Cal Thomas Quotations

In a free society, government reflects the soul of its people. If people want change at the top, they will have to live in different ways. Our major social problems are not the cause of our decadence. They are a reflection of it.

One of the reasons people hate politics is that truth is rarely a politician's objective. Election and power are.

People who relieve others of their money with guns are called robbers. It does not alter the immorality of the act when the income transfer is carried out by government.

America's most dangerous diseases have developed an immunity to politics. We suffer not from a failure of political organization or power, but a failure of love.

Freedom is a lonely battle, but if the United States doesn't lead it - sometimes imperfectly, but mostly with honor - who will?

No power on earth is greater than a mind and soul reawakened. Our Constitution begins we the people, not us the government.

As pressure grows to ease the financial burden on social security, pressure will also grow to eliminate the elderly and infirm to 'free up' more money for the 'fit' and those who contribute more than they take from society.

Government has a legitimate function, but the private sector has one too, and it is superior. In other words, people are better than institutions.

Politicians have limited power. They can't impose morality on themselves. How can they impose it on the country?

In violent streets and broken homes, the cry of anguished souls is not for more laws but for more conscience and character.

Sometimes people need a kick in the pants to get them to do what they would be doing if government weren't there as a perpetual parent.

The difference between the more traditional sports clubs and Congress is that Congress doesn't really compete against another team.

The measure of a great writer is not how many weeks his books spend on the best-seller lists, but how many years his books remain in print after his death.

Once a federal law or policy is in place it is more difficult to kill than a vampire.

In business, poor performance leads to bankruptcy or, at a minimum, a restructuring of the company. In American education, failure entitles the bankrupt system to even more taxpayer dollars.

When the Forbidden Fruit was handed to Adam and Eve, they were allowed the moral choice to accept or decline. I know people who have refused to feast on the money tree. They live simply, within their means, and seem far more content than those who are trying to horde their wealth while clinging to the ladder of 'success,' terrified to let go. That isn't real living. The Puritans rightly saw that as covetousness.

No child is taught to kill, but he has to be taught to love, respect, honor and value, not only his own life, but the lives of his classmates, parents and teachers. He has to experience love and acceptance. He has to know his life has purpose and meaning. No amount of money can do that.

But prosperity without a soul is like a corpse whose heart has stopped beating. There is no life, only consumption.

No nation can survive without passing its heritage, language and, yes, faith to the next generation. A country must be built on something substantial and if the cultural elitists think it can be built on 'diversity,' that is a foundation of shifting sand.

As with most things governmental, failure does not mean having to try something else. It means spending more money.

Homo-sexuals should not be censored, but neither should those who oppose their point of view. That's called free speech.

Evil cannot be accommodated. It must be defeated.

Radical Islamists are serious about killing in pursuit of their extreme objectives. Releasing their soldiers can only embolden them to take more Americans hostage. The deal for Sgt. Bergdahl may well turn out to have been a bargain with the devil.

Democrats' desperate attempt to focus on campaign finance reform instead of laws that may have been broken by the Clinton-Gore campaign is like Mike Tyson demanding a reform in boxing regulations after biting off a piece of Evander Holyfield's ear.

If a state, or nation, has laws it will not enforce for political reasons, it mocks both the law and politics, to say nothing of the cultural order.

In a world that has gone global, we no longer have a choice. If we don't export freedom, we risk importing the viruses which have corrupted other nations. ... Some critics complained that President Bush was arrogant when he suggested America can and should export freedom to other countries. This implies the people of unfree countries may not wish to be free. Which is the greater arrogance?

The courts demand that every religious person must accommodate a single atheist who might be 'offended' at the favorable mention of God's name. But no atheist can be forced to accommodate a single religious person who might be offended by the atheist's unbelief, or who wants to be part of the pluralism and diversity about which liberals regularly speak, but which is not broad enough to embrace people who believe in God.

Another question a biblically literate reporter might have asked is, "Why are you proclaiming the Ten Commandments when you believe no one can live up to all of them?"

Not to remember 9/11, is to forget what brought it about.

Welfare mostly subsidizes people in poverty, helping few escape from it. In their hearts, most people who are poor would like to be rich, or at least self-sustaining, but this president never talks about how they might achieve that goal. Instead, he criticizes those who made the right choices and now enjoy the fruits of their labor. Rather than use successful people as examples for the poor to follow, the president seeks to punish the rich with higher taxes and more regulations on their businesses.

Republicans should save the clip of Jonathan Gruber and run it over and over again in the run-up to the 2016 election. This attitude that government is better at making decisions than you are because you are too stupid to know what is good for you is a hallmark of patronizing, arrogant and condescending liberalism.

People, like water, will run downhill, seeking their lowest level unless something interdicts them.

Asking politicians to give up a source of money is like asking Dracula to forsake blood.

If we want to produce people who share the values of a democratic culture, they must be taught those values and not be left to acquire them by chance.

So, my fellow Christians, protest this film if you like, but then how about devoting some energy to fill the vacuum created by your retreat from popular culture.

Islam is a religion in which God requires you to send your son to die for him. Christianity is a faith in which God sends his son to die for you.

The high-minded definition of politics is: 'the art or science of government; the art or science concerned with guiding or influencing governmental policy.' It is only when you keep reading in Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary that you get closer to the truth: 'political activities characterized by artful and often dishonest practices'.

We tolerate, even promote, many things we once regarded as evil, wrong, or immoral. And then we seek "explanations" for an act that seems beyond comprehension. Remove societal restraints on some evils and one can expect the demons to be freed to conduct other evil acts.

If the pro abortionists were not in control of the press, I am convinced that not only would the debate on abortion be over by now (have we really even had a national debate?), but the Pro-Life side would be victorious because we would have seen the pictures every night on television of what is taking place behind the doors of the abortion clinics and hospitals.

I sense a general hostility toward Christianity among the literary and media establishments in our country. There is a tendency to keep Christian thinking out of the mainstream, to marginalize it and make it look like a product of 'fringe' groups.

In America most orthodox Christians become defensive or testy when they are asked even to break into a sweat. Most of our efforts up until now have been more symbolic than anything else. We are great at holding conventions, gathering for strategy meetings and seminars, holding congresses on evangelism. But where are the people to run our own antidefamation league?

Nowhere have the forces of intolerance been displayed less tolerantly than in the area of religious speech and practice.

Victimhood and a 'can't do' spirit is what the Democratic Party has mostly been about since the Great Depression.

The Obama 'stimulus' plan is a $1 trillion dollar gamble more suited to Las Vegas than Washington.

Don't liberal Democrats ever learn economic principles, or does their class warfare trump all else?

Thanks to pathetic reporting by The New York Times and other media sycophants more than 50 years ago, Fidel Castro, following the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, was also seen by many as a liberator of Cuba. 'I am not a communist and neither is the revolutionary movement.' Castro said at the time. Only after he consolidated power, did he tell the truth: 'I am a Marxist-Leninist and I will be one until the last day of my life.'

The brutality of communism was quickly swept under history's rug, in large part because so many on the left had embraced it as the solution to humankind's problems.

If taxpayers want to keep more of the money they earn, they must also work to become less dependent on a government check. We look to government too often and to ourselves not enough.

I am not robbed by people who have more money than me. I am robbed by a government that wants to penalize my industry and give increasing portions of what I earn to people who do not emulate my principles, morals and ethics.

Does the U.S. Constitution stand for anything in an era of government excess? Can that founding document, which is supposed to restrain the power and reach of a centralized federal government, slow down the juggernaut of czars, health insurance overhaul and anything else this administration and Congress wish to do that is not in the Constitution?

My financial adviser Ric Edelman...thinks the time to start educating people about money is when they are children. He's set up a retirement plan called the RIC-E-Trust that can provide retirement security. A $5,000 one-time tax-deferred investment at birth, with an average interest rate of ten percent compounded, means that a child would have $2.4 million when he or she is 65 years old. Who needs Social Security with that kind of nest egg?

Government aid impedes success and creates dependence, while entrepreneurs create success and independence.

Americans who believe their government should not be a giant ATM, dispensing money and benefits to people who have not earned them, and who want their country returned to its founding principles, must now exercise that power before it is taken from them. The Tenth Amendment is one place to begin. The streets are another. It worked for the Left.

I think the philosophy in our public schools, and many other institutions today, is that a dose of God is more hazardous to your health than a dose of herpes or drugs.

With the help of pressure groups, government now has crossed over into the final frontier of bigotry, what writer and Catholic theologian Michael Novak calls 'Christophobia .' Traditional Christians and Jews are the new counterculture - aliens in a land their forefathers' beliefs and values established and built.

It's time to resist efforts of the American Civil Liberties Union who have conducted a religious lobotomy on this country, seeking to strip it of any vestige of religious influence.

To suggest that a person's strongly held religious view is less tolerant than a strongly held antireligious view is morally, intellectually, and politically inconsistent and incorrect.

The worst thing the federal government could do is to increase the size, reach and cost of government. If government failed in its response to the hurricane, the answer is not more inefficient government.

It is now possible to live a "christian life" without doing the things that Jesus commanded us to do. We have hired people to go into all the world, to visit those in prison, to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to care for widows and orphans. The average Christian doesn't have to do it.

No matter how good a public school teacher, he or she will always be required to teach the state's values and the state's perspective on subjects from sex to history and biology.

President Obama is like a lost man who refuses to ask for directions. That's because he has never worked in the real world with people who create real jobs. He operates on theories and an ideology that is incapable of achieving his goals.

It is easier to drive a stake through the heart of a blood-sucking vampire than to kill off a money-sucking and useless government program.

Our politics suffers from a shortage of people who put character and country before career and personal gain.

All we are asking for is balance. I would like to think that I could walk into a public library and find not only works by Gloria Steinem but also those of Phyllis Schlafly. I would like to think a teenager could be taught in sex education that a serious alternative to abortion is teenage abstinence, or should pregnancy occur, that adoption might be preferable. I am not trying, as the ad says, to shove religion down anyone's throat. But I do think everyone has a right, and that the Christian voice is being chocked off.

The kingdom of God is not going to arrive on Air Force One.

When President Clinton starts talking about what is moral, as he did when recommending a national law banning human cloning, it's time for us to lock up our daughters.

People for the American Way says it has yet to find anyone who has made a stronger case against the proposed school prayer Constitutional amendment... What kind of prayer would we use?

One mark of a deteriorating society is when people cannot discern between truth and lies. Another is that they don't care and will believe whatever their itching ears want to hear.

We are approaching a time when Christians, especially, may have to declare the social contract between Enlightenment rationalists and Biblical believers - which formed the basis of the constitution written at our nation's founding - null and void.

The more we come to rely on government, the fewer freedoms we will enjoy. Government will start dictating what we can own, eat and drive, how much of our money they will let us keep, how we run our businesses, how many - if any - guns we can own, and what we may and may not say. Oh, wait! They are already doing that. To preserve freedom we must fight for it.

If life is not a continuum, from conception to natural death, then all of us are potential victims if we fall out of favor with a ruling elite.

When these false prophets again appear, they can be reminded of the error of their previous ways and at least be offered an opportunity to recant and repent.

huge failure on the part of the Bush administration...

Squeezing our money out of politicians is more difficult than squeezing blood from a turnip. To paraphrase an Oscar Hammerstein love song, they never let it go.

Students should come not only to support the team, but to get out there, have a great time, and enjoy the college experience.

Once it is established that some lives are less valuable and less meaningful than other lives (as happened in Roe), the rest is merely who's next and how quickly we can move forward with the disposal process.

I just figure it's a good way to work out in the morning, and you're not tired during school.