"We in America do not have government by the majority.
We have government by the majority who participate."

-  Thomas Jefferson

Assuming either the Left Wing or the Right Wing gained control of the country, it would probably fly around in circles.

  - Pat Paulsen 

"What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments but what is woven into the lives of others."

-Pericles

"A government ought to contain in itself every power requisite to the full accomplishment of the objects commmitted to its care, and to the complete execution of the trusts for which it is responsible, free from every other control but a regard to the public good and to the sense of the people."

-- Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 31, January 1st 1788)

I suppose, indeed, that in public life, a man whose political principles have any decided character and who has energy enough to give them effect must always expect to encounter political hostility from those of adverse principles.

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to Richard M. Johnson, 1808)

God either wants to eliminate bad things and cannot, or can but does not want to, or neither wishes to nor can, or both wants to and can. If he wants to and cannot, he is weak -- and this does not apply to god. If he can but does not want to, then he is spiteful -- which is equally foreign to god's nature. If he neither wants to nor can, he is both weak and spiteful and so not a god. If he wants to and can, which is the only thing fitting for a god, where then do bad things come from? Or why does he not eliminate them?"

-Epicurus

"... civilization is not something inborn or imperishable; it must be acquired anew by every generation. Man differs from the beast only by education, which may be defined as the technique of transmitting civilization... Through church, or family, or school, or otherwise, there must be a unifying moral code." 

-- Will Durant, Pulitzer Prize winning author and philosopher

"Public virtue cannot exist in a nation without private, and public virtue is the only foundation of republics.  There must be a positive passion for the public good, the public interest, honour, power and glory, established in the minds of the people, or there can be no republican government, nor any real liberty: and this public passion must be superiour to all private passions."

-- John Adams (letter to Mercy Warren, 16 April 1776)

Doubt everything. Find your own light.

-Last words of Gotama Buddha, in Theravada tradition

"The greatest good we can do our country is to heal its party divisions and make them one people."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to John Dickinson, 1801)