I find it easier to believe in God than to believe Hamlet was deduced from the molecular structure of a mutton chop. - William F. Buckley Jr.

Then one day, in October 1948, while Truman was campaigning feverishly for re-election, Hoover picked up the morning paper and read that the evening before, in Boston, Truman had denounced the Republican Party as desiring to reintroduce the age of Hoover, defined as the exploitation of the poor for the benefit of the greedy rich. “I vowed,” Hoover told me, “never to speak to Truman again.” But when, a few months after his election, Truman asked Hoover to drop in at the White House on an urgent matter, “I couldn’t, of course, refuse a summons from the President of the United States. But I was determined to tell him off before we got down to business, and I did: ‘Mr. President,’ I said, ‘the remarks you made about me in Boston were as dirty and unforgivable as any I ever heard in a lifetime of politics.’ ‘I couldn’t agree with you more,’ Truman replied affably. ‘When I came to that paragraph in my speech, I almost didn’t read it.

There is an inverse relationship between reliance on the state and self-reliance.

He told us that most of our civic problems were problems brought on or exacerbated by government, not problems that could be solved by government. That, of course, is enduringly true. Only government can cause inflation, preserve monopoly, and punish enterprise.