Quotes by Henry M. Robert

“Obama was the fourth president I had worked for who said outright that he wanted to eliminate all nuclear weapons (Carter, Reagan, and Bush 41 were the others). Former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, former defense secretary Bill Perry, and former senator Sam Nunn had also called for “going to zero.” The only problem, in my view, was that I hadn’t heard the leaders of any other nuclear country”

“Yes, I'm old," Henry said, and folded his arms. "Old enough to have made cemeteries of men younger than you. Killed in wars. Killed in peace. Knifed and shot my way most of my life. Killed Indians and white men with my hands or the guns I took from them." Another step, his arms unfolded. "I get paid to bring in escaped men that have done worse." One more foot. "And there is nothing in you that don't stand thin against me, and you know it. And this ain't the forst time I've had guns against me and you know that too." He looked at them all, weighed them all. "And I'm done talking.””

“Nouwen, Henri J. M. The Way of the Heart: Connecting with God through Prayer, Wisdom, and Silence. New York: HarperCollins, 2003.””

“In the words of Henry M. Robert, who wrote what we know today as Robert’s Rules of Order, “Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty.””

“In morals, as in physics, the stream cannot rise higher than its source. Christianity raises men from earth, for it comes from heaven; but human morality creeps, struts, or frets upon the earth's level, without wings to rise. The Knowledge School does not contemplate raising man above himself; it merely aims at disposing of his existing powers and tastes, as is most convenient, or is practicable under circumstances. It finds him, like the victims of the French Tyrant, doubled up in a cage in which he can neither lie, stand, sit, nor kneel, and its highest desire is to find an attitude in which his unrest may be least. Or it finds him like some musical instrument, of great power and compass, but imperfect; from its very structure some keys must ever be out of tune, and its object, when ambition is highest, is to throw the fault of its nature where least it will be observed. It leaves man where it found him”

“Mr. Bentham would answer, that the knowledge which carries virtue along with it, is the knowledge how to take care of number one”

“I'm afraid, Gringo, I must agree with our distinguished folklorist and foremost witness to the ontological revelations of the patterns of history,' intercedes (with a respectful nod to Schultz) Professor Costen Migod McCamish, Doctor of Nostology and Research Specialist in the Etiology of Homo Ludens, 'and have come to the conclusion that God exists and he is a nut.””

“I thought, “Cosmic intelligence is not a gaseous vertebrate,” which was Thomas Henry Huxley’s description of the Christian God. It does not have a penis, so it is not a “He”. I can’t think of it as an Eastern potentate or king. All the Christian symbology, “Our Almighty King or Lord,” “Our Great Father,” etc., seems to me to be a continuation of infantile thinking projected onto the universe. I don’t think the universe is a punishing father. I don’t think it has any of the traits of an old paranoid man. It’s impossible for me to think of cosmic intelligence peeking into bedrooms, taking notes and giving people gold stars for making love the right way and black stars for doing it the wrong way. All that seems absurd to me. So, I can’t take Christianity seriously as an intellectual force. It’s a continuation of infantile anxieties. And so, the same goes for Judaism and Islam. As far as the Western World is concerned, I’m an atheist.””

“People say to me, that it is but a dream to suppose that Christianity should regain the organic power in human society which it once possessed. I cannot help that; I never said it could. I am not a politician; I am proposing no measures, but exposing a fallacy, and resisting a pretence. Let Benthamism reign, if men have no aspirations; but do not tell them to be romantic, and then solace them with glory; do not attempt by philosophy what once was done by religion. The ascendancy of Faith may be impracticable, but the reign of Knowledge is incomprehensible. The problem for statesmen of this age is how to educate the masses, and literature and science cannot give the solution.””

“Kanjorski claims to be repeating an account of events given to him by US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke: On Thursday [18 September], at 11 a.m. the Federal Reserve noticed a tremendous draw-down of money-market accounts in the US; [money] to the tune of $550 billion was being drawn out in the matter of an hour or two. The Treasury opened up its window to help and pumped a $105 billion in the system and quickly realized that they could not stem the tide. We were having an electronic run on the banks. They decided to close the operation, close down the money accounts and announce a guarantee of $250,000 per account so there wouldn’t be further panic out there. If they had not done that, their estimation is that by 2 p.m. that afternoon $5.5 trillion would have been drawn out of the money-market system of the US; [this] would have collapsed the entire economy of the US, and within 24 hours the world economy would have collapsed. It would have been the end of our economic system and our political system as we know it.10””