We conceived of this section as a place to display and share ideas and quotes that exemplify our values, beliefs and fervent hopes for our country and for the world. We hope that visitors to this site will also send in ideas and quotes in the same vein — we would welcome your comments and ideas! In honor of the release of our first CD, "Tom Paine’s Blues", we will begin with a few choice quotes from this remarkable man — the Other Founding Father. "When it shall be said in any country in the world, my poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want; the taxes are not oppressive; the rational world is my friend, because I am the friend of its happiness; when these things can be said, then may that country boast its constitution and its government." "I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow creatures happy." "A right, to be truly so, must be right in itself — yet many things have obtained the name of rights, which are originally founded in wrong — of this kind are all rights by mere conquest, power or violence." "He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself." And one from former president Dwight Eisenhower: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."