Anyone who actively desires the Presidency should be automatically disqualified as mentally unfit.

Thank you for the addendum, Jim. Waffler, that isn't what Churchill said. If you're going to quote someone at least be accurate. It shouldn't be too difficult to find the quote you paraphrased. Hmmm, maybe a website might have it?

So very true. I have to wonder what the judge would say about liberty in the US today.

"Thank you Alex, I'll take the bleeding obvious for 10,000." Sorry, but this falls in the self-evident category.

Shouldn't it be "To sacrifice 'it'"? Though maybe, as an Australian, this how Queen's English would have it? Or maybe, as an idiot American, I don't know what I'm talking about. Note: Although an idiot, I always vote, and I've NEVER voted for a Bush. I agree with the ideas expressed in this quote, as I agree with Benjamin Franklin's sentiments when he wrote, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety,” in 1755. Unfortunately, my representatives in Congress forgot this when they passed the so-called Patriot Act.

The Real Me Again, I think she means that life is when things happen to you. Some people have an idea of absolute security that involves protection from any eventuality, but such an impregnable state would insulate a person from good fortune as well as calamity. Such a state could be likened to being dead -- as in devoid of physical physical sensation or numb, rather than being involved in some sort of afterlife. So maybe she is suggesting that security is over-rated, since taking risks is one of the ways in which we grow. I think George Orwell was addressing the same idea when he wrote, “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”