people now alive, but to the unborn people. A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car, but if he has a university education, he can steal the whole railroad. A muttonhead, after an education at West Point – or Harvard – is a muttonhead still. The object of government is the welfare of the people….Conservation means development as much as it does protection. I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use the natural resources of our land; but I do not recognize the right to waste them, or to rob, by wasteful use, the generations that come after us. Much can be done by law towards putting women on a footing of complete and entire equal rights with man - including the right to vote, the right to hold and use property, and the right to enter any profession she desires on the same terms as the man...Women should have free access to every field of labor which they care to enter, and when their work is as valuable as that of a man it should be paid as highly. This country will not be a permanently good place for any of us to live in unless we make it a reasonably good place for all of us to live in. Mary had a little lamb And when she saw it sicken She shipped it off to Packing Town And now it's labeled chicken. Let the watchwords of all our people be the old familiar watchwords of honesty, decency, fair-dealing, and commonsense... We must treat each man on his worth and merits as a man. We must see that each is given a square deal, because he is entitled to no more and should receive no less…The welfare of each of us is dependent fundamentally upon the welfare of all of us. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. ...power to command peace throughout the world could best be assured by some combination between those great nations which sincerely desire peace and have no thought themselves of committing aggressions. The combination might at first be only to secure peace within certain definite limits and on certain definite conditions; but the ruler or statesman who should bring about such a combination would have earned his place in history for all time and his title to the gratitude of all mankind. There should be relentless exposure of and attack upon every evil practice, whether in politics, in business, or in social life.
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