"Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought."
-J.F.K.-
"The Lord giveth, the government taketh away."
Every time history repeats itself, the price goes up."
"...All facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice...the first time as tragedy, the second as farce..."
-Karl Marx-
"Compromise - on strategy, not on principle."
-Brubaker-
"Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself..."
-Jean-Paul Sartre-
"With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter, nor waste arguments where they will certainly be lost."
-Wm. Lloyd Garrison-
"Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges."
"(The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.)"
-Cornelius Tacitus-
(55-117 A.D.)
Source: Annales, 1st century A.D.
"The bureaucratic mentality is the only constant in the universe."
-Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy-
(23rd century)
"I know that we have nothing to fear from the flag burners. We have a great deal to fear from those who have lost faith in the Constitution."
-Rep. Ted Weiss (D-NY)-
"The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom is courage."
-Thucydides-
"Choice is freedom. Science cannot and must not dictate our beliefs. But science can provide choices."
-Dr. Etienne-Emile Baulieu-
developer of RU-486
"What a waste it is to lose one's mind - or not to have a mind."
-Vice Pres. Dan Quayle-
to NAACP
"There are lies, damned lies, and right-wing religious zealots who believe if they tell big enough lies at a fast enough pace, they can anesthetize America to the truth."
-Rep. Pat Williams (D-MT)-
"That government is best which governs least, because its people discipline themselves. If we are directed from Washington (heads of an organization) when to sow and when to reap, we will soon want for bread."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"The flag uniquely symbolizes the ideas of liberty, equality and tolerance. The flag embodies the spirit of our national commitment to those ideals."
-Justice John Paul Stevens-
dissenter
Therefore...
"Punishing desecration of the flag dilutes the very freedom that makes this emblem so revered."
-Justice William Brennan-
voice of reason
"When I look around (at) the politicians today, I see more people who remind me of Daffy Duck than Thomas Jefferson."
-Rep. David Obey, D-Wis.-
"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."
-Eleanor Roosevelt-
"If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice."
-Rush-
"(Justice) Douglas is a great humanitarian in the abstract; he just can't stand people."
-Justice Felix-
Separate But Equal
"Religion is the opiate of the masses."
-Karl Marx-
"As a member of the great Washington, D.C., bureaucracy, Hellman evidently suffers from terminal Beltway Syndrome, that combination of pompous arrogance and creeping paranoia in which all society's ills are solved through regulation, human nature is perfected through judicial mandate, and common sense is replaced by legal statute....We can only hope Hellman isn't a statistician."
-Jim Miller-
managing editor of Cycle Magazine, responding to an editorial in RoadRider Magazine
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
-Hanlon's Razor-
"Don't write anything you can phone. Don't phone anything you can talk face-to-face. Don't talk anything you can smile. Don't smile anything you can wink. And don't wink anything you can nod."
-Earl Long-
Governor of LA
"Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion by evil-minded rulers, yet the greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."
-Supreme Court-
Olmstead v US, 1928
"He's a hero. They are killing innocent life. This is going to be, hopefully, the beginning of the war, and we'll win because we're right, and we'll once again have godly laws in our land."
-Andrew Cabot-
oft-arrested NH abortion protester on John Salvi, "pro-life" terrorist
"There may be a link between advocating the use of force and people acting on it."
-recent revelation of Rev. Pat Mahoney-
notorious abortion foe as leader of the Christian Defense Coalition and noted sociological genius
"Isn't it better to act on the basis of what is true, rather than maintaining it has no right to be true?"
-John Stossel-
Boys and Girls Are Different: Men, Women and the Sex Difference
"First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out--
because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out--
because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out--
because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out--
because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me--
and there was no one left to speak out for me."
-Pastor Niemoeller-
Upon exiting Nazi death camp
Holocaust Encyclopedia
"If my fellow citizens want to go to Hell, I will help them. It's my job."
-Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes-
"God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion [possibly the French Revolution, but more likely Shays' Rebellion]. What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion [possibly the French Revolution, but more likely Shays' Rebellion]. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty . . . And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."
-Thomas Jefferson-
letter to William Stevens Smith, November 13, 1787
"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
Source: motto to Historical Review of Pennsylvania
1755 letter that Franklin is presumed to have written on behalf of the Pennsylvania Assembly to the colonial governor during the French and Indian War
"Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner."
-James Bovard-
American author, lecturer
Source: Lost Rights. The Destruction of American Liberty (St. Martin's Press: New York, 1994), p. 333
"Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people."
-George Bernard Shaw-
"Live free or die. Death is not the worst of evils."
-John Stark-
"Among the many misdeeds of British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest."
-Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi-
(1869-1948)
Source: An Autobiography, pg 446
"Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have ... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people, by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpations."
-James Madison-
"Man has only those rights he can defend."
-Jack McCoy-
Law and Order
"As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight. And it is in such twilight that we all must be aware of change in the air - however slight - lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness."
-Justice William O. Douglas, US Supreme Court-
"Don't join the book burners. Don't think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed."
-Dwight D. Eisenhower-
"The discovery of the alphabet will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories. They will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves."
-Socrates, in Phaedrus-
"I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
1820
Source: letter to William Charles Jarvis, 28 September 1820; The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Memorial Edition, Lipscomb and Bergh, eds., vol. 15 (278)
"Laws are like sausages. It's better not to see them being made."
-Otto von Bismarck-
"It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again because there is no effort without error and short-comings, who knows the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the high achievement of triumph and who at worst, if he fails while daring greatly, knows his place shall never be with those timid and cold souls who know neither victory nor defeat."
-Theodore Roosevelt-
26th President of the United States.
"Hypocrisy is better than no standards at all."
-William Bennet-
drug czar
"A representative owes the people not only his industry, but his judgment, and he betrays them if he sacrifices it to their opinion."
-Sir Edmund Burke-
member of British Parliament
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
-Sir Edmund Burke-
"All that is necessary for good to triumph is for evil men to do nothing."
"When bad men combine, the good must associate else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."
- Sir Edmund Burke-
"Silence is golden, but when it threatens your freedom, it's yellow."
-Sir Edmund Burke-
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts."
-Bertrand Russell-
(1872-1970) Philosopher, educator
"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the opposite direction."
-Albert Einstein-
"Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans, born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage, and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world. Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty… Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate… And so my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country."
-John F. Kennedy-
Inaugural (Excerpts): January 20, 1961
“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."
-Martin Luther King Jr.-
"There can be no real peace while one American is dying some place in the world for the rest of us. We are at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars, and it has been said if we lose that war, and in so doing lose this way of freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening. . . . If we lose freedom here [in America], there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth."
-Ronald Reagan- (October 27, 1964)
"The price of Freedom is eternal vigilance."
-Thomas Jefferson-
or was it...
"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."
-Wendell Phillips -
(1811-1884) Abolitionist author, orator and columnist for The Liberator,
Source: (frequently misattributed to Thomas Jefferson), in a speech before the Massachusetts Antislavery Society in 1852
or was it...
"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."
-John Philpot Curran-
(1750-1814) Irish Orator, Statesman, Judge
Source: Speech, Dublin
"You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in their struggle for independence."
-Charles A. Beard-
US historian (1874 - 1948)
"He, who will not reason, is a bigot; he, who cannot, is a fool; and he, who dares not, is a slave."
-William Drummond-
Laird of Hawthornden
"The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously."
-Henry Kissinger-
"Sometimes a majority only means that all the fools are on the same side."
"Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear, kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor, with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it."
-General Douglas MacArthur-
(1880-1964) WWII Supreme Allied Commander of the Southwest Pacific, Supreme United Nations Commander
Source: Whan, ed. "A Soldier Speaks: Public Papers and Speeches of General of the Army Douglas MacArthur," (1965); Nation, August 17, 1957
"I don't think the world should be made so safe that we lose the educational benefits of consequences."
-Virgil Elliot-
motorcyclist
"There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers."
-Richard Feynman-
physicist, Nobel laureate (1918-1988)
"When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President. Now I'm beginning to believe it."
-Clarence Darrow-
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
-Margaret Mead-
"The rights you have are the rights given you by this Committee [the House Un-American Activities Committee]. We will determine what rights you have and what rights you have not got."
-J. Parnell Thomas-
"Contemplate the mangled bodies of your countrymen, and then say 'What should be the reward of such sacrifices?' Bid us and our posterity bow the knee, supplicate the friendship, and plough, and sow, and reap, to glut the avarice of the men who have let loose on us the dogs of war to riot in our blood and hunt us from the face of the earth? If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen."
-Samuel Adams-
speech at the Philadelphia State House, August 1, 1776
"The Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions."
-Daniel Webster-
(1782-1852), US Senator
"Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters."
-Daniel Webster-
"There are men in all ages who mean to exercise power usefully; but who mean to exercise it. They mean to govern well; but they mean to govern. They promise to be kind masters; but they mean to be masters. They think there need be but little restraint upon themselves. Their notion of the public interest is apt to be quite closely connected with their own exercise of authority. They may not, indeed, always understand their own motives. The love of power may sink too deep in their hearts even for their own scrutiny, and may pass with themselves for mere patriotism and benevolence."
-Daniel Webster-
speech delivered at Niblo’s Saloon, in New York, on the 15 of March, 1837
"Woe to those who enact evil statutes, and to those who constantly record unjust decisions, so as to deprive the needy of justice, and to rob the poor of my people of their rights, in order that widows may be their spoil, and that they may plunder the orphans."
-Isaiah 10: 1-2-
"Why doesn't everybody leave everybody else the hell alone?"
-Jimmy Durante-
(1893-1980) American singer, pianist, comedian and actor
"Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but only those specifically enumerated."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this."
-Albert Einstein-
"My First Impression of the U.S.A.", 1921
"You have enough money for some law, but not enough for justice."
-a particularly altruistic attorney-
"...It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds..."
-Samuel Adams-
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must undergo the fatigue of supporting it. "
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) Source: Common Sense, February 14, 1776
"Whensoever the General Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"Patriotism means supporting your country all of the time, and your government when it deserves it."
-Mark Twain-
"I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"We are about 50 years overdue for a revolution. There's only one thing standing in the way: do you have any idea how much the permit would cost?"
-Darrell-
blacksmith
"The first rule of liberty: mind your own business."
-Alan Weiss-
"A libertarian is a person who believes that no one has the right, under any circumstances, to initiate force against another human being, or to advocate or delegate its initiation. Those who act consistently with this principle are libertarians, whether they realize it or not. Those who fail to act consistently with it are not libertarians, regardless of what they may claim."
-L Neil Smith-
"Every normal man must be tempted at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats."
-H.L. Mencken-
"And herein lies lesson one on 'Truth.' Let's call it The Pithy Postulate: There is no Truth man cannot confuse or obscure. (Especially a Lawyer!)"
-Cpt. Bruce Hartgers V-
"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them."
-Frederick Douglass-
"The direct use of physical force is so poor a solution to the problem of limited resources that it is commonly employed only by small children and great nations."
-David D Friedman-
The Machinery of Freedom
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme."
-Mark Twain-
"Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys."
-P.J. O'Rourke-
"Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action."
-George Washington-
"Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: in a speech of January 7, 1790
Or more succinctly, government is evil. Any other type of action in which it might engage is purely unintentional, and it apologizes...
"When people fear the government, there is tyranny. When government fears the people, there is liberty."
-Thomas Paine-
-or was it...
"When the government fears the people there is liberty; when the people fear the government there is tyranny."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
although disputed as a rewriting of...
"Some are whigs, liberals, democrats, call them what you please. Others are tories, serviles, aristocrats, &c. The latter fear the people, and wish to transfer all power to the higher classes of society; the former consider the people as the safest depository of power in the last resort; they cherish them therefore, and wish to leave in them all the powers to the exercise of which they are competent."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down. Up to man's age-old dream -- the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order -- or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. Regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would sacrifice freedom for security have embarked on this downward path. Plutarch warned, 'The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits.'"
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
October 27, 1964
That, of course, he took by force from someone else...
ARTHUR: That's it! It's the armor! I missed that before. Of course! Only knights are rich enough to bedeck themselves in armor. They can declare war when it suits them, go clodhopping about the country slicing up peasants and foot soldiers, because peasants and foot soldiers are not equipped with armor. All that can happen to a knight is an occasional dent. [He takes a long run to the fireplace.] Proposition: Wrong or right, they have the might, so wrong or right, they're always right - and that's wrong. Right?
GUENEVERE: Absolutely.
-Camelot- (1967)
"Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded---here and there, now and then---are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as 'bad luck.'"
-Robert Heinlein-
"You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free."
-Clarence Darrow-
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
-Voltaire [François Marie Arouet]-
"There are many men of principle in both parties in America, but there is no party of principle."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
(Hey, Al, take another look now. The Libertarians are here!)
"Today, we need a nation of Minutemen, citizens who are not only prepared to take arms, but citizens who regard the preservation of freedom as the basic purpose of their daily life and who are willing to consciously work and sacrifice for that freedom."
-John F. Kennedy-
"I am rather inclined to silence, and whether that be wise or not, it is at least more unusual nowadays to find a man who can hold his tongue than to find one who cannot."
-Abraham Lincoln-
"Life was much simpler when all I had to worry about was the latest findings in science or a new cool mathematical concept. Now, in order to preserve freedom and liberty for myself and those whom I care about, I have to know and understand how the machine of our oppressors operates so I can turn it back against them.
So into the Belly of the Beast I go..."
-Freedom Fred-
"I am only one, but I am one.
I cannot do everything, but I can do something.
And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.
What I can do, I should do.
And what I should do, by the grace of God, I will do."
-Edward Everett Hale-
"I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Lets start with typewriters."
-Frank Lloyd Wright-
"Whatever enables us to go to war, secures our peace."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"The worst thing in this world, next to anarchy, is government."
-Henry Ward Beecher-
"In the beginning of a change, the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot. "
-Mark Twain-
Notebook, 1935
"The National Government will regard it as its first and foremost duty to revive in the nation the spirit of unity and cooperation. It will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built. It regards Christianity as the foundation of our national morality, and the family as the basis of national life."
-Adolph Hitler-
Berlin, 1933
"A man is usually more careful of his money than he is of his principles."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-
"Those who insist on the dignity of their office show they have not deserved it."
-Baltasar Gracian-
“I don’t know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God."
-George H. W. Bush-
"Good deeds, bad deeds... same old random punishment."
-Peter Fels-
blacksmith
"Liberty for all does not mean independence from one another."
-George W. Bush-
Inauguration, January 20, 2005
Huh? So liberty only applies to the collective?
"The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most easily adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.
The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."
-H. L. Mencken-
Baltimore Sun
July 26, 1920
"When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental. ...
So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack, or count himself lost. His one aim is to disarm suspicion, to arouse confidence in his orthodoxy, to avoid challenge. ...
All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most easily adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."
-H.L. Mencken-
July 26, 1920
"There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who portrays himself as 'caring' and 'sensitive' because he wants to expand the government's charitable programs is merely saying that he's willing to try to do good with other people's money. Well, who isn't? And a voter who takes pride in supporting such programs is telling us that he'll do good with his own money - if a gun is held to his head."
-P.J. O'Rourke-
"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!"
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
"Banning instruments rather than acts indicate a belief that man is not worthy of his own free will. Well, some men are not, but that is no justification for whimsical legislation. The Founding Fathers struggled for the principle that man could and should be trusted with his own destiny."
-Jeff Cooper-
"There may be honour among thieves, but there is none among politicians."
-T. E. Lawrence-
Lawrence of Arabia
"That's what governments are for: to get in a man's way."
-Capt. Malcolm Reynolds-
Firefly
"Nothin' worse than a monster that thinks he's right with God."
-Capt. Malcolm Reynolds-
Firefly
"Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will."
-Frederick Douglass-
[Frederick Baily] (1818-1895), escaped slave, Abolitionist, author, editor of the North Star and later the New National Era
"The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters."
-Frederick Douglass-
[Frederick Baily] (1818-1895), escaped slave, Abolitionist, author, editor of the North Star and later the New National Era
Source: Frederick Douglass, in an address on West India Emancipation (4 August 1857)
"I shall pursue in silence the path of right."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"I don't think they realized what they were doing. Is your property your property? Or can any developer come along and take it away from you? You don't just fight for freedom over in Iraq, some foreign country. The people taking our freedom are right here. And you saw five of them here in Washington."
-Bill Merrill-
winner of a landmark '80s NH eminent domain case
commenting on KELO V. NEW LONDON, 7/3/05
(both benches included Justice David Souter)
"Lack of respect, wrong attitude, failure to obey authority. The farm, immediately."
-Lou Craddock-
A Boy and His Dog
"The liberties of our Country, the freedom of our civil constitution are worth defending at all hazards: And it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have receiv'd them as a fair Inheritance from our worthy Ancestors: They purchas'd them for us with toil and danger and expence of treasure and blood; and transmitted them to us with care and diligence. It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle; or be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men. Of the latter we are in most danger at present: Let us therefore be aware of it. Let us contemplate our forefathers and posterity; and resolve to maintain the rights bequeath'd to us from the former, for the sake of the latter. - Instead of sitting down satisfied with the efforts we have already made, which is the wish of our enemies, the necessity of the times, more than ever, calls for our utmost circumspection, deliberation, fortitude, and perseverance. Let us remember that 'if we suffer tamely a lawless attack upon our liberty, we encourage it, and involve others in our doom.' It is a very serious consideration, which should deeply impress our minds, that millions yet unborn may be the miserable sharers of the event."
-Samuel Adams-
Boston Gazette, October 14, 1771
"The liberties of our Country, the freedom of our civil constitution are worth defending at all hazards: And it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have receiv'd them as a fair Inheritance from our worthy Ancestors: They purchas'd them for us with toil and danger and expence of treasure and blood; and transmitted them to us with care and diligence. It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle; or be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men. Of the latter we are in most danger at present: Let us therefore be aware of it. Let us contemplate our forefathers and posterity; and resolve to maintain the rights bequeath'd to us from the former, for the sake of the latter. — Instead of sitting down satisfied with the efforts we have already made, which is the wish of our enemies, the necessity of the times, more than ever, calls for our utmost circumspection, deliberation, fortitude, and perseverance."
-Samuel Adams-
article published in 1771
"Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end...liberty is the only object which benefits all alike, and provokes no sincere opposition...The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. ~ Every class is unfit to govern ... Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men."
-Lord Acton-
[John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton] (1834-1902), First Baron Acton of Aldenham
historian and moralist
expressed this opinion in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887
"I cannot accept, your canon that we are to judge pope and king unlike other men, with a favorable presumption that they do no wrong. If there is any presumption, it is the other way against holders of power ... Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
-Lord Acton-
[John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton] (1834-1902), First Baron Acton of Aldenham
Source: to the bishop of London, 1887
"Thinking is man's only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which all of you practice, but struggle never to admit: the act of blanking out, the willful suspension of one's consciousness, the refusal to think--not blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know. It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment--on the unstated premise that a thing will not exist if only you refuse to identify it, that A will not be A so long as you do not pronounce the verdict 'It is.'"
-John Galt-
Atlas Shrugged
"By a very conservative estimate, a hundred million people have died at the hands of their own governments in this century. Given that record, how bad could anarchy be?"
-Joseph Sobran-
"Conservative, n: A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others."
-Ambrose Bierce-
"Resistance to sudden violence, for the preservation not only of my person, my limbs and life, but of my property, is an indisputable right of nature which I have never surrendered to the public by the compact of society, and which perhaps, I could not surrender if I would. Nor is there anything in the common law of England ... inconsistent with that right."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: BOSTON GAZETTE, September 5, 1763, The Works of John Adams, p.438 (Charles F. Adams ed., 1851).
"Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom."
-Albert Einstein-
(1879-1955) Physicist and Professor, Nobel Prize 1921
Source: 'Out of My Later Years,' 1950
"The explanation of types of structure in classes — as resulting from the will of the Deity, to create animals on certain plans — is no explanation. It has not the character of a physical law and is therefore utterly useless. It foretells nothing because we know nothing of the will of the Deity, how it acts and whether constant or inconstant like that of man."
-Charles Darwin-
At a debate, the Bishop of Oxley asked Darwin protégé Thomas Huxley which side of his family was descended from an ape.
Huxley: "If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling, it would rather be a man, a man of restless and versatile intellect, who plunges into scientific questions with which he had no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice."
-1860 debate-
"The simple truth -- born of experience -- is that tyranny thrives best where government need not fear the wrath of an armed people. The prospect of tyranny may not grab the headlines the way vivid stories of gun crime routinely do. But few saw the Third Reich coming until it was too late. The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed -- where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once."
-Federal Appeals Judge Alex Kozinski, 2003-
Eastern European immigrant
"The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools."
-Herbert Spencer-
(1820-1903) British author, economist, philosopher
"Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself."
-Mark Twain-
"We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle."
-Sir Winston Churchill-
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
1903
"A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul."
-George Bernard Shaw-
"A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man; a debt he proposes to pay off with your money."
-G. Gordon Liddy-
(1930-) Attorney, FBI agent, politician, radio personality, convicted Watergate burglar
"Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries."
-Douglas Casey-
Classmate of W.J. Clinton at Georgetown U. (1992)
"The State is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else."
-Frederic Bastiat-
French Economist (1801-1850)
"Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it."
-Ronald Reagan- (1986)
"I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts."
-Will Rogers-
"If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free."
-P.J. O'Rourke-
"If you want government to intervene domestically, you're a liberal.
If you want government to intervene overseas, you're conservative.
If you want government to intervene everywhere, you're a moderate.
If you don't want government to intervene anywhere, you're an extremist."
-Joseph Sobran-
(1946-2010) Columnist
1995 (Editor of the National Review at one time)
"In general, the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other."
-Voltaire- (1764)
"Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you."
-Pericles- (430 B.C.)
"No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the congress is in session."
-Mark Twain- (1866)
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910)
or was it...
"No man's life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session."
-Judge Gideon J. Tucker- (1826-1899)
"Talk is cheap -- except when Congress does it."
-(Unknown)-
"The inherent vice of capitalism is the uneven division of blessings, while the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal division of misery."
-Sir Winston Churchill-
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
"The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin."
-Mark Twain-
"There is no distinctly native American criminal class save Congress."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910)
"What this country needs are more unemployed politicians."
-Edward Langley-
Artist (1928 - 1995)
"Freedom arises from the multiplicity of sects, which pervades America and which is the best and only security for religious liberty in any society. For where there is such a variety of sects, there cannot be a majority of any one sect to oppress and persecute the rest."
-James Madison-
to the Virginia Convention on Ratifying the Constitution, 1778
"In Kansas schools, 'science' is now a search for 'more adequate explanations of natural phenomena.' Who needs physics? Divine intervention can explain everything without all that math."
-Bob Park-
U of Maryland
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive."
-C.S. Lewis-
"Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others?"
-Thomas Jefferson-
"You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harm it would cause if improperly administered."
-Lyndon B. Johnson-
(1908-1973) 37th US President (1963-1969)
"That government is best which governs not at all; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have."
-Henry David Thoreau-
"Be thankful we're not getting all the government we're paying for."
-Will Rogers-
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
-George Santayana-
"The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter."
-Winston Churchill-
"All laws which are repugnant to the Constitution are null and void."
-U.S. Supreme Court Marbury v. Maidson, 5 US (2 Cranch) 137, 174, 176, (1803)-
"No one is bound to obey an unconstitutional law and no courts are bound to enforce it. The general rule is that an unconstitutional statute, though having the form and the name of law, is in reality no law, but is wholly void, and ineffective for any purpose, since unconstitutionality dates from the time of its enactment, and not merely from the date of the decision so branding it."
-16th American Jurisprudence 2d, Section 177 late 2nd, section 256-
"That sounds like the Alliance. Unite all the planets under one rule so that everybody can be interfered with or ignored equally."
-Malcolm Reynolds-
Firefly, "The Train Job"
"You were truthful back in town. These are tough times. A man can get a job, he might not look too close at what that job is. But a man learns all the details of a situation like ours, well, then he has a choice."
"I don't believe he does."
-Malcolm Reynolds-
Firefly, "The Train Job"
"A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned."
-Shepherd Derrial Book-
Firefly, "War Stories"
"People don't like to be meddled with. We tell them what to do, what to think. Don't run, don't walk. We're in their homes and in their heads and we haven't the right. We're meddlesome."
-River Tam-
Serenity
"Nothing is so galling to a people not broken in from the birth as a paternal, or, in other words, a meddling government, a government which tells them what to read, and say, and eat, and drink and wear."
-Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay-
1st Baron Macaulay PC (25 October 1800 - 28 December 1859)
British poet, historian and Whig politician
"The only hypothetical history that's empirically testable is the version that actually happened."
"Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are."
-Benjamin Franklin-
"A patriot must be ready to defend his country against his government."
-Edward Abbey-
(1927-1989) American author and essayist
"Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people... it is true that most stupid people are conservative."
-John Stuart Mill-
"Aim above conservatism."
-Bill Alleman-
"You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists."
-Abbie Hoffman-
"Politicians and diapers need to be changed. Often for the same reasons."
"Under Republicans, man exploits man. Under Democrats, it's just the opposite."
-John Kenneth Galbraith-
"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."
-Sinclair Lewis-
"I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ."
-Mahatma Gandhi-
"The media are only as liberal as the conservative businesses that own them."
Early Warning Signs of Fascism
Powerful and continuing nationalism
Disdain for human rights
Identification of enemies as a unifying cause
Supremacy of the military
Rampant sexism
Controlled mass media
Obsession with national security
Religion and government intertwined
Corporate power protected
Labor power suppressed
Disdain for intellectuals & the arts
Obsession with crime & punishment
Rampant cronyism & corruption
Fraudulent elections
-Lawrence W. Britt wrote about the common signs of fascism in April, 2003, after researching seven fascist regimes. Those were Adolph Hitler's Nazi Germany, Benito Mussolini's Italy, Francisco Franco's Spain, Antonio de Oliveira Salazar's Portugal, George Papadopoulos' Greece, Augusto Pinochet's Chile, Mohamed Suharto's Indonesia.-
FIREARMS REFRESHER COURSE
by Mike Bodiker
1. An armed man is a citizen. An unarmed man is a subject.
2. A gun in the hand is better than a cop on the phone.
3. Colt: The original point and click interface.
4. Gun control is not about guns, it's about control.
5. If guns are outlawed, can we use swords?
6. If guns cause crime, then pencils cause misspelled words.
7. FREE men do not ask permission to bear arms!
8. If you don't know your rights you don't have any.
9. Those who trade liberty for security have neither.
10. The United States Constitution © 1791. All Rights reserved.
11. What part of "shall not be infringed" do you not understand?
12. The Second Amendment is in place in case others are ignored.
13. 64,999,987 firearms owners killed no one yesterday.
14. Guns only have two enemies: liberals and rust.
15. Know guns, know peace and safety. No guns, no peace nor safety.
16. You don't shoot to kill; you shoot to stay alive.
17. 911 - government sponsored Dial-a-Prayer.
18. Assault is a behavior, not a device.
19. Criminals love gun control -- it makes their jobs safer.
20. If guns cause crime, then matches cause arson
..and flies cause garbage!!!
21. Only a government that is afraid of its citizens tries to disarm them.
22. You only have the rights you are willing to fight for.
23. When you remove the people's right to bear arms, you create slaves.
24. The American Revolution would never have happened with gun control.
25. ".. A government of the people, by the people, for the people..."
"Each State, in ratifying the Constitution, is considered as a sovereign body, independent of all others, and only to be bound by its own voluntary act. In this relation, then, the new Constitution will, if established, be a FEDERAL, and not a NATIONAL constitution."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Federalist No. 39, 1788
"Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law,' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"[T]he very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials. One's right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections."
-West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624, 638 (1943)-
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."
-Declaration of Independence-
"A democracy cannot survive as a permanent form of government. It can last only until its citizens discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority (who vote) will vote for the candidates promising the greatest benefits from the public purse, with the result that a democracy will always collapse from loose fiscal policies, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest democratic nations has been 200 years. Each has been through the following sequence:
1. From bondage to spiritual faith.
2. From faith to great courage.
3. From courage to liberty.
4. From liberty to abundance.
5. From abundance to complacency.
6. From complacency to selfishness.
7. From selfishness to apathy.
8. From apathy to dependency.
9. And from dependency back again into bondage."
-Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay-
author and politician, in a letter to a friend in 1857
or was it
-Alexander Tytler-
Scottish born British attorney, half a century earlier
or...
or...
or...
"People crushed by law have no hopes but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws ..."
-Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay-
"When public employments are few in number, ill-paid and precarious, whilst the different lines of business are numerous and lucrative, it is to business, and not to official duties, that the new and eager desires engendered by the principle of equality turn from every side. But if, whilst the ranks of society are becoming more equal, the education of the people remains incomplete, or their spirit the reverse of bold -- if commerce and industry, checked in their growth, afford only slow and arduous means of making a fortune -- the various members of the community, despairing of ameliorating their own condition, rush to the head of the State and demand its assistance. To relieve their own necessities at the cost of the public treasury, appears to them to be the easiest and most open, if not the only, way they have to rise above a condition which no longer contents them; place-hunting becomes the most generally followed of all trades. This must especially be the case, in those great centralized monarchies in which the number of paid offices is immense, and the tenure of them tolerably secure, so that no one despairs of obtaining a place, and of enjoying it as undisturbedly as a hereditary fortune."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
Democracy in America
"Thus, when public employments afford the only outlet for ambition, the government necessarily meets with a permanent opposition at last; for it is tasked to satisfy with limited means unlimited desires. It is very certain that of all people in the world the most difficult to restrain and to manage are a people of solicitants. Whatever endeavors are made by rulers, such a people can never be contented; and it is always to be apprehended that they will ultimately overturn the constitution of the country, and change the aspect of the State, for the sole purpose of making a clearance of places. The sovereigns of the present age, who strive to fix upon themselves alone all those novel desires which are aroused by equality, and to satisfy them, will repent in the end, if I am not mistaken, that they ever embarked in this policy: they will one day discover that they have hazarded their own power, by making it so necessary; and that the more safe and honest course would have been to teach their subjects the art of providing for themselves."
"I trace amongst our contemporaries two contrary notions which are equally injurious. One set of men can perceive nothing in the principle of equality but the anarchical tendencies which it engenders: they dread their own free agency -- they fear themselves. Other thinkers, less numerous but more enlightened, take a different view: besides that track which starts from the principle of equality to terminate in anarchy, they have at last discovered the road which seems to lead men to inevitable servitude. They shape their souls beforehand to this necessary condition; and, despairing of remaining free, they already do obeisance in their hearts to the master who is soon to appear. The former abandon freedom, because they think it dangerous; the latter, because they hold it to be impossible."
"When I see that the right and the means of absolute command are conferred on a people or upon a king, upon an aristocracy or a democracy, a monarchy or a republic, I recognize the germ of tyranny, and I journey onward to a land of more hopeful institutions."
In my opinion the main evil of the present democratic institutions of the United States does not arise, as is often asserted in Europe, from their weakness, but from their overpowering strength; and I am not so much alarmed at the excessive liberty which reigns in that country as at the very inadequate securities which exist against tyranny."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
"Certainly one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of citizens to keep and bear arms. ... The right of citizens to bear arms is just one guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which now appears remote in America but which historically has proven to be possible."
-US Senator Hubert H. Humphrey- (1960)
"Duty, Honor, Country — those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying point to build courage when courage seems to fail, to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith, to create hope when hope becomes forlorn."
-Douglas MacArthur-
Personally, my honor defines my duty...
“America wasn’t founded so we could all be better. America was founded so we could all be what we damned well pleased.”
-PJ O’Rourke-
"What happened was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to be governed by surprise, to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believe that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. . .
To live in the process is absolutely not to notice it -- please try to believe me -- unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us ever had occasion to develop.
Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, 'regretted.' . . . Believe me this is true. Each act, each occasion is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow... Suddenly it all comes down, all at once... You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair."
-German professor-
describing the arrival of Nazism to American journalist Milton Mayer
"The existence of a problem, however serious, does not justify federal remedies outside the scope of Congress's enumerated powers."
-Robert A. Levy and Michael I. Krauss-
Cato senior fellow in constitutional studies, and professor of law at George Mason University
"The flag is not simply the symbol of America; more deeply, it is the symbol of the principles on which this nation rests. Those who would desecrate the flag are thus guilty, at bottom, of desecrating our principles, which is why we find their acts so offensive. Ironically, it is those very principles that protect such acts-and restrain the rest of us in the process."
-Roger Pilon-
Cato Institute VP for Legal Affairs
"Still one thing more, fellow citizens — a wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities."
-Thomas Jefferson-
First Inaugural Address (March 4, 1801)
"A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: First Inaugural Address; March 4, 1801
"Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it.
Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many.
Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books.
Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders.
Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations.
But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it."
-Siddartha Gautama - The Buddha-
"Liberty, as it is conceived by current opinion, has nothing inherent about it; it is a sort of gift or trust bestowed on the individual by the state pending good behavior."
-Mary McCarthy-
The Contagion of Ideas, 1952
"All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by 'our' side . . . The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them."
-George Orwell-
"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly."
-Albert Einstein-
"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds."
-Albert Einstein-
(1879-1955) Physicist and Professor, Nobel Prize 1921
"Sin lies only in hurting others unnecessarily. All other 'sins' are invented nonsense."
-Robert A. Heinlein-
"The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist."
-Winston Churchill-
Nov 21, 1943
"Posterity: you will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it."
-John Quincy Adams-
(1767-1848) 6th US President
"I believe that God has endowed men with certain unalienable rights as set forth in the Declaration of Independence and that no legislature and no majority, however great, may morally limit or destroy these; that the sole function of government is to protect life, liberty, and property and anything more than this is usurpation and oppression. ...
I believe that each State is sovereign in performing those functions reserved to it by the Constitution and it is destructive of our federal system and the right of self-government guaranteed under the Constitution for the Federal Government to regulate or control the States in performing their functions or to engage in performing such functions itself."
-Ezra Taft Benson-
Secretary of Agriculture under the Eisenhower Administration
"The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry."
-Ernest Hemingway-
"Pardon him, Theodotus; he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature."
-George Bernard Shaw-
Caesar and Cleopatra
"No protracted war can fail to endanger the freedom of a democratic country."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
"We must all hang together, or, assuredly, we shall all hang separately."
-Benjamin Franklin-
"The world looks with some awe upon a man who appears unconcernedly indifferent to home, money, comfort, rank, or even power and fame. The world feels not without a certain apprehension, that here is some one outside its jurisdiction; someone before whom its allurements may be spread in vain; some one strangely enfranchised, untamed, untrammelled by convention, moving independent of the ordinary currents of human action."
-Winston Churchill-
"Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest."
-Denis Diderot-
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and hence clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
-H.L. Mencken-
"Your pretended fear lest error should step in, is like the man that would keep all the wine out of the country lest men should be drunk. It will be found an unjust and unwise jealousy, to deny a man the liberty he hath by nature upon a supposition that he may abuse it."
-Oliver Cromwell-
"But why did only one group of passengers oppose the terrorists? Perhaps because they were the only ones who knew what was happening -- they had gotten word via cell phone regarding the fate of the earlier flights. But perhaps there is another factor: in a society which endlessly promotes the idea that the government will protect you, is it any wonder that the American spirit has lost its will to fight back? How many passengers were simply waiting for someone "in authority" to save them?"
-JPFO Liberty Crew, 9/11/06
"Nothing says, 'I am ashamed of you, my government," more than 'Stewart/Colbert '08'."
-Jon Stewart-
"Stewart/Colbert '08!"
-Bill Alleman-
"In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong."
-John Kenneth Galbraith-
"If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. The loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or imagined, from abroad."
-James Madison-
"Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live."
-Oscar Wilde-
"An Unconstitutional Act is not a law; it confers no rights; it imposes no duties; it affords no protection; it creates no office; it is, in legal contemplation, as inoperative as though it had never been passed."
-U.S. Supreme Court Norton v. Shelby County 118 U.S. 425, 442, (1885)-
"Widespread intellectual and moral docility may be convenient for leaders in the short term, but it is suicidal for nations in the long term. One of the criteria for national leadership should therefore be a talent for understanding, encouraging, and making constructive use of vigorous criticism."
-Carl Sagan-
"I tire so of hearing people say,
'Let things take their course. Tomorrow is another day.'
I do not need my freedom when I’m dead.
I cannot live on tomorrow’s bread."
-Langston Hughes-
“A free people ought not only to be armed and disciplined, but they should have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own government.”
-George Washington-
Speech of Jan. 7, 1790, published in Boston Independent Chronicle, Jan. 14, 1790
"Freedom, privileges, options, must constantly be exercised, even at the risk of inconvenience. Otherwise they fall into desuetude and become unfashionable, unorthodox - finally irregulationary. Sometimes the person who insists upon his prerogatives seems shrill and contentious - but actually he performs a service for all. Freedom naturally should never become license, but regulation should never become restriction."
-Jack Vance-
Emphyrio
"It must not be forgotten that it is especially dangerous to enslave men in the minor details of life. For my own part, I should be inclined to think freedom less necessary in great things than in little ones."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
Democracy in America
"Responsibility is the price of freedom."
-Elbert Hubbard-
"If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself."
-James Madison-
"The right of a citizen to bear arms, in lawful defense of himself or the State, is absolute. He does not derive it from the State government. It is one of the high powers delegated directly to the citizen, and is excepted out of the general powers of government. A law cannot be passed to infringe upon or impair it, because it is above the law, and independent of the lawmaking power."
-Cockrum v. State, 24 Tex. 394, at 401-402 (1859)-
"Democracy is the bludgeoning of the people, by the people, for the people."
-Oscar Wilde-
"Accept the truth from whatever source it comes."
-Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon (Maimonides)-
1135~1204 C.E.
"The secular state is the guarantee of religious pluralism. This apparent paradox, again, is the simplest and most elegant of political truths."
-Christopher Hitchens-
"Never argue with a fool; onlookers may not be able to tell the difference."
-Mark Twain-
"Never argue with an idiot. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience."
-Mark Twain-
"Don’t argue with idiots because they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience."
-Greg King-
"If someone has a gun and is trying to kill you, it would be reasonable to shoot back with your own gun."
-The Dalai Lama-
The Seattle Times, May 15, 2001
"Those who would overturn the Second Amendment should not proceed blind to the fact that stripped of the right to bear arms, the people would be stripped of the right and the means to resist government oppression. Overturning the Second Amendment would complete the transformation of the American people from citizens empowered to hold government accountable to mere subjects of executive power."
-Paul Craig Roberts-
"Laws don't stop crime. They only define it."
"I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law."
-Martin Luther King Jr.-
"I myself am human and free only to the extent that I acknowledge the humanity and liberty of all my fellows... I am properly free when all the men and women about me are equally free. Far from being a limitation or a denial of my liberty, the liberty of another is its necessary condition and confirmation."
-Mikhail Bakunin-
"Here's my strategy on the Cold War: We win, they lose."
-Ronald Reagan-
"The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help."
-Ronald Reagan-
"The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they're ignorant: It's just that they know so much that isn't so."
-Ronald Reagan-
"Of the four wars in my lifetime none came about because the U.S. was too strong."
-Ronald Reagan-
"I have wondered at times about what the Ten Commandments would have looked like if Moses had run them through the U.S. Congress."
-Ronald Reagan-
"The taxpayer: That's someone who works for the federal government but doesn't have to take the civil service examination."
-Ronald Reagan-
"Government is like a baby: An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
"No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this earth!"
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
"I've laid down the law, though, to everyone from now on about anything that happens: no matter what time it is, wake me, even if it's in the middle of a Cabinet meeting."
-Ronald Reagan-
"It has been said that politics is the second oldest profession. I have learned that it bears a striking resemblance to the first."
-Ronald Reagan-
"Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it."
-Ronald Reagan-
"Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book."
-Ronald Reagan-
"No arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women."
-Ronald Reagan-
"General, I'm a civilian. I outrank you."
-Jim Rockford-
"That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant."
-John Stuart Mill-
(1806-1873) English philosopher and economist
Source: John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)
"Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman."
-Louis Brandeis-
"There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly."
-Henry David Thoreau-
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
-C.S. Lewis-
"There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want, merely because you think it would be good for him."
-Robert Heinlein-
"May you live in interesting times
May you come to the attention of those in authority
May you find what you are looking for"
-apocryphal Chinese curse-
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free."
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe-
(1749-1832)
"The natural tendency of things, it seems, is for government to grow and for liberty to retreat."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"As a matter of general principle, I believe there can be no doubt that criticism in time of war is essential to the maintenance of any kind of democratic government ... too many people desire to suppress criticism simply because they think that it will give some comfort to the enemy to know that there is such criticism. If that comfort makes the enemy feel better for a few moments, they are welcome to it as far as I am concerned, because the maintenance of the right of criticism in the long run will do the country maintaining it a great deal more good than it will do the enemy, and will prevent mistakes which might otherwise occur."
-Robert Taft-
"Mr Republican"
"Even as it stands, the Home Guard could only exist in a country where men feel themselves free. The totalitarian states can do great things, but there is one thing they cannot do: they cannot give the factory-worker a rifle and tell him to take it home and keep it in his bedroom. That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer's cottage is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there."
-George Orwell-
"Don't Let Colonel Blimp Ruin the Home Guard", Evening Standard, 8 January 1941
"Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let people have guns ... why should we let them have ideas?"
-Joseph Stalin-
"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win."
-Mahatma Gandhi-
"Ron Paul is one of the outstanding leaders fighting for a stronger national defense. As a former Air Force officer, he knows well the needs of our armed forces, and he always puts them first. We need to keep him fighting for our country."
-Ronald Reagan-
"Personally I do not resort to force -- not even the force of law -- to advance moral reforms. I prefer education, argument, persuasion, and above all the influence of example -- of fashion."
-Rutherford B. Hayes-
"It does the sheep no good to preach the goodness of a diet of grass, if the wolves are of a different mind."
-Terry Goodkind-
"A strong body makes the mind strong. As to the species of exercise, I advise the gun. While this gives moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise and independence to the mind. Games played with the ball and others of that nature are too violent for the body and stamp no character on the mind. Let your gun therefore be the constant companion of your walks."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity."
-Sigmund Freud-
"Another source of power in government is a military force. But this, to be efficient, must be superior to any force that exists among the people, or which they can command; for otherwise this force would be annihilated, on the first exercise of acts of oppression. Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States. A military force, at the command of Congress, can execute no laws, but such as the people perceive to be just and constitutional; for they will possess the power, and jealousy will instantly inspire the inclination, to resist the execution of a law which appears to them unjust and oppressive."
-Noah Webster-
(1758-1843) American patriot and scholar, author of the first dictionary of American English usage (1806) and the author of the 1828 edition of the dictionary that bears his name.
Source: An Examination of the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution, Philadelphia, 1787
"Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the President or any other public official save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country."
-Theodore Roosevelt-
"Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. I am Caesar."
-Anonymous-
"In matters of principle, stand like a rock; in matters of taste, swim with the current."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"What we don't see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do."
-Rudolph W. Giuliani-
(1944- ) Mayor of New York City from 1994-2001
Source: March 16, 1994, at symposium on urban crime sponsored by the New York Post
"By the theory of our Government majorities rule, but this right is not an arbitrary or unlimited one. It is a right to be exercised in subordination to the Constitution and in conformity to it. One great object of the Constitution was to restrain majorities from oppressing minorities or encroaching upon their just rights. Minorities have a right to appeal to the Constitution as a shield against such oppression."
-James K. Polk-
"Now let me state the present rules, the lawyer then went on,
These very simple guidelines, you can rely upon:
You're gouging on your prices if you charge more than the rest,
But it's unfair competition if you think you can charge less!
A second point that we would make to help avoid confusion...
Don't try to charge the same amount, that would be Collusion!"
-R.W. Grant-
"The Incredible Bread Machine"
"One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors."
-Plato-
(429-347 BC)
"In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility... I welcome it."
-John F. Kennedy-
"You know something is wrong when the New England Patriots face stiffer penalties for spying on innocent Americans than Dick Cheney and George Bush."
-Governor Bill Richardson-
"A Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever."
-John Adams-
"I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or to speak, or write, with moderation. ... I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD."
-William Lloyd Garrison-
"This government is acknowledged by all to be one of enumerated powers."
-Chief Justice Marshall-
(1755-1835) US Supreme Court Chief Justice
Source: McCulloch v. Maryland
"We start with first principles. The Constitution creates a Federal Government of enumerated powers."
-Chief Justice William Rehnquist-
Chief Justice, U. S. Supreme Court
Source: United States v. Lopez
"The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected. The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which ... concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Federalist No. 45
"If any state in the Union will declare that it prefers separation ... to a continuance in union ... I have no hesitation in saying, 'let us separate.'"
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: letter to W. Crawford, June 20, 1816
"The battle for freedom is never won, and is never lost. The battle for freedom always continues. It is never too late, and it is never soon enough, to defend freedom."
-John Perna-
"Our most basic civil liberty is the right to be kept alive."
-Mitt Romney-
(and more great Romney totalitarianism)
In other words, I guess...
"The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. Property must be sacred or liberty cannot exist."
-John Adams-
"The time is now near at hand which must probably determine whether Americans are to be Freemen or slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their houses and farms are to be pillaged and destroyed, and themselves consigned to a state of wretchedness from which no human efforts will deliver them. The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage and conduct of this army. Our cruel and unrelenting enemy leaves us only the choice of brave resistance, or the most abject submission. We have, therefore, to resolve to conquer or die."
-George Washington-
"It was not my intention to doubt that, the Doctrines of the Illuminati, and principles of Jacobinism had not spread in the United States. On the contrary, no one is more truly satisfied of this fact than I am."
-George Washington-
"The fear of freedom is strong in us. We call it chaos or anarchy, and the words are threatening. We live in a true chaos of contradicting authorities, an age of conformism without community, of proximity without communication. We could only fear chaos if we imagined that it was unknown to us, but in fact we know it very well."
-Germaine Greer-
"...It is not at all impossible that we may have to endure every hardship that we can imagine...(but) if the entire community manfully stands the test, the end will be near. If many of us fall back under storm and stress, the struggle will be prolonged. But...so long as there is even a handful of men true to their pledge, there can be only one end to the struggle, and that is victory."
-Mahatma Gandhi-
"When war is waged it is for the purpose of safeguarding or increasing one's capacity to make war. International politics are wholly involved in this vicious cycle. What is called national prestige consists in behaving always in such a way as to demoralize other nations by giving them the impression that, if it comes to war, one would certainly defeat them. What is called national security is an imaginary state of affairs in which one would retain the capacity to make war while depriving all other countries of it."
-Simone Weil-
"It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong."
-Richard Feynman-
"If a Nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.... If we are to guard against ignorance and remain free, it is the responsibility of every American to be informed."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: letter to Col. Charles Yancey, January 6, 1816
"I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."
-Barry Goldwater-
"Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us."
-Leo Tolstoy-
"When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the truth."
-Steve Jobs-
"Cowardice asks the question: is it safe? Expediency asks the question: is it political? Vanity asks the question: is it popular? But conscience asks the question: is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor political, nor popular - but one must take it simply because it is right."
-Martin Luther King, Jr.-
"The voice of protest, of warning, of appeal is never more needed than when the clamor of fife and drum, echoed by the press and too often by the pulpit, is bidding all men fall in and keep step and obey in silence the tyrannous word of command. Then, more than ever, it is the duty of the good citizen not to be silent."
-Charles Eliot Norton-
(1827-1908) American scholar
"As long as our government is administered for the good of the people, and is regulated by their will; as long as it secures to us the rights of person and property, liberty of conscience, and of the press, it will be worth defending."
-Andrew Jackson-
"Ronald Reagan is the first modern President whose contempt for the facts is treated as a charming idiosyncrasy."
-James David Barber-
"Political rights do not exist because they have been legally set down on a piece of paper, but only when they have become the ingrown habit of a people, and when any attempt to impair them will meet with the violent resistance of the populace. Where this is not the case, there is no help in any parliamentary Opposition or any Platonic appeals to the constitution. One compels respect from others when he knows how to defend his dignity as a human being."
-Rudolph Rocker-
"The shallow consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise see in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws."
-Walt Whitman-
"Notes Left Over," 1881
"...the Bill of Rights does not come from the people and is not subject to change by majorities. It comes from the nature of things. It declares the inalienable rights of man not only against all government but also against the people collectively."
-Walter Lippmann-
(1889-1974) American writer, journalist, and political commentator
"You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free."
-Clarence Darrow-
"If we run into such debts, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"When I was young, American politics were fairly straightforward: conservatives let you keep all your money in return for telling you how to live your life, while liberals let you live as you pleased in return for all your money. Now the only difference is whether they want your money or your life first."
-D.A. Ridgely-
"Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: 'Argument in Defense of the Soldiers in the Boston Massacre Trials,' December 1770
"You’re entitled to your own opinions. You’re not entitled to your own facts."
-Daniel Patrick Moynihan-
"I don't pay attention to either side. I mean, I've always been a libertarian. Leave everybody alone. Let everybody else do what they want. Just stay out of everybody else's hair. So I believe in that value of smaller government. Give politicians power and all of a sudden they'll misuse it on ya."
-Clint Eastwood-
"Remember that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take away everything you have."
-Barry Goldwater-
"Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear."
-Ambrose Redmoon-
"All men are created equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; among which are the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing the obtaining of happiness and safety."
-George Mason-
(1725-1792), drafted the Virgina Declaration of Rights, ally of James Madison and George Washington
Source: First Draft, Virginia Declaration of Rights
"The only practical function of the Libertarian Party is to serve as evidence that we tried to do this peaceably."
-Sam A. Robrin-
"You can make the Ring into an allegory of our own time, if you like: an allegory of the inevitable fate that waits for all attempts to defeat evil power by power".
-J.R.R Tolkien-
"When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President. I’m beginning to believe it."
-Clarence Darrow-
"In many cases, we could win if we could just convince Democrats to vote like liberals on civil liberties, and Republicans to vote like conservatives on fiscal issues."
-Jim Babka-
President, DownsizeDC.org
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
-John F. Kennedy-
Patriotism: i love my country
Nationalism: my country can beat up your country
Imperialism: here we come now
"Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent upon every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence."
-Sir Robert Peel-
"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of currency, first by inflation then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered...I sincerely believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. The issuing power of money should be taken from the banks and restored to Congress and the people to whom it belongs."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"We recognize, as appellants urge, the undisputed power of the jury to acquit, even if its verdict is contrary to the law as given by the judge, and contrary to the evidence. This is a power that must exist as long as we adhere to the general verdict in criminal cases, for the courts cannot search the minds of the jurors to find the basis upon which they judge. If the jury feels that the law under which the defendant is accused, is unjust, or that exigent circumstances justified the actions of the accused, or for any reason which appeals to their logic of passion, the jury has the power to acquit, and the courts must abide by that decision."
-U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Maryland-
Source: US vs Moylan, 417 F 2d 1002, 1006 (1969)
“It may not be amiss, here, Gentlemen, to remind you of the good old rule, that on questions of fact, it is the province of the jury, on questions of law, it is the province of the court to decide. But it must be observed that by the same law, which recognizes this reasonable distribution of jurisdiction, you have nevertheless a right to take upon yourselves to judge of both, and to determine the law as well as the fact in controversy. … Both objects are lawfully within your power of decision.”
-Chief Justice John Jay-
Georgia v. Brailsford, 1794
“The judge cannot direct a verdict it is true, and the jury has the power to bring in a verdict in the teeth of both law and facts.”
-Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes-
(1841-1935) US Supreme Court Justice, also known as "The Great Dissenter"
Horning v. District of Columbia, 1920
"I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do."
-Robert A. Heinlein-
(1907-1988) American writer
Well I won't back down, no I won't back down
You can stand me up at the gates of hell
But I won't back down
Gonna stand my ground, won't be turned around
And I'll keep this world from draggin' me down
Gonna stand my ground and I won't back down
Hey baby, there ain't no easy way out
Hey I will stand my ground
And I wont back down.
Well I know what's right, I got just one life
In a world that keeps on pushin' me around
But I'll stand my ground and I won't back down
Hey baby there ain't no easy way out
Hey I will stand my ground
And I won't back down
No, I won't back down
-Tom Petty-
I Won't Back Down
"I hurt nobody.
I owe nobody money.
I'm not paying.
I'm tired of being afraid."
-Nick "Coconut" Ryder-
"We're all free men, protected by the Constitution. You look any way you want, chief."
-Jackson 'Jax' Teller-
Sons of Anarchy
"Most of us were not violent by nature. We all had our problems with authority, but none of us were sociopaths. We came to realize that when you move your life off the social grid, you give up the safety that society provides. On the fringe, blood and bullets are the rule of law. And if you're a man with convictions, violence is inevitable."
-John Thomas Teller-
The Life and Death of Sam Crow: How the Sons of Anarchy Lost Their Way
Sons of Anarchy
(It occurred to me, a week after watching the episode premier in 9/08, that this passage could easily have been voiced by Jeremiah Johnson, fully in character...)
"Americans just want us to ... not be concerned if they [new laws] can be constitutionally justified ... Why, if we had to do that we could not pass most of the laws we enact around here."
-Sen. John Glenn-
(D-OH) 07/16/96
(and it doesn't occur to you that maybe, just maybe, that's how it should be...?)
"Political opportunism" is redundant.
-Bill Alleman-
"There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived."
-Henry David Thoreau-
"Lighthouses are more useful than churches."
-Benjamin Franklin-
"It's better to die upon your feet than to live upon your knees!"
-Emiliano Zapata-
"Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost."
-John Quincy Adams-
"Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right... Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice."
-Henry David Thoreau-
"Violence at home - liberal
Violence abroad - conservative
Violence against all - moderate
Violence against none - extremist"
-Joe Sobran-
"The way to combat noxious ideas is with other ideas. The way to combat falsehoods is with truth."
-William O. Douglas-
"There's too much of an attempt, it seems to me, to think in terms of controlling man, rather than freeing him. Of defining him rather than letting him go. It's part of the whole ideology of this age, which is power-mad."
-Arthur Miller-
"Worst of all, political law is the fountainhead of fascism. Fascism is often mistakenly identified as a political and economic philosophy. I would argue that fascism is actually the absence of any philosophy whatsoever. Fascism is based on the belief that the State should do whatever is necessary in any circumstance. Under fascism, the law exists simply to serve the purposes of the State. In a free society, the law exists to protect the individual, often from the State."
-Glenn "Kane" Jacobs-
"You must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard's power of Changing and Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power. It is most perilous. It must follow knowledge, and serve need. To light a candle is to cast a shadow."
-Ursula K. Le Guin-
Consequences? Are you trying to tell me there could be unintended consequences...?
"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards."
-Claire Wolfe-
"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards. On the road to tyranny, we've gone so far that polite political action is about as useless as a miniskirt in a convent. ... Something’s eventually going to happen. Government will bloat until it chokes us to death, or one more tyrannical power grab will turn out to be one too many. ... Maybe it’ll be one more round of “reasonable gun control” or one more episode of burning children to death to save them from “child abuse.” Whatever, something will snap."
-Claire Wolfe-
Source: "101 Things To Do 'Til The Revolution"
"We ought to hate very rarely, as it is too fatiguing; remain indifferent to a great deal, forgive often and never forget."
-Sarah Bernhardt-
"We have four boxes used to guarantee our liberty: The soap box, the ballot box, the jury box and the cartridge box."
-Ambrose Bierce- (1887)
"He who defends everything defends nothing."
-Frederick the Great-
"When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic. Sell not liberty to purchase power."
-Benjamin Franklin-
"If public schooling has produced a nation of adults who lack the competence to guide their children’s education, why do we want to continue a system that is likely to produce the same result?"
-Jacob Hornberger-
founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation
"A man said to the Universe: 'Sir, I exist!' 'However,' replied the Universe, 'the fact has not created in me a sense of obligation.'"
-Stephen Crane-
"A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular."
-Adlai Stevenson-
"As long as I am mayor of this city the great industries are secure. We hear about constitutional rights, free speech and the free press. Every time I hear these words I say to myself, 'That man is a Red, that man is a Communist.' You never hear a real American talk like that."
-Frank Hague-
Mayor, Jersey City, NJ
speech to the Jersey City Chamber of Commerce, January 12, 1938
"He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you."
-Friedrich Nietzsche-
"My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union."
-Abraham Lincoln-
August 22, 1862, letter to New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley
"The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free."
-Henry David Thoreau-
"If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged."
-Cardinal Richelieu-
"If you give me six lines written by the most honest man, I will find something in them to hang him."
-Cardinal Richelieu-
(1585-1642)
"If you want more of something, subsidize it; if you want less of something, tax it."
-Ronald Reagan-
"Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people, that can, may revolutionize, and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit."
-Abraham Lincoln-
January 12, 1848 speech in response to the "48ers, veterans of the 18 interconnected revolutions that convulsed Europe in 1848-1849," and who were, ironically enough, more centralizing imperialists than they were freedom fighting secessionists, apparently
Well, only as long as the oppressive government is European, of course...
"Victory attained by violence is tantamount to defeat, for it is momentary."
"This I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for it is the one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost."
-John Steinbeck-
Source: East of Eden, 1952
http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quote_blog/John.Steinbeck.Quote.5873
"The rule of no realm is mine, neither of Gondor nor any other, great or small. But all worthy things that are in peril as the world now stands, those are my care. And for my part, I shall not wholly fail of my task, though Gondor should perish, if anything passes through this night that can still grow fair or bear fruit and flower again in days to come."
-Gandalf-
The Lord of the Rings : The Return of the King
J. R. R. Tolkien
"That's the kind of wooly-headed liberal thinking that leads to being eaten."
-Principal Snyder-
Sunnydale High
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
The Puppet Show
Season 1, Episode 9
"The poorest man may in his cottage, bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail, its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storm may enter; the rain may enter; but the King of England may not enter; all his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement."
-William Pitt-
(1708-1778) First Earl of Chatham, English statesman and orator
Source: Speech in the House of Lords, in opposition to Excise Bill on perry and cider, 1763
"To retrofit a phrase, once the state has determined you’re a nail in need of smashing, there’s really no limit to the number of hammers at its disposal."
-Radley Balko-
"Japan would never invade the United States. We would find a rifle behind every blade of grass."
-Isoroku Yamamoto-
"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
-Albert Einstein-
"The holier-than-thou activists who blame the population for not spending more money on their personal crusades are worse than aggravating. They encourage the repudiation of personal responsibility by spreading the lie that support of a government program fulfills individual moral duty."
-Patrick Cox-
"If forty million people say a foolish thing it does not become a wise one, but the wise man is foolish to give them the lie."
-W. Somerset Maugham-
"I consider [trial by jury] as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution."
-Thomas Jefferson-
to Thomas Paine, 1789. ME 7:408, Papers 15:269
“Economic history is a long record of government policies that failed because they were designed with a bold disregard for the laws of economics.”
-Ludwig von Mises-
"Reason is the life of the law; nay, the common law itself is nothing else but reason."
-Edward Coke-
Colonel McNamara: "You're a dead man, Finn."
Riley Finn: "No, sir. I'm an anarchist."
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
New Moon Rising
Season 4, Episode 19
Riley Finn: "We're drawing up a plan for world domination. The key element: coffee-makers that think."
Buffy: "World domination? Is that a good?"
Riley: "Baby, we're the government. It's what we do."
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Restless (dream sequence)
Season 4, Episode 22
"No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated. Neither may a government determine the aesthetic value of artistic creations, nor limit the forms of literacy or artistic expression. Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic, religious, or philosophical doctrines. Instead it has a duty to its citizens to maintain the freedom, to let those citizens contribute to the further adventure and the development of the human race."
-Richard P. Feynman-
"God bless them both, & keep them in Union, if it be for their good, but separate them, if it be better."
-Thomas Jefferson-
August 12, 1803
in a letter to John C. Breckinridge
"Whether we remain in one confederacy, or form into Atlantic and Mississippi confederacies, I believe not very important to the happiness of either part. Those of the Western confederacy will be as much our children & descendants as those of the Eastern, and I feel myself as much identified with that country, in future time, as with this; and did I now foresee a separation [i.e., secession] at some future day, yet I should feel the duty & the desire to promote the western interests as zealously as the eastern, doing all the good for both portions of our future family which should fall within my power."
-Thomas Jefferson-
Jan. 29, 1804
in reference to secessionist rumblings in response to the Louisiana Purchase, in a letter to Dr. Joseph Priestly
"Never could an increase of comfort or security be a sufficient good to be bought at the price of liberty."
-Hilaire Belloc-
French-born British writer (1870-1953)
"Public opinion, or what passes for public opinion, is not invariably a moderating force in the jungle of politics. It may be true, and I suspect it is, that the mass of people everywhere are normally peace-loving and would accept many restraints and sacrifices in preference to the monstrous calamities of war. But I also suspect that what purports to be public opinion in most countries that consider themselves to have popular government is often not really the consensus of the feelings of the mass of the people at all, but rather the expression of the interests of special highly vocal minorities — politicians, commentators, and publicity-seekers of all sorts: people who live by their ability to draw attention to themselves and die, like fish out of water, if they are compelled to remain silent."
-George F. Kennan-
"Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grandchildren are once more slaves."
-D. H. Lawrence-
"Stand your ground. Don't fire unless fired upon. But if they mean to have a war, let it begin here."
-John Parker-
Battle of Lexington, April 19, 1775
"Lead, follow, or get out of the way."
-Laurence J. Peter-
"Who does what to whom?"
-Vladimir Lenin-
on the central question of politics
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
-William Pitt-
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."
-Joseph Goebbels-
"The Constitution expressly and exclusively vests in the Legislature the power of declaring a state of war [and] the power of raising armies. A delegation of such powers [to the president] would have struck, not only at the fabric of our Constitution, but at the foundation of all well organized and well checked governments. The separation of the power of declaring war from that of conducting it, is wisely contrived to exclude the danger of its being declared for the sake of its being conducted."
-James Madison-
"The U.S. is taking a course like a downhill skier: zig-zagging left and then right, but always moving downhill."
-David F. Nolan-
2009 NH Liberty Forum
"Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression. In our Governments, the real power lies in the majority of the Community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from the acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the Constituents."
-James Madison-
"Do what thy manhood bids thee do,
From none but self expect applause:
He noblest lives and noblest dies
Who makes and keeps his self-made laws."
-Sir Richard Francis Burton-
(1821-1890) English explorer, linguist, author, and soldier
"There go my people. I must find out where they are going so I can lead them."
-Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin-
French politician (1807-1874)
"To save the world requires faith and courage: faith in reason, and courage to proclaim what reason shows to be true."
-Bertrand Russell-
"Unless we put medical freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when medicine will organize into an undercover dictatorship. To restrict the art of healing to one class of men ... will constitute the Bastille of medical science. All such laws are un-American and despotic."
-Dr. Benjamin Rush-
signer of Declaration of Independence
"Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of government. The history of liberty is the history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it."
-Woodrow Wilson-
"The Framers of the Bill of Rights did not purport to 'create' rights. Rather they designed the Bill of Rights to prohibit our Government from infringing rights and liberties presumed to be preexisting."
-Justice William J. Brennan-
(1906-1997) U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: 1982
"A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826) US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"The first thing a genius needs is to breath free air."
-Ludwig Von Mises-
(1881-1973) Economist and social philosopher
"I want for our country enough laws to restrain me from injuring others,
so that these laws will also restrain others from injuring me.
I want enough government, with enough constitutional safeguards,
so that this necessary minimum of laws will be applied equitably
to everybody, and will be binding on the rulers as well as those ruled.
Beyond that I want neither laws nor government to be imposed on our people
as a means or with the excuse of protecting us from catching cold,
or of seeing that we raise the right kind of crops,
or of forcing us to live in the right kind of houses or neighborhoods,
or of compelling us to save money or to spend it,
or of telling us when or whether we can pray.
I do not want government or laws designed for
any other form of welfarism or paternalism,
based on the premise that government knows best
and can run our lives better than we can run them ourselves.
And my concept of freedom, and of its overwhelming importance,
is implicit in these aspirations and ideals."
-Robert Welch-
(1899-1985) Author, Founder of the John Birch Society
"Compelling a man by law to pay his money to elect candidates or advocate law or doctrines he is against differs only in degree, if at all, from compelling him by law to speak for a candidate, a party, or a cause he is against. The very reason for the First Amendment is to make the people of this country free to think, speak, write and worship as they wish, not as the Government commands."
-Justice Hugo L. Black-
(1886-1971) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: IAM v. Street, 367 U.S., 1961
"Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people."
-Eleanor Roosevelt-
"The people cannot delegate to government the power to do anything which would be unlawful for them to do themselves. ... whenever the Legislators endeavour to take away, and destroy the Property of the People, or to reduce them to Slavery under Arbitrary Power, they put themselves into a state of War with the People, who are thereupon absolved from any farther Obedience, and are left to the common Refuge which God hath provided for all Men against force and violence. Whensoever therefore the Legislative shall transgress this fundamental Rule of Society, and either by Ambition, Fear, Folly or Corruption, endeavor to grasp themselves, or put into the hands of any other an Absolute Power over the Lives, Liberties, and Estates of the People; By this breach of Trust they forfeit the Power the People had put into their hands, for quite contrary ends, and it devolves to the People, who have a Right to resume their original Liberty, and, by the Establishment of a new Legislative (such as they shall think fit) provide for their own Safety and Security, which is the end for which they are in Society."
-John Locke-
(1632-1704) English philosopher and political theorist. Considered the ideological progenitor of the American Revolution and who, by far, was the most often non-biblical writer quoted by the Founding Fathers of the USA.
Source: Second Treatise of Civil Government [1690], #222 (Lasslet Edition, Cambridge University Press, 1960), p. 460-461; French translation by David Mazel (1691): Traité de gouvernement civil (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1984), pp. 348-349
"The people cannot delegate to government the power to do anything which would be unlawful for them to do themselves. ... whenever the Legislators endeavor to take away, and destroy the Property of the People, or to reduce them to Slavery under Arbitrary Power, they put themselves into a state of War with the People, who are thereupon absolved from any farther Obedience, and are left to the common Refuge, which God hath provided for all Men, against Force and Violence. Whensoever therefore the Legislative shall transgress this fundamental Rule of Society, and either by Ambition, Fear, Folly or Corruption, endeavor to grasp themselves, or put into the hands of any other an Absolute Power over the Lives, Liberties, and Estates of the People; By this breach of Trust they forfeit the Power the People had put into their hands, for quite contrary ends, and it devolves to the People, who have a Right to resume their original Liberty."
-John Locke-
(1632-1704) English philosopher and political theorist. Considered the ideological progenitor of the American Revolution and who, by far, was the most often non-biblical writer quoted by the Founding Fathers of the USA.
Source: SECOND TREATISE ON CIVIL GOVERNMENT
"Those who suppress freedom always do so in the name of law and order."
-John V. Lindsay-
"We have the greatest opportunity the world has ever seen, as long as we remain honest -- which will be as long as we can keep the attention of our people alive. If they once become inattentive to public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, judges and governors would all become wolves."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government — lest it come to dominate our lives and interests."
-Patrick Henry-
"Congress may not abdicate or transfer to others its legitimate functions."
-U.S. Supreme Court-
Source: Schechter Poultry v. U.S., 29 U.S. 495, 55 U.S. 837.842 (1935)
"The constitution does not provide for first and second class citizens."
-Wendell L. Wilkie-
(1892-1944)
Source: An American Program, 1944
"Next to the right of liberty, the right of property is the most important individual right guaranteed by the Constitution and the one which, united with that of personal liberty, has contributed more to the growth of civilization than any other institution established by the human race."
-William Howard Taft-
(1857-1930) 27th US President
"It is fundamental that the great powers of Congress to conduct war and to regulate the Nation's foreign relations are subject to the constitutional requirements of due process. The imperative necessity for safeguarding these rights to procedural due process under the gravest of emergencies has existed throughout our constitutional history, for it is then, under the pressing exigencies of crisis, that there is the greatest temptation to dispense with fundamental constitutional guarantees which, it is feared, will inhibit governmental action."
-Justice Arthur Goldberg-
US Supreme Court Justice
Source: Kennedy v. Mendoza-Martinez, 1963
“A national government is a government of the people of a single state or nation, united as a community by what is termed the 'social compact,' and possessing complete and perfect supremacy over persons and things, so far as they can be made the lawful objects of civil government. A federal government is distinguished from a national government by its being the government of a community of independent and sovereign states, united by compact."
-Black's Law Dictionary-
Source: Piqua Branch Bank v. Knoup, 6 Ohio St. 393. [Black's Law Dictionary, Revised Fourth Edition, 1968, p. 1176]
"Outside Independence Hall when the Constitutional Convention of 1787 ended, Mrs. Powel of Philadelphia asked Benjamin Franklin, 'Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?' With no hesitation whatsoever, Franklin responded, 'A republic, if you can keep it.'"
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
1787
Source: as recorded by Constitution signer James McHenry in a diary entry.
"It is my living sentiment, and by the blessing of God, it shall be my dying sentiment. Independence now, and independence forever."
-Daniel Webster-
in an August 2, 1826 eulogy to Thomas Jefferson and John Adams; both had died on July 4th
"May [the Declaration of Independence] be to the world, what I believe it will be (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all), the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
June 24, 1826
Source: letter to Roger Weightman on June 24, 1826. It was his last letter, written ten days before his death - July 4th, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
"If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left to combat it."
-Thomas Jefferson-
first inaugural address
“It is the duty of every patriot to protect his country from its government”
-Thomas Paine-
"When you start talking about government as 'we' instead of 'they,' you have been in office too long."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
"But does 'the press' mean the media....? You think in 1791 there were ... people running around with fedoras that had ... little press tickets in (them)? Is that what 'press' means? Doesn't it cover the Xerox machine? Doesn't it cover the ... right of any individual to ... write, to publish?"
-Justice Anton Scalia-
"The politicians say that they can control the climate. Their arrogance is astounding."
-John Stossel-
"Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself."
-Justice Potter Stewart-
(1915-1985), U.S. Supreme Court Justice
"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law."
-Aliester Crowley-
"... the Constitution does not impose a duty on the state and local governments to protect the citizens from criminal harm."
-U.S. Supreme Court-
DeShaney vs. Winnebago County, 1989
"I have found strength where one does not look for it: in simple, mild, and pleasant people, without the least desire to rule -- and, conversely, the desire to rule has often appeared to me a sign of inward weakness: they fear their own slave soul and shroud it in a royal cloak (in the end, they still become the slaves of their followers, their fame, etc.)"
-Friedrich Nietzsche-
"Not to be a republican at 20 is proof of want of heart; to be one at 30 is proof of want of head."
-François Guizot-
"The natural proclivity of democratic governments is to pursue public policies which concentrate benefits on the well-organized and well-informed, and disperse the costs on the unorganized and ill-informed."
-Peter Boettke-
"The government deficit is the difference between the amount of money the government spends and the amount it has the nerve to collect."
-Sam Ewing-
"The dollar represents a one dollar debt to the Federal Reserve System. The Federal Reserve Banks create money out of thin air to buy Government Bonds from the U.S. Treasury ... and has created out of nothing a ... debt which the American people are obliged to pay with interest."
-Wright Patman-
[John William Wright Patman]
(1893-1976) US Congressman (TX-D)
1964
Source: http://centre.telemanage.ca/links.nsf/key/Federal_Reserve_Quiz
"... the amount spent on lobbying ... is related entirely to how much the federal government intervenes in the private economy."
-Craig Holman of the Nader-founded Public Citizen-
well, duh...
"I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time."
-H.L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"There is no slavery but ignorance. Liberty is the child of intelligence."
-Robert G. Ingersoll-
"All the problems we face in the United States today can be traced to an unenlightened immigration policy on the part of the American Indian."
-Pat Paulsen-
"Must I at length the Sword of Justice draw?
Oh curst Effects of necessary Law!
How ill my Fear they by my Mercy scan,
Beware the Fury of a Patient Man."
-John Dryden-
"A means can be justified only by its end. But the end in its turn needs to be justified."
-Leon Trotsky-
"The trouble with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money."
-Margaret Thatcher-
"The only idea ... ever manifested as to what is a government of consent, is this – that it is one to which everybody must consent, or be shot."
-Lysander Spooner-
"The constitutionality and propriety of the Federal Government assuming to enter into a novel and vast field of legislation, namely, that of providing for the care and support of all those … who by any form of calamity become fit objects of public philanthropy. ... I cannot find any authority in the Constitution for making the Federal Government the great almoner of public charity throughout the United States. To do so would, in my judgment, be contrary to the letter and spirit of the Constitution and subversive of the whole theory upon which the Union of these States is founded."
-Franklin Pierce-
(1804-1869) U.S. President
Source: 1854, he vetoed a bill to help the mentally ill
"I feel obliged to withhold my approval of the plan to indulge in benevolent and charitable sentiment through the appropriation of public funds ... I find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution."
-Grover Cleveland-
(1837-1908) 22nd & 24th US President
Source: In 1887 when vetoing an appropriation to help drought-stricken counties in Texas
"As somebody who considers the State to be nothing more than a criminal syndicate pursuing a monopoly, I consider sedition to be a fine and noble calling worthy of all decent and Godly people. But statists of the conservative stripe engage in purely situational sedition: They want to undermine our present crop of rulers in order to replace them, not to abolish State impositions on liberty."
-Will Grigg-
Well, statists of any stripe, Will...
"I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves."
-Harriet Tubman-
"There are two kinds of people: those who want to be left alone and those who won't leave them alone."
-Doreen Hannes-
"No attempt or pretence, that was ever carried into practical operation amongst civilized men -- unless possibly the pretence of a 'Divine Right,' on the part of some, to govern and enslave others -- embodied so much of shameless absurdity, falsehood, impudence, robbery, usurpation, tyranny, and villany of every kind, as the attempt or pretence of establishing a government by consent, and getting the actual consent of only so many as may be necessary to keep the rest in subjection by force. Such a government is a mere conspiracy of the strong against the weak. It no more rests on consent than does the worst government on earth."
-Lysander Spooner-
(1808-1887) Political theorist, activist, abolitionist Source: No Treason. No. II The Constitution, (Boston: Published by the Author, 1867)
"A government that can at pleasure accuse, shoot, and hang men, as traitors, for the one general offence of refusing to surrender themselves and their property unreservedly to its arbitrary will, can practice any and all special and particular oppressions it pleases. The result -- and a natural one -- has been that we have had governments, State and national, devoted to nearly every grade and species of crime that governments have ever practised upon their victims; and these crimes have culminated in a war that has cost a million of lives; a war carried on, upon one side, for chattel slavery, and on the other for political slavery; upon neither for liberty, justice, or truth. And these crimes have been committed, and this war waged, by men, and the descendants of men, who, less than a hundred years ago, said that all men were equal, and could owe neither service to individuals, nor allegiance to governments, except with their own consent."
-Lysander Spooner-
(1808-1887) Political theorist, activist, abolitionist
Source: No Treason. No. II The Constitution, (Boston: Published by the Author, 1867)
"This is the perpetual and pitiful tragedy of the practical man in practical affairs. He always begins with a flourish of contempt for what he calls theorizing and what people who can do it call thinking. He will not wait for logic--that is, in the most exact sense, he will not listen to reason. It will therefore appear to him an idle and ineffectual proceeding to say that there is a reason for his present failure. Nevertheless, it may be well to say it, and to try and make it clear even to him."
-Gilbert Keith Chesterton-
(1874-1936) British essayist, critic, poet, and novelist
Source: Illustrated London News, Feb 29,1925
"Most people prefer to believe their leaders are just and fair even in the face of evidence to the contrary, because once a citizen acknowledges that the government under which they live is lying and corrupt, the citizen has to choose what he or she will do about it. To take action in the face of a corrupt government entails risks of harm to life and loved ones. To choose to do nothing is to surrender one’s self-image of standing for principles. Most people do not have the courage to face that choice. Hence, most propaganda is not designed to fool the critical thinker but only to give moral cowards an excuse not to think at all."
-Michael Rivero-
"As Americans we must always remember that we all have a common enemy, an enemy that is dangerous, powerful, and relentless. I refer, of course, to the federal government."
-Dave Barry-
"I want a government small enough to fit inside the Constitution."
-Harry Browne-
(1933-2006) DownsizeDC.org co-founder
"He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice."
-Albert Einstein-
(1879-1955) Physicist and Professor, Nobel Prize 1921
"After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
[Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clerel, le Comte de Tocqueville] (1805-1859) French historian Source: Democracy in America, Vol. II (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1899), Chap. 6
"To require conformity in the appreciation of sentiments or the interpretation of language, or uniformity of thought, feeling, or action, is a fundamental error in human legislation -- a madness which would be only equaled by requiring all men to possess the same countenance, the same voice or the same stature."
-Josiah Warren-
(1798-1874)
Source: Equitable Commerce, 1855
"It is said that power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power."
-David Brin-
"When small men begin to cast big shadows, it means the sun is about to set."
-Lyn Yutang-
"When there are too many policemen, there can be no liberty. When there are too many soldiers, there can be no peace. When there are too many lawyers, there can be no justice."
-Lin Yutang-
"It is interesting to observe that in the year 1935 the average individual's incurious attitude towards the phenomenon of the State is precisely what his attitude was toward the phenomenon of the Church in the year, say, 1500. ... it does not appear to have occurred to the Church-citizen of that day, any more than it occurs to the State-citizen of the present, to ask what sort of institution it was that claimed his allegiance."
-Albert Jay Nock-
(1870-1945)
Source: Our Enemy, the State, c. 1935 (Delavan: Hallberg, 1983), p. 34
"I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics or in anything else, where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to Heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Letter to F. Hopkinson, Paris, March 13, 1789
"I claim for the nation an education that depends only on the State, because children of the State must be raised by members of the State."
-Louis-René de Caradeuc de La Chalotais-
Source: Essai d'éducation nationale et plan d'étude pour la jeunesse [1763] (Paris: Raynal, 1825), p. 15.
"Against individualism, the Fascist conception is for the State ... Liberalism denied the State in the interests of the particular individual; Fascism reaffirms the State as the true reality of the individual."
-Benito Mussolini-
(1883-1945), Italian dictator during WW2
Source: "Fascism," Italian Encyclopaedia, 1932, reproduced in Michael J. Oakeshott, The Social and Political Doctrines of Contemporary Europe (Cambridge University Press, 1939)
"It is the absolute right of the state to supervise the formation of public opinion."
-Joseph Paul Goebbels-
(1897-1945) Nazi Propaganda Minister
Source: Speech, October 1933
"Gentlemen, the time is coming when there will be two great classes, Socialists, and Anarchists. The Anarchists want the government to be nothing, and the Socialists want government to be everything. There can be no greater contrast. Well, the time will come when there will be only these two great parties, the Anarchists representing the laissez faire doctrine and the Socialists representing the extreme view on the other side, and when that time comes I am an Anarchist."
-William Graham Sumner-
(1840-1910) American academic and professor at Yale College
Source: quoted in Mark Thornton, The Economics of Prohibition (University of Utah Press, 1991), p. 17
"Once the government becomes the supplier of people's needs, there is no limit to the needs that will be claimed as a basic right."
-Lawrence Auster-
Political commentator
" ... I suggest that the more the state intervenes in such situations, the more 'necessary' (on this view) it becomes, because positive altruism and voluntary cooperative behaviour atrophy in the presence of the state and grow in its absence. Thus, again, the state exacerbates the conditions which are supposed to make it necessary. We might say that the state is like an addictive drug: the more of it we have, the more we 'need' it and the more we come to 'depend' on it."
-Michael Taylor-
Source: The Possibility of Cooperation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 168
"When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion -- when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing -- when you see money flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors -- when you see that men get richer by graft and pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you -- when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice -- you may know that your society is doomed."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
Source: Atlas Shrugged, p. 413
"I suppose the process of acceptance will pass through the usual four stages:
(i) this is worthless nonsense;
(ii) this is an interesting, but perverse, point of view;
(iii) this is true, but quite unimportant;
(iv) I always said so."
-J. B. S. Haldane-
"In truth, in the case of individuals, their actual voting is not to be taken as proof of consent, even for the time being. On the contrary, it is to be considered that, without his consent having ever been asked, a man finds himself environed by a government that he cannot resist; a government that forces him to pay money, render service, and forego the exercise of many of his natural rights, under peril of weighty punishments. He sees, too, that other men practise this tyranny over him by the use of the ballot. He sees further that, if he will but use the ballot himself, he has some chance of relieving himself from this tyranny of others, by subjecting them to his own. In short, he finds himself, without his consent, so situated that, if he use the ballot, he may become a master; if he does not use it, he must become a slave. And he has no other alternative than these two. In self-defence, he attempts the former. His case is analogous to that of a man who has been forced into battle, where he must either kill others, or be killed himself. Because, to save his own life in battle, a man attempts to take the lives of his opponents, it is not to be inferred that the battle is one of his own choosing. Neither in contests with the ballot -- which is a mere substitute for a bullet -- because, as his only chance of self-preservation, a man uses a ballot, is it to be inferred that the contest is one into which he voluntarily entered; that he voluntarily set up all his own natural rights, as a stake against those of others, to be lost or won by the mere power of numbers. On the contrary, it is to be considered that, in an exigency, into which he had been forced by others, and in which no other means of self-defence offered, he, as a matter of necessity, used the only one that was left to him."
-Lysander Spooner-
(1808-1887) Political theorist, activist, abolitionist
Source: No Treason. No. II The Constitution, (Boston: Published by the Author, 1867)
"Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man? There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly. I please myself with imagining a State at least which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose if a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow-men. A State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious State, which also I have imagined, but not yet anywhere seen."
-Henry David Thoreau-
(1817-1862) American author, poet, philosopher, polymath, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and transcendentalist
Source: Civil Disobedience (1849)
"The ostensible supporters of the Constitution, like the ostensible supporters of most other governments, are made up of three classes, viz.: 1. Knaves, a numerous and active class, who see in the government an instrument which they can use for their own aggrandizement or wealth. 2. Dupes - a large class, no doubt - each of whom, because he is allowed one voice out of millions in deciding what he may do with his own person and his own property, and because he is permitted to have the same voice in robbing, enslaving, and murdering others, that others have in robbing, enslaving, and murdering himself, is stupid enough to imagine that he is a 'free man,' a 'sovereign'; that this is 'a free government'; 'a government of equal rights,' 'the best government on earth,' and such like absurdities. 3. A class who have some appreciation of the evils of government, but either do not see how to get rid of them, or do not choose to so far sacrifice their private interests as to give themselves seriously and earnestly to the work of making a change."
-Lysander Spooner-
(1808-1887) Political theorist, activist, abolitionist
Source: No Treason. No. VI The Constitution of no Authority, (Boston: Published by the Author, 1870)
"When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators."
-P. J. O'Rourke-
"Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the President or any other public official save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. ... Every man who parrots the cry of “stand by the President” without adding the proviso “so far as he serves the Republic” takes an attitude as essentially unmanly as that of any Stuart royalist who championed the doctrine that the King could do no wrong. No self-respecting and intelligent free man could take such an attitude."
-Theodore Roosevelt-
(1858-1919) 26th US President
Source: Works, vol. 21, pp. 316, 321
"A Fatal Tendency of Mankind. Self-preservation and self-development are common aspirations among all people. And if everyone enjoyed the unrestricted use of his faculties and the free disposition of the fruits of his labor, social progress would be ceaseless, uninterrupted, and unfailing. But there is also another tendency that is common among people. When they can, they wish to live and prosper at the expense of others. This is no rash accusation. Nor does it come from a gloomy and uncharitable spirit. The annals of history bear witness to the truth of it: the incessant wars, mass migrations, religious persecutions, universal slavery, dishonesty in commerce, and monopolies. This fatal desire has its origin in the very nature of man -- in that primitive, universal, and insuppressible instinct that impels him to satisfy his desires with the least possible pain."
-Frederic Bastiat-
(1801-1850) French economist, statesman, and author. He did most of his writing during the years just before -- and immediately following -- the French Revolution of February 1848
Source: "The Law", June 1850
"When the representative body have lost the confidence of their constituents, when they have notoriously made sale of their most valuable rights, when they have assumed to themselves powers which the people never put into their hands, then indeed their continuing in office becomes dangerous to the State, and calls for an exercise of the power of dissolution."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"The right of a citizen to bear arms, in lawful defense of himself or the State, is absolute. He does not derive it from the State government. It is one of the 'high powers' delegated directly to the citizen, and 'is excepted out of the general powers of government.' A law cannot be passed to infringe upon or impair it, because it is above the law, and independent of the lawmaking power."
-Cockrum v. State-
Source: 24 Tex. 394, at 401-402 (1859)
"'The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.' The right of the whole people, old and young, men, women and boys, and not militia only, to keep and bear arms of every description, and not such merely as are used by the milita, shall not be infringed, curtailed, or broken in upon, in the smallest degree; and all this for the important end to be attained: the rearing up and qualifying a well-regulated militia, so vitally necessary to the security of a free State. Our opinion is that any law, State or Federal, is repugnant to the Constitution, and void, which contravenes this right."
-Nunn vs. State-
Source: 1 Ga. (1 Kel.) 243, at 251(1846)
"I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. Unsuccessful rebellions, indeed, generally establish the encroachments on the rights of the people, which produced them. An observation of this truth should render honest republican governors so mild in their punishment of rebellions as not to discourage them too much. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Letter to James Madison, Paris, January 30, 1787. THE POLITICAL WRITINGS OF THOMAS JEFFERSON 67 (Dumbauld Ed. 1955).
"The provision in the Constitution granting the right to all persons to bear arms is a limitation upon the power of the Legislature to enact any law to the contrary. The exercise of a right guaranteed by the Constitution cannot be made subject to the will of the sheriff."
-People vs. Zerillo-
Source: 219 Mich. 635, 189 N.W. 927, at 928 (1922)
"We find it intolerable that one constitutional right should have to be surrendered in order to assert another."
-Simmons v. U.S.-
Source: 390 US 389 (1968)
"When any court violates the clean and unambiguous language of the constitution, a fraud is perpetrated and no one is bound to obey it."
-State v. Sutton-
Source: 63 Minn 167, 65 NW 262, 30 LRA 630
"The right is general. It may be supposed from the phraseology of this provision that the right to keep and bear arms was only guaranteed to the militia; but this would be an interpretation not warranted by the intent. The militia, as has been explained elsewhere, consists of those persons who, under the law, are liable to the performance of military duty, and are officered and enrolled for service when called upon. . . .
[I]f the right were limited to those enrolled, the purpose of the guarantee might be defeated altogether by the action or the neglect to act of the government it was meant to hold in check. The meaning of the provision undoubtedly is, that the people, from whom the militia must be taken, shall have the right to keep and bear arms, and they need no permission or regulation of law for that purpose."
-Thomas Cooley-
(1824-1898) 25th Justice and a Chief Justice of the Michigan Supreme Court (1864-1885)
Source: General Principles of Constitutional Law, Third Edition, 1898
"...and by the way, Mr.Speaker, the Second Amendment is not for killing little ducks and leaving Huey and Dewey and Louie without an aunt and uncle. It's for hunting politicians, like in Grozny, and in the colonies in 1776, or when they take your independence away."
-Robert Dornan-
US Congressman (CA-R)
Source: January 25, 1994, responding to Bill Clinton's "State of the Union" speech
"The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
[Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clerel, le Comte de Tocqueville] (1805-1859) French historian
"Our particular principles of religion are a subject of accountability to our god alone. I enquire after no man's and trouble none with mine; nor is it given to us in this life to know whether yours or mine, our friend's or our foe's, are exactly the right."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: letter to Miles King, September 26, 1814
"Nothing is so galling to a people not broken in from the birth as a paternal, or, in other words, a meddling government, a government which tells them what to read, and say, and eat, and drink and wear."
-Thomas Babington Macaulay-
1st Baron Macaulay
"A man without religion is like a fish without a bicycle."
-Vique's Law-
"With respect to the two words ‘general welfare,’ I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators."
-James Madison-
"Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because if there be one he must approve of the homage of reason more than that of blindfolded fear."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"Shall I tell you what true evil is? It is to submit to you. It is when we surrender our freedom, our dignity, instead of defying you."
-Captain Jean-Luc Picard-
confronts Armus
"If you vote for bigger government, you get it."
-Joe Kennedy-
independent US Senate candidate to replace Ted Kennedy (no relation)
"Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber."
-Plato-
"Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. ... We've been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. Well, if no one among us is capable of government himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else? All of us together, in and out of government, must bear the burden. The solutions we seek must be equitable, with no one group singled out to pay a higher price."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
"The Federal Reserve Bank is nothing but a banking fraud and an unlawful crime against civilization. Why? Because they 'create' the money made out of nothing, and our Uncle Sap Government issues their 'Federal Reserve Notes' and stamps our Government approval with NO obligation whatever from these Federal Reserve Banks, Individual Banks or National Banks, etc."
-H. L. Birum, Sr.-
Source: American Mercury magazine, August 1957, p. 43
"It only ends once. Anything that happens before that is just progress."
-Jacob-
"Lost"
"The whole duty of man consists in being reasonable and just ... I am reasonable because I know the difference between understanding and not understanding and I am just because I have no opinion about things I don’t understand."
-Gertrude Stein-
"The first casualty when war comes is truth."
-Hiram W. Johnson-
(1866-1945) Governor of California (1911-1917), US Senator (1917-1945)
Source: U.S. Senate, 1917
"Under the Equal Protection clause, not to mention the First Amendment itself, government may not grant the use of a forum to people whose views it finds acceptable, but deny use to those wishing to express less favored or more controversial views."
-Supreme Court Of The United States-
Source: Police Department v. Mosley, 1972
"There is such a thing as a nation being so right it does not need to convince others by force that it is right."
-Woodrow Wilson-
"If monopoly persists, monopoly will always sit at the helm of government. I do not expect monopoly to restrain itself. If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it."
-Woodrow Wilson-
"I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have restricted credit, we have restricted opportunity, we have controlled development, and we have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the civilized world. No longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men."
-Woodrow Wilson-
"The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and peace, and it covers with its shield of protection all classes of men, at all times and under all circumstances. No doctrine involving more pernicious consequences was ever invented by the wit of men that any of its great provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of Government."
-U.S. Supreme Court-
Ex Parte Milligan, 1866
"A martial nobility and stubborn commons, possessed of arms, tenacious of property, and collected into constitutional assemblies form the only balance capable of preserving a free constitution against the enterprise of an aspiring prince."
-Edward Gibbon-
(1737-1794) English historian and Member of Parliament
"The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Letter to Abigail Adams, 22 February 1787
"All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others."
-Douglas Adams-
"Liberty is often a heavy burden on a man. It involves the necessity for perpetual choice which is the kind of labor men have always dreaded."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.-
(1809-1894) American Poet
Source: Elsie Venner, 1861
"But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain - that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it . In either case, it is unfit to exist."
-Lysander Spooner-
"The error seems not sufficiently eradicated, that the operations of the mind, as well as the acts of the body, are subject to the coercion of the laws. But our rulers can have authority over such natural rights only as we have submitted to them. The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to our God. The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. ... Was the government to prescribe to us our medicine and diet, our bodies would be in such keeping as our souls are now. Thus in France the emetic was once forbidden as a medicine, and the potatoe as an article of food."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Jefferson's Notes on Virginia, Query XVII (1781-1785)
"The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
"It is maintained by the advocates of the bank that its constitutionality in all its features ought to be considered as settled by precedent and by the decision of the Supreme Court. To this conclusion I cannot assent. Mere precedent is a dangerous source of authority...[and] the opinion of the Supreme Court...ought not to control the coordinate authorities of this Government. The Congress, the Executive, and the Court must each for itself be guided by its own opinion of the Constitution. Each public officer who takes an oath to support the Constitution swears that he will support it as he understands it, and not as it is understood by others. It is as much the duty of the House of Representatives, of the Senate, and of the President to decide upon the constitutionality of any bill...presented to them for passage...as it is of the supreme judges when it may be brought before them for judicial decision."
-Andrew Jackson-
1832 veto message rejecting a bill extending the charter of the Bank of the United States
"If you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive."
-CS Lewis-
"The only freedom deserving the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental and spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest."
-John Stuart Mill-
(1806-1873) English philosopher and economist
Source: On Liberty, 1859
"It rankles me when somebody tries to force somebody to do something."
-John Wayne-
[Marion Robert Morrison] (1907-1979) American film actor, director and producer
***
"The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty."
-Eugene McCarthy-
(1916- ) US Congressman (D-Minnesota) & US Senator (D-Minnesota)
Source: Time Magazine, 12 February 1979
"Since people, in a competitive or any other society, are by no means always just to each other, some regulation by the state in its capacity of umpire is unavoidable, What must be kept in mind is that the greatest injustice of all is done when the umpire forgets that he too is bound by the rules, and begins to make them as between contestants in behalf of his own prejudices."
-Felix Morley-
(1894-1982) American jourmalist. author, editor for The Washington Post (1933-40), 1936 Pulitzer Prize
Source: Freedom and Federalism, 1959
"The liberty the citizen enjoys is to be measured not by governmental machinery he lives under, whether representative or other, but by the paucity of restraints it imposes upon him."
-Herbert Spencer-
(1820-1903) British author, economist, philosopher
Source: Social Statics, 1850
"At the heart of western freedom and democracy is the belief that the individual man ... is the touchstone of value, and all society, groups, the state, exist for his benefit. Therefore the enlargement of liberty for individual human beings must be the supreme goal and abiding practice of any western society."
-Robert F. Kennedy-
(1925-1968), US Senator, Attorney General
Source: Speech, University of Capetown, 6 June 1966
"In its narrowest acceptation, order means obedience. A government is said to preserve order if it succeeds in getting itself obeyed."
-John Stuart Mill-
(1806-1873) English philosopher and economist
Source: Considerations on Representative Government, 1861
"The Press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of the government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people."
-Justice Hugo L. Black-
(1886-1971) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: New York Times v. Unites States (Pentagon Papers) 1971
"I have sworn upon the altar of god eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"Feeling good about government is like looking on the bright side of any catastrophe. When you quit looking on the bright side, the catastrophe is still there."
-P.J. O'Rourke-
(1947- ) US humorist, journalist, & political commentator
"The mania for giving the Government power to meddle with the private affairs of cities or citizens is likely to cause endless trouble … and there is great danger that our people will lose that independence of thought and action which is the cause of much of our greatness, and sink into the helplessness of the Frenchman or German who expects his government to feed him when hungry, clothe him when naked … and, in time, to regulate every act of humanity from the cradle to the tomb, including the manner in which he may seek future admission to paradise."
-Mark Twain-
letter to Enterprise on January 24, 1866
"The state can only survive as long as a majority is programmed to believe that theft isn't wrong if it's called taxation or asset forfeiture or eminent domain, that assault and kidnapping isn't wrong if it's called arrest, that mass murder isn't wrong if it's called war."
-Bill St. Clair-
"The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Letter to Abigail Adams, 22 February 1787
"I have been repeating over and over again that he who cannot protect himself or his nearest and dearest or their honor by non-violently facing death may and ought to do so by violently dealing with the oppressor. He who can do neither of the two is a burden. He has no business to be the head of a family. He must either hide himself, or must rest content to live for ever in helplessness and be prepared to crawl like a worm at the bidding of a bully."
-Gandhi-
"A constitution is not the act of a government, but of a people constituting a government; and government without a constitution is power without a right. All power exercised over a nation, must have some beginning. It must be either delegated, or assumed. There are not other sources. All delegated power is trust, and all assumed power is usurpation. Time does not alter the nature and quality of either."
-Thomas Paine-
"Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There's no better rule."
-Charles Dickens-
"This is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for a second, that second for a third, and so on 'til the bulk of the society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering ... And the forehorse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"Government can do something for the people only in proportion as it can do something to the people."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"Feudalism, serfdom, slavery, all tyrannical institutions, are merely the most vigorous kind to rule, springing out of, and necessarily to, a bad state of man. The progress from these is the same in all cases -- less government."
-Herbert Spencer-
(1820-1903) British author, economist, philosopher
"I have always believed that government had a limited capacity to do good and a virtually infinite capacity to do harm..."
-Neil Hamilton-
[Mostyn Neil Hamilton] (1949- ) former barrister, teacher and Conservative Member of Parliament in the United Kingdom
Source: House of Commons debates, 8 February 1994
"Government ought to be as much open to improvement as anything which appertains to man, instead of which it has been monopolized from age to age, by the most ignorant and vicious of the human race. Need we any other proof of their wretched management, than the excess of debts and taxes with which every nation groans, and the quarrels into which they have precipitated the world?"
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
"But to manipulate men, to propel them toward goals which you – the social reformers – see, but they may not, is to deny their human essence, to treat them as objects without wills of their own, and therefore to degrade them"
-Isaiah Berlin-
"[The] impersonal process of the market ... can be neither just nor unjust, because the results are not intended or foreseen."
-Fredrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
"The defect of equality is that we only desire it with our superiors."
-Henry Becque-
(1837-1899) French dramatist
"Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
"The less government we have the better -- the fewer laws and the less confided power. The antidote to this abuse of formal government is the influence of private character, the growth of the individual."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-
(1803-1882)
“Don’t write so that you can be understood. Write so that you can’t be misunderstood.”
-William Howard Taft-
"Don't practice until you get it right. Practice until you can't get it wrong."
"It is incredible how as soon as a people become subject, it promptly falls into such complete forgetfulness of its freedom that it can hardly be roused to the point of regaining it, obeying so easily and willingly that one is led to say that this people has not so much lost its liberty as won its enslavement."
-Estienne de la Boétie-
(1530-1563) French judge, writer, political philosopher
"Today's problems cannot be solved by thinking the way we thought when we created them."
-Albert Einstein-
(1879-1955) Physicist and Professor, Nobel Prize 1921
"We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a feather bed."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"Truth never damages a cause that is just."
-Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi-
(1869-1948)
"Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it."
-Albert Einstein-
(1879-1955) Physicist and Professor, Nobel Prize 1921
"My knowledge of pain, learned with the sabre, taught me not to be afraid. And just as in dueling when you must concentrate on your enemy's cheek, so, too, in war. You cannot waste time on feinting and sidestepping. You must decide on your target and go in."
-Otto Skorzeny-
"Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts. Some of you like pep rallies and plastic robots who tell you what to read. Forget I mentioned it... Rise for the flag salute."
-Frank Zappa-
(1940-1993), Musician
"No free people can lose their liberties while they are jealous of liberty. But the liberties of the freest people are in danger when they set up symbols of liberty as fetishes, worshipping the symbol instead of the principle it represents."
-Wendell Phillips-
(1811-1884) Abolitionist author
Source: Liberty and the Great Libertarians (C. Spradling)
"The last few decades have been marked by a special cultivation of the romance of the future. We seem to have made up our minds to misunderstand what has happened; and we turn, with a sort of relief, to stating what will happen-which is apparently much easier...The modern mind is forced towards the future by a certain sense of fatigue, not unmixed with terror, with which it regards the past."
-Gilbert Keith Chesterton-
(1874-1936) British essayist, critic, poet, and novelist
"The ultimate aim of government is not to rule, or restrain, by fear, nor to exact obedience, but contrariwise, to free every man from fear, that he may live in all possible security; in other words, to strengthen his natural right to exist and work without injury to himself or others. No, the object of government is not to change men from rational beings into beasts or puppets, but to enable them to develope their minds and bodies in security, and to employ their reason unshackled; neither showing hatred, anger, or deceit, nor watched with the eyes of jealousy and injustice. In fact, the true aim of government is liberty."
-Baruch Spinoza-
(1632-1677)
Source: Baruch Spinoza, in Theological-Political Treatise (1670)
"Indeed nations, in general, are not apt to think until they feel; and therefore nations in general have lost their liberty: For as violations of the rights of the governed, are commonly not only specious, but small at the beginning, they spread over the multitude in such a manner, as to touch individuals but slightly. Thus they are disregarded. The power or profit that arises from these violations centering in few persons, is to them considerable. For this reason the governors having in view their particular purposes, successively preserve an uniformity of conduct for attaining them. They regularly increase the first injuries, till at length the inattentive people are compelled to perceive the heaviness of their burthens — They begin to complain and inquire — but too late. They find their oppressors so strengthened by success, and themselves so entangled in examples of express authority on the part of their rulers, and of tacit recognition on their own part, that they are quite confounded: for millions entertain no other idea of the legality of power, than it is founded on the exercise of power."
-John Dickenson-
(1732-1808)
Source: John Dickenson, in The Political Writings of John Dickinson, Esquire Vol. I (1801), Letter XI
"What do we mean when we say that first of all we seek liberty? I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it… What is this liberty that must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not the freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check on their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few -- as we have learned to our sorrow. What then is the spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias..."
-Learned Hand-
(1872-1961), Judge, U. S. Court of Appeals
Source: Learned Hand, in "The Spirit of Liberty" - a speech at "I Am an American Day" ceremony, Central Park, New York City (21 May 1944
"Better to dwell in freedom's hall,
With a cold damp floor and mouldering wall,
Than bow the head and bend the knee
In the proudest palace of slaverie."
-Thomas Moore-
"Freedom is alone the unoriginated birthright of man; it belongs to him by force of his humanity, and is in dependence on the will and coaction of every other, in so far as this consists with every other person's freedom."
-Immanuel Kant-
(1724-1804) German philosopher
"No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue; and by a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles."
-Patrick Henry-
(1736-1799) US Founding Father
"It is very certain that [the commerce clause] grew out of the abuse of the power by the importing States in taxing the non-importing, and was intended as a negative and preventive provision against injustice among the States themselves, rather than as a power to be used for the positive purposes of the General Government."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: letter dated February 13, 1829
"The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature. Yet how can anyone speak of it today, with every soul in a prison, with every heart fettered, wounded, and maimed?... With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of its potentialities?"
-Emma Goldman-
(1869-1940)
Source: Anarchism
"Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths...
We may define a republic to be ... a government which derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people, and is administered by persons holding their offices during pleasure for a limited period, or during good behavior. It is essential to such a government that it be derived from the great body of the society, not from an inconsiderable proportion or a favored class of it; otherwise a handful of tyrannical nobles, exercising their oppressions by a delegation of their powers, might aspire to the rank of republicans and claim for their government the honorable title of republic."
-James Madison-
Federalist No. 10, (1787)
“A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men.”
-Henry David Thoreau-
(1817-1862)
"Had the states been despoiled of their sovereignty by the generality of the preamble, and had the Federal Government been endowed with whatever they should judge to be instrumental towards the union, justice, tranquility, common defence, general welfare, and the preservation of liberty, nothing could have been more frivolous than an enumeration of powers."
-Virginia’s General Assembly-
Source: January 23, 1799
"A free society can exist only when public spirit is balanced by an equal inclination of men to mind their own business."
-Edward A. Shils-
Source: The Torment of Secrecy, 1956
"The phase of the usury system which we are trying to analyze is more or less Patterson's perception that the Bank of England could have benefit of all the interest on all the money that it creates out of nothing. ... Now the American citizen can, of course, appeal to his constitution, which states that Congress shall have power to coin money or regulate the value thereof and of foreign coin. Such appeal is perhaps quixotic."
-Ezra Pound-
(1885-1972) American poet
March 30, 1943
"Heterodox doctrines, in economics and elsewhere, often fail to get adequately discussed in their formative stages: both the intellectual and the political establishment tend to regard them as unworthy of notice. Meanwhile, those doctrines can seem compelling to large numbers of people (some of whom may have considerable political clout, large financial resources, or both). By the time it becomes apparent that such influential ideas demand serious attention after all, reasoned argument has become very difficult. People have become invested emotionally, politically, and financially in the doctrine; careers and even institutions have been built on it; and the proponents can no longer allow themselves to contemplate the possibility that they have taken a wrong turning."
-Paul Krugman-
Economist, MIT
"Corruption, like a cancer ... eats faster and faster every hour. The revenue creates pensioners, and the pensioners urge for more revenue. The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependents and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, floppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole of society."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
"Capitalism should not be condemned, since we haven’t had capitalism. A system of capitalism presumes sound money, not fiat money manipulated by a central bank. Capitalism cherishes voluntary contracts and interest rates that are determined by savings, not credit creation by a central bank. It’s not capitalism when the system is plagued with incomprehensible rules regarding mergers, acquisitions, and stock sales, along with wage controls, price controls, protectionism, corporate subsidies, international management of trade, complex and punishing corporate taxes, privileged government contracts to the military-industrial complex, and a foreign policy controlled by corporate interests and overseas investments. Add to this centralized federal mismanagement of farming, education, medicine, insurance, banking and welfare. This is not capitalism!"
-Ron Paul-
(1935-) American physician, US Congressman (R-TX), US Presidential candidate
Source: Has Capitalism Failed?, July 9, 2002
"The preservation of peace and the guaranteeing of man's basic freedoms and rights require courage and eternal vigilance: courage to speak and act — and if necessary, to suffer and die — for truth and justice; eternal vigilance, that the least transgression of international morality shall not go undetected and unremedied. These lessons must be learned anew by each succeeding generation, and that generation is fortunate indeed which learns from other than its own bitter experience."
-Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia-
"No legal tender law is ever needed to make men take good money; its only use is to make them take bad money."
-Stephen T. Byington-
Source: September 1895, American Federationist
"One of the most insidious consequences of the present burden of personal income tax is that it strips many middle class families of financial reserves & seems to lend support to campaigns for socialized medicine, socialized housing, socialized food, socialized every thing. The personal income tax has made the individual vastly more dependent on the State & more avid for state hand-outs. It has shifted the balance in America from an individual-centered to a State-centered economic & social system."
-W. H. Chamberlin-
"How bad do things have to get before you do something? Do they have to take away all your property? Do they have to license every activity that you want to engage in? Do they have to start throwing you on cattle cars before you say “now wait a minute, I don’t think this is a good idea.” How long is it going to be before you finally resist and say “No, I will not comply. Period!” Ask yourself now because sooner or later you are going to come to that line, and when they cross it, you’re going to say well now cross this line; ok now cross that line; ok now cross this line. Pretty soon you’re in a corner. Sooner or later you’ve got to stand your ground whether anybody else does or not. That is what liberty is all about."
-Michael Badnarik-
"As government regulations grow slowly, we become used to the harness. Habit is a powerful force, and we no longer feel as intensely as we once would have [about the] constriction of our liberties that would have been utterly intolerable a mere half century ago."
-Judge Robert Bork-
(1927- ) Circuit Judge for US Court of Appeals
"To take from one because it is thought that his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association -- the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Note in Tracy's "Political Economy," 1816
"The secret of the superiority of state over private education lies in the fact that in the former the teacher is responsible to society ... [T]he result desired by the state is a wholly different one from that desired by parents, guardians, and pupils."
-Lester Frank Ward-
Source: 1897
"The censor believes that he can hold back the mighty traffic of life with a tin whistle and a raised right hand. For after all, it is life with which he quarrels."
-Heywood Broun-
(1888-1939)
Source: in The Fifty Year Decline of Hollywood (E. Goodman) 1961
"Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort."
-Robert A. Heinlein-
(1907-1988) American writer
"On every question of construction [of the Constitution] let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or intended against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: to Justice William Johnson, 1823, The Complete Jefferson, p. 322
"The First Amendment protects the right to gather information about what public officials do on public property, and specifically, a right to record matters of public interest."
-11th Circuit Court of Appeals-
Smith v. City of Cummings
"The state represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the state is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence."
-Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi-
(1869-1948)
"What, then, is the law? It is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense. ... since an individual cannot lawfully use force against the person, liberty, or property of another individual, then the common force -- for the same reason -- cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, liberty, or property of individual groups. ... But, unfortunately, law by no means confines itself to its proper functions. And when it has exceeded its proper functions, it has not done so merely in some inconsequential and debatable matters. The law has gone further than this; it has acted in direct opposition to its own purpose. The law has been used to destroy its own objective: It has been applied to annihilating the justice that it was supposed to maintain; to limiting and destroying rights which its real purpose was to respect. The law has placed the collective force at the disposal of the unscrupulous who wish, without risk, to exploit the person, liberty, and property of others. It has converted plunder into a right, in order to protect plunder. And it has converted lawful defense into a crime, in order to punish lawful defense."
-Frederic Bastiat-
(1801-1850) French economist, statesman, and author. He did most of his writing during the years just before -- and immediately following -- the French Revolution of February 1848
Source: THE LAW, 1850
"I may die a beggar, but with the Grace of God, I will not die a slave. I will not be filed, stamped, briefed, debriefed, or numbered... My life is my own."
-The Prisoner-
Source: From the television show, The Prisoner
"The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed, and people must learn to work instead of living on public assistance, lest Rome become bankrupt."
-Cicero-
55 BC
"If a juror accepts as the law that which the judge states then that juror has accepted the exercise of absolute authority of a government employee and has surrendered a power and right that once was the citizen's safeguard of liberty, -- For the saddest epitaph which can be carved in the memory of a vanished liberty is that it was lost because its possessors failed to stretch forth a saving hand while yet there was time."
-George Sutherland-
(1862-1942) U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: 2 ELLIOT’S DEBATES, 94, BANCROFT, HISTORY OF THE CONSTITUTION, p.267, 1788.
"If a juror feels that the statute involved in any criminal offence is unfair, or that it infringes upon the defendant's natural god-given unalienable or constitutional rights, then it is his duty to affirm that the offending statute is really no law at all and that the violation of it is no crime at all, for no one is bound to obey an unjust law."
-Harlan F. Stone-
12th Chief Justice U.S. Supreme Court
"We must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which are the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world and which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, Trial by Jury, and the English common law, find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence."
-Winston Churchill-
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
Source: To Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, 1946
"That is reserved expressly to the States and is not granted to the Federal Government by our national charter. The Federal Government has nothing to do under the Constitution with the preservation of public order. To pass this bill is to pass a bill for an unconstitutional purpose, under the guise of regulating interstate commerce."
-George Huddleson-
US Congressman (D-AL)
Source: 1930 House Firearms Hearing, supra note 45, at 15.
"The biggest threat to the American people today lies with the United States government. ... [T]he long-term solution is to dismantle, not reform, the iron fist of the welfare state and the controlled economy. This includes the end (not the reform) of the IRS, the DEA, the BATF, the SEC, the FDA, HUD, the departments of HHS, Labor, Agriculture, and energy, and every other agency that takes money from some and gives it to others or interferes with peaceful behavior."
-Jacob G. Hornberger-
American author, journalist, politician, founder and president of the Future of Freedom Foundation
Source: The Nazi Mind-Set in America, THE TYRANNY OF GUN CONTROL, 63 (Future of Freedom Foundation 1997).
"Arms in the hands of individual citizens may be used at individual discretion for the defence of the country, the over-throw of tyranny, or in private self-defense."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: A DEFENSE OF THE CONSTITUTIONS OF GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, at 475, (Philadelphia 1788)
“One may well ask: How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others? The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”
-Martin Luther King, Jr.-
"One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws, but conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws."
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-
(1929-1968), US civil rights leader
"[R]evenues drive expenditures, not the inverse. ... tax evasion represents a net benefit to everybody ... A statue should be erected to the unknown tax evader."
-Pierre Lemieux-
Source: In Praise of the Unknown Tax Evader, NATIONAL POST, February 27, 2002
"Self-defense is a part of the law of nature; nor can it be denied the community, even against the king himself."
-William Barclay-
(1546-1608, Scottish jurist)
"The people are Sovereign. ... at the Revolution, the sovereignty devolved on the people; and they are truly the sovereigns of the country, but they are sovereigns without subjects... with none to govern but themselves; the citizens of America are equal as fellow citizens, and as joint tenants in the sovereignty."
-John Jay-
(1745-1829) first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, First President of the United States - preceding George Washington, one of three men most responsible for the US Constitution
Source: Chisholm v. Georgia, (US) 2 Dall 419, 454, 1 L Ed 440, 455 @Dall 1793 pp471-472
http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0002_0419_ZS.html
"It is incorrect to think of liberty as synonymous with unrestrained action. Liberty does not and cannot include any action, regardless of sponsorship, which lessens the liberty of a single human being. To argue contrarily is to claim that liberty can be composed of liberty negations, patently absurd. Unrestraint carried to the point of impairing the liberty of others is the exercise of license, not liberty. To minimize the exercise of license is to maximize the area of liberty. Ideally, government would restrain license, not indulge in it; make it difficult, not easy; disgraceful, not popular. A government that does otherwise is licentious, not liberal."
-Leonard E. Read-
(1898-1983) founder of the Foundation for Economic Education
Source: Leonard E. Read, in The Freeman
"There is simply no escaping the fact that the fate of the Constitution is in our hands -- as voters, representatives, justices. If we allow ourselves to abuse the tradition of higher lawmaking, the very idea that the Constitution can be viewed as the culminating expression of a mobilized citizenry will disintegrate. After all, the American Republic is no more eternal than the Roman -- and it will come to an end when American citizens betray their Constitution’s fundamental ideals and aspirations so thoroughly that existing institutions merely parody the public meanings they formerly conveyed."
-Bruce Ackerman-
(1943-) American constitutional law scholar, Sterling Professor at Yale Law School
Source: WE THE PEOPLE: FOUNDATIONS, 291 (1991)
"The law itself is on trial quite as much as the cause which is to be decided."
-Harlan F. Stone-
12th Chief Justice U.S. Supreme Court
Source: 1941
"For more than six hundred years -- that is, since the Magna Carta in 1215 -- there has been no clearer principle of English or American constitutional law than that, in criminal cases, it is not only the right and duty of juries to judge what are the facts, what is the law, and what was the moral intent of the accused; but that it is also their right, and their primary and paramount duty, to judge the justice of the law, and to hold all laws invalid, that are, in their opinion, unjust, oppressive, and all persons guiltless in violating or resisting the execution of such laws."
-Lysander Spooner-
(1808-1887) Political theorist, activist, abolitionist
Source: AN ESSAY ON THE TRIAL BY JURY p. 11 (1852)
"The pages of history shine on instances of the jury's exercise of its prerogative to disregard instructions of the judge..."
-U.S. vs. Dougherty-
Source: 473 F 2nd 1113, 1139. (1972)
"To render the magistrate a judge of truth, and engage his authority in the suppression of opinions, shews an inattention to the nature and designs of political liberty."
-Robert Hall-
(1764-1831)
Source: An Apology for the Liberty of the Press, 1793
"The jury has the right to determine both the law and the facts."
-Samuel Chase-
(1741-1811) Signatory to the United States Declaration of Independence as a representative of Maryland, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court
Source: 1796
"Are we going to take the hands of the federal government completely off any effort to adjust the growing of national crops, and go right straight back to the old principle that every farmer is a lord of his own farm and can do anything he wants, raise anything, any old time, in any quantity, and sell any time he wants?"
-Franklin D. Roosevelt-
(1882-1945), 32nd US President
Source: May 31, 1935 press conference, responding to a Supreme Court decision that defined the commerce clause narrowly enough to interfere with his regulation of farm products
"It is a known fact that the policies of the government today, whether Republican or Democrat are closer to the 1932 platform of the Communist Party than they are to either of their own party platforms in that critical year."
-Walter Trohan-
(1903-2003) Chicago Tribune reporter (1929-1972) and bureau chief in Washington, D.C.
Source: CHICAGO TRIBUNE, October 5, 1970
"...Jury nullification is the undisputed power of the jury to acquit, even if its verdict is contrary to the law as given by the judge and contrary to the evidence."
-State v. Hokanson, 140 N.H. at 721B906-
cited and reiterated in State of NH v Sanchez, 2005
"We demand entire freedom of action and then expect the government in some miraculous way to save us from the consequences of our own acts.... Self-government means self-reliance."
-Calvin Coolidge-
(1873-1933), 30th US President
"You know, the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common, they don't alter their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views, which can be uncomfortable, if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering."
-Doctor Who-
Source: The Face of Evil
"Trust is a two way street. If your government does not trust you, how can you trust your government?"
-Bruce Montague-
"There is no crime more infamous than the violation of truth. It is apparent that men can be social beings no longer than they believe each other. When speech is employed only as the vehicle of falsehood, every man must disunite himself from others, inhabit his own cave and seek prey only for himself."
-Dr. Samuel Johnson-
(1709-1784)
"There is but one means to extenuate the effects of enemy fire: it is to develop a more violent fire oneself."
-Ferdinand Foch-
"For the power given to Congress by the Constitution does not extend to the internal regulation of the commerce of a State (that is to say, of the commerce between citizen and citizen,) which remain exclusively with its own legislature; but to its external commerce only, that is to say, its commerce with another State, or with foreign nations, or with the Indian tribes."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Opinion against the constitutionality of a National Bank, February 15, 1791
"Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it. Thus the beneficiaries are spared the shame and danger that their acts would otherwise involve... But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them and gives it to the other persons to whom it doesn't belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. Then abolish that law without delay ... No legal plunder; this is the principle of justice, peace, order, stability, harmony and logic."
-Frederic Bastiat-
(1801-1850) French economist, statesman, and author. He did most of his writing during the years just before -- and immediately following -- the French Revolution of February 1848.
June 1850
Source: "The Law" by Frederic Bastiat, 1850
"Unless they can pass the same test that immigrants must pass to become citizens, people shouldn't be allowed to vote. The idea that there is some public benefit in ignoramuses and morons pulling levers next to names on a ballot is one of the evil myths of post-modern America. The purpose of voting, in our country, is to select men and women with the competence and integrity to operate the mechanics of government fixed by our Constitution. For this process to have any public benefit requires that the choices be made on an intelligent, knowledgeable and reasoned basis."
-Charley Reese-
Source: The Orlando Sentinel, 11/03/98
"Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility."
-Sigmund Freud-
(1856-1939) Jewish Austrian neurologist, founder of the psychoanalytic school of psychiatry
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license."
-John Milton-
"An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted."
-Arthur Miller-
"The statesman who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals, would ... assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it."
-Adam Smith-
(1723-1790) Scottish philosopher and economist
Source: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1776
"Usurpation, the exercise of power not granted, is not legitimized by repetition."
-Raoul Berger-
(1901-2000) was an attorney and professor at Harvard University
"To blindly trust government is to automatically vest it with excessive power. To distrust government is simply to trust humanity - to trust in the ability of average people to peacefully, productively coexist without some official policing their every move. The State is merely another human institution - less creative than Microsoft, less reliable than Federal Express, less responsible than the average farmer husbanding his land, and less prudent than the average citizen spending his own paycheck."
-James Bovard-
(1956- ) American author, lecturer
Source: Freedom in Chains, The Rise of the State and the Demise of the Citizen (St. Martin's Press), 2000
"It is the paper money created out of thin air that creates the unfair distribution of wealth that is making the middle class fall more behind and the poor more poor. Newly created money and credit in a paper money system benefits those that can access the money first and buy capital goods and real property at one price before the new money circulates and makes all prices go up. Wages also do not keep up with inflation and that creates another squeeze on the middle class."
-Kenneth Gerbino-
former chairman of the American Economic Council
Source: The Great Deceit, May 28, 2010
"Always remember the difference between economic power and political power: You can refuse to hire someone's services or buy his products in the private sector and go somewhere else instead. In the public sector, though, if you refuse to accept a politician's or bureaucrat's product or services you go to jail. Ultimately, after all, all regulations are observed and all taxes are paid at gunpoint. I believe those few who can't even see that have been short-sighted sheep, and I suggest they learn how to think conceptually, develop consistency and grasp principles soon."
-Rick Gaber-
Source: Selfishness vs. "Selfishness"
"I will not accept if nominated and will not serve if elected."
-William Tecumseh Sherman-
(1820-1891) General Commander of the United States Army
"No nation however powerful, any more than an individual, can be unjust with impunity. Sooner or later, public opinion, an instrument merely moral in the beginning, will find occasion physically to inflict its sentences on the unjust... The lesson is useful to the weak as well as the strong."
-Thomas Jefferson-
to James Madison, 1804
"It is the trade of lawyers to question everything, yield nothing, and talk by the hour."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"Laws that forbid the carrying of arms...disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes...Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"Democrats and Republicans alike support the "War on Drugs." Federal, state, and local police make more than a million drug arrests yearly. Drug cases clog the courts. More than 60% of federal prison cells and about 30% of state prison cells hold drug offenders. No-knock drug raiders nullify the Fourth Amendment every day. Yet illicit drugs continue to pour onto the market, and they are readily available throughout the land. Looks like another failed policy. But politicians say more money will win the war. For fiscal 1996, President Clinton has requested a record $14.6 billion for this exercise in futility. State and local government will also spend huge sums. Who benefits? Posturing politicians and puritanical zealots, of course, but also the Drug Enforcement Administration, Customs Service, Coast Guard, FBI, and the rest of the drug warriors. Police love the drug war, because the forfeiture laws it inspired allow them to seize and keep private property with impunity. Corrupt cops get fabulous bribes, and corruption therefore runs rampant."
-Robert Higgs-
(1944- ) American economic historian, economist of the Austrian School
Source: The Myth of “Failed” Policies, THE FREE MARKET, June 1995.
"Now it is one thing to say (I say it) that people shouldn’t consume psychoactive drugs. It is entirely something else to condone marijuana laws, the application of which resulted, in 1995, in the arrest of 588,963 Americans. Why are we so afraid to inform ourselves on the question?"
-William F. Buckley, Jr.-
(1925-2008) American author and journalist, founded 'National Review'
Source: October 21, 1997
"No moral system can rest solely on authority."
-Alfred Jules Ayer-
"The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take the place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy."
-John Adams-
"Government isn't a good way to solve problems ... [G]overnment is concerned mostly with self-perpetuation and is subject to fantastic ideas about its own capabilities. ... [G]overnment is wasteful of the nation's resources, immune to common sense and subject to pressure from every half-organized bouquet of assholes. ... [G]overnment is distrustful of and disrespectful toward average Americans while being easily gulled by Americans with money, influence or fame."
-P. J. O'Rourke-
(1947- ) US humorist, journalist, & political commentator
"The true theory of our constitution is surely the wisest and best, that the States are independent as to everything within themselves, and united as to everything respecting foreign nations."
-Thomas Jefferson-
1800 presidential campaign
"[T]he best general key for the solution of questions of power between our governments, is the fact that every foreign and federal power is given to the federal government, and to the States every power purely domestic. ... The federal is, in truth, our foreign government, which department alone is taken from the sovereignty of the separate States."
-Thomas Jefferson-
1824 letter
"Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen."
-Friedrich Nietzsche-
(1844-1900)
Source: Thus Spoke Zarathustra
"Contrary to the Marxists, the Nazis did not advocate public ownership of the means of production. They did demand that the government oversee and run the nation's economy. The issue of legal ownership, they explained, is secondary; what counts is the issue of control. Private citizens, therefore, may continue to hold titles to property -- so long as the state reserves to itself the unqualified right to regulate the use of their property."
-Leonard Peikoff-
(1933- )
Source: The Ominous Parallels
"[I]f we won't choose to pay the price of liberty, then by default we shall suffer the cost of servitude -- whether it be the iron chains of a tyrannical oligarchy or the regulatory chains of unelected, faceless bureaucrats. When we witness our neighbors abused by tyrants, will we skulk away and hope we’re not next? Or will we stand by them and challenge -- as freedom-loving Americans — the tyranny of lawless leaders."
-Phil Trieb-
Source: The New American, p. 39 April 29, 1996.
"We ask that government undertake the obligation above all of providing citizens with adequate opportunity for employment and earning a living. The activities of the individual must not be allowed to clash with the interests of the community, but must take place within the confines and be for the good of all. Therefore, we demand: ... an end to the power of financial interest. We demand profit sharing in big business. We demand a broad extension of care for the aged. We demand ... the greatest possible consideration of small business in the purchases of the national, state, and municipal governments. In order to make possible to every capable and industrious [citizen] the attainment of higher education and thus the achievement of a post of leadership, the government must provide an all-around enlargement of our system of public education.... We demand the education at government expense of gifted children of poor parents.... The government must undertake the improvement of public health -- by protecting mother and child, by prohibiting child labor -- by the greatest possible support for all groups concerned with the physical education of youth. [W]e combat the ... materialistic spirit within and without us, and are convinced that a permanent recovery of our people can only proceed from within on the foundation of The Common Good Before the Individual Good."
-National Socialist Party of Germany (NAZI)-
Source: planks of the National Socialist Party of Germany (NAZI), adopted in Munich on February 24, 1920.
"We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
"The Nature of Government"
"What I say is, that the real non-resistants can believe in direct action only, never in political action. For the basis of all political action is coercion; even when the State does good things, it finally rests on a club, a gun, or a prison, for its power to carry them through."
-Voltairine de Cleyre-
"A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon it adds up to real money."
-Everett Dirksen-
(1896-1969) Illinois Senator
"It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a 'dismal science.' But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance."
-Murray N. Rothbard-
(1926-1995) Dean of the Austrian School of Economics
"According to the Tax Foundation, the average American worker works 127 days of the year just to pay his taxes. That means that government owns 36 percent of the average American’s output—which is more than feudal serfs owed the robber barons. That 36 percent is more than the average American spends on food, clothing and housing. In other words, if it were not for taxes, the average American’s living standard would at least double."
-Paul Craig Roberts-
(1939- ) Economist, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration ("Father of Reaganomics"), former editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Scripps Howard News Service.
Source: Taxes take enormous toll on America, THE CONSERVATIVE CHRONICLE p. 21, May 1, 1996
"The people are the masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who would pervert it!"
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
"A tax cut means higher family income and higher business profits and a balanced federal budget.... As the national income grows, the federal government will ultimately end up with more revenues. Prosperity is the real way to balance our budget. By lowering tax rates, by increasing jobs and income, we can expand tax revenues and finally bring our budget into balance."
-John F. Kennedy-
(1917-1963) 35th US President
Source: September 18, 1963
"In any event, freedom to travel throughout the United States has long been recognized as a basic right under the Constitution."
-US Supreme Court-
U.S. v. Guest 383 U.S. 745 (1966)
"'The constitutional right to travel from one State to another . . . has been firmly established and repeatedly recognized.' United States v. Guest, 383 U.S. 745, 757. This constitutional right, which, of course, includes the right of 'entering and abiding in any State in the Union,' Truax v. Raich, 239 U.S. 33, 39, is not a mere conditional liberty subject to regulation and control under conventional [394 U.S. 618, 643] due process or equal protection standards. 1 '[T]he right to travel freely from State to State finds constitutional protection that is quite independent of the Fourteenth Amendment.’ United States v. Guest, supra, at 760, n. 17. 2 As we made clear in Guest, it is a right broadly assertable against private interference as well as governmental action. 3 Like the right of association, NAACP v. Alabama, 357 U.S. 449, it is a virtually unconditional personal right, 4 guaranteed by the Constitution to us all."
-US Supreme Court-
Shapiro v Thompson, 394 U.S. 618 (1969)
"I believe that what separates us all from one another is simply society itself, or, if you like, politics. This is what raises barriers between men, this is what creates misunderstanding.
If I may be allowed to express myself paradoxically, I should say that the truest society, the authentic human community, is extra-social — a wider, deeper society, that which is revealed by our common anxieties, our desires, our secret nostalgias. The whole history of the world has been governed by nostalgias and anxieties, which political action does no more than reflect and interpret, very imperfectly. No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa."
-Eugène Ionesco-
"It is the invariable habit of bureaucracies, at all times and everywhere, to assume...that every citizen is a criminal. Their one apparent purpose, pursued with a relentless and furious diligence, is to convert the assumption into a fact. They hunt endlessly for proofs, and, when proofs are lacking, for mere suspicions. The moment they become aware of a definite citizen, John Doe, seeking what is his right under the law, they begin searching feverishly for an excuse for withholding it from him."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956)
American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"Being intelligent is not a felony. But most societies evaluate it as at least a misdemeanor."
-Robert A. Heinlein-
(1907-1988) American writer
"The Gettysburg speech was at once the shortest and the most famous oration in American history...the highest emotion reduced to a few poetical phrases. Lincoln himself never even remotely approached it. It is genuinely stupendous. But let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of everyday. The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination – that government of the people, by the people, for the people, should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves."
-H.L. Mencken-
"Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs have in Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be empowered. It's not entitlement. An entitlement is what people on welfare get, and how free are they? It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights -- the 'right' to education, the 'right' to health care, the 'right' to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are rations of slavery -- hay and a barn for human cattle. There's only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences."
-P. J. O'Rourke-
(1947- ) US humorist, journalist, & political commentator
Source: AGE AND GUILE BEAT YOUTH, INNOCENCE, AND A BAD HAIRCUT (Atlantic Monthly Press 1995)
"The governments of the great States have two instruments for keeping the people dependent, in fear and obedience: a coarser, the army; and a more refined, the school."
-Friedrich Nietzsche-
(1844-1900)
Source: The Complete Works of Frederick Nietzsche, 152 (O. Levy Ed. 1974)
"Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidarity to pure wind."
-George Orwell-
[Eric Arthur Blair] (1903-1950) British author
"The state spends much time and effort persuading the public that it is not really what it is and that the consequences of its actions are positive rather than negative."
-Hans Hermann Hoppe-
Source: A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism
"Is Freedom only a Will-o'-the-wisp
To cheat a poet's eye?
Be it phantom or fact, it's a noble cause
In which to sing and to die!"
-Joyce Kilmer-
"[E]very Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his. The great and chief end therefore, of Mens uniting into Commonwealths, and putting themselves under Government, is the Preservation of their Property."
-John Locke-
(1632-1704) English philosopher and political theorist. Considered the ideological progenitor of the American Revolution and who, by far, was the most often non-biblical writer quoted by the Founding Fathers of the USA.
1690
"Positive laws are tyrannical. One's individual rights -- whether they be life, liberty, or property -- must be sacrificed by the state in order to fulfill the positive rights of another. For example, if housing is considered a "right," then the state will have to confiscate wealth (property) from those who have provided shelter for themselves in order to house those who have not.... True justice is realized when our lives, and property are secure, and we are free to express our thoughts without fear of retribution. Just laws are negative in nature; they exist to thwart the violation of our natural rights. Government ought to be the collective organization -- that is, the extension -- of the individual's right of self-defense, and its purpose to protect our lives, liberties, and property."
-Mark Da Vee-
Source: Defining Justice, The Freeman, P. 566-67, August, 1996
"The doctrine of non-resistance against arbitrary power and oppression, is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind."
-New Hampshire Constitution-
Source: Article 10
"Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: 'Novanglus', 'Boston Gazette' 06 Feb 1775
"We despise and abhor the bully, the brawler, the oppressor, whether in private or public life, but we despise no less the coward and the voluptuary. No man is worth calling a man who will not fight rather than submit to infamy or see those that are dear to him suffer wrong."
-Theodore Roosevelt-
"I'm convinced that we have to have federal legislation to build on. We're going to have to take one step at a time, and the first step is necessarily -- given the political realities -- going to be very modest. Of course, it's true that politicians will then go home and say, 'This is a great law. The problem is solved.' And it's also true that such statements will tend to defuse the gun-control issue for a time. So then we'll have to strengthen that law, and then again to strengthen that law, and maybe again and again. Right now, though, we'd be satisfied not with half a loaf but with a slice. Our ultimate goal -- total control of handguns in the United States -- is going to take time. My estimate is from seven to ten years. The problem is to slow down the increasing number of handguns sold in this country. The second problem is to get them all registered. And the final problem is to make the possession of all handguns and all handgun ammunition -- except for the military, policemen, licensed security guards, licensed sporting clubs, and licensed gun collectors -- totally illegal."
-Nelson Shields-
Co-founder and Chairman Emeritus, Handgun Control, Inc.
Source: A Reporter At Large: Handguns, The New Yorker, July 26, 1976, 57-58
"All military type firearms are to be handed in immediately ... The SS, SA and Stahlhelm give every respectable German man the opportunity of campaigning with them. Therefore anyone who does not belong to one of the above named organizations and who unjustifiably nevertheless keeps his weapon ... must be regarded as an enemy of the national government."
-SA Oberfuhrer of Bad Tolz-
March, 1933
"It is clear in our criminal justice system that the jury has the power to nullify -- that is, the power to acquit or to convict on reduced charges despite overwhelming evidence against the defendant. ... In a criminal trial, the court cannot direct a verdict of guilty, no matter how strong the evidence. In addition, if the jury acquits, double jeopardy bars the prosecution from appealing the verdict or seeking retrial. Similarly, if the jury convicts the defendant of a less serious offense than the one charged, the prosecution cannot again try the defendant on the more serious charge. This result occurs regardless of whether the jury consciously rejects the law, embraces a merciful attitude, or is simply confused concerning the law or facts. Thus, nullification -- with or without authority, intended or not -- is part of our system."
-Anne Bowen Poulin-
Professor of Law, Villanova School of Law
Source: Article: The Jury: The Criminal Justice System’s Different Voice, 62 U. CIN. L. REV. 1377, 1399 (1994).
"The power of nullification plays an important role in the criminal justice system. ... Because an accused criminal is restricted in the defenses he or she can raise, the law recognizes only certain defenses and justification, and correspondingly, limited evidence. The jury’s power to nullify provides an accommodation between the rigidity of the law and the need to hear and respond to positions that do not fit legal pigeonholes, such as claims of spousal abuse before the battered-spouse syndrome received acceptance. Jury nullification permits the jury to respond to a position that does not have the status of a legally recognized defense. The power to nullify guarantees that the jury is free to speak as the conscience of the community. "
-Anne Bowen Poulin-
Professor of Law, Villanova School of Law
Source: Article: The Jury: The Criminal Justice System’s Different Voice, 62 U. CIN. L. REV. 1377, 1400 (1994)
"But, sir, the people themselves have it in their power effectually to resist usurpation, without being driven to an appeal of arms. An act of usurpation is not obligatory; it is not law; and any man may be justified in his resistance. Let him be considered as a criminal by the general government, yet only his fellow-citizens can convict him; they are his jury, and if they pronounce him innocent, not all the powers of Congress can hurt him; and innocent they certainly will pronounce him, if the supposed law he resisted was an act of usurpation."
-Theophilus Parsons-
(1750-1813)
Source: in the Massachusetts Convention on the ratification of the Constitution, January 23, 1788,
in _Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution,_
Jonathan Elliot, ed., v.2 p.94 (Philadelphia, 1836)
"It is easy to think the State has a lot of different objects -- military, political, economic, and what not. But in a way things are much simpler than that. The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging in his own garden -- that is what the State is there for. And unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc., are simply a waste of time."
-C. S. Lewis-
(1898-1963), British novelist
"Congress will ever exercise their powers to levy as much money as the people can pay. They will not be restrained from direct taxes by the consideration that necessity does not require them."
-Melancton Smith-
(1744-1798) opponent of Alexander Hamilton during New York's ratifying convention
"I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground: That 'all powers not delegated to the United States, by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States or to the people' (10th Amendment). To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specifically drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible to any definition."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Opinion on the Constitutionality of a National Bank, letter to George Washington,15 February 1791,
The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Boyd, ed., vol. 19 (276)
"When men are brought face to face with their opponents, forced to listen and learn and mend their ideas, they cease to be children and savages and begin to live like civilized men. Then only is freedom a reality, when men may voice their opinions because they must examine their opinions."
-Walter Lippmann-
(1889-1974) American writer, journalist, and political commentator
Source: The Indispensable Opposition, 1939
"With respect to the words general welfare, I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
"The power of the legislative being derived from the people by a positive voluntary grant and institution, can be no other than what that positive grant conveyed, which being only to make laws, and not to make legislators, the legislative can have no power to transfer their authority of making laws, and place it in other hands."
-John Locke-
(1632-1704) English philosopher and political theorist. Considered the ideological progenitor of the American Revolution and who, by far, was the most often non-biblical writer quoted by the Founding Fathers of the USA
"Parties are... censors of the conduct of each other, and useful watchmen for the public. Men by their constitutions are naturally divided into two parties:
1. Those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes.
2. Those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them, cherish and consider them as the most honest and safe, although not the most wise, depository of the public interests.
In every country these two parties exist, and in every one where they are free to think, speak, and write, they will declare themselves. Call them, therefore,... Whigs and Tories, Republicans and Federalists, Aristocrats and Democrats, or by whatever name you please, they are the same parties still, and pursue the same object."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"By the power to lay and collect imposts Congress may impose duties on any or every article of commerce imported into these states to what amount they please. By the power to lay excises, a power very odious in its nature, since it authorizes officers to examine into your private concerns, the Congress may impose duties on every article of use or consumption: On the food that we eat, on the liquors we drink, on the clothes that we wear, the glass which enlighten our houses, or the hearths necessary for our warmth and comfort. By the power to lay and collect taxes, they may proceed to direct taxation on every individual either by a capitation tax on their heads or an assessment on their property. By this part of the section, therefore, the government has a power to tax to what amount they choose and thus to sluice the people at every vein as long as they have a drop of blood left."
-Luther Martin-
(1744-1826) Maryland delegate to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia
"'Heaven helps those who help themselves' is a well-tried maxim, embodying in a small compass the results of vast human experience. The spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual; and, exhibited in the lives of many, it constitutes the true source of national vigour and strength. Help from without is often enfeebling in its effects, but help from within invariably invigorates. Whatever is done for men or classes, to a certain extent takes away the stimulus and necessity of doing for themselves; and where men are subjected to over-guidance and over-government, the inevitable tendency is to render them comparatively helpless."
-Samuel Smiles-
"I tell you true, liberty is the best of all things; never live beneath the noose of a servile halter."
-William Wallace-
Scottish patriot, led a revolution against England’s King Edward I [Longshanks]
Address to the Scots [c. 1300]
"If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no resource left but in the exertion of that original right of self-defense. ... The citizens must rush tumultuously to arms..."
-Alexander Hamilton-
Essay 28, The Federalist Papers
"The constitutions of most of our States assert that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves in all cases to which they think themselves competent (as in electing their functionaries executive and legislative, and deciding by a jury of themselves in all judiciary cases in which any fact is involved), or they may act by representatives, freely and equally chosen; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed; that they are entitled to freedom of person, freedom of religion, freedom of property, and freedom of the press."
-Thomas Jefferson-
to John Cartwright, 1824
"Congress have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birth-right of an American ... the unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people."
-Tench Coxe-
(1755-1824) American political economist
20 Feb 1788
"The Jury has a right to judge both the law as well as the fact in controversy."
-John Jay-
(1745-1829) first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, First President of the united States after the American Revolution - preceding George Washington, one of three men most responsible for the US Constitution
1789
"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation."
-Henry David Thoreau-
(1817-1862)
"The only reason for a government service is precisely to provide financial support for an operation that is otherwise unsustainable, or else there would be no point in the government’s involvement at all."
-Lew Rockwell-
[Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.] (1944- ) Chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute
"Since March 9, 1933, the United States has been in a state of declared national emergency.... Under the powers delegated by these statutes, the President may: seize property; organize and control the means of production; seize commodities; assign military forces abroad; institute martial law; seize and control all transportation and communication; regulate the operation of private enterprise; restrict travel; and, in a plethora of particular ways, control the lives of all American citizens. ...
A majority of the people of the United States have lived all of their lives under emergency rule. For 40 years, freedoms and governmental procedures guaranteed by the Constitution have, in varying degrees, been abridged by laws brought into force by states of national emergency....from, at least, the Civil War in important ways shaped the present phenomenon of a permanent state of national emergency."
-Senate Report, 93rd Congress-
Source: from the Senate Report 93-549, 93rd Congress, November 19, 1973, Special Committee On The Termination Of The National Emergency United States Senate. The purpose of the committee was to discuss and address the 40 year long state of emergency that had been in effect in the United States since the Emergency Act of 1933, the Trading with the Enemy Act October 6, 1917 as amended in March 9, 1933. During the continued state of emergency, Congress voted to transfer powers from Congress to the President. The debate to end long-running states of National Emergency was ended in 1976 with the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1601-1651), which limits any such declared emergencies to two years.
"Many politicians are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition, that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story, who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim."
-Thomas Babington Macaulay-
(1800-1859) [Lord Macaulay] 1st Baron Macaulay, British historian
"The moment men obtain perfect freedom, that moment they erect a stage for the manifestation of their faults. The strong characters begin to go wrong by excess of energy; the weak by remissness of action."
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe-
(1749-1832)
"I know it will give great offense to the clergy, but the advocate of religious freedom is to expect neither peace nor forgiveness from them."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"If it be asked what is to be the consequence, in case the Congress shall misconstrue this part of the Constitution, and exercise powers not warranted by its true meaning, I answer, the same as if they should misconstrue or enlarge any other power vested in them; as if the general power had been reduced to particulars, and any one of these were to be violated; the same, in short, as if the State legislatures should violate their respective constitutional authorities. In the first instance, the success of the usurpation will depend on the executive and judiciary departments, which are to expound and give effect to the legislative acts; and in the last resort a remedy must be obtained from the people who can, by the election of more faithful representatives, annul the acts of the usurpers."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President Source: THE FEDERALIST No. 44
"Extreme justice is an extreme injury: for we ought not to approve of those terrible laws that make the smallest offences capital, nor of that opinion of the Stoics that makes all crimes equal; as if there were no difference to be made between the killing a man and the taking his purse, between which, if we examine things impartially, there is no likeness nor proportion."
-Thomas More-
"If Big Brother (of Orwell's 1984) comes to America, he will not be a fearsome, foreboding figure with a heart-chilling, omnipresent glare as in 1984. He will come with a smile on his face, a quip on his lips, a wave to the crowd, and a press that (a) dutifully reports the suppressive measures he is taking to save the nation from internal chaos and foreign threat; and (b) gingerly questions whether he will be able to succeed."
-Michael Parenti-
Source: "Inventing Reality" (1986)
"Since the federal constitution has removed all danger of our having a paper tender, our trade is advanced fifty percent. Our monied people can trust their cash abroad, and have brought their coin into circulation."
-The Pennsylvania Gazette-
December 16, 1789
"As a very important source of strength and security, cherish public credit. One method of preserving it is to use it as sparingly as possible, avoiding occasions of expense by cultivating peace, but remembering also that timely disbursements to prepare for danger frequently prevent much greater disbursements to repel it, avoiding likewise the accumulation of debt, not only by shunning occasions of expense, but by vigorous exertion in time of peace to discharge the debts which unavoidable wars may have occasioned, not ungenerously throwing upon posterity the burden which we ourselves ought to bear. The execution of these maxims belongs to your representatives, but it is necessary that public opinion should co-operate."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: George Washington's Farewell Address, September 19, 1796
"The chief duty of the National Government in connection with the currency of the country is to coin money and declare its value. Grave doubts have been entertained whether Congress is authorized by the Constitution to make any form of paper money legal tender. The present issue of United States notes has been sustained by the necessities of war; but such paper should depend for its value and currency upon its convenience in use and its prompt redemption in coin at the will of the holder, and not upon its compulsory circulation. These notes are not money, but promises to pay money. If the holders demand it, the promise should be kept."
-James A. Garfield-
(1831-1881) 20th President of the United States (1881)
Source: Inaugural Address, March 14, 1881.
"Let them march all they want, as long as they continue to pay their taxes."
-Alexander Haig-
Attributed; then Secretary of State under President Reagan, following the million-person rally for nuclear disarmament in New York City's Central Park, June 12, 1982
"Regulation -- which is based on force and fear -- undermines the moral base of business dealings. It becomes cheaper to bribe a building inspector than to meet his standards of construction. A fly-by-night securities operator can quickly meet all the S.E.C. requirements, gain the inference of respectability, and proceed to fleece the public. In an unregulated economy, the operator would have had to spend a number of years in reputable dealings before he could earn a position of trust sufficient to induce a number of investors to place funds with him. Protection of the consumer by regulation is thus illusory."
-Alan Greenspan-
(1926- ) Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors (1987-2006)
"It constantly amazes me that defenders of the free market are expected to offer certainty and perfection while government has only to make promises and express good intentions. Many times, for instance, I’ve heard people say, 'A free market in education is a bad idea because some child somewhere might fall through the cracks,' even though in today's government school, millions of children are falling through the cracks every day."
-Dr. Lawrence W. Reed-
(1953-) President of the Foundation for Economic Education, economist, author
Source: Making the Case for Liberty Stick, The Freeman, p.791, December 1996.
"Indeed, that was an apt and true reply which was given to Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been seized. For when that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride, 'What thou meanest by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, whilst thou who dost it with a great fleet art styled emperor'"
-Saint Augustine-
[Augustine of Hippo (Latin: Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis)] (354-430) Bishop of Hippo Regius, philosopher and theologian
The City of God
(book IV, chapter 4)
"When the state murders, it assumes an authority I refuse to concede: the authority of perfect knowledge in final things."
-John Leonard-
"Another major reason why crime is increasing is that crime pays, and in our tax-ridden, regulation crushed economy, many people cannot economically survive through low-end jobs. ... 'The income that offenders can earn in the world of crime, as compared with the world of work, all too often makes crime appear to be the better choice.' In Washington, D.C., it costs $7,000 in city fees to open a pushcart. In California, up to eighty federal and state licenses are required to open a small business. In New York, a medallion to operate a taxicab costs $150,000. More than 700 occupations in the United States require a government license. Throughout the country, church soup kitchens are being closed by departments of health. No wonder so many people turn to crime and violence to survive."
-Jacob G. Hornberger-
American author, journalist, politician, founder and president of the Future of Freedom Foundation
Source: Will You be Safer if Guns are Banned?, The Tyranny of Gun Control, 9-10 (1997).
"It ain’t over on April 15! If you stop, for example, for a $10 pizza on Thursday night to celebrate being done with the IRS for another year, the taxman will be right there to grab a slice or two. On top of paying the sales tax, you’ll also be picking up a major chunk of what the government charges the pizza shop owner for local property taxes, unemployment insurance taxes, federal payroll taxes, federal and state and local income taxes, and worker’s compensation taxes. Altogether, according to a study by the Americans for Tax Reform, that comes to $3.80 on a $10 pizza for the omnipresent taxman. If you pick up a Bud six-pack to go with the pizza, there’s another 43 cents of each beer dollar that goes straight to the taxman for excise taxes, income taxes, property taxes, etc. For something stronger, say Jack Daniels, the taxman’s share is $7.20, on average, out of every $10. Go lighter and just drink Pepsi and it’s 35 percent of what you pay that goes for taxes at all levels. Add some Marlboros and its 75 percent of the retail price that’s funneled directly into the state’s coffers. Get home and hit the light switch and another $26 out of every $100 on the electric bill goes for government rather than electricity. If you’re flying the next day, the taxman is up early and waiting at the aiport, pocketing $40 on every $100 airline ticket. And he’s there in the hotel lobby when you land, snatching $43 on every $100 of the hotel bill. Go out to dinner and it’s another $28 of every $100 of the tab that ends up with the government rather than with the restaurant, the farmers, truckers and everyone else who worked together to produce the meal."
-Ralph Reiland-
Prof of Economics Robert Morris College
Source: Taxed to Death
"The government expands at will, based on what might be charitably called flimsy constitutional reasoning and less charitably and more accurately called arrogant judicial tyranny. Government authority these days rarely comes from the Constitution as written but from the last carefully crafted misinterpretation of it. This is called legal precedent."
-Linda Bowles-
(1952-2003) Columnist
Source: Enlarging government's power a step at a time, CONSERVATIVE CHRONICLE, May 1, 1996.
"Indeed, it was the enumeration of powers, not the enumeration of rights in the Bill of Rights, that was meant by the Framers to be the principal limitation on government power."
-Roger Pilon-
Vice President for Legal Affairs for the Cato Institute
Source: Restoring Constitutional Government, Cato's Letter #9, p. 2, published by the Cato Institute (1995)
"If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon's but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition and ignorance on the other."
-Ulysses S. Grant-
(1822-1885) 18th US President
"... ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance... A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon -- so long as there is no answer to it -- gives claws to the weak."
-George Orwell-
"If a government were trying to squeeze as much money as possible out of a population, what would it do?
1. The use of indirect rather than direct taxes, so that the tax is hidden in the price of goods.
2. Inflation, by which the state reduces the value of everyone else's currency.
3. Borrowing, so as to postpone the necessary taxation.
4. Gift and luxury taxes, where the tax accompanies the receipt or purchase of something special, lessening the annoyance of the tax.
5. “Temporary” taxes, which somehow never get repealed when the emergency passes.
6. Taxes that exploit social conflict, by placing higher taxes on unpopular groups.
7. The threat of social collapse or withholding monopoly government services if taxes are reduced.
8. Collection of the total tax burden in relatively small increments over time, rather than in a yearly lump sum.
9. Taxes whose exact incidence cannot be predicted in advance, thus keeping the taxpayer unaware of just how much he is paying.
10. Extraordinary budget complexity to hide the budget process from public understanding.
11. The use of generalized expenditure categories to make it difficult for outsiders to assess the individual components of the budget."
-Amilcare Puviani-
Italian scholar
Source: paraphrased by David Boaz, What Big Government Is All About, The Freeman, April, 1997, p. 213-14
"When libertarian moral theory is combined with economic theory a compelling conception of the good society emerges."
-Lansing Pollock-
Source: The Free Society (Westview Press)
"Principio Obstate (Resist from the beginning)."
-Latin Proverb-
"We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented."
-Elie Wiesel-
Buchenwald survivor
"If the Union was formed by accession of States then the Union may be dissolved by the secession of States."
-Daniel Webster-
(1782-1852), US Senator
Source: U.S. Senate, Feb 15, 1833
"Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new."
-Henry David Thoreau-
(1817-1862)
"The human voice can never reach the distance that is covered by the still small voice of conscience."
-Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi-
(1869-1948)
"It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth can not be produced by human institutions. In the full enjoyment of the gifts of Heaven and the fruits of superior industry, economy, and virtue, every man is equally entitled to protection by law; but when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society — the farmers, mechanics, and laborers — who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their government."
-Andrew Jackson-
"It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. [W]hen the laws undertake to add . . . artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society — the farmers, mechanics, and laborers — who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government.”
-Andrew Jackson-
1832
"If this spirit shall ever be so far debased as to tolerate a law not obligatory on the legislature, as well as on the people, the people will be prepared to tolerate anything but liberty."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: THE FEDERALIST No. 57
"Under God we are determined that, wheresoever, whensoever, or howsoever, we shall be called upon to make our exit, we will die freemen."
-Josiah Quincy-
(1744-1775) American patriot, writer
1774
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."
-Richard Feynman-
(1918-1988) American physicist, Nobel Prize in Physics (1965)
“We don’t read most of the bills. Do you really know what that would entail if we read every bill that we passed?”
-John Conyers-
U.S. Representative
Fahrenheit 9/11
"The strongest argument for free enterprise is that it prevents anybody from having too much power. Whether that person is a government official, a trade union official, or a business executive. If forces them to put up or shut up. They either have to deliver the goods, produce something that people are willing to pay for, are willing to buy, or else they have to go into a different business."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
Source: "Free to Choose" (1980), segment 2 of 10, "The Tyranny of Control"
"All government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management."
-Franklin D. Roosevelt-
(1882-1945), 32nd US President
Source: letter in 1937
"Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round heads in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status-quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them. But the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do."
-Jack Kerouac-
"Commerce with all nations, alliance with none, should be our motto."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"And the men who loan money to governments, so called, for the purpose of enabling the latter to rob, enslave, and murder their people, are among the greatest villains that the world has ever seen. And they as much deserve to be hunted and killed (if they cannot otherwise be got rid of) as any slave traders, robbers, or pirates that ever lived."
-Lysander Spooner-
"What I want to fix your attention on is the vast overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence -- moral, cultural, social or intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how 'democracy' (in the incantatory sense) is now doing for us the work that was once done by the most ancient dictatorships, and by the same methods? The basic proposal of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be 'undemocratic.' Children who are fit to proceed may be artifically kept back, because the others would get a trauma by being left behind. The bright pupil thus remains democratically fettered to his own age group throughout his school career, and a boy who would be capable of tackling Aeschylus or Dante sits listening to his coeval's attempts to spell out A CAT SAT ON A MAT. We may reasonably hope for the virtual abolition of education when 'I'm as good as you' has fully had its way. All incentives to learn and all penalties for not learning will vanish. The few who might want to learn will be prevented; who are they to overtop their fellows? And anyway, the teachers -- or should I say nurses? -- will be far too busy reassuring the dunces and patting them on the back to waste any time on real teaching. We shall no longer have to plan and toil to spread imperturbable conceit and incurable ignorance among men."
-C. S. Lewis-
(1898-1963), British novelist
"Is it not ironical that in a planned society of controlled workers given compulsory assignments, where religious expression is suppressed, the press controlled, and all media of communication censored, where a puppet government is encouraged but denied any real authority, where great attention is given to efficiency and character reports, and attendance at cultural assemblies is mandatory, where it is avowed that all will be administered to each according to his needs and performance required from each according to his abilities, and where those who flee are tracked down, returned, and punished for trying to escape - in short in the milieu of the typical large American secondary school - we attempt to teach 'the democratic system'?"
-Royce Van Norman-
Source: "School Administration: Thoughts on Organization and Purpose," Phi Delta Kappan 47(1966):315-16
"The Anarchists never have claimed that liberty will bring perfection; they simply say that its results are vastly preferable to those that follow authority."
-Benjamin Tucker-
"[A]s all history informs us, there has been in every State & Kingdom a constant kind of warfare between the governing & governed: the one striving to obtain more for its support, and the other to pay less. And this has alone occasioned great convulsions, actual civil wars, ending either in dethroning of the Princes, or enslaving of the people. Generally indeed the ruling power carries its point, the revenues of princes constantly increasing, and we see that they are never satisfied, but always in want of more. The more the people are discontented with the oppression of taxes; the greater need the prince has of money to distribute among his partisans and pay the troops that are to suppress all resistance, and enable him to plunder at pleasure. There is scarce a king in a hundred who would not, if he could, follow the example of Pharaoh, get first all the peoples money, then all their lands, and then make them and their children servants for ever ..."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
Source: before the Constitutional Convention, June 2, 1787
"The history of the welfare state is the history of public enterprise pushing out private organization. The impact was largely unintentional, but natural and inevitable. Higher taxes left individuals with less money to give; government’s assumption of responsibility for providing welfare shriveled the perceived duty of individuals to respond to their neighbors’ needs; and the availability of public programs gave recipients an alternative to private assistance, one which did not challenge recipients to reform their destructive behavior."
-Doug Bandow-
(1954- ) columnist, author, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute
Source: National Service -- or Government Service?, Policy Review, P. 34, September-October, 1996
"At home, fellow citizens, you best know whether we have done well or ill. The suppression of unnecessary offices, of useless establishments and expenses, enabled us to discontinue our internal taxes. These covering our land with officers, and opening our doors to their intrusions, had already begun that process of domiciliary vexation which, once entered, is scarcely to be restrained from reaching successively every article of produce and property."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Second Inaugural Address
"Our schools have been scientifically designed to prevent over-education from happening. The average American [should be] content with their humble role in life, because they're not tempted to think about any other role."
-William T. Harris-
U.S. Commissioner of Education
Source: 1889
"I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."
-Grover Norquist-
May 25, 2001
"It was self-serving politicians who convinced recent generations of Americans that we could all stand in a circle with our hands in each other’s pockets and somehow get rich."
-Paul Harvey-
[Paul Harvey Aurandt] (1918-2009) American radio broadcaster
Source: The Biggest Tax You Pay, Conservative Chronicle, November 8, 1995
"Let me define the difference between economic power and political power: economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value; political power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction. The businessman’s tool is values; the bureaucrat’s tool is fear."
-Ayn Rand-
"If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?"
-Frederic Bastiat-
“The people will be crushed under the burden of taxes, loan after loan will be floated; after having drained the present, the State will devour the future."
-Frederic Bastiat-
"I believe that if we had and would keep our dirty, bloody, dollar-soaked fingers out of the business of these nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own -- and if unfortunately their revolution must be of the violent type because the "haves" refuse to share with the "have-nots" by any peaceful method, at least what they get will be their own, and not the American style, which they don't want and above all don't want crammed down their throats by Americans. "
-General David M. Shoup-
Commandant of the Marine Corps 1960-63, Medal of Honor, Distinguished Service Medal
Source: May 14, 1966
"My policy has been, and will continue to be, while I have the honor to remain in the administration of the government, to be upon friendly terms with, but independent of, all the nations of the earth. To share in the broils of none. To fulfil our own engagements. To supply the wants, and be carriers for them all: Being thoroughly convinced that it is our policy and interest to do so."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: 1795 - letter to Gouverneur Morris, Ref: Washington's Maxims, 54.
"The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you've got it made."
-Jean Giraudoux-
French diplomat, dramatist, & novelist (1882 - 1944)
"I favor the policy of economy, not because I wish to save money, but because I wish to save people. The men and women of this country who toil are the ones who bear the cost of the Government. Every dollar that we carelessly waste means that their life will be so much the more meager. Every dollar that we save means that their life will be so much the more abundant."
-Calvin Coolidge-
"Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object."
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
1848
"Can any reasonable man be well disposed toward a government which makes war and carnage the only means of supporting itself?"
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804)
Source: at the US Constitutional Convention
"All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish it."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
(1805-1859) French historian
Source: Democracy in America, 1835
"Our civil laws will never be supple enough to fit the immense and changing variety of facts. Laws change more slowly than custom, and though dangerous when they fall behind the times are more dangerous still when they presume to anticipate custom."
-Marguerite Yourcenar-
"It is a policeman’s duty to protect men from criminals -- criminals being those who seize wealth by force. It is a policeman’s duty to retrieve stolen property and return it to its owners. But when robbery becomes the purpose of the law, and the policeman’s duty becomes, not the protection, but the plunder of property -- then it is an outlaw who has to become a policeman."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
Source: Atlas Shrugged, P. 535 (1957)
"Inflation is not caused by the actions of private citizens, but by the government: by an artificial expansion of the money supply required to support deficit spending. No private embezzlers or bank robbers in history have ever plundered people’s savings on a scale comparable to the plunder perpetrated by the fiscal policies of statist governments."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
Source: Who Will Protect Us From Our Protectors?, The Objectivist Newsletter, May 1952.
"The banks -- commercial banks and the Federal Reserve -- create all the money of this nation and its people pay interest on every dollar of that newly created money. Which means that private banks exercise unconstitutionally, immorally, and ridiculously the power to tax the people. For every newly created dollar dilutes to some extent the value of every other dollar already in circulation."
-Jerry Voorhis-
[Horace Jeremiah Voorhis] (1901-1984) US Congressman (D-Ca)
"[T]he power system continues only as long as individuals try to get something for nothing. The day when a majority of individuals declares or acts as if it wants nothing from the government, declares that it will look after its own welfare and interests, then on that day the power elites are doomed."
-Anthony Sutton-
Source: The Best Enemy Money Can Buy
"The idea of creating systems designed to threaten, coerce, and kill, and to imbue such agencies with principled legitimacy, and not expect them to lead to wars, genocides, and other tyrannical practices, expresses an innocence we can no longer afford to indulge."
-Butler D. Shaffer-
Professor, Southwestern University School of Law
June 9, 2003
"The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend toward each other. Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree. You have done violence to him, consumed his energy."
-Frank Herbert-
(1920-1986)
Source: Dune, 1965
"I hope your committee will not permit doubts as to constitutionality, however reasonable, to block the suggested legislation."
-Franklin D. Roosevelt-
(1882-1945), 32nd US President
Source: in a 1935 letter to the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee concerning Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation
"Under our Constitution, the federal government has delegated, enumerated and thus limited powers. Power is delegated by the founding generation or through subsequent amendment (that makes it legitimate); enumerated in the constitution (that makes it legal); and limited by that enumeration. As the 10th Amendment says, if a power hasn’t been delegated, the federal government doesn’t have it. For 150 years, that design held for the most part. When faced with a welfare bill in 1794, for example, James Madison, the principal author of the Constitution, rose in the House to say that he could find no constitutional authority for the bill. A century later, when Congress passed a similar measure, President Cleveland vetoed it as beyond Congress’ authority. That all changed during the New Deal as both congress and the president sought to expand federal power. When the Supreme court objected, rather than amend the Constitution, Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to pack the court with six additional members. The scheme failed, but the threat worked. Thereafter, the court started reading the Constitution’s General Welfare and Commerce Clauses so broadly that the doctrine of enumerated powers was essentially destroyed—and with it limited government."
-Roger Pilon-
Vice President for Legal Affairs for the Cato Institute
Source: Founders Intended Only Limited Powers, USA Today, Friday, July 21, 1995.
"In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs."
-Walter Lippmann-
(1889-1974)
Source: "An Inquiry into the Principles of the Good Society," 1937
"The liberty of the press is not confined to newspapers and periodicals. It necessarily embraces pamphlets and leaflets. These indeed have been historic weapons in the defense of liberty, as the pamphlets of Thomas Paine and others in our own history abundantly attest. The press in its historic connotation comprehends every sort of publication which affords a vehicle of information and opinion."
-U.S. Supreme Court-
Lovell v. City of Griffin, 303 U.S. 444 (1938)
"Whenever you put your faith in big government for any reason, sooner or later you wind up an apologist for mass murder."
-Karl Hess-
"For a government to declare a vice to be a crime, and to punish it as such, is an attempt to falsify the very nature of things. It is as absurd as it would be to declare truth to be a falsehood, or falsehood a truth."
-Lysander Spooner-
(1808-1887) Political theorist, activist, abolitionist
Source: Vices are Not Crimes, A Vindication of Moral Liberty (1875)
http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quote_blog/Lysander.Spooner.Quote.4B40
"There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism."
-Walter Benjamin-
"[I]t is true that [the provisions of the Bill of Rights] were designed to meet ancient evils. But they are the same kind of human evils that have emerged from century to century whenever excessive power is sought by the few at the expense of the many."
-Justice Hugo L. Black-
(1886-1971) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: Adamson v. California, 332 U.S. 46, 89 (Dissent) (1947).
"There exists a law, not written down anywhere but inborn in our hearts; a law which comes to us not by training or custom or reading but by derivation and absorption and adoption from nature itself; a law which has come to us not from theory but from practice, not by instruction but by natural intuition. I refer to the law which lays it down that, if our lives are endangered by plots or violence or armed robbers or enemies, any and every method of protecting ourselves is morally right."
-Marcus Tullius Cicero-
(January 6, 106 B.C. - December 7, 43 B.C.; Roman statesman, orator and writer)
"There exists a law, not written down anywhere, but inborn in our hearts, a law which comes to us not by training or custom or reading, a law which has come to us not from theory but from practice, not by instruction but by natural intuition. I refer to the law which lays down that, if our lives are endangered by plots or violence or armed robbers or enemies, any and every method of protecting ourselves is morally right."
-Marcus Tullius Cicero-
(106-43 B.C.) Roman Statesman, Philosopher and Orator
"It is true, the yeomanry of the country possess the lands, the weight of property, possess arms, and are too strong a body of men to be openly offended—and, therefore, it is urged, they will take care of themselves, that men who shall govern will not dare pay any disrespect to their opinions. It is easily perceived, that if they have not their proper negative upon passing laws in congress, or on the passage of laws relative to taxes and armies, they may in twenty or thirty years be by means imperceptible to them, totally deprived of that boasted weight and strength: This may be done in great measure by congress."
-Richard Henry Lee-
(1732-1794) Founding Father
Source: Letters From The Federal Farmer (1787)
"... By calling attention to a well-regulated militia for the security of the Nation, and the right of each citizen to keep and bear arms, our founding fathers recognized the essentially civilian nature of our economy. Although it is extremely unlikely that the fear of governmental tyranny, which gave rise to the 2nd amendment, will ever be a major danger to our Nation, the amendment still remains an important declaration of our basic military-civilian relationship, in which every citizen must be ready to participate in the defense of his country. For that reason I believe the 2nd Amendment will always be important."
-John F. Kennedy-
(1917-1963) 35th US President
Source: (Ref: AR 12-73 p.14)
"Militia: The body of citizens in a state, enrolled for discipline as a military force, but not engaged in actual service except in emergencies, as distinguished from regular troops or a standing army."
-Black's Law Dictionary, 3rd Edition-
Source: Black's Law Dictionary, third edition, published in 1933. See Ex parte McCants, 39 Ala. 112; Worth v. Craven County, 118 N.C. 112, 24 S.E. 778; Brown v. Newark, 29 N.J. Law, 238; Story v. Perkins (D.C.) 243 F. 997, 999.
"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy."
-Ernest Benn-
British author and publisher
"To me, consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects; the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner: ‘I stand for consensus?’"
-Margaret Thatcher-
"The government is good at one thing. It knows how to break your legs, and then hand you a crutch and say, 'See, if it weren't for the government, you wouldn't be able to walk.'"
-Harry Browne-
(1933-2006) American libertarian writer, politician, and free-market investment analyst. Libertarian candidate for US President 1996 & 2000
"The most absurd apology for authority and law is that they serve to diminish crime. Aside from the fact that the State is itself the greatest criminal, breaking every written and natural law, stealing in the form of taxes, killing in the form of war and capital punishment, it has come to an absolute standstill in coping with crime. It has failed utterly to destroy or even minimize the horrible scourge of its own creation."
-Emma Goldman-
(1869-1940)
Source: Anarchism
"The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual crime."
-Max Stirner-
[Johann Kaspar Schmidt] (1806-1856) German philosopher
Source: The Ego and His Own
"I am further of opinion that it would be better for us to have [no laws] at all than to have them in so prodigious numbers as we have."
-Michel de Montaigne-
[Michel Eyquem De Montaigne] (1532-1592) French Renaissance scholar, philosopher, writer
"The greatest violator of the principle of equal liberty is the State. Its functions are to control, to rule, to dictate, to regulate, and in exercising these functions it interferes with and injures individuals who have done no wrong. The objection to government is, not that it controls those who invade the liberty of others, but that it controls the non-invader. It may be necessary to govern one who will not govern himself, but that in no wise justifies governing one who is capable of and willing to govern himself. To argue that because some need restraint all must be restrained is neither consistent nor logical."
-Charles T. Sprading-
Source: Charles T. Sprading's Introduction to Liberty and the Great Libertarians; An Anthology On Liberty; A Hand-book Of Freedom (Los Angeles: The Libertarian Publishing Company, 1913)
"Every ambitious would-be empire clarions it abroad that she is conquering the world to bring it peace, security and freedom, and is sacrificing her sons only for the most noble and humanitarian purposes. That is a lie, and it is an ancient lie, yet generations still rise and believe it! ... If America ever does seek Empire, and most nations do, then planned reforms in our domestic life will be abandoned, States Rights will be abolished -- in order to impose a centralized government upon us for the purpose of internal repudiation of freedom, and adventures abroad. The American Dream will then die -- on battlefields all over the world -- and a nation conceived in liberty will destroy liberty for Americans and impose tyranny on subject nations."
-George S. Boutwell-
(1818-1905) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury under President Ulysses S. Grant, Governor of Massachusetts, Senator and Representative from Massachusetts and the first Commissioner of Internal Revenue under President Abraham Lincoln.
"For as long as one hundred of us shall remain alive, we shall never in any wise consent submit to the rule of the English, for it is not for glory we fight, nor riches, or for honour, but for freedom alone, which no good man loses but with his life."
-Robert Bruce-
[Robert I] (1274-1329), King of Scots (1306-1329), known as Robert the Bruce
Source: Declaration of Arbroath (April 6, 1320)
"Allow me to dispel a myth. People in the Middle East do not hate us for our freedom. They do not hate us for our lifestyle. They hate us because we have spent many years attempting to force them to emulate our lifestyle. The US government overthrew the democratically elected leader of Iran and replaced him with the Shah. The US government gave weapons, intelligence and money to Saddam Hussein. The US government also helped Libyan Col. Qaddafi come to power, propped up the Saudi monarchy and the Egyptian regime, and gave assistance to Osama bin Laden. Most Americans have forgotten these events. But the people of the Middle East will always remember. It was because of American troops in Saudi Arabia, lethal sanctions on Iraq, support for states in serious violation of International Law, and siding with Israel in its dispute with the Palestinians that terrorist leaders were able to recruit those individuals who caused 3,000 Americans to pay the ultimate price on September 11, 2001."
-Michael Badnarik-
(1954- ) American software engineer, political figure, former radio talk show host, Libertarian Party nominee for US President in 2004
Source: July, 2004
"By placing discretion in the hands of an official to grant or deny a license, such a statute creates a threat of censorship that by its very existence chills free speech."
-Harry A. Blackmun-
(1908-1999) U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Roe v. Wade, 1973
"There is no fury like that against one who, we fear, may succeed in making us disloyal to beliefs we hold with passion, but have not really won."
-Judge Learned Hand-
(1872-1961), Judge, U. S. Court of Appeals
Source: 1932
"If the true freedom of the press is to decide for itself what to publish and when to publish it, the true responsibility of the press must be to assert and defend that freedom… What the press in America needs is less inhibition, not more restraint."
-Tom Wicker-
Source: On Press, 1978
"To prevent government from becoming corrupt and tyrannous, its organization and methods should be as simple as possible, its functions be restricted to those necessary to the common welfare, and in all its parts it should be kept as close to the people and as directly within their control as may be."
-Henry George-
"How many Catholic schools do you think teach the students to question the authority of the Pope? Do you believe Christian schools teach students to question or challenge the authority of Jesus Christ? Do military schools teach the cadets to challenge the authority of superior officers? Well, why should we then expect government schools to teach children to question the authority of government?"
-Neal Boortz-
(1945- ) Radio talk show host, columnist
"[Tyrannical] power is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?"
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
[Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clerel, le Comte de Tocqueville] (1805-1859) French historian
"Should, hereafter, those incited by the lust of power and prompted by the supineness or venality of their constituents, overleap the known barriers of this Constitution and violate the unalienable rights of humanity: it will only serve to show, that no compact among men (however provident in its construction and sacred in its ratification) can be pronounced everlasting and inviolable, and if I may so express myself, that no Wall of words, that no mound of parchment can be so formed as to stand against the sweeping torrent of boundless ambition on the side, aided by the sapping current of corrupted morals on the other."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
"19 terrorists in 6 weeks have been able to command 300 million North Americans to do away with the entirety of their civil liberties that took 700 years to advance from the Magna Carta onward. The terrorists have already won the political and ideological war with one terrorist act. It is mindboggling that we are that weak as a society."
-Rocco Galati-
lawyer for the Canadian Islamic Congress
October, 2001
Source: http://www.canadianliberty.bc.ca/
"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act."
-George Orwell-
[Eric Arthur Blair] (1903-1950) British author
"Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."
-Hermann Goering-
(1893-1946) Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, President of the Reichstag, Prime Minister of Prussia and, as Hitler's designated successor, the second man in the Third Reich. [Göring]
April 18, 1946
Source: Nuremberg Diary (Farrar, Straus & Co 1947), by Gustave Gilbert (an Allied appointed psychologist), who visited daily with Goering and his cronies in their cells, afterwards making notes and ultimately writing the book about these conversations.
"It is fortunate that each generation does not comprehend its own ignorance. We are thus enabled to call our ancestors barbarous."
-Charles Dudley Warner-
"Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing."
-Helen Keller-
(1880-1968) Blind-Deaf Author
Source: The Open Door, 1957
"Fear is the foundation of most governments; but it is so sordid and brutal a passion, and renders men in whose breasts it predominates so stupid and miserable, that Americans will not be likely to approve of any political institution which is founded on it."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: Thoughts on Government, 1776
"But if you say, you can still pass the violations over, then I ask, hath your house been burnt? Hath your property been destroyed before your face? Are your wife and children destitute of a bed to lie on, or bread to live on? Have you lost a parent or a child by their hands, and yourself the ruined and wretched survivor? If you have not, then you are not a judge of those who have. But if you have, and can still shake hands with the murderers, then you are unworthy of the name of husband, father, friend, or lover, and whatever may be your rank or title in life, you have the heart of a coward and the spirit of a sycophant."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809)
Source: Common Sense, 1776
"The real menace of our Republic is the invisible government which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy legs over our cities states and nation. At the head is a small group of banking houses generally referred to as 'international bankers.' This little coterie... run our government for their own selfish ends. It operates under cover of a self-created screen...[and] seizes...our executive officers... legislative bodies... schools... courts... newspapers and every agency created for the public protection."
-John F. Hylan-
(1868-1936), Mayor of New York City (1918-1925), nicknamed "Red Mike"
"Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of the day; but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period, and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers (adminstrators) too plainly proves a deliberate, systematic plan of reducing us to slavery."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"The ideally non-violent state will be an ordered anarchy. That State is the best governed which is governed the least."
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi-
"The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature; and if men are now sufficiently enlightened to disabuse themselves of artifice, imposture, hypocrisy, and superstition, they will consider this event as an era in their history. Although the detail of the formation of the American governments is at present little known or regarded either in Europe or in America, it may hereafter become an object of curiosity. It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the influence of Heaven, more than those at work upon ships or houses, or laboring in merchandise or agriculture; it will forever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: "A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America" (1787-88)
"Disunion and civil war are at hand; and yet I fear disunion and war less than compromise. We can recover from them. The free States alone, if we must go on alone, will make a glorious nation."
-Rutherford B. Hayes-
"Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth."
-Oscar Wilde-
(1854-1900)
"I want the people of America to be able to work less for the government and more for themselves. I want them to have the rewards of their own industry. This is the chief meaning of freedom. Until we can reestablish a condition under which the earnings of the people can be kept by the people, we are bound to suffer a very severe and distinct curtailment of our liberty."
-Calvin Coolidge-
(1873-1933), 30th US President
"If we must all agree, all work together, we're no better than a machine. If an individual can't work in solidarity with his fellows, it's his duty to work alone. His duty and his right. We have been denying people that right. We've been saying, more and more often, you must work with the others, you must accept the rule of the majority. But any rule is tyranny. The duty of the individual is to accept no rule, to be the initiator of his own acts, to be responsible. Only if he does so will the society live, and change, and adapt, and survive. We are not subjects of a State founded upon law, but members of a society founded upon revolution. Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution."
-Ursula K. Le Guin-
"As to the history of the revolution, my ideas may be peculiar, perhaps singular. What do we mean by the Revolution? The war? That was no part of the revolution; it was only an effect and consequence of it. The revolution was in the minds of the people."
-John Adams-
"By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose."
-John Maynard Keynes-
(1883-1946) British economist
Source: "The Economic Consequences Of The Peace"
"There will not be one kind of community existing and one kind of life led in utopia. Utopia will consist of utopias, of many different and divergent communities in which people lead different kinds of lives under different institutions. Some kinds of communities will be more attractive to most than others; communities will wax and wane. People will leave some for others or spend their whole lives in one. Utopia is a framework for utopias, a place where people are at liberty to join together voluntarily to pursue and attempt to realize their own vision of the good life in the ideal community but where no one can impose his own utopian vision upon others."
-Robert Nozick-
"The Rothschilds, and that class of money-lenders of whom they are the representatives and agents -- men who never think of lending a shilling to their next-door neighbors, for purposes of honest industry, unless upon the most ample security, and at the highest rate of interest -- stand ready, at all times, to lend money in unlimited amounts to those robbers and murderers, who call themselves governments, to be expended in shooting down those who do not submit quietly to being robbed and enslaved."
-Lysander Spooner-
(1808-1887) Political theorist, activist, abolitionist
Source: "No Treason #6" (1870)
"Make no laws whatever concerning speech, and speech will be free; so soon as you make a declaration on paper that speech shall be free, you will have a hundred lawyers proving that "freedom does not mean abuse, nor liberty license"; and they will define and define freedom out of existence. Let the guarantee of free speech be in every man's determination to use it, and we shall have no need of paper declarations. On the other hand, so long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men."
-Voltairine de Cleyre-
"Do you think that we want those laws to be observed? We want them broken. There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power the government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
Source: Atlas Shrugged, 1957
"The difference between a welfare state and a totalitarian state is a matter of time."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
"The mission of the law is not to oppress persons and plunder them of their property, even though the law may be acting in a philanthropic spirit. Its purpose is to protect persons and property.... If you exceed this proper limit -- if you attempt to make the law religious, fraternal, equalizing, philanthropic, industrial, or artistic -- you will then be lost in uncharted territory, in vagueness and uncertainty, in a forced utopia or, even worse, in a multitude of utopias, each striving to seize the law and impose it on you."
-Frederic Bastiat-
(1801-1850) [Claude Frederic Bastiat] French economist, statesman, and author. He did most of his writing during the years just before -- and immediately following -- the French Revolution of February 1848
Source: "The Law" by Frederic Bastiat (1850)
"They would be the shepherds over us, their sheep. Certainly such an arrangement presupposes that they are naturally superior to the rest of us. And certainly we are fully justified in demanding from the legislators and organizers proof of this natural superiority."
-Frederic Bastiat-
(1801-1850) [Claude Frederic Bastiat] French economist, statesman, and author. He did most of his writing during the years just before -- and immediately following -- the French Revolution of February 1848
"All you have to do, is to see whether the law takes from some what belongs to them in order to give it to others to whom it does not belong. We must see whether the law performs, for the profit of one citizen and to the detriment of others, an act which that citizen could not perform himself without being guilty of a crime. Repeal such a law without delay. ... [I]f you don’t take care, what begins by being an exception tends to become general, to multiply itself, and to develop into a veritable system."
-Frederic Bastiat-
(1801-1850) [Claude Frederic Bastiat] French economist, statesman, and author. He did most of his writing during the years just before -- and immediately following -- the French Revolution of February 1848
Source: "The Law" by Frederic Bastiat (1850)
"Being daily better informed about their knowledge than my adversaries themselves, I argued till finally one day they applied the one means that wins the easiest victory over reason: terror and force."
-Adolf Hitler-
(1889-1945) German Nazi Dictator
Source: in reference to being forced to join the Social Democratic labor union, Mein Kampf, pg. 53 (1939)
"It is thus necessary that the individual should finally come to realize that his own pride is of no importance in comparison with the existence of his nation; that the position of the individual ego is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole; that pride and conceitedness, the feeling that the individual ... is superior, so far from being merely laughable, involve great dangers for the existence of the community that is a nation; that above all the unity of a nation’s spirit and will are worth far more than the freedom of the spirit and the will of an individual; and that the higher interests involved in the life of the whole must here set the limits and lay down the duties of interests of the individual. ... By this we understand only the individual's capacity to make sacrifices for the community, for his fellow men."
-Adolf Hitler-
(1889-1945) German Nazi Dictator
Source: Adolf Hitler speaking at Bueckeburg, Oct. 7, 1933; The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, 1922-39, ed. N.H. Baynes (2 vols., Oxford, 1942), I, 871-72; translation Professor George Reisman.
"I do verily believe that if the principle were to prevail of a common law being in force in the United States (which principle possesses the general government at once of all the powers of the state governments, and reduces us to a single consolidated government), it would become the most corrupt government on the earth."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Thomas Jefferson to Gideon Granger, 1800. 10:168
"The policy of American government is to leave its citizens free, neither restraining them nor aiding them in their pursuits."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Thomas Jefferson to M. L'Hommande, 1787.
"In this distribution of powers the wisdom of our constitution is manifested. It is the province and duty of the Executive to preserve to the Nation the blessings of peace. The Legislature alone can interrupt those blessings, by placing the Nation in a state of War."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804)
Source: Pacificus #1, June 29, 1793.
"No power but Congress can declare war; but what is the value of this constitutional provision, if the President of his own authority may make such military movements as must bring on war? ... [T]hese remarks originate purely in a desire to maintain the powers of government as they are established by the Constitution between the different departments, and hope that, whether we have conquests or no conquests, war or no war, peace or no peace, we shall yet preserve, in its integrity and strength, the Constitution of the United States."
-Daniel Webster-
(1782-1852), US Senator
Source: December 2, 1846 speech in Philadelphia.
"The Executive should be able to repel and not to commence war."
-Roger Sherman-
(1721-1793) US Founding father, first mayor of New Haven, Connecticut, served on the Committee of Five that drafted the Declaration of Independence, representative and senator in the new republic, was the only person to sign all four great state papers of the U.S.: the Articles of Association, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution.
"All of us have heard this term "preventive war" since the earliest days of Hitler. ... A preventive war, to my mind, is an impossibility today. How could you have one if one of its features would be several cities lying in ruins, several cities where many, many thousands of people would be dead and injured and mangled, the transportation systems destroyed, sanitation implements and systems all gone? That isn't preventive war; that is war. ... I don't believe there is such a thing; and, frankly, I wouldn't even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked about such a thing."
-Dwight D. Eisenhower-
(1890-1969), 34th US President, WWII General
Source: 11 August 1954 news conference in response to a question from Ray L. Scherer, NBC: 'Mr. President, there seem to be increasing suggestions that we should embark on a preventive war with the Communist world, some of these suggestions by people in high places. I wonder, sir, if you would care to address yourself to that proposition.'
"Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so."
-Albert J. Beveridge-
(1862-1927) American historian, United States Senator from Indiana
"The President is to be commander-in-chief of the army and navy of the United States. In this respect his authority would be nominally the same with that of the king of Great Britain, but in substance much inferior to it. It would amount to nothing more than the supreme command and direction of the land and naval forces, as first general and admiral ... while that of the British king extends to the declaring of war and to the raising and regulating of fleets and armies—all which, by the Constitution under consideration, would appertain to the legislature."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804)
Source: The Federalist #69.
"The Constitution supposes, what the history of all governments demonstrates, that the executive is the branch of government most interested in war, and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care, vested the question of war in the legislature."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: in an April 2, 1798 letter to Thomas Jefferson.
"A thing moderately good is not so good as it ought to be. Moderation in temper is always a virtue, but moderation in principle is always a vice."
-Thomas Paine-
"Each must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, and which course is patriotic and which isn’t. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your convictions is to be an unqualified and inexcusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let man label you as they may. If you alone of all the nation shall decide one way, and that way be the right way according to your convictions of the right, you have done your duty by yourself and by your country- hold up your head! You have nothing to be ashamed of."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910)
"Where are we then? The religionists are the enemies of liberty, and the friends of liberty attack religion; the high-minded and the noble advocate subjection, and the meanest and most servile minds preach independence; honest and enlightened citizens are opposed to all progress, whilst men without patriotism and without principles are the apostles of civilization and intelligence. Has such been the fate of the centuries which have preceded our own? and has man always inhabited a world like the present, where nothing is linked together, where virtue is without genius, and genius without honor; where the love of order is confounded with a taste for oppression, and the holy rites of freedom with a taste for law; where the light thrown by conscience on human actions is dim, and where nothing seems to be any longer forbidden or allowed, honorable or shameful, false or true?"
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
[Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clerel, le Comte de Tocqueville] (1805-1859) French historian
"I have said I do not dread industrial corporations as instruments of power to destroy this country, because there are a thousand agencies which can regulate, restrain and control them; but there is a corporation we may all dread. That corporation is the federal government. From the aggressions of this corporation, there can be no safety, if it is allowed to go beyond the well defined limits of its powers. I dread nothing so much as the exercise of ungranted and doubtful powers by the government. It is, in my opinion, the danger of dangers to the future of this country. Let us be sure to keep it always within its limits. If this great, ambitious, ever growing corporation becomes oppressive, who shall check it? If it becomes too wayward who shall control it? If it becomes unjust, who shall trust it? As sentinels of the country's watchtower, Senators, I beseech you to watch and guard with sleepless dread, that corporation which can make all property and rights, all states and people, all liberty and hope its plaything in an hour, and its victims forever."
-Benjamin H. Hill-
(1823-1882) U.S. Representative, U.S. Senator and a Confederate senator from the state of Georgia
Source: before the U.S. Senate, March 27, 1878.
"Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth."
-Albert Einstein-
(1879-1955) Physicist and Professor, Nobel Prize 1921
"There never did, there never will, and there never can exist a parliament, or any description of men, or any generation of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controlling posterity to the `end of time,’ or of commanding for ever how the world shall be governed, or who shall govern it. ... Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generations which preceded it."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
"That which is not just, is not Law; and that which is not Law, ought not to be obeyed."
-Algernon Sydney-
"[W]henever the Legislators endeavor to take away, and destroy the Property of the People, or to reduce them to Slavery under Arbitrary Power, they put themselves into a state of War with the People, who are thereupon absolved from any farther Obedience, and are left to the common Refuge, which God hath provided for all Men, against Force and Violence. Whensoever therefore the Legislative shall transgress this fundamental Rule of Society; and either by Ambition, Fear, Folly or Corruption, endeavor to grasp themselves, or put into the hands of any other an Absolute Power over the Lives, Liberties, and Estates of the People; By this breach of Trust they forfeit the Power, the People had put into their hands, for quite contrary ends, and it devolves to the people, who have a Right to resume their original Liberty."
-John Locke-
(1632-1704) English philosopher and political theorist. Considered the ideological progenitor of the American Revolution and who, by far, was the most often non-biblical writer quoted by the Founding Fathers of the USA.
"The right to privacy is one of the most cherished rights an American citizen has; the right to privacy sets America apart from totalitarian states in which the interests of the state prevail over individual rights. A fundamental part of our concept of ordered liberty is the right to protect one’s home and family against dangerous intrusions subject to the criminal law."
-John Louis Coffey-
(1922- ) Judge, U. S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit
Source: Quilici v. Village of Morton Grove, 695 F.2d 261, 272, 278 (1982) (dissent) cert. denied 464 U.S. 863 (1983).
"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
-George Santayana-
"I believe that there is a moral and constitutional equivalence between laws designed to subjugate a race and those that distribute benefits on the basis of race in order to foster some current notion of equality.... In my mind, government-sponsored racial discrimination based on benign prejudice is just as noxious as discrimination inspired by malicious prejudice."
-Clarence Thomas-
U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Adarand v. Federico Pena
"We must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living. I will not attempt to prove that Congress has no power to appropriate this money as an act of charity. Every member upon this floor knows it. We have the right as individuals to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of congress we have no right to appropriate a dollar of the public money."
-Davy Crockett-
(1786-1836) American hunter, frontiersman, soldier and politician
Source: 1827, spoken on the floor of Congress concerning a proposed relief bill for the widow of a naval officer.
"What shall be done with the four million slaves if they are emancipated? ... Primarily, it is a question less for man than for God -- less for human intellect than for the laws of nature to solve. It assumes that nature has erred; that the law of liberty is a mistake; that freedom, though a natural want of the human soul, can only be enjoyed at the expense of human welfare, and that men are better off in slavery than they would or could be in freedom; that slavery is the natural order of human relations, and that liberty is an experiment. What shall be done with them? Our answer is, do nothing with them; mind your business, and let them mind theirs. Your doing with them is their greatest misfortune. They have been undone by your doings, and all they now ask, and really have need of at your hands, is just to let them alone. They suffer by every interference, and succeed best by being let alone."
-Frederick Douglass-
[Frederick Baily] (1818-1895), escaped slave, Abolitionist, author, editor of the North Star and later the New National Era
Source: What Shall Be Done With The Slaves If Emancipated? Douglass' Monthly, January, 1862
"Mankind is at its best when it is most free.
This will be clear if we grasp the principle of liberty.
We must recall that the basic principle is freedom of choice,
which saying many have on their lips, but few in their mind."
-Dante Alighieri-
(1265-1320) Italian Poet
"It [government] covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting: such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
[Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clerel, le Comte de Tocqueville] (1805-1859) French historian
"A wise man once asked, 'What shall we have accomplished when we have made a law?' Or words to that effect. He goes on to point out that those who agree with the new law are most likely 'obeying' it already, before it’s ever passed. Meanwhile, those who don’t agree with it will either obey it grudgingly, which is very dangerous in the long run, especially in a democracy, where nothing is ever really settled, or they will break it surreptitiously, a particular specialty of yours truly.
What we will really have accomplished, says the wise man, is to have given more jobs to cops, and bought more guns and clubs—and these days, TV cameras. If law really worked, there’d be no need for it."
-L. Neil Smith-
"The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are. Never under any circumstances admit that his success may be due to his own efforts, to the productive contribution he has made to the whole community. Always attribute his success to the exploitation, the cheating, the more or less open robbery of others. Never under any circumstances admit that your own failure may be owing to your own weakness, or that the failure of anyone else may be due to his own defects - his laziness, incompetence, improvidence, or stupidity."
-Henry Hazlitt-
(1894-1993) American economist, philosopher,literary critic and journalist
"We may safely rely on the disposition of the State legislatures to erect barriers against the encroachments of the national authority."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804)
Source: The Federalist Papers Federalist No. 85
"If it be admitted that a man, possessing absolute power, may misuse that power by wronging his adversaries, why should a majority not be liable to the same reproach? Men are not apt to change their character by agglomeration; nor does their patience in the presence of obstacles increase with the consciousness of their strength. And for these reasons I can never willingly invest any number of my fellow creatures with that unlimited authority which I should refuse to any one of them."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
[Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clerel, le Comte de Tocqueville] (1805-1859) French historian
"[The founding fathers] conferred, as against the Government, the right to be left alone -- the right most valued by civilized men."
-Justice Louis D. Brandeis-
(1856-1941) US Supreme Court Justice
1928
"Laws are made for men of ordinary understanding and should, therefore, be construed by the ordinary rules of common sense. Their meaning is not to be sought for in metaphysical subtleties which may make anything mean everything or nothing at pleasure."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Johnson, 1823.
"In this country sovereignty resides in the people, and Congress can exercise no power which they have not, by their Constitution, entrusted to it: All else is withheld."
-U.S. Supreme Court-
Source: Juilliard v. Greenman, 110 U.S. 421 (1884).
"How can I set free anyone who doesn't have the guts to stand up alone and declare his own freedom? I think it's a lie – people claim they want to be free – everybody insists that freedom is what they want the most, the most sacred and precious thing a man can possess. But that's bullshit! People are terrified to be set free – they hold on to their chains. They fight anyone who tries to break those chains. It's their security... How can they expect me or anyone else to set them free if they don't really want to be free?"
-Jim Morrison-
"Communism and fascism or nazism, although poles apart in their intellectual content, are similar in this, that both have emotional appeal to the type of personality that takes pleasure in being submerged in a mass movement and submitting to superior authority."
-James A. C. Brown-
(1911-1964)
Source: Techniques of Persuasion, 1963
"Every politician, every member of the clerical profession, ought to incur the reasonable suspicion of being an interested supporter of false doctrines, who becomes angry at opposition, and endeavors to cast an odium on free inquiry. Fraud and falsehood only dread examination. Truth invites it."
-Thomas Cooper-
(1759-1839)
Source: Liberty of the Press, 1830
"The problems we face today exist because the people who work for a living are outnumbered by those who vote for a living.”
-anonymous-
"[I]f the policy of the government upon vital questions, affecting the whole people, is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made, in ordinary litigation between parties, in personal actions, the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their government into the hands of that eminent tribunal."
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
Source: First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861, Washington, D.C.
"When courts fail to engage in oversight or even distort the Constitution to rationalize the ultra vires actions of government, and when academics and political activists aid and abet them in this activity by devising ingenious rationalizations for ignoring the Constitution’s words, they are playing a most dangerous game. For they are putting at risk the legitimacy of the lawmaking process and risking the permanent disaffection of significant segments of the people."
-Brannon P. Denning-
Source: Brannon P. Denning, And Randy Barnett, CantThe Simple Cite Be Trusted?: Lower Court Interpretations of United States V. Miller and the Second Amendment, 26 Cumb. L. Rev. 961-1004 (1996).
"You seem ... to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions; a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men, and not more so. They have, with others, the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps.... Their power [is] the more dangerous as they are in office for life, and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots. It has more wisely made all the departments co-equal and co-sovereign within themselves."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Letter to William Jarvis (September 28, 1820).
"The concealed weapon law has not worked as well as was expected by those of us who commended it. This is a fact too obvious for denial. Criminals are as well armed as ever, in spite of the sternness with which the law has been applied to a few of them. It appears to only have truly limited the law abiding."
-New York Times-
May 24, 1913, two years after the Sullivan Act became effective
"Our whole political system rests on the distinction between constitutional and other laws. The former are the solemn principles laid down by the people in its ultimate sovereignty; the latter are regulations made by its representatives within the limits of their authority, and the courts can hold unauthorized and void any act which exceeds those limits. The courts can do this because they are maintaining against the legislature the fundamental principles which the people themselves have determined to support, and they can do it only so long as the people feel that the constitution is something more sacred and enduring than ordinary laws, something that derives its force from a higher authority."
-Walter F. Dodd-
(1880-1960) Author, professor of political science
Source: The Revision and Amendment of State Constitutions, P. 253 (1910).
"[T]here are, at bottom, basically two ways to order social affairs, Coercively, through the mechanisms of the state -- what we can call political society. And voluntarily, through the private interaction of individuals and associations -- what we can call civil society. ... In a civil society, you make the decision. In a political society, someone else does. ... Civil society is based on reason, eloquence, and persuasion, which is to say voluntarism. Political society, on the other hand, is based on force."
-Edward H. Crane-
Founder and president of the Cato Institute
"Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed."
-Étienne de la Boétie-
(1530-1563) French judge, writer, political philosopher
"The only purpose for which power can rightfully be exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. ... Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign."
-John Stuart Mill-
(1806-1873) English philosopher and economist
Source: On Liberty (1859)
"Not surprisingly, the federal judiciary nearly always rules in favor of the federal government. Judicial review, contrary to the assurances of its advocates, has hardly restrained Congress at all. Instead it has progressively stripped the states of their traditional powers, while allowing federal power to grow unchecked."
-Joseph Sobran-
(1946-2010) Columnist
Source: Usurpation of power is routine, Conservative Chronicle, October 25, 1995
"At the beginning, we reject the idea that, when the United States acts against citizens abroad, it can do so free of the Bill of Rights. The United States is entirely a creature of the Constitution. Its power and authority have no other source. It can only act in accordance with all the limitations imposed by the Constitution. When the Government reaches out to punish a citizen who is abroad, the shield which the Bill of Rights and other parts of the Constitution provide to protect his life and liberty should not be stripped away just because he happens to be in another land. This is not a novel concept. To the contrary, it is as old as government."
-U.S. Supreme Court-
Reid v. Covert, 1956
"Why do we love this trial by jury? Because it prevents the hand of oppression from cutting you off ... This gives me comfort—that, as long as I have existence, my neighbors will protect me."
-Patrick Henry-
(1736-1799) US Founding Father
Source: 3 J. Elliot, The Debates In The Several States Conventions On The Adoption Of The Federal Constitution 545, 546 (1901).
"Can we assume that a thing is right if it is legal? But slavery was once legal; Nazism was legal. Well, can we assume a thing is right if it is endorsed by majority rule? But a lynch mob is majority rule. Is a thing sure to be right, then, if it comes about through the democratic process? But fascist dictator Juan Perón of Argentina was democratically elected by majority rule on two occasions. . . . Well, how about the Constitution? But again we run into difficulties, for the Constitution can be amended to say anything the society wishes it to say. Suppose, for example, the Constitution were amended to permit the lynching of blacks—would this practice become ethically correct merely because the Constitution permitted it? The moral basis of capitalism is the right of each individual to live his own life, for his own sake."
-R.W. Grant-
Source: The Incredible Bread Machine: A Study of Capitalism, Freedom, and the State
"Jury lawlessness is the greatest corrective of law in its actual administration. The will of the state at large imposed on a reluctant community, the will of a majority imposed on a vigorous and determined minority, find the same obstacle in the local jury that formerly confronted kings and ministers."
-U.S. Court of Appeals District of Columbia-
Source: U.S. v. Dougherty, 473 F.2d 1113, 1130 at note 32 (1972).
"It is far more rational to suppose that the courts were designed to be an intermediate body between the people and the legislature, in order, among other things, to keep the latter within the limits assigned to their authority."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804)
Source: The Federalist No. 78
http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quote_blog/Alexander.Hamilton.Quote.8B10
"The germ of dissolution of our federal government is in ... the federal judiciary; an irresponsible body (for impeachment is scarcely a scare-crow), working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing it’s noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped from the States, and the government of all be consolidated into one. ...when all government... in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the centre of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
1821
"From now onwards the jury enters on a new phase of its history, and for the next three centuries it will exercise its power of veto on the use of the criminal law against political offenders who have succeeded in obtaining popular sympathy."
-U.S. Court of Appeals Sixth Circuit-
Source: U.S. v. Wilson, 629 F.2d 439, 443 (1980)
"When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets."
-James Joyce-
"Now what I contend is that my body is my own, at least I have always so regarded it. If I do harm through my experimenting with it, it is I who suffers, not the state."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910)
"There is a danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty"
-John Adams-
"We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force."
-Ayn Rand-
"Legislators and revolutionaries who promise equality and liberty at the same time are either psychopaths or mountebanks."
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe-
(1749-1832)
Source: Maximen und Reflexionen
"The drafters of the Constitution clearly intended [the right of trial by jury] to protect the accused from oppression by the Government. Singer v. United States, 380 U.S. 24, 31, 85 S. Ct. 783, 788, 13 L. Ed. 2d 630 (1965). ... Part of this protection is embodied in the concept of jury nullification: “In criminal cases, a jury is entitled to acquit the defendant because it has no sympathy for the government’s position.” United States v. Wilson, 629 F.2d 439, 443 (6th Cir. 1980). The Founding Fathers knew that, absent jury nullification, judicial tyranny not only was a possibility, but was a reality in the colonial experience. Although we may view ourselves as living in more civilized times, there is obviously no reason to believe the need for this protection has been eliminated. Judicial and prosecutorial excesses still occur, and Congress is not yet an infallible body incapable of making tyrannical laws."
-Judge Thomas Wiseman-
Source: U.S. v. Datcher, 830 F. Supp. 411, 413 (M.D. Tenn., 1993) case dismissed Sept. 1, 1994, 6th Cir. Ct. Of Appeals, Case No. 3:92-00054 certiorari denied U.S. Supreme Court Case No. 94-8767, May 15, 1995.
"The jury possesses a general veto power and may acquit when it has no sympathy for the Government’s case, no matter how overwhelming the evidence of guilt. A jury acquittal is final and unreviewable; a judge may not direct a jury to convict or vacate an acquittal, nor may a prosecutor appeal an acquittal on grounds of judicial error or erroneous jury determination."
-Lieutenant Commander Robert E. Korroch-
Source: Lieutenant Commander Robert E. Korroch and Major Michael J. Davidson, (LTC Korroch serves with the U.S. Coast Guard; B.S., U.S. Coast Guard Academy (1981); J.D., Marshall-Wythe School of Law, College of William and Mary 1988) (Maj. Davidson serves with the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General Corps, Litigation Division), in Jury Nullification: A Call for Justice or an Invitation to Anarchy?, 139 MIL. L. REV. 131 (1993).
"Jurors should acquit, even against the judge’s instruction ... if exercising their judgment with discretion and honesty they have a clear conviction that the charge of the court is wrong."
-Andrew Hamilton-
(c.1676-1741) Scottish lawyer in colonial America
Source: August 4, 1735, advice to jurors to acquit against the judge’s instructions in the seditious libel trial of John Peter Zenger; Rex. V. Zenger, How. St. Tr. 17:675 (1735)
"[That] the Jury may determine the law and the fact of the case, has been supported by every English judge, except Chief Justice Jeffries .... And to their credit be it spoken that the Juries have always been right on fundamental
questions of liberty and popular right."
-Georgia Supreme Court-
Source: Keener v. The State, 18 Ga. 194, 231 (1855).
"[T]he Jury have not only the power, but the right, to pass upon the law as well as the facts..."
-Georgia Supreme Court-
Source: Keener v. The State, 18 Ga. 194, 231 (1855).
"In 'A jury’s duty' (11/8) by Mike Romano, John Junker asserts that juries have the right to nullify laws in principle but should not use this right in practice. Would he then be willing to give up the rights of free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, freedom to organize a labor union, abolition of slavery in the North, and the repeal of alcohol prohibition — all of which were given to us by juries who put the principle of nullification into practice? Without jury nullification no systematic veto exists for the people and tyranny ensues."
-Patricia Michl Sumner-
Source: November 29, 1995, Necessary nullification, letter to the Seattle Weekly
"In the general course of human nature, A power over a man’s subsistence amounts to a power over his will."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804)
Source: The Federalist No. 79
"When we compare the laws made today and the method and purpose of their making, with those of the past, we find them to be in perfect harmony. It was the law and custom of the past to provide for a class of idlers, it was customary for the powerful to enslave the weak, for the rich to rob the poor, for the unscrupulous to make laws in their own interests, even as it is the law and custom today. Surely it must be evident that law does not have its basis in justice, but rather in custom. To both law and custom, justice is a total stranger."
-Charles T. Sprading-
(1871-1959) Libertarian activist, writer
Source: Charles T. Sprading's Introduction to Liberty and the Great Libertarians; An Anthology On Liberty; A Hand-book Of Freedom (Los Angeles: The Libertarian Publishing Company, 1913)
"The superior man understands what is right. The inferior man understands what is popular."
-Confucius-
[Kung Fu-tse] (551-479 B.C.)
"The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the greatest liars: the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"The principle, on which the war was waged by the North, was simply this: That men may rightfully be compelled to submit to, and support, a government that they do not want; and that resistance, on their part, makes them traitors and criminals.
No principle, that is possible to be named, can be more self-evidently false than this; or more self-evidently fatal to all political freedom. Yet it triumphed in the field, and is now assumed to be established. If it really be established, the number of slaves, instead of having been diminished by the war, has been greatly increased; for a man, thus subjected to a government that he does not want, is a slave."
-Lysander Spooner-
"When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic."
-Dresden James-
http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quote_blog/Dresden.James.Quote.8B45
"A secret blueprint for US global domination reveals that President Bush and his cabinet were planning a premeditated attack on Iraq to secure regime change even before he took power in January 2001… It has been called a secret blueprint for US global domination. … A small group of people with a plan to remove Saddam Hussein long before George W. Bush was elected president. … And 9/11 provided the opportunity to set it in motion. Not since Mein Kampf has a geopolitical punch been so blatantly telegraphed years ahead of the blow."
-Ted Koppel-
(1940-) British-American broadcast journalist
Source: Nightline, 5 March 2003, quoting the Glasgow Sunday Herald (Sept. 15, 2002)
"No pecuniary consideration is more urgent, than the regular redemption and discharge of the public debt: on none can delay be more injurious, or an economy of time more valuable."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: 1793, Message to the House of Representatives, Ref: Washington's Maxims, 64
"We have stricken the shackles from 4,000,000 human beings and brought all labourers to a common level, but not so much by the elevation of former slaves as by reducing the whole working population, white and black, to a condition of serfdom. While boasting of our noble deeds, we are careful to conceal the ugly fact that by our iniquitous money system we have manipulated a system of oppression which, though more refined, is no less cruel than the old system of chattel slavery."
-Horace Greeley-
(1811-1872) Editor of the New York Tribune, ran against Ulysses Grant for presidency
1872
"From the earliest ages of history to the present day there have never been thirteen millions of people associated in one political body who enjoyed so much freedom and happiness as the people of these United States. You have no longer any cause to fear dangers from abroad ... It is from within, among yourselves - from cupidity, from corruption, from disappointed ambition and inordinate thirst for power - that factions will be formed and liberty endangered ... "
-Andrew Jackson-
(1767-1845) 7th US President
"I can scarcely contemplate a greater calamity that could befall this country, than be loaded with a debt exceeding their ability ever to discharge. If this be a just remark, it is unwise and improvident to vest in the general government a power to borrow at discretion, without any limitation or restriction."
-Brutus-
pseudonym, probably Robert Yates (1738-1801) politician and judge
Source: The Anti-Federalist,1787-88.
"Freedom of movement is the very essence of our free society -- once the right to travel is curtailed, all other rights suffer."
-William O. Douglas-
(1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
"Once the government can demand of a publisher the names of the purchasers of his publication, the free press as we know it disappears. Then the spectre of a government agent will look over the shoulder of everyone who reads. ... Fear of criticism goes with every person into the bookstall. The subtle, imponderable pressures of the orthodox lay hold. Some will fear to read what is unpopular, what the powers-that-be dislike. ... fear will take the place of freedom in the libraries, book stores, and homes in the land."
-William O. Douglas-
(1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
"Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us?"
-William O. Douglas-
(1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
"The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence. A proper government is only a policeman, acting as an agent of man's self-defense, and, as such, may only resort to force only against those who start the use of force."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
Source: "Atlas Shrugged"
"The idea of 'crime' in existing criminology is artificial, for what is called crime is really an infringement of 'existing laws', whereas 'laws' are very often a manifestation of barbarism and violence. Such are the prohibiting laws of different kinds which abound in modern life. The number of these laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm. On the other hand, unquestionable crimes escape the field of vision of criminology, either because they have not recognized the form of crime or because they surpass a certain scale. In existing criminology there are concepts: a criminal man, a criminal profession, a criminal society, a criminal sect, and a criminal tribe, but there is no concept of a criminal state, or a criminal government, or criminal legislation. Consequently what is often regarded as 'political' activity is in fact a criminal activity."
-P. D. Ouspensky-
"This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember it or overthrow it."
-Abraham Lincoln-
4 April 1861
"If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private school . . . At the next session you may ban books and newspapers. Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men."
-Clarence S. Darrow-
(1857-1938)
Source: during the Scopes trial
"When the People contend for their Liberty, they seldom get anything by their Victory but new masters. Power is so apt to be insolent and Liberty to be saucy, that they are very seldom upon good Terms."
-George Savile-
(1633-1695) 1st Marquess of Halifax, English statesman, writer, and politician
Source: Of Prerogative, Power and Liberty
"But what is tyranny? Or how can a free people be deprived of their liberties? Tyranny is the exercise of some power over a man, which is not warranted by law, or necessary for the public safety. A people can never be deprived of their liberties, while they retain in their own hands, a power sufficient to any other power in the state."
-Noah Webster-
(1758-1843) American patriot and scholar, author of the first dictionary of American English usage (1806) and the author of the 1828 edition of the dictionary that bears his name.
Source: An Examination into the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution, 42-43, (1787)
"And say, finally, whether peace is best preserved by giving energy to the government or information to the people. This last is the most legitimate engine of government. Educate and inform the whole mass of people. Enable them to see that it is their interest to preserve peace and order, and they will preserve them. And it requires no very high degree of education to convince them of this. They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Letter to James Madison, Paris, December 20, 1787. The Political Writings Of Thomas Jefferson 68 (Dumbauld Ed. 1955)
"If through your vices you afflicted are,
Lay not the blame of your distress on God;
You made your rulers mighty, gave them guards,
So now you groan 'neath slavery's heavy rod."
-Solon-
(c.638 BC-558 BC) Athenian statesman, lawmaker, Lyric poet, renowned as a founding father of the Athenian polis, one of the Seven Sages of Greece
550 B.C.
Source: Diogenes Laërtius (trans. C. D. Yonge) The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (1853), "Solon", sect. 5, p. 25.
"I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive. It places the governors indeed more at their ease at the expense of the people. The late rebellion in Massachusetts has given much more alarm than I think it should have done. Calculate that one rebellion in thirteen States in the course of eleven years is but one for each State in a century and a half. No country should be so long without one. Nor will any degree of power in the hands of the government prevent insurrections. In England, where the hand of power is heavier than with us, there are seldom half a dozen years without an insurrection. In France, where it is still heavier but less despotic, as Montesquieu supposes, than in some other countries and where there are always two or three hundred thousand men ready to crush insurrections, there have been three in the course of the three years I have been here, in every one of which greater numbers were engaged than in Massachusetts."
-Thomas Jefferson-
Source: Letter to James Madison, Paris, December 20, 1787. The Political Writings Of Thomas Jefferson 67-68 (Dumbauld Ed. 1955)
"Government, in its last analysis, is organized force."
-Woodrow Wilson-
(1856-1924) 28th US President
"One of the hardest things to teach a child is that the truth is more important than the consequences."
-O. A. Battista-
[Orlando Aloysius Battista] (1917-1995), Canadian-American chemist and author
"Where suspicion fills the air and holds scholars in line for fear of their jobs, there can be no exercise of the free intellect. Supineness and dogmatism take the place of inquiry. A problem can no longer be pursued to its edges. Fear stalks the classroom. The teacher is no longer a stimulant to adventurous thinking; she becomes instead a pipe line for safe and sound information. A deadening dogma takes the place of free inquiry. Instruction tends to become sterile; pursuit of knowledge is discouraged; discussion often leaves off where it should begin."
-William O. Douglas-
(1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Adler v. Board of Education, 1951
"Our whole evolution has reached a stage where nearly every man is either ruler or ruled; sometimes he is both. By this the attitude of dependence has been greatly strengthened, for a truly free man does not like to play the part of either the ruler or the ruled. He is, above all, concerned with making his inner values and personal powers effective in a way as to permit him to use his own judgment in all affairs and to be independent in action."
-Rudolf Rocker-
"You know, comrades, that I think in regard to this: I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this — who will count the votes, and how."
-Josef Stalin-
-or-
"Comrades, I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how. But what is extraordinarily important is this: who will count the votes, and how."
-Josef Stalin-
(1879-1953) Communist leader of the USSR
Source: 'Memoirs of Stalin's Former Secretary' by Boris Bazhanov (1900-1982) a Soviet Union Politburo secretary who served as Stalin's personal secretary
-or-
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything."
-Josef Stalin-
(1879-1953) Communist leader of the USSR
Source: Attributed
"When the Federal Reserve Act was passed, the people of these United States did not perceive that a world banking system was being set up here. A super-state controlled by international bankers and industrialists...acting together to enslave the world...Every effort has been made by the Fed to conceal its powers but the truth is--the Fed has usurped the government."
-Louis McFadden-
(1876-1936) US Congressman (R-PA) (1915-1935), Chairman of House Banking and Currency Committee. Poisoned in 1936.
"The power of the state to impose restraints and burdens upon persons and property in conservation and promotion of the public health, good order, and prosperity is a power originally and always belonging to the states, not surrendered to them by the general government, nor directly restrained by the constitution of the United States, and essentially exclusive."
-Justice Melville Fuller-
(1833-1910) Chief Justice of the United States (1888-1910)
Source: Wilkerson V. Rahrer, 140 U.S. 545 (1891)
"State inspection laws, health laws, and laws for regulating the internal commerce of a State, and those which respect turnpike roads, ferries, &c. are not within the power granted to Congress. ... Inspection laws, quarantine laws, health laws of every description, as well as laws for regulating the internal commerce of a State, and those which respect turnpike roads, ferries, &c., are component parts of this mass. No direct general power over these objects is granted to Congress, and, consequently, they remain subject to State legislation."
-Justice John Marshall-
(1755-1835) US Supreme Court Chief Justice
Source: Gibbons v. Ogden, 22 U.S. (9 Wheat.) 1 (1824)
"To hold that Congress has general police power would be to hold that it may accomplish objects not intrusted to the general government, and to defeat the operation of the 10th Amendment, declaring that 'the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.' "
-Justice Melville Fuller-
(1833-1910) Chief Justice of the United States (1888-1910)
Source: Champion v. Ames, 188 U.S. 321, 364-65 (1902) (Fuller, C.J., dissenting)
“That the people have an original right to establish, for their future government, such principles as, in their opinion, shall most conduce to their own happiness, is the basis, on which the whole American fabric has been erected.... The principles, therefore, so established, are deemed fundamental. And as the authority, from which they proceed, is supreme ... they are designed to be permanent.... The powers of the legislature are defined, and limited; and that those limits may not be mistaken, or forgotten, the constitution is written.”
-Justice John Marshall-
(1755-1835) US Supreme Court Chief Justice
Source: Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. (1 Cranch.) 137, 176 (1803)
“[T]he framers of the constitution contemplated that instrument, as a rule for the government of courts, as well as of the legislature.”
-Justice John Marshall-
(1755-1835) US Supreme Court Chief Justice
Source: Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. (1 Cranch.) 137, 179-80 (1803)
"Let the end be legitimate, let it be within the scope of the constitution, and all means which are appropriate, which are plainly adapted to that end, which are not prohibited, but consist with the letter and spirit of the constitution, are constitutional. ... [S]hould Congress, under the pretext of executing its powers, pass laws for the accomplishment of objects not entrusted to the government, such [acts are] not the law of the land."
-Justice John Marshall-
(1755-1835) US Supreme Court Chief Justice
Source: McCulloch v. Maryland, 17 U.S. (4 Wheat.) 316, 421-423 (1819)
"The proper role of government is exactly what John Stuart Mill said in the middle of the 19th century in On Liberty. The proper role of government is to prevent other people from harming an individual. Government, he said, never has any right to interfere with an individual for that individual's own good. The case for prohibiting drugs is exactly as strong and as weak as the case for prohibiting people from overeating. We all know that overeating causes more deaths than drugs do. If it's in principle OK for the government to say you must not consume drugs because they'll do you harm, why isn't it all right to say you must not eat too much because you'll do harm? Why isn't it all right to say you must not try to go in for skydiving because you're likely to die? Why isn't it all right to say, 'Oh, skiing, that's no good, that's a very dangerous sport, you'll hurt yourself'? Where do you draw the line?"
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
Source: America's Drug Forum interview (1991)"America's Drug Forum" (1991)
"One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
Source: Interview with Richard Heffner on The Open Mind (7 December 1975)
"Spending by government currently amounts to about 45 percent of national income. By that test, government owns 45 percent of the means of production that produce the national income. The U.S. is now 45 percent socialist."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
Source: "We Have Socialism, Q.E.D." in The New York Times (31 December 1989)
"One role of prohibition is in making the drug market more lucrative."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
Source: America's Drug Forum interview (1991)"America's Drug Forum" (1991)
"To the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them. He is proud of a common heritage and loyal to common traditions. But he regards government as a means, an instrumentality, neither a grantor of favors and gifts, nor a master or god to be blindly worshipped and served."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
Source: Introduction, Capitalism and Freedom (1962)
"The key insight of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations is misleadingly simple: if an exchange between two parties is voluntary, it will not take place unless both believe they will benefit from it. Most economic fallacies derive from the neglect of this simple insight, from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
Source: Free to Choose (1990). Ch. 1 "The Power of the Market", page 13
"Men are rewarded and punished not for what they do, but rather for how their acts are defined. This is why men are more interested in better justifying themselves than in behaving themselves."
-Thomas Szasz-
(1920- ) Author, Professor
Source: The Second Sin, 1973
"Justice is incedental to law and order."
-J. Edgar Hoover-
former FBI director
"If you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel. That's literally true."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
Source: America's Drug Forum interview (1991)"America's Drug Forum" (1991)
"It's a moral problem that the government is making into criminals people, who may be doing something you and I don't approve of, but who are doing something that hurts nobody else. Most of the arrests for drugs are for possession by casual users.
Now here's somebody who wants to smoke a marijuana cigarette. If he's caught, he goes to jail. Now is that moral? Is that proper? I think it's absolutely disgraceful that our government, supposed to be our government, should be in the position of converting people who are not harming others into criminals, of destroying their lives, putting them in jail. That's the issue to me. The economic issue comes in only for explaining why it has those effects. But the economic reasons are not the reasons."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
Source: America's Drug Forum interview (1991)"America's Drug Forum" (1991)
"There is no act, however virtuous, for which ingenuity may not find some bad motive."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"Laws to suppress tend to strengthen what they would prohibit. This is the fine point on which all the legal professions of history have based their job security."
-Frank Herbert-
(1920-1986)
"I think it might be important to point out that this country is a one-party country. Half of that party is called Republican and half is called Democrat. It doesn’t make any difference. All the really good ideas belong to the Libertarians."
-Hugh Downs-
(1921-) American broadcaster, television host, news anchor, TV producer, author
Source: on Politically Correct, April, 1997.
"Politically popular speech has always been protected: even the Jews were free to say ‘Heil Hitler.’"
-Isaac Asimov-
(1920-1992) American author and professor of biochemistry at Boston University
"I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich, are our dependence for continued freedom. And to preserve their independence, We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty or profusion and servitude.
If we run into such debt, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our calling and our creeds as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling our miss-managers to account but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers.
Our land-holders, too, like theirs, retaining indeed the title and stewardship of estates called theirs but held really in trust for the treasury, must wander, like theirs, in foreign countries, and be contented with penury, obscurity, exile, and the glory of the nation.
This example reads to us the salutary lesson, that private fortunes are destroyed by public as well as by private extravagances.
And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for the second; that second for a third; and so on, till the bulk of society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering.
Then begins, indeed, the bellum omnium in omnia, which some philosophers observing to be so general in this world, have mistaken for the natural, instead of the abusive state of man.
And the fore-horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Letter to Samuel Kercheval, Monticello, July 12, 1816
"Democracy is a form of government that cannot long survive, for as soon as the people learn that they have a voice in the fiscal policies of the government, they will move to vote for themselves all the money in the treasury, and bankrupt the nation."
-Karl Marx-
Father of Communism, Author of the 'Communist Manifesto'
"We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove. We have two opinions: one private, which we are afraid to express; and another one - the one we use - which we force ourselves to wear to please Mrs. Grundy, until habit makes us comfortable in it, and the custom of defending it presently makes us love it, adore it, and forget how pitifully we came by it. Look at it in politics."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910)
"There are four ways in which you can spend money.
1) You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money.
2) Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost.
3) Then, I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch!
4) Finally, I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get. And that’s government. And that’s close to 40% of our national income."
-Milton Friedman-
"I came to America because of the great, great freedom which I heard existed in this country. I made a mistake in selecting America as a land of freedom, a mistake I cannot repair in the balance of my lifetime."
-Albert Einstein-
1947
"The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can't get and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"Politics must be the battle of the principles... the principle of liberty against the principle of force."
-Auberon Herbert-
(1838-1906) English author
"Useless laws weaken necessary laws."
-Charles-Louis de Secondat-
(1689-1755) Baron de Montesquieu
"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards. On the road to tyranny, we've gone so far that polite political action is about as useless as a miniskirt in a convent."
-Claire Wolfe-
Source: "101 Things To Do 'Til The Revolution"
"There is no maxim, in my opinion, which is more liable to be misapplied, and which, therefore, more needs elucidation, than the current, that the interest of the majority is the political standard of right and wrong."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
"The less government we have, the better, — the fewer laws, and the less confided power. The antidote to this abuse of formal Government, is, the influence of private character, the growth of the Individual."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-
"When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing more to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader."
-Plato-
"The tank, the B-52, the fighter-bomber, the state controlled police and the military are the weapons of dictatorship. The rifle is the weapon of democracy... If guns are outlawed, only the government will have guns. Only the police, the secret police, the military, the hired servants of our rulers. Only the government—and a few outlaws. I intend to be among the outlaws."
-Edward Abbey-
(1927-1989) American author and essayist
"... any broad unlimited power to hold laws unconstitutional because they offend what this Court conceives to be the ‘conscience of our people’ ... was not given by the Framers, but rather has been bestowed on the Court by the Court."
-Justice Hugo L. Black-
(1886-1971) US Supreme Court Justice
"Republics are created by the virtue, public spirit, and intelligence of the citizens. They fall, when the wise are banished from the public councils, because they dare to be honest, and the profligate are rewarded, because they flatter the people, in order to betray them."
-Justice Joseph Story-
(1779-1845) US Supreme Court Justice
1833
"Resistance to sudden violence, for the preservation not only of my person, my limbs and life, but of my property, is an indisputable right of nature which I have never surrendered to the public by the compact of society, and which perhaps, I could not surrender if I would. Nor is there anything in the common law of England inconsistent with that right."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: Boston Gazette, September 5, 1763, reprinted in The Works of John Adams 438 (Charles F. Adams ed., 1851).
"Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they've been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It's an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It's a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing."
-Muhammad Ali-
"No one is more truly helpless, more completely a victim, than he who can neither choose nor change nor escape his protectors."
-John Holt-
(1923-1985) American author and educator, proponent of homeschooling, and pioneer in youth rights theory
Source: Holt, J. (1967). How Children Learn. New York: Pitman Publishing Corporation
"[The state] cannot disarm any class of persons or deprive them of the right guaranteed under section 13, article 2 of the Constitution, to bear arms in defense of home, person, and property. The guaranty thus extended is meaningless if any person is denied the right to possess arms for such protection...."
-Colorado Supreme Court-
Source: People v. Nakamura, 99 Colo. 262, 264, 62 P.2d 246, 247 (1936) rehearing denied.
"I believe that the community is already in process of dissolution where each man begins to eye his neighbor as a possible enemy, where non-conformity with the accepted creed, political as well as religious, is a mark of disaffection; where denunciation, without specification or backing, takes the place of evidence, where orthodoxy chokes freedom of dissent; where faith in the eventual supremacy of reason has become so timid that we dare not enter our convictions in the open lists, to win or lose."
-Judge Learned Hand-
(1872-1961), Judge, U. S. Court of Appeals
Source: Speech, New York University, 24 October 1952
"Never blame a legislative body for not doing something. When they do nothing, that don't hurt anybody. When they do something is when they become dangerous."
-Will Rogers-
(1879-1935) American humorist
"If a jury have not the right to judge between the government and those who disobey its laws, the government is absolute, and the people, legally speaking, are slaves. "
-Lysander Spooner-
(1808-1887) Political theorist, activist, abolitionist
"Jury lawlessness is the greatest corrective of law in its actual administration."
-Roscoe Pound-
Legal scholar
1910
"[The] purpose of a jury is to . . . make available the common sense judgment of the community as a hedge against the overzealous or mistaken prosecutor and in preference to the professional or perhaps over conditioned or biased response of a judge."
-U.S. Supreme Court-
Source: Taylor v. Louisiana, 419 U.S. 522, 530 (1975)
"Man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet, in other respects he is free; because, once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does."
-Jean-Paul Sartre-
"Man is condemned to be free. Condemned because he did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at liberty, and from the moment he is thrown into this world he is responsible for everything he does."
-Jean-Paul Sartre
(1905-1980)
Source: Existentialism and Humanism
"The Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations ... This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people, was the real American Revolution."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
February 13, 1818
"Outside Independence Hall when the Constitutional Convention of 1787 ended, Mrs. Powel of Philadelphia asked Benjamin Franklin, 'Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?' With no hesitation whatsoever, Franklin responded, 'A republic, if you can keep it.'"
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
1787
Source: as recorded by Constitution signer James McHenry in a diary entry.
"You have rights antecedent to all earthly governments: rights that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws; rights derived from the Great Legislator of the universe."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
"To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Virginia Statutes of Religious Freedom, 1779.
Close of Yahoo Quotes
"[Bills of rights are not only] unnecessary in the proposed Constitution, but would even be dangerous. They would contain various exceptions to powers not granted; and, on this very account, would afford a colorable pretext to claim more than were granted. ... Why, for instance, should it be said that the liberty of the press shall not be restrained, when no power is given by which restrictions may be imposed? ... [S]uch a provision ... would furnish, to men disposed to usurp, a plausible pretense for claiming that power. ... This may serve as a specimen of the numerous handles which would be given to the doctrine of constructive powers, by the indulgence of an injudicious zeal for bills of rights."
-Alexander Hamilton-
Federalist No. 84
"I will say than that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that here is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race."
-Abraham Lincoln-
September 18, 1858 debate with Stephen Douglas
"Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels -- men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, we may never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion."
-Dwight D. Eisenhower-
(1890-1969), 34th US President, WWII General
Source: Speech, Columbia University, 1954
"To maintain the ascendancy of the Constitution over the lawmaking majority is the great and essential point on which the success of the [American] system must depend; unless that ascendancy can be preserved, the necessary consequence must be that the laws will supersede the Constitution; and, finally, the will of the Executive, by influence of its patronage, will supersede the laws ..."
-John C. Calhoun-
(1782-1850) American statesman
"Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not so costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance for survival. There may be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no chance of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves."
-Sir Winston Churchill-
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
Source: The Gathering Storm, bk.I ch.19 p.348 (Houghton Mifflin, 1948)
"The difference between [socialism and fascism] is superficial and purely formal, but it is significant psychologically: it brings the authoritarian nature of a planned economy crudely into the open. The main characteristic of socialism (and of communism) is public ownership of the means of production, and, therefore, the abolition of private property. The right to property is the right of use and disposal. Under fascism, men retain the semblance or pretense of private property, but the government holds total power over its use and disposal."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
Source: “The Fascist New Frontier,” The Ayn Rand Column, p.98
"Under fascism, citizens retain the responsibilities of owning property, without freedom to act and without any of the advantages of ownership. Under socialism, government officials acquire all the advantages of ownership, without any of the responsibilities, since they do not hold title to the property, but merely the right to use it -- at least until the next purge. In either case, the government officials hold the economic, political and legal power of life or death over the citizens."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
Source: “The Fascist New Frontier,” The Ayn Rand Column, p.98
"Needless to say, under either system [socialism or fascism], the inequalities of income and standard of living are greater than anything possible under a free economy -- and a man’s position is determined, not by his productive ability and achievement, but by political pull and force. Under both systems, sacrifice is invoked as a magic, omnipotent solution in any crisis -- and “the public good” is the altar on which victims are immolated."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
Source: “The Fascist New Frontier,” The Ayn Rand Column, p.98
"I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground that 'all powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are preserved to the states or to the people.' ... To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition. The incorporation of a bank, and the powers assumed by this bill (chartering the first Bank of the United States), have not, been delegated to the United States by the Constitution."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: in opposition to the chartering of the first Bank of the United States (1791).
"I am afraid that the ordinary citizen will not like to be told that the banks can and do create and destroy money. And they who control the credit of a nation direct the policy of governments, and hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people."
-Reginald McKenna-
(1863-1943) British Secretary to the Treasury (1903), President of the Board of Education (1907–08) First Lord of the Admiralty (1908–1911), Home Secretary (1911–1915) and Chancellor of the Exchequer (1915–1916), and Chairman of the Midland Bank (1918)
Source: speaking in 1924
“But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man’s capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made–before it can be looted or mooched–made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can’t consume more than he has produced.’
To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss–the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery–that you must offer them values, not wounds–that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods. Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men’s stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best that your money can find. And when men live by trade–with reason, not force, as their final arbiter–it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability–and the degree of a man’s productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?"
-Francisco dOnconia-
The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to the doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can "throw the rascals out" at any election without leading to any profound or extreme shifts in policy.
-Carrol Quigley-
Tragedy and Hope
"Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign."
-John Stuart Mill-
(1806-1873) English philosopher and economist
Source: On Liberty (1859) (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1978), p. 9
"Free men are aware of the imperfection inherent in human affairs, and they are willing to fight and die for that which is not perfect. They know that basic human problems can have no final solutions, that our freedom, justice, equality, etc. are far from absolute, and that the good life is compounded of half measures, compromises, lesser evils, and gropings toward the perfect. The rejection of approximations and the insistence on absolutes are the manifestation of a nihilism that loathes freedom, tolerance, and equity."
-Eric Hoffer-
"The poor people, it is true, have been much less successful than the great. They have seldom found either leisure or opportunity to form a union and exert their strength; ignorant as they were of arts and letters, they have seldom been able to frame and support a regular opposition. This, however, has been known by the great to be the temper of mankind; and they have accordingly labored, in all ages, to wrest from the populace, as they are contemptuously called, the knowledge of their rights and wrongs, and the power to assert the former or redress the latter. I say RIGHTS, for such they have, undoubtedly, antecedent to all earthly government, Rights, that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws, Rights, derived from the great Legislator of the universe."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, 1765
"I never could believe that Providence had sent a few men into the world, ready booted and spurred to ride, and millions ready saddled and bridled to be ridden."
-Richard Rumbold-
(?-1685) British Colonel
Source: His final words on the scaffold before he was hanged in 1685.
Douglass ADAIR, Rumbold's Dying Speech, 1685, and Jefferson's Last Words on Democracy, 1826 [Notes and Documents], in: William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 9, 1952, p. 521
"Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!"
-Albert Einstein-
(1879-1955) Physicist and Professor, Nobel Prize 1921
"There comes a point when a man must refuse to answer to his leader if he is also to answer to his own conscience."
-Hartley Shawcross-
(1902-2003), prosecutor at Nuremberg War Crimes tribunal
"Justice, being violated, destroys;
justice, being preserved, preserves:
therefore, justice must not be violated,
lest violated justice destroy us."
-Manusmriti-
1200 BC
"A politician thinks of the next election. A statesman, of the next generation."
-James Freeman Clarke-
"The peaceable part of mankind will be continually overrun by the vile and abandoned while they neglect the means of self-defense. The supposed quietude of a good man allures the ruffian; while on the other hand, arms, like laws discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe and preserve order in the world as well as property. The balance of power is the scale of peace. The same balance would be preserved were all the world destitute of arms, for all would be alike; but since some will not, others dare not lay them aside... Horrid mischief would ensue were (the good) deprived of the use of them ... the weak will become a prey to the strong."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
Source: 1 Writings Of Thomas Paine 56 (M. Conway ed. 1894); 1776, Thoughts on a Defensive War.
"But to be in conflict with the constitution, it is not essential that the act should contain a prohibition against bearing arms in every possible form—it is the right to bear arms in defence of the citizens and the state, that is secured by the constitution, and whatever restrains the full and complete exercise of that right, though not an entire destruction of it, is forbidden by the explicit language of the constitution. If, therefore, the act in question imposes any restraint on the right, immaterial what appellation may be given to the act, whether it be an act regulating the manner of bearing arms or any other, the consequence, in reference to the constitution, is precisely the same, and its collision with that instrument equally obvious. ... The right existed at the adoption of the constitution; it had then no limits short of the moral power of the citizens to exercise it, and it in fact consisted in nothing else but in the liberty of the citizens to bear arms. Diminish that liberty, therefore, and you necessarily restrain the right; ... For, in principle, there is no difference between a law prohibiting the wearing [of] concealed arms, and a law forbidding the wearing such as are exposed; and if the former is unconstitutional, the latter must be so likewise."
-Kentucky Supreme Court-
Source: Bliss v. Commonwealth, 12 KY. (2 LITT.) 90 (Kentucky 1822) reprinted in THE FOUNDERS’ CONSTITUTION, Volume Five (Amendments I-XII) p. 212-213 (Univ. of Chicago Press).
"[O]ur War of the Revolution was, in good measure, fought as a protest against standing armies."
-Earl Warren-
(1891-1974) Chief Justice, U. S. Supreme Court
Source: The Bill of Rights and the Military, 37 N.Y.U.L. Rev. 181, 184 (1962).
"Who will stand guard to the guards themselves?"
-Juvenal-
[Decimus Junius Juvenalis] (c.55-c.128 AD) Roman satirical poet
"In the Jim Crow South, for example, government failed and indeed refused to protect blacks from extra-legal violence. Given our history, it's stunning we fail to question those who would force upon us a total reliance on the state for defense."
-Robert J. Cottrol-
Professor at Rutgers School of Law and George Washington University, member of the ACLU and the NAACP
Source: A Liberal Democrat’s Lament, The American Enterprise, 1999.
"Where would be the end of fraud and litigation, if one party could bring into court a written instrument, without any signature, and claim to have it enforced, upon the ground that it was written for another man to sign? that this other man had promised to sign it? that he ought to have signed it? that he had had the opportunity to sign it, if he would? but that he had refused or neglected to do so? Yet that is the most that could ever be said of the Constitution."
-Lysander Spooner-
No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority
"The man who hopes absurdly, it appears, is in some fantastic and gaseous manner a better citizen than the man who detects and exposes the truth"
-H.L. Mencken-
'Notes on Democracy'
"The proposal of any new law or regulation which comes from [businessmen], ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it."
-Adam Smith-
(1723-1790) Scottish philosopher and economist
"In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. If everyone decided, for example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any other good, and thereafter declined to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government-created bank credit would be worthless as a claim on goods. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.
This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights."
-Alan Greenspan-
(1926- ) Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors (1987-2006)
1966
"In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. ... This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard."
-Alan Greenspan-
(1926- ) Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors (1987-2006)
Source: from page 101 of the book "Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal"
by Ayn Rand with additional articles by Alan Greenspan - 1966
"The man of system…is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it… He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it."
-Adam Smith-
(1723-1790) Scottish philosopher and economist
Source: The Theory Of Moral Sentiments, Part VI, Section II, Chapter II, pp. 233-4
"Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon."
-Winston Churchill-
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
"The uniform, constant, and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition ... is frequently powerful enough to maintain the natural progress of things toward improvement, in spite of the extravagance of government, and of the greatest errors of administration."
-Adam Smith-
(1723-1790) Scottish philosopher and economist
"Capital will always go where it’s welcome and stay where it’s well treated. Capital is not just money. It’s also talent and ideas. They, too, will go where they’re welcome and stay where they are well treated."
-Walter Wriston-
(1919-2005) Chairman and CEO of Citibank/Citicorp (1967-84)
"It seemed that rebellion must have an unassailable base, something guarded not merely from attack, but from the fear of it."
-T. E. Lawrence-
"The cardinal maxim is, that any aid to a present bad Bank is the surest mode of preventing the establishment of a future good Bank."
-Walter Bagehot-
(1826-1877) British businessman, essayist, and journalist
"An almost hysterical antagonism toward the gold standard is one issue which unites statists of all persuasions. They seem to sense -- perhaps more clearly and subtly than many consistent defenders of laissez-faire -- that gold and economic freedom are inseparable, that the gold standard is an instrument of laissez-faire and that each implies and requires the other."
-Alan Greenspan-
(1926- ) Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors (1987-2006)
Source: "Gold and Economic Freedom", 1966
"I can't remember the exact quote but when I used to trade and Mr. Volcker was Fed chairman, he said something like 'gold is my enemy, I'm always watching what gold is doing', we need to think why he made a statement like that. If you're a central banker or one of the congressmen or senators, watch what gold is doing because this is a no-confidence vote in fiscal and dollar policy."
-Rick Santelli-
American on-air editor for the CNBC Business News network
Source: CNBC
"Agorism is the act of removing one's self from government regulation and monopolized currency. It's the idea that the exchange of products and services can be voluntary transactions in which all parties benefit without the heavy hand of the state reaching into your pockets. The end goal of The Agora is to starve the beast by making your productivity unavailable to their system, which funds violence. This Agorist Day: you can help spread this philosophy by choosing to exchange with those who are participating in the counter-economy."
-Jillian Batty-
Your friendly neighborhood agorist from Stateless Sweets
"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."
-Arthur Schopenhauer-
1788-1860
"Good Government is not intrusive, the people are hardly aware of it; the next best is felt yet loved; then comes that which is known and feared; the worst government is hated."
-Lao-Tzu-
[Li Erh] (570-490 BC) 'Old Sage', Father of Taoism
Source: Tao Te Ching
"A person's right to a job is as specious as his boss' right to success in business. There is no right to a minimum wage, just as there is no right to success in self-employment."
-Rex Curry-
Source: letter to the Washington Times National Weekly Edition, May 5, 1996
"What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared we would become a captive audience. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared that we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate would ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us."
-Neil Postman-
Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985)
"The ultimate result of protecting fools from their folly is to fill the planet full of fools."
-James Russell Lowell-
(1819-1891) American author and diplomatist
"We can guarantee cash benefits as far out and at whatever size you like, but we cannot guarantee their purchasing power."
-Alan Greenspan-
(1926- ) Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors (1987-2006)
Source: appearing before the Senate Banking Committee on February 15, 2005, in response to Democratic Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island on the topic of funding Social Security.
"It would take little more than $50 billion to raise every poor person above the official poverty line, yet the percentage of the population classified as poor hardly budges, while annual welfare spending amounts to four times that much. Where's the money going?"
-Robert Higgs-
(1944- ) American economic historian, economist of the Austrian School
Source: The Myth of "Failed" Policies, The Free Market, June 1995.
"If welfare and equality are to be primary aims of law, some people must necessarily possess a greater power of coercion in order to force redistribution of material goods. Political power alone should be equal among human beings; yet striving for other kinds of equality absolutely requires political inequality."
-Tibor Machan-
Source: Private Rights and Public Institutions
"As man is so constituted that it is utterly impossible for him to attain happiness save by seeking the happiness of others, so does it seem to be of the nature of things that individuals and classes can obtain their own just rights only by struggling for the rights of others."
-Henry George-
"Each peso [or dollar] is a contract between the government and the peso holder. That contract guarantees that each peso -- as a unit of value that the holder has worked hard to get -- will be worth as much tomorrow as today. If the government breaks the contract, it's breaking the law. The only role of government in the economy should be to guarantee the integrity of market transactions."
-Domingo Cavallo-
Finance Minister of Argentina
"Do not separate text from historical background. If you do, you will have perverted and subverted the Constitution, which can only end in a distorted, bastardized form of illegitimate government."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
"The government will make use of these powers only insofar as they are essential for carrying out vitally necessary measures.... The separate existence of the federal states will not be done away.... The number of cases in which an internal necessity exists for having recourse to such law is in itself a limited one."
-Adolf Hitler-
(1889-1945) German Nazi Dictator
Source: attempting to allay the people's fears over the Reichstag's centralization of law enforcement with the passage of the "Enabling Act" on March 23, 1933; (Historian William Shirer attributes this Enabling Act alone as the legal basis for Hitler's dictatorship).
"If ... our bureaucratic masters are becoming more akin to Soviet-style or Eastern European counterparts, it was rarely seen as a plus that those central schemers had wonderful intentions with their five-year plans. Such goals as 'job safety,' 'equality,' and freedom from 'discrimination,' depending on their definitions, may be good things for society, but they were never intended to be the business of the federal government."
-William P. Hoar-
Author, columnist, and managing editor of Periscope, the U.S. Naval Institute military database
Source: More Leeway for Regulators?, The New American, October 16, 1995.
"A political convention illustrates the workings of majority rule: If the minority in a party advocate a progressive move which is defeated when put to a vote in the convention, the minority are prohibited from advancing it during the campaign; if this minority refuse to advocate what the convention has decided to be right, they are barred from the platform and press, the cry of majority rule is raised against them, and they are called "traitors to the party;" but if they abandon their progressive ideas and advocate the wishes of the majority they are rewarded with office. Thus majority rule develops the dishonest politician: in order to rule sometime, he consents to being ruled at other times. The desire to rule and the willingness to be ruled ends in degradation; and no one who accepts the principles of equal liberty can endorse majority rule."
-Charles T. Sprading-
(1871-1959) Libertarian activist, writer
Source: Charles T. Sprading's Introduction to Liberty and the Great Libertarians; An Anthology On Liberty; A Hand-book Of Freedom (Los Angeles: The Libertarian Publishing Company, 1913)
"Moral indignation: jealousy with a halo."
-H. G. Wells-
(1866-1946)
"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end."
-Leonardo Da Vinci-
(1452-1519)
"In truth, attempts to regulate the civilian possession of firearms have five political functions. They
(1) increase citizen reliance on government and tolerance of increased police powers and abuse;
(2) help prevent opposition to the government;
(3) facilitate repressive action by government and its allies;
(4) lesson the pressure for major or radical reform; and
(5) can be selectively enforced against those perceived to be a threat to government."
-Raymond G. Kessler-
Lawyer, sociologist, professor Dept. of Criminal Justice, Sul Ross State University
Source: "Gun Control and Political Power", Law and Policy Quarterly, Vol. 5 (July) 1988, pp. 381-400
"The police of a state should never be stronger or better armed than the citizenry. An armed citizenry, willing to fight, is the foundation of civil freedom."
-Robert A. Heinlein-
(1907-1988) American writer
Source: Beyond This Horizon, 1942
"Ironically, the only gun control in 19th century England was the policy forbidding police to have arms while on duty."
-Don B. Kates, Jr.-
Constitutional lawyer, criminologist, author
Source: Quoted In The Proponent, February, 1996
"Prohibition goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man’s appetite by legislation and make crime out of things that are not crimes."
-Abraham Lincoln-
Source: Questionable. Supposedly from a speech, 18 Dec. 1840, to Illinois House of Representatives . No source has been confirmed. Believed to have been written by former Mayor of Atlanta, Anti-Prohibition campaign manager, Col. John B. Goodwin, 1887
see: http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lincoln.htm
"History teaches us the unfortunate lesson that cultural values supplant constitutional rights whenever the cultural elite consider a right too burdensome to suit the needs of the moment. The outlandish pronouncement in Dred Scott 'that the Negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit,' the shameful court-approved internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, and the separate but equal doctrine that officially existed until 1954 are all examples of the evils that result when cultural values are given more weight than constitutional rights."
-Robert Dowlut-
General Counsel for the National Rifle Association
Source: Arms: A Right to Self-Defense Against Criminals and Despots, 8 Stanford L. & Pol'y Rev. 25 (1997).
"In 1928, Germany enacted its Gesetz uber Schusswaffen und Munition (Law on Firearms and Ammunition), which required firearms and ammunition acquisition permits and record keeping for all transactions. Through this legislation, the police acquired knowledge of all firearm owners, which was used to the Nazis' advantage when they took power in 1933. The Nazi Waffengesetz (Weapons Law) of 1938, signed by Adolph Hitler, built upon the previous registration systems and strictly regulated handguns. ... On the first day the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia, they put up posters in every town ordering the inhabitants to surrender all firearms, including hunting guns. The penalty for disobedience was death. The Nazis were able to use local and central registration records of firearms owners and hunters to execute the decree. Lists of potential dissidents and other suspects were already prepared, and those persons disappeared immediately. The Nazi commander of Belgium and Netherlands proclaimed that '[t]he surrender of weapons and other implements of war has been ordered by special proclamation.... Hunting guns are [also] to be surrendered ....' The Nazi head of Norway decreed that '[a]ll arms and munitions must be handed over' because only licensed officials and persons with police permits retained the right to possess arms."
-Stephen P. Halbrook-
Source: Congress Interprets the Second Amendment: Declarations By A Co-Equal Branch On The Individual Right To Keep And Bear Arms, 62 Tenn. L.R. 597, 619 -- 623 (1995)
"A covenant not to defend myself from force by force is always void. For ... no man can transfer or lay down his Right to save himself. For the right men have by Nature to protect themselves, when none else can protect them, can by no Covenant be relinquished. ... [The right] to defend ourselves [is the] summe of the Right of Nature."
-Thomas Hobbes-
(1588-1679) English philosopher, political theorist
Source: Leviathan 88, 95 (reprint 1964) (1651)
"In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: 'If you don't work you die.'"
-Rudyard Kipling-
"In the kingdom of ends everything has either a price or a dignity. Whatever has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; on the other hand, whatever is above all price, and therefore admits of no equivalent, has a dignity. But that which constitutes the condition under which alone something can be an end in itself does not have mere relative worth, i.e., price, but an intrinsic worth, i.e., a dignity."
-Immanuel Kant-
"I don't think the Constitution is studied almost anywhere, including law schools. In law schools, what they study is what the court said about the Constitution. They study the opinions. They don't study the Constitution itself."
-Robert Bork-
(1927- ) former US Circuit Judge, legal scholar, author
"Perhaps the deterioration of American education is illustrated by the high correlation between the number of years a person has attended school and his inability to understand the words "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." It is more likely, though, that those who interpret the Second Amendment to preclude an individual right to own guns are driven by their political agenda. Whichever the case, they do themselves no credit when they tell us that a simple, elegant sentence means the opposite of what it clearly says."
-Sheldon Richman-
Editor of The Freeman, author, journalist
Source: Reading the Second Amendment, The Second Amendment's Syntax Permits Only One Reasonable Interpretation, The Freeman, February 1998 • Volume: 48 • Issue: 2
“If it is a question of taking a road past his property, [a man] sees at once that this small public matter has a bearing on his greatest private interests, and there is no need to point out to him the close connection between his private profit and the general interest. . . . Local liberties, then, which induce a great number of citizens to value the affection of their kindred and neighbors, bring men constantly into contact, despite the instincts which separate them, and force them to help one another. . . . The free institutions of the United States and the political rights enjoyed there provide a thousand continual reminders to every citizen that he lives in society. . . . Having no particular reason to hate others, since he is neither their slave nor their master, the American’s heart easily inclines toward benevolence. At first it is of necessity that men attend to the public interest, afterward by choice. What had been calculation becomes instinct. By dint of working for the good of his fellow citizens, he in the end acquires a habit and taste for serving them. . . . I maintain that there is only one effective remedy against the evils which equality may cause, and that is political liberty.
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
pp. 511-13, Lawrence/Mayer edition
"Crisis is the rallying cry of the tyrant."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
"Statists relish 'crises' because they can be used to force more controls into our lives."
-William P. Hoar-
Source: Tampering With the Markets, The New American, P. 13, June 10, 1996.
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before."
-Rahm Emmanuel-
(1959-) Mayor of Chicago (2011-), White House Chief of Staff to President Barack Obama (2009-2010), US Congressman (D-IL) (2004-2009), advisor to President Bill Clinton (1993-1998)
Source: Wall Street Journal Digital Network, November 19, 2008
"The freedom of the city is not negotiable. We cannot negotiate with those who say, 'What's mine is mine and what's yours is negotiable.'"
-John F. Kennedy-
“Independent self-reliant people were a counter-productive anachronism in the collective society of the future. In such a world people who read too well or too early are dangerous because they become privately empowered, they know too much, and they know how to find out what they don’t know by themselves, without consulting the experts.”
-John Dewey-
education reformer
"While there is a chance of the world getting through its troubles, I hold that a reasonable man has to behave as though he were sure of it. If at the end your cheerfulness is not justified, at any rate you will have been cheerful."
-H. G. Wells-
"If all the bank loans were paid, no one could have a bank deposit, and there would not be a dollar of coin or currency in circulation. This is a staggering thought. We are completely dependent on the commercial Banks. Someone has to borrow every dollar we have in circulation, cash or credit. If the Banks create ample synthetic money we are prosperous; if not, we starve. We are absolutely without a permanent money system. When one gets a complete grasp of the picture, the tragic absurdity of our hopeless position is almost incredible, but there it is. It is the most important subject intelligent persons can investigate and reflect upon. It is so important that our present civilization may collapse unless it becomes widely understood and the defects remedied very soon."
-Robert Hemphill-
Credit Manager of Federal Reserve Bank, Atlanta, Ga.
Source: In the foreword to a book by Irving Fisher, entitled 100% Money (1935)
"The bank hath benefit of interest on all moneys which it creates out of nothing."
-William Paterson-
(1658-1719) Founder of the Bank of England in 1694, the privately owned central bank for the Kingdom of England.
"If you want to know who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize."
-Voltaire-
"We have what is known as the Federal Reserve Bank System. That system is not owned by the Government. Many people think that it is because it says “Federal Reserve.” It belongs to private banks, private corporations. So we have farmed out to the Federal Reserve Banking System that which is owned exclusively, wholly, one hundred percent to the private banks—we have farmed out to them the privilege of issuing the Government’s money!"
-Wright Patman-
[John William Wright Patman] (1893-1976) US Congressman (TX-D)
Source: Congressional Record (29 Sep. 1941)
"There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution."
-John Adams-
"The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.
Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind, (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight,) the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.
It serves always to distract the Public Councils, and enfeeble the Public Administration. It agitates the Community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms; kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which find a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.
There is an opinion, that parties in free countries are useful checks upon the administration of the Government, and serve to keep alive the spirit of Liberty. This within certain limits is probably true; and in Governments of a Monarchical cast, Patriotism may look with indulgence, if not with favor, upon the spirit of party. But in those of the popular character, in Governments purely elective, it is a spirit not to be encouraged. From their natural tendency, it is certain there will always be enough of that spirit for every salutary purpose. And, there being constant danger of excess, the effort ought to be, by force of public opinion, to mitigate and assuage it. A fire not to be quenched, it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest, instead of warming, it should consume."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
George Washington's Farewell Address, September 17, 1796
"I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell, June 11, 1807
"To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, "by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only." Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of it's benefits, than is done by it's abandoned prostitution to falsehood."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell, June 11, 1807
"Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell, June 11, 1807
"The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost invariably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And if he is not romantic personally, he is apt to spread discontent among those who are."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him. If it be aristocratic in organization, then it seeks to protect the man who is superior only in law against the man who is superior in fact; if it be democratic, then it seeks to protect the man who is inferior in every way against both. One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among them. All it can see in an original idea is potential change, and hence an invasion of its prerogatives. The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are."
-H. L. Mencken-
Smart Set (December 1919)
"When you become entitled to exercise the right of voting for public officers, let it be impressed on your mind that God commands you to choose for rulers, 'just men who will rule in the fear of God.' The preservation of government depends on the faithful discharge of this duty; if the citizens neglect their duty and place unprincipled men in office, the government will soon be corrupted; laws will be made, not for the public good so much as for selfish or local purposes; corrupt or incompetent men will be appointed to execute the laws; the public revenues will be sqandered on unworthy men; and the rights of the citizens will be violated or disregarded. If a republican government fails to secure public prosperity and happiness, it must be because the citizens neglect the divine commands, and elect bad men to make and administer the laws."
-Noah Webster-
"Asset forfeiture is a mockery of the Bill of Rights. There is no presumption of innocence, no need to prove you guilty (or even charge you with a crime), no right to a jury trial, no right to confront your accuser, no right to a court-appointed attorney (even if the government has just stolen all your money), and no right to compensation for the property that's been taken."
-Harry Browne-
(1933-2006), Downsize DC co-founder
"[In the case of] dangerous exercise of other powers, not granted by the said compact, the states, who are parties thereto, have the right, and are duty bound, to interpose for arresting the progress of the evil."
-James Madison=
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Virginia Resolves
"The Declaration of Independence, however, is not a legal prescription conferring powers upon the courts; and the Constitution's refusal to "deny or disparage" other rights is far removed from affirming any one of them, and even farther removed from authorizing judges to identify what they might be, and to enforce the judges' list against laws duly enacted by the people."
-Justice Antonin Scalia-
(1936- ) American jurist, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
Source: Justice Scalia dissenting, Troxel v. Granville, 530 U.S. 57, 91-92 (2000)
"Our contest is not only whether we ourselves shall be free, but whether there shall be left to mankind an asylum on earth for civil and
religious liberty."
-Samuel Adams-
"To see what is right, and not to do it, is want of courage or of principle."
-Confucius-
"How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it."
-Adam Smith-
(1723-1790) Scottish philosopher and economist
Source: The Theory Of Moral Sentiments, Part I, Section I, Chapter I, pg. 9
"The use of force alone is but temporary. It may subdue for a moment; but it does not remove the necessity of subduing again; and a nation is not governed, which is perpetually to be conquered."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
Source: speaking of the American Revolution
"If I said, 'The live-and-let-live people I've met are generally warm and generous, although often reserved and respectful, while the control freaks I've met are generally cynical, mean and aggressively obnoxious,' would that seem likely to be true?
Of course it does. It IS true, and it's obviously logically consistent and what you'd expect.
BUT, if I said, 'I've found the intellectual defenders of private property and laissez-faire capitalism whom I've met to be generally warm and generous, while the so-called "liberal" defenders of the welfare state I've found to be often cynical, mean and tight-fisted in their personal lives,' would THAT seem likely to be true?
Think about it. Well, it's also true.... it's a matter of semantics, or word choice. BECAUSE BOTH SENTENCES SAY EXACTLY THE SAME THING. "
-Rick Gaber-
Source: Selfishness vs. "Selfishness"
"Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all."
-Frederic Bastiat-
(1801-1850) [Claude Frederic Bastiat] French economist, statesman, and author. He did most of his writing during the years just before -- and immediately following -- the French Revolution of February 1848
Source: ca. 1837
"The unity of a nation's spirit and will are worth far more than the freedom of the spirit and will of an individual; and that the higher interests involved in the life of the whole must here set the limits and lay down the duties of the interests of the individual."
-Adolf Hitler-
(1889-1945) German Nazi Dictator
"We must stop thinking of the individual and start thinking about what is best for society."
-Hillary Clinton-
(1947- ) Wife of President Bill Clinton, US Senator (NY-D)
1993
"Fascist ethics begin ... with the acknowledgment that it is not the individual who confers a meaning upon society, but it is, instead, the existence of a human society which determines the human character of the individual. According to Fascism, a true, a great spiritual life cannot take place unless the State has risen to a position of pre-eminence in the world of man. The curtailment of liberty thus becomes justified at once, and this need of rising the State to its rightful position."
-Mario Palmieri-
Source: "The Philosophy of Fascism" 1936
"Don't ever make the mistake with people like me thinking we are looking for heroes. There aren't any and if there were, they would be killed immediately. I'm never surprised by bad behaviour. I expect it."
-Gore Vidal-
"Most of the major ills of the world have been caused by well-meaning people who ignored the principle of individual freedom, except as applied to themselves, and who were obsessed with fanatical zeal to improve the lot of mankind-in-the-mass through some pet formula of their own. The harm done by ordinary criminals, murderers, gangsters, and thieves is negligible in comparison with the agony inflicted upon human beings by the professional do-gooders, who attempt to set themselves up as gods on earth and who would ruthlessly force their views on all others - with the abiding assurance that the end justifies the means."
-Henry Grady Weaver-
(1889–1949) American author, General Motors marketing executive who made the cover of Time in 1938
"What, actually, is the difference between communism and fascism? Both are forms of statism, authoritarianism. The only difference between Stalin’s communism and Mussolini’s fascism is an insignificant detail in organizational structure."
-Leonard E. Read-
(1898-1983) founder of the Foundation for Economic Education
Source: "Neither Left Nor Right", Freeman, January/February 2006 • Volume: 56 • Issue: 1
"In principle, there are only two fundamental political viewpoints. That is, two contradictory ends of the 'political spectrum.' Those two principles are freedom and slavery."
-Mark Da Cunha-
Publisher of Capitalism magazine
"I apprehend no danger to our country from a foreign foe ... Our destruction, should it come at all, will be from another quarter. -- From the inattention of the people to the concerns of their government, from their carelessness and negligence, I must confess that I do apprehend some danger. I fear that they may place too implicit a confidence in their public servants, and fail properly to scrutinize their conduct; that in this way they may be made the dupes of designing men, and become the instruments of their own undoing. Make them intelligent, and they will be vigilant; give them the means of detecting the wrong, and they will apply the remedy."
-Daniel Webster-
(1782-1852), US Senator
Source: June 1, 1837; Works 1:403
"Can you live without answers? All of you, ask that of yourself. Can you live without answers? Because if you cannot, then most assuredly you will invent your own answers and they will comfort you. And all those who do not share your view will by their very existence strike fear and hatred into your heart. What god blesses this?"
-Steven Erikson-
"Do not blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who have rejoiced in their loss of freedom, who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of more security, more living fatly at the expense of the industrious."
-Marcus Cicero-
"A man's admiration for absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
[Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clerel, le Comte de Tocqueville] (1805-1859) French historian
"The people = government doctrine is equivalent to political infantilism -- an agreement to pretend that the citizen's wishes animate each restriction or exaction inflicted upon him."
-James Bovard-
American author, lecturer
"Men who look upon themselves born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent; selected from the rest of mankind their minds are early poisoned by importance; and the world they act in differs so materially from the world at large, that they have but little opportunity of knowing its true interests, and when they succeed to the government are frequently the most ignorant and unfit of any throughout the dominions."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
Source: Common Sense, February 14, 1776
"And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"Fortunately, political freedom and economic progress are natural partners. Despite capitalism's lingering reputation as the source of all the world's evils, the fact remains that every single democracy is a capitalist country. Half a century of economic experimentation proved beyond doubt that tyranny cannot yield prosperity. ... Socialism collapsed because it is a policy of unrestrained intervention. It tries to fix what is 'wrong' with the spontaneous, self-organizaing phenomenon called capitalism. But, of course, a natural process cannot be 'fixed.' ... Socialism is an ideology. Capitalism is a natural phenomenon."
-Michael Rothschild-
(1942-) American economist, professor
Source: BIONOMICS: Economy as Ecosystem, (1979)
"Let me explain this. There are, fundamentally, only two causes of the progress of the nineteenth century -- the same two causes which you will find at the root of any happy, benevolent, progressive era in human history. One cause is psychological, the other existential -- or: one pertains to man's consciousness, the other to the physical conditions of his existence. The first is reason, the second is freedom. And when I say "freedom," I do not mean poetic sloppiness, such as "freedom from want" or "freedom from fear" or "freedom from the necessity of earning a living." I mean "freedom from compulsion -- freedom from rule by physical force." Which means: political freedom."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
Source: Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World, (A lecture delivered at Yale University on February 17, 1960, at Brooklyn College on April 4, 1960, and at Columbia University on May 5, 1960. Published as a pamphlet by the Nathaniel Branden Institute in 1967, and now included as a chapter in the book, Philosophy: Who Needs It)
"Make no mistake about it -- and tell it to your Republican friends: capitalism and altruism cannot coexist in the same man or in the same society. Tell it to anyone who attempts to justify capitalism on the ground of the "public good" or the "general welfare" or "service to society" or the benefit it brings to the poor. All these things are true, but they are the by-products, the secondary consequences of capitalism -- not its goal, purpose or moral justification. The moral justification of capitalism is man's right to exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself; it is the recognition that man -- every man -- is an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others, not a sacrificial animal serving anyone's need."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
Source: Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World, (A lecture delivered at Yale University on February 17, 1960, at Brooklyn College on April 4, 1960, and at Columbia University on May 5, 1960. Published as a pamphlet by the Nathaniel Branden Institute in 1967, and now included as a chapter in the book, Philosophy: Who Needs It)
"If a multitude is to be subjected to a plan, it must be militarized. If individuals are allowed a free choice, the plan is thrown into confusion. Bureaucracy, under an absolute ruler, or rulers, is necessary. Popular consent can be secured only by rigorous censorship and prohibition of free discussion. Espionage is a necessary part of the system, and a considerable amount of terrorism. Since private expenditure must be controlled, it is wise to keep private incomes near a subsistence level and to dole out any surplus on collective pleasures such as free holidays. We shall not understand totalitarian tyranny unless we realize that it is the result of the planned economy."
-Dean Inge-
[William Ralph Inge] (1860-1954) English author, Anglican priest, professor of divinity at Cambridge, and Dean of St Paul's Cathedral
"Republicans don't know how to defend morally an individual's right to achieve wealth and to keep it, and that is why they fail. ... It's part and parcel with their ambivalence over the individualist heritage of the nation. ... One of the things that people have to understand is that the American Revolution was truly an epic revolution in the way individuals were perceived in relation to the rest of the society. Throughout history individuals had always been cogs in some machine; they'd always been something to be sacrificed for the king, the tribe, the gang, the chieftain, the society around them, the race, whatever, and the real revolution, in America especially, was a moral revolution. It was a moral revolution in that ... suddenly, with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the individual, his life, his well-being, his property, his happiness became central to our values, and that is what really made America unique. People came here from all over the world to try to escape the kind of oppression they had and experienced in the past. They came here for freedom; they came here for self-expression and self-realization, and America offered them that kind of a place."
-Robert Bidinotto-
"Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most times he will pick himself up and carry on."
-Sir Winston Churchill-
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
"Nearly all men can withstand adversity; if you want to test a man's character, give him power."
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
"There is no subjugation so perfect as that which keeps the appearance of freedom for in that way one captures volition itself."
-Jean-Jacques Rousseau-
(1712-1778) Political philosopher, educationist and essayist
Source: Emile, 1762
"[Political parties] serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community ... They are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion."
-George Washington-
Farewell Address, 1796
"In existing criminology there are concepts: a criminal man, a criminal profession, a criminal society, a criminal sect, and a criminal tribe, but there is no concept of a criminal state, or a criminal government, or criminal legislation. Consequently, the biggest crimes actually escape being called crimes."
-P. D. Ouspensky-
(1878-1947)
Source: A New Model of the Universe, 1931
"My policy has been, and will continue to be, while I have the honor to remain in the administration of the government, to be upon friendly terms with, but independent of, all the nations of the earth. To share in the broils of none. To fulfil our own engagements. To supply the wants, and be carriers for them all: Being thoroughly convinced that it is our policy and interest to do so."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: 1795 - letter to Gouverneur Morris, ref: Washington's Maxims, 54
"Neither wisdom nor good will is now dominant. Hope lies in dreams, in imagination and in the courage of those who dare to make dreams into reality."
-Jonas Salk-
"See, when the Government spends money, it creates jobs; whereas when the money is left in the hands of Taxpayers, God only knows what they do with it. Bake it into pies, probably. Anything to avoid creating jobs."
-Dave Barry-
"I hope I shall possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider the most enviable of all titles, the character of an honest man."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
"Before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience."
-Harper Lee-
(1926- ) American author, 1960 Pulitzer Prize winning novelist for 'To Kill A Mockingbird'
Source: To Kill a Mockingbird
"It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit."
-Noël Coward-
(1899-1973) British playwright
Source: Blithe Spirit
"That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false."
-Paul Valéry-
"To know what is right and not do it is the worst cowardice."
-Confucius-
[Kung Fu-tse] (551-479 B.C.)
"You can't learn too soon that the most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency."
-Somerset Maugham-
"When a gesture of respect is made mandatory, it becomes an act of submission."
-Pete Eyre-
"What is right is often forgotten by what is convenient."
-Bodie Thoene-
Source: Warsaw Requiem
"I would rather be right than President."
-Henry Clay-
(1777-1852) U. S. Senator, Speaker of the House of Representatives
Source: speech, 1850
"Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified and excusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let me label you as they may."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910)
"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."
-H.L. Mencken-
'A Little Book in C Major', p. 19 (1916)
"Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: letter to John Taylor, April 15, 1814
"Not being able to govern events, I govern myself."
-Michel de Montaigne-
[Michel Eyquem De Montaigne] (1532-1592) French Renaissance scholar, philosopher, writer
"I am, indeed, a king, because I know how to rule myself."
-Pietro Aretino-
(1492-1556) Italian author, playwright, poet and satirist
10 May 1537
"Are right and wrong convertible terms, dependant upon popular opinion?"
-William Lloyd Garrison-
(1805-1879) American abolitionist, journalist, and social reformer
"The principle that the majority have a right to rule the minority, practically resolves all government into a mere contest between tow bodies of men, as to which of them shall be masters, and which of them slaves; a contest, that -- however bloddy -- can, in the nature of things, never be finally closed, so long as man refuses to be a slave."
-Lysander Spooner-
"State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies; and this lie slips from its mouth: 'I, the state, am the people.'"
-Friedrich Nietzsche-
"The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair."
-H. L. Mencken-
"I didn't learn until I was in college about all the other cultures, and I should have learned that in the first grade. A first grader should understand that his or her culture isn't a rational invention; that there are thousands of other cultures and they all work pretty well; that all cultures function on faith rather than truth; that there are lots of alternatives to our own society. Cultural relativism is defensible and attractive. It's also a source of hope. It means we don't have to continue this way if we don't like it."
-Kurt Vonnegut-
"The art of punditry is the ability to fit any new evidence into your pre-existing narrative. "
-Grant Bosse-
"Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live."
-Oscar Wilde-
(1854-1900)
Source: The Soul of Man Under Socialism
"Where freedom is menaced or justice threatened or where aggression takes place, we cannot be and shall not be neutral."
-Jawaharlal Nehru-
"Miss Goldman is a communist; I am an individualist. She wishes to destroy the right of property, I wish to assert it. I make my war upon privilege and authority, whereby the right of property, the true right in that which is proper to the individual, is annihilated. She believes that co-operation would entirely supplant competition; I hold that competition in one form or another will always exist, and that it is highly desirable it should. But whether she or I be right, or both of us be wrong, of one thing I am sure; the spirit which animates Emma Goldman is the only one which will emancipate the slave from his slavery, the tyrant from his tyranny — the spirit which is willing to dare and suffer."
-Voltairine de Cleyre-
"Only a large-scale popular movement toward decentralization and self-help can arrest the present tendency toward statism... A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers."
-Aldous Huxley-
(1894-1963) Author
Source: Forward to 'Brave New World', 1932
"A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers.... The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth."
-Aldous Huxley-
(1894-1963) Author
Source: forward to Brave New World, 1946 edition
"In the end, more than freedom, they wanted security. They wanted a comfortable life, and they lost it all - security, comfort, and freedom. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again."
-Edward Gibbon-
(1737-1794) English historian and Member of Parliament
Source: Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1909
"It may be your intent to be our masters; how can it be ours to be your slaves?"
-Melians-
Source: Melians to Athenians, Peloponnesian War, 431 BC, ref: Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War
"Live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart.
Trouble no one about his religion.
Respect others in their views and demand that they respect yours.
Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life.
Seek to make your life long and of service to your people.
Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide.
Always give a word or sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend,
or even a stranger, if in a lonely place.
Show respect to all people, but grovel to none.
When you rise in the morning, give thanks for the light,
for your life, for your strength.
Give thanks for your food and for the joy of living.
If you see no reason to give thanks, the fault lies in yourself.
Abuse no one and no thing, for abuse turns the wise ones to fools
and robs the spirit of its vision.
When your time comes to die,
be not like those whose hearts are filled with fear of death,
so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time
to live their lives over again in a different way.
Sing your death song, and die like a hero going home."
-Tecumseh-
(1768-1813) Shawnee Chief
"Liberty ... was a two-headed boon. There was first, the liberty of the people as a whole to determine the forms of their own government, to levy their own taxes, and to make their own laws.... There was second, the liberty of the individual man to live his own life, within the limits of decency and decorum, as he pleased -- freedom from the despotism of the majority."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
1926
"As men's habits of mind differ, so that some more readily embrace one form of faith, some another, for what moves one to pray may move another to scoff, I conclude ... that everyone should be free to choose for himself the foundations of his creed, and that faith should be judged only by its fruits; each would then obey God freely with his whole heart, while nothing would be publicly honoured save justice and charity."
-Baruch Spinoza-
"The love of liberty with life is given,
And life itself the inferior gift of Heaven."
-John Dryden-
(1631-1700) English Poet
Source: Palamon and Arcite (bk. II, l. 291)
"If you're not paying for something, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold."
-blue_beetle-
on MetaFilter
"An elective despotism was not the government we fought for, but one which should not only be founded on true free principles, but in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among general bodies of magistracy, as that no one could transcend their legal limits without being effectually checked and restrained by the others."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
1782
Source: Notes on Va.
"When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
Source: Attributed.
"A Union of the States containing such an ingredient seemed to provide for its own destruction. The use of force against a State would look more like a declaration of war than an infliction of punishment and would probably be considered by the party attacked as a dissolution of all previous compacts by which it might be bound."
-James Madison-
"father of our Constitution"
rejecting a proposal at the 1787 constitutional convention to allow the federal government to suppress a seceding state
"Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own."
-Jonathan Swift-
"If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier... just so long as I'm the dictator."
-George W. Bush-
"Prohibition is an awful flop.
We like it.
It can't stop what it's meant to stop.
We like it.
It's left a trail of graft and slime,
It don't prohibit worth a dime,
It's filled our land with vice and crime.
Nevertheless, we're for it."
-Franklin P. Adams-
(1881-1960)
1931
"It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law... that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"Prohibition ended in 1933 because the nation’s most influential people, as well as the general public, acknowledged that it had failed. It had increased lawlessness and drinking and aggravated alcohol abuse."
-Thomas M. Coffey-
Source: The Long Thirst - Prohibition In America: 1920-1933
"Moderation in all things -- including moderation."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
"Laws to suppress tend to strengthen what they would prohibit. This is the fine point on which all legal professions of history have based their job security."
-Frank Herbert-
(1920-1986)
Source: Dune, 1965
"That which we call sin in others is experiment for us."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-
(1803-1882)
"I never hurt nobody but myself and that's nobody's business but my own."
-Billie Holiday-
(1915-1959) American Jazz Singer
"Laws provide against injury from others, but not from ourselves."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Notes on Religion
"It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system, that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country."
-Justice Louis D. Brandeis-
(1856-1941) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: wrote (in dissent) in 1932
"Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners."
-Edward Abbey-
"Powerful people cannot afford to educate the people they oppress ... because once you are truly educated, you will not ask for power. You will take it."
-John Henrik Clarke-
writer, historian, professor, academic pioneer
"In relation to the political decontamination of our public life, the government will embark upon a systematic campaign to restore the nation’s moral and material health. The whole educational system, theater, film, literature, the press and broadcasting -- all these will be used as a means to this end."
-Adolf Hitler-
(1889-1945) German Nazi Dictator
Source: Volkischer Beobachter, 23 March 1933
"Hitler’s dictatorship differed in one fundamental point from all its predecessors in history. It was the first dictatorship in the present period of modern technical development, a dictatorship which made complete use of all technical means for the domination of its own country. Through technical devices like the radio and the loud-speaker, eighty million people were deprived of independent thought. It was thereby possible to subject them to the will of one man."
-Albert Speer-
[Berthold Konrad Hermann Albert Speer] (1905-1981) German architect, Adolf Hitler's chief architect before becoming Minister of Armaments and War Production for the Third Reich
Source: at the Nuremberg Trials after World War II, 1946
"[T]he police do not and cannot protect law-abiding citizens from criminal violence. ... This thought may not occur to wealthy people who can shelter themselves in low-crime enclaves and who care not at all about their less fortunate neighbors. But no one knows it better than the police, who scrupulously preserve their own right to carry firearms on and off duty (and often after they retire as well) even while some of them advocate disarming those whom the police cannot protect."
-Nelson Lund-
Source: The Past and Future of the Individual's Right to Bear Arms, 31 GA LAW REV. 1, 61-63 (1996).
"[T]he next time you read or hear about a murder victim, a rape victim or an assault victim, I want you to preface it with the word 'unarmed' so that murder victims become 'unarmed murder victims'; this is especially true in rape. How many times have you read, 'An unidentified woman, heavily armed with a semi-automatic weapon was raped by a man wielding a knife.' No answer is necessary, right?"
-The Liberty Pole-
Source: A Letter to L. A. Times Advertiser Big 5., October, 1997.
"The account they give of your situation grieves me. I send you herewith a Bill for Ten Louis d'ors. I do not pretend to give such a Sum; I only lend it to you. When you shall return to your Country with a good Character, you cannot fail of getting into some Business, that will in time enable you to pay all your Debts. In that Case, when you meet with another honest Man in similar Distress, you must pay me by lending this Sum to him; enjoining him to discharge the Debt by a like operation, when he shall be able, and shall meet with another opportunity. I hope it may thus go thro' many hands, before it meets with a Knave that will stop its Progress. This is a trick of mine for doing a deal of good with a little money. I am not rich enough to afford much in good works, and so am obliged to be cunning and make the most of a little.
With best wishes for the success of your Memorial, and your future prosperity, I am, dear Sir, your most obedient servant"
-Benjamin Franklin-
to Benjamin Webb
"In recent years it has been suggested that the Second Amendment protects the "collective" right of states to maintain militias, while it does not protect the right of "the people" to keep and bear arms. If anyone entertained this notion in the period during which the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were debated and ratified, it remains one of the most closely guarded secrets of the eighteenth century, for no known writing surviving from the period between 1787 and 1791 states such a thesis."
-Steven P. Halbrook-
Attorney, author
Source: That Every Man Be Armed: The Evolution Of A Constitutional Right, P. 83 (The Independence Institute 1984.).
"A system of licensing and registration is the perfect device to deny gun ownership to the bourgeoisie."
-Vladimir Ilyich Lenin-
[Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov] (1870 - 1924), First Leader of the Soviet Union
Source: Questionable: supposedly from "The Beginning of the Revolution in Russia", Selected Works, Vol. I, International Publishers, New York, 1967, however, the quote does not appear in the text
"Any unarmed people are slaves, or are subject to slavery at any given moment. If the guns are taken out of the hands of the people and only the pigs have guns, then it's off to the concentration camps, the gas chambers, or whatever the fascists in America come up with. One of the democratic rights of the United States, the Second Amendment to the Constitution, gives the people the right to bear arms. However, there is a greater right; the right of human dignity that gives all men the right to defend themselves."
-Huey P. Newton-
(1942-1989) Founder of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense
"The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed the subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the supply of arms to the underdogs is a sine qua non for the overthrow of any sovereignty."
-Adolf Hitler-
(1889-1945) German Nazi Dictator
Source: Hitler's Table Talks 1941-1944, Edited by H.R. Trevor-Roper (London: Widenfeld and Nicolson, 1953), pp. 425-426.
"The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to permit the conquered Eastern peoples to have arms. History teaches that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by doing so. Indeed I would go so far as to say that the underdog is a sine qua non for the overthrow of any sovereignty. So let's not have any native militia or police. German troops alone will bear the sole responsibility for the maintenance of law and order."
-Adolf Hitler-
(1889-1945) German Nazi Dictator
Source: April 11, 1942, "Hitler's Table-Talk at the Fuehrer's Headquarters 1941-1942", Dr. Henry Picker, ed. (Athenaeum Verlag, Bonn, 1951)
"Laissez-nous faire, laissez-nous passer. Le monde va de lui meme."
"(Let us do, leave us alone. The world runs by itself.)"
-French Saying-
"Freedom all solace to man gives:
He lives at ease that freely lives."
-John Barbour-
"The market is not a place, a thing, or a collective entity. It is a process."
-Ludwig von Mises
(1881-1973) Economist and social philosopher, escaped from NAZI Germany
"For it is a habit of mankind to entrust to careless hope what they long for, and to use sovereign reason to thrust aside what they do not fancy."
-Thucydides-
[Thoukudídês] (c.455-c.400 BC) Greek historian, author of the History of the Peloponnesian War
Source: History of the Peloponnesian War p. 276 Book 4
"Socialism is the phantastic younger brother of despotism, which it wants to inherit. Socialism wants to have the fullness of state force which before only existed in despotism. ... However, it goes further than anything in the past because it aims at the formal destruction of the individual … who … can be used to improve communities by an expedient organ of government."
-Friedrich Nietzsche-
(1844-1900)
"A human group transforms itself into a crowd when it suddenly responds to a suggestion rather than to reasoning, to an image rather than to an idea, to an affirmation rather than to proof, to the repetition of a phrase rather than to arguments, to prestige rather than to competence."
-Jean-Francois Revel-
[Jean-Francois Ricard] (1924-2006) French politician, journalist, author, philosopher, member of the Académie française
"After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
[Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clerel, le Comte de Tocqueville] (1805-1859) French historian
"...I know not what treason is, if sapping and betraying the liberties of a people be not treason..."
-Cato-
John Trenchard (1662-1723) & Thomas Gordon (169?-1750)
"Treason doth never prosper, what's the reason?
For if it prosper, none dare call it Treason."
-Sir John Harrington-
(1561-1612) English courtier, wit, poet and satirist
Source: Epigrams, Book iv. Ep. 5.
"The attack on economics sprang rather from a dislike of the application of scientific methods to the investigation of social problems. The existence of a body of reasoning which prevented people from following their first impulsive reactions, and which compelled them to balance indirect effects, which could be seen only by exercising the intellect, against intense feeling caused by the direct observation of concrete suffering, then as now, occasioned intense resentment."
-FA Hayek-
(1933)
"There is a certain indolence in us, a wish not to be disturbed, which tempts us to think that when things are quiet, all is well. Subconsciously, we tend to give the preference to 'social peace,' though it be only apparent, because our lives and possessions seem then secure. Actually, human beings acquiesce too easily in evil conditions; they rebel far too little and too seldom. There is nothing noble about acquiescence in a cramped life or mere submission to superior force."
-A. J. Muste-
"There exist in the world only two great parties; that of those who prefer to live from the produce of their labor or of their property, and that of those who prefer to live on the labor or the property of others."
-Charles Dunoyer-
(1786-1862)
"Notice how some people even try to put socialists on the 'left' and fascists on the 'right' ... and then trap you into accepting the bizarre and evil notion that freedom is somehow a 'compromise' between, or a combination of, two allegedly 'opposite' collectivist extremes. This, of course, is absurd on its face, and actually leaves limited-government advocacy and the essence of freedom totally off the chart out of the picture."
-Rick Gaber-
"Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day."
-Theodore Roosevelt-
(1858-1919) 26th US President
April 19, 1906
"In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification."
-George Orwell-
[Eric Arthur Blair] (1903-1950) British author
Source: Politics and the English Language, 1946
"Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910)
Source: The Mysterious Stranger, 1916, Ch.9
"What chiefly distinguishes the daily press is its incurable fear of ideas, its constant effort to evade the discussion of fundamentals by translating all issues into a few elemental fears, its incessant reduction of all reflection to mere emotion."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"The worst that can happen under monarchy is rule by a single imbecile, but democracy often means the rule by an assembly of three or four hundred imbeciles."
-Robert Anton Wilson-
"Freedom is not merely the opportunity to do as one pleases; neither is it merely the opportunity to choose between set alternatives. Freedom is, first of all, the chance to formulate the available choices, to argue over them -- and then, the opportunity to choose."
-C. Wright Mills-
(1916-1962)
"Even more significant of the inherent weakness of the collectivist theories is the extraordinary paradox that from the assertion that society is in some sense more than merely the aggregate of all individuals their adherents regularly pass by a sort of intellectual somersault to the thesis that in order that the coherence of this larger entity be safeguarded it must be subjected to conscious control, that is, to the control of what in the last resort must be an individual mind. It thus comes about that in practice it is regularly the theoretical collectivist who extols individual reason and demands that all forces of society be made subject to the direction of a single mastermind, while it is the individualist who recognizes the limitations of the powers of individual reason and consequently advocates freedom as a means for the fullest development of the powers of the interindividual process."
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
"The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"Do not blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who have so enthusiastically acclaimed and adored him and rejoiced in their loss of freedom and danced in his path and given him triumphal processions. Blame the people who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of the new wonderful good society which shall now be Rome's, interpreted to mean more money, more ease, more security, and more living fatly at the expense of the industrious."
-Marcus Tullius Cicero-
(106-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman
"Government is instituted to protect property of every sort. ... This being the end of government, that alone is a just government, which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Essay entitled Property, published March 27, 1792 in the NATIONAL GAZETTE, and
reprinted in THE PAPERS OF JAMES MADISON, Vol. 14, p. 266 (University of Virginia Press 1982).
"We are Socialists, we are enemies of the capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with it's unfair salaries, with it's unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions."
-Adolf Hitler
(1889-1945) German Nazi Dictator
May 1 1927
"In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
"The more laws and restrictions there are, the poorer people become."
-Lao-Tzu-
[Li Erh] (570-490 BC) 'Old Sage', Father of Taoism
Source: Tao Te Ching
"During the time of the Soviet Union the role of the state in economy was made absolute, which eventually lead to the total non-competitiveness of the economy. That lesson cost us very dearly. I am sure nobody would want history to repeat itself.
We should also be aware that for during the last months, we have been witnessing the washout of the entrepreneurship spirit. That includes the principle of the personal responsibility -- of a businessman, an investor or a share-holder -- for his or her own decisions. There are no grounds to suggest that by putting the responsibility over to the state, one can achieve better results.
Another thing -- handling crisis must not turn into financial populism, into rejecting a responsible macro-economic policy. Unreasonable expansion of the budget deficit, accumulation of the national debt -- are as destructive as an adventurous stock market game."
-Vladimir Putin-
Source: Key-note speech, Davos World Economic Forum, 28 January, 2009
"There's a difference between us. You think the people of this country exist to provide you with position. I think your position exists to provide those people with freedom. And I go to make sure that they have it."
-William Wallace-
Braveheart
"Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought."
-Graham Greene-
(1904-1991)
"As the death toll mounts -- as many as 25 million in the former Soviet Union, 65 million in China, 1.7 million in Cambodia, and on and on -- the authors systematically show how and why, wherever the millenarian ideology of Communism was established, it quickly led to crime, terror, and repression. An extraordinary accounting, this book amply documents the unparalleled position and significance of Communism in the hierarchy of violence that is the history of the twentieth century."
-Harvard University Press-
Source: Harvard University Press' review of The Black Book of Communism (1999)
"Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on 'I am not too sure.' "
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes...known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.… No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Political Observations, 1795
"This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer. "
-Will Rogers-
"But to ban guns because criminals use them is to tell the innocent and law-abiding that their rights and liberties depend not on their own conduct, but on the conduct of the guilty and the lawless, and that the law will permit them to have only such rights and liberties as the lawless will allow. ... For society does not control crime, ever, by forcing the law-abiding to accommodate themselves to the expected behavior of criminals. Society controls crime by forcing the criminals to accommodate themselves to the expected behavior of the law-abiding."
-Jeff Snyder-
Source: "Who's Under Assault in the 'Assault Weapon' Ban?", American Rifleman, October 1994, p. 53; excerpted from the Washington Times, August 25, 1994
"Riding a bike is 113 times more dangerous than hunting with all those 'gun nuts'! The NSC [National Safety Council] reports that out of 100,000 bicyclists 905 had injuries requiring hospital treatment. Out of the same number of fisherman, 141 required treatment and out of 100,000 golfers 104 were injured. Please compare that to the 8 hunters out of 100,000 who were injured in 1991 (last year for data)."
-The Proponent-
Source: Proud Hunters, The Proponent, December, 1995, P. 3.
"To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them."
-George Mason-
(1725-1792), drafted the Virgina Declaration of Rights, ally of James Madison and George Washington
Source: June 14, 1788, in the Virginia Convention on the ratification of the Constitution,
in_Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution,_
Jonathan Elliot, ed., v.3 p.380 (Philadelphia, 1836)
"The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head.
Put it in his hand and it's good-bye to the Bill of Rights."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"No kingdom can be secured otherwise than by arming the people. The possession of arms is the distinction between a freeman and a slave. He, who has nothing, and who himself belongs to another, must be defended by him, whose property he is, and needs no arms. But he, who thinks he is his own master, and has what he can call his own, ought to have arms to defend himself, and what he possesses; else he lives precariously, and at discretion."
-James Burgh-
(1714-1775) was an English Whig politician
Source: "Political Disquisitions: Or, an Enquiry into Public Errors, Defects, and Abuses" (London, 1774-1775)
"Conventional society has as its guiding, unspoken, maxim the censorious attitude: If we can't make the unconventional people act like us, the least we can do is make them miserable."
-Sydney Harris-
"I love agitation and investigation and glory in defending unpopular truth against popular error."
-James A. Garfield-
(1831-1881) 20th President of the United States (1881)
"Thus arbitrary power will have divided men of superior intelligence into two groups: the former will be seditious, the latter corrupt..."
-Benjamin Constant-
[Henri-Benjamin Constant de Rebecque] (1767-1830) Swiss-born thinker, writer and French politician.
Source: The Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation (1814), reprinted in Political Writings, translated and edited by Bancamaria Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 126. Later editions than the 1814 one had "despotism" instead of "abitrary power."
"Treaties do not confer powers not authorized by the Constitution."
-Reid v Covert, 354 US 1 (1957)-
"As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy."
-Abraham Lincoln-
and yet he would enslave entire states, and be their master...
“Socialized medicine is the keystone to the arch of the socialist state.”
-Vladimir Lenin-
Source: No record of Lenin speaking or writing this has been found. The quote first appeared in Lawrence Sullivan's 'The Case Against Socialized Medicine' (1948) and later appeared in a pamphlet circulated in huge quantities by the American Medical Association entitled 'The Voluntary Way is the American Way.'
“Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished ... The social psychologist of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for more than one generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen.”
-Johann Gottlieb Fichte-
(1762-1814) German philosopher, psychologist, considered the father of German nationalism
Source: Prussian University in Berlin, 1810, quoted by The Impact of Science on Society by Bertrand Russell, 1952
"If the public are bound to yield obedience to laws to which they cannot give their approbation, they are slaves to those who make such laws and enforce them."
-John Adams-
As Candidus, Boston Gazette, January 20, 1772
“Are we at last brought to such a humiliating and debasing degradation, that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own defence? Where is the difference between having our arms in our own possession and under our own direction, and having them under the management of Congress? If our defence be the real object of having those arms, in whose hands can they be trusted with more propriety, or equal safety to us, as in our own hands?”
-Patrick Henry-
June 9, 1788
"Any single man must judge for himself whether circumstances warrant obedience or resistance to the commands of the civil magistrate; we are all qualified, entitled, and morally obliged to evaluate the conduct of our rulers. This political judgment, moreover, is not simply or primarily a right, but like self-preservation, a duty to God. As such it is a judgment that men cannot part with according to the God of Nature. It is the first and foremost of our inalienable rights without which we can preserve no other."
-John Locke-
(1632-1704) English philosopher and political theorist. Considered the ideological progenitor of the American Revolution and who, by far, was the most often non-biblical writer quoted by the Founding Fathers of the USA.
"The attack on economics sprang rather from a dislike of the application of scientific methods to the investigation of social problems. The existence of a body of reasoning which prevented people from following their first impulsive reactions, and which compelled them to balance indirect effects, which could be seen only by exercising the intellect, against intense feeling caused by the direct observation of concrete suffering, then as now, occasioned intense resentment."
-FA Hayek-
(1933)
"[g]uard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are ruined."
-Patrick Henry-
A Speech to the Virginia Ratifying Convention, June 5, 1778
William Roper: "So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!"
Sir Thomas More: "Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?"
William Roper: "Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!"
Sir Thomas More: "Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!"
-'A Man for All Seasons'-
"It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished. But if innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, perhaps to die, then the citizen will say, 'whether I do good or whether I do evil is immaterial, for innocence itself is no protection,' and if such an idea as that were to take hold in the mind of the citizen that would be the end of security whatsoever."
-John Adams-
"That these are our grievances which we have thus laid before his majesty, with that freedom of language and sentiment which becomes a free people claiming their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate."
–Thomas Jefferson-
A Summary View of the Rights of British America, August, 1774
"If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace."
-Thomas Paine-
"The time is now near at hand which must probably determine whether Americans are to be freemen or slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their houses and farms are to be pillaged and destroyed, and themselves consigned to a state of wretchedness from which no human efforts will deliver them."
-George Washington-
"... as all history informs us, there has been in every State & Kingdom a constant kind of warfare between the governing & governed: the one striving to obtain more for its support, and the other to pay less. And this has alone occasioned great convulsions, actual civil wars, ending either in dethroning of the Princes, or enslaving of the people. Generally indeed the ruling power carries its point, the revenues of princes constantly increasing, and we see that they are never satisfied, but always in want of more. The more the people are discontented with the oppression of taxes; the greater need the prince has of money to distribute among his partisans and pay the troops that are to suppress all resistance, and enable him to plunder at pleasure. There is scarce a king in a hundred who would not, if he could, follow the example of Pharaoh, get first all the peoples money, then all their lands, and then make them and their children servants for ever."
-Benjamin Franklin-
"It is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth - and listen to the song of that siren, till she transforms us into beasts. Is this the part of wise men, engaged in a great and arduous struggle for liberty? Are we disposed to be of the number of those, who having eyes, see not, and having ears, hear not, the things which so nearly concern their temporal salvation? For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it might cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst, and to provide for it."
-Patrick Henry-
"Show me a young Conservative and I'll show you someone with no heart. Show me an old Liberal and I'll show you someone with no brains."
-Winston Churchill-
"The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them."
-Patrick Henry-
"Parliamentary government is simply a mild and disguised form of compulsion. We agree to try strength by counting heads instead of breaking heads, but the principle is exactly the same. ... The minority gives way not because it is convinced that it is wrong, but because it is convinced that it is a minority."
-James Fitzjames Stephen-
"So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men."
-Voltaire-
ODE TO THE WELFARE STATE
Democratic Dialogue
Father must I go to work?
No my lucky son,
We’re living now on Easy Street
On dough from Washington.
We’ve left it up to Uncle Sam
So don’t get exercised.
Nobody has to give a damn –
We’ve all been subsidized.
But if Sam treats us all so well
And feeds us milk and honey,
Please daddy, tell me what the hell
He’s going to use for money.
Don’t worry Bub, there’s not a hitch
In this here noble plan –
He simply soaks the filthy rich
And helps the common man.
But father, won’t there come a time
When they run out of cash
And we have left them not a dime
When things will go to smash?
My faith in you is shrinking, son,
You nosy little brat;
You do too much thinking, son,
To be a Democrat.
-Rep Clarence J. Brown-
R-Ohio
A poem put into the Congressional Record
NY Daily News, November 4, 1949, in response to a Harry S Truman speech.
"Violent resistance against the power of the state is the last resort of the minority in its effort to break loose from the oppression of the majority. ... The citizen must not be so narrowly circumscribed in his activities that, if he thinks differently from those in power, his only choice is either to perish or to destroy the machinery of state."
-Ludwig von Mises-
(1881-1973) Economist and social philosopher
Source: Liberalism. The Classical Tradition (1927), Fourth American Edition (Irvington-on-Hudson: Foundation for Economic Education, 1996), p. 59
"Let us render the tyrant no aid; let us not hold the light by which he can trace the footprints of our flying brother."
-Frederick Douglass-
[Frederick Baily] (1818-1895), escaped slave, Abolitionist, author, editor of the North Star and later the New National Era
Source: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself [1845] (Toronto: New American Library, 1968), p. 106
"Back in my teaching days, many years ago, one of the things I liked to ask the class to consider was this: Imagine a government agency with only two tasks: (1) building statues of Benedict Arnold and (2) providing life-saving medications to children. If this agency's budget were cut, what would it do?
The answer, of course, is that it would cut back on the medications for children. Why? Because that would be what was most likely to get the budget cuts restored. If they cut back on building statues of Benedict Arnold, people might ask why they were building statues of Benedict Arnold in the first place."
-Thomas Sowell-
"... in all countries where personal freedom is valued, however much each individual may rely on legal redress, the right of each to carry arms -- and these the best and the sharpest -- for his own protection in case of extremity, is a right of nature indelible and irrepressible, and the more it is sought to be repressed the more it will recur."
-James Paterson-
(1823-1894) English jurist, historian
Source: Commentaries on the Liberty of the Subject and the Laws of England Relating to the Security of the Person, (London, 1877), Vol. 1, p. 441; quoted in Joyce Malcolm, To Keep and Bear Arms. The Origins of an Anglo-American Right (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 169-170
"A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body."
-John Stuart Mill-
(1806-1873) English philosopher and economist
Source: On Liberty
"Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society... then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them... We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant."
-Karl R. Popper-
"It's the misfortune of all Countries,
that they sometimes lie under a unhappy necessity
to defend themselves by Arms
against the ambition of their Governors,
and to fight for what's their own.
If those in government are heedless of reason,
the people must patiently submit to Bondage,
or stand upon their own Defence;
which if they are enabled to do,
they shall never be put upon it,
but their Swords may grow rusty in their hands;
for that Nation is surest to live in Peace,
that is most capable of making War;
and a Man that hath a Sword by his side,
shall have least occasion to make use of it."
-John Trenchard-
(1662-1723)
Source: and Walter Moyle (1672-1721), "An Argument, shewing; that a standing Army is Inconsistent with a Free Government and Absolutely Destructive to the Constitution of the English Monarchy," (London, 1697)
"The tragedy of the police state is that it always regards all opposition as a crime, and there are no degrees."
-Lord Vansittart-
(1881-1957)
Source: Speech, 1947
"The state represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the state is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence."
-Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi-
(1869-1948)
"The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women..."
-Judge Learned Hand-
(1872-1961), Judge, U. S. Court of Appeals
Source: Speech, 21 May 1944
"If what is best in mankind, and what its progress depends on, manifests itself primarily in the individual and only secondarily in the mass, then our objectives should be to maintain such freedom as allows the individual to think and speak for himself."
-Louis J. Halle-
(1910-1998) Professor at the Graduate Institute of International Studies, Geneva; policy maker at U.S. Department of State
Source: The Ideological Imagination, 1972
"The type and formula of most schemes of philanthropy or humanitarianism is this: A and B put their heads together to decide what C shall be made to do for D. The radical vice of all these schemes, from a sociological point of view, is that C is not allowed a voice in the matter, and his position, character, and interests, as well as the ultimate effects on society through C's interests, are entirely overlooked. I call C the Forgotten Man."
-William Graham Sumner-
(1840-1910) American academic and professor at Yale College
Source: William Graham Sumner's Essay, "The Forgotten Man"
"The Government of the absolute majority instead of the Government of the people is but the Government of the strongest interests; and when not efficiently checked, it is the most tyrannical and oppressive that can be devised."
-John C. Calhoun-
"If you think there is freedom of the press in the United States, I tell you there is no freedom of the press... They come out with the cheap shot. The press should be ashamed of itself. They should come to both sides of the issue and hear both sides and let the American people make up their minds."
-Bill Moyers-
(1934- ) Journalist
Source: Columbia Journalism Review, March/April 1982
Umm... "Both" sides...?
"Social positivism only accepts duties, for all and towards all. Its constant social viewpoint cannot include any notion of rights, for such notion always rests on individuality. We are born under a load of obligations of every kind, to our predecessors, to our successors, to our contemporaries. These obligations then increase or accumulate, for it is some time before we can return any service. ... Any human right is therefore as absurd as immoral. Since there are no divine rights anymore, this concept must therefore disappear completely as related only to the preliminary regime and totally inconsistent with the final state where there are only duties based on functions."
-Auguste Comte-
[Isidore Marie Auguste François Xavier Comte] (1798-1857) French philosopher, was the founder of Positivism and Sociology
Source: Le catéchisme positiviste (1852), reproduit in Alain Laurent, L'Individu et ses ennemis (Paris: Hachette, 1987), pp. 255-256.
"Those who are convinced they have a monopoly on The Truth always feel that they are only saving the world when they slaughter the heretics."
-Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.-
(1888-1965)
"Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves."
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
"Countries are well cultivated, not as they are fertile, but as they are free."
-Charles de Montesquieu-
[Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat] (1689-1755) Baron de Montesquieu
"Government, as we know it, is the real enemy. It produces nothing except distortions of social life, through war, taxation, regulation, and the general redistribution of wealth and resources."
-Joe Sobran-
"'Need' now means wanting someone else's money.
'Greed' now means wanting to keep your own.
'Compassion' is when a politician arranges the transfer."
-Joe Sobran-
"We do not need more intellectual power, we need more moral power. We do not need more knowledge, we need more character. We do not need more government, we need more culture. We do not need more law, we need more religion. We do not need more of the things that are seen, we need more of the things that are unseen.... If the foundation is firm, the superstructure will stand."
-Calvin Coolidge-
(1873-1933), 30th US President
"So when any of the four pillars of government, are mainly shaken, or weakened (which are religion, justice, counsel, and treasure), men had need to pray for fair weather."
-Francis Bacon-
(1561-1626) Philosopher, British Lord Chancellor
"The very scientist who, in the service of the sinful king, was the brain behind the horror of the labyrinth, quite as readily can serve the purposes of freedom. But the hero-heart must be at hand. ... Centuries of husbandry, decades of diligent culling, the work of numerous hearts and hands, have gone into the hackling, sorting, and spinning of this tightly twisted yarn. Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us — the labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path, and where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world."
-Joseph Campbell-
"In 1913, exactly a century ago, the United States was a flourishing, economically advanced country. Its real output per capita was the world's highest. It produced a great abundance of agricultural products and was a leading exporter of cotton, wheat, and many other farm products. Yet it also had the world's largest industrial sector, producing as much manufactured output as France, Germany, and the United Kingdom combined. It brought forth new technological marvels almost daily, and its cities featured well paved and lighted streets, automobiles, modern sewerage and water-supply systems, central electrical-supply systems, skyscrapers, street cars, subways, and frequent intercity train service. During the preceding fifty years, its real income per capita had grown by about 2 percent per year, on average, and its total real output by about 4 percent per year, on average. All races, classes, and regions participated in this progress. In 1913, the rate of unemployment was 4.3 percent, and the price level was roughly the same as its average during the nineteenth century.
Yet the United States in 1913 had no federal income tax, no central bank, no social security taxes, no general sales taxes, no Securities and Exchange Commission, no Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, no Department of Health and Human Services, no National Labor Relations Board, no federal this, that, and the other as far as the eye can see."
-Robert Higgs-
with a look at life in the United States before the institution of the Federal Reserve and the income tax. Needless to say, it's pretty much been downhill ever since.
"All religions united with government are more or less inimical to liberty. All, separated from government, are compatible with liberty."
-Henry Clay-
(1777-1852) U. S. Senator, Speaker of the House of Representatives
Source: Speech, 24 March 1818
"Freedom of religion means the right of the individual to choose and to adhere to whichever religious beliefs he may prefer, to join with others in religious associations to express these beliefs, and to incur no civil disabilities because of his choice..."
-Joseph L. Blau-
(1909-1986) Professor Emeritus of Religion, Columbia University
Source: Cornerstones of Religious Freedom in America 1949, quoted from Menendez and Doerr, The Great Quotations on Religious Freedom
"It is in our lives and not our words that our religion must be read."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"When I shall learn that in France the citizen, by whatever description he is qualified, is in a perfect state of legal security with regard to his life, to his property, to the uncontrolled disposal of his person, to the free use of his industry, and his faculties; that he is protected in the beneficial enjoyment of the estates to which, by the course of settled law, he was born, or is provided with a fair compensation for them; that he is maintained in the full fruition of the advantages belonging to the state and condition of life in which he had lawfully engaged himself, or is supplied with an equitable equivalent; when I am assured that a simple citizen may decently express his sentiments upon public affairs without hazard to his life or liberty, even though against a predominant and fashionable opinion; when I know all this of France, I shall be as well pleased"
-Edmund Burke-
"Blandishments will not fascinate us, nor will threats of a 'halter' intimidate. For, under God, we are determined that wheresoever, whensoever, or howsoever we shall be called to make our exit, we will die free men."
-Josiah Quincy-
"To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonoured. That is government; that is it's justice; that is it's morality."
-Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
(1809-1865) French mutualist political philosopher
Source: The General Idea of the Revolution in the 19th Century, 1851
"Men naturally rebel against the injustice of which they are victims. Thus, when plunder is organized by law for the profit of those who make the law, all the plundered classes try somehow to enter -- by peaceful or revolutionary means -- into the making of laws. According to their degree of enlightenment, these plundered classes may propose one of two entirely different purposes when they attempt to attain political power: Either they may wish to stop lawful plunder, or they may wish to share in it."
-- Frederic Bastiat
(1801-1850) French economist, statesman, and author. He did most of his writing during the years just before -- and immediately following -- the French Revolution of February 1848
Source: "The Law" by Frederic Bastiat (1848)
"To tax the community for the advantage of a class is not protection, it is plunder."
-Benjamin Disraeli-
(1804-1881) Prime Minister of England, British statesman, novelist
"The natural effort of every individual to better his own condition is so powerful that it is alone, and without any assistance, not only capable of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity, but of surmounting a hundred impertinent obstructions with which the folly of human laws too often encumbers its operations."
-Adam Smith-
(1723-1790) Scottish philosopher and economist
"Congress will ever exercise their powers to levy as much money as the people can pay. They will not be restrained from direct taxes by the consideration that necessity does not require them."
-Melancton Smith-
(1744-1798) opponent of Alexander Hamilton during New York's ratifying convention
"I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Letter to William Ludlow, 1824
"A first grader should understand that his or her culture isn't a rational invention; that there are thousands of other cultures and they all work pretty well; that all cultures function on faith rather than truth; that there are lots of alternatives to our own society. Cultural relativity is defensible and attractive. It's also a source of hope. It means we don't have to continue this way if we don't like it."
-Kurt Vonnegut-
"When more of the people's sustenance is exacted through the form of taxation than is necessary to meet the just obligations of government, such exaction becomes ruthless extortion and a violation of the fundamental principles of a free government."
-Grover Cleveland-
(1837-1908) 22nd & 24th US President
Source: Second Annual Message, December 1886
"From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs."
-Karl Marx-
(1818-1883) Father of Communism, Author of the 'Communist Manifesto'
Source: The Criticism of the Gotha Program, 1875
"Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle."
-Franklin D. Roosevelt-
(1882-1945), 32nd US President
Source: Franklin D. Roosevelt: "Address at Worcester, Mass.," October 21, 1936
"I don't like the income tax. Every time we talk about these taxes we get around to the idea of 'from each according to his capacity and to each according to his needs'. That's socialism. It's written into the Communist Manifesto. Maybe we ought to see that every person who gets a tax return receives a copy of the Communist Manifesto with it so he can see what's happening to him."
-T. Coleman Andrews-
Commissioner of Internal Revenue
Source: May 25, 1956 in US. News & World Report
"We are all doubtless bound to contribute a certain portion of our income to the support of charitable and other useful public institutions. But it is a part of our duty also to apply our contributions in the most effectual way we can to secure this object. The question then is whether this will not be better done by each of us appropriating our whole contribution to the institutions within our reach, under our own eye, and over which we can exercise some useful control? Or would it be better that each should divide the sum he can spare among all the institutions of his State or the United States? Reason and the interest of these institutions themselves, certainly decide in favor of the former practice."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on the objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: 1792, in disapproval of Congress appropriating $15,000 to assist some French refugees
"To lay taxes to provide for the general welfare of the United States, that is to say, 'to lay taxes for the purpose of providing for the general welfare.' For the laying of taxes is the power, and the general welfare the purpose for which the power is to be exercised. They are not to lay taxes ad libitum for any purpose they please; but only to pay the debts or provide for the welfare of the Union."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"The war against illegal plunder has been fought since the beginning of the world. But how is... legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. Then abolish this law without delay ... If such a law is not abolished immediately it will spread, multiply and develop into a system."
-Frederic Bastiat-
(1801-1850) French economist, statesman, and author. He did most of his writing during the years just before -- and immediately following -- the French Revolution of February 1848
Source: "The Law" by Frederic Bastiat (1848)
"An unlimited power to tax involves, necessarily, a power to destroy;
because there is a limit beyond which no institution and no property can bear taxation."
-Justice John Marshall-
(1755-1835) US Supreme Court Chief Justice
"The root of the evil... lay not in corruption but in the system which bred it, the alliance between industrialists and politicians which produced benefits in the form of tariffs, public lands, and federal subsidies."
-Samuel P. Hays-
Source: The Response to Industrialism 1885-1914, p. 26, describing the view of E.L. Godkin, who founded the weekly Nation
"We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debt, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our calling and our creeds... [we will] have no time to think, no means of calling our miss-managers to account but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers... And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for [another ]... till the bulk of society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery... And the fore-horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Letter to Samuel Kercheval, Monticello, July 12, 1816
"Because of what appears to be a lawful command on the surface, many Citizens, because of their respect for what appears to be law, are cunningly coerced into waiving their rights due to ignorance."
-United States Supreme Court-
Source: US. v. Minker, 350 US 179 at 187
"Let me point this out now. Your income tax is 100 percent voluntary tax, and your liquor tax is 100 percent enforced tax. Now, the situation is as different as night and day. Consequently, your same rules just will not apply..."
-Dwight E. Avis-
former head of the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax Division of the IRS
Source: testifying before a House Ways and Means subcommittee in 1953
"Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes. Over and over again the Courts have said that there is nothing sinister in so arranging affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everyone does it, rich and poor alike and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands."
-Judge Learned Hand-
(1872-1961), Judge, U. S. Court of Appeals
Source: in the case of Gregory v. Helvering 69 F.2d 809, 810 (2d Cir. 1934), aff'd, 293 U.S. 465, 55 S.Ct. 266, 79 L.Ed. 596 (1935)
"No man - prince, peasant, pope - has all the light, who says else is a mountebank. I claim no private lien on truth, only a liberty to seek it, prove it in debate, and to be wrong a thousand times to reach a single rightness. It is that liberty they fear. They want us to be driven to God like sheep, not running to him like lovers, shouting joy!"
-Morris West-
"The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"To lay with one hand the power of government on the property of the citizen, and with the other to bestow it on favored individuals... is none the less robbery because it is... called taxation."
-United States Supreme Court-
Source: Loan Association v. Topeka (18__ )
"Legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of ways; hence, there are an infinite number of plans for organizing it: tariffs, protection, bonuses, subsidies, incentives, the progressive income tax, free education, the right to employment, the right to profit, the right to wages, the right to relief, the right to the tools of production, interest free credit, etc., etc. And in the aggregate of all these plans, in respect to what they have in common, legal plunder, that goes under the name of socialism."
-Frederic Bastiat-
(1801-1850) French economist, statesman, and author. He did most of his writing during the years just before -- and immediately following -- the French Revolution of February 1848
Source: Essays, 61
"Moral Action is that great and only Experiment, in which all riddles of the most manifold appearances explain themselves. Whoso understands it, and in rigid sequence of Thought can lay it open, is forever master of Nature."
-Novalis-
"It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning."
-Henry Ford-
(1863-1947) Founder of Ford Motor Company
"Our federal tax system is, in short, utterly impossible, utterly unjust and completely counterproductive, [it] reeks with injustice and is fundamentally un-American... it has earned a rebellion and it's time we rebelled."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
Source: May 1983, Williamsburg, VA
"... [the 16th Amendment] conferred no new power of taxation... [and]... prohibited the ... power of income taxation possessed by Congress from the beginning from being taken out of the category of indirect taxation to which it inherently belonged..."
-United States Supreme Court-
Source: Stanton v. Baltic Mining (1916)
"If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order, he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible. He will therefore have to use what knowledge he can achieve, not to shape the results as the craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather to cultivate a growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner in which the gardener does this for his plants."
-Friedrich Hayek-
"I know, both by reason and by experience, that if you ever need a gun, whether in Katmandu or Los Angeles, at that moment you will have never needed anything so badly in your life."
-Carmine Sarracino-
American author, poet, professor
Source: American Guardian, p. 40, September, 1998
"[A] public policy of simply discouraging people from owning or using firearms is not, in and of itself, a constitutionally permissible objective, any more than discouraging people from religious observance would be permissible to some oh-so-progressive government that considered religion as hopelessly declassé as progressives nowadays consider the right to keep and bear arms .... And any statute or regulation that burdens the right to keep and bear arms on the ground that guns are a public health hazard should enjoy the same frosty reception in court that would be given a statute or regulation that burdened the free exercise of religion as a mental hazard."
-Daniel D. Polsby-
(1945-) Dean of the Law School and Professor of Law at George Mason University
Source: Treating the Second Amendment Like Normal Constitutional Law, REASON, March 1996, at 36.
"Tell the American people never to lose their guns. As long as they keep their guns in their hands, whatever happened here [China] will never happen there."
-Donald S. MacAlvaney-
American writer, editor of The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor
Source: quoting a female student from Beijing Red China repeating her parents last words to her, Toward A New World Order, 44 (2nd ed. 1992).
"The object of this clause [the right of the people to keep and bear arms] is to secure a well-armed militia.... But a militia would be useless unless the citizens were enabled to exercise themselves in the use of warlike weapons. To preserve this privilege, and to secure to the people the ability to oppose themselves in military force against the usurpations of government, as well as against enemies from without, that government is forbidden by any law or proceeding to invade or destroy the right to keep and bear arms."
-John Norton Pomeroy-
(1828-1885) American lawyer, legal writer
Source: An Introduction to the Constitutional Law of the United States 239, at 152 (New York, Hurd & Houghton 3d ed., rev. & enl. 1875).
"The only idea they have ever manifested as to what is a government of consent, is this -- that it is one to which everybody must consent, or be shot."
-Lysander Spooner-
(1808-1887) Political theorist, activist, abolitionist
"The monetary managers are fond of telling us that they have substituted 'responsible money management' for the gold standard. But there is no historic record of responsible paper money management ... The record taken as a whole is one of hyperinflation, devaluation and monetary chaos."
-Henry Hazlitt-
"Governments, whatever their pretensions otherwise, try to preserve themselves by holding the individual down ... Government itself, indeed, may be reasonably defined as a conspiracy against him. Its one permanent aim, whatever its form, is to hobble him sufficiently to maintain itself."
-H. L. Mencken-
"We are taxed in our bread and our wine, in our incomes and our investments, on our land and on our property not only for base creatures who do not deserve the name of men, but for foreign nations, complaisant nations who will bow to us and accept our largesse and promise us to assist in the keeping of the peace - these mendicant nations who will destroy us when we show a moment of weakness or our treasury is bare, and surely it is becoming bare! We are taxed to maintain legions on their soil, in the name of law and order and the Pax Romana, a document which will fall into dust when it pleases our allies and our vassals. We keep them in precarious balance only with our gold. Is the heartblood of our nation worth these? Were they bound to us with ties of love, they would not ask our gold. They take our very flesh, and they hate and despise us. And who shall say we are worthy of more? ... When a government becomes powerful it is destructive, extravagant and violent; it is an usurer which takes bread from innocent mouths and deprives honorable men of their substance, for votes with which to perpetuate itself."
-Marcus Tullius Cicero-
(106-43 B.C.) Roman Statesman, Philosopher and Orator
54 B.C.
"One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny, and is likely to interfere with happiness in all kinds of ways."
-Bertrand Russell-
"Every law is a gun."
-Stefan Molyneux-
"The lust for power, for dominating others, inflames the heart more than any other passion."
-Cornelius Tacitus-
(55-117 A.D.)
Source: The Histories
"... ours is a sick profession marked by incompetence, lack of training, misconduct and bad manners. Ineptness, bungling, malpractice, and bad ethics can be observed in court houses all over this country every day ... these incompetents have a seeming unawareness of the fundamental ethics of the profession. ... the harsh truth is that ... we may well be on our way to a society, overrun by hordes of lawyers, hungry as locusts, and brigades of judges in numbers never before contemplated."
-Justice Warren E. Burger-
Chief Justice, U. S. Supreme Court
"Strange times are these in which we live when old and young are taught in falsehood's school. And the one man who dares to tell the truth is called at once a lunatic and fool."
-Plato-
(429-347 BC)
"A stupid man's report of what a clever man says is never accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something that he can understand."
-Bertrand Russell-
"Socialism is not in the least what it pretends to be. It is not the pioneer of a better and finer world, but the spoiler of what thousands of years of civilization have created. It does not build, it destroys. For destruction is the essence of it. It produces nothing, it only consumes what the social order based on private ownership in the means of production has created."
-Ludwig von Mises-
(1881-1973) Economist and social philosopher
Source: "Socialism", 1922
"When all government, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the Center of all Power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: (1821) in a letter to Gideon Granger.
"The value of paper money is precisely the value of a politician's promise, as high or low as you put that; the value of gold is protected by the inability of politicians to manufacture it."
-Sir William Rees-Mogg-
"Freedom is the only worthy goal in life. It is won by disregarding things that lie beyond our control ... stop aspiring to be anyone other than your own best self: for that does fall within your control."
–Epictetus-
"[Y]ou will understand the game behind the curtain too well not to perceive the old trick of turning every contingency into a resource for accumulating force in the government."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: letter to Thomas Jefferson, March 14, 1794
'Never let a crisis go to waste...?'
"The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau. What an alluring utopia! What a noble cause to fight!"
-Ludwig von Mises-
(1881-1973) Economist and social philosopher
"It's ours to right the great wrong done,
Ten thousand years ago --
The State, conceived in blood and hate,
Remains our only foe!
Oh, join us, brothers, join us, sisters,
Victory is nigh!
Come meet your fate, destroy the State,
And raise black banners high!"
-Murray N. Rothbard-
(1926-1995) Dean of the Austrian School of Economics
"Reason obeys itself; and ignorance does whatever is dictated to it."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
Source: Rights of Man
"Government is instituted for the common good; for the protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness of the people; and not for profit, honor, or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men; therefore, the people alone have an incontestable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to institute government; and to reform, alter, or totally change the same, when their protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness require it."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804)
Source: Federalist No. 22, December 14, 1787
"Our legislators are not sufficiently appraised of the rightful limits of their power; that their true office is to declare and enforce our natural rights and duties, and to take none of them from us. No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another; and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him; every man is under the natural duty of contributing to the necessities of the society; and this is all the laws should enforce on him; and, no man having the right to be the judge between himself and another, it is his natural duty to submit to the umpirage of an impartial third [party]. When the laws have declared and enforced all this, they have fulfilled their functions; and the idea is quite unfounded, that on entering into society we give up any natural right."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: letter to Francis W. Gilmer, June 7, 1816
"The demand that defective people be prevented from propagating equally defective offspring... represents the most humane act of mankind."
-Adolf Hitler-
(1889-1945) German Nazi Dictator
Source: Mein Kampf
"Be it or be it not true that Man is shapen in iniquity and conceived in sin, it is unquestionably true that Government is begotten of aggression, and by aggression."
-Herbert Spencer-
(1820-1903) British author, economist, philosopher
1850
"[The Income Tax is] a vicious, inequitable, unpopular, impolitic and socialist act."
-New York Times-
1894
"Tax reform is taking the taxes off thingsthat have been taxed in the past and putting taxes on things that haven't been taxed before."
-Art Buchwald-
(1925-2006) American Humorist and Columnist
"If the major opportunities for future growth of government lie in the area of conventional taxation, are there any defenses available to the citizenry? ... Perhaps the most fruitful advice comes in two parts. The first piece of advice is to avoid war and the rumor of war: this is history's greatest boon to the tax man. ... The second piece of advice is to seek ways of inhibiting government's ability conveniently to increase its collections. Possibly the very increase in that ability that is in prospect can be turned to account by a constitutional provision which forbade the income tax, and perhaps even the storage of information regarding individual incomes by third parties, including government."
-Benjamin Ward-
(1926-2002) first black New York City Police Commissioner
Source: "Taxes and the Size of Government," American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings, Vol. 72, No. 2 (May 1982), p. 350.
"Three groups spend other people's money: children, thieves, politicians. All three need supervision."
-Dick Armey-
(1940- ) U.S. Congressman, TX-R
"After the 16th Amendment was ratified, an income tax was imposed starting in 1913 with rates ranging from 1 percent to 7 percent with the top rate applying only to incomes in excess of $500,000. By 1916 that top rate had risen to 15 percent, on income in excess of $2,000,000. The top rate exceeded 90 percent at its peak in the early 1950s. The first 1040 form -- instructions and all -- took up only four pages. Today there are some 4,000 pages of tax forms and instructions. American workers and business are forced to spend more than 5.4 billion man-hours every year figuring out their taxes. Since those hours could be put to a more productive use, and almost surely would be in the absence of today’s incomprehensible tax code, the result is a large dead-weight output loss of some $200 billion each year. ... The IRS now has more enforcement personnel than the EPA, BATF, OSHA, FDA, and DEA combined. With its 115,000-man workforce, it has the power to search the property and financial documents of American citizens without a search warrant and to seize property from American citizens without a trial. It routinely does both. Economist James L. Payne has written a most revealing analysis of the IRS, a 1993 book entitled Costly Returns. He arrives at a stunning conclusion, the total cost to collect our federal taxes, including the effects on the economy as a whole adds up to an amazing 65 percent of all the tax dollars received annually. The U.S. tax system, says Payne, has produced hundreds of thousands of victims of erroneous IRS penalties, liens, levies, and tax advice. In answering taxpayer questions, for example, the IRS telephone information service has in previous years given about one-third of all callers -- as many as 8.5 million Americans -- the wrong answers to their questions. A 1987 General Accounting Office study found that 47 percent of a random sample of IRS correspondence -- including demands for payments -- contained errors. Incredibly a GAO audit of the IRS in 1993 found widespread evidence of financial malfeasance and gross negligence at the agency. The IRS could not account for 64 percent of its congressional appropriation!"
-Dr. Lawrence W. Reed-
(1953-) President of the Foundation for Economic Education
Source: Taxes and Tyranny, THE UNREPORTED NEWS, August 27, 1995.
"At what exact point, then should one resist the communists? ... How we burned in the prison camps later thinking: what would things have been like if every security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if during periods of mass arrests people had simply not sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand. ... The Organs [police] would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers ... and notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt."
-Alexander Solzhenitsyn-
(1918-2008) Russian novelist, Soviet dissident, imprisoned for 8 years for critizing Stalin in a personal letter, Nobel Prize for Literature, 1970
Source: Gulag Archipelago
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
–Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn-
“Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners.”
-Edward Abbey-
"People go funny in the head when talking about politics. The evolutionary reasons for this are so obvious as to be worth belaboring: In the ancestral environment, politics was a matter of life and death. And sex, and wealth, and allies, and reputation... When, today, you get into an argument about whether "we" ought to raise the minimum wage, you're executing adaptations for an ancestral environment where being on the wrong side of the argument could get you killed... Politics is an extension of war by other means. Arguments are soldiers. Once you know which side you're on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side; otherwise it's like stabbing your soldiers in the back - providing aid and comfort to the enemy."
-Eliezer Yudkowsky-
"Americans think their danger is terrorists. They don't understand the terrorists cannot take away habeas corpus, the Bill of Rights, the Constitution.... The terrorists are not anything like the threat we face from our own government in the name of fighting terrorism.... The American constitutional system is near to being overthrown."
-Paul Craig Roberts-
"That this privilege of giving or of withholding our monies is an important barrier against the undue exertion of prerogative, which if left altogether without control may be exercised to our great oppression; and all history shews how efficacious is its intercession for redress of grievances and re-establishment of rights, and how improvident would be the surrender of so powerful a mediator"
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Reply to Lord North's Conciliatory Proposition, July 25, 1775. Papers 1:225
"The collection of taxes which are not absolutely required, which do not beyond reasonable doubt contribute to the public welfare, is only a species of legalized larceny. The wise and correct course to follow in taxation is not to destroy those who have already secured success, but to create conditions under which everyone will have a better chance to be successful."
-Calvin Coolidge-
(1873-1933), 30th US President
"A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.”
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Speech, Constitutional Convention (1787-06-29), from Max Farrand's Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, vol. I[1] (1911), p. 465
"A Union founded on consent can never be cemented by force. This is the testimony of the Fathers."
-Congressman Clement L. Vallandigham (D-Ohio)-
August 2, 1862
"The very word 'secrecy' is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it."
-John F. Kennedy-
"Shame on the men who can court exemption from present trouble and expense at the price of their own posterity's liberty!"
-Samuel Adams-
(1722-1803), was known as the "Father of the American Revolution."
Source: writing as "Candidus," February 3, 1776
"Standing armies consist of professional soldiers who owe their livelihood and income to the government. Unlike civilians who render periodic service in local militia, professional soldiers do not own property and therefore do not have any source of income other than the government’s military paymaster. Thus, they are more likely to serve the government’s interests, regardless of whether its leaders are dishonest and corrupt or not. In fact, standing armies may even promote rapacious foreign or domestic policies if such policies enrich the army. In contrast, arms bearing, property owning citizen militiamen have a stake in the health of the republic as a whole and can be trusted to act in the republic’s best interests, whether those interests call for action in support of or against the political leadership of the nation."
-Anthony J. Dennis-
Officer and lawyer for Aetna Life and Casualty Company, author, B.A. cum laude from Tufts University; J.D. from Northwestern University School of Law
Source: Article: Clearing the Smoke from the right to Bear Arms and the Second Amendment, 29 AKRON L. REV. 57, 76-77 (Fall 1995).
"Is it not proven beyond all dispute that there is no limit to the enormities which men will commit when they are once persuaded that they are keepers of other men's consciences? To spread religion by any means, and to crush heresy by all means is the practical inference from the doctrine that one man may control another's religion. Given the duty of a state to foster some one form of faith, and by the sure inductions of our nature slowly but certainly persecution will occur. To prevent for ever the possibility of Papists roasting Protestants, Anglicans hanging Romish priests, and Puritans flogging Quakers, let every form of state-churchism be utterly abolished, and the remembrance of the long curse which it has cast upon the world be blotted out for ever."
-Charles Spurgeon-
"Do you wish to know when that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by Compulsion -- when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing -- when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors -- when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you -- when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming self-sacrifice -- you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
Source: Atlas Shrugged, P. 385 (1957)
"We have depended on government for so much for so long that we as people have become less vigilant of our liberties. As long as the government provides largesse for the majority, the special interest lobbyists will succeed in continuing the redistribution of welfare programs that occupies most of Congress's legislative time."
-Dr. Ron Paul-
(1935-) American physician, US Congressman (R-TX), US Presidential candidate
Source: Sept 17, 1997 speech to Congress
"[T]here are, at bottom, basically two ways to order social affairs, Coercively, through the mechanisms of the state -- what we can call political society. And voluntarily, through the private interaction of individuals and associations -- what we can call civil society. ... In a civil society, you make the decision. In a political society, someone else does. ... Civil society is based on reason, eloquence, and persuasion, which is to say voluntarism. Political society, on the other hand, is based on force."
-Edward H. Crane-
Founder and president of the Cato Institute
"An individual should not have too much freedom. A nation should have absolute freedom."
-Sun Yat-sen-
(1866-1925) Chinese revolutionary, first president and founding father of the Republic of China ("Nationalist China")
"I believe the States can best govern our home concerns, and the General Government our foreign ones. I wish, therefore, to see maintained that wholesome distribution of powers established by the constitution for the limitation of both; and never to see all offices transferred to Washington, where, further withdrawn from the eyes of the people, they may more secretly be bought and sold as at market."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: letter to Judge William Johnson, June 12, 1823
"Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one."
-Thomas Paine-
"The relative freedom which we enjoy depends of public opinion. The law is no protection. Governments make laws, but whether they are carried out, and how the police behave, depends on the general temper in the country. If large numbers of people are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it; if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them."
-George Orwell-
"Collectivism is a doctrine that holds that the individual has no rights, and the ultimate standard of value is the group to which 'he belongs.' Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage—the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors. Racism claims that the content of a man’s mind (not his cognitive apparatus, but its content) is inherited; that a man’s convictions, values and character are determined before he is born, by physical factors beyond his control. This is the caveman’s version of the doctrine of innate ideas -- or of inherited knowledge -- which has been thoroughly refuted by philosophy and science. Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes. It is a barnyard or stock-farm version of collectivism, appropriate to a mentality that differentiates between various breeds of animals, but not between animals and men. Like every form of determinism, racism invalidates the specific attribute which distinguishes man from all other living species: his rational faculty. Racism negates two aspects of man’s life: reason and choice, or mind and morality, replacing them with chemical predestination."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
Source: Racism, The Virtue of Selfishness, 126
"So long as you are a slave to the opinions of the many you have not yet approached freedom or tasted its nectar ... But I do not mean by this that we ought to be shameless before all men and to do what we ought not; but all that we refrain from and all that we do, let us not do or refrain from merely because it seems to the multitude somehow honorable or base, but because it is forbidden by reason and the god within us."
-Julian-
"An elective despotism was not the government we fought for, but one which should not only be founded on true free principles, but in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among general bodies of magistracy, as that no one could transcend their legal limits without being effectually checked and restrained by the others."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"What is strong wins: that is the universal law. If only it were not so often what is stupid and evil!"
-Nietzsche-
Notes (1873)
"When you run in debt; you give to another power over your liberty."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
"Avoid occasions of expense ... and avoid likewise the accumulation of debt not only by shunning occasions of expense but by vigorous exertions to discharge the debts, not throwing upon posterity the burden which we ourselves ought to bear."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
"Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed; everything else is public relations."
-George Orwell-
"The theory of natural monopoly is an economic fiction. No such thing as a 'natural' monopoly has ever existed. The history of the so-called public utility concept is that the late 19th and early 20th-century 'utilities' competed vigorously, and like all other industries, they did not like competition. They first secured government-sanctioned monopolies, and then, with the help of a few influential economists, they constructed an ex post facto rationalization for their monopoly power. ... The theory of natural monopoly is a 19th-century economic fiction that defends 19th-century (or 18th-century, in the case of the U.S. Postal Service) monopolistic privileges and has no useful place in the 21st-century American economy."
-Thomas J. DiLorenzo-
Source: June 14, 1995 at the CATO Institute conference examining the question Postal Service in the 21st Century: Time to Privatize?
"You say that I have been dished up to you as an anti-federalist, and ask me if it be just. My opinion was never worthy enough of notice to merit citing; but since you ask it, I will tell it to you. I am not a federalist. What I disapproved from the first moment also, was the want of a bill of rights, to guard liberty against the legislative as well as the executive branches of the government; that is to say, to secure freedom in religion, freedom of the press, freedom from monopolies, freedom from unlawful imprisonment, freedom from a permanent military, and a trial by jury, in all cases determinable by the laws of the land."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: March 13th 1789, Jefferson letter to Francis Hopkinson
"To the size of the state there is a limit, as there is to plants, animals and implements, for none of these retain their facility when they are too large."
-Aristotle-
(384-322 BC) Greek philosopher
"But the indissoluble link of union between the people of the several States of this confederated nation is, after all, not in the RIGHT, but in the HEART. If the day should ever come (may Heaven avert it!) when the affections of the people of these States shall be alienated from each other, when the fraternal spirit shall give way to cold indifference, or collision of interests shall fester into hatred, the bonds of political association - will not long hold together parties no longer attracted by the magnetism of conciliated interests and kindly sympathies; and far better will it be for the people of the disunited States to part in friendship with each other than to be held together by constraint. Then will be the time for reverting to the precedents which occurred at the formation and adoption of the Constitution, to form again a more perfect Union, by dissolving that which could no longer bind, and to leave the separated parts to be reunited by the law of political gravitation to the center."
-John Quincy Adams-
(1767-1848) 6th US President
Source: in his discourse before the New York Historical Society, in 1839
"It has been thought a considerable advance towards establishing the principles of Freedom, to say, that government is a compact between those who govern and those that are governed: but this cannot be true, because it is putting the effect before the cause; for as man must have existed before governments existed, there necessarily was a time when governments did not exist, and consequently there could originally exist no governors to form such a compact with. The fact therefore must be, that the individuals themselves, each in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a compact with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
"We must, therefore, emphasize that 'we' are not the government; the government is not 'us.' The government does not in any accurate sense 'represent' the majority of the people. But, even if it did, even if 70 percent of the people decided to murder the remaining 30 percent, this would still be murder and would not be voluntary suicide on the part of the slaughtered minority. No organicist metaphor, no irrelevant bromide that 'we are all part of one another,' must be permitted to obscure this basic fact."
-Murray N. Rothbard-
(1926-1995) Dean of the Austrian School of Economics
Source: Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays (Auburn: Mises Institute, 2000 [1974]), pp. 55-88.
"Freedom had been hunted round the globe; reason was considered as rebellion; and the slavery of fear had made men afraid to think. But such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing."
-Thomas Paine-
"The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion."
-Albert Camus-
"Liberty is not collective, it is personal. All liberty is individual liberty."
-Calvin Coolidge-
(1873-1933), 30th US President
Source: Speech, 1924
“A national government is a government of the people of a single state or nation, united as a community by what is termed the 'social compact,’ and possessing complete and perfect supremacy over persons and things, so far as they can be made the lawful objects of civil government. A federal government is distinguished from a national government by its being the government of a community of independent and sovereign states, united by compact."
-Black's Law Dictionary-
Source: Piqua Branch Bank v. Knoup, 6 Ohio St. 393. [Black's Law Dictionary, Revised Fourth Edition, 1968, p. 1176]
"Freedom is the emancipation from the arbitrary rule of other men."
-Mortimer Adler-
(1902-2001)
"There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him."
-Frederick Douglass-
1852 speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”
"The most important thing to do in your life is to not interfere with somebody else's life."
-Frank Zappa-
on The Howard Stern Show, 1987
"All men by nature are equal in that equal right that every man hath to his natural freedom, without being subjected to the will or authority of any other man; being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions."
-John Locke-
(1632-1704) English philosopher and political theorist. Considered the ideological progenitor of the American Revolution and who, by far, was the most often non-biblical writer quoted by the Founding Fathers of the USA.
Source: Second Treatise on Government (Chapter 2) 1698
"A rational anarchist believes that concepts such as 'state' and 'society' and 'government' have no existence save as physically exemplified in the acts of self-responsible individuals. He believes that it is impossible to shift blame, share blame, distribute blame ... as blame, guilt, responsibility are matters taking place inside human beings singly and nowhere else. But being rational, he knows that not all individuals hold his evaluations, so he tries to live perfectly in an imperfect world ... aware that his effort will be less than perfect yet undismayed by self-knowledge of self-failure."
-The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress-
"Fear can only prevail when victims are ignorant of the facts."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"You know what's evil about politics? It turns people into enemies when they should and would naturally be friends in a normal society. In the marketplace you are happy to cooperate with anyone to mutual betterment. But in politics, it's all about hating your neighbor. If a person who believes all of civilization rests on a Romney win would naturally and rightly regard all Obama voters as moral threats, wreckers of the good life itself. And the demographics of voting are rather predictable. You can often tell quickly how a person will or will not vote, by appearance alone. That creates prejudice, bias, and hate. So politics creates these stupid battles between people - for absolutely no reason - and wars against the brotherhood of man. It creates the divisions it pretends to heal."
-Jeffrey A. Tucker-
"When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, "This you may not read, this you may not see, this you are forbidden to know," the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything -- you can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him."
-Robert A. Heinlein-
(1907-1988) American writer
"There can be no socialism without a state, and as long as there is a state, there is socialism. The state, then, is the very institution that puts socialism into action; and as socialism rests on aggressive violence directed against innocent victims, aggressive violence is the nature of any state."
-Hans-Hermann Hoppe-
Chapter VIII :The Socio-Psychological Foundations of Socialism or: The Theory of the State - A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism
"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is hard business. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself."
-Rudyard Kipling-
Arthur Gordon, "Interview with an Immortal", Reader’s Digest, 1935
"There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution."
-John Adams-
Letter to Jonathan Jackson (2 October 1780)
"Crime and politics, little girl. Situation is always... fluid."
-Badger-
"Certainly there are examples of countries where the people remain relatively free after the people have been disarmed, but there are no examples of a totalitarian state being created or existing where the people have personal arms."
-Neal Knox-
Source: quoted by Jeff Cooper in Jeff Cooper’s Commentaries, Vol. 4, No. 7.
"I don’t know why liberals want to disarm the law-abiding population, but I do know that not a single argument proffered stands the light of facts. Armed citizens deter far more crimes than the police, and far more lives are saved by the intended victim being armed than are lost in firearm accidents."
-Paul Craig Roberts
(1939- ) Economist, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration ("Father of Reaganomics"), former editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Scripps Howard News Service.
Source: Houston Chronicle, Sept. 13, 1993
"By a declaration of rights, I mean one which shall stipulate freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of commerce against monopolies, trial by juries in all cases, no suspensions of the habeas corpus, no standing armies. These are fetters against doing evil, which no honest government should decline."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Jefferson letter to Mr. A. Donald, on February 7th 1788
"An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life."
-Robert A. Heinlein-
(1907-1988) American writer
"There is no position which depends on clearer principles, than that every act of a delegated authority, contrary to the tenor of the commission under which it is exercised, is void. No legislative act, therefore, contrary to the Constitution, can be valid. To deny this, would be to affirm, that the deputy is greater than his principal; that the servant is above his master; that the representatives of the people are superior to the people themselves; that men acting by virtue of powers, may do not only what their powers do not authorize, but what they forbid."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804)
Source: The Federalist No. 78.
"The dignity and stability of government in all its branches, the morals of the people, and every blessing of society depend so much upon an upright and skillful administration of justice, that the judicial power ought to be distinct from both the legislative and executive, and independent upon both, that so it may be a check upon both, and both should be checks upon that."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: John Adams, Thoughts on Government, 1776
"Constitutions are checks upon the hasty action of the majority. They are the self-imposed restraints of a whole people upon a majority of them to secure sober action and a respect for the rights of the minority."
-William Howard Taft-
(1857-1930) 27th US President
Source: Veto Message, Arizona Enabling Act, 1911
"The right of a citizen to bear arms, in lawful defense of himself or the State, is absolute. He does not derive it from the State government. It is one of the 'high powers' delegated directly to the citizen, and 'is excepted out of the general powers of government.' A law cannot be passed to infringe upon or impair it, because it is above the law, and independent of the lawmaking power."
-Cockrum v. State-
24 Tex. 394 [1859]
"Do not be merciful, but be just, for mercy is bestowed upon the guilty criminal, while Justice is all that the innocent man requires."
-Khalil Gibran-
"Since it was first recognized in [the] Magna Carta, trial by jury has been a prized shield against oppression ...."
-U.S. Supreme Court-
Source: Glasser v. United States, 315 U.S. 60, 84 (1942)
"The common notion that free speech prevails in the United States always makes me laugh."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"There are many prices we pay for freedoms secured by the First Amendment; the risk of undue influence is one of them, confirming what we have long known: Freedom is hazardous, but some restraints are worse."
-Justice Warren E. Burger-
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
-Niels Bohr-
(1885-1962) Danish Physicist
"It is now well established that the Constitution protects the right to receive information and ideas. ... This right to receive information and ideas, regardless of their social worth, ... is fundamental to our free society."
-Thurgood Marshall-
(1908-1993) first Black US Supreme Court Justice
Source: Stanley v. Georgia, 1969
"The dilemma of the critic has always been that if he knows enough to speak with authority, he knows too much to speak with detachment."
-Raymond Chandler-
"The ruling class has the schools and press under its thumb. This enables it to sway the emotions of the masses."
-Albert Einstein-
(1879-1955) Physicist and Professor, Nobel Prize 1921
"In the highest antiquity, the people did not know that there were rulers. In the next age they loved them and praised them. In the next they feared them; in the next they despised them."
-Lao-Tzu-
[Li Erh] (570-490 BC) 'Old Sage', Father of Taoism
"One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in Kings, is that nature disapproves it, otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule, by giving mankind an ASS FOR A LION."
-Thomas Paine-
"My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs). The most improper job of any man is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity."
-J.R.R. Tolkien-
The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien
"Nay, all laws must fall, human societies that subsist by them be dissolved, and all innocent persons be exposed to the violence of the most wicked, if men might not justly defend themselves against injustice by their own natural right, when the ways prescribed by publick authority cannot be taken."
-Algernon Sidney-
(1622-1683) English statesman, writer, Whig leader
Source: Discourses Concerning Government 266-67 (1763)
"If oppression and wrong should gain the ascendancy, and injustice stalk abroad in the land, and all else fail him; nevertheless his humblest roof, and all things that are sheltered beneath it, would find, somehow, someway, a final refuge and protection in the Supreme Court of the United States."
-Edward J. Phelps-
(1822-1900) American diplomat, Envoy to Court of St. James's in Britain
"To vest a few fallible men -- prosecutors, judges, jurors -- with vast powers of literary or artistic censorship, to convert them into what J.S. Mill called the "moral police" is to make them despotic arbiters of literary products... If one day they ban mediocre books as obscene, another day they may do otherwise to a work of a genius. Originality, not too plentiful, should be cherished, not stifled. An author's imagination may be cramped if he must write with an eye on prosecutors or juries…"
-Jerome D. Frank-
(1889-1957)
Source: Second Circuit of Appeals, 1956
"No danger flowing from speech can be deemed clear and present unless the incidence of the evil apprehended is so imminent that it may befall before there is an opportunity for full discussion. Only an emergency can justify repression."
-Justice Louis D. Brandeis-
(1856-1941) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: Whitney v. California, 1927
"What is objectionable, what is dangerous about extremists is not that they are extreme, but that they are intolerant. The evil is not what they say about their cause, but what they say about their opponents."
-Robert F. Kennedy-
(1925-1968), US Senator, Attorney General
Source: The Pursuit of Justice, 1964
"The pages of history shine on instances of the jury's exercise of it's prerogative to disregard instructions of the judge."
-U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia-
Source: US v. Dougherty, 473 F 2nd 1113, 1139, (1972)
"The percentage of correct decisions which individuals make is very high when they are risking their own money and their own future. The percentage of correct decisions is very low when made by politicians, so-called intellectuals, and others, regardless of their intelligence, who are not faced with the discipline of having to pay for their own mistakes with their own earnings."
-A.W. Stewart-
"If the freedom of religion, guaranteed to us by law in theory, can ever rise in practice under the overbearing inquisition of public opinion, then and only then will truth, prevail over fanaticism."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living."
-R. Buckminster Fuller-
"Peace has other governments that don't go through the will of politicians."
-Mia Couto-
"Rain, the Dreamsend" (tr. Austen Hyde)
"If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that Government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable."
-Justice William J. Brennan-
(1906-1997) U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: 1989
"The function of the censor is to censor. He has a professional interest in finding things to suppress."
-Thomas I. Emerson-
(1907-1991) Lines Professor of Law, Yale University, author
Source: Law and Contemporary Problems (1955)
"The only valid censorship of ideas is the right of people not to listen."
-Tommy Smothers-
American Comedian
"Without some form of censorship, propaganda in the strict sense of the word is impossible. In order to conduct propaganda there must be some barrier between the public and the event."
-Walter Lippmann-
(1889-1974) American writer, journalist, and political commentator
Source: Public Opinion, 1922
And typically, this "noble gatekeeper" is the propagandist, in the form of the expressly prohibited censor, government...
"The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights, cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
"The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.... It makes no difference who you vote for -- the two parties are really one party representing four percent of the people."
-Gore Vidal-
"Government control gives rise to fraud, suppression of truth, intensification of the black market and to artificial scarcity. Above all, it unmans the people and deprives them of initiative, it undoes the teaching of self-help they have been learning for a generation. It makes them spoon-fed."
-Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi-
3rd November 1947, The Delhi Diary
“The really dangerous American fascist... is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power... They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective, toward which all their deceit is directed, is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection."
-Henry A. Wallace-
quoted in the New York Times, April 9, 1944
"Immoral means cannot bring moral ends, for the ends are pre-existent in the means... Destructive means cannot bring constructive ends, because the means represent the- ideal-in-the-making and the-end-in-progress. ...All this is saying that, in the final analysis, means and ends must cohere because the end is pre-existent in the means, and ultimately destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends."
-Martin Luther King, Jr.-
Strength to Love
"But with respect to future debt; would it not be wise and just for that nation to declare in the constitution they are forming that neither the legislature, nor the nation itself can validly contract more debt, than they may pay within their own age, or within the term of 19 years."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: letter to James Madison, 6 September 1789
"Divide and rule, the politician cries; unite and lead, is watchword of the wise."
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe-
"Government, in its very essence, is opposed to all increase in knowledge. Its tendency is always towards permanence and against
change...[T]he progress of humanity, far from being the result of government, has been made entirely without its aid and in the face if its constant and bitter opposition."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"Censorship is the mother of metaphor."
-Jorge Luis Borges-
(1899-1986), Argentine Poet
Source: Argentine Poet
"When you want to help people, you tell them the truth.
When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear."
-Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
Source: Conservative Chronicle, September 13, 1995
"The illegitimate use of a state by economic interests for their own ends is based upon a preexisting illegitimate power of the state to enrich some persons at the expense of others. Eliminate that illegitimate power of giving differential economic benefits and you eliminate or drastically restrict the motive for wanting political influence."
-Robert Nozick-
"Paradoxical as it may seem, men and women who are free to pursue individualism and material wealth turn out to be the most compassionate of all."
-Lawrence Lindsey-
Source: Financial Times, London, Nov 22, 2001
"The fact that most people think that being selfish means harming one's fellow man, that pursuing one's own self-interest equates to behaving brutally or irrationally, is, as Ms. Rand noted, a 'psychological confession' on their part. In fact it is against one's own long-term self-interest to behave irrationally or trample others. Such actions are the exact opposite of selfish -- they're self-destructive."
-Wayne Dunn-
American writer
Source: The Rational View
"INDIVIDUALISM: The term 'individualism' has a great variety of meanings in social and political philosophy. There are at least three types that can be distinguished: (1) ontological individualism, (2) methodological individualism, and (3) moral or political individualism. Ontological individualism is the doctrine that social reality consists, ultimately, only of persons who choose and act. Collectives, such as a social class, state, or a group, cannot act so they are not considered to have a reality independent of the actions of persons. Methodological individualists hold that the only genuinely scientific propositions in social science are those that can be reduced to the actions, dispositions, and decisions of individuals. Political or moral individualism is the theory that individuals should be left, as far as possible, to determine their own futures in economic and moral matters. Key thinkers include Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Robert Nozick, John Locke, and Herbert Spencer."
-Stephen Grabill-
Source: Stephen Grabill and Gregory M. A. Gronbacher
"Freedom is an intellectual achievement which requires disavowal of collectivism and embrace of individualism."
-Onkar Ghate-
Senior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute
"Individualism regards man -- every man -- as an independent, sovereign entity who possesses an inalienable right to his own life, a right derived from his nature as a rational being. Individualism holds that a civilized society, or any form of association, cooperation or peaceful co-existence among men, can be achieved only on the basis of the recognition of individual rights -- and that a group, as such, has no rights other than the individual rights of its members."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
"Politically, true individualism means recognizing that one has a right to his own life and happiness. But it also means uniting with other citizens to preserve and defend the institutions that protect that right."
-Shawn E. Klein
American professor of philosophy, author
Source: Community and American Individualism. A commentary from the Navigator Special: The Assault on Civilization, posted October 17, 2001. Published in the November 2001 Navigator
"I will now tell you what I do not like. First, the omission of a bill of rights, providing clearly, and without the aid of sophism, for freedom of religion, freedom of the press, protection against standing armies, restriction of monopolies, the eternal and unremitting force of the habeas corpus laws, and trials by jury in all matters of fact triable by the laws of the land, and not by the laws of nations. ... Let me add that a bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular; and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: December 20th, 1787, Jefferson letter to James Madison about his concerns regarding the Constitution.
"You are not to inquire how your trade may be increased, nor how you are to become a great and powerful people, but how your liberties can be secured; for liberty ought to be the direct end of your government."
-Patrick Henry-
"A passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one nation the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions; by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained, and by exciting jealousy, ill-will, and a disposition to retaliate, in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld. And it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens who devote themselves to the favorite nation, facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity; gilding, with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good, the foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: Washington's Farewell Address 1796
"We hold that what one man cannot morally do, a million men cannot morally do, and government, representing many millions of men, cannot do."
-Auberon Herbert-
(1838-1906) English author
"The people cannot delegate to government the power to do anything which would be unlawful for them to do themselves."
-John Locke-
(1632-1704) English philosopher and political theorist. Considered the ideological progenitor of the American Revolution and who, by far, was the most often non-biblical writer quoted by the Founding Fathers of the USA.
"This right to life, this right to liberty, and this right to pursue one’s happiness is unabashedly individualistic, without in the slightest denying at the same time our thoroughly social nature. It’s only that our social relations, while vital to us all, must be chosen - that is what makes the crucial difference."
-Tibor R. Machan-
Professor, author, research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University
Source: Collectivist Thinking Is Rife in the USA, March 01, 2004
"To be apt in quotation is a splendid and dangerous gift. Splendid, because it ornaments a man's speech with other men's jewels; dangerous, for the same reason."
-Robertson Davies-
"The well-informed mind is so easily swayed by charismatic ignorance."
-Dilbert-
"Self confidence is the ability to exercise restraint in the face of disrespect and still show respect in response."
-Simon Sinek-
"To be a socialist is to submit the I to the thou; socialism is sacrificing the individual to the whole."
-Joseph Goebbels-
(1897-1945) German Reich Minister of Propaganda (1933-1945), National Socialist German Workers' Party ("Nazi")
"Comrades! We must abolish the cult of the individual decisively, once and for all."
-Nikita Khrushchev-
(1894-1971) Premier of the Soviet Union
Source: addressing the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, 2-25-56
"The Nazis are well remembered for murdering well over 11 million people in the implementation of their slogan, 'The public good before the private good,' the Chinese Communists for murdering 62 million people in the implementation of theirs, 'Serve the people,' and the Soviet Communists for murdering more than 60 million people in the implementation of Karl Marx's slogan, 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.' Anyone who defends any of these, or any variation of them, on the grounds of their 'good intentions' is an immoral (NOT 'amoral') enabler of the ACTUAL (not just the proverbial) road to hell."
-Rick Gaber-
Libertarian writer
"We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good."
-Hillary Clinton-
(1947- ) Wife of President Bill Clinton, US Senator (NY-D)
Source: June 28, 2004 fundraiser for Senator Barbara Boxer in San Francisco
"If it's true that we are here to help others, then what exactly are the others here for?"
-Robert Anton Wilson-
American writer
"Republicans don't know how to defend morally an individual's right to achieve wealth and to keep it, and that is why they fail. ... It's part and parcel with their ambivalence over the individualist heritage of the nation. ... One of the things that people have to understand is that the American Revolution was truly an epic revolution in the way individuals were perceived in relation to the rest of the society. Throughout history individuals had always been cogs in some machine; they'd always been something to be sacrificed for the king, the tribe, the gang, the chieftain, the society around them, the race, whatever, and the real revolution, in America especially, was a moral revolution. It was a moral revolution in that ... suddenly, with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the individual, his life, his well-being, his property, his happiness became central to our values, and thatis what really made America unique. People came here from all over the world to try to escape the kind of oppression they had and experienced in the past. They came here for freedom; they came here for self-expression and self-realization, and America offered them that kind of a place."
-Robert Bidinotto-
"[T]he prerogatives of the federal government were carefully defined, and it was stipulated that any prerogative not comprised within that definition was to be retained by the states. Thus state government remained the rule; the federal government was the exception."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
Democracy in America [1835-1840]
"Only the incompetent wait until the last extremity to use force, and by then, it is usually too late to use anything, even prayer."
-H. Beam Piper-
(1904-1964) Author
Source: A Slave Is A Slave
"It doesn't take a majority to make a rebellion; it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"Anarchy is no guarantee that some people won't kill, injure, kidnap, defraud, or steal from others. Government is a guarantee that some will."
-Gustave de Molinari-
"There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man."
-Patrick Rothfuss-
"I'm not afraid of you, Doctor. You're a good man. Good men have too many rules."
"Good men do not NEED rules. Today is NOT the day to find out why I have so many..."
-Doctor Who-
"If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein."
-Justice Robert Jackson-
Board of Education v. Barnette (1943), declaring it unconstitutional to compel the Pledge of Allegiance
"Any society that needs disclaimers has too many lawyers."
-Erik Pepke-
"[There is a] strong correlation between market freedom and lower government corruption -- not terribly surprising, since the effect of increasing regulatory power is to shift 'cheating' from the private to the public sphere."
-Julian Sanchez-
Source: Cheating Heart, Does capitalism teach people to break the rules?
Reason Magazine, July 2004
"The art of politics, under democracy, is simply the art of ringing it. Two branches reveal themselves. There is the art of the demagogue, and there is the art of what may be called, by a shot-gun marriage of Latin and Greek, the demaslave. They are complementary, and both of them are degrading to their practitioners. The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots. The demaslave is one who listens to what these idiots have to say and then pretends that he believes it himself."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
Source: "Notes On Democracy"
"The old phrase, "Government of the people, by the people, for the people", represents a true ideal. It is best for the people as a whole. It is even more clearly the best for the development of the individual man and woman. And since in the end, the character and the prosperity of the nation depend on the character of the individuals that compose it, the form of government which best promotes individual development is the best for the people as a whole."
-Robert Cecil-
1st Viscount Cecil of Chelwood
"A world of unseen dictatorship is conceivable, still using the forms of democratic government."
-Kenneth Boulding-
(1910-1993) British-American economist, educator, peace activist, poet, religious mystic, devoted Quaker, systems scientist, and interdisciplinary philosopher
Source: University of Michigan, quoted in The Hidden Persuaders
"Democracy tends to ignore, even deny, threats to its existence because it loathes doing what is needed to counter them. It awakens only when the danger becomes deadly, imminent, evident. By then, either there is too little time left for it to save itself, or the price of survival has become crushingly high."
-Jean-Francois Revel-
[Jean-Francois Ricard] (1924-2006) French politician, journalist, author, philosopher, member of the Académie française
"I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly."
-Michel de Montaigne-
[Michel Eyquem De Montaigne] (1532-1592) French Renaissance scholar, philosopher, writer
"The great trouble with religion - any religion - is that a religionist, having accepted certain propositions by faith, cannot thereafter judge those propositions by evidence. One may bask at the warm fire of faith or choose to live in the bleak uncertainty of reason – but one cannot have both."
-Robert A. Heinlein-
(1907-1988) American writer
Source: From the science fiction novel ‘Friday’ by Robert A. Heinlein Pg. 253
"The right of property is the guardian of every other right, and to deprive the people of this, is in fact to deprive them of their liberty."
-Arthur Lee-
(1740-1792) Virgina delegate to the Continental Congress in 1782
"Compare this [U.S. taxation] to the plight of medieval serfs. They only had to give the lord of the manor a third of their output and they were considered slaves. So what does that make us."
-Daniel Mitchell-
Economist
"Either you think -- or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you."
-F. Scott Fitzgerald-
"Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding."
-Albert Einstein-
(1879-1955) Physicist and Professor, Nobel Prize 1921
"I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"[C]ivilization means, above all, an unwillingness to inflict unnecessary pain ... those of us who heedlessly accept the commands of authority cannot yet claim to be civilized men."
-Harold J. Laski-
(1893-1950)
Source: The Dangers of Obedience.
"Jefferson refused to pin his hopes on the occasional success of honest and unambitious men; on the contrary, the great danger was that philosophers would be lulled into complacence by the accidental rise of a Franklin or a Washington. Any government which made the welfare of men depend on the character of their governors was an illusion."
-Daniel J. Boorstin-
"It is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners."
-Albert Camus-
(1913-1960) French Algerian author
"The people who burned witches at the stake never for one moment thought of their act as violence; rather they thought of it as an act of divinely mandated righteousness. The same can be said of most of the violence we humans have ever committed."
-Gil Bailie-
College Fellow at Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology, author, lecturer
"We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear. Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders."
-John Perry Barlow-
"As for politics, I'm an anarchist. I hate governments and rules and fetters. Can't stand caged animals. People must be free."
-Charlie Chaplin-
"General education is the best preventive of the evils now most dreaded. In the civilized countries of the world, the question is how to distribute most generally and equally the property of the world. As a rule, where education is most general the distribution of property is most general.... As knowledge spreads, wealth spreads. To diffuse knowledge is to diffuse wealth. To give all an equal chance to acquire knowledge is the best and surest way to give all an equal chance to acquire property."
-Rutherford B. Hayes-
"The public welfare demands that constitutional cases must be decided according to the terms of the Constitution itself, and not according to judges’ views of fairness, reasonableness, or justice."
-Justice Hugo L. Black-
(1886-1971) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: Lecture, Columbia University, 1968
"No man has received from nature the right to give orders to others. Freedom is a gift from heaven, and every individual of the same species has the right to enjoy it as soon as he is in enjoyment of his reason."
-Denis Diderot-
"Any man who thinks he can be happy and prosperous by letting the Government take care of him, better take a closer look at the American Indian."
-Henry Ford-
"Anarchy is rules without rulers. Statism is rulers without rules."
-The Art of Not Being Governed-
"We still find the greedy hand of government thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry, and grasping at the spoil of the multitude. Invention is continually exercised to furnish new pretenses for revenue and taxation. It watches prosperity as its prey and permits none to escape without a tribute."
-Thomas Paine-
"The successful politician owes his power to the fact that he moves within the accepted framework of thought, that he thinks and talks conventionally. It would be almost a contradiction in terms for a politician to be a leader in the field of ideas. His task in a democracy is to find out what the opinions held by the largest number are, not to give currency to new opinions which may become the majority view in some distant future."
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
"Poltical campaigns are designedly made into emotional orgies which endeavor to distract attention from the real issues involved, and they actually paralyze what slight powers of cerebration (thinking) man can normally muster."
-James Harvey Robinson-
(1863-1936) American historian
"No government knows any limits to its power except the endurance of the people."
-Lysander Spooner-
(1808-1887) Political theorist, activist, abolitionist
"We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the Courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who would pervert the Constitution."
-Abraham Lincoln-
"The career of a politician mainly consists in making one part of the nation do what it does not want to do, in order to please and satisfy the other part of the nation. It is the prolonged sacrifice of the rights of some persons at the bidding and for the satisfaction of other persons. The ruling idea of the politician - stated rather bluntly - is that those who are opposed to him exist for the purpose of being made to serve his ends, if he can get power enough in his hands to force these ends upon them."
-Auberon Herbert-
(1838-1906) English author
"...there is no such entity as 'the public' - since the public is merely a number of individuals - the idea that 'the public interest' supersedes private interests and rights can have but one meaning: that the interests and rights of some individuals take precedence over the interests and rights of others."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
"All governments are more or less combinations against the people...and as rulers have no more virtue than the ruled...the power of government can only be kept within its constituted bounds by the display of a power equal to itself, the collected sentiment of the people."
-Benjamin Franklin Bache-
(1769-1798) American journalist, printer and publisher, founded the Philadephia Aurora, grandson of Benjamin Franklin
Source: Philadelphia Aurora, 1794
"It has often been said that power corrupts. But it is perhaps equally important to realize that weakness, too, corrupts. Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many. Hatred, malice, rudeness, intolerance, and suspicion are the faults of weakness. The resentment of the weak does not spring from any injustice done to them but from their sense of inadequacy and impotence. We cannot win the weak by sharing our wealth with them. They feel our generosity as oppression."
-Eric Hoffer-
(1902-1983) American author, philosopher, awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
"When the same man, or set of men, holds the sword and the purse, there is an end of liberty."
-George Mason-
(1725-1792), drafted the Virgina Declaration of Rights, ally of James Madison and George Washington
"And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangstersget control. History has proven that. All power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely."
-Lord Acton-
[John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton] (1834-1902), First Baron Acton of Aldenham
"What, then, do they want a government for? Not to regulate commerce; not to educate the people; not to teach religion, not to administer charity; not to make roads and railways; but simply to defend the natural rights of man -- to protect person and property -- to prevent the aggressions of the powerful upon the weak -- in a word, to administer justice. This is the natural, the original, office of a government. It was not intended to do less: it ought not to be allowed to do more."
-Herbert Spencer-
"Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race. All through history, mankind has been bullied by scum. Those who lord it over their fellows and toss commands in every direction and would boss the grass in the meadow about which way to bend in the wind are the most depraved kind of prostitutes. They will submit to any indignity, perform any vile act, do anything to achieve power. The worst off-sloughings of the planet are the ingredients of sovereignty. Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy the whores are us."
-P. J. O'Rourke-
(1947- ) US humorist, journalist, & political commentator
Source: Parliament of Whores
"The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments."
-William E. Borah-
(1865-1940) U. S. Senator
"The State, both in its genesis and by its primary intention, is purely anti-social. It is not based on the idea of natural rights, but on the idea that the individual has no rights except those that the State may provisionally grant him. It has always made justice costly and difficult of access, and has invariably held itself above justice and common morality whenever it could advantage itself by so doing."
-Albert Jay Nock-
(1870-1945)
"...above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare them for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood..."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
[Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clerel, le Comte de Tocqueville] (1805-1859) French historian
"Facilis descensus Averni: noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis;
sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras. hoc opus, hic labor est.
The gates of hell are open night and day;
Smooth the descent, and easy is the way:
But to return, and view the cheerful skies,
In this the task and mighty labor lies."
-John Dryden-
(translation)
"He brings disaster upon his nation who never sows a seed, or lays a brick, or weaves a garment, but makes politics his occupation."
-Khalil Gibran-
"Economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value; political power exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction. The businessman's tool is values; the bureucrat's tool is fear."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
"Whoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before would deserve better of mankind and do more essential service to his country than the whole race of politicians put together."
-Jonathan Swift-
(1667-1745) Anglo-Irish Poet and Satirist
"We should...be able to see that our interest would be best served not by asking the state to promulgate our values but by forbidding the state to promulgate any values at all. If the state can espouse some value that we love, it can, with equal justice, espouse others we do not love."
-Richard Mitchell-
(1929-2002) Professor at Glassboro State College, NJ, author, founder and publisher of The Underground Grammarian
"Prohibition was introduced as a fraud; it has been nursed as a fraud. It is wrapped in the livery of Heaven, but it comes to serve the devil. It comes to regulate by law our appetites and our daily lives. It comes to tear down liberty and build up fanaticism, hypocrisy, and intolerance. It comes to confiscate by legislative decree the property of many of our fellow citizens. It comes to send spies, detectives, and informers into our homes; to have us arrested and carried before courts and condemned to fines and imprisonments. It comes to dissipate the sunlight of happiness, peace, and prosperity in which we are now living and to fill our land with alienations, estrangements, and bitterness. It comes to bring us evil - only evil - and that continually. Let us rise in our might as one and overwhelm it with such indignation that we shall never hear of it again as long as grass grows and water runs."
-Roger Quarles Mills-
(1832-1911) US Congressman (1873-1892), US Senator (1892-1899) TX-D
Source: from an 1887 speech by Roger Q. Mills of Texas. It was quoted more than once during the December, 1914 debate in Congress
"What is the best government? That which teaches us to govern ourselves."
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe-
(1749-1832)
"There is nothing so bad that politics cannot make it worse."
-Thomas Sowell-
"But you must remember, my fellow-citizens, that eternal vigilance by the people is the price of liberty, and that you must pay the price if you wish to secure the blessing."
-Andrew Jackson-
(1767-1845) 7th US President
Source: in his Farewell Address, (1837-March-04)
"Civilization is nothing else but the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort."
-José Ortega y Gasset-
(1883-1955)
"In war, truth is the first casualty."
-Aeschylus-
(525-456 BC) Greek playwright
"[W]ar is a question, under our constitution, not of Executive, but of Legislative cognizance. It belongs to Congress to say whether the Nation shall of choice dismiss the olive branch and unfurl the banners of War."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804)
Source: Americanus #1, January 31, 1794.
"No protracted war can fail to endanger the freedom of a democratic country."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
[Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clerel, le Comte de Tocqueville] (1805-1859) French historian
"Among other grand achievements, F. A. Hayek had a remarkable career pointing out the flaws in collectivism. One of his keenest insights was that, paradoxically, any collectivist system necessarily depends on one individual (or small group) to make key social and economic decisions. In contrast, a system based on individualism takes advantage of the aggregate, or 'collective,' information of the whole society; through his actions each participant contributes his own particular, if incomplete, knowledge -- information that could never be tapped by the individual at the head of a collectivist state."
-Sheldon Richman-
Editor of The Freeman, author, journalist
"It would be a healthy exercise for every politician to look in the mirror every morning and remind himself that he holds office only because, in a two-man race against another mediocrity, a modest majority of those half-informed people who imagined that their votes mattered reckoned that he was the lesser evil. And they weren't too sure about that."
-Joseph Sobran-
"There is in fact a manly and legitimate passion for equality that spurs all men to wish to be strong and esteemed. This passion tends to elevate the lesser to the rank of the greater. But one also finds in the human heart a depraved taste for equality which impels the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level and which reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
Democracy in America
"It is strangely absurd to suppose that a million of human beings, collected together, are not under the same moral laws which bind each of them separately."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"Nullification is not a 'defense' recognized by law, but rather a mechanism that permits a jury, as community conscience, to disregard the strict requirements of law where it finds that those requirements cannot justly be applied in a particular case."
-David L. Bazelon-
(1909-1993) Chief Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit
Source: U.S. v. Dougherty, 473 F. 2d 1113, 42 (dissent) (1972).
"Therefore, the jury have the power of deciding an issue upon a general verdict. And, if they have, is it not an absurdity to suppose that the law would oblige them to find a verdict according to the direction of the court, against their own opinion, judgment, and conscience? ... [I]s a juror to give his verdict generally, according to [the judge’s] direction, or even to find the fact specially, and submit the law to the court? Every man, of any feeling or conscience, will answer, no. It is not only his right, but his duty, in that case, to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment, and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: Diary entry February 12, 1771, reprinted in The Works of John Adams, 254-255 (C. Adams ed. 1850).
"Jury Nullification encourages participation in the judicial process, which in turn furthers the legitimization of the legal system. Jury Nullification also serves to inject community values and standards into the administration of our laws. Ordinary citizens are given the chance to infuse community values into the judicial process in the interests of fairness and justice and at the same time provide a signal to lawmakers that they have drifted too far from the Democratic will... History is replete with examples that Jury Nullification serves as a corrective 'veto' power of the people over both legislative and judicial rigidity and tyranny."
-Justice William C. Goodle-
Washington Supreme Court
"Coming of age in a fascist police state will not be a barrel of fun for anybody, much less for people like me, who are not inclined to suffer Nazis gladly and feel only contempt for the cowardly flag-suckers who would gladly give up their outdated freedom to live for the mess of pottage they have been conned into believing will be freedom from fear."
-Hunter S. Thompson-
"Of the liberty of conscience in matters of religious faith, of speech and of the press; of the trial by jury of the vicinage in civil and criminal cases; of the benefit of the writ of habeas corpus; of the right to keep and bear arms... If these rights are well defined, and secured against encroachment, it is impossible that government should ever degenerate into tyranny."
-James Monroe-
(1758-1831), 5th US President
"The right of juries to decide questions of law was widely accepted in the colonies, especially in criminal cases. Prior to 1850, the judge and jury were viewed as partners in many jurisdictions. The jury could decide questions of both law and fact, and the judge helped guide the decision-making process by comments on the witnesses and the evidence. Legal theory and political philosophy emphasized the importance of the Jury in divining natural law, which was thought to be a better source for decision than the 'authority of black letter maxim.' Since natural law was accessible to lay people, it was held to be the duty of each juror to determine for himself whether a particular rule of law embodied the principles of the higher natural law. Indeed, it was argued that the United States Constitution embodied a codification of natural rights so that 'the reliance by the jury on a higher law was usually viewed as a constitutional judgment.'"
-Kane & Miller Friedenthal-
Source: Civil Procedure, p 476-77, chapter 11, Jury Trial; 2 The Judge Jury Relationship (West Publishing Company 1985).
"Jury nullification is a doctrine based on the concept that 'jurors have the inherent right to set aside the instructions of the judge and to reach a verdict of acquittal based upon their own consciences, and the defendant has the right to be so instructed.' Though jury nullification may seem like a shocking proposal today, it is by no means a new idea. In fact, jury nullification was first espoused nearly three and one half centuries ago."
-M. Kristine Creagan-
Source: Jury Nullification: Assessing Recent Legislative Developments, 43 CASE W. RES. 1101(1993) quoting Alan W. Scheflin, Jury Nullification: The Right to Say No, 45 CAL. L. REV. 168 (1972).
"There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice."
-Charles-Louis De Secondat-
(1689-1755) Baron de Montesquieu
Source: The Spirit of the Laws, 1748
"Under any conditions, anywhere, whatever you are doing, there is some ordinance under which you can be booked."
-Robert D. Sprecht-
Rand Corporation
"Today the grand jury is the total captive of the prosecutor who, if he is candid, will concede that he can indict anybody, at any time, for almost anything, before any grand jury."
-William J. Campbell-
Judge, U. S. District Court
Source: Newsweek, 22 August 1977
"If it weren't for lawyers, we wouldn't need them."
-A. K. Griffin-
"We have a criminal jury system which is superior to any in the world; and its efficiency is only marred by the difficulty of finding twelve men every day who don't know anything and can't read."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910)
"A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves."
-Edward R. Murrow-
"'Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed?' said Dr. Ferris. 'We want them broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against -- then you'll know that this is not the age for beautiful gestures. We're after power and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick, and you'd better get wise to it. There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted -- and you create a nation of law-breakers -- and then you cash in on guilt. Now, that's the system, Mr. Rearden, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with.'"
–Ayn Rand-
Atlas Shrugged [1957]
"Let us revise our views and work from the premise that all laws should be for the welfare of society as a whole and not directed at the punishment of sins."
-John Biggs, Jr.-
(1895-1979) former Chief Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit (1945-65)
"The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant."
-John Stuart Mill-
(1806-1873) English philosopher and economist
"We enact many laws that manufacture criminals, and then a few that punish them."
-Benjamin R. Tucker-
(1854-1939)
Source: Instead of a Book, 1893
"I cannot say that our country could have no secret police without becoming totalitarian, but I can say with great conviction that it cannot become totalitarian without a centralized national police."
-Justice Robert H. Jackson-
(1892-1954), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: The Supreme Court in the American System of Government, 1955
"Better to die fighting for freedom than be a prisoner all the days of your life."
-Bob Marley-
"There is in all of us a strong disposition to believe that anything lawful is also legitimate. This belief is so widespread that many persons have erroneously held that things are 'just' because the law makes them so."
-Frederic Bastiat-
(1801-1850) French economist, statesman, and author. He did most of his writing during the years just before -- and immediately following -- the French Revolution of February 1848.
Source: "The Law" by Frederic Bastiat (1848)
"I say that you cannot administer a wicked law impartially. You can only destroy. You can only punish. I warn you that a wicked law, like cholera, destroys everyone it touches -- its upholders as well as its defiers."
-Jerome Lawrence & Robert E. Lee-
Source: the book, Inherit the Wind
"To declare that in the administration of criminal law the end justifies the means -- to declare that the Government may commit crimes in order to secure conviction of a private criminal -- would bring terrible retribution."
-Justice Louis D. Brandeis
(1856-1941) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: 1912
"It should be clear by now that a nation can be no stronger abroad than she is at home. Only an America which practices what it preaches about equal rights and social justice will be respected by those whose choice affects our future. Only an America which has fully educated its citizens is fully capable of tackling the complex problems and perceiving the hidden dangers of the world in which we live. And only an America which is growing and prospering economically can sustain the worldwide defenses of freedom, while demonstrating to all concerned the opportunities of our system and society."
-John F. Kennedy-
"Oh, judge, your damn laws: the good people don't need them and the bad people don't follow them so what good are they?"
-Ammon Hennacy-
(1893-1970) Catholic anarchist, pacifist, vegetarian, draft refuser in two world wars, tax resister, "one-person revolution in America."
Source: Whenever Ammon was arrested for any number of reasons, mostly for "illegal" picketing, instead of pleading guilty or innocent he would plead 'anarchy'. This was his reply to the judge's statement 'But Ammon you broke the law.'
"Schisms do not originate in a love of truth, which is a source of courtesy and gentleness, but rather in an inordinate desire for supremacy. From all these considerations it is clearer than the sun at noonday, that the true schismatics are those who condemn other men's writings, and seditiously stir up the quarrelsome masses against their authors, rather than those authors themselves, who generally write only for the learned, and appeal solely to reason. In fact, the real disturbers of the peace are those who, in a free state, seek to curtail the liberty of judgment which they are unable to tyrannize over."
-Baruch Spinoza-
"Perhaps it will be said that this consent is not a specific, but a general one, and that the citizen is understood to have assented to every thing his representative may do, when he voted for him. But suppose he did not vote for him; and on the contrary did all in his power to get elected some one holding opposite views — what then? The reply will probably be that, by taking part in such an election, he tacitly agreed to abide by the decision of the majority. And how if he did not vote at all? Why then he cannot justly complain of any tax, seeing that he made no protest against its imposition. So, curiously enough, it seems that he gave his consent in whatever way he acted — whether he said yes, whether he said no, or whether he remained neuter! A rather awkward doctrine this. Here stands an unfortunate citizen who is asked if he will pay money for a certain proffered advantage; and whether he employs the only means of expressing his refusal or does not employ it, we are told that he practically agrees; if only the number of others who agree is greater than the number of those who dissent. And thus we are introduced to the novel principle that A's consent to a thing is not determined by what A says, but by what B may happen to say!"
–Herbert Spencer-
The Right to Ignore the State
"All human history is the struggle between systems that attempt to shackle the human personality in the name of some intangible good on the one hand and systems that enable and expand the scope of human personality in the pursuit of extremely tangible aims. The American system is the most successful in the world because it harmonizes best with the aims and longings of human personality while allowing the best protection to other personalities."
-Ben Stein-
social conservative, military interventionist (IIRC)
"[When a victimless criminal] is treated as an enemy of society, he almost necessarily becomes one. Forced into criminal acts, immersed in underworld-related supply networks, and ever-conscious of the need to evade the police, his outlooks as well as behavior become more and more anti-social."
-Edwin M. Schur-
American professor, sociologist, lawyer, economist, author
Source: Schur, Edwin (1974) Victimless crimes: Two sides of controversy. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall.
"He didn't know the right people. That's all a police record means in this rotten crime-ridden country."
-Raymond Chandler-
(1888-1959) American writer of detective novels
"The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own."
-Aldous Huxley-
"It makes no difference whether a good man has defrauded a bad man, or a bad man defrauded a good man, or whether a good or bad man has committed adultery: the law can look only to the amount of damage done."
-Aristotle-
(384-322 BC) Greek philosopher
Source: Nicomachean Ethics, 340 B.C
What?! No!! What about 'privilege'...?!
"The public good is in nothing more essentially interested, than in the protection of every individual’s private rights."
-Sir William Blackstone-
(1723-1780)
Source: Commentaries on the Laws of England, 1765-69
"It is left, therefore, to the juries, if they think the permanent judges are under any bias whatever in any cause, to take on themselves to judge the law as well as the fact. They never exercise this power but when they suspect partiality in the judges, and by the exercise of this power they have been the firmest bulwarks of English liberty."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Letter to Abbe Arnoux, Paris, July 19, 1789
"The number of laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm."
-P. D. Ouspensky-
(1878-1947)
Source: A New Model of the Universe, 1931
"None of the modes by which a magistrate is appointed, popular election, the accident of the lot, or the accident of birth, affords, as far as we can perceive, much security for his being wiser than any of his neighbours. The chance of his being wiser than all his neighbours together is still smaller."
-Thomas Babington Macaulay-
(1800-1859) [Lord Macaulay] 1st Baron Macaulay, British historian
Source: "Southey's Colloquies on Society" par. SC.62
"It is not because we have been free, but because we have a right to be free, that we ought to demand freedom. Justice and liberty have neither birth nor race, youth nor age."
-Sir James MacKintosh-
(1765-1832) Scottish historian and statesman
Source: Vindicae Gallicae, 1791
"In dealing with the State, we ought to remember that its institutions are not aboriginal, though they existed before we were born; that they are not superior to the citizen; that every one of them was once the act of a single man; every law and usage was a man's expedient to meet a particular case; that they all are imitable, all alterable; we may make as good; we may make better."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-
(1803-1882)
Source: Essays, Second Series (1844)
"There is one, and only one, thing in modern society more hideous than crime -- namely, repressive justice."
-Simone Weil-
(1909-1943)
Source: Human Personality
"In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law ... That would lead to anarchy. An individual who breaks a law that his conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law."
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-
(1929-1968), US civil rights leader
Words, words, words, are the stumbling-blocks in the way of truth. Until you think of things as they are, and not of the words that misrepresent them, you cannot think rightly. Words produce the appearance of hard and fast lines where there are none. Words divide; thus we call this a man, that an ape, that a monkey, while they are all only differentiations of the same thing. To think of a thing they must be got rid of: they are the clothes that thoughts wear — only the clothes. I say this over and over again, for there is nothing of more importance. Other men's words will stop you at the beginning of an investigation. A man may play with words all his life, arranging them and rearranging them like dominoes. If I could think to you without words you would understand me better."
-Samuel Butler-
"I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice."
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
"The possession of power over others is inherently destructive both to the possessor of the power and to those over whom it is exercised."
-George D. Herron-
(1862-1925)
Source: in The Cry For Justice (Upton Sinclair) 1920
"Freedom is independence of the compulsory will of another, and in so far as it tends to exist with the freedom of all according to a universal law, it is the one sole original inborn right belonging to every man in virtue of his humanity."
-Immanuel Kant-
(1724-1804) German philosopher
"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. No one in this world, so far as I know -- and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me -- has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people."
-H.L. Mencken-
"Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us."
-Justice William O. Douglas-
(1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
"It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster."
-Voltaire-
[François Marie Arouet] (1694-1778)
"There are three estates in Parliament but in the Reporters' Gallery yonder there sits a Fourth Estate more important far than they all. It is not a figure of speech or witty saying, it is a literal fact, very momentous to us in these times."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
Source: Attributed
“Whenever you put your faith in big government for any reason, sooner or later you wind up an apologist for mass murder.”
-Karl Hess-
"I was taught when I was a young reporter that it's news when we say it is. I think that's still true -- it's news when 'we' say it is. It's just who 'we' is has changed. Members of the public, people with modems, people with cell phones are now producers, editors. They can push and push and push on a story until it ends up being acknowledged by everyone."
-David Carr-
columnist for The New York Times
"Quis costodiet ipsos custodes?"
("Who will watch the watchers?")
-Juvenal-
[Decimus Junius Juvenalis] (c.55-c.128 AD) Roman satirical poet
"The function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it invites a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger. Speech is often provocative and challenging. It may strike at prejudices and preconceptions and have profound unsettling effects as it passes for acceptance of an idea."
-Justice William O. Douglas-
(1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Terminello v. Chicago, 1949
"For the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are."
-Niccolo Machiavelli-
(1469-1527) Italian Statesman and Political Philosopher
Source: Discourses, 1513-1517
"People may or may not say what they mean... but they always say something designed to get what they want."
-David Mamet-
American playwright
"Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups … So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing."
-Philip K. Dick-
"The press must grow day in and day out -- it is our Party's sharpest and most powerful weapon."
-Josef Stalin-
(1879-1953) Communist leader of the USSR
Source: Speech at The Twelfth Congress of the R.C.P.(B.) (19 April 1923)
"The real searcher after truth will not receive the old because it is old, or reject the new because it is new. He will not believe men because they are dead, or contradict them because they are alive. With him an utterance is worth the truth, the reason it contains, without the slightest regard to the author. He may have been a king or serf -- a philosopher or servant, -- but the utterance neither gains nor loses in truth or reason. Its value is absolutely independent of the fame or station of the man who gave it to the world."
-Robert G. Ingersoll-
(1833-1899) American political leader, orator
(or of the infamy...)
"There is no kind of dishonesty into which otherwise good people more easily and frequently fall than that of defrauding the government."
-Benjamin Franklin-
"And to say that society ought to be governed by the opinion of the wisest and best, though true, is useless. Whose opinion is to decide who are the wisest and best?"
-Thomas Babington Macaulay-
(1800-1859) [Lord Macaulay] 1st Baron Macaulay, British historian
Source: "Southey's Colloquies on Society" par. SC.60
(why, the best and wisest, of course...)
"The first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means."
-Georges Bernanos-
(1888-1949)
Source: The Last Essays of Georges Bernanos, 1955
"There is a higher court than courts of justice and that is the court of conscience. It supercedes all other courts."
-Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi-
(1869-1948)
"A good end cannot sanctify evil means; nor must we ever do evil, that good may come of it."
-William Penn-
(1644-1718)
Source: Some Fruits of Solitude in Reflections and Maxims
"These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated. Britain, with an army to enforce her tyranny, has declared that she has a right (not only to TAX) but "to BIND us in ALL CASES WHATSOEVER" and if being bound in that manner, is not slavery, then is there not such a thing as slavery upon earth. Even the expression is impious; for so unlimited a power can belong only to God."
-Thomas Paine-
December 23, 1776
"If language is not correct,
then what is said is not what is meant;
if what is said is not what is meant,
then what must be done remains undone;
if this remains undone,
morals and art will deteriorate;
if justice goes astray,
the people will stand about in helpless confusion.
Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said.
This matters above everything."
-Confucius-
[Kung Fu-tse] (551-479 B.C.)
"No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore to us the belief in our own guidance."
-Henry Miller-
"Truth does not become more true by virtue of the fact that the entire world agrees with it, nor less so even if the whole world disagrees with it."
-Maimonides-
(1135-1204) Jewish philosopher
"Statesmen, my dear Sir, may plan and speculate for liberty, but it is religion and morality alone, which can establish the principles upon which freedom can securely stand. The only foundation of a free Constitution is pure virtue, and if this cannot be inspired into our People in a greater Measure than they have it now, they may change their rulers and the forms of government, but they will not obtain a lasting liberty."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
June 21, 1776
Source: letter to Zabdiel Adams, 21 June 1776, (Reference: Our Sacred Honor, Bennett (371))
"Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest prop of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked: Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice? And let us with caution indulge in the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle... Observe good faith and justice toward all nations. Cultivate peace and harmony with all. Religion and morality enjoin this conduct; and can it be that good policy does not equally enjoin it?"
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: George Washington's Farewell Address, September 17, 1796
"We hold it for a fundamental and undeniable truth, that religion, or the duty we owe our Creator and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence. The religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate. This right is in its nature an unalienable right."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
"When New Zealanders emigrate to Australia, the average IQ of both countries increases."
-Sir Robert Muldoon-
Former NZ Prime Minister
(likely stolen from...)
"When the Okies left Oklahoma and moved to California, they raised the average intelligence level in both states."
-Will Rogers-
"Unlimited power is in itself a bad and dangerous thing. Human beings are not competent to exercise it with discretion. God alone can be omnipotent, because his wisdom and his justice are always equal to his power. There is no power on earth so worthy of honor in itself, or clothed with rights so sacred, that I would admit its uncontrolled and all-predominant authority. When I see that the right and the means of absolute command are conferred on any power whatever, be it called a people or a king, an aristocracy or a republic, I say there is the germ of tyranny, and I seek to live elsewhere, under other laws."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
"'Bipartisan' usually means that a larger-than-usual deception is being carried out."
-George Carlin-
"Anarchy is the only slight glimmer of hope. Not the popular conception of it -- men in black cloaks lurching around with hidden bombs -- but a freedom of every man personally for himself."
-Mick Jagger-
"Individuality is the aim of political liberty. By leaving to the citizen as much freedom of action and of being as comports with order and the rights of others, the institutions render him truly a free man. He is left to pursue his means of happiness in his own manner."
-James Fenimore Cooper-
(1789-1851) American Novelist
Source: The American Democrat, 1838
"Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties... They valued liberty both as an end and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty."
-Justice Louis D. Brandeis-
(1856-1941) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: Whitney v. California, 1927
"I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them."
-Thomas Jefferson
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"The makers of our constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness... They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred, as against the government, the right to be let alone -- the most comprehensive of the rights and the right most valued by civilized men."
-Justice Louis D. Brandeis-
(1856-1941) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: Olmstead v. United States, 1928
"Neither the trappings of robes, nor temples of stone, nor a fixed liturgy, nor an extensive literature or history is required to meet the test of beliefs cognizable under the Constitution as religious. So far as our law is concerned, one person's religious beliefs held for one day are presumptively entitled to the same protection as the beliefs of millions which have been shared for thousands of years."
-Judge Jack B. Weinstein-
(1921-) United States federal judge
Source: New York State, 1977
"Just as the right to speak and the right to refrain from speaking are complementary components of a broader concept of individual freedom, so also the individual’s freedom to choose his own creed is the counterpart of his right to refrain from accepting the creed established by the majority."
-Justice John Paul Stevens-
U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Wallace v. Jaffree, 1985
"Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule -- and both commonly succeed, and are right."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"He therefore is the truest friend to the liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue, and who, so far as his power and influence extend, will not suffer a man to be chosen into any office of power and trust who is not a wise and virtuous man... The sum of all is, if we would most truly enjoy this gift of Heaven, let us become a virtuous people."
-Samuel Adams-
(1722-1803), was known as the "Father of the American Revolution."
"Anti-social behavior is a trait of intelligence in a world full of conformists."
-Nikola Tesla-
"Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all."
-Edmund Burke-
"The Anarchists are right in everything; in the negation of the existing order, and in the assertion that, without authority, there could not be worse violence than that of authority under existing conditions. They are mistaken only in thinking that Anarchy can be instituted by a revolution. 'To establish Anarchy.' 'Anarchy will be instituted.' But it will be instituted only by there being more and more people who do not require protection from governmental power, and by there being more and more people who will be ashamed of applying this power."
-Leo Tolstoy-
"We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart."
-H. L. Mencken
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"Whether or not legislation is truly moral is often a question of who has the power to define morality."
-Jerome H. Skolnick-
"Laws which prescribe what everyone must believe, and forbid men to say or write anything against this or that opinion, are often passed to gratify, or rather to appease the anger of those who cannot abide independent minds."
-Baruch Spinoza-
(1632-1677)
Source: Theological Political Treatise, 1670
"If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a state has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch. Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds."
-Justice Thurgood Marshall-
(1908-1993) first Black US Supreme Court Justice
Source: Stanley v. Georgia, 1969
"It is bad policy to fear the resentment of an enemy."
-Ethan Allen-
"Considering the natural lust for power so inherent in man, I fear the thirst of power will prevail to oppress the people."
-George Mason-
(1725-1792), drafted the Virgina Declaration of Rights, ally of James Madison and George Washington
Source: The Papers of George Mason, 1052 (Robert A. Rutland Ed., 1970)
"When you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship."
-Harry S. Truman-
(1884-1972), 33rd US President
"He is free who knows how to keep in his own hands the power to decide at each step, the course of his life, and who lives in a society which does not block the exercise of that power."
-Salvador De Madariaga-
(1886-1978 ), Spanish writer, diplomat, and historian, noted for his service at the League of Nations
Source: New York Times, 29 January 1957
"It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become prey to the active. The conditions upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime, and the punishment of his guilt."
-John Philpot Curran-
(1750-1814) Irish Orator, Statesman, Judge
Source: Speech on the Right of Election of Lord Mayor of Dublin, July 10, 1790
"[N]o country can be well governed unless its citizens as a body keep religiously before their minds that they are the guardians of the law and that the law officers are only the machinery for its execution, nothing more."
-Mark Twain
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910)
"It is an established fact that alcoholism, cocainism, and morphinism are deadly enemies of life, of health, and of the capacity for work and enjoyment; and a utilitarian must therefore consider them as vices. But this is far from demonstrating that the authorities must interpose to suppress these vices by commercial prohibitions, nor is it by any means evident that such intervention on the part of the government is really capable of suppressing them or that, even if this end could be attained, it might not therewith open up a Pandora's box of other dangers, no less mischievous than alcoholism and morphinism."
-Ludwig von Mises-
1927
"For who can endure a doctrine which would allow only dentists to say whether our teeth were aching, only cobblers to say whether our shoes hurt us, and only governments to tell us whether we were being well governed?"
-C. S. Lewis-
(1898-1963), British novelist
"Mankind is at its best when it is most free. This will be clear if we grasp the principle of liberty. We must recall that the basic principle is freedom of choice, which saying many have on their lips but few in their minds."
-Dante Alighieri-
(1265-1320) Italian Poet
Source: Letters
"To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality."
General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, translated by John Beverly Robinson (London: Freedom Press, 1923), pp. 293-294.
-Pierre-Joseph Proudhon-
"The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are. Never under any circumstances admit that his success may be due to his own efforts, to the productive contribution he has made to the whole community. Always attribute his success to the exploitation, the cheating, the more or less open robbery of others.
Never under any circumstances admit that your own failure may be owing to your own weaknesses, or that the failure of anyone else may be due to his own defects — his laziness, incompetence, improvidence, or stupidity. Never believe in the honesty or disinterestedness of anyone who disagrees with you.
This basic hatred is the heart of Marxism. This is its animating force. You can throw away the dialectical materialism, the Hegelian framework, the technical jargon, the 'scientific' analysis, and millions of pretentious words, and you still have the core: the implacable hatred and envy that are the raison d'être for all the rest."
-Henry Hazlitt-
Marxism in One Minute
"Is freedom anything else than the right to live as we wish? Nothing else."
-Epictetus-
(ca 55-135 A.D.) Greek philospher
"A right is not what someone gives you; it's what no one can take from you."
-Ramsey Clark
(1927-) US Attorney General (1967-69)
Source: New York Times, 2 October 1977
"It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Notes on the State of Virginia, 1784
"Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Nations and peoples who forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms."
-Robert Heinlein-
"The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling, against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them."
-John Stuart Mill-
(1806-1873) English philosopher and economist
Source: On Liberty, 1859
"It is a maxim among lawyers that whatever hath been done before may be done again, and therefore they take special care to record all the decisions formerly made against common justice and the general reason of mankind. These, under the name of precedents, they produce as authorities to justify the most iniquitous opinions, and the judges never fail of directing them accordingly."
-Jonathan Swift-
(1667-1745) Irish author
Source: Gulliver’s Travels, 1726
"Do not expect justice where might is right."
-Plato-
(429-347 BC)
Source: Phaedrus, 360 B.C.
"Good men must not obey the laws too well."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-
(1803-1882)
"[T]hough not unqualified, a citizen's right to film government officials, including law enforcement officers, in the discharge of their duties in a public space is a basic, vital, and well-established liberty safeguarded by the First Amendment."
-First Circuit Court of Appeals-
Glik v. Cunniffe
"It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer"
-Sir William Blackstone-
"Blackstone's formulation"
"An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates his duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
Source: Dissertation on First Principles of Government, 7 July 1795
"All bad precedents began as justifiable measures."
-Gaius Julius Caesar-
(100-44 B.C.) Roman emperor
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-
(1929-1968), US civil rights leader
Letter from the Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963
"The Prince himself has no distinction, either of garments, or of a crown; but is only distinguished by a sheaf of corn carried before him; as the high priest is also known by his being preceded by a person carrying a wax light. They have but few laws, and such is their constitution that they need not many. They very much condemn other nations whose laws, together with the commentaries on them, swell up to so many volumes; for they think it an unreasonable thing to oblige men to obey a body of laws that are both of such a bulk, and so dark as not to be read and understood by every one of the subjects."
-Thomas More-
"You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having both at once."
-Robert A. Heinlein-
(1907-1988) American writer
Source: The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
"The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair."
-H.L. Mencken-
"If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no recourse left but in the exertion of that original right of self-defense which is paramount to all positive forms of government..."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804)
Source: The Federalist No. 28.
"There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confide itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing."
-Andrew Jackson-
(1767-1845) 7th US President
Source: July 10, 1832, Veto of the Bank Bill
"The internal effects of a mutable policy are [...] calamitous. It poisons the blessings of liberty itself. It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man who knows what the law is today can guess what it will be tomorrow."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: "Federalist" # 62, in The Federalist (Indianapolis: Modern Library and National Foundation for Education in American Citizenship, n.d.), p. 406
"It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is today, can guess what it will be tomorrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?"
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Federalist Papers 62
"An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it."
-Col. Jeff Cooper-
"Sovereignty itself is, of course, not subject to law, for it is the author and source of law; but in our system, while sovereign powers are delegated to the agencies of government, sovereignty itself remains with the people, by whom and for whom all government exists and acts."
-Yick Yo v. Hopkins, 118 U.S. 356 1886-
"All see, and most admire, the glare which hovers round the external trappings of elevated office. To me there is nothing in it, beyond the lustre which may be reflected from its connection with a power of promoting human felicity."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: letter to Catherine Macaulay Graham, 1790
"The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create whatever the form of government, a real despotism. A just estimate of that love of power, and proneness to abuse it, which predominates in the human heart is sufficient to satisfy us of the truth of this position."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: George Washington's Farewell Address, September 17, 1796
"The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the republican model of government, are justly considered deeply, perhaps as finally, staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: First Inaugural Address, 1789, Ref: George Washington: A Collection, W.B. Allen, ed. (462)
"Truth always rests with the minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion -- and who, therefore, in the next instant (when it is evident that the minority is the stronger) assume its opinion ... while Truth again reverts to a new minority."
-Soren Kierkegaard
(1813-1855) Danish philosopher
"It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere."
-Voltaire-
[François Marie Arouet] (1694-1778)
"The ideal form of government is democracy tempered with assassination."
-Voltaire-
[François Marie Arouet] (1694-1778)
"Freedom is the right to be wrong, not the right to do wrong."
-John G. Diefenbaker-
(1895-1979) Prime Minister of Canada
"Law logic -- an artificial system of reasoning, exclusively used in courts of justice, but good for nothing anywhere else."
-John Quincy Adams-
(1767-1848) 6th US President
"In view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens."
-John Marshall Harlan-
(1899-1971) U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896
"Laws are like cobwebs which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through."
-Jonathan Swift-
(1667-1745) Anglo-Irish Poet and Satirist
Source: A Critical Essay upon the Faculties of the Mind, 1707, & Gullivers Travels, 1726
"To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt."
-Elizabeth Cady Stanton-
(1815-1902) American social activist, abolitionist, and leading figure of the early women's rights movement.
"Do not separate text from historical background. If you do, you will have perverted and subverted the Constitution, which can only end in a distorted, bastardized form of illegitimate government."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
"The framers of the constitution employed words in their natural sense; and, where they are plain and clear, resort to collateral aids to interpretation is unnecessary, and cannot be indulged in to narrow or enlarge the text; but where there is ambiguity or doubt, or where two views may well be entertained, contemporaneous and subsequent practical construction is entitled to the greatest weight."
-Justice Melville Weston Fuller-
(1833-1910) Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, 1888-1910
Source: delivering the opinion of the court in MCPHERSON v. BLACKER, 146 U.S. 1 (1892)
"If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law."
-Henry David Thoreau-
(1817-1862)
"Nothing can destroy a government more quickly than its failure to observe its own laws, or worse, its disregard of the charter of its own existence."
-Justice Tom C. Clark-
(1899-1977) US Attorney General, 1945-1949, Associate Justice of theSupreme Court of the United States, 1949-1967
Source: delivering the opinion of the Court in MAPP v. OHIO, 367 U.S. 643 (1961)
"When a legislature undertakes to proscribe the exercise of a citizen's constitutional rights it acts lawlessly and the citizen can take matters into his own hands and proceed on the basis that such a law is no law at all."
-Justice William O. Douglas-
(1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
"The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants."
-Albert Camus-
(1913-1960) French Algerian author
"There comes a time when a moral man can't obey a law which his conscience tells him is unjust."
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-
(1929-1968), US civil rights leader
"Unnecessary laws are not good laws, but traps for money."
-Thomas Hobbes-
(1588-1679) English philosopher, political theorist
Source: Leviathan, 1651
"Ense petit placidam sub libertate quietem"
(By the sword we seek peace, but peace only under liberty)
-Massachusetts State Motto-
"Why is patriotism thought to be blind loyalty to the government and the politicians who run it, rather than loyalty to the principles of liberty and support for the people? Real patriotism is a willingness to challenge the government when it’s wrong."
-Ron Paul-
2012
"I define anarchist society as one where there is no legal possibility for coercive aggression against the person or property of
any individual."
-Murray Rothbard-
"People want government to do all manner of things, things that if done privately would lead to condemnation and jail sentences. Some want government to give money to farmers, poor folk, college students, senior citizens and businesses. There’s no Santa Claus or tooth fairy. The only way government can give money to one person is to forcibly take it from another person. If I privately used the same method to raise money for a “deserving” college student, homeless person or businessman, I’d face theft charges. Others among us want government to protect wild wolves, bears and the Stephens kangaroo rat even if it results in gross violations of private property and loss of lives. The problem is that some people disagree with having their earnings taken to satisfy someone else’s wishes. They don’t want the Corps of Engineers and Fish and Wildlife Service dictating to them what they can and cannot do with their property to ensure a habitat for the kangaroo rat. Force and threats must be used. Here’s the question: Could the average American kill a person who resolutely refuses to give up his earnings so Congress can give it to farmers? Could you kill a person who insists on using all of his property, even though some wolves have set up a den on it? You say, “What do you mean, Williams -- kill?” Here’s the scenario: The Corps of Engineers commands me not to remove debris from a drainage ditch on my property, placed there by beavers building a dam, because the debris creates a wetland. I remove it anyway. The Corps of Engineers fines me. I refuse to pay the unjust fine. The Corps of Engineers threatens to seize my land. I say no, you won’t: it’s my land, and I’ll protect it. A politician sends marshals to take it, and I get killed defending it."
-Walter E. Williams-
(1936- ) Columnist, Professor of Economics at George Mason University
Source: CONSERVATIVE CHRONICLE, September 20, 1995
"[T]he main evil of the present democratic institutions of the united states does not raise ... from their weakness, but from their irresistible strength. I am not so much alarmed at the excessive liberty which reigns in that country as at the inadequate securities which one finds there against tyranny."
-Alexis De Tocqueville-
[Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clerel, le Comte de Tocqueville] (1805-1859) French historian
Source: Democracy in America, 1835
"Let us disappoint the Men who are raising themselves upon the ruin of this Country."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: November 20th, 1772, the Votes and Proceedings of the Town of Boston were printed as a Pamphlet and sent to each Town stating the Rights of the Colonists.
"We create the government that screws you, and then you’re supposed to thank us for protecting you from it."
-Vin Weber-
(1952-) US Congressman (R-MN)
"Distrust of authority should be the first civic duty."
-Norman Douglas-
"Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bedroom windows. Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could."
-William F. Buckley, Jr.-
(1925-2008) American author and journalist, founded 'National Review'
"I consider marijuana the worst of all narcotics, far worse than the use of morphine or cocaine. Under its influence men become beasts... Marijuana destroys life itself. I have no sympathy with those who sell this weed. The government is going to enforce this new law to the letter."
-Judge John Foster Symes-
(1878-1951) United States federal judge
Source: October 5, 1937, when sentencing Samuel R. Caldwell (the first person to be charged under the new Marijuana Tax Stamp Act passed 3 days earlier) to four years of hard labour in Leavenworth Penitentiary, plus a $1,000 fine. Caldwell served every day of his sentence and died one year later after his release.
"Most marijuana smokers are Negroes, Hispanics, jazz musicians, and entertainers. Their satanic music is driven by marijuana, and marijuana smoking by white women makes them want to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers, and others. It is a drug that causes insanity, criminality, and death -- the most violence-causing drug in the history of mankind."
-Harry J. Anslinger-
(1892-1975) Assistant Prohibition Commissioner in the Bureau of Prohibition, first Commissioner of the Treasury Department's Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) (1930-1962, 32 years), US Representative to the United Nations Narcotics Commission
"We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason."
-Daryl Gates-
Los Angeles Police Chief
"Of great importance to the public is the preservation of this personal liberty; for if once it were left in the power of any the highest magistrate to imprison arbitrarily whomever he or his officers thought proper, (as in France it is daily practised by the crown,) there would soon be an end of all other rights and immunities. Some have thought that unjust attacks, even upon life or property, at the arbitrary will of the magistrate, are less dangerous to the commonwealth than such as are made upon the personal liberty of the subject. To bereave a man of life, or by violence to confiscate his estate, without accusation or trial, would be so gross and notorious an act of despotism, as must at once convey the alarm of tyranny throughout the whole kingdom; but confinement of the person, by secretly hurrying him to jail, where his sufferings are unknown or forgotten, is a less public, a less striking, and therefore a more dangerous engine of arbitrary government."
-William Blackstone-
"Should we believe self-serving, ever-growing drug enforcement/drug treatment bureaucrats, whose pay and advancement depends on finding more and more people to arrest and 'treat'? More Americans die in just one day in prisons, penitentiaries, jails and stockades than have ever died from marijuana throughout history. Who are they protecting? From what?"
-Dr. Fred Oerther-
Source: Portland, Oregon, September 1986
"The First Amendment issue here is, as the parties frame it, fairly narrow: is there a constitutionally protected right to videotape police carrying out their duties in public? Basic First Amendment principles, along with case law from this and other circuits, answer that question unambiguously in the affirmative."
-Judge Kermit Victor Lipez-
(1941-) Senior United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit
Aug 26, 2011
Source: writing the opinion of the court in Glik v. Cunniffe, 655 F.3d 78, 82 (1st Cir. 2011), (quoting Mills v. Alabama, 384 U.S. 214, 218 (1966))
"The Illinois eavesdropping statute restricts a medium of expression commonly used for the preservation and communication of information and ideas, thus triggering First Amendment scrutiny. Illinois has criminalized the nonconsensual recording of most any oral communication, including recordings of public officials doing the public’s business in public and regardless of whether the recording is open or surreptitious. Defending the broad sweep of this statute, the State’s Attorney relies on the government’s interest in protecting conversational privacy, but that interest is not implicated when police officers are performing their duties in public places and engaging in public communications audible to persons who witness the events. Even under the more lenient intermediate standard of scrutiny applicable to content-neutral burdens on speech, this application of the statute very likely flunks. The Illinois eavesdropping statute restricts far more speech than necessary to protect legitimate privacy interests; as applied to the facts alleged here, it likely violates the First Amendment’s free-speech and free-press guarantees."
-Judge Diane Schwerm Sykes
(1957-) Federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, former Justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court
Source: in the ruling for the U.S Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, ALCU of Illinois v. Anita Alvarez (2012)
"Police may have no right to privacy in carrying out official duties in public. But the civilians they interact with do."
-Judge Richard Allen Posner-
(1939-) American jurist, legal theorist and economist. Federal judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago, Senior Lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School
Source: U.S Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, ALCU of Illinois v. Anita Alvarez (2012) (Dissenting)
"May it not be asked of every intelligent friend to the liberties of his country, whether the power exercised in such an act as this ought not to produce great and universal alarm? Whether a rigid execution of such an act, in time past, would not have repressed that information and communication among the people which is indispensable to the just exercise of their electoral rights? And whether such an act, if made perpetual, and enforced with rigor, would not, in time to come, either destroy our free system of government, or prepare a convulsion that might prove equally fatal to it? "
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Jan 1800, regarding the Sedition Act of 1798, Report on the Virginia Resolutions
"A statute intended to prevent unwarranted intrusions into a citizen’s privacy cannot be used as a shield for public officials who cannot assert a comparable right of privacy in their public duties. Such action impedes the free flow of information concerning public officials and violates the First Amendment right to gather such information. ... The [Illinois Eavesdropping Statute] includes conduct that is unrelated to the statute’s purpose and is not rationally related to the evil the legislation sought to prohibit. For example, a defendant recording his case in a courtroom has nothing to do with an intrusion into a citizen’s privacy but with distraction. ... The court finds the Illinois Eavesdropping Statute is unconstitutional on its face and as applied to the defendant as the statute is violative of substantive due process."
-Judge David Frankland-
Circuit Court Judge for Crawford County, Illinois
Source: In a 12-page order entered September 15, 2011, in People v Michael D. Allison, No 2009-CF-50, Judge David K. Frankland of the circuit court of Crawford County held that the Illinois Eavesdropping Act is unconstitutional in that it violates substantive due process and the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. Michael Allison faced up to to 75 years in prison for recording his encounters with police officers and a judge.
"Two wars necessitated vast curtailments of liberty, and we have grown, though grumblingly, accustomed to our chains. The increasing complexity and precariousness of our economic life have forced Government to take over many spheres of activity once left to choice or chance. Our intellectuals have surrendered first to the slave-philosophy of Hegel, then to Marx, finally to the linguistic analysts.
As a result, classical political theory, with its Stoical, Christian, and juristic key-conceptions (natural law, the value of the individual, the rights of man), has died. The modern State exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good -- anyway, to do something to us or to make us something. Hence the new name 'leaders' for those who were once 'rulers'. We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, 'Mind your own business.' Our whole lives are their business.
I write 'they' because it seems childish not to recognize that actual government is and always must be oligarchical. Our effective masters must be more than one and fewer than all. But the oligarchs begin to regard us in a new way."
-C. S. Lewis-
(1898-1963), British novelist
Source: Willing Slaves of the Welfare State, first published in The Observer on July 20, 1958
"Justice without force is impotent, force without justice is tyranny. Unable to make what is just strong, we have made what is strong just."
-Blaise Pascal-
(1623- 1662) French mathematician and philosopher
Source: Pensées
"The government is the potent omnipresent teacher. For good or ill it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that the end justifies the means -- to declare that the government may commit crimes -- would bring terrible retribution."
-Justice Louis D. Brandeis-
-J.F.K.-
"The Lord giveth, the government taketh away."
Every time history repeats itself, the price goes up."
"...All facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice...the first time as tragedy, the second as farce..."
-Karl Marx-
"Compromise - on strategy, not on principle."
-Brubaker-
"Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself..."
-Jean-Paul Sartre-
"With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter, nor waste arguments where they will certainly be lost."
-Wm. Lloyd Garrison-
"Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges."
"(The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.)"
-Cornelius Tacitus-
(55-117 A.D.)
Source: Annales, 1st century A.D.
"The bureaucratic mentality is the only constant in the universe."
-Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy-
(23rd century)
"I know that we have nothing to fear from the flag burners. We have a great deal to fear from those who have lost faith in the Constitution."
-Rep. Ted Weiss (D-NY)-
"The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom is courage."
-Thucydides-
"Choice is freedom. Science cannot and must not dictate our beliefs. But science can provide choices."
-Dr. Etienne-Emile Baulieu-
developer of RU-486
"What a waste it is to lose one's mind - or not to have a mind."
-Vice Pres. Dan Quayle-
to NAACP
"There are lies, damned lies, and right-wing religious zealots who believe if they tell big enough lies at a fast enough pace, they can anesthetize America to the truth."
-Rep. Pat Williams (D-MT)-
"That government is best which governs least, because its people discipline themselves. If we are directed from Washington (heads of an organization) when to sow and when to reap, we will soon want for bread."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"The flag uniquely symbolizes the ideas of liberty, equality and tolerance. The flag embodies the spirit of our national commitment to those ideals."
-Justice John Paul Stevens-
dissenter
Therefore...
"Punishing desecration of the flag dilutes the very freedom that makes this emblem so revered."
-Justice William Brennan-
voice of reason
"When I look around (at) the politicians today, I see more people who remind me of Daffy Duck than Thomas Jefferson."
-Rep. David Obey, D-Wis.-
"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."
-Eleanor Roosevelt-
"If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice."
-Rush-
"(Justice) Douglas is a great humanitarian in the abstract; he just can't stand people."
-Justice Felix-
Separate But Equal
"Religion is the opiate of the masses."
-Karl Marx-
"As a member of the great Washington, D.C., bureaucracy, Hellman evidently suffers from terminal Beltway Syndrome, that combination of pompous arrogance and creeping paranoia in which all society's ills are solved through regulation, human nature is perfected through judicial mandate, and common sense is replaced by legal statute....We can only hope Hellman isn't a statistician."
-Jim Miller-
managing editor of Cycle Magazine, responding to an editorial in RoadRider Magazine
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
-Hanlon's Razor-
"Don't write anything you can phone. Don't phone anything you can talk face-to-face. Don't talk anything you can smile. Don't smile anything you can wink. And don't wink anything you can nod."
-Earl Long-
Governor of LA
"Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion by evil-minded rulers, yet the greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."
-Supreme Court-
Olmstead v US, 1928
"He's a hero. They are killing innocent life. This is going to be, hopefully, the beginning of the war, and we'll win because we're right, and we'll once again have godly laws in our land."
-Andrew Cabot-
oft-arrested NH abortion protester on John Salvi, "pro-life" terrorist
"There may be a link between advocating the use of force and people acting on it."
-recent revelation of Rev. Pat Mahoney-
notorious abortion foe as leader of the Christian Defense Coalition and noted sociological genius
"Isn't it better to act on the basis of what is true, rather than maintaining it has no right to be true?"
-John Stossel-
Boys and Girls Are Different: Men, Women and the Sex Difference
"First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out--
because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out--
because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out--
because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out--
because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me--
and there was no one left to speak out for me."
-Pastor Niemoeller-
Upon exiting Nazi death camp
Holocaust Encyclopedia
"If my fellow citizens want to go to Hell, I will help them. It's my job."
-Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes-
"God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion [possibly the French Revolution, but more likely Shays' Rebellion]. What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion [possibly the French Revolution, but more likely Shays' Rebellion]. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty . . . And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."
-Thomas Jefferson-
letter to William Stevens Smith, November 13, 1787
"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
Source: motto to Historical Review of Pennsylvania
1755 letter that Franklin is presumed to have written on behalf of the Pennsylvania Assembly to the colonial governor during the French and Indian War
"Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner."
-James Bovard-
American author, lecturer
Source: Lost Rights. The Destruction of American Liberty (St. Martin's Press: New York, 1994), p. 333
"Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people."
-George Bernard Shaw-
"Live free or die. Death is not the worst of evils."
-John Stark-
"Among the many misdeeds of British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest."
-Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi-
(1869-1948)
Source: An Autobiography, pg 446
"Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have ... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people, by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpations."
-James Madison-
"Man has only those rights he can defend."
-Jack McCoy-
Law and Order
"As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight. And it is in such twilight that we all must be aware of change in the air - however slight - lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness."
-Justice William O. Douglas, US Supreme Court-
"Don't join the book burners. Don't think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed."
-Dwight D. Eisenhower-
"The discovery of the alphabet will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories. They will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves."
-Socrates, in Phaedrus-
"I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
1820
Source: letter to William Charles Jarvis, 28 September 1820; The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Memorial Edition, Lipscomb and Bergh, eds., vol. 15 (278)
"Laws are like sausages. It's better not to see them being made."
-Otto von Bismarck-
"It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again because there is no effort without error and short-comings, who knows the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the high achievement of triumph and who at worst, if he fails while daring greatly, knows his place shall never be with those timid and cold souls who know neither victory nor defeat."
-Theodore Roosevelt-
26th President of the United States.
"Hypocrisy is better than no standards at all."
-William Bennet-
drug czar
"A representative owes the people not only his industry, but his judgment, and he betrays them if he sacrifices it to their opinion."
-Sir Edmund Burke-
member of British Parliament
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
-Sir Edmund Burke-
"All that is necessary for good to triumph is for evil men to do nothing."
"When bad men combine, the good must associate else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."
- Sir Edmund Burke-
"Silence is golden, but when it threatens your freedom, it's yellow."
-Sir Edmund Burke-
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts."
-Bertrand Russell-
(1872-1970) Philosopher, educator
"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the opposite direction."
-Albert Einstein-
"Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans, born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage, and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world. Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty… Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate… And so my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country."
-John F. Kennedy-
Inaugural (Excerpts): January 20, 1961
“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."
-Martin Luther King Jr.-
"There can be no real peace while one American is dying some place in the world for the rest of us. We are at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars, and it has been said if we lose that war, and in so doing lose this way of freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening. . . . If we lose freedom here [in America], there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth."
-Ronald Reagan- (October 27, 1964)
"The price of Freedom is eternal vigilance."
-Thomas Jefferson-
or was it...
"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."
-Wendell Phillips -
(1811-1884) Abolitionist author, orator and columnist for The Liberator,
Source: (frequently misattributed to Thomas Jefferson), in a speech before the Massachusetts Antislavery Society in 1852
or was it...
"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."
-John Philpot Curran-
(1750-1814) Irish Orator, Statesman, Judge
Source: Speech, Dublin
"You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in their struggle for independence."
-Charles A. Beard-
US historian (1874 - 1948)
"He, who will not reason, is a bigot; he, who cannot, is a fool; and he, who dares not, is a slave."
-William Drummond-
Laird of Hawthornden
"The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously."
-Henry Kissinger-
"Sometimes a majority only means that all the fools are on the same side."
"Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear, kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor, with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it."
-General Douglas MacArthur-
(1880-1964) WWII Supreme Allied Commander of the Southwest Pacific, Supreme United Nations Commander
Source: Whan, ed. "A Soldier Speaks: Public Papers and Speeches of General of the Army Douglas MacArthur," (1965); Nation, August 17, 1957
"I don't think the world should be made so safe that we lose the educational benefits of consequences."
-Virgil Elliot-
motorcyclist
"There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers."
-Richard Feynman-
physicist, Nobel laureate (1918-1988)
"When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President. Now I'm beginning to believe it."
-Clarence Darrow-
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
-Margaret Mead-
"The rights you have are the rights given you by this Committee [the House Un-American Activities Committee]. We will determine what rights you have and what rights you have not got."
-J. Parnell Thomas-
"Contemplate the mangled bodies of your countrymen, and then say 'What should be the reward of such sacrifices?' Bid us and our posterity bow the knee, supplicate the friendship, and plough, and sow, and reap, to glut the avarice of the men who have let loose on us the dogs of war to riot in our blood and hunt us from the face of the earth? If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen."
-Samuel Adams-
speech at the Philadelphia State House, August 1, 1776
"The Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions."
-Daniel Webster-
(1782-1852), US Senator
"Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters."
-Daniel Webster-
"There are men in all ages who mean to exercise power usefully; but who mean to exercise it. They mean to govern well; but they mean to govern. They promise to be kind masters; but they mean to be masters. They think there need be but little restraint upon themselves. Their notion of the public interest is apt to be quite closely connected with their own exercise of authority. They may not, indeed, always understand their own motives. The love of power may sink too deep in their hearts even for their own scrutiny, and may pass with themselves for mere patriotism and benevolence."
-Daniel Webster-
speech delivered at Niblo’s Saloon, in New York, on the 15 of March, 1837
"Woe to those who enact evil statutes, and to those who constantly record unjust decisions, so as to deprive the needy of justice, and to rob the poor of my people of their rights, in order that widows may be their spoil, and that they may plunder the orphans."
-Isaiah 10: 1-2-
"Why doesn't everybody leave everybody else the hell alone?"
-Jimmy Durante-
(1893-1980) American singer, pianist, comedian and actor
"Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but only those specifically enumerated."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this."
-Albert Einstein-
"My First Impression of the U.S.A.", 1921
"You have enough money for some law, but not enough for justice."
-a particularly altruistic attorney-
"...It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds..."
-Samuel Adams-
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must undergo the fatigue of supporting it. "
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) Source: Common Sense, February 14, 1776
"Whensoever the General Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"Patriotism means supporting your country all of the time, and your government when it deserves it."
-Mark Twain-
"I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"We are about 50 years overdue for a revolution. There's only one thing standing in the way: do you have any idea how much the permit would cost?"
-Darrell-
blacksmith
"The first rule of liberty: mind your own business."
-Alan Weiss-
"A libertarian is a person who believes that no one has the right, under any circumstances, to initiate force against another human being, or to advocate or delegate its initiation. Those who act consistently with this principle are libertarians, whether they realize it or not. Those who fail to act consistently with it are not libertarians, regardless of what they may claim."
-L Neil Smith-
"Every normal man must be tempted at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats."
-H.L. Mencken-
"And herein lies lesson one on 'Truth.' Let's call it The Pithy Postulate: There is no Truth man cannot confuse or obscure. (Especially a Lawyer!)"
-Cpt. Bruce Hartgers V-
"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them."
-Frederick Douglass-
"The direct use of physical force is so poor a solution to the problem of limited resources that it is commonly employed only by small children and great nations."
-David D Friedman-
The Machinery of Freedom
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme."
-Mark Twain-
"Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys."
-P.J. O'Rourke-
"Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action."
-George Washington-
"Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: in a speech of January 7, 1790
Or more succinctly, government is evil. Any other type of action in which it might engage is purely unintentional, and it apologizes...
"When people fear the government, there is tyranny. When government fears the people, there is liberty."
-Thomas Paine-
-or was it...
"When the government fears the people there is liberty; when the people fear the government there is tyranny."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
although disputed as a rewriting of...
"Some are whigs, liberals, democrats, call them what you please. Others are tories, serviles, aristocrats, &c. The latter fear the people, and wish to transfer all power to the higher classes of society; the former consider the people as the safest depository of power in the last resort; they cherish them therefore, and wish to leave in them all the powers to the exercise of which they are competent."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down. Up to man's age-old dream -- the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order -- or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. Regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would sacrifice freedom for security have embarked on this downward path. Plutarch warned, 'The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits.'"
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
October 27, 1964
That, of course, he took by force from someone else...
ARTHUR: That's it! It's the armor! I missed that before. Of course! Only knights are rich enough to bedeck themselves in armor. They can declare war when it suits them, go clodhopping about the country slicing up peasants and foot soldiers, because peasants and foot soldiers are not equipped with armor. All that can happen to a knight is an occasional dent. [He takes a long run to the fireplace.] Proposition: Wrong or right, they have the might, so wrong or right, they're always right - and that's wrong. Right?
GUENEVERE: Absolutely.
-Camelot- (1967)
"Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded---here and there, now and then---are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as 'bad luck.'"
-Robert Heinlein-
"You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free."
-Clarence Darrow-
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
-Voltaire [François Marie Arouet]-
"There are many men of principle in both parties in America, but there is no party of principle."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
(Hey, Al, take another look now. The Libertarians are here!)
"Today, we need a nation of Minutemen, citizens who are not only prepared to take arms, but citizens who regard the preservation of freedom as the basic purpose of their daily life and who are willing to consciously work and sacrifice for that freedom."
-John F. Kennedy-
"I am rather inclined to silence, and whether that be wise or not, it is at least more unusual nowadays to find a man who can hold his tongue than to find one who cannot."
-Abraham Lincoln-
"Life was much simpler when all I had to worry about was the latest findings in science or a new cool mathematical concept. Now, in order to preserve freedom and liberty for myself and those whom I care about, I have to know and understand how the machine of our oppressors operates so I can turn it back against them.
So into the Belly of the Beast I go..."
-Freedom Fred-
"I am only one, but I am one.
I cannot do everything, but I can do something.
And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.
What I can do, I should do.
And what I should do, by the grace of God, I will do."
-Edward Everett Hale-
"I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Lets start with typewriters."
-Frank Lloyd Wright-
"Whatever enables us to go to war, secures our peace."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"The worst thing in this world, next to anarchy, is government."
-Henry Ward Beecher-
"In the beginning of a change, the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot. "
-Mark Twain-
Notebook, 1935
"The National Government will regard it as its first and foremost duty to revive in the nation the spirit of unity and cooperation. It will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built. It regards Christianity as the foundation of our national morality, and the family as the basis of national life."
-Adolph Hitler-
Berlin, 1933
"A man is usually more careful of his money than he is of his principles."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-
"Those who insist on the dignity of their office show they have not deserved it."
-Baltasar Gracian-
“I don’t know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God."
-George H. W. Bush-
"Good deeds, bad deeds... same old random punishment."
-Peter Fels-
blacksmith
"Liberty for all does not mean independence from one another."
-George W. Bush-
Inauguration, January 20, 2005
Huh? So liberty only applies to the collective?
"The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most easily adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.
The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."
-H. L. Mencken-
Baltimore Sun
July 26, 1920
"When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental. ...
So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack, or count himself lost. His one aim is to disarm suspicion, to arouse confidence in his orthodoxy, to avoid challenge. ...
All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most easily adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."
-H.L. Mencken-
July 26, 1920
"There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who portrays himself as 'caring' and 'sensitive' because he wants to expand the government's charitable programs is merely saying that he's willing to try to do good with other people's money. Well, who isn't? And a voter who takes pride in supporting such programs is telling us that he'll do good with his own money - if a gun is held to his head."
-P.J. O'Rourke-
"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!"
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
"Banning instruments rather than acts indicate a belief that man is not worthy of his own free will. Well, some men are not, but that is no justification for whimsical legislation. The Founding Fathers struggled for the principle that man could and should be trusted with his own destiny."
-Jeff Cooper-
"There may be honour among thieves, but there is none among politicians."
-T. E. Lawrence-
Lawrence of Arabia
"That's what governments are for: to get in a man's way."
-Capt. Malcolm Reynolds-
Firefly
"Nothin' worse than a monster that thinks he's right with God."
-Capt. Malcolm Reynolds-
Firefly
"Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will."
-Frederick Douglass-
[Frederick Baily] (1818-1895), escaped slave, Abolitionist, author, editor of the North Star and later the New National Era
"The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters."
-Frederick Douglass-
[Frederick Baily] (1818-1895), escaped slave, Abolitionist, author, editor of the North Star and later the New National Era
Source: Frederick Douglass, in an address on West India Emancipation (4 August 1857)
"I shall pursue in silence the path of right."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"I don't think they realized what they were doing. Is your property your property? Or can any developer come along and take it away from you? You don't just fight for freedom over in Iraq, some foreign country. The people taking our freedom are right here. And you saw five of them here in Washington."
-Bill Merrill-
winner of a landmark '80s NH eminent domain case
commenting on KELO V. NEW LONDON, 7/3/05
(both benches included Justice David Souter)
"Lack of respect, wrong attitude, failure to obey authority. The farm, immediately."
-Lou Craddock-
A Boy and His Dog
"The liberties of our Country, the freedom of our civil constitution are worth defending at all hazards: And it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have receiv'd them as a fair Inheritance from our worthy Ancestors: They purchas'd them for us with toil and danger and expence of treasure and blood; and transmitted them to us with care and diligence. It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle; or be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men. Of the latter we are in most danger at present: Let us therefore be aware of it. Let us contemplate our forefathers and posterity; and resolve to maintain the rights bequeath'd to us from the former, for the sake of the latter. - Instead of sitting down satisfied with the efforts we have already made, which is the wish of our enemies, the necessity of the times, more than ever, calls for our utmost circumspection, deliberation, fortitude, and perseverance. Let us remember that 'if we suffer tamely a lawless attack upon our liberty, we encourage it, and involve others in our doom.' It is a very serious consideration, which should deeply impress our minds, that millions yet unborn may be the miserable sharers of the event."
-Samuel Adams-
Boston Gazette, October 14, 1771
"The liberties of our Country, the freedom of our civil constitution are worth defending at all hazards: And it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have receiv'd them as a fair Inheritance from our worthy Ancestors: They purchas'd them for us with toil and danger and expence of treasure and blood; and transmitted them to us with care and diligence. It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle; or be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men. Of the latter we are in most danger at present: Let us therefore be aware of it. Let us contemplate our forefathers and posterity; and resolve to maintain the rights bequeath'd to us from the former, for the sake of the latter. — Instead of sitting down satisfied with the efforts we have already made, which is the wish of our enemies, the necessity of the times, more than ever, calls for our utmost circumspection, deliberation, fortitude, and perseverance."
-Samuel Adams-
article published in 1771
"Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end...liberty is the only object which benefits all alike, and provokes no sincere opposition...The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. ~ Every class is unfit to govern ... Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men."
-Lord Acton-
[John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton] (1834-1902), First Baron Acton of Aldenham
historian and moralist
expressed this opinion in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887
"I cannot accept, your canon that we are to judge pope and king unlike other men, with a favorable presumption that they do no wrong. If there is any presumption, it is the other way against holders of power ... Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
-Lord Acton-
[John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton] (1834-1902), First Baron Acton of Aldenham
Source: to the bishop of London, 1887
"Thinking is man's only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which all of you practice, but struggle never to admit: the act of blanking out, the willful suspension of one's consciousness, the refusal to think--not blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know. It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment--on the unstated premise that a thing will not exist if only you refuse to identify it, that A will not be A so long as you do not pronounce the verdict 'It is.'"
-John Galt-
Atlas Shrugged
"By a very conservative estimate, a hundred million people have died at the hands of their own governments in this century. Given that record, how bad could anarchy be?"
-Joseph Sobran-
"Conservative, n: A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others."
-Ambrose Bierce-
"Resistance to sudden violence, for the preservation not only of my person, my limbs and life, but of my property, is an indisputable right of nature which I have never surrendered to the public by the compact of society, and which perhaps, I could not surrender if I would. Nor is there anything in the common law of England ... inconsistent with that right."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: BOSTON GAZETTE, September 5, 1763, The Works of John Adams, p.438 (Charles F. Adams ed., 1851).
"Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom."
-Albert Einstein-
(1879-1955) Physicist and Professor, Nobel Prize 1921
Source: 'Out of My Later Years,' 1950
"The explanation of types of structure in classes — as resulting from the will of the Deity, to create animals on certain plans — is no explanation. It has not the character of a physical law and is therefore utterly useless. It foretells nothing because we know nothing of the will of the Deity, how it acts and whether constant or inconstant like that of man."
-Charles Darwin-
At a debate, the Bishop of Oxley asked Darwin protégé Thomas Huxley which side of his family was descended from an ape.
Huxley: "If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling, it would rather be a man, a man of restless and versatile intellect, who plunges into scientific questions with which he had no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice."
-1860 debate-
"The simple truth -- born of experience -- is that tyranny thrives best where government need not fear the wrath of an armed people. The prospect of tyranny may not grab the headlines the way vivid stories of gun crime routinely do. But few saw the Third Reich coming until it was too late. The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed -- where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once."
-Federal Appeals Judge Alex Kozinski, 2003-
Eastern European immigrant
"The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools."
-Herbert Spencer-
(1820-1903) British author, economist, philosopher
"Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself."
-Mark Twain-
"We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle."
-Sir Winston Churchill-
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
1903
"A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul."
-George Bernard Shaw-
"A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man; a debt he proposes to pay off with your money."
-G. Gordon Liddy-
(1930-) Attorney, FBI agent, politician, radio personality, convicted Watergate burglar
"Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries."
-Douglas Casey-
Classmate of W.J. Clinton at Georgetown U. (1992)
"The State is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else."
-Frederic Bastiat-
French Economist (1801-1850)
"Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it."
-Ronald Reagan- (1986)
"I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts."
-Will Rogers-
"If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free."
-P.J. O'Rourke-
"If you want government to intervene domestically, you're a liberal.
If you want government to intervene overseas, you're conservative.
If you want government to intervene everywhere, you're a moderate.
If you don't want government to intervene anywhere, you're an extremist."
-Joseph Sobran-
(1946-2010) Columnist
1995 (Editor of the National Review at one time)
"In general, the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other."
-Voltaire- (1764)
"Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you."
-Pericles- (430 B.C.)
"No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the congress is in session."
-Mark Twain- (1866)
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910)
or was it...
"No man's life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session."
-Judge Gideon J. Tucker- (1826-1899)
"Talk is cheap -- except when Congress does it."
-(Unknown)-
"The inherent vice of capitalism is the uneven division of blessings, while the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal division of misery."
-Sir Winston Churchill-
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
"The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin."
-Mark Twain-
"There is no distinctly native American criminal class save Congress."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910)
"What this country needs are more unemployed politicians."
-Edward Langley-
Artist (1928 - 1995)
"Freedom arises from the multiplicity of sects, which pervades America and which is the best and only security for religious liberty in any society. For where there is such a variety of sects, there cannot be a majority of any one sect to oppress and persecute the rest."
-James Madison-
to the Virginia Convention on Ratifying the Constitution, 1778
"In Kansas schools, 'science' is now a search for 'more adequate explanations of natural phenomena.' Who needs physics? Divine intervention can explain everything without all that math."
-Bob Park-
U of Maryland
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive."
-C.S. Lewis-
"Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others?"
-Thomas Jefferson-
"You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harm it would cause if improperly administered."
-Lyndon B. Johnson-
(1908-1973) 37th US President (1963-1969)
"That government is best which governs not at all; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have."
-Henry David Thoreau-
"Be thankful we're not getting all the government we're paying for."
-Will Rogers-
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
-George Santayana-
"The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter."
-Winston Churchill-
"All laws which are repugnant to the Constitution are null and void."
-U.S. Supreme Court Marbury v. Maidson, 5 US (2 Cranch) 137, 174, 176, (1803)-
"No one is bound to obey an unconstitutional law and no courts are bound to enforce it. The general rule is that an unconstitutional statute, though having the form and the name of law, is in reality no law, but is wholly void, and ineffective for any purpose, since unconstitutionality dates from the time of its enactment, and not merely from the date of the decision so branding it."
-16th American Jurisprudence 2d, Section 177 late 2nd, section 256-
"That sounds like the Alliance. Unite all the planets under one rule so that everybody can be interfered with or ignored equally."
-Malcolm Reynolds-
Firefly, "The Train Job"
"You were truthful back in town. These are tough times. A man can get a job, he might not look too close at what that job is. But a man learns all the details of a situation like ours, well, then he has a choice."
"I don't believe he does."
-Malcolm Reynolds-
Firefly, "The Train Job"
"A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned."
-Shepherd Derrial Book-
Firefly, "War Stories"
"People don't like to be meddled with. We tell them what to do, what to think. Don't run, don't walk. We're in their homes and in their heads and we haven't the right. We're meddlesome."
-River Tam-
Serenity
"Nothing is so galling to a people not broken in from the birth as a paternal, or, in other words, a meddling government, a government which tells them what to read, and say, and eat, and drink and wear."
-Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay-
1st Baron Macaulay PC (25 October 1800 - 28 December 1859)
British poet, historian and Whig politician
"The only hypothetical history that's empirically testable is the version that actually happened."
"Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are."
-Benjamin Franklin-
"A patriot must be ready to defend his country against his government."
-Edward Abbey-
(1927-1989) American author and essayist
"Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people... it is true that most stupid people are conservative."
-John Stuart Mill-
"Aim above conservatism."
-Bill Alleman-
"You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists."
-Abbie Hoffman-
"Politicians and diapers need to be changed. Often for the same reasons."
"Under Republicans, man exploits man. Under Democrats, it's just the opposite."
-John Kenneth Galbraith-
"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."
-Sinclair Lewis-
"I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ."
-Mahatma Gandhi-
"The media are only as liberal as the conservative businesses that own them."
Early Warning Signs of Fascism
Powerful and continuing nationalism
Disdain for human rights
Identification of enemies as a unifying cause
Supremacy of the military
Rampant sexism
Controlled mass media
Obsession with national security
Religion and government intertwined
Corporate power protected
Labor power suppressed
Disdain for intellectuals & the arts
Obsession with crime & punishment
Rampant cronyism & corruption
Fraudulent elections
-Lawrence W. Britt wrote about the common signs of fascism in April, 2003, after researching seven fascist regimes. Those were Adolph Hitler's Nazi Germany, Benito Mussolini's Italy, Francisco Franco's Spain, Antonio de Oliveira Salazar's Portugal, George Papadopoulos' Greece, Augusto Pinochet's Chile, Mohamed Suharto's Indonesia.-
FIREARMS REFRESHER COURSE
by Mike Bodiker
1. An armed man is a citizen. An unarmed man is a subject.
2. A gun in the hand is better than a cop on the phone.
3. Colt: The original point and click interface.
4. Gun control is not about guns, it's about control.
5. If guns are outlawed, can we use swords?
6. If guns cause crime, then pencils cause misspelled words.
7. FREE men do not ask permission to bear arms!
8. If you don't know your rights you don't have any.
9. Those who trade liberty for security have neither.
10. The United States Constitution © 1791. All Rights reserved.
11. What part of "shall not be infringed" do you not understand?
12. The Second Amendment is in place in case others are ignored.
13. 64,999,987 firearms owners killed no one yesterday.
14. Guns only have two enemies: liberals and rust.
15. Know guns, know peace and safety. No guns, no peace nor safety.
16. You don't shoot to kill; you shoot to stay alive.
17. 911 - government sponsored Dial-a-Prayer.
18. Assault is a behavior, not a device.
19. Criminals love gun control -- it makes their jobs safer.
20. If guns cause crime, then matches cause arson
..and flies cause garbage!!!
21. Only a government that is afraid of its citizens tries to disarm them.
22. You only have the rights you are willing to fight for.
23. When you remove the people's right to bear arms, you create slaves.
24. The American Revolution would never have happened with gun control.
25. ".. A government of the people, by the people, for the people..."
"Each State, in ratifying the Constitution, is considered as a sovereign body, independent of all others, and only to be bound by its own voluntary act. In this relation, then, the new Constitution will, if established, be a FEDERAL, and not a NATIONAL constitution."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Federalist No. 39, 1788
"Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law,' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"[T]he very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials. One's right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections."
-West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624, 638 (1943)-
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."
-Declaration of Independence-
"A democracy cannot survive as a permanent form of government. It can last only until its citizens discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority (who vote) will vote for the candidates promising the greatest benefits from the public purse, with the result that a democracy will always collapse from loose fiscal policies, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest democratic nations has been 200 years. Each has been through the following sequence:
1. From bondage to spiritual faith.
2. From faith to great courage.
3. From courage to liberty.
4. From liberty to abundance.
5. From abundance to complacency.
6. From complacency to selfishness.
7. From selfishness to apathy.
8. From apathy to dependency.
9. And from dependency back again into bondage."
-Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay-
author and politician, in a letter to a friend in 1857
or was it
-Alexander Tytler-
Scottish born British attorney, half a century earlier
or...
or...
or...
"People crushed by law have no hopes but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws ..."
-Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay-
"When public employments are few in number, ill-paid and precarious, whilst the different lines of business are numerous and lucrative, it is to business, and not to official duties, that the new and eager desires engendered by the principle of equality turn from every side. But if, whilst the ranks of society are becoming more equal, the education of the people remains incomplete, or their spirit the reverse of bold -- if commerce and industry, checked in their growth, afford only slow and arduous means of making a fortune -- the various members of the community, despairing of ameliorating their own condition, rush to the head of the State and demand its assistance. To relieve their own necessities at the cost of the public treasury, appears to them to be the easiest and most open, if not the only, way they have to rise above a condition which no longer contents them; place-hunting becomes the most generally followed of all trades. This must especially be the case, in those great centralized monarchies in which the number of paid offices is immense, and the tenure of them tolerably secure, so that no one despairs of obtaining a place, and of enjoying it as undisturbedly as a hereditary fortune."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
Democracy in America
"Thus, when public employments afford the only outlet for ambition, the government necessarily meets with a permanent opposition at last; for it is tasked to satisfy with limited means unlimited desires. It is very certain that of all people in the world the most difficult to restrain and to manage are a people of solicitants. Whatever endeavors are made by rulers, such a people can never be contented; and it is always to be apprehended that they will ultimately overturn the constitution of the country, and change the aspect of the State, for the sole purpose of making a clearance of places. The sovereigns of the present age, who strive to fix upon themselves alone all those novel desires which are aroused by equality, and to satisfy them, will repent in the end, if I am not mistaken, that they ever embarked in this policy: they will one day discover that they have hazarded their own power, by making it so necessary; and that the more safe and honest course would have been to teach their subjects the art of providing for themselves."
"I trace amongst our contemporaries two contrary notions which are equally injurious. One set of men can perceive nothing in the principle of equality but the anarchical tendencies which it engenders: they dread their own free agency -- they fear themselves. Other thinkers, less numerous but more enlightened, take a different view: besides that track which starts from the principle of equality to terminate in anarchy, they have at last discovered the road which seems to lead men to inevitable servitude. They shape their souls beforehand to this necessary condition; and, despairing of remaining free, they already do obeisance in their hearts to the master who is soon to appear. The former abandon freedom, because they think it dangerous; the latter, because they hold it to be impossible."
"When I see that the right and the means of absolute command are conferred on a people or upon a king, upon an aristocracy or a democracy, a monarchy or a republic, I recognize the germ of tyranny, and I journey onward to a land of more hopeful institutions."
In my opinion the main evil of the present democratic institutions of the United States does not arise, as is often asserted in Europe, from their weakness, but from their overpowering strength; and I am not so much alarmed at the excessive liberty which reigns in that country as at the very inadequate securities which exist against tyranny."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
"Certainly one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of citizens to keep and bear arms. ... The right of citizens to bear arms is just one guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which now appears remote in America but which historically has proven to be possible."
-US Senator Hubert H. Humphrey- (1960)
"Duty, Honor, Country — those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying point to build courage when courage seems to fail, to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith, to create hope when hope becomes forlorn."
-Douglas MacArthur-
Personally, my honor defines my duty...
“America wasn’t founded so we could all be better. America was founded so we could all be what we damned well pleased.”
-PJ O’Rourke-
"What happened was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to be governed by surprise, to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believe that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. . .
To live in the process is absolutely not to notice it -- please try to believe me -- unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us ever had occasion to develop.
Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, 'regretted.' . . . Believe me this is true. Each act, each occasion is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow... Suddenly it all comes down, all at once... You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair."
-German professor-
describing the arrival of Nazism to American journalist Milton Mayer
"The existence of a problem, however serious, does not justify federal remedies outside the scope of Congress's enumerated powers."
-Robert A. Levy and Michael I. Krauss-
Cato senior fellow in constitutional studies, and professor of law at George Mason University
"The flag is not simply the symbol of America; more deeply, it is the symbol of the principles on which this nation rests. Those who would desecrate the flag are thus guilty, at bottom, of desecrating our principles, which is why we find their acts so offensive. Ironically, it is those very principles that protect such acts-and restrain the rest of us in the process."
-Roger Pilon-
Cato Institute VP for Legal Affairs
"Still one thing more, fellow citizens — a wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities."
-Thomas Jefferson-
First Inaugural Address (March 4, 1801)
"A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: First Inaugural Address; March 4, 1801
"Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it.
Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many.
Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books.
Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders.
Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations.
But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it."
-Siddartha Gautama - The Buddha-
"Liberty, as it is conceived by current opinion, has nothing inherent about it; it is a sort of gift or trust bestowed on the individual by the state pending good behavior."
-Mary McCarthy-
The Contagion of Ideas, 1952
"All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by 'our' side . . . The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them."
-George Orwell-
"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly."
-Albert Einstein-
"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds."
-Albert Einstein-
(1879-1955) Physicist and Professor, Nobel Prize 1921
"Sin lies only in hurting others unnecessarily. All other 'sins' are invented nonsense."
-Robert A. Heinlein-
"The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist."
-Winston Churchill-
Nov 21, 1943
"Posterity: you will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it."
-John Quincy Adams-
(1767-1848) 6th US President
"I believe that God has endowed men with certain unalienable rights as set forth in the Declaration of Independence and that no legislature and no majority, however great, may morally limit or destroy these; that the sole function of government is to protect life, liberty, and property and anything more than this is usurpation and oppression. ...
I believe that each State is sovereign in performing those functions reserved to it by the Constitution and it is destructive of our federal system and the right of self-government guaranteed under the Constitution for the Federal Government to regulate or control the States in performing their functions or to engage in performing such functions itself."
-Ezra Taft Benson-
Secretary of Agriculture under the Eisenhower Administration
"The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry."
-Ernest Hemingway-
"Pardon him, Theodotus; he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature."
-George Bernard Shaw-
Caesar and Cleopatra
"No protracted war can fail to endanger the freedom of a democratic country."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
"We must all hang together, or, assuredly, we shall all hang separately."
-Benjamin Franklin-
"The world looks with some awe upon a man who appears unconcernedly indifferent to home, money, comfort, rank, or even power and fame. The world feels not without a certain apprehension, that here is some one outside its jurisdiction; someone before whom its allurements may be spread in vain; some one strangely enfranchised, untamed, untrammelled by convention, moving independent of the ordinary currents of human action."
-Winston Churchill-
"Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest."
-Denis Diderot-
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and hence clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
-H.L. Mencken-
"Your pretended fear lest error should step in, is like the man that would keep all the wine out of the country lest men should be drunk. It will be found an unjust and unwise jealousy, to deny a man the liberty he hath by nature upon a supposition that he may abuse it."
-Oliver Cromwell-
"But why did only one group of passengers oppose the terrorists? Perhaps because they were the only ones who knew what was happening -- they had gotten word via cell phone regarding the fate of the earlier flights. But perhaps there is another factor: in a society which endlessly promotes the idea that the government will protect you, is it any wonder that the American spirit has lost its will to fight back? How many passengers were simply waiting for someone "in authority" to save them?"
-JPFO Liberty Crew, 9/11/06
"Nothing says, 'I am ashamed of you, my government," more than 'Stewart/Colbert '08'."
-Jon Stewart-
"Stewart/Colbert '08!"
-Bill Alleman-
"In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong."
-John Kenneth Galbraith-
"If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. The loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or imagined, from abroad."
-James Madison-
"Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live."
-Oscar Wilde-
"An Unconstitutional Act is not a law; it confers no rights; it imposes no duties; it affords no protection; it creates no office; it is, in legal contemplation, as inoperative as though it had never been passed."
-U.S. Supreme Court Norton v. Shelby County 118 U.S. 425, 442, (1885)-
"Widespread intellectual and moral docility may be convenient for leaders in the short term, but it is suicidal for nations in the long term. One of the criteria for national leadership should therefore be a talent for understanding, encouraging, and making constructive use of vigorous criticism."
-Carl Sagan-
"I tire so of hearing people say,
'Let things take their course. Tomorrow is another day.'
I do not need my freedom when I’m dead.
I cannot live on tomorrow’s bread."
-Langston Hughes-
“A free people ought not only to be armed and disciplined, but they should have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own government.”
-George Washington-
Speech of Jan. 7, 1790, published in Boston Independent Chronicle, Jan. 14, 1790
"Freedom, privileges, options, must constantly be exercised, even at the risk of inconvenience. Otherwise they fall into desuetude and become unfashionable, unorthodox - finally irregulationary. Sometimes the person who insists upon his prerogatives seems shrill and contentious - but actually he performs a service for all. Freedom naturally should never become license, but regulation should never become restriction."
-Jack Vance-
Emphyrio
"It must not be forgotten that it is especially dangerous to enslave men in the minor details of life. For my own part, I should be inclined to think freedom less necessary in great things than in little ones."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
Democracy in America
"Responsibility is the price of freedom."
-Elbert Hubbard-
"If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself."
-James Madison-
"The right of a citizen to bear arms, in lawful defense of himself or the State, is absolute. He does not derive it from the State government. It is one of the high powers delegated directly to the citizen, and is excepted out of the general powers of government. A law cannot be passed to infringe upon or impair it, because it is above the law, and independent of the lawmaking power."
-Cockrum v. State, 24 Tex. 394, at 401-402 (1859)-
"Democracy is the bludgeoning of the people, by the people, for the people."
-Oscar Wilde-
"Accept the truth from whatever source it comes."
-Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon (Maimonides)-
1135~1204 C.E.
"The secular state is the guarantee of religious pluralism. This apparent paradox, again, is the simplest and most elegant of political truths."
-Christopher Hitchens-
"Never argue with a fool; onlookers may not be able to tell the difference."
-Mark Twain-
"Never argue with an idiot. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience."
-Mark Twain-
"Don’t argue with idiots because they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience."
-Greg King-
"If someone has a gun and is trying to kill you, it would be reasonable to shoot back with your own gun."
-The Dalai Lama-
The Seattle Times, May 15, 2001
"Those who would overturn the Second Amendment should not proceed blind to the fact that stripped of the right to bear arms, the people would be stripped of the right and the means to resist government oppression. Overturning the Second Amendment would complete the transformation of the American people from citizens empowered to hold government accountable to mere subjects of executive power."
-Paul Craig Roberts-
"Laws don't stop crime. They only define it."
"I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law."
-Martin Luther King Jr.-
"I myself am human and free only to the extent that I acknowledge the humanity and liberty of all my fellows... I am properly free when all the men and women about me are equally free. Far from being a limitation or a denial of my liberty, the liberty of another is its necessary condition and confirmation."
-Mikhail Bakunin-
"Here's my strategy on the Cold War: We win, they lose."
-Ronald Reagan-
"The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help."
-Ronald Reagan-
"The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they're ignorant: It's just that they know so much that isn't so."
-Ronald Reagan-
"Of the four wars in my lifetime none came about because the U.S. was too strong."
-Ronald Reagan-
"I have wondered at times about what the Ten Commandments would have looked like if Moses had run them through the U.S. Congress."
-Ronald Reagan-
"The taxpayer: That's someone who works for the federal government but doesn't have to take the civil service examination."
-Ronald Reagan-
"Government is like a baby: An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
"No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this earth!"
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
"I've laid down the law, though, to everyone from now on about anything that happens: no matter what time it is, wake me, even if it's in the middle of a Cabinet meeting."
-Ronald Reagan-
"It has been said that politics is the second oldest profession. I have learned that it bears a striking resemblance to the first."
-Ronald Reagan-
"Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it."
-Ronald Reagan-
"Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book."
-Ronald Reagan-
"No arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women."
-Ronald Reagan-
"General, I'm a civilian. I outrank you."
-Jim Rockford-
"That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant."
-John Stuart Mill-
(1806-1873) English philosopher and economist
Source: John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)
"Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman."
-Louis Brandeis-
"There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly."
-Henry David Thoreau-
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
-C.S. Lewis-
"There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want, merely because you think it would be good for him."
-Robert Heinlein-
"May you live in interesting times
May you come to the attention of those in authority
May you find what you are looking for"
-apocryphal Chinese curse-
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free."
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe-
(1749-1832)
"The natural tendency of things, it seems, is for government to grow and for liberty to retreat."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"As a matter of general principle, I believe there can be no doubt that criticism in time of war is essential to the maintenance of any kind of democratic government ... too many people desire to suppress criticism simply because they think that it will give some comfort to the enemy to know that there is such criticism. If that comfort makes the enemy feel better for a few moments, they are welcome to it as far as I am concerned, because the maintenance of the right of criticism in the long run will do the country maintaining it a great deal more good than it will do the enemy, and will prevent mistakes which might otherwise occur."
-Robert Taft-
"Mr Republican"
"Even as it stands, the Home Guard could only exist in a country where men feel themselves free. The totalitarian states can do great things, but there is one thing they cannot do: they cannot give the factory-worker a rifle and tell him to take it home and keep it in his bedroom. That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer's cottage is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there."
-George Orwell-
"Don't Let Colonel Blimp Ruin the Home Guard", Evening Standard, 8 January 1941
"Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let people have guns ... why should we let them have ideas?"
-Joseph Stalin-
"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win."
-Mahatma Gandhi-
"Ron Paul is one of the outstanding leaders fighting for a stronger national defense. As a former Air Force officer, he knows well the needs of our armed forces, and he always puts them first. We need to keep him fighting for our country."
-Ronald Reagan-
"Personally I do not resort to force -- not even the force of law -- to advance moral reforms. I prefer education, argument, persuasion, and above all the influence of example -- of fashion."
-Rutherford B. Hayes-
"It does the sheep no good to preach the goodness of a diet of grass, if the wolves are of a different mind."
-Terry Goodkind-
"A strong body makes the mind strong. As to the species of exercise, I advise the gun. While this gives moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise and independence to the mind. Games played with the ball and others of that nature are too violent for the body and stamp no character on the mind. Let your gun therefore be the constant companion of your walks."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity."
-Sigmund Freud-
"Another source of power in government is a military force. But this, to be efficient, must be superior to any force that exists among the people, or which they can command; for otherwise this force would be annihilated, on the first exercise of acts of oppression. Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States. A military force, at the command of Congress, can execute no laws, but such as the people perceive to be just and constitutional; for they will possess the power, and jealousy will instantly inspire the inclination, to resist the execution of a law which appears to them unjust and oppressive."
-Noah Webster-
(1758-1843) American patriot and scholar, author of the first dictionary of American English usage (1806) and the author of the 1828 edition of the dictionary that bears his name.
Source: An Examination of the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution, Philadelphia, 1787
"Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the President or any other public official save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country."
-Theodore Roosevelt-
"Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. I am Caesar."
-Anonymous-
"In matters of principle, stand like a rock; in matters of taste, swim with the current."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"What we don't see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do."
-Rudolph W. Giuliani-
(1944- ) Mayor of New York City from 1994-2001
Source: March 16, 1994, at symposium on urban crime sponsored by the New York Post
"By the theory of our Government majorities rule, but this right is not an arbitrary or unlimited one. It is a right to be exercised in subordination to the Constitution and in conformity to it. One great object of the Constitution was to restrain majorities from oppressing minorities or encroaching upon their just rights. Minorities have a right to appeal to the Constitution as a shield against such oppression."
-James K. Polk-
"Now let me state the present rules, the lawyer then went on,
These very simple guidelines, you can rely upon:
You're gouging on your prices if you charge more than the rest,
But it's unfair competition if you think you can charge less!
A second point that we would make to help avoid confusion...
Don't try to charge the same amount, that would be Collusion!"
-R.W. Grant-
"The Incredible Bread Machine"
"One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors."
-Plato-
(429-347 BC)
"In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility... I welcome it."
-John F. Kennedy-
"You know something is wrong when the New England Patriots face stiffer penalties for spying on innocent Americans than Dick Cheney and George Bush."
-Governor Bill Richardson-
"A Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever."
-John Adams-
"I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or to speak, or write, with moderation. ... I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD."
-William Lloyd Garrison-
"This government is acknowledged by all to be one of enumerated powers."
-Chief Justice Marshall-
(1755-1835) US Supreme Court Chief Justice
Source: McCulloch v. Maryland
"We start with first principles. The Constitution creates a Federal Government of enumerated powers."
-Chief Justice William Rehnquist-
Chief Justice, U. S. Supreme Court
Source: United States v. Lopez
"The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected. The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which ... concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Federalist No. 45
"If any state in the Union will declare that it prefers separation ... to a continuance in union ... I have no hesitation in saying, 'let us separate.'"
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: letter to W. Crawford, June 20, 1816
"The battle for freedom is never won, and is never lost. The battle for freedom always continues. It is never too late, and it is never soon enough, to defend freedom."
-John Perna-
"Our most basic civil liberty is the right to be kept alive."
-Mitt Romney-
(and more great Romney totalitarianism)
In other words, I guess...
"The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. Property must be sacred or liberty cannot exist."
-John Adams-
"The time is now near at hand which must probably determine whether Americans are to be Freemen or slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their houses and farms are to be pillaged and destroyed, and themselves consigned to a state of wretchedness from which no human efforts will deliver them. The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage and conduct of this army. Our cruel and unrelenting enemy leaves us only the choice of brave resistance, or the most abject submission. We have, therefore, to resolve to conquer or die."
-George Washington-
"It was not my intention to doubt that, the Doctrines of the Illuminati, and principles of Jacobinism had not spread in the United States. On the contrary, no one is more truly satisfied of this fact than I am."
-George Washington-
"The fear of freedom is strong in us. We call it chaos or anarchy, and the words are threatening. We live in a true chaos of contradicting authorities, an age of conformism without community, of proximity without communication. We could only fear chaos if we imagined that it was unknown to us, but in fact we know it very well."
-Germaine Greer-
"...It is not at all impossible that we may have to endure every hardship that we can imagine...(but) if the entire community manfully stands the test, the end will be near. If many of us fall back under storm and stress, the struggle will be prolonged. But...so long as there is even a handful of men true to their pledge, there can be only one end to the struggle, and that is victory."
-Mahatma Gandhi-
"When war is waged it is for the purpose of safeguarding or increasing one's capacity to make war. International politics are wholly involved in this vicious cycle. What is called national prestige consists in behaving always in such a way as to demoralize other nations by giving them the impression that, if it comes to war, one would certainly defeat them. What is called national security is an imaginary state of affairs in which one would retain the capacity to make war while depriving all other countries of it."
-Simone Weil-
"It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong."
-Richard Feynman-
"If a Nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.... If we are to guard against ignorance and remain free, it is the responsibility of every American to be informed."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: letter to Col. Charles Yancey, January 6, 1816
"I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."
-Barry Goldwater-
"Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us."
-Leo Tolstoy-
"When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the truth."
-Steve Jobs-
"Cowardice asks the question: is it safe? Expediency asks the question: is it political? Vanity asks the question: is it popular? But conscience asks the question: is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor political, nor popular - but one must take it simply because it is right."
-Martin Luther King, Jr.-
"The voice of protest, of warning, of appeal is never more needed than when the clamor of fife and drum, echoed by the press and too often by the pulpit, is bidding all men fall in and keep step and obey in silence the tyrannous word of command. Then, more than ever, it is the duty of the good citizen not to be silent."
-Charles Eliot Norton-
(1827-1908) American scholar
"As long as our government is administered for the good of the people, and is regulated by their will; as long as it secures to us the rights of person and property, liberty of conscience, and of the press, it will be worth defending."
-Andrew Jackson-
"Ronald Reagan is the first modern President whose contempt for the facts is treated as a charming idiosyncrasy."
-James David Barber-
"Political rights do not exist because they have been legally set down on a piece of paper, but only when they have become the ingrown habit of a people, and when any attempt to impair them will meet with the violent resistance of the populace. Where this is not the case, there is no help in any parliamentary Opposition or any Platonic appeals to the constitution. One compels respect from others when he knows how to defend his dignity as a human being."
-Rudolph Rocker-
"The shallow consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise see in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws."
-Walt Whitman-
"Notes Left Over," 1881
"...the Bill of Rights does not come from the people and is not subject to change by majorities. It comes from the nature of things. It declares the inalienable rights of man not only against all government but also against the people collectively."
-Walter Lippmann-
(1889-1974) American writer, journalist, and political commentator
"You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free."
-Clarence Darrow-
"If we run into such debts, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"When I was young, American politics were fairly straightforward: conservatives let you keep all your money in return for telling you how to live your life, while liberals let you live as you pleased in return for all your money. Now the only difference is whether they want your money or your life first."
-D.A. Ridgely-
"Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: 'Argument in Defense of the Soldiers in the Boston Massacre Trials,' December 1770
"You’re entitled to your own opinions. You’re not entitled to your own facts."
-Daniel Patrick Moynihan-
"I don't pay attention to either side. I mean, I've always been a libertarian. Leave everybody alone. Let everybody else do what they want. Just stay out of everybody else's hair. So I believe in that value of smaller government. Give politicians power and all of a sudden they'll misuse it on ya."
-Clint Eastwood-
"Remember that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take away everything you have."
-Barry Goldwater-
"Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear."
-Ambrose Redmoon-
"All men are created equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; among which are the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing the obtaining of happiness and safety."
-George Mason-
(1725-1792), drafted the Virgina Declaration of Rights, ally of James Madison and George Washington
Source: First Draft, Virginia Declaration of Rights
"The only practical function of the Libertarian Party is to serve as evidence that we tried to do this peaceably."
-Sam A. Robrin-
"You can make the Ring into an allegory of our own time, if you like: an allegory of the inevitable fate that waits for all attempts to defeat evil power by power".
-J.R.R Tolkien-
"When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President. I’m beginning to believe it."
-Clarence Darrow-
"In many cases, we could win if we could just convince Democrats to vote like liberals on civil liberties, and Republicans to vote like conservatives on fiscal issues."
-Jim Babka-
President, DownsizeDC.org
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
-John F. Kennedy-
Patriotism: i love my country
Nationalism: my country can beat up your country
Imperialism: here we come now
"Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent upon every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence."
-Sir Robert Peel-
"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of currency, first by inflation then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered...I sincerely believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. The issuing power of money should be taken from the banks and restored to Congress and the people to whom it belongs."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"We recognize, as appellants urge, the undisputed power of the jury to acquit, even if its verdict is contrary to the law as given by the judge, and contrary to the evidence. This is a power that must exist as long as we adhere to the general verdict in criminal cases, for the courts cannot search the minds of the jurors to find the basis upon which they judge. If the jury feels that the law under which the defendant is accused, is unjust, or that exigent circumstances justified the actions of the accused, or for any reason which appeals to their logic of passion, the jury has the power to acquit, and the courts must abide by that decision."
-U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Maryland-
Source: US vs Moylan, 417 F 2d 1002, 1006 (1969)
“It may not be amiss, here, Gentlemen, to remind you of the good old rule, that on questions of fact, it is the province of the jury, on questions of law, it is the province of the court to decide. But it must be observed that by the same law, which recognizes this reasonable distribution of jurisdiction, you have nevertheless a right to take upon yourselves to judge of both, and to determine the law as well as the fact in controversy. … Both objects are lawfully within your power of decision.”
-Chief Justice John Jay-
Georgia v. Brailsford, 1794
“The judge cannot direct a verdict it is true, and the jury has the power to bring in a verdict in the teeth of both law and facts.”
-Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes-
(1841-1935) US Supreme Court Justice, also known as "The Great Dissenter"
Horning v. District of Columbia, 1920
"I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do."
-Robert A. Heinlein-
(1907-1988) American writer
Well I won't back down, no I won't back down
You can stand me up at the gates of hell
But I won't back down
Gonna stand my ground, won't be turned around
And I'll keep this world from draggin' me down
Gonna stand my ground and I won't back down
Hey baby, there ain't no easy way out
Hey I will stand my ground
And I wont back down.
Well I know what's right, I got just one life
In a world that keeps on pushin' me around
But I'll stand my ground and I won't back down
Hey baby there ain't no easy way out
Hey I will stand my ground
And I won't back down
No, I won't back down
-Tom Petty-
I Won't Back Down
"I hurt nobody.
I owe nobody money.
I'm not paying.
I'm tired of being afraid."
-Nick "Coconut" Ryder-
"We're all free men, protected by the Constitution. You look any way you want, chief."
-Jackson 'Jax' Teller-
Sons of Anarchy
"Most of us were not violent by nature. We all had our problems with authority, but none of us were sociopaths. We came to realize that when you move your life off the social grid, you give up the safety that society provides. On the fringe, blood and bullets are the rule of law. And if you're a man with convictions, violence is inevitable."
-John Thomas Teller-
The Life and Death of Sam Crow: How the Sons of Anarchy Lost Their Way
Sons of Anarchy
(It occurred to me, a week after watching the episode premier in 9/08, that this passage could easily have been voiced by Jeremiah Johnson, fully in character...)
"Americans just want us to ... not be concerned if they [new laws] can be constitutionally justified ... Why, if we had to do that we could not pass most of the laws we enact around here."
-Sen. John Glenn-
(D-OH) 07/16/96
(and it doesn't occur to you that maybe, just maybe, that's how it should be...?)
"Political opportunism" is redundant.
-Bill Alleman-
"There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived."
-Henry David Thoreau-
"Lighthouses are more useful than churches."
-Benjamin Franklin-
"It's better to die upon your feet than to live upon your knees!"
-Emiliano Zapata-
"Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost."
-John Quincy Adams-
"Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right... Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice."
-Henry David Thoreau-
"Violence at home - liberal
Violence abroad - conservative
Violence against all - moderate
Violence against none - extremist"
-Joe Sobran-
"The way to combat noxious ideas is with other ideas. The way to combat falsehoods is with truth."
-William O. Douglas-
"There's too much of an attempt, it seems to me, to think in terms of controlling man, rather than freeing him. Of defining him rather than letting him go. It's part of the whole ideology of this age, which is power-mad."
-Arthur Miller-
"Worst of all, political law is the fountainhead of fascism. Fascism is often mistakenly identified as a political and economic philosophy. I would argue that fascism is actually the absence of any philosophy whatsoever. Fascism is based on the belief that the State should do whatever is necessary in any circumstance. Under fascism, the law exists simply to serve the purposes of the State. In a free society, the law exists to protect the individual, often from the State."
-Glenn "Kane" Jacobs-
"You must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard's power of Changing and Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power. It is most perilous. It must follow knowledge, and serve need. To light a candle is to cast a shadow."
-Ursula K. Le Guin-
Consequences? Are you trying to tell me there could be unintended consequences...?
"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards."
-Claire Wolfe-
"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards. On the road to tyranny, we've gone so far that polite political action is about as useless as a miniskirt in a convent. ... Something’s eventually going to happen. Government will bloat until it chokes us to death, or one more tyrannical power grab will turn out to be one too many. ... Maybe it’ll be one more round of “reasonable gun control” or one more episode of burning children to death to save them from “child abuse.” Whatever, something will snap."
-Claire Wolfe-
Source: "101 Things To Do 'Til The Revolution"
"We ought to hate very rarely, as it is too fatiguing; remain indifferent to a great deal, forgive often and never forget."
-Sarah Bernhardt-
"We have four boxes used to guarantee our liberty: The soap box, the ballot box, the jury box and the cartridge box."
-Ambrose Bierce- (1887)
"He who defends everything defends nothing."
-Frederick the Great-
"When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic. Sell not liberty to purchase power."
-Benjamin Franklin-
"If public schooling has produced a nation of adults who lack the competence to guide their children’s education, why do we want to continue a system that is likely to produce the same result?"
-Jacob Hornberger-
founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation
"A man said to the Universe: 'Sir, I exist!' 'However,' replied the Universe, 'the fact has not created in me a sense of obligation.'"
-Stephen Crane-
"A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular."
-Adlai Stevenson-
"As long as I am mayor of this city the great industries are secure. We hear about constitutional rights, free speech and the free press. Every time I hear these words I say to myself, 'That man is a Red, that man is a Communist.' You never hear a real American talk like that."
-Frank Hague-
Mayor, Jersey City, NJ
speech to the Jersey City Chamber of Commerce, January 12, 1938
"He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you."
-Friedrich Nietzsche-
"My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union."
-Abraham Lincoln-
August 22, 1862, letter to New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley
"The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free."
-Henry David Thoreau-
"If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged."
-Cardinal Richelieu-
"If you give me six lines written by the most honest man, I will find something in them to hang him."
-Cardinal Richelieu-
(1585-1642)
"If you want more of something, subsidize it; if you want less of something, tax it."
-Ronald Reagan-
"Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people, that can, may revolutionize, and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit."
-Abraham Lincoln-
January 12, 1848 speech in response to the "48ers, veterans of the 18 interconnected revolutions that convulsed Europe in 1848-1849," and who were, ironically enough, more centralizing imperialists than they were freedom fighting secessionists, apparently
Well, only as long as the oppressive government is European, of course...
"Victory attained by violence is tantamount to defeat, for it is momentary."
"This I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for it is the one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost."
-John Steinbeck-
Source: East of Eden, 1952
http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quote_blog/John.Steinbeck.Quote.5873
"The rule of no realm is mine, neither of Gondor nor any other, great or small. But all worthy things that are in peril as the world now stands, those are my care. And for my part, I shall not wholly fail of my task, though Gondor should perish, if anything passes through this night that can still grow fair or bear fruit and flower again in days to come."
-Gandalf-
The Lord of the Rings : The Return of the King
J. R. R. Tolkien
"That's the kind of wooly-headed liberal thinking that leads to being eaten."
-Principal Snyder-
Sunnydale High
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
The Puppet Show
Season 1, Episode 9
"The poorest man may in his cottage, bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail, its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storm may enter; the rain may enter; but the King of England may not enter; all his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement."
-William Pitt-
(1708-1778) First Earl of Chatham, English statesman and orator
Source: Speech in the House of Lords, in opposition to Excise Bill on perry and cider, 1763
"To retrofit a phrase, once the state has determined you’re a nail in need of smashing, there’s really no limit to the number of hammers at its disposal."
-Radley Balko-
"Japan would never invade the United States. We would find a rifle behind every blade of grass."
-Isoroku Yamamoto-
"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
-Albert Einstein-
"The holier-than-thou activists who blame the population for not spending more money on their personal crusades are worse than aggravating. They encourage the repudiation of personal responsibility by spreading the lie that support of a government program fulfills individual moral duty."
-Patrick Cox-
"If forty million people say a foolish thing it does not become a wise one, but the wise man is foolish to give them the lie."
-W. Somerset Maugham-
"I consider [trial by jury] as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution."
-Thomas Jefferson-
to Thomas Paine, 1789. ME 7:408, Papers 15:269
“Economic history is a long record of government policies that failed because they were designed with a bold disregard for the laws of economics.”
-Ludwig von Mises-
"Reason is the life of the law; nay, the common law itself is nothing else but reason."
-Edward Coke-
Colonel McNamara: "You're a dead man, Finn."
Riley Finn: "No, sir. I'm an anarchist."
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
New Moon Rising
Season 4, Episode 19
Riley Finn: "We're drawing up a plan for world domination. The key element: coffee-makers that think."
Buffy: "World domination? Is that a good?"
Riley: "Baby, we're the government. It's what we do."
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Restless (dream sequence)
Season 4, Episode 22
"No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated. Neither may a government determine the aesthetic value of artistic creations, nor limit the forms of literacy or artistic expression. Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic, religious, or philosophical doctrines. Instead it has a duty to its citizens to maintain the freedom, to let those citizens contribute to the further adventure and the development of the human race."
-Richard P. Feynman-
"God bless them both, & keep them in Union, if it be for their good, but separate them, if it be better."
-Thomas Jefferson-
August 12, 1803
in a letter to John C. Breckinridge
"Whether we remain in one confederacy, or form into Atlantic and Mississippi confederacies, I believe not very important to the happiness of either part. Those of the Western confederacy will be as much our children & descendants as those of the Eastern, and I feel myself as much identified with that country, in future time, as with this; and did I now foresee a separation [i.e., secession] at some future day, yet I should feel the duty & the desire to promote the western interests as zealously as the eastern, doing all the good for both portions of our future family which should fall within my power."
-Thomas Jefferson-
Jan. 29, 1804
in reference to secessionist rumblings in response to the Louisiana Purchase, in a letter to Dr. Joseph Priestly
"Never could an increase of comfort or security be a sufficient good to be bought at the price of liberty."
-Hilaire Belloc-
French-born British writer (1870-1953)
"Public opinion, or what passes for public opinion, is not invariably a moderating force in the jungle of politics. It may be true, and I suspect it is, that the mass of people everywhere are normally peace-loving and would accept many restraints and sacrifices in preference to the monstrous calamities of war. But I also suspect that what purports to be public opinion in most countries that consider themselves to have popular government is often not really the consensus of the feelings of the mass of the people at all, but rather the expression of the interests of special highly vocal minorities — politicians, commentators, and publicity-seekers of all sorts: people who live by their ability to draw attention to themselves and die, like fish out of water, if they are compelled to remain silent."
-George F. Kennan-
"Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grandchildren are once more slaves."
-D. H. Lawrence-
"Stand your ground. Don't fire unless fired upon. But if they mean to have a war, let it begin here."
-John Parker-
Battle of Lexington, April 19, 1775
"Lead, follow, or get out of the way."
-Laurence J. Peter-
"Who does what to whom?"
-Vladimir Lenin-
on the central question of politics
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
-William Pitt-
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."
-Joseph Goebbels-
"The Constitution expressly and exclusively vests in the Legislature the power of declaring a state of war [and] the power of raising armies. A delegation of such powers [to the president] would have struck, not only at the fabric of our Constitution, but at the foundation of all well organized and well checked governments. The separation of the power of declaring war from that of conducting it, is wisely contrived to exclude the danger of its being declared for the sake of its being conducted."
-James Madison-
"The U.S. is taking a course like a downhill skier: zig-zagging left and then right, but always moving downhill."
-David F. Nolan-
2009 NH Liberty Forum
"Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression. In our Governments, the real power lies in the majority of the Community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from the acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the Constituents."
-James Madison-
"Do what thy manhood bids thee do,
From none but self expect applause:
He noblest lives and noblest dies
Who makes and keeps his self-made laws."
-Sir Richard Francis Burton-
(1821-1890) English explorer, linguist, author, and soldier
"There go my people. I must find out where they are going so I can lead them."
-Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin-
French politician (1807-1874)
"To save the world requires faith and courage: faith in reason, and courage to proclaim what reason shows to be true."
-Bertrand Russell-
"Unless we put medical freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when medicine will organize into an undercover dictatorship. To restrict the art of healing to one class of men ... will constitute the Bastille of medical science. All such laws are un-American and despotic."
-Dr. Benjamin Rush-
signer of Declaration of Independence
"Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of government. The history of liberty is the history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it."
-Woodrow Wilson-
"The Framers of the Bill of Rights did not purport to 'create' rights. Rather they designed the Bill of Rights to prohibit our Government from infringing rights and liberties presumed to be preexisting."
-Justice William J. Brennan-
(1906-1997) U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: 1982
"A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826) US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"The first thing a genius needs is to breath free air."
-Ludwig Von Mises-
(1881-1973) Economist and social philosopher
"I want for our country enough laws to restrain me from injuring others,
so that these laws will also restrain others from injuring me.
I want enough government, with enough constitutional safeguards,
so that this necessary minimum of laws will be applied equitably
to everybody, and will be binding on the rulers as well as those ruled.
Beyond that I want neither laws nor government to be imposed on our people
as a means or with the excuse of protecting us from catching cold,
or of seeing that we raise the right kind of crops,
or of forcing us to live in the right kind of houses or neighborhoods,
or of compelling us to save money or to spend it,
or of telling us when or whether we can pray.
I do not want government or laws designed for
any other form of welfarism or paternalism,
based on the premise that government knows best
and can run our lives better than we can run them ourselves.
And my concept of freedom, and of its overwhelming importance,
is implicit in these aspirations and ideals."
-Robert Welch-
(1899-1985) Author, Founder of the John Birch Society
"Compelling a man by law to pay his money to elect candidates or advocate law or doctrines he is against differs only in degree, if at all, from compelling him by law to speak for a candidate, a party, or a cause he is against. The very reason for the First Amendment is to make the people of this country free to think, speak, write and worship as they wish, not as the Government commands."
-Justice Hugo L. Black-
(1886-1971) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: IAM v. Street, 367 U.S., 1961
"Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people."
-Eleanor Roosevelt-
"The people cannot delegate to government the power to do anything which would be unlawful for them to do themselves. ... whenever the Legislators endeavour to take away, and destroy the Property of the People, or to reduce them to Slavery under Arbitrary Power, they put themselves into a state of War with the People, who are thereupon absolved from any farther Obedience, and are left to the common Refuge which God hath provided for all Men against force and violence. Whensoever therefore the Legislative shall transgress this fundamental Rule of Society, and either by Ambition, Fear, Folly or Corruption, endeavor to grasp themselves, or put into the hands of any other an Absolute Power over the Lives, Liberties, and Estates of the People; By this breach of Trust they forfeit the Power the People had put into their hands, for quite contrary ends, and it devolves to the People, who have a Right to resume their original Liberty, and, by the Establishment of a new Legislative (such as they shall think fit) provide for their own Safety and Security, which is the end for which they are in Society."
-John Locke-
(1632-1704) English philosopher and political theorist. Considered the ideological progenitor of the American Revolution and who, by far, was the most often non-biblical writer quoted by the Founding Fathers of the USA.
Source: Second Treatise of Civil Government [1690], #222 (Lasslet Edition, Cambridge University Press, 1960), p. 460-461; French translation by David Mazel (1691): Traité de gouvernement civil (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1984), pp. 348-349
"The people cannot delegate to government the power to do anything which would be unlawful for them to do themselves. ... whenever the Legislators endeavor to take away, and destroy the Property of the People, or to reduce them to Slavery under Arbitrary Power, they put themselves into a state of War with the People, who are thereupon absolved from any farther Obedience, and are left to the common Refuge, which God hath provided for all Men, against Force and Violence. Whensoever therefore the Legislative shall transgress this fundamental Rule of Society, and either by Ambition, Fear, Folly or Corruption, endeavor to grasp themselves, or put into the hands of any other an Absolute Power over the Lives, Liberties, and Estates of the People; By this breach of Trust they forfeit the Power the People had put into their hands, for quite contrary ends, and it devolves to the People, who have a Right to resume their original Liberty."
-John Locke-
(1632-1704) English philosopher and political theorist. Considered the ideological progenitor of the American Revolution and who, by far, was the most often non-biblical writer quoted by the Founding Fathers of the USA.
Source: SECOND TREATISE ON CIVIL GOVERNMENT
"Those who suppress freedom always do so in the name of law and order."
-John V. Lindsay-
"We have the greatest opportunity the world has ever seen, as long as we remain honest -- which will be as long as we can keep the attention of our people alive. If they once become inattentive to public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, judges and governors would all become wolves."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government — lest it come to dominate our lives and interests."
-Patrick Henry-
"Congress may not abdicate or transfer to others its legitimate functions."
-U.S. Supreme Court-
Source: Schechter Poultry v. U.S., 29 U.S. 495, 55 U.S. 837.842 (1935)
"The constitution does not provide for first and second class citizens."
-Wendell L. Wilkie-
(1892-1944)
Source: An American Program, 1944
"Next to the right of liberty, the right of property is the most important individual right guaranteed by the Constitution and the one which, united with that of personal liberty, has contributed more to the growth of civilization than any other institution established by the human race."
-William Howard Taft-
(1857-1930) 27th US President
"It is fundamental that the great powers of Congress to conduct war and to regulate the Nation's foreign relations are subject to the constitutional requirements of due process. The imperative necessity for safeguarding these rights to procedural due process under the gravest of emergencies has existed throughout our constitutional history, for it is then, under the pressing exigencies of crisis, that there is the greatest temptation to dispense with fundamental constitutional guarantees which, it is feared, will inhibit governmental action."
-Justice Arthur Goldberg-
US Supreme Court Justice
Source: Kennedy v. Mendoza-Martinez, 1963
“A national government is a government of the people of a single state or nation, united as a community by what is termed the 'social compact,' and possessing complete and perfect supremacy over persons and things, so far as they can be made the lawful objects of civil government. A federal government is distinguished from a national government by its being the government of a community of independent and sovereign states, united by compact."
-Black's Law Dictionary-
Source: Piqua Branch Bank v. Knoup, 6 Ohio St. 393. [Black's Law Dictionary, Revised Fourth Edition, 1968, p. 1176]
"Outside Independence Hall when the Constitutional Convention of 1787 ended, Mrs. Powel of Philadelphia asked Benjamin Franklin, 'Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?' With no hesitation whatsoever, Franklin responded, 'A republic, if you can keep it.'"
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
1787
Source: as recorded by Constitution signer James McHenry in a diary entry.
"It is my living sentiment, and by the blessing of God, it shall be my dying sentiment. Independence now, and independence forever."
-Daniel Webster-
in an August 2, 1826 eulogy to Thomas Jefferson and John Adams; both had died on July 4th
"May [the Declaration of Independence] be to the world, what I believe it will be (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all), the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
June 24, 1826
Source: letter to Roger Weightman on June 24, 1826. It was his last letter, written ten days before his death - July 4th, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
"If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left to combat it."
-Thomas Jefferson-
first inaugural address
“It is the duty of every patriot to protect his country from its government”
-Thomas Paine-
"When you start talking about government as 'we' instead of 'they,' you have been in office too long."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
"But does 'the press' mean the media....? You think in 1791 there were ... people running around with fedoras that had ... little press tickets in (them)? Is that what 'press' means? Doesn't it cover the Xerox machine? Doesn't it cover the ... right of any individual to ... write, to publish?"
-Justice Anton Scalia-
"The politicians say that they can control the climate. Their arrogance is astounding."
-John Stossel-
"Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself."
-Justice Potter Stewart-
(1915-1985), U.S. Supreme Court Justice
"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law."
-Aliester Crowley-
"... the Constitution does not impose a duty on the state and local governments to protect the citizens from criminal harm."
-U.S. Supreme Court-
DeShaney vs. Winnebago County, 1989
"I have found strength where one does not look for it: in simple, mild, and pleasant people, without the least desire to rule -- and, conversely, the desire to rule has often appeared to me a sign of inward weakness: they fear their own slave soul and shroud it in a royal cloak (in the end, they still become the slaves of their followers, their fame, etc.)"
-Friedrich Nietzsche-
"Not to be a republican at 20 is proof of want of heart; to be one at 30 is proof of want of head."
-François Guizot-
"The natural proclivity of democratic governments is to pursue public policies which concentrate benefits on the well-organized and well-informed, and disperse the costs on the unorganized and ill-informed."
-Peter Boettke-
"The government deficit is the difference between the amount of money the government spends and the amount it has the nerve to collect."
-Sam Ewing-
"The dollar represents a one dollar debt to the Federal Reserve System. The Federal Reserve Banks create money out of thin air to buy Government Bonds from the U.S. Treasury ... and has created out of nothing a ... debt which the American people are obliged to pay with interest."
-Wright Patman-
[John William Wright Patman]
(1893-1976) US Congressman (TX-D)
1964
Source: http://centre.telemanage.ca/links.nsf/key/Federal_Reserve_Quiz
"... the amount spent on lobbying ... is related entirely to how much the federal government intervenes in the private economy."
-Craig Holman of the Nader-founded Public Citizen-
well, duh...
"I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time."
-H.L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"There is no slavery but ignorance. Liberty is the child of intelligence."
-Robert G. Ingersoll-
"All the problems we face in the United States today can be traced to an unenlightened immigration policy on the part of the American Indian."
-Pat Paulsen-
"Must I at length the Sword of Justice draw?
Oh curst Effects of necessary Law!
How ill my Fear they by my Mercy scan,
Beware the Fury of a Patient Man."
-John Dryden-
"A means can be justified only by its end. But the end in its turn needs to be justified."
-Leon Trotsky-
"The trouble with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money."
-Margaret Thatcher-
"The only idea ... ever manifested as to what is a government of consent, is this – that it is one to which everybody must consent, or be shot."
-Lysander Spooner-
"The constitutionality and propriety of the Federal Government assuming to enter into a novel and vast field of legislation, namely, that of providing for the care and support of all those … who by any form of calamity become fit objects of public philanthropy. ... I cannot find any authority in the Constitution for making the Federal Government the great almoner of public charity throughout the United States. To do so would, in my judgment, be contrary to the letter and spirit of the Constitution and subversive of the whole theory upon which the Union of these States is founded."
-Franklin Pierce-
(1804-1869) U.S. President
Source: 1854, he vetoed a bill to help the mentally ill
"I feel obliged to withhold my approval of the plan to indulge in benevolent and charitable sentiment through the appropriation of public funds ... I find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution."
-Grover Cleveland-
(1837-1908) 22nd & 24th US President
Source: In 1887 when vetoing an appropriation to help drought-stricken counties in Texas
"As somebody who considers the State to be nothing more than a criminal syndicate pursuing a monopoly, I consider sedition to be a fine and noble calling worthy of all decent and Godly people. But statists of the conservative stripe engage in purely situational sedition: They want to undermine our present crop of rulers in order to replace them, not to abolish State impositions on liberty."
-Will Grigg-
Well, statists of any stripe, Will...
"I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves."
-Harriet Tubman-
"There are two kinds of people: those who want to be left alone and those who won't leave them alone."
-Doreen Hannes-
"No attempt or pretence, that was ever carried into practical operation amongst civilized men -- unless possibly the pretence of a 'Divine Right,' on the part of some, to govern and enslave others -- embodied so much of shameless absurdity, falsehood, impudence, robbery, usurpation, tyranny, and villany of every kind, as the attempt or pretence of establishing a government by consent, and getting the actual consent of only so many as may be necessary to keep the rest in subjection by force. Such a government is a mere conspiracy of the strong against the weak. It no more rests on consent than does the worst government on earth."
-Lysander Spooner-
(1808-1887) Political theorist, activist, abolitionist Source: No Treason. No. II The Constitution, (Boston: Published by the Author, 1867)
"A government that can at pleasure accuse, shoot, and hang men, as traitors, for the one general offence of refusing to surrender themselves and their property unreservedly to its arbitrary will, can practice any and all special and particular oppressions it pleases. The result -- and a natural one -- has been that we have had governments, State and national, devoted to nearly every grade and species of crime that governments have ever practised upon their victims; and these crimes have culminated in a war that has cost a million of lives; a war carried on, upon one side, for chattel slavery, and on the other for political slavery; upon neither for liberty, justice, or truth. And these crimes have been committed, and this war waged, by men, and the descendants of men, who, less than a hundred years ago, said that all men were equal, and could owe neither service to individuals, nor allegiance to governments, except with their own consent."
-Lysander Spooner-
(1808-1887) Political theorist, activist, abolitionist
Source: No Treason. No. II The Constitution, (Boston: Published by the Author, 1867)
"This is the perpetual and pitiful tragedy of the practical man in practical affairs. He always begins with a flourish of contempt for what he calls theorizing and what people who can do it call thinking. He will not wait for logic--that is, in the most exact sense, he will not listen to reason. It will therefore appear to him an idle and ineffectual proceeding to say that there is a reason for his present failure. Nevertheless, it may be well to say it, and to try and make it clear even to him."
-Gilbert Keith Chesterton-
(1874-1936) British essayist, critic, poet, and novelist
Source: Illustrated London News, Feb 29,1925
"Most people prefer to believe their leaders are just and fair even in the face of evidence to the contrary, because once a citizen acknowledges that the government under which they live is lying and corrupt, the citizen has to choose what he or she will do about it. To take action in the face of a corrupt government entails risks of harm to life and loved ones. To choose to do nothing is to surrender one’s self-image of standing for principles. Most people do not have the courage to face that choice. Hence, most propaganda is not designed to fool the critical thinker but only to give moral cowards an excuse not to think at all."
-Michael Rivero-
"As Americans we must always remember that we all have a common enemy, an enemy that is dangerous, powerful, and relentless. I refer, of course, to the federal government."
-Dave Barry-
"I want a government small enough to fit inside the Constitution."
-Harry Browne-
(1933-2006) DownsizeDC.org co-founder
"He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice."
-Albert Einstein-
(1879-1955) Physicist and Professor, Nobel Prize 1921
"After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
[Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clerel, le Comte de Tocqueville] (1805-1859) French historian Source: Democracy in America, Vol. II (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1899), Chap. 6
"To require conformity in the appreciation of sentiments or the interpretation of language, or uniformity of thought, feeling, or action, is a fundamental error in human legislation -- a madness which would be only equaled by requiring all men to possess the same countenance, the same voice or the same stature."
-Josiah Warren-
(1798-1874)
Source: Equitable Commerce, 1855
"It is said that power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power."
-David Brin-
"When small men begin to cast big shadows, it means the sun is about to set."
-Lyn Yutang-
"When there are too many policemen, there can be no liberty. When there are too many soldiers, there can be no peace. When there are too many lawyers, there can be no justice."
-Lin Yutang-
"It is interesting to observe that in the year 1935 the average individual's incurious attitude towards the phenomenon of the State is precisely what his attitude was toward the phenomenon of the Church in the year, say, 1500. ... it does not appear to have occurred to the Church-citizen of that day, any more than it occurs to the State-citizen of the present, to ask what sort of institution it was that claimed his allegiance."
-Albert Jay Nock-
(1870-1945)
Source: Our Enemy, the State, c. 1935 (Delavan: Hallberg, 1983), p. 34
"I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics or in anything else, where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to Heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Letter to F. Hopkinson, Paris, March 13, 1789
"I claim for the nation an education that depends only on the State, because children of the State must be raised by members of the State."
-Louis-René de Caradeuc de La Chalotais-
Source: Essai d'éducation nationale et plan d'étude pour la jeunesse [1763] (Paris: Raynal, 1825), p. 15.
"Against individualism, the Fascist conception is for the State ... Liberalism denied the State in the interests of the particular individual; Fascism reaffirms the State as the true reality of the individual."
-Benito Mussolini-
(1883-1945), Italian dictator during WW2
Source: "Fascism," Italian Encyclopaedia, 1932, reproduced in Michael J. Oakeshott, The Social and Political Doctrines of Contemporary Europe (Cambridge University Press, 1939)
"It is the absolute right of the state to supervise the formation of public opinion."
-Joseph Paul Goebbels-
(1897-1945) Nazi Propaganda Minister
Source: Speech, October 1933
"Gentlemen, the time is coming when there will be two great classes, Socialists, and Anarchists. The Anarchists want the government to be nothing, and the Socialists want government to be everything. There can be no greater contrast. Well, the time will come when there will be only these two great parties, the Anarchists representing the laissez faire doctrine and the Socialists representing the extreme view on the other side, and when that time comes I am an Anarchist."
-William Graham Sumner-
(1840-1910) American academic and professor at Yale College
Source: quoted in Mark Thornton, The Economics of Prohibition (University of Utah Press, 1991), p. 17
"Once the government becomes the supplier of people's needs, there is no limit to the needs that will be claimed as a basic right."
-Lawrence Auster-
Political commentator
" ... I suggest that the more the state intervenes in such situations, the more 'necessary' (on this view) it becomes, because positive altruism and voluntary cooperative behaviour atrophy in the presence of the state and grow in its absence. Thus, again, the state exacerbates the conditions which are supposed to make it necessary. We might say that the state is like an addictive drug: the more of it we have, the more we 'need' it and the more we come to 'depend' on it."
-Michael Taylor-
Source: The Possibility of Cooperation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 168
"When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion -- when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing -- when you see money flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors -- when you see that men get richer by graft and pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you -- when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice -- you may know that your society is doomed."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
Source: Atlas Shrugged, p. 413
"I suppose the process of acceptance will pass through the usual four stages:
(i) this is worthless nonsense;
(ii) this is an interesting, but perverse, point of view;
(iii) this is true, but quite unimportant;
(iv) I always said so."
-J. B. S. Haldane-
"In truth, in the case of individuals, their actual voting is not to be taken as proof of consent, even for the time being. On the contrary, it is to be considered that, without his consent having ever been asked, a man finds himself environed by a government that he cannot resist; a government that forces him to pay money, render service, and forego the exercise of many of his natural rights, under peril of weighty punishments. He sees, too, that other men practise this tyranny over him by the use of the ballot. He sees further that, if he will but use the ballot himself, he has some chance of relieving himself from this tyranny of others, by subjecting them to his own. In short, he finds himself, without his consent, so situated that, if he use the ballot, he may become a master; if he does not use it, he must become a slave. And he has no other alternative than these two. In self-defence, he attempts the former. His case is analogous to that of a man who has been forced into battle, where he must either kill others, or be killed himself. Because, to save his own life in battle, a man attempts to take the lives of his opponents, it is not to be inferred that the battle is one of his own choosing. Neither in contests with the ballot -- which is a mere substitute for a bullet -- because, as his only chance of self-preservation, a man uses a ballot, is it to be inferred that the contest is one into which he voluntarily entered; that he voluntarily set up all his own natural rights, as a stake against those of others, to be lost or won by the mere power of numbers. On the contrary, it is to be considered that, in an exigency, into which he had been forced by others, and in which no other means of self-defence offered, he, as a matter of necessity, used the only one that was left to him."
-Lysander Spooner-
(1808-1887) Political theorist, activist, abolitionist
Source: No Treason. No. II The Constitution, (Boston: Published by the Author, 1867)
"Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man? There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly. I please myself with imagining a State at least which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose if a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow-men. A State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious State, which also I have imagined, but not yet anywhere seen."
-Henry David Thoreau-
(1817-1862) American author, poet, philosopher, polymath, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and transcendentalist
Source: Civil Disobedience (1849)
"The ostensible supporters of the Constitution, like the ostensible supporters of most other governments, are made up of three classes, viz.: 1. Knaves, a numerous and active class, who see in the government an instrument which they can use for their own aggrandizement or wealth. 2. Dupes - a large class, no doubt - each of whom, because he is allowed one voice out of millions in deciding what he may do with his own person and his own property, and because he is permitted to have the same voice in robbing, enslaving, and murdering others, that others have in robbing, enslaving, and murdering himself, is stupid enough to imagine that he is a 'free man,' a 'sovereign'; that this is 'a free government'; 'a government of equal rights,' 'the best government on earth,' and such like absurdities. 3. A class who have some appreciation of the evils of government, but either do not see how to get rid of them, or do not choose to so far sacrifice their private interests as to give themselves seriously and earnestly to the work of making a change."
-Lysander Spooner-
(1808-1887) Political theorist, activist, abolitionist
Source: No Treason. No. VI The Constitution of no Authority, (Boston: Published by the Author, 1870)
"When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators."
-P. J. O'Rourke-
"Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the President or any other public official save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. ... Every man who parrots the cry of “stand by the President” without adding the proviso “so far as he serves the Republic” takes an attitude as essentially unmanly as that of any Stuart royalist who championed the doctrine that the King could do no wrong. No self-respecting and intelligent free man could take such an attitude."
-Theodore Roosevelt-
(1858-1919) 26th US President
Source: Works, vol. 21, pp. 316, 321
"A Fatal Tendency of Mankind. Self-preservation and self-development are common aspirations among all people. And if everyone enjoyed the unrestricted use of his faculties and the free disposition of the fruits of his labor, social progress would be ceaseless, uninterrupted, and unfailing. But there is also another tendency that is common among people. When they can, they wish to live and prosper at the expense of others. This is no rash accusation. Nor does it come from a gloomy and uncharitable spirit. The annals of history bear witness to the truth of it: the incessant wars, mass migrations, religious persecutions, universal slavery, dishonesty in commerce, and monopolies. This fatal desire has its origin in the very nature of man -- in that primitive, universal, and insuppressible instinct that impels him to satisfy his desires with the least possible pain."
-Frederic Bastiat-
(1801-1850) French economist, statesman, and author. He did most of his writing during the years just before -- and immediately following -- the French Revolution of February 1848
Source: "The Law", June 1850
"When the representative body have lost the confidence of their constituents, when they have notoriously made sale of their most valuable rights, when they have assumed to themselves powers which the people never put into their hands, then indeed their continuing in office becomes dangerous to the State, and calls for an exercise of the power of dissolution."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"The right of a citizen to bear arms, in lawful defense of himself or the State, is absolute. He does not derive it from the State government. It is one of the 'high powers' delegated directly to the citizen, and 'is excepted out of the general powers of government.' A law cannot be passed to infringe upon or impair it, because it is above the law, and independent of the lawmaking power."
-Cockrum v. State-
Source: 24 Tex. 394, at 401-402 (1859)
"'The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.' The right of the whole people, old and young, men, women and boys, and not militia only, to keep and bear arms of every description, and not such merely as are used by the milita, shall not be infringed, curtailed, or broken in upon, in the smallest degree; and all this for the important end to be attained: the rearing up and qualifying a well-regulated militia, so vitally necessary to the security of a free State. Our opinion is that any law, State or Federal, is repugnant to the Constitution, and void, which contravenes this right."
-Nunn vs. State-
Source: 1 Ga. (1 Kel.) 243, at 251(1846)
"I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. Unsuccessful rebellions, indeed, generally establish the encroachments on the rights of the people, which produced them. An observation of this truth should render honest republican governors so mild in their punishment of rebellions as not to discourage them too much. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Letter to James Madison, Paris, January 30, 1787. THE POLITICAL WRITINGS OF THOMAS JEFFERSON 67 (Dumbauld Ed. 1955).
"The provision in the Constitution granting the right to all persons to bear arms is a limitation upon the power of the Legislature to enact any law to the contrary. The exercise of a right guaranteed by the Constitution cannot be made subject to the will of the sheriff."
-People vs. Zerillo-
Source: 219 Mich. 635, 189 N.W. 927, at 928 (1922)
"We find it intolerable that one constitutional right should have to be surrendered in order to assert another."
-Simmons v. U.S.-
Source: 390 US 389 (1968)
"When any court violates the clean and unambiguous language of the constitution, a fraud is perpetrated and no one is bound to obey it."
-State v. Sutton-
Source: 63 Minn 167, 65 NW 262, 30 LRA 630
"The right is general. It may be supposed from the phraseology of this provision that the right to keep and bear arms was only guaranteed to the militia; but this would be an interpretation not warranted by the intent. The militia, as has been explained elsewhere, consists of those persons who, under the law, are liable to the performance of military duty, and are officered and enrolled for service when called upon. . . .
[I]f the right were limited to those enrolled, the purpose of the guarantee might be defeated altogether by the action or the neglect to act of the government it was meant to hold in check. The meaning of the provision undoubtedly is, that the people, from whom the militia must be taken, shall have the right to keep and bear arms, and they need no permission or regulation of law for that purpose."
-Thomas Cooley-
(1824-1898) 25th Justice and a Chief Justice of the Michigan Supreme Court (1864-1885)
Source: General Principles of Constitutional Law, Third Edition, 1898
"...and by the way, Mr.Speaker, the Second Amendment is not for killing little ducks and leaving Huey and Dewey and Louie without an aunt and uncle. It's for hunting politicians, like in Grozny, and in the colonies in 1776, or when they take your independence away."
-Robert Dornan-
US Congressman (CA-R)
Source: January 25, 1994, responding to Bill Clinton's "State of the Union" speech
"The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
[Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clerel, le Comte de Tocqueville] (1805-1859) French historian
"Our particular principles of religion are a subject of accountability to our god alone. I enquire after no man's and trouble none with mine; nor is it given to us in this life to know whether yours or mine, our friend's or our foe's, are exactly the right."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: letter to Miles King, September 26, 1814
"Nothing is so galling to a people not broken in from the birth as a paternal, or, in other words, a meddling government, a government which tells them what to read, and say, and eat, and drink and wear."
-Thomas Babington Macaulay-
1st Baron Macaulay
"A man without religion is like a fish without a bicycle."
-Vique's Law-
"With respect to the two words ‘general welfare,’ I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators."
-James Madison-
"Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because if there be one he must approve of the homage of reason more than that of blindfolded fear."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"Shall I tell you what true evil is? It is to submit to you. It is when we surrender our freedom, our dignity, instead of defying you."
-Captain Jean-Luc Picard-
confronts Armus
"If you vote for bigger government, you get it."
-Joe Kennedy-
independent US Senate candidate to replace Ted Kennedy (no relation)
"Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber."
-Plato-
"Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. ... We've been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. Well, if no one among us is capable of government himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else? All of us together, in and out of government, must bear the burden. The solutions we seek must be equitable, with no one group singled out to pay a higher price."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
"The Federal Reserve Bank is nothing but a banking fraud and an unlawful crime against civilization. Why? Because they 'create' the money made out of nothing, and our Uncle Sap Government issues their 'Federal Reserve Notes' and stamps our Government approval with NO obligation whatever from these Federal Reserve Banks, Individual Banks or National Banks, etc."
-H. L. Birum, Sr.-
Source: American Mercury magazine, August 1957, p. 43
"It only ends once. Anything that happens before that is just progress."
-Jacob-
"Lost"
"The whole duty of man consists in being reasonable and just ... I am reasonable because I know the difference between understanding and not understanding and I am just because I have no opinion about things I don’t understand."
-Gertrude Stein-
"The first casualty when war comes is truth."
-Hiram W. Johnson-
(1866-1945) Governor of California (1911-1917), US Senator (1917-1945)
Source: U.S. Senate, 1917
"Under the Equal Protection clause, not to mention the First Amendment itself, government may not grant the use of a forum to people whose views it finds acceptable, but deny use to those wishing to express less favored or more controversial views."
-Supreme Court Of The United States-
Source: Police Department v. Mosley, 1972
"There is such a thing as a nation being so right it does not need to convince others by force that it is right."
-Woodrow Wilson-
"If monopoly persists, monopoly will always sit at the helm of government. I do not expect monopoly to restrain itself. If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it."
-Woodrow Wilson-
"I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have restricted credit, we have restricted opportunity, we have controlled development, and we have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the civilized world. No longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men."
-Woodrow Wilson-
"The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and peace, and it covers with its shield of protection all classes of men, at all times and under all circumstances. No doctrine involving more pernicious consequences was ever invented by the wit of men that any of its great provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of Government."
-U.S. Supreme Court-
Ex Parte Milligan, 1866
"A martial nobility and stubborn commons, possessed of arms, tenacious of property, and collected into constitutional assemblies form the only balance capable of preserving a free constitution against the enterprise of an aspiring prince."
-Edward Gibbon-
(1737-1794) English historian and Member of Parliament
"The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Letter to Abigail Adams, 22 February 1787
"All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others."
-Douglas Adams-
"Liberty is often a heavy burden on a man. It involves the necessity for perpetual choice which is the kind of labor men have always dreaded."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.-
(1809-1894) American Poet
Source: Elsie Venner, 1861
"But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain - that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it . In either case, it is unfit to exist."
-Lysander Spooner-
"The error seems not sufficiently eradicated, that the operations of the mind, as well as the acts of the body, are subject to the coercion of the laws. But our rulers can have authority over such natural rights only as we have submitted to them. The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to our God. The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. ... Was the government to prescribe to us our medicine and diet, our bodies would be in such keeping as our souls are now. Thus in France the emetic was once forbidden as a medicine, and the potatoe as an article of food."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Jefferson's Notes on Virginia, Query XVII (1781-1785)
"The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
"It is maintained by the advocates of the bank that its constitutionality in all its features ought to be considered as settled by precedent and by the decision of the Supreme Court. To this conclusion I cannot assent. Mere precedent is a dangerous source of authority...[and] the opinion of the Supreme Court...ought not to control the coordinate authorities of this Government. The Congress, the Executive, and the Court must each for itself be guided by its own opinion of the Constitution. Each public officer who takes an oath to support the Constitution swears that he will support it as he understands it, and not as it is understood by others. It is as much the duty of the House of Representatives, of the Senate, and of the President to decide upon the constitutionality of any bill...presented to them for passage...as it is of the supreme judges when it may be brought before them for judicial decision."
-Andrew Jackson-
1832 veto message rejecting a bill extending the charter of the Bank of the United States
"If you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive."
-CS Lewis-
"The only freedom deserving the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental and spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest."
-John Stuart Mill-
(1806-1873) English philosopher and economist
Source: On Liberty, 1859
"It rankles me when somebody tries to force somebody to do something."
-John Wayne-
[Marion Robert Morrison] (1907-1979) American film actor, director and producer
***
"The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty."
-Eugene McCarthy-
(1916- ) US Congressman (D-Minnesota) & US Senator (D-Minnesota)
Source: Time Magazine, 12 February 1979
"Since people, in a competitive or any other society, are by no means always just to each other, some regulation by the state in its capacity of umpire is unavoidable, What must be kept in mind is that the greatest injustice of all is done when the umpire forgets that he too is bound by the rules, and begins to make them as between contestants in behalf of his own prejudices."
-Felix Morley-
(1894-1982) American jourmalist. author, editor for The Washington Post (1933-40), 1936 Pulitzer Prize
Source: Freedom and Federalism, 1959
"The liberty the citizen enjoys is to be measured not by governmental machinery he lives under, whether representative or other, but by the paucity of restraints it imposes upon him."
-Herbert Spencer-
(1820-1903) British author, economist, philosopher
Source: Social Statics, 1850
"At the heart of western freedom and democracy is the belief that the individual man ... is the touchstone of value, and all society, groups, the state, exist for his benefit. Therefore the enlargement of liberty for individual human beings must be the supreme goal and abiding practice of any western society."
-Robert F. Kennedy-
(1925-1968), US Senator, Attorney General
Source: Speech, University of Capetown, 6 June 1966
"In its narrowest acceptation, order means obedience. A government is said to preserve order if it succeeds in getting itself obeyed."
-John Stuart Mill-
(1806-1873) English philosopher and economist
Source: Considerations on Representative Government, 1861
"The Press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of the government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people."
-Justice Hugo L. Black-
(1886-1971) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: New York Times v. Unites States (Pentagon Papers) 1971
"I have sworn upon the altar of god eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"Feeling good about government is like looking on the bright side of any catastrophe. When you quit looking on the bright side, the catastrophe is still there."
-P.J. O'Rourke-
(1947- ) US humorist, journalist, & political commentator
"The mania for giving the Government power to meddle with the private affairs of cities or citizens is likely to cause endless trouble … and there is great danger that our people will lose that independence of thought and action which is the cause of much of our greatness, and sink into the helplessness of the Frenchman or German who expects his government to feed him when hungry, clothe him when naked … and, in time, to regulate every act of humanity from the cradle to the tomb, including the manner in which he may seek future admission to paradise."
-Mark Twain-
letter to Enterprise on January 24, 1866
"The state can only survive as long as a majority is programmed to believe that theft isn't wrong if it's called taxation or asset forfeiture or eminent domain, that assault and kidnapping isn't wrong if it's called arrest, that mass murder isn't wrong if it's called war."
-Bill St. Clair-
"The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Letter to Abigail Adams, 22 February 1787
"I have been repeating over and over again that he who cannot protect himself or his nearest and dearest or their honor by non-violently facing death may and ought to do so by violently dealing with the oppressor. He who can do neither of the two is a burden. He has no business to be the head of a family. He must either hide himself, or must rest content to live for ever in helplessness and be prepared to crawl like a worm at the bidding of a bully."
-Gandhi-
"A constitution is not the act of a government, but of a people constituting a government; and government without a constitution is power without a right. All power exercised over a nation, must have some beginning. It must be either delegated, or assumed. There are not other sources. All delegated power is trust, and all assumed power is usurpation. Time does not alter the nature and quality of either."
-Thomas Paine-
"Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There's no better rule."
-Charles Dickens-
"This is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for a second, that second for a third, and so on 'til the bulk of the society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering ... And the forehorse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"Government can do something for the people only in proportion as it can do something to the people."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"Feudalism, serfdom, slavery, all tyrannical institutions, are merely the most vigorous kind to rule, springing out of, and necessarily to, a bad state of man. The progress from these is the same in all cases -- less government."
-Herbert Spencer-
(1820-1903) British author, economist, philosopher
"I have always believed that government had a limited capacity to do good and a virtually infinite capacity to do harm..."
-Neil Hamilton-
[Mostyn Neil Hamilton] (1949- ) former barrister, teacher and Conservative Member of Parliament in the United Kingdom
Source: House of Commons debates, 8 February 1994
"Government ought to be as much open to improvement as anything which appertains to man, instead of which it has been monopolized from age to age, by the most ignorant and vicious of the human race. Need we any other proof of their wretched management, than the excess of debts and taxes with which every nation groans, and the quarrels into which they have precipitated the world?"
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
"But to manipulate men, to propel them toward goals which you – the social reformers – see, but they may not, is to deny their human essence, to treat them as objects without wills of their own, and therefore to degrade them"
-Isaiah Berlin-
"[The] impersonal process of the market ... can be neither just nor unjust, because the results are not intended or foreseen."
-Fredrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
"The defect of equality is that we only desire it with our superiors."
-Henry Becque-
(1837-1899) French dramatist
"Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
"The less government we have the better -- the fewer laws and the less confided power. The antidote to this abuse of formal government is the influence of private character, the growth of the individual."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-
(1803-1882)
“Don’t write so that you can be understood. Write so that you can’t be misunderstood.”
-William Howard Taft-
"Don't practice until you get it right. Practice until you can't get it wrong."
"It is incredible how as soon as a people become subject, it promptly falls into such complete forgetfulness of its freedom that it can hardly be roused to the point of regaining it, obeying so easily and willingly that one is led to say that this people has not so much lost its liberty as won its enslavement."
-Estienne de la Boétie-
(1530-1563) French judge, writer, political philosopher
"Today's problems cannot be solved by thinking the way we thought when we created them."
-Albert Einstein-
(1879-1955) Physicist and Professor, Nobel Prize 1921
"We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a feather bed."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"Truth never damages a cause that is just."
-Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi-
(1869-1948)
"Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it."
-Albert Einstein-
(1879-1955) Physicist and Professor, Nobel Prize 1921
"My knowledge of pain, learned with the sabre, taught me not to be afraid. And just as in dueling when you must concentrate on your enemy's cheek, so, too, in war. You cannot waste time on feinting and sidestepping. You must decide on your target and go in."
-Otto Skorzeny-
"Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts. Some of you like pep rallies and plastic robots who tell you what to read. Forget I mentioned it... Rise for the flag salute."
-Frank Zappa-
(1940-1993), Musician
"No free people can lose their liberties while they are jealous of liberty. But the liberties of the freest people are in danger when they set up symbols of liberty as fetishes, worshipping the symbol instead of the principle it represents."
-Wendell Phillips-
(1811-1884) Abolitionist author
Source: Liberty and the Great Libertarians (C. Spradling)
"The last few decades have been marked by a special cultivation of the romance of the future. We seem to have made up our minds to misunderstand what has happened; and we turn, with a sort of relief, to stating what will happen-which is apparently much easier...The modern mind is forced towards the future by a certain sense of fatigue, not unmixed with terror, with which it regards the past."
-Gilbert Keith Chesterton-
(1874-1936) British essayist, critic, poet, and novelist
"The ultimate aim of government is not to rule, or restrain, by fear, nor to exact obedience, but contrariwise, to free every man from fear, that he may live in all possible security; in other words, to strengthen his natural right to exist and work without injury to himself or others. No, the object of government is not to change men from rational beings into beasts or puppets, but to enable them to develope their minds and bodies in security, and to employ their reason unshackled; neither showing hatred, anger, or deceit, nor watched with the eyes of jealousy and injustice. In fact, the true aim of government is liberty."
-Baruch Spinoza-
(1632-1677)
Source: Baruch Spinoza, in Theological-Political Treatise (1670)
"Indeed nations, in general, are not apt to think until they feel; and therefore nations in general have lost their liberty: For as violations of the rights of the governed, are commonly not only specious, but small at the beginning, they spread over the multitude in such a manner, as to touch individuals but slightly. Thus they are disregarded. The power or profit that arises from these violations centering in few persons, is to them considerable. For this reason the governors having in view their particular purposes, successively preserve an uniformity of conduct for attaining them. They regularly increase the first injuries, till at length the inattentive people are compelled to perceive the heaviness of their burthens — They begin to complain and inquire — but too late. They find their oppressors so strengthened by success, and themselves so entangled in examples of express authority on the part of their rulers, and of tacit recognition on their own part, that they are quite confounded: for millions entertain no other idea of the legality of power, than it is founded on the exercise of power."
-John Dickenson-
(1732-1808)
Source: John Dickenson, in The Political Writings of John Dickinson, Esquire Vol. I (1801), Letter XI
"What do we mean when we say that first of all we seek liberty? I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it… What is this liberty that must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not the freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check on their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few -- as we have learned to our sorrow. What then is the spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias..."
-Learned Hand-
(1872-1961), Judge, U. S. Court of Appeals
Source: Learned Hand, in "The Spirit of Liberty" - a speech at "I Am an American Day" ceremony, Central Park, New York City (21 May 1944
"Better to dwell in freedom's hall,
With a cold damp floor and mouldering wall,
Than bow the head and bend the knee
In the proudest palace of slaverie."
-Thomas Moore-
"Freedom is alone the unoriginated birthright of man; it belongs to him by force of his humanity, and is in dependence on the will and coaction of every other, in so far as this consists with every other person's freedom."
-Immanuel Kant-
(1724-1804) German philosopher
"No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue; and by a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles."
-Patrick Henry-
(1736-1799) US Founding Father
"It is very certain that [the commerce clause] grew out of the abuse of the power by the importing States in taxing the non-importing, and was intended as a negative and preventive provision against injustice among the States themselves, rather than as a power to be used for the positive purposes of the General Government."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: letter dated February 13, 1829
"The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature. Yet how can anyone speak of it today, with every soul in a prison, with every heart fettered, wounded, and maimed?... With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of its potentialities?"
-Emma Goldman-
(1869-1940)
Source: Anarchism
"Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths...
We may define a republic to be ... a government which derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people, and is administered by persons holding their offices during pleasure for a limited period, or during good behavior. It is essential to such a government that it be derived from the great body of the society, not from an inconsiderable proportion or a favored class of it; otherwise a handful of tyrannical nobles, exercising their oppressions by a delegation of their powers, might aspire to the rank of republicans and claim for their government the honorable title of republic."
-James Madison-
Federalist No. 10, (1787)
“A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men.”
-Henry David Thoreau-
(1817-1862)
"Had the states been despoiled of their sovereignty by the generality of the preamble, and had the Federal Government been endowed with whatever they should judge to be instrumental towards the union, justice, tranquility, common defence, general welfare, and the preservation of liberty, nothing could have been more frivolous than an enumeration of powers."
-Virginia’s General Assembly-
Source: January 23, 1799
"A free society can exist only when public spirit is balanced by an equal inclination of men to mind their own business."
-Edward A. Shils-
Source: The Torment of Secrecy, 1956
"The phase of the usury system which we are trying to analyze is more or less Patterson's perception that the Bank of England could have benefit of all the interest on all the money that it creates out of nothing. ... Now the American citizen can, of course, appeal to his constitution, which states that Congress shall have power to coin money or regulate the value thereof and of foreign coin. Such appeal is perhaps quixotic."
-Ezra Pound-
(1885-1972) American poet
March 30, 1943
"Heterodox doctrines, in economics and elsewhere, often fail to get adequately discussed in their formative stages: both the intellectual and the political establishment tend to regard them as unworthy of notice. Meanwhile, those doctrines can seem compelling to large numbers of people (some of whom may have considerable political clout, large financial resources, or both). By the time it becomes apparent that such influential ideas demand serious attention after all, reasoned argument has become very difficult. People have become invested emotionally, politically, and financially in the doctrine; careers and even institutions have been built on it; and the proponents can no longer allow themselves to contemplate the possibility that they have taken a wrong turning."
-Paul Krugman-
Economist, MIT
"Corruption, like a cancer ... eats faster and faster every hour. The revenue creates pensioners, and the pensioners urge for more revenue. The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependents and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, floppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole of society."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
"Capitalism should not be condemned, since we haven’t had capitalism. A system of capitalism presumes sound money, not fiat money manipulated by a central bank. Capitalism cherishes voluntary contracts and interest rates that are determined by savings, not credit creation by a central bank. It’s not capitalism when the system is plagued with incomprehensible rules regarding mergers, acquisitions, and stock sales, along with wage controls, price controls, protectionism, corporate subsidies, international management of trade, complex and punishing corporate taxes, privileged government contracts to the military-industrial complex, and a foreign policy controlled by corporate interests and overseas investments. Add to this centralized federal mismanagement of farming, education, medicine, insurance, banking and welfare. This is not capitalism!"
-Ron Paul-
(1935-) American physician, US Congressman (R-TX), US Presidential candidate
Source: Has Capitalism Failed?, July 9, 2002
"The preservation of peace and the guaranteeing of man's basic freedoms and rights require courage and eternal vigilance: courage to speak and act — and if necessary, to suffer and die — for truth and justice; eternal vigilance, that the least transgression of international morality shall not go undetected and unremedied. These lessons must be learned anew by each succeeding generation, and that generation is fortunate indeed which learns from other than its own bitter experience."
-Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia-
"No legal tender law is ever needed to make men take good money; its only use is to make them take bad money."
-Stephen T. Byington-
Source: September 1895, American Federationist
"One of the most insidious consequences of the present burden of personal income tax is that it strips many middle class families of financial reserves & seems to lend support to campaigns for socialized medicine, socialized housing, socialized food, socialized every thing. The personal income tax has made the individual vastly more dependent on the State & more avid for state hand-outs. It has shifted the balance in America from an individual-centered to a State-centered economic & social system."
-W. H. Chamberlin-
"How bad do things have to get before you do something? Do they have to take away all your property? Do they have to license every activity that you want to engage in? Do they have to start throwing you on cattle cars before you say “now wait a minute, I don’t think this is a good idea.” How long is it going to be before you finally resist and say “No, I will not comply. Period!” Ask yourself now because sooner or later you are going to come to that line, and when they cross it, you’re going to say well now cross this line; ok now cross that line; ok now cross this line. Pretty soon you’re in a corner. Sooner or later you’ve got to stand your ground whether anybody else does or not. That is what liberty is all about."
-Michael Badnarik-
"As government regulations grow slowly, we become used to the harness. Habit is a powerful force, and we no longer feel as intensely as we once would have [about the] constriction of our liberties that would have been utterly intolerable a mere half century ago."
-Judge Robert Bork-
(1927- ) Circuit Judge for US Court of Appeals
"To take from one because it is thought that his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association -- the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Note in Tracy's "Political Economy," 1816
"The secret of the superiority of state over private education lies in the fact that in the former the teacher is responsible to society ... [T]he result desired by the state is a wholly different one from that desired by parents, guardians, and pupils."
-Lester Frank Ward-
Source: 1897
"The censor believes that he can hold back the mighty traffic of life with a tin whistle and a raised right hand. For after all, it is life with which he quarrels."
-Heywood Broun-
(1888-1939)
Source: in The Fifty Year Decline of Hollywood (E. Goodman) 1961
"Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort."
-Robert A. Heinlein-
(1907-1988) American writer
"On every question of construction [of the Constitution] let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or intended against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: to Justice William Johnson, 1823, The Complete Jefferson, p. 322
"The First Amendment protects the right to gather information about what public officials do on public property, and specifically, a right to record matters of public interest."
-11th Circuit Court of Appeals-
Smith v. City of Cummings
"The state represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the state is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence."
-Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi-
(1869-1948)
"What, then, is the law? It is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense. ... since an individual cannot lawfully use force against the person, liberty, or property of another individual, then the common force -- for the same reason -- cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, liberty, or property of individual groups. ... But, unfortunately, law by no means confines itself to its proper functions. And when it has exceeded its proper functions, it has not done so merely in some inconsequential and debatable matters. The law has gone further than this; it has acted in direct opposition to its own purpose. The law has been used to destroy its own objective: It has been applied to annihilating the justice that it was supposed to maintain; to limiting and destroying rights which its real purpose was to respect. The law has placed the collective force at the disposal of the unscrupulous who wish, without risk, to exploit the person, liberty, and property of others. It has converted plunder into a right, in order to protect plunder. And it has converted lawful defense into a crime, in order to punish lawful defense."
-Frederic Bastiat-
(1801-1850) French economist, statesman, and author. He did most of his writing during the years just before -- and immediately following -- the French Revolution of February 1848
Source: THE LAW, 1850
"I may die a beggar, but with the Grace of God, I will not die a slave. I will not be filed, stamped, briefed, debriefed, or numbered... My life is my own."
-The Prisoner-
Source: From the television show, The Prisoner
"The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed, and people must learn to work instead of living on public assistance, lest Rome become bankrupt."
-Cicero-
55 BC
"If a juror accepts as the law that which the judge states then that juror has accepted the exercise of absolute authority of a government employee and has surrendered a power and right that once was the citizen's safeguard of liberty, -- For the saddest epitaph which can be carved in the memory of a vanished liberty is that it was lost because its possessors failed to stretch forth a saving hand while yet there was time."
-George Sutherland-
(1862-1942) U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: 2 ELLIOT’S DEBATES, 94, BANCROFT, HISTORY OF THE CONSTITUTION, p.267, 1788.
"If a juror feels that the statute involved in any criminal offence is unfair, or that it infringes upon the defendant's natural god-given unalienable or constitutional rights, then it is his duty to affirm that the offending statute is really no law at all and that the violation of it is no crime at all, for no one is bound to obey an unjust law."
-Harlan F. Stone-
12th Chief Justice U.S. Supreme Court
"We must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which are the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world and which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, Trial by Jury, and the English common law, find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence."
-Winston Churchill-
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
Source: To Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, 1946
"That is reserved expressly to the States and is not granted to the Federal Government by our national charter. The Federal Government has nothing to do under the Constitution with the preservation of public order. To pass this bill is to pass a bill for an unconstitutional purpose, under the guise of regulating interstate commerce."
-George Huddleson-
US Congressman (D-AL)
Source: 1930 House Firearms Hearing, supra note 45, at 15.
"The biggest threat to the American people today lies with the United States government. ... [T]he long-term solution is to dismantle, not reform, the iron fist of the welfare state and the controlled economy. This includes the end (not the reform) of the IRS, the DEA, the BATF, the SEC, the FDA, HUD, the departments of HHS, Labor, Agriculture, and energy, and every other agency that takes money from some and gives it to others or interferes with peaceful behavior."
-Jacob G. Hornberger-
American author, journalist, politician, founder and president of the Future of Freedom Foundation
Source: The Nazi Mind-Set in America, THE TYRANNY OF GUN CONTROL, 63 (Future of Freedom Foundation 1997).
"Arms in the hands of individual citizens may be used at individual discretion for the defence of the country, the over-throw of tyranny, or in private self-defense."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: A DEFENSE OF THE CONSTITUTIONS OF GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, at 475, (Philadelphia 1788)
“One may well ask: How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others? The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”
-Martin Luther King, Jr.-
"One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws, but conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws."
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-
(1929-1968), US civil rights leader
"[R]evenues drive expenditures, not the inverse. ... tax evasion represents a net benefit to everybody ... A statue should be erected to the unknown tax evader."
-Pierre Lemieux-
Source: In Praise of the Unknown Tax Evader, NATIONAL POST, February 27, 2002
"Self-defense is a part of the law of nature; nor can it be denied the community, even against the king himself."
-William Barclay-
(1546-1608, Scottish jurist)
"The people are Sovereign. ... at the Revolution, the sovereignty devolved on the people; and they are truly the sovereigns of the country, but they are sovereigns without subjects... with none to govern but themselves; the citizens of America are equal as fellow citizens, and as joint tenants in the sovereignty."
-John Jay-
(1745-1829) first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, First President of the United States - preceding George Washington, one of three men most responsible for the US Constitution
Source: Chisholm v. Georgia, (US) 2 Dall 419, 454, 1 L Ed 440, 455 @Dall 1793 pp471-472
http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0002_0419_ZS.html
"It is incorrect to think of liberty as synonymous with unrestrained action. Liberty does not and cannot include any action, regardless of sponsorship, which lessens the liberty of a single human being. To argue contrarily is to claim that liberty can be composed of liberty negations, patently absurd. Unrestraint carried to the point of impairing the liberty of others is the exercise of license, not liberty. To minimize the exercise of license is to maximize the area of liberty. Ideally, government would restrain license, not indulge in it; make it difficult, not easy; disgraceful, not popular. A government that does otherwise is licentious, not liberal."
-Leonard E. Read-
(1898-1983) founder of the Foundation for Economic Education
Source: Leonard E. Read, in The Freeman
"There is simply no escaping the fact that the fate of the Constitution is in our hands -- as voters, representatives, justices. If we allow ourselves to abuse the tradition of higher lawmaking, the very idea that the Constitution can be viewed as the culminating expression of a mobilized citizenry will disintegrate. After all, the American Republic is no more eternal than the Roman -- and it will come to an end when American citizens betray their Constitution’s fundamental ideals and aspirations so thoroughly that existing institutions merely parody the public meanings they formerly conveyed."
-Bruce Ackerman-
(1943-) American constitutional law scholar, Sterling Professor at Yale Law School
Source: WE THE PEOPLE: FOUNDATIONS, 291 (1991)
"The law itself is on trial quite as much as the cause which is to be decided."
-Harlan F. Stone-
12th Chief Justice U.S. Supreme Court
Source: 1941
"For more than six hundred years -- that is, since the Magna Carta in 1215 -- there has been no clearer principle of English or American constitutional law than that, in criminal cases, it is not only the right and duty of juries to judge what are the facts, what is the law, and what was the moral intent of the accused; but that it is also their right, and their primary and paramount duty, to judge the justice of the law, and to hold all laws invalid, that are, in their opinion, unjust, oppressive, and all persons guiltless in violating or resisting the execution of such laws."
-Lysander Spooner-
(1808-1887) Political theorist, activist, abolitionist
Source: AN ESSAY ON THE TRIAL BY JURY p. 11 (1852)
"The pages of history shine on instances of the jury's exercise of its prerogative to disregard instructions of the judge..."
-U.S. vs. Dougherty-
Source: 473 F 2nd 1113, 1139. (1972)
"To render the magistrate a judge of truth, and engage his authority in the suppression of opinions, shews an inattention to the nature and designs of political liberty."
-Robert Hall-
(1764-1831)
Source: An Apology for the Liberty of the Press, 1793
"The jury has the right to determine both the law and the facts."
-Samuel Chase-
(1741-1811) Signatory to the United States Declaration of Independence as a representative of Maryland, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court
Source: 1796
"Are we going to take the hands of the federal government completely off any effort to adjust the growing of national crops, and go right straight back to the old principle that every farmer is a lord of his own farm and can do anything he wants, raise anything, any old time, in any quantity, and sell any time he wants?"
-Franklin D. Roosevelt-
(1882-1945), 32nd US President
Source: May 31, 1935 press conference, responding to a Supreme Court decision that defined the commerce clause narrowly enough to interfere with his regulation of farm products
"It is a known fact that the policies of the government today, whether Republican or Democrat are closer to the 1932 platform of the Communist Party than they are to either of their own party platforms in that critical year."
-Walter Trohan-
(1903-2003) Chicago Tribune reporter (1929-1972) and bureau chief in Washington, D.C.
Source: CHICAGO TRIBUNE, October 5, 1970
"...Jury nullification is the undisputed power of the jury to acquit, even if its verdict is contrary to the law as given by the judge and contrary to the evidence."
-State v. Hokanson, 140 N.H. at 721B906-
cited and reiterated in State of NH v Sanchez, 2005
"We demand entire freedom of action and then expect the government in some miraculous way to save us from the consequences of our own acts.... Self-government means self-reliance."
-Calvin Coolidge-
(1873-1933), 30th US President
"You know, the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common, they don't alter their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views, which can be uncomfortable, if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering."
-Doctor Who-
Source: The Face of Evil
"Trust is a two way street. If your government does not trust you, how can you trust your government?"
-Bruce Montague-
"There is no crime more infamous than the violation of truth. It is apparent that men can be social beings no longer than they believe each other. When speech is employed only as the vehicle of falsehood, every man must disunite himself from others, inhabit his own cave and seek prey only for himself."
-Dr. Samuel Johnson-
(1709-1784)
"There is but one means to extenuate the effects of enemy fire: it is to develop a more violent fire oneself."
-Ferdinand Foch-
"For the power given to Congress by the Constitution does not extend to the internal regulation of the commerce of a State (that is to say, of the commerce between citizen and citizen,) which remain exclusively with its own legislature; but to its external commerce only, that is to say, its commerce with another State, or with foreign nations, or with the Indian tribes."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Opinion against the constitutionality of a National Bank, February 15, 1791
"Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it. Thus the beneficiaries are spared the shame and danger that their acts would otherwise involve... But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them and gives it to the other persons to whom it doesn't belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. Then abolish that law without delay ... No legal plunder; this is the principle of justice, peace, order, stability, harmony and logic."
-Frederic Bastiat-
(1801-1850) French economist, statesman, and author. He did most of his writing during the years just before -- and immediately following -- the French Revolution of February 1848.
June 1850
Source: "The Law" by Frederic Bastiat, 1850
"Unless they can pass the same test that immigrants must pass to become citizens, people shouldn't be allowed to vote. The idea that there is some public benefit in ignoramuses and morons pulling levers next to names on a ballot is one of the evil myths of post-modern America. The purpose of voting, in our country, is to select men and women with the competence and integrity to operate the mechanics of government fixed by our Constitution. For this process to have any public benefit requires that the choices be made on an intelligent, knowledgeable and reasoned basis."
-Charley Reese-
Source: The Orlando Sentinel, 11/03/98
"Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility."
-Sigmund Freud-
(1856-1939) Jewish Austrian neurologist, founder of the psychoanalytic school of psychiatry
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license."
-John Milton-
"An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted."
-Arthur Miller-
"The statesman who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals, would ... assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it."
-Adam Smith-
(1723-1790) Scottish philosopher and economist
Source: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1776
"Usurpation, the exercise of power not granted, is not legitimized by repetition."
-Raoul Berger-
(1901-2000) was an attorney and professor at Harvard University
"To blindly trust government is to automatically vest it with excessive power. To distrust government is simply to trust humanity - to trust in the ability of average people to peacefully, productively coexist without some official policing their every move. The State is merely another human institution - less creative than Microsoft, less reliable than Federal Express, less responsible than the average farmer husbanding his land, and less prudent than the average citizen spending his own paycheck."
-James Bovard-
(1956- ) American author, lecturer
Source: Freedom in Chains, The Rise of the State and the Demise of the Citizen (St. Martin's Press), 2000
"It is the paper money created out of thin air that creates the unfair distribution of wealth that is making the middle class fall more behind and the poor more poor. Newly created money and credit in a paper money system benefits those that can access the money first and buy capital goods and real property at one price before the new money circulates and makes all prices go up. Wages also do not keep up with inflation and that creates another squeeze on the middle class."
-Kenneth Gerbino-
former chairman of the American Economic Council
Source: The Great Deceit, May 28, 2010
"Always remember the difference between economic power and political power: You can refuse to hire someone's services or buy his products in the private sector and go somewhere else instead. In the public sector, though, if you refuse to accept a politician's or bureaucrat's product or services you go to jail. Ultimately, after all, all regulations are observed and all taxes are paid at gunpoint. I believe those few who can't even see that have been short-sighted sheep, and I suggest they learn how to think conceptually, develop consistency and grasp principles soon."
-Rick Gaber-
Source: Selfishness vs. "Selfishness"
"I will not accept if nominated and will not serve if elected."
-William Tecumseh Sherman-
(1820-1891) General Commander of the United States Army
"No nation however powerful, any more than an individual, can be unjust with impunity. Sooner or later, public opinion, an instrument merely moral in the beginning, will find occasion physically to inflict its sentences on the unjust... The lesson is useful to the weak as well as the strong."
-Thomas Jefferson-
to James Madison, 1804
"It is the trade of lawyers to question everything, yield nothing, and talk by the hour."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"Laws that forbid the carrying of arms...disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes...Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"Democrats and Republicans alike support the "War on Drugs." Federal, state, and local police make more than a million drug arrests yearly. Drug cases clog the courts. More than 60% of federal prison cells and about 30% of state prison cells hold drug offenders. No-knock drug raiders nullify the Fourth Amendment every day. Yet illicit drugs continue to pour onto the market, and they are readily available throughout the land. Looks like another failed policy. But politicians say more money will win the war. For fiscal 1996, President Clinton has requested a record $14.6 billion for this exercise in futility. State and local government will also spend huge sums. Who benefits? Posturing politicians and puritanical zealots, of course, but also the Drug Enforcement Administration, Customs Service, Coast Guard, FBI, and the rest of the drug warriors. Police love the drug war, because the forfeiture laws it inspired allow them to seize and keep private property with impunity. Corrupt cops get fabulous bribes, and corruption therefore runs rampant."
-Robert Higgs-
(1944- ) American economic historian, economist of the Austrian School
Source: The Myth of “Failed” Policies, THE FREE MARKET, June 1995.
"Now it is one thing to say (I say it) that people shouldn’t consume psychoactive drugs. It is entirely something else to condone marijuana laws, the application of which resulted, in 1995, in the arrest of 588,963 Americans. Why are we so afraid to inform ourselves on the question?"
-William F. Buckley, Jr.-
(1925-2008) American author and journalist, founded 'National Review'
Source: October 21, 1997
"No moral system can rest solely on authority."
-Alfred Jules Ayer-
"The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take the place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy."
-John Adams-
"Government isn't a good way to solve problems ... [G]overnment is concerned mostly with self-perpetuation and is subject to fantastic ideas about its own capabilities. ... [G]overnment is wasteful of the nation's resources, immune to common sense and subject to pressure from every half-organized bouquet of assholes. ... [G]overnment is distrustful of and disrespectful toward average Americans while being easily gulled by Americans with money, influence or fame."
-P. J. O'Rourke-
(1947- ) US humorist, journalist, & political commentator
"The true theory of our constitution is surely the wisest and best, that the States are independent as to everything within themselves, and united as to everything respecting foreign nations."
-Thomas Jefferson-
1800 presidential campaign
"[T]he best general key for the solution of questions of power between our governments, is the fact that every foreign and federal power is given to the federal government, and to the States every power purely domestic. ... The federal is, in truth, our foreign government, which department alone is taken from the sovereignty of the separate States."
-Thomas Jefferson-
1824 letter
"Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen."
-Friedrich Nietzsche-
(1844-1900)
Source: Thus Spoke Zarathustra
"Contrary to the Marxists, the Nazis did not advocate public ownership of the means of production. They did demand that the government oversee and run the nation's economy. The issue of legal ownership, they explained, is secondary; what counts is the issue of control. Private citizens, therefore, may continue to hold titles to property -- so long as the state reserves to itself the unqualified right to regulate the use of their property."
-Leonard Peikoff-
(1933- )
Source: The Ominous Parallels
"[I]f we won't choose to pay the price of liberty, then by default we shall suffer the cost of servitude -- whether it be the iron chains of a tyrannical oligarchy or the regulatory chains of unelected, faceless bureaucrats. When we witness our neighbors abused by tyrants, will we skulk away and hope we’re not next? Or will we stand by them and challenge -- as freedom-loving Americans — the tyranny of lawless leaders."
-Phil Trieb-
Source: The New American, p. 39 April 29, 1996.
"We ask that government undertake the obligation above all of providing citizens with adequate opportunity for employment and earning a living. The activities of the individual must not be allowed to clash with the interests of the community, but must take place within the confines and be for the good of all. Therefore, we demand: ... an end to the power of financial interest. We demand profit sharing in big business. We demand a broad extension of care for the aged. We demand ... the greatest possible consideration of small business in the purchases of the national, state, and municipal governments. In order to make possible to every capable and industrious [citizen] the attainment of higher education and thus the achievement of a post of leadership, the government must provide an all-around enlargement of our system of public education.... We demand the education at government expense of gifted children of poor parents.... The government must undertake the improvement of public health -- by protecting mother and child, by prohibiting child labor -- by the greatest possible support for all groups concerned with the physical education of youth. [W]e combat the ... materialistic spirit within and without us, and are convinced that a permanent recovery of our people can only proceed from within on the foundation of The Common Good Before the Individual Good."
-National Socialist Party of Germany (NAZI)-
Source: planks of the National Socialist Party of Germany (NAZI), adopted in Munich on February 24, 1920.
"We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
"The Nature of Government"
"What I say is, that the real non-resistants can believe in direct action only, never in political action. For the basis of all political action is coercion; even when the State does good things, it finally rests on a club, a gun, or a prison, for its power to carry them through."
-Voltairine de Cleyre-
"A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon it adds up to real money."
-Everett Dirksen-
(1896-1969) Illinois Senator
"It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a 'dismal science.' But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance."
-Murray N. Rothbard-
(1926-1995) Dean of the Austrian School of Economics
"According to the Tax Foundation, the average American worker works 127 days of the year just to pay his taxes. That means that government owns 36 percent of the average American’s output—which is more than feudal serfs owed the robber barons. That 36 percent is more than the average American spends on food, clothing and housing. In other words, if it were not for taxes, the average American’s living standard would at least double."
-Paul Craig Roberts-
(1939- ) Economist, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration ("Father of Reaganomics"), former editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Scripps Howard News Service.
Source: Taxes take enormous toll on America, THE CONSERVATIVE CHRONICLE p. 21, May 1, 1996
"The people are the masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who would pervert it!"
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
"A tax cut means higher family income and higher business profits and a balanced federal budget.... As the national income grows, the federal government will ultimately end up with more revenues. Prosperity is the real way to balance our budget. By lowering tax rates, by increasing jobs and income, we can expand tax revenues and finally bring our budget into balance."
-John F. Kennedy-
(1917-1963) 35th US President
Source: September 18, 1963
"In any event, freedom to travel throughout the United States has long been recognized as a basic right under the Constitution."
-US Supreme Court-
U.S. v. Guest 383 U.S. 745 (1966)
"'The constitutional right to travel from one State to another . . . has been firmly established and repeatedly recognized.' United States v. Guest, 383 U.S. 745, 757. This constitutional right, which, of course, includes the right of 'entering and abiding in any State in the Union,' Truax v. Raich, 239 U.S. 33, 39, is not a mere conditional liberty subject to regulation and control under conventional [394 U.S. 618, 643] due process or equal protection standards. 1 '[T]he right to travel freely from State to State finds constitutional protection that is quite independent of the Fourteenth Amendment.’ United States v. Guest, supra, at 760, n. 17. 2 As we made clear in Guest, it is a right broadly assertable against private interference as well as governmental action. 3 Like the right of association, NAACP v. Alabama, 357 U.S. 449, it is a virtually unconditional personal right, 4 guaranteed by the Constitution to us all."
-US Supreme Court-
Shapiro v Thompson, 394 U.S. 618 (1969)
"I believe that what separates us all from one another is simply society itself, or, if you like, politics. This is what raises barriers between men, this is what creates misunderstanding.
If I may be allowed to express myself paradoxically, I should say that the truest society, the authentic human community, is extra-social — a wider, deeper society, that which is revealed by our common anxieties, our desires, our secret nostalgias. The whole history of the world has been governed by nostalgias and anxieties, which political action does no more than reflect and interpret, very imperfectly. No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa."
-Eugène Ionesco-
"It is the invariable habit of bureaucracies, at all times and everywhere, to assume...that every citizen is a criminal. Their one apparent purpose, pursued with a relentless and furious diligence, is to convert the assumption into a fact. They hunt endlessly for proofs, and, when proofs are lacking, for mere suspicions. The moment they become aware of a definite citizen, John Doe, seeking what is his right under the law, they begin searching feverishly for an excuse for withholding it from him."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956)
American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"Being intelligent is not a felony. But most societies evaluate it as at least a misdemeanor."
-Robert A. Heinlein-
(1907-1988) American writer
"The Gettysburg speech was at once the shortest and the most famous oration in American history...the highest emotion reduced to a few poetical phrases. Lincoln himself never even remotely approached it. It is genuinely stupendous. But let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of everyday. The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination – that government of the people, by the people, for the people, should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves."
-H.L. Mencken-
"Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs have in Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be empowered. It's not entitlement. An entitlement is what people on welfare get, and how free are they? It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights -- the 'right' to education, the 'right' to health care, the 'right' to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are rations of slavery -- hay and a barn for human cattle. There's only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences."
-P. J. O'Rourke-
(1947- ) US humorist, journalist, & political commentator
Source: AGE AND GUILE BEAT YOUTH, INNOCENCE, AND A BAD HAIRCUT (Atlantic Monthly Press 1995)
"The governments of the great States have two instruments for keeping the people dependent, in fear and obedience: a coarser, the army; and a more refined, the school."
-Friedrich Nietzsche-
(1844-1900)
Source: The Complete Works of Frederick Nietzsche, 152 (O. Levy Ed. 1974)
"Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidarity to pure wind."
-George Orwell-
[Eric Arthur Blair] (1903-1950) British author
"The state spends much time and effort persuading the public that it is not really what it is and that the consequences of its actions are positive rather than negative."
-Hans Hermann Hoppe-
Source: A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism
"Is Freedom only a Will-o'-the-wisp
To cheat a poet's eye?
Be it phantom or fact, it's a noble cause
In which to sing and to die!"
-Joyce Kilmer-
"[E]very Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his. The great and chief end therefore, of Mens uniting into Commonwealths, and putting themselves under Government, is the Preservation of their Property."
-John Locke-
(1632-1704) English philosopher and political theorist. Considered the ideological progenitor of the American Revolution and who, by far, was the most often non-biblical writer quoted by the Founding Fathers of the USA.
1690
"Positive laws are tyrannical. One's individual rights -- whether they be life, liberty, or property -- must be sacrificed by the state in order to fulfill the positive rights of another. For example, if housing is considered a "right," then the state will have to confiscate wealth (property) from those who have provided shelter for themselves in order to house those who have not.... True justice is realized when our lives, and property are secure, and we are free to express our thoughts without fear of retribution. Just laws are negative in nature; they exist to thwart the violation of our natural rights. Government ought to be the collective organization -- that is, the extension -- of the individual's right of self-defense, and its purpose to protect our lives, liberties, and property."
-Mark Da Vee-
Source: Defining Justice, The Freeman, P. 566-67, August, 1996
"The doctrine of non-resistance against arbitrary power and oppression, is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind."
-New Hampshire Constitution-
Source: Article 10
"Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: 'Novanglus', 'Boston Gazette' 06 Feb 1775
"We despise and abhor the bully, the brawler, the oppressor, whether in private or public life, but we despise no less the coward and the voluptuary. No man is worth calling a man who will not fight rather than submit to infamy or see those that are dear to him suffer wrong."
-Theodore Roosevelt-
"I'm convinced that we have to have federal legislation to build on. We're going to have to take one step at a time, and the first step is necessarily -- given the political realities -- going to be very modest. Of course, it's true that politicians will then go home and say, 'This is a great law. The problem is solved.' And it's also true that such statements will tend to defuse the gun-control issue for a time. So then we'll have to strengthen that law, and then again to strengthen that law, and maybe again and again. Right now, though, we'd be satisfied not with half a loaf but with a slice. Our ultimate goal -- total control of handguns in the United States -- is going to take time. My estimate is from seven to ten years. The problem is to slow down the increasing number of handguns sold in this country. The second problem is to get them all registered. And the final problem is to make the possession of all handguns and all handgun ammunition -- except for the military, policemen, licensed security guards, licensed sporting clubs, and licensed gun collectors -- totally illegal."
-Nelson Shields-
Co-founder and Chairman Emeritus, Handgun Control, Inc.
Source: A Reporter At Large: Handguns, The New Yorker, July 26, 1976, 57-58
"All military type firearms are to be handed in immediately ... The SS, SA and Stahlhelm give every respectable German man the opportunity of campaigning with them. Therefore anyone who does not belong to one of the above named organizations and who unjustifiably nevertheless keeps his weapon ... must be regarded as an enemy of the national government."
-SA Oberfuhrer of Bad Tolz-
March, 1933
"It is clear in our criminal justice system that the jury has the power to nullify -- that is, the power to acquit or to convict on reduced charges despite overwhelming evidence against the defendant. ... In a criminal trial, the court cannot direct a verdict of guilty, no matter how strong the evidence. In addition, if the jury acquits, double jeopardy bars the prosecution from appealing the verdict or seeking retrial. Similarly, if the jury convicts the defendant of a less serious offense than the one charged, the prosecution cannot again try the defendant on the more serious charge. This result occurs regardless of whether the jury consciously rejects the law, embraces a merciful attitude, or is simply confused concerning the law or facts. Thus, nullification -- with or without authority, intended or not -- is part of our system."
-Anne Bowen Poulin-
Professor of Law, Villanova School of Law
Source: Article: The Jury: The Criminal Justice System’s Different Voice, 62 U. CIN. L. REV. 1377, 1399 (1994).
"The power of nullification plays an important role in the criminal justice system. ... Because an accused criminal is restricted in the defenses he or she can raise, the law recognizes only certain defenses and justification, and correspondingly, limited evidence. The jury’s power to nullify provides an accommodation between the rigidity of the law and the need to hear and respond to positions that do not fit legal pigeonholes, such as claims of spousal abuse before the battered-spouse syndrome received acceptance. Jury nullification permits the jury to respond to a position that does not have the status of a legally recognized defense. The power to nullify guarantees that the jury is free to speak as the conscience of the community. "
-Anne Bowen Poulin-
Professor of Law, Villanova School of Law
Source: Article: The Jury: The Criminal Justice System’s Different Voice, 62 U. CIN. L. REV. 1377, 1400 (1994)
"But, sir, the people themselves have it in their power effectually to resist usurpation, without being driven to an appeal of arms. An act of usurpation is not obligatory; it is not law; and any man may be justified in his resistance. Let him be considered as a criminal by the general government, yet only his fellow-citizens can convict him; they are his jury, and if they pronounce him innocent, not all the powers of Congress can hurt him; and innocent they certainly will pronounce him, if the supposed law he resisted was an act of usurpation."
-Theophilus Parsons-
(1750-1813)
Source: in the Massachusetts Convention on the ratification of the Constitution, January 23, 1788,
in _Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution,_
Jonathan Elliot, ed., v.2 p.94 (Philadelphia, 1836)
"It is easy to think the State has a lot of different objects -- military, political, economic, and what not. But in a way things are much simpler than that. The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging in his own garden -- that is what the State is there for. And unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc., are simply a waste of time."
-C. S. Lewis-
(1898-1963), British novelist
"Congress will ever exercise their powers to levy as much money as the people can pay. They will not be restrained from direct taxes by the consideration that necessity does not require them."
-Melancton Smith-
(1744-1798) opponent of Alexander Hamilton during New York's ratifying convention
"I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground: That 'all powers not delegated to the United States, by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States or to the people' (10th Amendment). To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specifically drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible to any definition."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Opinion on the Constitutionality of a National Bank, letter to George Washington,15 February 1791,
The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Boyd, ed., vol. 19 (276)
"When men are brought face to face with their opponents, forced to listen and learn and mend their ideas, they cease to be children and savages and begin to live like civilized men. Then only is freedom a reality, when men may voice their opinions because they must examine their opinions."
-Walter Lippmann-
(1889-1974) American writer, journalist, and political commentator
Source: The Indispensable Opposition, 1939
"With respect to the words general welfare, I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
"The power of the legislative being derived from the people by a positive voluntary grant and institution, can be no other than what that positive grant conveyed, which being only to make laws, and not to make legislators, the legislative can have no power to transfer their authority of making laws, and place it in other hands."
-John Locke-
(1632-1704) English philosopher and political theorist. Considered the ideological progenitor of the American Revolution and who, by far, was the most often non-biblical writer quoted by the Founding Fathers of the USA
"Parties are... censors of the conduct of each other, and useful watchmen for the public. Men by their constitutions are naturally divided into two parties:
1. Those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes.
2. Those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them, cherish and consider them as the most honest and safe, although not the most wise, depository of the public interests.
In every country these two parties exist, and in every one where they are free to think, speak, and write, they will declare themselves. Call them, therefore,... Whigs and Tories, Republicans and Federalists, Aristocrats and Democrats, or by whatever name you please, they are the same parties still, and pursue the same object."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"By the power to lay and collect imposts Congress may impose duties on any or every article of commerce imported into these states to what amount they please. By the power to lay excises, a power very odious in its nature, since it authorizes officers to examine into your private concerns, the Congress may impose duties on every article of use or consumption: On the food that we eat, on the liquors we drink, on the clothes that we wear, the glass which enlighten our houses, or the hearths necessary for our warmth and comfort. By the power to lay and collect taxes, they may proceed to direct taxation on every individual either by a capitation tax on their heads or an assessment on their property. By this part of the section, therefore, the government has a power to tax to what amount they choose and thus to sluice the people at every vein as long as they have a drop of blood left."
-Luther Martin-
(1744-1826) Maryland delegate to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia
"'Heaven helps those who help themselves' is a well-tried maxim, embodying in a small compass the results of vast human experience. The spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual; and, exhibited in the lives of many, it constitutes the true source of national vigour and strength. Help from without is often enfeebling in its effects, but help from within invariably invigorates. Whatever is done for men or classes, to a certain extent takes away the stimulus and necessity of doing for themselves; and where men are subjected to over-guidance and over-government, the inevitable tendency is to render them comparatively helpless."
-Samuel Smiles-
"I tell you true, liberty is the best of all things; never live beneath the noose of a servile halter."
-William Wallace-
Scottish patriot, led a revolution against England’s King Edward I [Longshanks]
Address to the Scots [c. 1300]
"If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no resource left but in the exertion of that original right of self-defense. ... The citizens must rush tumultuously to arms..."
-Alexander Hamilton-
Essay 28, The Federalist Papers
"The constitutions of most of our States assert that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves in all cases to which they think themselves competent (as in electing their functionaries executive and legislative, and deciding by a jury of themselves in all judiciary cases in which any fact is involved), or they may act by representatives, freely and equally chosen; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed; that they are entitled to freedom of person, freedom of religion, freedom of property, and freedom of the press."
-Thomas Jefferson-
to John Cartwright, 1824
"Congress have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birth-right of an American ... the unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people."
-Tench Coxe-
(1755-1824) American political economist
20 Feb 1788
"The Jury has a right to judge both the law as well as the fact in controversy."
-John Jay-
(1745-1829) first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, First President of the united States after the American Revolution - preceding George Washington, one of three men most responsible for the US Constitution
1789
"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation."
-Henry David Thoreau-
(1817-1862)
"The only reason for a government service is precisely to provide financial support for an operation that is otherwise unsustainable, or else there would be no point in the government’s involvement at all."
-Lew Rockwell-
[Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.] (1944- ) Chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute
"Since March 9, 1933, the United States has been in a state of declared national emergency.... Under the powers delegated by these statutes, the President may: seize property; organize and control the means of production; seize commodities; assign military forces abroad; institute martial law; seize and control all transportation and communication; regulate the operation of private enterprise; restrict travel; and, in a plethora of particular ways, control the lives of all American citizens. ...
A majority of the people of the United States have lived all of their lives under emergency rule. For 40 years, freedoms and governmental procedures guaranteed by the Constitution have, in varying degrees, been abridged by laws brought into force by states of national emergency....from, at least, the Civil War in important ways shaped the present phenomenon of a permanent state of national emergency."
-Senate Report, 93rd Congress-
Source: from the Senate Report 93-549, 93rd Congress, November 19, 1973, Special Committee On The Termination Of The National Emergency United States Senate. The purpose of the committee was to discuss and address the 40 year long state of emergency that had been in effect in the United States since the Emergency Act of 1933, the Trading with the Enemy Act October 6, 1917 as amended in March 9, 1933. During the continued state of emergency, Congress voted to transfer powers from Congress to the President. The debate to end long-running states of National Emergency was ended in 1976 with the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1601-1651), which limits any such declared emergencies to two years.
"Many politicians are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition, that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story, who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim."
-Thomas Babington Macaulay-
(1800-1859) [Lord Macaulay] 1st Baron Macaulay, British historian
"The moment men obtain perfect freedom, that moment they erect a stage for the manifestation of their faults. The strong characters begin to go wrong by excess of energy; the weak by remissness of action."
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe-
(1749-1832)
"I know it will give great offense to the clergy, but the advocate of religious freedom is to expect neither peace nor forgiveness from them."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"If it be asked what is to be the consequence, in case the Congress shall misconstrue this part of the Constitution, and exercise powers not warranted by its true meaning, I answer, the same as if they should misconstrue or enlarge any other power vested in them; as if the general power had been reduced to particulars, and any one of these were to be violated; the same, in short, as if the State legislatures should violate their respective constitutional authorities. In the first instance, the success of the usurpation will depend on the executive and judiciary departments, which are to expound and give effect to the legislative acts; and in the last resort a remedy must be obtained from the people who can, by the election of more faithful representatives, annul the acts of the usurpers."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President Source: THE FEDERALIST No. 44
"Extreme justice is an extreme injury: for we ought not to approve of those terrible laws that make the smallest offences capital, nor of that opinion of the Stoics that makes all crimes equal; as if there were no difference to be made between the killing a man and the taking his purse, between which, if we examine things impartially, there is no likeness nor proportion."
-Thomas More-
"If Big Brother (of Orwell's 1984) comes to America, he will not be a fearsome, foreboding figure with a heart-chilling, omnipresent glare as in 1984. He will come with a smile on his face, a quip on his lips, a wave to the crowd, and a press that (a) dutifully reports the suppressive measures he is taking to save the nation from internal chaos and foreign threat; and (b) gingerly questions whether he will be able to succeed."
-Michael Parenti-
Source: "Inventing Reality" (1986)
"Since the federal constitution has removed all danger of our having a paper tender, our trade is advanced fifty percent. Our monied people can trust their cash abroad, and have brought their coin into circulation."
-The Pennsylvania Gazette-
December 16, 1789
"As a very important source of strength and security, cherish public credit. One method of preserving it is to use it as sparingly as possible, avoiding occasions of expense by cultivating peace, but remembering also that timely disbursements to prepare for danger frequently prevent much greater disbursements to repel it, avoiding likewise the accumulation of debt, not only by shunning occasions of expense, but by vigorous exertion in time of peace to discharge the debts which unavoidable wars may have occasioned, not ungenerously throwing upon posterity the burden which we ourselves ought to bear. The execution of these maxims belongs to your representatives, but it is necessary that public opinion should co-operate."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: George Washington's Farewell Address, September 19, 1796
"The chief duty of the National Government in connection with the currency of the country is to coin money and declare its value. Grave doubts have been entertained whether Congress is authorized by the Constitution to make any form of paper money legal tender. The present issue of United States notes has been sustained by the necessities of war; but such paper should depend for its value and currency upon its convenience in use and its prompt redemption in coin at the will of the holder, and not upon its compulsory circulation. These notes are not money, but promises to pay money. If the holders demand it, the promise should be kept."
-James A. Garfield-
(1831-1881) 20th President of the United States (1881)
Source: Inaugural Address, March 14, 1881.
"Let them march all they want, as long as they continue to pay their taxes."
-Alexander Haig-
Attributed; then Secretary of State under President Reagan, following the million-person rally for nuclear disarmament in New York City's Central Park, June 12, 1982
"Regulation -- which is based on force and fear -- undermines the moral base of business dealings. It becomes cheaper to bribe a building inspector than to meet his standards of construction. A fly-by-night securities operator can quickly meet all the S.E.C. requirements, gain the inference of respectability, and proceed to fleece the public. In an unregulated economy, the operator would have had to spend a number of years in reputable dealings before he could earn a position of trust sufficient to induce a number of investors to place funds with him. Protection of the consumer by regulation is thus illusory."
-Alan Greenspan-
(1926- ) Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors (1987-2006)
"It constantly amazes me that defenders of the free market are expected to offer certainty and perfection while government has only to make promises and express good intentions. Many times, for instance, I’ve heard people say, 'A free market in education is a bad idea because some child somewhere might fall through the cracks,' even though in today's government school, millions of children are falling through the cracks every day."
-Dr. Lawrence W. Reed-
(1953-) President of the Foundation for Economic Education, economist, author
Source: Making the Case for Liberty Stick, The Freeman, p.791, December 1996.
"Indeed, that was an apt and true reply which was given to Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been seized. For when that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride, 'What thou meanest by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, whilst thou who dost it with a great fleet art styled emperor'"
-Saint Augustine-
[Augustine of Hippo (Latin: Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis)] (354-430) Bishop of Hippo Regius, philosopher and theologian
The City of God
(book IV, chapter 4)
"When the state murders, it assumes an authority I refuse to concede: the authority of perfect knowledge in final things."
-John Leonard-
"Another major reason why crime is increasing is that crime pays, and in our tax-ridden, regulation crushed economy, many people cannot economically survive through low-end jobs. ... 'The income that offenders can earn in the world of crime, as compared with the world of work, all too often makes crime appear to be the better choice.' In Washington, D.C., it costs $7,000 in city fees to open a pushcart. In California, up to eighty federal and state licenses are required to open a small business. In New York, a medallion to operate a taxicab costs $150,000. More than 700 occupations in the United States require a government license. Throughout the country, church soup kitchens are being closed by departments of health. No wonder so many people turn to crime and violence to survive."
-Jacob G. Hornberger-
American author, journalist, politician, founder and president of the Future of Freedom Foundation
Source: Will You be Safer if Guns are Banned?, The Tyranny of Gun Control, 9-10 (1997).
"It ain’t over on April 15! If you stop, for example, for a $10 pizza on Thursday night to celebrate being done with the IRS for another year, the taxman will be right there to grab a slice or two. On top of paying the sales tax, you’ll also be picking up a major chunk of what the government charges the pizza shop owner for local property taxes, unemployment insurance taxes, federal payroll taxes, federal and state and local income taxes, and worker’s compensation taxes. Altogether, according to a study by the Americans for Tax Reform, that comes to $3.80 on a $10 pizza for the omnipresent taxman. If you pick up a Bud six-pack to go with the pizza, there’s another 43 cents of each beer dollar that goes straight to the taxman for excise taxes, income taxes, property taxes, etc. For something stronger, say Jack Daniels, the taxman’s share is $7.20, on average, out of every $10. Go lighter and just drink Pepsi and it’s 35 percent of what you pay that goes for taxes at all levels. Add some Marlboros and its 75 percent of the retail price that’s funneled directly into the state’s coffers. Get home and hit the light switch and another $26 out of every $100 on the electric bill goes for government rather than electricity. If you’re flying the next day, the taxman is up early and waiting at the aiport, pocketing $40 on every $100 airline ticket. And he’s there in the hotel lobby when you land, snatching $43 on every $100 of the hotel bill. Go out to dinner and it’s another $28 of every $100 of the tab that ends up with the government rather than with the restaurant, the farmers, truckers and everyone else who worked together to produce the meal."
-Ralph Reiland-
Prof of Economics Robert Morris College
Source: Taxed to Death
"The government expands at will, based on what might be charitably called flimsy constitutional reasoning and less charitably and more accurately called arrogant judicial tyranny. Government authority these days rarely comes from the Constitution as written but from the last carefully crafted misinterpretation of it. This is called legal precedent."
-Linda Bowles-
(1952-2003) Columnist
Source: Enlarging government's power a step at a time, CONSERVATIVE CHRONICLE, May 1, 1996.
"Indeed, it was the enumeration of powers, not the enumeration of rights in the Bill of Rights, that was meant by the Framers to be the principal limitation on government power."
-Roger Pilon-
Vice President for Legal Affairs for the Cato Institute
Source: Restoring Constitutional Government, Cato's Letter #9, p. 2, published by the Cato Institute (1995)
"If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon's but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition and ignorance on the other."
-Ulysses S. Grant-
(1822-1885) 18th US President
"... ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance... A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon -- so long as there is no answer to it -- gives claws to the weak."
-George Orwell-
"If a government were trying to squeeze as much money as possible out of a population, what would it do?
1. The use of indirect rather than direct taxes, so that the tax is hidden in the price of goods.
2. Inflation, by which the state reduces the value of everyone else's currency.
3. Borrowing, so as to postpone the necessary taxation.
4. Gift and luxury taxes, where the tax accompanies the receipt or purchase of something special, lessening the annoyance of the tax.
5. “Temporary” taxes, which somehow never get repealed when the emergency passes.
6. Taxes that exploit social conflict, by placing higher taxes on unpopular groups.
7. The threat of social collapse or withholding monopoly government services if taxes are reduced.
8. Collection of the total tax burden in relatively small increments over time, rather than in a yearly lump sum.
9. Taxes whose exact incidence cannot be predicted in advance, thus keeping the taxpayer unaware of just how much he is paying.
10. Extraordinary budget complexity to hide the budget process from public understanding.
11. The use of generalized expenditure categories to make it difficult for outsiders to assess the individual components of the budget."
-Amilcare Puviani-
Italian scholar
Source: paraphrased by David Boaz, What Big Government Is All About, The Freeman, April, 1997, p. 213-14
"When libertarian moral theory is combined with economic theory a compelling conception of the good society emerges."
-Lansing Pollock-
Source: The Free Society (Westview Press)
"Principio Obstate (Resist from the beginning)."
-Latin Proverb-
"We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented."
-Elie Wiesel-
Buchenwald survivor
"If the Union was formed by accession of States then the Union may be dissolved by the secession of States."
-Daniel Webster-
(1782-1852), US Senator
Source: U.S. Senate, Feb 15, 1833
"Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new."
-Henry David Thoreau-
(1817-1862)
"The human voice can never reach the distance that is covered by the still small voice of conscience."
-Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi-
(1869-1948)
"It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth can not be produced by human institutions. In the full enjoyment of the gifts of Heaven and the fruits of superior industry, economy, and virtue, every man is equally entitled to protection by law; but when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society — the farmers, mechanics, and laborers — who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their government."
-Andrew Jackson-
"It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. [W]hen the laws undertake to add . . . artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society — the farmers, mechanics, and laborers — who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government.”
-Andrew Jackson-
1832
"If this spirit shall ever be so far debased as to tolerate a law not obligatory on the legislature, as well as on the people, the people will be prepared to tolerate anything but liberty."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: THE FEDERALIST No. 57
"Under God we are determined that, wheresoever, whensoever, or howsoever, we shall be called upon to make our exit, we will die freemen."
-Josiah Quincy-
(1744-1775) American patriot, writer
1774
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."
-Richard Feynman-
(1918-1988) American physicist, Nobel Prize in Physics (1965)
“We don’t read most of the bills. Do you really know what that would entail if we read every bill that we passed?”
-John Conyers-
U.S. Representative
Fahrenheit 9/11
"The strongest argument for free enterprise is that it prevents anybody from having too much power. Whether that person is a government official, a trade union official, or a business executive. If forces them to put up or shut up. They either have to deliver the goods, produce something that people are willing to pay for, are willing to buy, or else they have to go into a different business."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
Source: "Free to Choose" (1980), segment 2 of 10, "The Tyranny of Control"
"All government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management."
-Franklin D. Roosevelt-
(1882-1945), 32nd US President
Source: letter in 1937
"Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round heads in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status-quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them. But the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do."
-Jack Kerouac-
"Commerce with all nations, alliance with none, should be our motto."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"And the men who loan money to governments, so called, for the purpose of enabling the latter to rob, enslave, and murder their people, are among the greatest villains that the world has ever seen. And they as much deserve to be hunted and killed (if they cannot otherwise be got rid of) as any slave traders, robbers, or pirates that ever lived."
-Lysander Spooner-
"What I want to fix your attention on is the vast overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence -- moral, cultural, social or intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how 'democracy' (in the incantatory sense) is now doing for us the work that was once done by the most ancient dictatorships, and by the same methods? The basic proposal of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be 'undemocratic.' Children who are fit to proceed may be artifically kept back, because the others would get a trauma by being left behind. The bright pupil thus remains democratically fettered to his own age group throughout his school career, and a boy who would be capable of tackling Aeschylus or Dante sits listening to his coeval's attempts to spell out A CAT SAT ON A MAT. We may reasonably hope for the virtual abolition of education when 'I'm as good as you' has fully had its way. All incentives to learn and all penalties for not learning will vanish. The few who might want to learn will be prevented; who are they to overtop their fellows? And anyway, the teachers -- or should I say nurses? -- will be far too busy reassuring the dunces and patting them on the back to waste any time on real teaching. We shall no longer have to plan and toil to spread imperturbable conceit and incurable ignorance among men."
-C. S. Lewis-
(1898-1963), British novelist
"Is it not ironical that in a planned society of controlled workers given compulsory assignments, where religious expression is suppressed, the press controlled, and all media of communication censored, where a puppet government is encouraged but denied any real authority, where great attention is given to efficiency and character reports, and attendance at cultural assemblies is mandatory, where it is avowed that all will be administered to each according to his needs and performance required from each according to his abilities, and where those who flee are tracked down, returned, and punished for trying to escape - in short in the milieu of the typical large American secondary school - we attempt to teach 'the democratic system'?"
-Royce Van Norman-
Source: "School Administration: Thoughts on Organization and Purpose," Phi Delta Kappan 47(1966):315-16
"The Anarchists never have claimed that liberty will bring perfection; they simply say that its results are vastly preferable to those that follow authority."
-Benjamin Tucker-
"[A]s all history informs us, there has been in every State & Kingdom a constant kind of warfare between the governing & governed: the one striving to obtain more for its support, and the other to pay less. And this has alone occasioned great convulsions, actual civil wars, ending either in dethroning of the Princes, or enslaving of the people. Generally indeed the ruling power carries its point, the revenues of princes constantly increasing, and we see that they are never satisfied, but always in want of more. The more the people are discontented with the oppression of taxes; the greater need the prince has of money to distribute among his partisans and pay the troops that are to suppress all resistance, and enable him to plunder at pleasure. There is scarce a king in a hundred who would not, if he could, follow the example of Pharaoh, get first all the peoples money, then all their lands, and then make them and their children servants for ever ..."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
Source: before the Constitutional Convention, June 2, 1787
"The history of the welfare state is the history of public enterprise pushing out private organization. The impact was largely unintentional, but natural and inevitable. Higher taxes left individuals with less money to give; government’s assumption of responsibility for providing welfare shriveled the perceived duty of individuals to respond to their neighbors’ needs; and the availability of public programs gave recipients an alternative to private assistance, one which did not challenge recipients to reform their destructive behavior."
-Doug Bandow-
(1954- ) columnist, author, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute
Source: National Service -- or Government Service?, Policy Review, P. 34, September-October, 1996
"At home, fellow citizens, you best know whether we have done well or ill. The suppression of unnecessary offices, of useless establishments and expenses, enabled us to discontinue our internal taxes. These covering our land with officers, and opening our doors to their intrusions, had already begun that process of domiciliary vexation which, once entered, is scarcely to be restrained from reaching successively every article of produce and property."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Second Inaugural Address
"Our schools have been scientifically designed to prevent over-education from happening. The average American [should be] content with their humble role in life, because they're not tempted to think about any other role."
-William T. Harris-
U.S. Commissioner of Education
Source: 1889
"I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."
-Grover Norquist-
May 25, 2001
"It was self-serving politicians who convinced recent generations of Americans that we could all stand in a circle with our hands in each other’s pockets and somehow get rich."
-Paul Harvey-
[Paul Harvey Aurandt] (1918-2009) American radio broadcaster
Source: The Biggest Tax You Pay, Conservative Chronicle, November 8, 1995
"Let me define the difference between economic power and political power: economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value; political power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction. The businessman’s tool is values; the bureaucrat’s tool is fear."
-Ayn Rand-
"If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?"
-Frederic Bastiat-
“The people will be crushed under the burden of taxes, loan after loan will be floated; after having drained the present, the State will devour the future."
-Frederic Bastiat-
"I believe that if we had and would keep our dirty, bloody, dollar-soaked fingers out of the business of these nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own -- and if unfortunately their revolution must be of the violent type because the "haves" refuse to share with the "have-nots" by any peaceful method, at least what they get will be their own, and not the American style, which they don't want and above all don't want crammed down their throats by Americans. "
-General David M. Shoup-
Commandant of the Marine Corps 1960-63, Medal of Honor, Distinguished Service Medal
Source: May 14, 1966
"My policy has been, and will continue to be, while I have the honor to remain in the administration of the government, to be upon friendly terms with, but independent of, all the nations of the earth. To share in the broils of none. To fulfil our own engagements. To supply the wants, and be carriers for them all: Being thoroughly convinced that it is our policy and interest to do so."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: 1795 - letter to Gouverneur Morris, Ref: Washington's Maxims, 54.
"The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you've got it made."
-Jean Giraudoux-
French diplomat, dramatist, & novelist (1882 - 1944)
"I favor the policy of economy, not because I wish to save money, but because I wish to save people. The men and women of this country who toil are the ones who bear the cost of the Government. Every dollar that we carelessly waste means that their life will be so much the more meager. Every dollar that we save means that their life will be so much the more abundant."
-Calvin Coolidge-
"Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object."
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
1848
"Can any reasonable man be well disposed toward a government which makes war and carnage the only means of supporting itself?"
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804)
Source: at the US Constitutional Convention
"All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish it."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
(1805-1859) French historian
Source: Democracy in America, 1835
"Our civil laws will never be supple enough to fit the immense and changing variety of facts. Laws change more slowly than custom, and though dangerous when they fall behind the times are more dangerous still when they presume to anticipate custom."
-Marguerite Yourcenar-
"It is a policeman’s duty to protect men from criminals -- criminals being those who seize wealth by force. It is a policeman’s duty to retrieve stolen property and return it to its owners. But when robbery becomes the purpose of the law, and the policeman’s duty becomes, not the protection, but the plunder of property -- then it is an outlaw who has to become a policeman."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
Source: Atlas Shrugged, P. 535 (1957)
"Inflation is not caused by the actions of private citizens, but by the government: by an artificial expansion of the money supply required to support deficit spending. No private embezzlers or bank robbers in history have ever plundered people’s savings on a scale comparable to the plunder perpetrated by the fiscal policies of statist governments."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
Source: Who Will Protect Us From Our Protectors?, The Objectivist Newsletter, May 1952.
"The banks -- commercial banks and the Federal Reserve -- create all the money of this nation and its people pay interest on every dollar of that newly created money. Which means that private banks exercise unconstitutionally, immorally, and ridiculously the power to tax the people. For every newly created dollar dilutes to some extent the value of every other dollar already in circulation."
-Jerry Voorhis-
[Horace Jeremiah Voorhis] (1901-1984) US Congressman (D-Ca)
"[T]he power system continues only as long as individuals try to get something for nothing. The day when a majority of individuals declares or acts as if it wants nothing from the government, declares that it will look after its own welfare and interests, then on that day the power elites are doomed."
-Anthony Sutton-
Source: The Best Enemy Money Can Buy
"The idea of creating systems designed to threaten, coerce, and kill, and to imbue such agencies with principled legitimacy, and not expect them to lead to wars, genocides, and other tyrannical practices, expresses an innocence we can no longer afford to indulge."
-Butler D. Shaffer-
Professor, Southwestern University School of Law
June 9, 2003
"The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend toward each other. Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree. You have done violence to him, consumed his energy."
-Frank Herbert-
(1920-1986)
Source: Dune, 1965
"I hope your committee will not permit doubts as to constitutionality, however reasonable, to block the suggested legislation."
-Franklin D. Roosevelt-
(1882-1945), 32nd US President
Source: in a 1935 letter to the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee concerning Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation
"Under our Constitution, the federal government has delegated, enumerated and thus limited powers. Power is delegated by the founding generation or through subsequent amendment (that makes it legitimate); enumerated in the constitution (that makes it legal); and limited by that enumeration. As the 10th Amendment says, if a power hasn’t been delegated, the federal government doesn’t have it. For 150 years, that design held for the most part. When faced with a welfare bill in 1794, for example, James Madison, the principal author of the Constitution, rose in the House to say that he could find no constitutional authority for the bill. A century later, when Congress passed a similar measure, President Cleveland vetoed it as beyond Congress’ authority. That all changed during the New Deal as both congress and the president sought to expand federal power. When the Supreme court objected, rather than amend the Constitution, Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to pack the court with six additional members. The scheme failed, but the threat worked. Thereafter, the court started reading the Constitution’s General Welfare and Commerce Clauses so broadly that the doctrine of enumerated powers was essentially destroyed—and with it limited government."
-Roger Pilon-
Vice President for Legal Affairs for the Cato Institute
Source: Founders Intended Only Limited Powers, USA Today, Friday, July 21, 1995.
"In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs."
-Walter Lippmann-
(1889-1974)
Source: "An Inquiry into the Principles of the Good Society," 1937
"The liberty of the press is not confined to newspapers and periodicals. It necessarily embraces pamphlets and leaflets. These indeed have been historic weapons in the defense of liberty, as the pamphlets of Thomas Paine and others in our own history abundantly attest. The press in its historic connotation comprehends every sort of publication which affords a vehicle of information and opinion."
-U.S. Supreme Court-
Lovell v. City of Griffin, 303 U.S. 444 (1938)
"Whenever you put your faith in big government for any reason, sooner or later you wind up an apologist for mass murder."
-Karl Hess-
"For a government to declare a vice to be a crime, and to punish it as such, is an attempt to falsify the very nature of things. It is as absurd as it would be to declare truth to be a falsehood, or falsehood a truth."
-Lysander Spooner-
(1808-1887) Political theorist, activist, abolitionist
Source: Vices are Not Crimes, A Vindication of Moral Liberty (1875)
http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quote_blog/Lysander.Spooner.Quote.4B40
"There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism."
-Walter Benjamin-
"[I]t is true that [the provisions of the Bill of Rights] were designed to meet ancient evils. But they are the same kind of human evils that have emerged from century to century whenever excessive power is sought by the few at the expense of the many."
-Justice Hugo L. Black-
(1886-1971) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: Adamson v. California, 332 U.S. 46, 89 (Dissent) (1947).
"There exists a law, not written down anywhere but inborn in our hearts; a law which comes to us not by training or custom or reading but by derivation and absorption and adoption from nature itself; a law which has come to us not from theory but from practice, not by instruction but by natural intuition. I refer to the law which lays it down that, if our lives are endangered by plots or violence or armed robbers or enemies, any and every method of protecting ourselves is morally right."
-Marcus Tullius Cicero-
(January 6, 106 B.C. - December 7, 43 B.C.; Roman statesman, orator and writer)
"There exists a law, not written down anywhere, but inborn in our hearts, a law which comes to us not by training or custom or reading, a law which has come to us not from theory but from practice, not by instruction but by natural intuition. I refer to the law which lays down that, if our lives are endangered by plots or violence or armed robbers or enemies, any and every method of protecting ourselves is morally right."
-Marcus Tullius Cicero-
(106-43 B.C.) Roman Statesman, Philosopher and Orator
"It is true, the yeomanry of the country possess the lands, the weight of property, possess arms, and are too strong a body of men to be openly offended—and, therefore, it is urged, they will take care of themselves, that men who shall govern will not dare pay any disrespect to their opinions. It is easily perceived, that if they have not their proper negative upon passing laws in congress, or on the passage of laws relative to taxes and armies, they may in twenty or thirty years be by means imperceptible to them, totally deprived of that boasted weight and strength: This may be done in great measure by congress."
-Richard Henry Lee-
(1732-1794) Founding Father
Source: Letters From The Federal Farmer (1787)
"... By calling attention to a well-regulated militia for the security of the Nation, and the right of each citizen to keep and bear arms, our founding fathers recognized the essentially civilian nature of our economy. Although it is extremely unlikely that the fear of governmental tyranny, which gave rise to the 2nd amendment, will ever be a major danger to our Nation, the amendment still remains an important declaration of our basic military-civilian relationship, in which every citizen must be ready to participate in the defense of his country. For that reason I believe the 2nd Amendment will always be important."
-John F. Kennedy-
(1917-1963) 35th US President
Source: (Ref: AR 12-73 p.14)
"Militia: The body of citizens in a state, enrolled for discipline as a military force, but not engaged in actual service except in emergencies, as distinguished from regular troops or a standing army."
-Black's Law Dictionary, 3rd Edition-
Source: Black's Law Dictionary, third edition, published in 1933. See Ex parte McCants, 39 Ala. 112; Worth v. Craven County, 118 N.C. 112, 24 S.E. 778; Brown v. Newark, 29 N.J. Law, 238; Story v. Perkins (D.C.) 243 F. 997, 999.
"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy."
-Ernest Benn-
British author and publisher
"To me, consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects; the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner: ‘I stand for consensus?’"
-Margaret Thatcher-
"The government is good at one thing. It knows how to break your legs, and then hand you a crutch and say, 'See, if it weren't for the government, you wouldn't be able to walk.'"
-Harry Browne-
(1933-2006) American libertarian writer, politician, and free-market investment analyst. Libertarian candidate for US President 1996 & 2000
"The most absurd apology for authority and law is that they serve to diminish crime. Aside from the fact that the State is itself the greatest criminal, breaking every written and natural law, stealing in the form of taxes, killing in the form of war and capital punishment, it has come to an absolute standstill in coping with crime. It has failed utterly to destroy or even minimize the horrible scourge of its own creation."
-Emma Goldman-
(1869-1940)
Source: Anarchism
"The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual crime."
-Max Stirner-
[Johann Kaspar Schmidt] (1806-1856) German philosopher
Source: The Ego and His Own
"I am further of opinion that it would be better for us to have [no laws] at all than to have them in so prodigious numbers as we have."
-Michel de Montaigne-
[Michel Eyquem De Montaigne] (1532-1592) French Renaissance scholar, philosopher, writer
"The greatest violator of the principle of equal liberty is the State. Its functions are to control, to rule, to dictate, to regulate, and in exercising these functions it interferes with and injures individuals who have done no wrong. The objection to government is, not that it controls those who invade the liberty of others, but that it controls the non-invader. It may be necessary to govern one who will not govern himself, but that in no wise justifies governing one who is capable of and willing to govern himself. To argue that because some need restraint all must be restrained is neither consistent nor logical."
-Charles T. Sprading-
Source: Charles T. Sprading's Introduction to Liberty and the Great Libertarians; An Anthology On Liberty; A Hand-book Of Freedom (Los Angeles: The Libertarian Publishing Company, 1913)
"Every ambitious would-be empire clarions it abroad that she is conquering the world to bring it peace, security and freedom, and is sacrificing her sons only for the most noble and humanitarian purposes. That is a lie, and it is an ancient lie, yet generations still rise and believe it! ... If America ever does seek Empire, and most nations do, then planned reforms in our domestic life will be abandoned, States Rights will be abolished -- in order to impose a centralized government upon us for the purpose of internal repudiation of freedom, and adventures abroad. The American Dream will then die -- on battlefields all over the world -- and a nation conceived in liberty will destroy liberty for Americans and impose tyranny on subject nations."
-George S. Boutwell-
(1818-1905) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury under President Ulysses S. Grant, Governor of Massachusetts, Senator and Representative from Massachusetts and the first Commissioner of Internal Revenue under President Abraham Lincoln.
"For as long as one hundred of us shall remain alive, we shall never in any wise consent submit to the rule of the English, for it is not for glory we fight, nor riches, or for honour, but for freedom alone, which no good man loses but with his life."
-Robert Bruce-
[Robert I] (1274-1329), King of Scots (1306-1329), known as Robert the Bruce
Source: Declaration of Arbroath (April 6, 1320)
"Allow me to dispel a myth. People in the Middle East do not hate us for our freedom. They do not hate us for our lifestyle. They hate us because we have spent many years attempting to force them to emulate our lifestyle. The US government overthrew the democratically elected leader of Iran and replaced him with the Shah. The US government gave weapons, intelligence and money to Saddam Hussein. The US government also helped Libyan Col. Qaddafi come to power, propped up the Saudi monarchy and the Egyptian regime, and gave assistance to Osama bin Laden. Most Americans have forgotten these events. But the people of the Middle East will always remember. It was because of American troops in Saudi Arabia, lethal sanctions on Iraq, support for states in serious violation of International Law, and siding with Israel in its dispute with the Palestinians that terrorist leaders were able to recruit those individuals who caused 3,000 Americans to pay the ultimate price on September 11, 2001."
-Michael Badnarik-
(1954- ) American software engineer, political figure, former radio talk show host, Libertarian Party nominee for US President in 2004
Source: July, 2004
"By placing discretion in the hands of an official to grant or deny a license, such a statute creates a threat of censorship that by its very existence chills free speech."
-Harry A. Blackmun-
(1908-1999) U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Roe v. Wade, 1973
"There is no fury like that against one who, we fear, may succeed in making us disloyal to beliefs we hold with passion, but have not really won."
-Judge Learned Hand-
(1872-1961), Judge, U. S. Court of Appeals
Source: 1932
"If the true freedom of the press is to decide for itself what to publish and when to publish it, the true responsibility of the press must be to assert and defend that freedom… What the press in America needs is less inhibition, not more restraint."
-Tom Wicker-
Source: On Press, 1978
"To prevent government from becoming corrupt and tyrannous, its organization and methods should be as simple as possible, its functions be restricted to those necessary to the common welfare, and in all its parts it should be kept as close to the people and as directly within their control as may be."
-Henry George-
"How many Catholic schools do you think teach the students to question the authority of the Pope? Do you believe Christian schools teach students to question or challenge the authority of Jesus Christ? Do military schools teach the cadets to challenge the authority of superior officers? Well, why should we then expect government schools to teach children to question the authority of government?"
-Neal Boortz-
(1945- ) Radio talk show host, columnist
"[Tyrannical] power is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?"
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
[Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clerel, le Comte de Tocqueville] (1805-1859) French historian
"Should, hereafter, those incited by the lust of power and prompted by the supineness or venality of their constituents, overleap the known barriers of this Constitution and violate the unalienable rights of humanity: it will only serve to show, that no compact among men (however provident in its construction and sacred in its ratification) can be pronounced everlasting and inviolable, and if I may so express myself, that no Wall of words, that no mound of parchment can be so formed as to stand against the sweeping torrent of boundless ambition on the side, aided by the sapping current of corrupted morals on the other."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
"19 terrorists in 6 weeks have been able to command 300 million North Americans to do away with the entirety of their civil liberties that took 700 years to advance from the Magna Carta onward. The terrorists have already won the political and ideological war with one terrorist act. It is mindboggling that we are that weak as a society."
-Rocco Galati-
lawyer for the Canadian Islamic Congress
October, 2001
Source: http://www.canadianliberty.bc.ca/
"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act."
-George Orwell-
[Eric Arthur Blair] (1903-1950) British author
"Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."
-Hermann Goering-
(1893-1946) Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, President of the Reichstag, Prime Minister of Prussia and, as Hitler's designated successor, the second man in the Third Reich. [Göring]
April 18, 1946
Source: Nuremberg Diary (Farrar, Straus & Co 1947), by Gustave Gilbert (an Allied appointed psychologist), who visited daily with Goering and his cronies in their cells, afterwards making notes and ultimately writing the book about these conversations.
"It is fortunate that each generation does not comprehend its own ignorance. We are thus enabled to call our ancestors barbarous."
-Charles Dudley Warner-
"Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing."
-Helen Keller-
(1880-1968) Blind-Deaf Author
Source: The Open Door, 1957
"Fear is the foundation of most governments; but it is so sordid and brutal a passion, and renders men in whose breasts it predominates so stupid and miserable, that Americans will not be likely to approve of any political institution which is founded on it."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: Thoughts on Government, 1776
"But if you say, you can still pass the violations over, then I ask, hath your house been burnt? Hath your property been destroyed before your face? Are your wife and children destitute of a bed to lie on, or bread to live on? Have you lost a parent or a child by their hands, and yourself the ruined and wretched survivor? If you have not, then you are not a judge of those who have. But if you have, and can still shake hands with the murderers, then you are unworthy of the name of husband, father, friend, or lover, and whatever may be your rank or title in life, you have the heart of a coward and the spirit of a sycophant."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809)
Source: Common Sense, 1776
"The real menace of our Republic is the invisible government which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy legs over our cities states and nation. At the head is a small group of banking houses generally referred to as 'international bankers.' This little coterie... run our government for their own selfish ends. It operates under cover of a self-created screen...[and] seizes...our executive officers... legislative bodies... schools... courts... newspapers and every agency created for the public protection."
-John F. Hylan-
(1868-1936), Mayor of New York City (1918-1925), nicknamed "Red Mike"
"Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of the day; but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period, and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers (adminstrators) too plainly proves a deliberate, systematic plan of reducing us to slavery."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"The ideally non-violent state will be an ordered anarchy. That State is the best governed which is governed the least."
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi-
"The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature; and if men are now sufficiently enlightened to disabuse themselves of artifice, imposture, hypocrisy, and superstition, they will consider this event as an era in their history. Although the detail of the formation of the American governments is at present little known or regarded either in Europe or in America, it may hereafter become an object of curiosity. It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the influence of Heaven, more than those at work upon ships or houses, or laboring in merchandise or agriculture; it will forever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: "A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America" (1787-88)
"Disunion and civil war are at hand; and yet I fear disunion and war less than compromise. We can recover from them. The free States alone, if we must go on alone, will make a glorious nation."
-Rutherford B. Hayes-
"Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth."
-Oscar Wilde-
(1854-1900)
"I want the people of America to be able to work less for the government and more for themselves. I want them to have the rewards of their own industry. This is the chief meaning of freedom. Until we can reestablish a condition under which the earnings of the people can be kept by the people, we are bound to suffer a very severe and distinct curtailment of our liberty."
-Calvin Coolidge-
(1873-1933), 30th US President
"If we must all agree, all work together, we're no better than a machine. If an individual can't work in solidarity with his fellows, it's his duty to work alone. His duty and his right. We have been denying people that right. We've been saying, more and more often, you must work with the others, you must accept the rule of the majority. But any rule is tyranny. The duty of the individual is to accept no rule, to be the initiator of his own acts, to be responsible. Only if he does so will the society live, and change, and adapt, and survive. We are not subjects of a State founded upon law, but members of a society founded upon revolution. Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution."
-Ursula K. Le Guin-
"As to the history of the revolution, my ideas may be peculiar, perhaps singular. What do we mean by the Revolution? The war? That was no part of the revolution; it was only an effect and consequence of it. The revolution was in the minds of the people."
-John Adams-
"By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose."
-John Maynard Keynes-
(1883-1946) British economist
Source: "The Economic Consequences Of The Peace"
"There will not be one kind of community existing and one kind of life led in utopia. Utopia will consist of utopias, of many different and divergent communities in which people lead different kinds of lives under different institutions. Some kinds of communities will be more attractive to most than others; communities will wax and wane. People will leave some for others or spend their whole lives in one. Utopia is a framework for utopias, a place where people are at liberty to join together voluntarily to pursue and attempt to realize their own vision of the good life in the ideal community but where no one can impose his own utopian vision upon others."
-Robert Nozick-
"The Rothschilds, and that class of money-lenders of whom they are the representatives and agents -- men who never think of lending a shilling to their next-door neighbors, for purposes of honest industry, unless upon the most ample security, and at the highest rate of interest -- stand ready, at all times, to lend money in unlimited amounts to those robbers and murderers, who call themselves governments, to be expended in shooting down those who do not submit quietly to being robbed and enslaved."
-Lysander Spooner-
(1808-1887) Political theorist, activist, abolitionist
Source: "No Treason #6" (1870)
"Make no laws whatever concerning speech, and speech will be free; so soon as you make a declaration on paper that speech shall be free, you will have a hundred lawyers proving that "freedom does not mean abuse, nor liberty license"; and they will define and define freedom out of existence. Let the guarantee of free speech be in every man's determination to use it, and we shall have no need of paper declarations. On the other hand, so long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men."
-Voltairine de Cleyre-
"Do you think that we want those laws to be observed? We want them broken. There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power the government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
Source: Atlas Shrugged, 1957
"The difference between a welfare state and a totalitarian state is a matter of time."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
"The mission of the law is not to oppress persons and plunder them of their property, even though the law may be acting in a philanthropic spirit. Its purpose is to protect persons and property.... If you exceed this proper limit -- if you attempt to make the law religious, fraternal, equalizing, philanthropic, industrial, or artistic -- you will then be lost in uncharted territory, in vagueness and uncertainty, in a forced utopia or, even worse, in a multitude of utopias, each striving to seize the law and impose it on you."
-Frederic Bastiat-
(1801-1850) [Claude Frederic Bastiat] French economist, statesman, and author. He did most of his writing during the years just before -- and immediately following -- the French Revolution of February 1848
Source: "The Law" by Frederic Bastiat (1850)
"They would be the shepherds over us, their sheep. Certainly such an arrangement presupposes that they are naturally superior to the rest of us. And certainly we are fully justified in demanding from the legislators and organizers proof of this natural superiority."
-Frederic Bastiat-
(1801-1850) [Claude Frederic Bastiat] French economist, statesman, and author. He did most of his writing during the years just before -- and immediately following -- the French Revolution of February 1848
"All you have to do, is to see whether the law takes from some what belongs to them in order to give it to others to whom it does not belong. We must see whether the law performs, for the profit of one citizen and to the detriment of others, an act which that citizen could not perform himself without being guilty of a crime. Repeal such a law without delay. ... [I]f you don’t take care, what begins by being an exception tends to become general, to multiply itself, and to develop into a veritable system."
-Frederic Bastiat-
(1801-1850) [Claude Frederic Bastiat] French economist, statesman, and author. He did most of his writing during the years just before -- and immediately following -- the French Revolution of February 1848
Source: "The Law" by Frederic Bastiat (1850)
"Being daily better informed about their knowledge than my adversaries themselves, I argued till finally one day they applied the one means that wins the easiest victory over reason: terror and force."
-Adolf Hitler-
(1889-1945) German Nazi Dictator
Source: in reference to being forced to join the Social Democratic labor union, Mein Kampf, pg. 53 (1939)
"It is thus necessary that the individual should finally come to realize that his own pride is of no importance in comparison with the existence of his nation; that the position of the individual ego is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole; that pride and conceitedness, the feeling that the individual ... is superior, so far from being merely laughable, involve great dangers for the existence of the community that is a nation; that above all the unity of a nation’s spirit and will are worth far more than the freedom of the spirit and the will of an individual; and that the higher interests involved in the life of the whole must here set the limits and lay down the duties of interests of the individual. ... By this we understand only the individual's capacity to make sacrifices for the community, for his fellow men."
-Adolf Hitler-
(1889-1945) German Nazi Dictator
Source: Adolf Hitler speaking at Bueckeburg, Oct. 7, 1933; The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, 1922-39, ed. N.H. Baynes (2 vols., Oxford, 1942), I, 871-72; translation Professor George Reisman.
"I do verily believe that if the principle were to prevail of a common law being in force in the United States (which principle possesses the general government at once of all the powers of the state governments, and reduces us to a single consolidated government), it would become the most corrupt government on the earth."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Thomas Jefferson to Gideon Granger, 1800. 10:168
"The policy of American government is to leave its citizens free, neither restraining them nor aiding them in their pursuits."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Thomas Jefferson to M. L'Hommande, 1787.
"In this distribution of powers the wisdom of our constitution is manifested. It is the province and duty of the Executive to preserve to the Nation the blessings of peace. The Legislature alone can interrupt those blessings, by placing the Nation in a state of War."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804)
Source: Pacificus #1, June 29, 1793.
"No power but Congress can declare war; but what is the value of this constitutional provision, if the President of his own authority may make such military movements as must bring on war? ... [T]hese remarks originate purely in a desire to maintain the powers of government as they are established by the Constitution between the different departments, and hope that, whether we have conquests or no conquests, war or no war, peace or no peace, we shall yet preserve, in its integrity and strength, the Constitution of the United States."
-Daniel Webster-
(1782-1852), US Senator
Source: December 2, 1846 speech in Philadelphia.
"The Executive should be able to repel and not to commence war."
-Roger Sherman-
(1721-1793) US Founding father, first mayor of New Haven, Connecticut, served on the Committee of Five that drafted the Declaration of Independence, representative and senator in the new republic, was the only person to sign all four great state papers of the U.S.: the Articles of Association, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution.
"All of us have heard this term "preventive war" since the earliest days of Hitler. ... A preventive war, to my mind, is an impossibility today. How could you have one if one of its features would be several cities lying in ruins, several cities where many, many thousands of people would be dead and injured and mangled, the transportation systems destroyed, sanitation implements and systems all gone? That isn't preventive war; that is war. ... I don't believe there is such a thing; and, frankly, I wouldn't even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked about such a thing."
-Dwight D. Eisenhower-
(1890-1969), 34th US President, WWII General
Source: 11 August 1954 news conference in response to a question from Ray L. Scherer, NBC: 'Mr. President, there seem to be increasing suggestions that we should embark on a preventive war with the Communist world, some of these suggestions by people in high places. I wonder, sir, if you would care to address yourself to that proposition.'
"Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so."
-Albert J. Beveridge-
(1862-1927) American historian, United States Senator from Indiana
"The President is to be commander-in-chief of the army and navy of the United States. In this respect his authority would be nominally the same with that of the king of Great Britain, but in substance much inferior to it. It would amount to nothing more than the supreme command and direction of the land and naval forces, as first general and admiral ... while that of the British king extends to the declaring of war and to the raising and regulating of fleets and armies—all which, by the Constitution under consideration, would appertain to the legislature."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804)
Source: The Federalist #69.
"The Constitution supposes, what the history of all governments demonstrates, that the executive is the branch of government most interested in war, and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care, vested the question of war in the legislature."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: in an April 2, 1798 letter to Thomas Jefferson.
"A thing moderately good is not so good as it ought to be. Moderation in temper is always a virtue, but moderation in principle is always a vice."
-Thomas Paine-
"Each must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, and which course is patriotic and which isn’t. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your convictions is to be an unqualified and inexcusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let man label you as they may. If you alone of all the nation shall decide one way, and that way be the right way according to your convictions of the right, you have done your duty by yourself and by your country- hold up your head! You have nothing to be ashamed of."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910)
"Where are we then? The religionists are the enemies of liberty, and the friends of liberty attack religion; the high-minded and the noble advocate subjection, and the meanest and most servile minds preach independence; honest and enlightened citizens are opposed to all progress, whilst men without patriotism and without principles are the apostles of civilization and intelligence. Has such been the fate of the centuries which have preceded our own? and has man always inhabited a world like the present, where nothing is linked together, where virtue is without genius, and genius without honor; where the love of order is confounded with a taste for oppression, and the holy rites of freedom with a taste for law; where the light thrown by conscience on human actions is dim, and where nothing seems to be any longer forbidden or allowed, honorable or shameful, false or true?"
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
[Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clerel, le Comte de Tocqueville] (1805-1859) French historian
"I have said I do not dread industrial corporations as instruments of power to destroy this country, because there are a thousand agencies which can regulate, restrain and control them; but there is a corporation we may all dread. That corporation is the federal government. From the aggressions of this corporation, there can be no safety, if it is allowed to go beyond the well defined limits of its powers. I dread nothing so much as the exercise of ungranted and doubtful powers by the government. It is, in my opinion, the danger of dangers to the future of this country. Let us be sure to keep it always within its limits. If this great, ambitious, ever growing corporation becomes oppressive, who shall check it? If it becomes too wayward who shall control it? If it becomes unjust, who shall trust it? As sentinels of the country's watchtower, Senators, I beseech you to watch and guard with sleepless dread, that corporation which can make all property and rights, all states and people, all liberty and hope its plaything in an hour, and its victims forever."
-Benjamin H. Hill-
(1823-1882) U.S. Representative, U.S. Senator and a Confederate senator from the state of Georgia
Source: before the U.S. Senate, March 27, 1878.
"Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth."
-Albert Einstein-
(1879-1955) Physicist and Professor, Nobel Prize 1921
"There never did, there never will, and there never can exist a parliament, or any description of men, or any generation of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controlling posterity to the `end of time,’ or of commanding for ever how the world shall be governed, or who shall govern it. ... Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generations which preceded it."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
"That which is not just, is not Law; and that which is not Law, ought not to be obeyed."
-Algernon Sydney-
"[W]henever the Legislators endeavor to take away, and destroy the Property of the People, or to reduce them to Slavery under Arbitrary Power, they put themselves into a state of War with the People, who are thereupon absolved from any farther Obedience, and are left to the common Refuge, which God hath provided for all Men, against Force and Violence. Whensoever therefore the Legislative shall transgress this fundamental Rule of Society; and either by Ambition, Fear, Folly or Corruption, endeavor to grasp themselves, or put into the hands of any other an Absolute Power over the Lives, Liberties, and Estates of the People; By this breach of Trust they forfeit the Power, the People had put into their hands, for quite contrary ends, and it devolves to the people, who have a Right to resume their original Liberty."
-John Locke-
(1632-1704) English philosopher and political theorist. Considered the ideological progenitor of the American Revolution and who, by far, was the most often non-biblical writer quoted by the Founding Fathers of the USA.
"The right to privacy is one of the most cherished rights an American citizen has; the right to privacy sets America apart from totalitarian states in which the interests of the state prevail over individual rights. A fundamental part of our concept of ordered liberty is the right to protect one’s home and family against dangerous intrusions subject to the criminal law."
-John Louis Coffey-
(1922- ) Judge, U. S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit
Source: Quilici v. Village of Morton Grove, 695 F.2d 261, 272, 278 (1982) (dissent) cert. denied 464 U.S. 863 (1983).
"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
-George Santayana-
"I believe that there is a moral and constitutional equivalence between laws designed to subjugate a race and those that distribute benefits on the basis of race in order to foster some current notion of equality.... In my mind, government-sponsored racial discrimination based on benign prejudice is just as noxious as discrimination inspired by malicious prejudice."
-Clarence Thomas-
U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Adarand v. Federico Pena
"We must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living. I will not attempt to prove that Congress has no power to appropriate this money as an act of charity. Every member upon this floor knows it. We have the right as individuals to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of congress we have no right to appropriate a dollar of the public money."
-Davy Crockett-
(1786-1836) American hunter, frontiersman, soldier and politician
Source: 1827, spoken on the floor of Congress concerning a proposed relief bill for the widow of a naval officer.
"What shall be done with the four million slaves if they are emancipated? ... Primarily, it is a question less for man than for God -- less for human intellect than for the laws of nature to solve. It assumes that nature has erred; that the law of liberty is a mistake; that freedom, though a natural want of the human soul, can only be enjoyed at the expense of human welfare, and that men are better off in slavery than they would or could be in freedom; that slavery is the natural order of human relations, and that liberty is an experiment. What shall be done with them? Our answer is, do nothing with them; mind your business, and let them mind theirs. Your doing with them is their greatest misfortune. They have been undone by your doings, and all they now ask, and really have need of at your hands, is just to let them alone. They suffer by every interference, and succeed best by being let alone."
-Frederick Douglass-
[Frederick Baily] (1818-1895), escaped slave, Abolitionist, author, editor of the North Star and later the New National Era
Source: What Shall Be Done With The Slaves If Emancipated? Douglass' Monthly, January, 1862
"Mankind is at its best when it is most free.
This will be clear if we grasp the principle of liberty.
We must recall that the basic principle is freedom of choice,
which saying many have on their lips, but few in their mind."
-Dante Alighieri-
(1265-1320) Italian Poet
"It [government] covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting: such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
[Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clerel, le Comte de Tocqueville] (1805-1859) French historian
"A wise man once asked, 'What shall we have accomplished when we have made a law?' Or words to that effect. He goes on to point out that those who agree with the new law are most likely 'obeying' it already, before it’s ever passed. Meanwhile, those who don’t agree with it will either obey it grudgingly, which is very dangerous in the long run, especially in a democracy, where nothing is ever really settled, or they will break it surreptitiously, a particular specialty of yours truly.
What we will really have accomplished, says the wise man, is to have given more jobs to cops, and bought more guns and clubs—and these days, TV cameras. If law really worked, there’d be no need for it."
-L. Neil Smith-
"The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are. Never under any circumstances admit that his success may be due to his own efforts, to the productive contribution he has made to the whole community. Always attribute his success to the exploitation, the cheating, the more or less open robbery of others. Never under any circumstances admit that your own failure may be owing to your own weakness, or that the failure of anyone else may be due to his own defects - his laziness, incompetence, improvidence, or stupidity."
-Henry Hazlitt-
(1894-1993) American economist, philosopher,literary critic and journalist
"We may safely rely on the disposition of the State legislatures to erect barriers against the encroachments of the national authority."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804)
Source: The Federalist Papers Federalist No. 85
"If it be admitted that a man, possessing absolute power, may misuse that power by wronging his adversaries, why should a majority not be liable to the same reproach? Men are not apt to change their character by agglomeration; nor does their patience in the presence of obstacles increase with the consciousness of their strength. And for these reasons I can never willingly invest any number of my fellow creatures with that unlimited authority which I should refuse to any one of them."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
[Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clerel, le Comte de Tocqueville] (1805-1859) French historian
"[The founding fathers] conferred, as against the Government, the right to be left alone -- the right most valued by civilized men."
-Justice Louis D. Brandeis-
(1856-1941) US Supreme Court Justice
1928
"Laws are made for men of ordinary understanding and should, therefore, be construed by the ordinary rules of common sense. Their meaning is not to be sought for in metaphysical subtleties which may make anything mean everything or nothing at pleasure."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Johnson, 1823.
"In this country sovereignty resides in the people, and Congress can exercise no power which they have not, by their Constitution, entrusted to it: All else is withheld."
-U.S. Supreme Court-
Source: Juilliard v. Greenman, 110 U.S. 421 (1884).
"How can I set free anyone who doesn't have the guts to stand up alone and declare his own freedom? I think it's a lie – people claim they want to be free – everybody insists that freedom is what they want the most, the most sacred and precious thing a man can possess. But that's bullshit! People are terrified to be set free – they hold on to their chains. They fight anyone who tries to break those chains. It's their security... How can they expect me or anyone else to set them free if they don't really want to be free?"
-Jim Morrison-
"Communism and fascism or nazism, although poles apart in their intellectual content, are similar in this, that both have emotional appeal to the type of personality that takes pleasure in being submerged in a mass movement and submitting to superior authority."
-James A. C. Brown-
(1911-1964)
Source: Techniques of Persuasion, 1963
"Every politician, every member of the clerical profession, ought to incur the reasonable suspicion of being an interested supporter of false doctrines, who becomes angry at opposition, and endeavors to cast an odium on free inquiry. Fraud and falsehood only dread examination. Truth invites it."
-Thomas Cooper-
(1759-1839)
Source: Liberty of the Press, 1830
"The problems we face today exist because the people who work for a living are outnumbered by those who vote for a living.”
-anonymous-
"[I]f the policy of the government upon vital questions, affecting the whole people, is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made, in ordinary litigation between parties, in personal actions, the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their government into the hands of that eminent tribunal."
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
Source: First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861, Washington, D.C.
"When courts fail to engage in oversight or even distort the Constitution to rationalize the ultra vires actions of government, and when academics and political activists aid and abet them in this activity by devising ingenious rationalizations for ignoring the Constitution’s words, they are playing a most dangerous game. For they are putting at risk the legitimacy of the lawmaking process and risking the permanent disaffection of significant segments of the people."
-Brannon P. Denning-
Source: Brannon P. Denning, And Randy Barnett, CantThe Simple Cite Be Trusted?: Lower Court Interpretations of United States V. Miller and the Second Amendment, 26 Cumb. L. Rev. 961-1004 (1996).
"You seem ... to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions; a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men, and not more so. They have, with others, the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps.... Their power [is] the more dangerous as they are in office for life, and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots. It has more wisely made all the departments co-equal and co-sovereign within themselves."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Letter to William Jarvis (September 28, 1820).
"The concealed weapon law has not worked as well as was expected by those of us who commended it. This is a fact too obvious for denial. Criminals are as well armed as ever, in spite of the sternness with which the law has been applied to a few of them. It appears to only have truly limited the law abiding."
-New York Times-
May 24, 1913, two years after the Sullivan Act became effective
"Our whole political system rests on the distinction between constitutional and other laws. The former are the solemn principles laid down by the people in its ultimate sovereignty; the latter are regulations made by its representatives within the limits of their authority, and the courts can hold unauthorized and void any act which exceeds those limits. The courts can do this because they are maintaining against the legislature the fundamental principles which the people themselves have determined to support, and they can do it only so long as the people feel that the constitution is something more sacred and enduring than ordinary laws, something that derives its force from a higher authority."
-Walter F. Dodd-
(1880-1960) Author, professor of political science
Source: The Revision and Amendment of State Constitutions, P. 253 (1910).
"[T]here are, at bottom, basically two ways to order social affairs, Coercively, through the mechanisms of the state -- what we can call political society. And voluntarily, through the private interaction of individuals and associations -- what we can call civil society. ... In a civil society, you make the decision. In a political society, someone else does. ... Civil society is based on reason, eloquence, and persuasion, which is to say voluntarism. Political society, on the other hand, is based on force."
-Edward H. Crane-
Founder and president of the Cato Institute
"Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed."
-Étienne de la Boétie-
(1530-1563) French judge, writer, political philosopher
"The only purpose for which power can rightfully be exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. ... Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign."
-John Stuart Mill-
(1806-1873) English philosopher and economist
Source: On Liberty (1859)
"Not surprisingly, the federal judiciary nearly always rules in favor of the federal government. Judicial review, contrary to the assurances of its advocates, has hardly restrained Congress at all. Instead it has progressively stripped the states of their traditional powers, while allowing federal power to grow unchecked."
-Joseph Sobran-
(1946-2010) Columnist
Source: Usurpation of power is routine, Conservative Chronicle, October 25, 1995
"At the beginning, we reject the idea that, when the United States acts against citizens abroad, it can do so free of the Bill of Rights. The United States is entirely a creature of the Constitution. Its power and authority have no other source. It can only act in accordance with all the limitations imposed by the Constitution. When the Government reaches out to punish a citizen who is abroad, the shield which the Bill of Rights and other parts of the Constitution provide to protect his life and liberty should not be stripped away just because he happens to be in another land. This is not a novel concept. To the contrary, it is as old as government."
-U.S. Supreme Court-
Reid v. Covert, 1956
"Why do we love this trial by jury? Because it prevents the hand of oppression from cutting you off ... This gives me comfort—that, as long as I have existence, my neighbors will protect me."
-Patrick Henry-
(1736-1799) US Founding Father
Source: 3 J. Elliot, The Debates In The Several States Conventions On The Adoption Of The Federal Constitution 545, 546 (1901).
"Can we assume that a thing is right if it is legal? But slavery was once legal; Nazism was legal. Well, can we assume a thing is right if it is endorsed by majority rule? But a lynch mob is majority rule. Is a thing sure to be right, then, if it comes about through the democratic process? But fascist dictator Juan Perón of Argentina was democratically elected by majority rule on two occasions. . . . Well, how about the Constitution? But again we run into difficulties, for the Constitution can be amended to say anything the society wishes it to say. Suppose, for example, the Constitution were amended to permit the lynching of blacks—would this practice become ethically correct merely because the Constitution permitted it? The moral basis of capitalism is the right of each individual to live his own life, for his own sake."
-R.W. Grant-
Source: The Incredible Bread Machine: A Study of Capitalism, Freedom, and the State
"Jury lawlessness is the greatest corrective of law in its actual administration. The will of the state at large imposed on a reluctant community, the will of a majority imposed on a vigorous and determined minority, find the same obstacle in the local jury that formerly confronted kings and ministers."
-U.S. Court of Appeals District of Columbia-
Source: U.S. v. Dougherty, 473 F.2d 1113, 1130 at note 32 (1972).
"It is far more rational to suppose that the courts were designed to be an intermediate body between the people and the legislature, in order, among other things, to keep the latter within the limits assigned to their authority."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804)
Source: The Federalist No. 78
http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quote_blog/Alexander.Hamilton.Quote.8B10
"The germ of dissolution of our federal government is in ... the federal judiciary; an irresponsible body (for impeachment is scarcely a scare-crow), working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing it’s noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped from the States, and the government of all be consolidated into one. ...when all government... in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the centre of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
1821
"From now onwards the jury enters on a new phase of its history, and for the next three centuries it will exercise its power of veto on the use of the criminal law against political offenders who have succeeded in obtaining popular sympathy."
-U.S. Court of Appeals Sixth Circuit-
Source: U.S. v. Wilson, 629 F.2d 439, 443 (1980)
"When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets."
-James Joyce-
"Now what I contend is that my body is my own, at least I have always so regarded it. If I do harm through my experimenting with it, it is I who suffers, not the state."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910)
"There is a danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty"
-John Adams-
"We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force."
-Ayn Rand-
"Legislators and revolutionaries who promise equality and liberty at the same time are either psychopaths or mountebanks."
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe-
(1749-1832)
Source: Maximen und Reflexionen
"The drafters of the Constitution clearly intended [the right of trial by jury] to protect the accused from oppression by the Government. Singer v. United States, 380 U.S. 24, 31, 85 S. Ct. 783, 788, 13 L. Ed. 2d 630 (1965). ... Part of this protection is embodied in the concept of jury nullification: “In criminal cases, a jury is entitled to acquit the defendant because it has no sympathy for the government’s position.” United States v. Wilson, 629 F.2d 439, 443 (6th Cir. 1980). The Founding Fathers knew that, absent jury nullification, judicial tyranny not only was a possibility, but was a reality in the colonial experience. Although we may view ourselves as living in more civilized times, there is obviously no reason to believe the need for this protection has been eliminated. Judicial and prosecutorial excesses still occur, and Congress is not yet an infallible body incapable of making tyrannical laws."
-Judge Thomas Wiseman-
Source: U.S. v. Datcher, 830 F. Supp. 411, 413 (M.D. Tenn., 1993) case dismissed Sept. 1, 1994, 6th Cir. Ct. Of Appeals, Case No. 3:92-00054 certiorari denied U.S. Supreme Court Case No. 94-8767, May 15, 1995.
"The jury possesses a general veto power and may acquit when it has no sympathy for the Government’s case, no matter how overwhelming the evidence of guilt. A jury acquittal is final and unreviewable; a judge may not direct a jury to convict or vacate an acquittal, nor may a prosecutor appeal an acquittal on grounds of judicial error or erroneous jury determination."
-Lieutenant Commander Robert E. Korroch-
Source: Lieutenant Commander Robert E. Korroch and Major Michael J. Davidson, (LTC Korroch serves with the U.S. Coast Guard; B.S., U.S. Coast Guard Academy (1981); J.D., Marshall-Wythe School of Law, College of William and Mary 1988) (Maj. Davidson serves with the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General Corps, Litigation Division), in Jury Nullification: A Call for Justice or an Invitation to Anarchy?, 139 MIL. L. REV. 131 (1993).
"Jurors should acquit, even against the judge’s instruction ... if exercising their judgment with discretion and honesty they have a clear conviction that the charge of the court is wrong."
-Andrew Hamilton-
(c.1676-1741) Scottish lawyer in colonial America
Source: August 4, 1735, advice to jurors to acquit against the judge’s instructions in the seditious libel trial of John Peter Zenger; Rex. V. Zenger, How. St. Tr. 17:675 (1735)
"[That] the Jury may determine the law and the fact of the case, has been supported by every English judge, except Chief Justice Jeffries .... And to their credit be it spoken that the Juries have always been right on fundamental
questions of liberty and popular right."
-Georgia Supreme Court-
Source: Keener v. The State, 18 Ga. 194, 231 (1855).
"[T]he Jury have not only the power, but the right, to pass upon the law as well as the facts..."
-Georgia Supreme Court-
Source: Keener v. The State, 18 Ga. 194, 231 (1855).
"In 'A jury’s duty' (11/8) by Mike Romano, John Junker asserts that juries have the right to nullify laws in principle but should not use this right in practice. Would he then be willing to give up the rights of free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, freedom to organize a labor union, abolition of slavery in the North, and the repeal of alcohol prohibition — all of which were given to us by juries who put the principle of nullification into practice? Without jury nullification no systematic veto exists for the people and tyranny ensues."
-Patricia Michl Sumner-
Source: November 29, 1995, Necessary nullification, letter to the Seattle Weekly
"In the general course of human nature, A power over a man’s subsistence amounts to a power over his will."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804)
Source: The Federalist No. 79
"When we compare the laws made today and the method and purpose of their making, with those of the past, we find them to be in perfect harmony. It was the law and custom of the past to provide for a class of idlers, it was customary for the powerful to enslave the weak, for the rich to rob the poor, for the unscrupulous to make laws in their own interests, even as it is the law and custom today. Surely it must be evident that law does not have its basis in justice, but rather in custom. To both law and custom, justice is a total stranger."
-Charles T. Sprading-
(1871-1959) Libertarian activist, writer
Source: Charles T. Sprading's Introduction to Liberty and the Great Libertarians; An Anthology On Liberty; A Hand-book Of Freedom (Los Angeles: The Libertarian Publishing Company, 1913)
"The superior man understands what is right. The inferior man understands what is popular."
-Confucius-
[Kung Fu-tse] (551-479 B.C.)
"The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the greatest liars: the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"The principle, on which the war was waged by the North, was simply this: That men may rightfully be compelled to submit to, and support, a government that they do not want; and that resistance, on their part, makes them traitors and criminals.
No principle, that is possible to be named, can be more self-evidently false than this; or more self-evidently fatal to all political freedom. Yet it triumphed in the field, and is now assumed to be established. If it really be established, the number of slaves, instead of having been diminished by the war, has been greatly increased; for a man, thus subjected to a government that he does not want, is a slave."
-Lysander Spooner-
"When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic."
-Dresden James-
http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quote_blog/Dresden.James.Quote.8B45
"A secret blueprint for US global domination reveals that President Bush and his cabinet were planning a premeditated attack on Iraq to secure regime change even before he took power in January 2001… It has been called a secret blueprint for US global domination. … A small group of people with a plan to remove Saddam Hussein long before George W. Bush was elected president. … And 9/11 provided the opportunity to set it in motion. Not since Mein Kampf has a geopolitical punch been so blatantly telegraphed years ahead of the blow."
-Ted Koppel-
(1940-) British-American broadcast journalist
Source: Nightline, 5 March 2003, quoting the Glasgow Sunday Herald (Sept. 15, 2002)
"No pecuniary consideration is more urgent, than the regular redemption and discharge of the public debt: on none can delay be more injurious, or an economy of time more valuable."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: 1793, Message to the House of Representatives, Ref: Washington's Maxims, 64
"We have stricken the shackles from 4,000,000 human beings and brought all labourers to a common level, but not so much by the elevation of former slaves as by reducing the whole working population, white and black, to a condition of serfdom. While boasting of our noble deeds, we are careful to conceal the ugly fact that by our iniquitous money system we have manipulated a system of oppression which, though more refined, is no less cruel than the old system of chattel slavery."
-Horace Greeley-
(1811-1872) Editor of the New York Tribune, ran against Ulysses Grant for presidency
1872
"From the earliest ages of history to the present day there have never been thirteen millions of people associated in one political body who enjoyed so much freedom and happiness as the people of these United States. You have no longer any cause to fear dangers from abroad ... It is from within, among yourselves - from cupidity, from corruption, from disappointed ambition and inordinate thirst for power - that factions will be formed and liberty endangered ... "
-Andrew Jackson-
(1767-1845) 7th US President
"I can scarcely contemplate a greater calamity that could befall this country, than be loaded with a debt exceeding their ability ever to discharge. If this be a just remark, it is unwise and improvident to vest in the general government a power to borrow at discretion, without any limitation or restriction."
-Brutus-
pseudonym, probably Robert Yates (1738-1801) politician and judge
Source: The Anti-Federalist,1787-88.
"Freedom of movement is the very essence of our free society -- once the right to travel is curtailed, all other rights suffer."
-William O. Douglas-
(1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
"Once the government can demand of a publisher the names of the purchasers of his publication, the free press as we know it disappears. Then the spectre of a government agent will look over the shoulder of everyone who reads. ... Fear of criticism goes with every person into the bookstall. The subtle, imponderable pressures of the orthodox lay hold. Some will fear to read what is unpopular, what the powers-that-be dislike. ... fear will take the place of freedom in the libraries, book stores, and homes in the land."
-William O. Douglas-
(1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
"Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us?"
-William O. Douglas-
(1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
"The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence. A proper government is only a policeman, acting as an agent of man's self-defense, and, as such, may only resort to force only against those who start the use of force."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
Source: "Atlas Shrugged"
"The idea of 'crime' in existing criminology is artificial, for what is called crime is really an infringement of 'existing laws', whereas 'laws' are very often a manifestation of barbarism and violence. Such are the prohibiting laws of different kinds which abound in modern life. The number of these laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm. On the other hand, unquestionable crimes escape the field of vision of criminology, either because they have not recognized the form of crime or because they surpass a certain scale. In existing criminology there are concepts: a criminal man, a criminal profession, a criminal society, a criminal sect, and a criminal tribe, but there is no concept of a criminal state, or a criminal government, or criminal legislation. Consequently what is often regarded as 'political' activity is in fact a criminal activity."
-P. D. Ouspensky-
"This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember it or overthrow it."
-Abraham Lincoln-
4 April 1861
"If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private school . . . At the next session you may ban books and newspapers. Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men."
-Clarence S. Darrow-
(1857-1938)
Source: during the Scopes trial
"When the People contend for their Liberty, they seldom get anything by their Victory but new masters. Power is so apt to be insolent and Liberty to be saucy, that they are very seldom upon good Terms."
-George Savile-
(1633-1695) 1st Marquess of Halifax, English statesman, writer, and politician
Source: Of Prerogative, Power and Liberty
"But what is tyranny? Or how can a free people be deprived of their liberties? Tyranny is the exercise of some power over a man, which is not warranted by law, or necessary for the public safety. A people can never be deprived of their liberties, while they retain in their own hands, a power sufficient to any other power in the state."
-Noah Webster-
(1758-1843) American patriot and scholar, author of the first dictionary of American English usage (1806) and the author of the 1828 edition of the dictionary that bears his name.
Source: An Examination into the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution, 42-43, (1787)
"And say, finally, whether peace is best preserved by giving energy to the government or information to the people. This last is the most legitimate engine of government. Educate and inform the whole mass of people. Enable them to see that it is their interest to preserve peace and order, and they will preserve them. And it requires no very high degree of education to convince them of this. They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Letter to James Madison, Paris, December 20, 1787. The Political Writings Of Thomas Jefferson 68 (Dumbauld Ed. 1955)
"If through your vices you afflicted are,
Lay not the blame of your distress on God;
You made your rulers mighty, gave them guards,
So now you groan 'neath slavery's heavy rod."
-Solon-
(c.638 BC-558 BC) Athenian statesman, lawmaker, Lyric poet, renowned as a founding father of the Athenian polis, one of the Seven Sages of Greece
550 B.C.
Source: Diogenes Laërtius (trans. C. D. Yonge) The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (1853), "Solon", sect. 5, p. 25.
"I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive. It places the governors indeed more at their ease at the expense of the people. The late rebellion in Massachusetts has given much more alarm than I think it should have done. Calculate that one rebellion in thirteen States in the course of eleven years is but one for each State in a century and a half. No country should be so long without one. Nor will any degree of power in the hands of the government prevent insurrections. In England, where the hand of power is heavier than with us, there are seldom half a dozen years without an insurrection. In France, where it is still heavier but less despotic, as Montesquieu supposes, than in some other countries and where there are always two or three hundred thousand men ready to crush insurrections, there have been three in the course of the three years I have been here, in every one of which greater numbers were engaged than in Massachusetts."
-Thomas Jefferson-
Source: Letter to James Madison, Paris, December 20, 1787. The Political Writings Of Thomas Jefferson 67-68 (Dumbauld Ed. 1955)
"Government, in its last analysis, is organized force."
-Woodrow Wilson-
(1856-1924) 28th US President
"One of the hardest things to teach a child is that the truth is more important than the consequences."
-O. A. Battista-
[Orlando Aloysius Battista] (1917-1995), Canadian-American chemist and author
"Where suspicion fills the air and holds scholars in line for fear of their jobs, there can be no exercise of the free intellect. Supineness and dogmatism take the place of inquiry. A problem can no longer be pursued to its edges. Fear stalks the classroom. The teacher is no longer a stimulant to adventurous thinking; she becomes instead a pipe line for safe and sound information. A deadening dogma takes the place of free inquiry. Instruction tends to become sterile; pursuit of knowledge is discouraged; discussion often leaves off where it should begin."
-William O. Douglas-
(1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Adler v. Board of Education, 1951
"Our whole evolution has reached a stage where nearly every man is either ruler or ruled; sometimes he is both. By this the attitude of dependence has been greatly strengthened, for a truly free man does not like to play the part of either the ruler or the ruled. He is, above all, concerned with making his inner values and personal powers effective in a way as to permit him to use his own judgment in all affairs and to be independent in action."
-Rudolf Rocker-
"You know, comrades, that I think in regard to this: I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this — who will count the votes, and how."
-Josef Stalin-
-or-
"Comrades, I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how. But what is extraordinarily important is this: who will count the votes, and how."
-Josef Stalin-
(1879-1953) Communist leader of the USSR
Source: 'Memoirs of Stalin's Former Secretary' by Boris Bazhanov (1900-1982) a Soviet Union Politburo secretary who served as Stalin's personal secretary
-or-
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything."
-Josef Stalin-
(1879-1953) Communist leader of the USSR
Source: Attributed
"When the Federal Reserve Act was passed, the people of these United States did not perceive that a world banking system was being set up here. A super-state controlled by international bankers and industrialists...acting together to enslave the world...Every effort has been made by the Fed to conceal its powers but the truth is--the Fed has usurped the government."
-Louis McFadden-
(1876-1936) US Congressman (R-PA) (1915-1935), Chairman of House Banking and Currency Committee. Poisoned in 1936.
"The power of the state to impose restraints and burdens upon persons and property in conservation and promotion of the public health, good order, and prosperity is a power originally and always belonging to the states, not surrendered to them by the general government, nor directly restrained by the constitution of the United States, and essentially exclusive."
-Justice Melville Fuller-
(1833-1910) Chief Justice of the United States (1888-1910)
Source: Wilkerson V. Rahrer, 140 U.S. 545 (1891)
"State inspection laws, health laws, and laws for regulating the internal commerce of a State, and those which respect turnpike roads, ferries, &c. are not within the power granted to Congress. ... Inspection laws, quarantine laws, health laws of every description, as well as laws for regulating the internal commerce of a State, and those which respect turnpike roads, ferries, &c., are component parts of this mass. No direct general power over these objects is granted to Congress, and, consequently, they remain subject to State legislation."
-Justice John Marshall-
(1755-1835) US Supreme Court Chief Justice
Source: Gibbons v. Ogden, 22 U.S. (9 Wheat.) 1 (1824)
"To hold that Congress has general police power would be to hold that it may accomplish objects not intrusted to the general government, and to defeat the operation of the 10th Amendment, declaring that 'the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.' "
-Justice Melville Fuller-
(1833-1910) Chief Justice of the United States (1888-1910)
Source: Champion v. Ames, 188 U.S. 321, 364-65 (1902) (Fuller, C.J., dissenting)
“That the people have an original right to establish, for their future government, such principles as, in their opinion, shall most conduce to their own happiness, is the basis, on which the whole American fabric has been erected.... The principles, therefore, so established, are deemed fundamental. And as the authority, from which they proceed, is supreme ... they are designed to be permanent.... The powers of the legislature are defined, and limited; and that those limits may not be mistaken, or forgotten, the constitution is written.”
-Justice John Marshall-
(1755-1835) US Supreme Court Chief Justice
Source: Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. (1 Cranch.) 137, 176 (1803)
“[T]he framers of the constitution contemplated that instrument, as a rule for the government of courts, as well as of the legislature.”
-Justice John Marshall-
(1755-1835) US Supreme Court Chief Justice
Source: Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. (1 Cranch.) 137, 179-80 (1803)
"Let the end be legitimate, let it be within the scope of the constitution, and all means which are appropriate, which are plainly adapted to that end, which are not prohibited, but consist with the letter and spirit of the constitution, are constitutional. ... [S]hould Congress, under the pretext of executing its powers, pass laws for the accomplishment of objects not entrusted to the government, such [acts are] not the law of the land."
-Justice John Marshall-
(1755-1835) US Supreme Court Chief Justice
Source: McCulloch v. Maryland, 17 U.S. (4 Wheat.) 316, 421-423 (1819)
"The proper role of government is exactly what John Stuart Mill said in the middle of the 19th century in On Liberty. The proper role of government is to prevent other people from harming an individual. Government, he said, never has any right to interfere with an individual for that individual's own good. The case for prohibiting drugs is exactly as strong and as weak as the case for prohibiting people from overeating. We all know that overeating causes more deaths than drugs do. If it's in principle OK for the government to say you must not consume drugs because they'll do you harm, why isn't it all right to say you must not eat too much because you'll do harm? Why isn't it all right to say you must not try to go in for skydiving because you're likely to die? Why isn't it all right to say, 'Oh, skiing, that's no good, that's a very dangerous sport, you'll hurt yourself'? Where do you draw the line?"
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
Source: America's Drug Forum interview (1991)"America's Drug Forum" (1991)
"One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
Source: Interview with Richard Heffner on The Open Mind (7 December 1975)
"Spending by government currently amounts to about 45 percent of national income. By that test, government owns 45 percent of the means of production that produce the national income. The U.S. is now 45 percent socialist."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
Source: "We Have Socialism, Q.E.D." in The New York Times (31 December 1989)
"One role of prohibition is in making the drug market more lucrative."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
Source: America's Drug Forum interview (1991)"America's Drug Forum" (1991)
"To the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them. He is proud of a common heritage and loyal to common traditions. But he regards government as a means, an instrumentality, neither a grantor of favors and gifts, nor a master or god to be blindly worshipped and served."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
Source: Introduction, Capitalism and Freedom (1962)
"The key insight of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations is misleadingly simple: if an exchange between two parties is voluntary, it will not take place unless both believe they will benefit from it. Most economic fallacies derive from the neglect of this simple insight, from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
Source: Free to Choose (1990). Ch. 1 "The Power of the Market", page 13
"Men are rewarded and punished not for what they do, but rather for how their acts are defined. This is why men are more interested in better justifying themselves than in behaving themselves."
-Thomas Szasz-
(1920- ) Author, Professor
Source: The Second Sin, 1973
"Justice is incedental to law and order."
-J. Edgar Hoover-
former FBI director
"If you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel. That's literally true."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
Source: America's Drug Forum interview (1991)"America's Drug Forum" (1991)
"It's a moral problem that the government is making into criminals people, who may be doing something you and I don't approve of, but who are doing something that hurts nobody else. Most of the arrests for drugs are for possession by casual users.
Now here's somebody who wants to smoke a marijuana cigarette. If he's caught, he goes to jail. Now is that moral? Is that proper? I think it's absolutely disgraceful that our government, supposed to be our government, should be in the position of converting people who are not harming others into criminals, of destroying their lives, putting them in jail. That's the issue to me. The economic issue comes in only for explaining why it has those effects. But the economic reasons are not the reasons."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
Source: America's Drug Forum interview (1991)"America's Drug Forum" (1991)
"There is no act, however virtuous, for which ingenuity may not find some bad motive."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"Laws to suppress tend to strengthen what they would prohibit. This is the fine point on which all the legal professions of history have based their job security."
-Frank Herbert-
(1920-1986)
"I think it might be important to point out that this country is a one-party country. Half of that party is called Republican and half is called Democrat. It doesn’t make any difference. All the really good ideas belong to the Libertarians."
-Hugh Downs-
(1921-) American broadcaster, television host, news anchor, TV producer, author
Source: on Politically Correct, April, 1997.
"Politically popular speech has always been protected: even the Jews were free to say ‘Heil Hitler.’"
-Isaac Asimov-
(1920-1992) American author and professor of biochemistry at Boston University
"I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich, are our dependence for continued freedom. And to preserve their independence, We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty or profusion and servitude.
If we run into such debt, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our calling and our creeds as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling our miss-managers to account but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers.
Our land-holders, too, like theirs, retaining indeed the title and stewardship of estates called theirs but held really in trust for the treasury, must wander, like theirs, in foreign countries, and be contented with penury, obscurity, exile, and the glory of the nation.
This example reads to us the salutary lesson, that private fortunes are destroyed by public as well as by private extravagances.
And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for the second; that second for a third; and so on, till the bulk of society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering.
Then begins, indeed, the bellum omnium in omnia, which some philosophers observing to be so general in this world, have mistaken for the natural, instead of the abusive state of man.
And the fore-horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Letter to Samuel Kercheval, Monticello, July 12, 1816
"Democracy is a form of government that cannot long survive, for as soon as the people learn that they have a voice in the fiscal policies of the government, they will move to vote for themselves all the money in the treasury, and bankrupt the nation."
-Karl Marx-
Father of Communism, Author of the 'Communist Manifesto'
"We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove. We have two opinions: one private, which we are afraid to express; and another one - the one we use - which we force ourselves to wear to please Mrs. Grundy, until habit makes us comfortable in it, and the custom of defending it presently makes us love it, adore it, and forget how pitifully we came by it. Look at it in politics."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910)
"There are four ways in which you can spend money.
1) You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money.
2) Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost.
3) Then, I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch!
4) Finally, I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get. And that’s government. And that’s close to 40% of our national income."
-Milton Friedman-
"I came to America because of the great, great freedom which I heard existed in this country. I made a mistake in selecting America as a land of freedom, a mistake I cannot repair in the balance of my lifetime."
-Albert Einstein-
1947
"The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can't get and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"Politics must be the battle of the principles... the principle of liberty against the principle of force."
-Auberon Herbert-
(1838-1906) English author
"Useless laws weaken necessary laws."
-Charles-Louis de Secondat-
(1689-1755) Baron de Montesquieu
"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards. On the road to tyranny, we've gone so far that polite political action is about as useless as a miniskirt in a convent."
-Claire Wolfe-
Source: "101 Things To Do 'Til The Revolution"
"There is no maxim, in my opinion, which is more liable to be misapplied, and which, therefore, more needs elucidation, than the current, that the interest of the majority is the political standard of right and wrong."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
"The less government we have, the better, — the fewer laws, and the less confided power. The antidote to this abuse of formal Government, is, the influence of private character, the growth of the Individual."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-
"When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing more to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader."
-Plato-
"The tank, the B-52, the fighter-bomber, the state controlled police and the military are the weapons of dictatorship. The rifle is the weapon of democracy... If guns are outlawed, only the government will have guns. Only the police, the secret police, the military, the hired servants of our rulers. Only the government—and a few outlaws. I intend to be among the outlaws."
-Edward Abbey-
(1927-1989) American author and essayist
"... any broad unlimited power to hold laws unconstitutional because they offend what this Court conceives to be the ‘conscience of our people’ ... was not given by the Framers, but rather has been bestowed on the Court by the Court."
-Justice Hugo L. Black-
(1886-1971) US Supreme Court Justice
"Republics are created by the virtue, public spirit, and intelligence of the citizens. They fall, when the wise are banished from the public councils, because they dare to be honest, and the profligate are rewarded, because they flatter the people, in order to betray them."
-Justice Joseph Story-
(1779-1845) US Supreme Court Justice
1833
"Resistance to sudden violence, for the preservation not only of my person, my limbs and life, but of my property, is an indisputable right of nature which I have never surrendered to the public by the compact of society, and which perhaps, I could not surrender if I would. Nor is there anything in the common law of England inconsistent with that right."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: Boston Gazette, September 5, 1763, reprinted in The Works of John Adams 438 (Charles F. Adams ed., 1851).
"Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they've been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It's an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It's a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing."
-Muhammad Ali-
"No one is more truly helpless, more completely a victim, than he who can neither choose nor change nor escape his protectors."
-John Holt-
(1923-1985) American author and educator, proponent of homeschooling, and pioneer in youth rights theory
Source: Holt, J. (1967). How Children Learn. New York: Pitman Publishing Corporation
"[The state] cannot disarm any class of persons or deprive them of the right guaranteed under section 13, article 2 of the Constitution, to bear arms in defense of home, person, and property. The guaranty thus extended is meaningless if any person is denied the right to possess arms for such protection...."
-Colorado Supreme Court-
Source: People v. Nakamura, 99 Colo. 262, 264, 62 P.2d 246, 247 (1936) rehearing denied.
"I believe that the community is already in process of dissolution where each man begins to eye his neighbor as a possible enemy, where non-conformity with the accepted creed, political as well as religious, is a mark of disaffection; where denunciation, without specification or backing, takes the place of evidence, where orthodoxy chokes freedom of dissent; where faith in the eventual supremacy of reason has become so timid that we dare not enter our convictions in the open lists, to win or lose."
-Judge Learned Hand-
(1872-1961), Judge, U. S. Court of Appeals
Source: Speech, New York University, 24 October 1952
"Never blame a legislative body for not doing something. When they do nothing, that don't hurt anybody. When they do something is when they become dangerous."
-Will Rogers-
(1879-1935) American humorist
"If a jury have not the right to judge between the government and those who disobey its laws, the government is absolute, and the people, legally speaking, are slaves. "
-Lysander Spooner-
(1808-1887) Political theorist, activist, abolitionist
"Jury lawlessness is the greatest corrective of law in its actual administration."
-Roscoe Pound-
Legal scholar
1910
"[The] purpose of a jury is to . . . make available the common sense judgment of the community as a hedge against the overzealous or mistaken prosecutor and in preference to the professional or perhaps over conditioned or biased response of a judge."
-U.S. Supreme Court-
Source: Taylor v. Louisiana, 419 U.S. 522, 530 (1975)
"Man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet, in other respects he is free; because, once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does."
-Jean-Paul Sartre-
"Man is condemned to be free. Condemned because he did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at liberty, and from the moment he is thrown into this world he is responsible for everything he does."
-Jean-Paul Sartre
(1905-1980)
Source: Existentialism and Humanism
"The Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations ... This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people, was the real American Revolution."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
February 13, 1818
"Outside Independence Hall when the Constitutional Convention of 1787 ended, Mrs. Powel of Philadelphia asked Benjamin Franklin, 'Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?' With no hesitation whatsoever, Franklin responded, 'A republic, if you can keep it.'"
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
1787
Source: as recorded by Constitution signer James McHenry in a diary entry.
"You have rights antecedent to all earthly governments: rights that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws; rights derived from the Great Legislator of the universe."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
"To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Virginia Statutes of Religious Freedom, 1779.
Close of Yahoo Quotes
"[Bills of rights are not only] unnecessary in the proposed Constitution, but would even be dangerous. They would contain various exceptions to powers not granted; and, on this very account, would afford a colorable pretext to claim more than were granted. ... Why, for instance, should it be said that the liberty of the press shall not be restrained, when no power is given by which restrictions may be imposed? ... [S]uch a provision ... would furnish, to men disposed to usurp, a plausible pretense for claiming that power. ... This may serve as a specimen of the numerous handles which would be given to the doctrine of constructive powers, by the indulgence of an injudicious zeal for bills of rights."
-Alexander Hamilton-
Federalist No. 84
"I will say than that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that here is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race."
-Abraham Lincoln-
September 18, 1858 debate with Stephen Douglas
"Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels -- men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, we may never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion."
-Dwight D. Eisenhower-
(1890-1969), 34th US President, WWII General
Source: Speech, Columbia University, 1954
"To maintain the ascendancy of the Constitution over the lawmaking majority is the great and essential point on which the success of the [American] system must depend; unless that ascendancy can be preserved, the necessary consequence must be that the laws will supersede the Constitution; and, finally, the will of the Executive, by influence of its patronage, will supersede the laws ..."
-John C. Calhoun-
(1782-1850) American statesman
"Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not so costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance for survival. There may be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no chance of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves."
-Sir Winston Churchill-
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
Source: The Gathering Storm, bk.I ch.19 p.348 (Houghton Mifflin, 1948)
"The difference between [socialism and fascism] is superficial and purely formal, but it is significant psychologically: it brings the authoritarian nature of a planned economy crudely into the open. The main characteristic of socialism (and of communism) is public ownership of the means of production, and, therefore, the abolition of private property. The right to property is the right of use and disposal. Under fascism, men retain the semblance or pretense of private property, but the government holds total power over its use and disposal."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
Source: “The Fascist New Frontier,” The Ayn Rand Column, p.98
"Under fascism, citizens retain the responsibilities of owning property, without freedom to act and without any of the advantages of ownership. Under socialism, government officials acquire all the advantages of ownership, without any of the responsibilities, since they do not hold title to the property, but merely the right to use it -- at least until the next purge. In either case, the government officials hold the economic, political and legal power of life or death over the citizens."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
Source: “The Fascist New Frontier,” The Ayn Rand Column, p.98
"Needless to say, under either system [socialism or fascism], the inequalities of income and standard of living are greater than anything possible under a free economy -- and a man’s position is determined, not by his productive ability and achievement, but by political pull and force. Under both systems, sacrifice is invoked as a magic, omnipotent solution in any crisis -- and “the public good” is the altar on which victims are immolated."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
Source: “The Fascist New Frontier,” The Ayn Rand Column, p.98
"I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground that 'all powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are preserved to the states or to the people.' ... To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition. The incorporation of a bank, and the powers assumed by this bill (chartering the first Bank of the United States), have not, been delegated to the United States by the Constitution."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: in opposition to the chartering of the first Bank of the United States (1791).
"I am afraid that the ordinary citizen will not like to be told that the banks can and do create and destroy money. And they who control the credit of a nation direct the policy of governments, and hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people."
-Reginald McKenna-
(1863-1943) British Secretary to the Treasury (1903), President of the Board of Education (1907–08) First Lord of the Admiralty (1908–1911), Home Secretary (1911–1915) and Chancellor of the Exchequer (1915–1916), and Chairman of the Midland Bank (1918)
Source: speaking in 1924
“But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man’s capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made–before it can be looted or mooched–made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can’t consume more than he has produced.’
To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss–the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery–that you must offer them values, not wounds–that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods. Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men’s stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best that your money can find. And when men live by trade–with reason, not force, as their final arbiter–it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability–and the degree of a man’s productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?"
-Francisco dOnconia-
The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to the doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can "throw the rascals out" at any election without leading to any profound or extreme shifts in policy.
-Carrol Quigley-
Tragedy and Hope
"Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign."
-John Stuart Mill-
(1806-1873) English philosopher and economist
Source: On Liberty (1859) (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1978), p. 9
"Free men are aware of the imperfection inherent in human affairs, and they are willing to fight and die for that which is not perfect. They know that basic human problems can have no final solutions, that our freedom, justice, equality, etc. are far from absolute, and that the good life is compounded of half measures, compromises, lesser evils, and gropings toward the perfect. The rejection of approximations and the insistence on absolutes are the manifestation of a nihilism that loathes freedom, tolerance, and equity."
-Eric Hoffer-
"The poor people, it is true, have been much less successful than the great. They have seldom found either leisure or opportunity to form a union and exert their strength; ignorant as they were of arts and letters, they have seldom been able to frame and support a regular opposition. This, however, has been known by the great to be the temper of mankind; and they have accordingly labored, in all ages, to wrest from the populace, as they are contemptuously called, the knowledge of their rights and wrongs, and the power to assert the former or redress the latter. I say RIGHTS, for such they have, undoubtedly, antecedent to all earthly government, Rights, that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws, Rights, derived from the great Legislator of the universe."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, 1765
"I never could believe that Providence had sent a few men into the world, ready booted and spurred to ride, and millions ready saddled and bridled to be ridden."
-Richard Rumbold-
(?-1685) British Colonel
Source: His final words on the scaffold before he was hanged in 1685.
Douglass ADAIR, Rumbold's Dying Speech, 1685, and Jefferson's Last Words on Democracy, 1826 [Notes and Documents], in: William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 9, 1952, p. 521
"Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!"
-Albert Einstein-
(1879-1955) Physicist and Professor, Nobel Prize 1921
"There comes a point when a man must refuse to answer to his leader if he is also to answer to his own conscience."
-Hartley Shawcross-
(1902-2003), prosecutor at Nuremberg War Crimes tribunal
"Justice, being violated, destroys;
justice, being preserved, preserves:
therefore, justice must not be violated,
lest violated justice destroy us."
-Manusmriti-
1200 BC
"A politician thinks of the next election. A statesman, of the next generation."
-James Freeman Clarke-
"The peaceable part of mankind will be continually overrun by the vile and abandoned while they neglect the means of self-defense. The supposed quietude of a good man allures the ruffian; while on the other hand, arms, like laws discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe and preserve order in the world as well as property. The balance of power is the scale of peace. The same balance would be preserved were all the world destitute of arms, for all would be alike; but since some will not, others dare not lay them aside... Horrid mischief would ensue were (the good) deprived of the use of them ... the weak will become a prey to the strong."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
Source: 1 Writings Of Thomas Paine 56 (M. Conway ed. 1894); 1776, Thoughts on a Defensive War.
"But to be in conflict with the constitution, it is not essential that the act should contain a prohibition against bearing arms in every possible form—it is the right to bear arms in defence of the citizens and the state, that is secured by the constitution, and whatever restrains the full and complete exercise of that right, though not an entire destruction of it, is forbidden by the explicit language of the constitution. If, therefore, the act in question imposes any restraint on the right, immaterial what appellation may be given to the act, whether it be an act regulating the manner of bearing arms or any other, the consequence, in reference to the constitution, is precisely the same, and its collision with that instrument equally obvious. ... The right existed at the adoption of the constitution; it had then no limits short of the moral power of the citizens to exercise it, and it in fact consisted in nothing else but in the liberty of the citizens to bear arms. Diminish that liberty, therefore, and you necessarily restrain the right; ... For, in principle, there is no difference between a law prohibiting the wearing [of] concealed arms, and a law forbidding the wearing such as are exposed; and if the former is unconstitutional, the latter must be so likewise."
-Kentucky Supreme Court-
Source: Bliss v. Commonwealth, 12 KY. (2 LITT.) 90 (Kentucky 1822) reprinted in THE FOUNDERS’ CONSTITUTION, Volume Five (Amendments I-XII) p. 212-213 (Univ. of Chicago Press).
"[O]ur War of the Revolution was, in good measure, fought as a protest against standing armies."
-Earl Warren-
(1891-1974) Chief Justice, U. S. Supreme Court
Source: The Bill of Rights and the Military, 37 N.Y.U.L. Rev. 181, 184 (1962).
"Who will stand guard to the guards themselves?"
-Juvenal-
[Decimus Junius Juvenalis] (c.55-c.128 AD) Roman satirical poet
"In the Jim Crow South, for example, government failed and indeed refused to protect blacks from extra-legal violence. Given our history, it's stunning we fail to question those who would force upon us a total reliance on the state for defense."
-Robert J. Cottrol-
Professor at Rutgers School of Law and George Washington University, member of the ACLU and the NAACP
Source: A Liberal Democrat’s Lament, The American Enterprise, 1999.
"Where would be the end of fraud and litigation, if one party could bring into court a written instrument, without any signature, and claim to have it enforced, upon the ground that it was written for another man to sign? that this other man had promised to sign it? that he ought to have signed it? that he had had the opportunity to sign it, if he would? but that he had refused or neglected to do so? Yet that is the most that could ever be said of the Constitution."
-Lysander Spooner-
No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority
"The man who hopes absurdly, it appears, is in some fantastic and gaseous manner a better citizen than the man who detects and exposes the truth"
-H.L. Mencken-
'Notes on Democracy'
"The proposal of any new law or regulation which comes from [businessmen], ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it."
-Adam Smith-
(1723-1790) Scottish philosopher and economist
"In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. If everyone decided, for example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any other good, and thereafter declined to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government-created bank credit would be worthless as a claim on goods. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.
This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights."
-Alan Greenspan-
(1926- ) Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors (1987-2006)
1966
"In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. ... This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard."
-Alan Greenspan-
(1926- ) Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors (1987-2006)
Source: from page 101 of the book "Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal"
by Ayn Rand with additional articles by Alan Greenspan - 1966
"The man of system…is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it… He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it."
-Adam Smith-
(1723-1790) Scottish philosopher and economist
Source: The Theory Of Moral Sentiments, Part VI, Section II, Chapter II, pp. 233-4
"Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon."
-Winston Churchill-
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
"The uniform, constant, and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition ... is frequently powerful enough to maintain the natural progress of things toward improvement, in spite of the extravagance of government, and of the greatest errors of administration."
-Adam Smith-
(1723-1790) Scottish philosopher and economist
"Capital will always go where it’s welcome and stay where it’s well treated. Capital is not just money. It’s also talent and ideas. They, too, will go where they’re welcome and stay where they are well treated."
-Walter Wriston-
(1919-2005) Chairman and CEO of Citibank/Citicorp (1967-84)
"It seemed that rebellion must have an unassailable base, something guarded not merely from attack, but from the fear of it."
-T. E. Lawrence-
"The cardinal maxim is, that any aid to a present bad Bank is the surest mode of preventing the establishment of a future good Bank."
-Walter Bagehot-
(1826-1877) British businessman, essayist, and journalist
"An almost hysterical antagonism toward the gold standard is one issue which unites statists of all persuasions. They seem to sense -- perhaps more clearly and subtly than many consistent defenders of laissez-faire -- that gold and economic freedom are inseparable, that the gold standard is an instrument of laissez-faire and that each implies and requires the other."
-Alan Greenspan-
(1926- ) Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors (1987-2006)
Source: "Gold and Economic Freedom", 1966
"I can't remember the exact quote but when I used to trade and Mr. Volcker was Fed chairman, he said something like 'gold is my enemy, I'm always watching what gold is doing', we need to think why he made a statement like that. If you're a central banker or one of the congressmen or senators, watch what gold is doing because this is a no-confidence vote in fiscal and dollar policy."
-Rick Santelli-
American on-air editor for the CNBC Business News network
Source: CNBC
"Agorism is the act of removing one's self from government regulation and monopolized currency. It's the idea that the exchange of products and services can be voluntary transactions in which all parties benefit without the heavy hand of the state reaching into your pockets. The end goal of The Agora is to starve the beast by making your productivity unavailable to their system, which funds violence. This Agorist Day: you can help spread this philosophy by choosing to exchange with those who are participating in the counter-economy."
-Jillian Batty-
Your friendly neighborhood agorist from Stateless Sweets
"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."
-Arthur Schopenhauer-
1788-1860
"Good Government is not intrusive, the people are hardly aware of it; the next best is felt yet loved; then comes that which is known and feared; the worst government is hated."
-Lao-Tzu-
[Li Erh] (570-490 BC) 'Old Sage', Father of Taoism
Source: Tao Te Ching
"A person's right to a job is as specious as his boss' right to success in business. There is no right to a minimum wage, just as there is no right to success in self-employment."
-Rex Curry-
Source: letter to the Washington Times National Weekly Edition, May 5, 1996
"What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared we would become a captive audience. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared that we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate would ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us."
-Neil Postman-
Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985)
"The ultimate result of protecting fools from their folly is to fill the planet full of fools."
-James Russell Lowell-
(1819-1891) American author and diplomatist
"We can guarantee cash benefits as far out and at whatever size you like, but we cannot guarantee their purchasing power."
-Alan Greenspan-
(1926- ) Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors (1987-2006)
Source: appearing before the Senate Banking Committee on February 15, 2005, in response to Democratic Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island on the topic of funding Social Security.
"It would take little more than $50 billion to raise every poor person above the official poverty line, yet the percentage of the population classified as poor hardly budges, while annual welfare spending amounts to four times that much. Where's the money going?"
-Robert Higgs-
(1944- ) American economic historian, economist of the Austrian School
Source: The Myth of "Failed" Policies, The Free Market, June 1995.
"If welfare and equality are to be primary aims of law, some people must necessarily possess a greater power of coercion in order to force redistribution of material goods. Political power alone should be equal among human beings; yet striving for other kinds of equality absolutely requires political inequality."
-Tibor Machan-
Source: Private Rights and Public Institutions
"As man is so constituted that it is utterly impossible for him to attain happiness save by seeking the happiness of others, so does it seem to be of the nature of things that individuals and classes can obtain their own just rights only by struggling for the rights of others."
-Henry George-
"Each peso [or dollar] is a contract between the government and the peso holder. That contract guarantees that each peso -- as a unit of value that the holder has worked hard to get -- will be worth as much tomorrow as today. If the government breaks the contract, it's breaking the law. The only role of government in the economy should be to guarantee the integrity of market transactions."
-Domingo Cavallo-
Finance Minister of Argentina
"Do not separate text from historical background. If you do, you will have perverted and subverted the Constitution, which can only end in a distorted, bastardized form of illegitimate government."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
"The government will make use of these powers only insofar as they are essential for carrying out vitally necessary measures.... The separate existence of the federal states will not be done away.... The number of cases in which an internal necessity exists for having recourse to such law is in itself a limited one."
-Adolf Hitler-
(1889-1945) German Nazi Dictator
Source: attempting to allay the people's fears over the Reichstag's centralization of law enforcement with the passage of the "Enabling Act" on March 23, 1933; (Historian William Shirer attributes this Enabling Act alone as the legal basis for Hitler's dictatorship).
"If ... our bureaucratic masters are becoming more akin to Soviet-style or Eastern European counterparts, it was rarely seen as a plus that those central schemers had wonderful intentions with their five-year plans. Such goals as 'job safety,' 'equality,' and freedom from 'discrimination,' depending on their definitions, may be good things for society, but they were never intended to be the business of the federal government."
-William P. Hoar-
Author, columnist, and managing editor of Periscope, the U.S. Naval Institute military database
Source: More Leeway for Regulators?, The New American, October 16, 1995.
"A political convention illustrates the workings of majority rule: If the minority in a party advocate a progressive move which is defeated when put to a vote in the convention, the minority are prohibited from advancing it during the campaign; if this minority refuse to advocate what the convention has decided to be right, they are barred from the platform and press, the cry of majority rule is raised against them, and they are called "traitors to the party;" but if they abandon their progressive ideas and advocate the wishes of the majority they are rewarded with office. Thus majority rule develops the dishonest politician: in order to rule sometime, he consents to being ruled at other times. The desire to rule and the willingness to be ruled ends in degradation; and no one who accepts the principles of equal liberty can endorse majority rule."
-Charles T. Sprading-
(1871-1959) Libertarian activist, writer
Source: Charles T. Sprading's Introduction to Liberty and the Great Libertarians; An Anthology On Liberty; A Hand-book Of Freedom (Los Angeles: The Libertarian Publishing Company, 1913)
"Moral indignation: jealousy with a halo."
-H. G. Wells-
(1866-1946)
"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end."
-Leonardo Da Vinci-
(1452-1519)
"In truth, attempts to regulate the civilian possession of firearms have five political functions. They
(1) increase citizen reliance on government and tolerance of increased police powers and abuse;
(2) help prevent opposition to the government;
(3) facilitate repressive action by government and its allies;
(4) lesson the pressure for major or radical reform; and
(5) can be selectively enforced against those perceived to be a threat to government."
-Raymond G. Kessler-
Lawyer, sociologist, professor Dept. of Criminal Justice, Sul Ross State University
Source: "Gun Control and Political Power", Law and Policy Quarterly, Vol. 5 (July) 1988, pp. 381-400
"The police of a state should never be stronger or better armed than the citizenry. An armed citizenry, willing to fight, is the foundation of civil freedom."
-Robert A. Heinlein-
(1907-1988) American writer
Source: Beyond This Horizon, 1942
"Ironically, the only gun control in 19th century England was the policy forbidding police to have arms while on duty."
-Don B. Kates, Jr.-
Constitutional lawyer, criminologist, author
Source: Quoted In The Proponent, February, 1996
"Prohibition goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man’s appetite by legislation and make crime out of things that are not crimes."
-Abraham Lincoln-
Source: Questionable. Supposedly from a speech, 18 Dec. 1840, to Illinois House of Representatives . No source has been confirmed. Believed to have been written by former Mayor of Atlanta, Anti-Prohibition campaign manager, Col. John B. Goodwin, 1887
see: http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lincoln.htm
"History teaches us the unfortunate lesson that cultural values supplant constitutional rights whenever the cultural elite consider a right too burdensome to suit the needs of the moment. The outlandish pronouncement in Dred Scott 'that the Negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit,' the shameful court-approved internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, and the separate but equal doctrine that officially existed until 1954 are all examples of the evils that result when cultural values are given more weight than constitutional rights."
-Robert Dowlut-
General Counsel for the National Rifle Association
Source: Arms: A Right to Self-Defense Against Criminals and Despots, 8 Stanford L. & Pol'y Rev. 25 (1997).
"In 1928, Germany enacted its Gesetz uber Schusswaffen und Munition (Law on Firearms and Ammunition), which required firearms and ammunition acquisition permits and record keeping for all transactions. Through this legislation, the police acquired knowledge of all firearm owners, which was used to the Nazis' advantage when they took power in 1933. The Nazi Waffengesetz (Weapons Law) of 1938, signed by Adolph Hitler, built upon the previous registration systems and strictly regulated handguns. ... On the first day the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia, they put up posters in every town ordering the inhabitants to surrender all firearms, including hunting guns. The penalty for disobedience was death. The Nazis were able to use local and central registration records of firearms owners and hunters to execute the decree. Lists of potential dissidents and other suspects were already prepared, and those persons disappeared immediately. The Nazi commander of Belgium and Netherlands proclaimed that '[t]he surrender of weapons and other implements of war has been ordered by special proclamation.... Hunting guns are [also] to be surrendered ....' The Nazi head of Norway decreed that '[a]ll arms and munitions must be handed over' because only licensed officials and persons with police permits retained the right to possess arms."
-Stephen P. Halbrook-
Source: Congress Interprets the Second Amendment: Declarations By A Co-Equal Branch On The Individual Right To Keep And Bear Arms, 62 Tenn. L.R. 597, 619 -- 623 (1995)
"A covenant not to defend myself from force by force is always void. For ... no man can transfer or lay down his Right to save himself. For the right men have by Nature to protect themselves, when none else can protect them, can by no Covenant be relinquished. ... [The right] to defend ourselves [is the] summe of the Right of Nature."
-Thomas Hobbes-
(1588-1679) English philosopher, political theorist
Source: Leviathan 88, 95 (reprint 1964) (1651)
"In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: 'If you don't work you die.'"
-Rudyard Kipling-
"In the kingdom of ends everything has either a price or a dignity. Whatever has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; on the other hand, whatever is above all price, and therefore admits of no equivalent, has a dignity. But that which constitutes the condition under which alone something can be an end in itself does not have mere relative worth, i.e., price, but an intrinsic worth, i.e., a dignity."
-Immanuel Kant-
"I don't think the Constitution is studied almost anywhere, including law schools. In law schools, what they study is what the court said about the Constitution. They study the opinions. They don't study the Constitution itself."
-Robert Bork-
(1927- ) former US Circuit Judge, legal scholar, author
"Perhaps the deterioration of American education is illustrated by the high correlation between the number of years a person has attended school and his inability to understand the words "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." It is more likely, though, that those who interpret the Second Amendment to preclude an individual right to own guns are driven by their political agenda. Whichever the case, they do themselves no credit when they tell us that a simple, elegant sentence means the opposite of what it clearly says."
-Sheldon Richman-
Editor of The Freeman, author, journalist
Source: Reading the Second Amendment, The Second Amendment's Syntax Permits Only One Reasonable Interpretation, The Freeman, February 1998 • Volume: 48 • Issue: 2
“If it is a question of taking a road past his property, [a man] sees at once that this small public matter has a bearing on his greatest private interests, and there is no need to point out to him the close connection between his private profit and the general interest. . . . Local liberties, then, which induce a great number of citizens to value the affection of their kindred and neighbors, bring men constantly into contact, despite the instincts which separate them, and force them to help one another. . . . The free institutions of the United States and the political rights enjoyed there provide a thousand continual reminders to every citizen that he lives in society. . . . Having no particular reason to hate others, since he is neither their slave nor their master, the American’s heart easily inclines toward benevolence. At first it is of necessity that men attend to the public interest, afterward by choice. What had been calculation becomes instinct. By dint of working for the good of his fellow citizens, he in the end acquires a habit and taste for serving them. . . . I maintain that there is only one effective remedy against the evils which equality may cause, and that is political liberty.
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
pp. 511-13, Lawrence/Mayer edition
"Crisis is the rallying cry of the tyrant."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
"Statists relish 'crises' because they can be used to force more controls into our lives."
-William P. Hoar-
Source: Tampering With the Markets, The New American, P. 13, June 10, 1996.
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before."
-Rahm Emmanuel-
(1959-) Mayor of Chicago (2011-), White House Chief of Staff to President Barack Obama (2009-2010), US Congressman (D-IL) (2004-2009), advisor to President Bill Clinton (1993-1998)
Source: Wall Street Journal Digital Network, November 19, 2008
"The freedom of the city is not negotiable. We cannot negotiate with those who say, 'What's mine is mine and what's yours is negotiable.'"
-John F. Kennedy-
“Independent self-reliant people were a counter-productive anachronism in the collective society of the future. In such a world people who read too well or too early are dangerous because they become privately empowered, they know too much, and they know how to find out what they don’t know by themselves, without consulting the experts.”
-John Dewey-
education reformer
"While there is a chance of the world getting through its troubles, I hold that a reasonable man has to behave as though he were sure of it. If at the end your cheerfulness is not justified, at any rate you will have been cheerful."
-H. G. Wells-
"If all the bank loans were paid, no one could have a bank deposit, and there would not be a dollar of coin or currency in circulation. This is a staggering thought. We are completely dependent on the commercial Banks. Someone has to borrow every dollar we have in circulation, cash or credit. If the Banks create ample synthetic money we are prosperous; if not, we starve. We are absolutely without a permanent money system. When one gets a complete grasp of the picture, the tragic absurdity of our hopeless position is almost incredible, but there it is. It is the most important subject intelligent persons can investigate and reflect upon. It is so important that our present civilization may collapse unless it becomes widely understood and the defects remedied very soon."
-Robert Hemphill-
Credit Manager of Federal Reserve Bank, Atlanta, Ga.
Source: In the foreword to a book by Irving Fisher, entitled 100% Money (1935)
"The bank hath benefit of interest on all moneys which it creates out of nothing."
-William Paterson-
(1658-1719) Founder of the Bank of England in 1694, the privately owned central bank for the Kingdom of England.
"If you want to know who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize."
-Voltaire-
"We have what is known as the Federal Reserve Bank System. That system is not owned by the Government. Many people think that it is because it says “Federal Reserve.” It belongs to private banks, private corporations. So we have farmed out to the Federal Reserve Banking System that which is owned exclusively, wholly, one hundred percent to the private banks—we have farmed out to them the privilege of issuing the Government’s money!"
-Wright Patman-
[John William Wright Patman] (1893-1976) US Congressman (TX-D)
Source: Congressional Record (29 Sep. 1941)
"There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution."
-John Adams-
"The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.
Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind, (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight,) the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.
It serves always to distract the Public Councils, and enfeeble the Public Administration. It agitates the Community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms; kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which find a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.
There is an opinion, that parties in free countries are useful checks upon the administration of the Government, and serve to keep alive the spirit of Liberty. This within certain limits is probably true; and in Governments of a Monarchical cast, Patriotism may look with indulgence, if not with favor, upon the spirit of party. But in those of the popular character, in Governments purely elective, it is a spirit not to be encouraged. From their natural tendency, it is certain there will always be enough of that spirit for every salutary purpose. And, there being constant danger of excess, the effort ought to be, by force of public opinion, to mitigate and assuage it. A fire not to be quenched, it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest, instead of warming, it should consume."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
George Washington's Farewell Address, September 17, 1796
"I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell, June 11, 1807
"To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, "by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only." Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of it's benefits, than is done by it's abandoned prostitution to falsehood."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell, June 11, 1807
"Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell, June 11, 1807
"The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost invariably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And if he is not romantic personally, he is apt to spread discontent among those who are."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him. If it be aristocratic in organization, then it seeks to protect the man who is superior only in law against the man who is superior in fact; if it be democratic, then it seeks to protect the man who is inferior in every way against both. One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among them. All it can see in an original idea is potential change, and hence an invasion of its prerogatives. The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are."
-H. L. Mencken-
Smart Set (December 1919)
"When you become entitled to exercise the right of voting for public officers, let it be impressed on your mind that God commands you to choose for rulers, 'just men who will rule in the fear of God.' The preservation of government depends on the faithful discharge of this duty; if the citizens neglect their duty and place unprincipled men in office, the government will soon be corrupted; laws will be made, not for the public good so much as for selfish or local purposes; corrupt or incompetent men will be appointed to execute the laws; the public revenues will be sqandered on unworthy men; and the rights of the citizens will be violated or disregarded. If a republican government fails to secure public prosperity and happiness, it must be because the citizens neglect the divine commands, and elect bad men to make and administer the laws."
-Noah Webster-
"Asset forfeiture is a mockery of the Bill of Rights. There is no presumption of innocence, no need to prove you guilty (or even charge you with a crime), no right to a jury trial, no right to confront your accuser, no right to a court-appointed attorney (even if the government has just stolen all your money), and no right to compensation for the property that's been taken."
-Harry Browne-
(1933-2006), Downsize DC co-founder
"[In the case of] dangerous exercise of other powers, not granted by the said compact, the states, who are parties thereto, have the right, and are duty bound, to interpose for arresting the progress of the evil."
-James Madison=
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Virginia Resolves
"The Declaration of Independence, however, is not a legal prescription conferring powers upon the courts; and the Constitution's refusal to "deny or disparage" other rights is far removed from affirming any one of them, and even farther removed from authorizing judges to identify what they might be, and to enforce the judges' list against laws duly enacted by the people."
-Justice Antonin Scalia-
(1936- ) American jurist, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
Source: Justice Scalia dissenting, Troxel v. Granville, 530 U.S. 57, 91-92 (2000)
"Our contest is not only whether we ourselves shall be free, but whether there shall be left to mankind an asylum on earth for civil and
religious liberty."
-Samuel Adams-
"To see what is right, and not to do it, is want of courage or of principle."
-Confucius-
"How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it."
-Adam Smith-
(1723-1790) Scottish philosopher and economist
Source: The Theory Of Moral Sentiments, Part I, Section I, Chapter I, pg. 9
"The use of force alone is but temporary. It may subdue for a moment; but it does not remove the necessity of subduing again; and a nation is not governed, which is perpetually to be conquered."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
Source: speaking of the American Revolution
"If I said, 'The live-and-let-live people I've met are generally warm and generous, although often reserved and respectful, while the control freaks I've met are generally cynical, mean and aggressively obnoxious,' would that seem likely to be true?
Of course it does. It IS true, and it's obviously logically consistent and what you'd expect.
BUT, if I said, 'I've found the intellectual defenders of private property and laissez-faire capitalism whom I've met to be generally warm and generous, while the so-called "liberal" defenders of the welfare state I've found to be often cynical, mean and tight-fisted in their personal lives,' would THAT seem likely to be true?
Think about it. Well, it's also true.... it's a matter of semantics, or word choice. BECAUSE BOTH SENTENCES SAY EXACTLY THE SAME THING. "
-Rick Gaber-
Source: Selfishness vs. "Selfishness"
"Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all."
-Frederic Bastiat-
(1801-1850) [Claude Frederic Bastiat] French economist, statesman, and author. He did most of his writing during the years just before -- and immediately following -- the French Revolution of February 1848
Source: ca. 1837
"The unity of a nation's spirit and will are worth far more than the freedom of the spirit and will of an individual; and that the higher interests involved in the life of the whole must here set the limits and lay down the duties of the interests of the individual."
-Adolf Hitler-
(1889-1945) German Nazi Dictator
"We must stop thinking of the individual and start thinking about what is best for society."
-Hillary Clinton-
(1947- ) Wife of President Bill Clinton, US Senator (NY-D)
1993
"Fascist ethics begin ... with the acknowledgment that it is not the individual who confers a meaning upon society, but it is, instead, the existence of a human society which determines the human character of the individual. According to Fascism, a true, a great spiritual life cannot take place unless the State has risen to a position of pre-eminence in the world of man. The curtailment of liberty thus becomes justified at once, and this need of rising the State to its rightful position."
-Mario Palmieri-
Source: "The Philosophy of Fascism" 1936
"Don't ever make the mistake with people like me thinking we are looking for heroes. There aren't any and if there were, they would be killed immediately. I'm never surprised by bad behaviour. I expect it."
-Gore Vidal-
"Most of the major ills of the world have been caused by well-meaning people who ignored the principle of individual freedom, except as applied to themselves, and who were obsessed with fanatical zeal to improve the lot of mankind-in-the-mass through some pet formula of their own. The harm done by ordinary criminals, murderers, gangsters, and thieves is negligible in comparison with the agony inflicted upon human beings by the professional do-gooders, who attempt to set themselves up as gods on earth and who would ruthlessly force their views on all others - with the abiding assurance that the end justifies the means."
-Henry Grady Weaver-
(1889–1949) American author, General Motors marketing executive who made the cover of Time in 1938
"What, actually, is the difference between communism and fascism? Both are forms of statism, authoritarianism. The only difference between Stalin’s communism and Mussolini’s fascism is an insignificant detail in organizational structure."
-Leonard E. Read-
(1898-1983) founder of the Foundation for Economic Education
Source: "Neither Left Nor Right", Freeman, January/February 2006 • Volume: 56 • Issue: 1
"In principle, there are only two fundamental political viewpoints. That is, two contradictory ends of the 'political spectrum.' Those two principles are freedom and slavery."
-Mark Da Cunha-
Publisher of Capitalism magazine
"I apprehend no danger to our country from a foreign foe ... Our destruction, should it come at all, will be from another quarter. -- From the inattention of the people to the concerns of their government, from their carelessness and negligence, I must confess that I do apprehend some danger. I fear that they may place too implicit a confidence in their public servants, and fail properly to scrutinize their conduct; that in this way they may be made the dupes of designing men, and become the instruments of their own undoing. Make them intelligent, and they will be vigilant; give them the means of detecting the wrong, and they will apply the remedy."
-Daniel Webster-
(1782-1852), US Senator
Source: June 1, 1837; Works 1:403
"Can you live without answers? All of you, ask that of yourself. Can you live without answers? Because if you cannot, then most assuredly you will invent your own answers and they will comfort you. And all those who do not share your view will by their very existence strike fear and hatred into your heart. What god blesses this?"
-Steven Erikson-
"Do not blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who have rejoiced in their loss of freedom, who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of more security, more living fatly at the expense of the industrious."
-Marcus Cicero-
"A man's admiration for absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
[Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clerel, le Comte de Tocqueville] (1805-1859) French historian
"The people = government doctrine is equivalent to political infantilism -- an agreement to pretend that the citizen's wishes animate each restriction or exaction inflicted upon him."
-James Bovard-
American author, lecturer
"Men who look upon themselves born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent; selected from the rest of mankind their minds are early poisoned by importance; and the world they act in differs so materially from the world at large, that they have but little opportunity of knowing its true interests, and when they succeed to the government are frequently the most ignorant and unfit of any throughout the dominions."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
Source: Common Sense, February 14, 1776
"And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"Fortunately, political freedom and economic progress are natural partners. Despite capitalism's lingering reputation as the source of all the world's evils, the fact remains that every single democracy is a capitalist country. Half a century of economic experimentation proved beyond doubt that tyranny cannot yield prosperity. ... Socialism collapsed because it is a policy of unrestrained intervention. It tries to fix what is 'wrong' with the spontaneous, self-organizaing phenomenon called capitalism. But, of course, a natural process cannot be 'fixed.' ... Socialism is an ideology. Capitalism is a natural phenomenon."
-Michael Rothschild-
(1942-) American economist, professor
Source: BIONOMICS: Economy as Ecosystem, (1979)
"Let me explain this. There are, fundamentally, only two causes of the progress of the nineteenth century -- the same two causes which you will find at the root of any happy, benevolent, progressive era in human history. One cause is psychological, the other existential -- or: one pertains to man's consciousness, the other to the physical conditions of his existence. The first is reason, the second is freedom. And when I say "freedom," I do not mean poetic sloppiness, such as "freedom from want" or "freedom from fear" or "freedom from the necessity of earning a living." I mean "freedom from compulsion -- freedom from rule by physical force." Which means: political freedom."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
Source: Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World, (A lecture delivered at Yale University on February 17, 1960, at Brooklyn College on April 4, 1960, and at Columbia University on May 5, 1960. Published as a pamphlet by the Nathaniel Branden Institute in 1967, and now included as a chapter in the book, Philosophy: Who Needs It)
"Make no mistake about it -- and tell it to your Republican friends: capitalism and altruism cannot coexist in the same man or in the same society. Tell it to anyone who attempts to justify capitalism on the ground of the "public good" or the "general welfare" or "service to society" or the benefit it brings to the poor. All these things are true, but they are the by-products, the secondary consequences of capitalism -- not its goal, purpose or moral justification. The moral justification of capitalism is man's right to exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself; it is the recognition that man -- every man -- is an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others, not a sacrificial animal serving anyone's need."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
Source: Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World, (A lecture delivered at Yale University on February 17, 1960, at Brooklyn College on April 4, 1960, and at Columbia University on May 5, 1960. Published as a pamphlet by the Nathaniel Branden Institute in 1967, and now included as a chapter in the book, Philosophy: Who Needs It)
"If a multitude is to be subjected to a plan, it must be militarized. If individuals are allowed a free choice, the plan is thrown into confusion. Bureaucracy, under an absolute ruler, or rulers, is necessary. Popular consent can be secured only by rigorous censorship and prohibition of free discussion. Espionage is a necessary part of the system, and a considerable amount of terrorism. Since private expenditure must be controlled, it is wise to keep private incomes near a subsistence level and to dole out any surplus on collective pleasures such as free holidays. We shall not understand totalitarian tyranny unless we realize that it is the result of the planned economy."
-Dean Inge-
[William Ralph Inge] (1860-1954) English author, Anglican priest, professor of divinity at Cambridge, and Dean of St Paul's Cathedral
"Republicans don't know how to defend morally an individual's right to achieve wealth and to keep it, and that is why they fail. ... It's part and parcel with their ambivalence over the individualist heritage of the nation. ... One of the things that people have to understand is that the American Revolution was truly an epic revolution in the way individuals were perceived in relation to the rest of the society. Throughout history individuals had always been cogs in some machine; they'd always been something to be sacrificed for the king, the tribe, the gang, the chieftain, the society around them, the race, whatever, and the real revolution, in America especially, was a moral revolution. It was a moral revolution in that ... suddenly, with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the individual, his life, his well-being, his property, his happiness became central to our values, and that is what really made America unique. People came here from all over the world to try to escape the kind of oppression they had and experienced in the past. They came here for freedom; they came here for self-expression and self-realization, and America offered them that kind of a place."
-Robert Bidinotto-
"Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most times he will pick himself up and carry on."
-Sir Winston Churchill-
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
"Nearly all men can withstand adversity; if you want to test a man's character, give him power."
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
"There is no subjugation so perfect as that which keeps the appearance of freedom for in that way one captures volition itself."
-Jean-Jacques Rousseau-
(1712-1778) Political philosopher, educationist and essayist
Source: Emile, 1762
"[Political parties] serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community ... They are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion."
-George Washington-
Farewell Address, 1796
"In existing criminology there are concepts: a criminal man, a criminal profession, a criminal society, a criminal sect, and a criminal tribe, but there is no concept of a criminal state, or a criminal government, or criminal legislation. Consequently, the biggest crimes actually escape being called crimes."
-P. D. Ouspensky-
(1878-1947)
Source: A New Model of the Universe, 1931
"My policy has been, and will continue to be, while I have the honor to remain in the administration of the government, to be upon friendly terms with, but independent of, all the nations of the earth. To share in the broils of none. To fulfil our own engagements. To supply the wants, and be carriers for them all: Being thoroughly convinced that it is our policy and interest to do so."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: 1795 - letter to Gouverneur Morris, ref: Washington's Maxims, 54
"Neither wisdom nor good will is now dominant. Hope lies in dreams, in imagination and in the courage of those who dare to make dreams into reality."
-Jonas Salk-
"See, when the Government spends money, it creates jobs; whereas when the money is left in the hands of Taxpayers, God only knows what they do with it. Bake it into pies, probably. Anything to avoid creating jobs."
-Dave Barry-
"I hope I shall possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider the most enviable of all titles, the character of an honest man."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
"Before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience."
-Harper Lee-
(1926- ) American author, 1960 Pulitzer Prize winning novelist for 'To Kill A Mockingbird'
Source: To Kill a Mockingbird
"It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit."
-Noël Coward-
(1899-1973) British playwright
Source: Blithe Spirit
"That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false."
-Paul Valéry-
"To know what is right and not do it is the worst cowardice."
-Confucius-
[Kung Fu-tse] (551-479 B.C.)
"You can't learn too soon that the most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency."
-Somerset Maugham-
"When a gesture of respect is made mandatory, it becomes an act of submission."
-Pete Eyre-
"What is right is often forgotten by what is convenient."
-Bodie Thoene-
Source: Warsaw Requiem
"I would rather be right than President."
-Henry Clay-
(1777-1852) U. S. Senator, Speaker of the House of Representatives
Source: speech, 1850
"Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified and excusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let me label you as they may."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910)
"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."
-H.L. Mencken-
'A Little Book in C Major', p. 19 (1916)
"Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: letter to John Taylor, April 15, 1814
"Not being able to govern events, I govern myself."
-Michel de Montaigne-
[Michel Eyquem De Montaigne] (1532-1592) French Renaissance scholar, philosopher, writer
"I am, indeed, a king, because I know how to rule myself."
-Pietro Aretino-
(1492-1556) Italian author, playwright, poet and satirist
10 May 1537
"Are right and wrong convertible terms, dependant upon popular opinion?"
-William Lloyd Garrison-
(1805-1879) American abolitionist, journalist, and social reformer
"The principle that the majority have a right to rule the minority, practically resolves all government into a mere contest between tow bodies of men, as to which of them shall be masters, and which of them slaves; a contest, that -- however bloddy -- can, in the nature of things, never be finally closed, so long as man refuses to be a slave."
-Lysander Spooner-
"State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies; and this lie slips from its mouth: 'I, the state, am the people.'"
-Friedrich Nietzsche-
"The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair."
-H. L. Mencken-
"I didn't learn until I was in college about all the other cultures, and I should have learned that in the first grade. A first grader should understand that his or her culture isn't a rational invention; that there are thousands of other cultures and they all work pretty well; that all cultures function on faith rather than truth; that there are lots of alternatives to our own society. Cultural relativism is defensible and attractive. It's also a source of hope. It means we don't have to continue this way if we don't like it."
-Kurt Vonnegut-
"The art of punditry is the ability to fit any new evidence into your pre-existing narrative. "
-Grant Bosse-
"Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live."
-Oscar Wilde-
(1854-1900)
Source: The Soul of Man Under Socialism
"Where freedom is menaced or justice threatened or where aggression takes place, we cannot be and shall not be neutral."
-Jawaharlal Nehru-
"Miss Goldman is a communist; I am an individualist. She wishes to destroy the right of property, I wish to assert it. I make my war upon privilege and authority, whereby the right of property, the true right in that which is proper to the individual, is annihilated. She believes that co-operation would entirely supplant competition; I hold that competition in one form or another will always exist, and that it is highly desirable it should. But whether she or I be right, or both of us be wrong, of one thing I am sure; the spirit which animates Emma Goldman is the only one which will emancipate the slave from his slavery, the tyrant from his tyranny — the spirit which is willing to dare and suffer."
-Voltairine de Cleyre-
"Only a large-scale popular movement toward decentralization and self-help can arrest the present tendency toward statism... A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers."
-Aldous Huxley-
(1894-1963) Author
Source: Forward to 'Brave New World', 1932
"A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers.... The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth."
-Aldous Huxley-
(1894-1963) Author
Source: forward to Brave New World, 1946 edition
"In the end, more than freedom, they wanted security. They wanted a comfortable life, and they lost it all - security, comfort, and freedom. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again."
-Edward Gibbon-
(1737-1794) English historian and Member of Parliament
Source: Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1909
"It may be your intent to be our masters; how can it be ours to be your slaves?"
-Melians-
Source: Melians to Athenians, Peloponnesian War, 431 BC, ref: Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War
"Live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart.
Trouble no one about his religion.
Respect others in their views and demand that they respect yours.
Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life.
Seek to make your life long and of service to your people.
Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide.
Always give a word or sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend,
or even a stranger, if in a lonely place.
Show respect to all people, but grovel to none.
When you rise in the morning, give thanks for the light,
for your life, for your strength.
Give thanks for your food and for the joy of living.
If you see no reason to give thanks, the fault lies in yourself.
Abuse no one and no thing, for abuse turns the wise ones to fools
and robs the spirit of its vision.
When your time comes to die,
be not like those whose hearts are filled with fear of death,
so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time
to live their lives over again in a different way.
Sing your death song, and die like a hero going home."
-Tecumseh-
(1768-1813) Shawnee Chief
"Liberty ... was a two-headed boon. There was first, the liberty of the people as a whole to determine the forms of their own government, to levy their own taxes, and to make their own laws.... There was second, the liberty of the individual man to live his own life, within the limits of decency and decorum, as he pleased -- freedom from the despotism of the majority."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
1926
"As men's habits of mind differ, so that some more readily embrace one form of faith, some another, for what moves one to pray may move another to scoff, I conclude ... that everyone should be free to choose for himself the foundations of his creed, and that faith should be judged only by its fruits; each would then obey God freely with his whole heart, while nothing would be publicly honoured save justice and charity."
-Baruch Spinoza-
"The love of liberty with life is given,
And life itself the inferior gift of Heaven."
-John Dryden-
(1631-1700) English Poet
Source: Palamon and Arcite (bk. II, l. 291)
"If you're not paying for something, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold."
-blue_beetle-
on MetaFilter
"An elective despotism was not the government we fought for, but one which should not only be founded on true free principles, but in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among general bodies of magistracy, as that no one could transcend their legal limits without being effectually checked and restrained by the others."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
1782
Source: Notes on Va.
"When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
Source: Attributed.
"A Union of the States containing such an ingredient seemed to provide for its own destruction. The use of force against a State would look more like a declaration of war than an infliction of punishment and would probably be considered by the party attacked as a dissolution of all previous compacts by which it might be bound."
-James Madison-
"father of our Constitution"
rejecting a proposal at the 1787 constitutional convention to allow the federal government to suppress a seceding state
"Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own."
-Jonathan Swift-
"If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier... just so long as I'm the dictator."
-George W. Bush-
"Prohibition is an awful flop.
We like it.
It can't stop what it's meant to stop.
We like it.
It's left a trail of graft and slime,
It don't prohibit worth a dime,
It's filled our land with vice and crime.
Nevertheless, we're for it."
-Franklin P. Adams-
(1881-1960)
1931
"It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law... that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"Prohibition ended in 1933 because the nation’s most influential people, as well as the general public, acknowledged that it had failed. It had increased lawlessness and drinking and aggravated alcohol abuse."
-Thomas M. Coffey-
Source: The Long Thirst - Prohibition In America: 1920-1933
"Moderation in all things -- including moderation."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
"Laws to suppress tend to strengthen what they would prohibit. This is the fine point on which all legal professions of history have based their job security."
-Frank Herbert-
(1920-1986)
Source: Dune, 1965
"That which we call sin in others is experiment for us."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-
(1803-1882)
"I never hurt nobody but myself and that's nobody's business but my own."
-Billie Holiday-
(1915-1959) American Jazz Singer
"Laws provide against injury from others, but not from ourselves."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Notes on Religion
"It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system, that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country."
-Justice Louis D. Brandeis-
(1856-1941) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: wrote (in dissent) in 1932
"Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners."
-Edward Abbey-
"Powerful people cannot afford to educate the people they oppress ... because once you are truly educated, you will not ask for power. You will take it."
-John Henrik Clarke-
writer, historian, professor, academic pioneer
"In relation to the political decontamination of our public life, the government will embark upon a systematic campaign to restore the nation’s moral and material health. The whole educational system, theater, film, literature, the press and broadcasting -- all these will be used as a means to this end."
-Adolf Hitler-
(1889-1945) German Nazi Dictator
Source: Volkischer Beobachter, 23 March 1933
"Hitler’s dictatorship differed in one fundamental point from all its predecessors in history. It was the first dictatorship in the present period of modern technical development, a dictatorship which made complete use of all technical means for the domination of its own country. Through technical devices like the radio and the loud-speaker, eighty million people were deprived of independent thought. It was thereby possible to subject them to the will of one man."
-Albert Speer-
[Berthold Konrad Hermann Albert Speer] (1905-1981) German architect, Adolf Hitler's chief architect before becoming Minister of Armaments and War Production for the Third Reich
Source: at the Nuremberg Trials after World War II, 1946
"[T]he police do not and cannot protect law-abiding citizens from criminal violence. ... This thought may not occur to wealthy people who can shelter themselves in low-crime enclaves and who care not at all about their less fortunate neighbors. But no one knows it better than the police, who scrupulously preserve their own right to carry firearms on and off duty (and often after they retire as well) even while some of them advocate disarming those whom the police cannot protect."
-Nelson Lund-
Source: The Past and Future of the Individual's Right to Bear Arms, 31 GA LAW REV. 1, 61-63 (1996).
"[T]he next time you read or hear about a murder victim, a rape victim or an assault victim, I want you to preface it with the word 'unarmed' so that murder victims become 'unarmed murder victims'; this is especially true in rape. How many times have you read, 'An unidentified woman, heavily armed with a semi-automatic weapon was raped by a man wielding a knife.' No answer is necessary, right?"
-The Liberty Pole-
Source: A Letter to L. A. Times Advertiser Big 5., October, 1997.
"The account they give of your situation grieves me. I send you herewith a Bill for Ten Louis d'ors. I do not pretend to give such a Sum; I only lend it to you. When you shall return to your Country with a good Character, you cannot fail of getting into some Business, that will in time enable you to pay all your Debts. In that Case, when you meet with another honest Man in similar Distress, you must pay me by lending this Sum to him; enjoining him to discharge the Debt by a like operation, when he shall be able, and shall meet with another opportunity. I hope it may thus go thro' many hands, before it meets with a Knave that will stop its Progress. This is a trick of mine for doing a deal of good with a little money. I am not rich enough to afford much in good works, and so am obliged to be cunning and make the most of a little.
With best wishes for the success of your Memorial, and your future prosperity, I am, dear Sir, your most obedient servant"
-Benjamin Franklin-
to Benjamin Webb
"In recent years it has been suggested that the Second Amendment protects the "collective" right of states to maintain militias, while it does not protect the right of "the people" to keep and bear arms. If anyone entertained this notion in the period during which the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were debated and ratified, it remains one of the most closely guarded secrets of the eighteenth century, for no known writing surviving from the period between 1787 and 1791 states such a thesis."
-Steven P. Halbrook-
Attorney, author
Source: That Every Man Be Armed: The Evolution Of A Constitutional Right, P. 83 (The Independence Institute 1984.).
"A system of licensing and registration is the perfect device to deny gun ownership to the bourgeoisie."
-Vladimir Ilyich Lenin-
[Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov] (1870 - 1924), First Leader of the Soviet Union
Source: Questionable: supposedly from "The Beginning of the Revolution in Russia", Selected Works, Vol. I, International Publishers, New York, 1967, however, the quote does not appear in the text
"Any unarmed people are slaves, or are subject to slavery at any given moment. If the guns are taken out of the hands of the people and only the pigs have guns, then it's off to the concentration camps, the gas chambers, or whatever the fascists in America come up with. One of the democratic rights of the United States, the Second Amendment to the Constitution, gives the people the right to bear arms. However, there is a greater right; the right of human dignity that gives all men the right to defend themselves."
-Huey P. Newton-
(1942-1989) Founder of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense
"The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed the subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the supply of arms to the underdogs is a sine qua non for the overthrow of any sovereignty."
-Adolf Hitler-
(1889-1945) German Nazi Dictator
Source: Hitler's Table Talks 1941-1944, Edited by H.R. Trevor-Roper (London: Widenfeld and Nicolson, 1953), pp. 425-426.
"The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to permit the conquered Eastern peoples to have arms. History teaches that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by doing so. Indeed I would go so far as to say that the underdog is a sine qua non for the overthrow of any sovereignty. So let's not have any native militia or police. German troops alone will bear the sole responsibility for the maintenance of law and order."
-Adolf Hitler-
(1889-1945) German Nazi Dictator
Source: April 11, 1942, "Hitler's Table-Talk at the Fuehrer's Headquarters 1941-1942", Dr. Henry Picker, ed. (Athenaeum Verlag, Bonn, 1951)
"Laissez-nous faire, laissez-nous passer. Le monde va de lui meme."
"(Let us do, leave us alone. The world runs by itself.)"
-French Saying-
"Freedom all solace to man gives:
He lives at ease that freely lives."
-John Barbour-
"The market is not a place, a thing, or a collective entity. It is a process."
-Ludwig von Mises
(1881-1973) Economist and social philosopher, escaped from NAZI Germany
"For it is a habit of mankind to entrust to careless hope what they long for, and to use sovereign reason to thrust aside what they do not fancy."
-Thucydides-
[Thoukudídês] (c.455-c.400 BC) Greek historian, author of the History of the Peloponnesian War
Source: History of the Peloponnesian War p. 276 Book 4
"Socialism is the phantastic younger brother of despotism, which it wants to inherit. Socialism wants to have the fullness of state force which before only existed in despotism. ... However, it goes further than anything in the past because it aims at the formal destruction of the individual … who … can be used to improve communities by an expedient organ of government."
-Friedrich Nietzsche-
(1844-1900)
"A human group transforms itself into a crowd when it suddenly responds to a suggestion rather than to reasoning, to an image rather than to an idea, to an affirmation rather than to proof, to the repetition of a phrase rather than to arguments, to prestige rather than to competence."
-Jean-Francois Revel-
[Jean-Francois Ricard] (1924-2006) French politician, journalist, author, philosopher, member of the Académie française
"After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
[Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clerel, le Comte de Tocqueville] (1805-1859) French historian
"...I know not what treason is, if sapping and betraying the liberties of a people be not treason..."
-Cato-
John Trenchard (1662-1723) & Thomas Gordon (169?-1750)
"Treason doth never prosper, what's the reason?
For if it prosper, none dare call it Treason."
-Sir John Harrington-
(1561-1612) English courtier, wit, poet and satirist
Source: Epigrams, Book iv. Ep. 5.
"The attack on economics sprang rather from a dislike of the application of scientific methods to the investigation of social problems. The existence of a body of reasoning which prevented people from following their first impulsive reactions, and which compelled them to balance indirect effects, which could be seen only by exercising the intellect, against intense feeling caused by the direct observation of concrete suffering, then as now, occasioned intense resentment."
-FA Hayek-
(1933)
"There is a certain indolence in us, a wish not to be disturbed, which tempts us to think that when things are quiet, all is well. Subconsciously, we tend to give the preference to 'social peace,' though it be only apparent, because our lives and possessions seem then secure. Actually, human beings acquiesce too easily in evil conditions; they rebel far too little and too seldom. There is nothing noble about acquiescence in a cramped life or mere submission to superior force."
-A. J. Muste-
"There exist in the world only two great parties; that of those who prefer to live from the produce of their labor or of their property, and that of those who prefer to live on the labor or the property of others."
-Charles Dunoyer-
(1786-1862)
"Notice how some people even try to put socialists on the 'left' and fascists on the 'right' ... and then trap you into accepting the bizarre and evil notion that freedom is somehow a 'compromise' between, or a combination of, two allegedly 'opposite' collectivist extremes. This, of course, is absurd on its face, and actually leaves limited-government advocacy and the essence of freedom totally off the chart out of the picture."
-Rick Gaber-
"Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day."
-Theodore Roosevelt-
(1858-1919) 26th US President
April 19, 1906
"In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification."
-George Orwell-
[Eric Arthur Blair] (1903-1950) British author
Source: Politics and the English Language, 1946
"Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910)
Source: The Mysterious Stranger, 1916, Ch.9
"What chiefly distinguishes the daily press is its incurable fear of ideas, its constant effort to evade the discussion of fundamentals by translating all issues into a few elemental fears, its incessant reduction of all reflection to mere emotion."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"The worst that can happen under monarchy is rule by a single imbecile, but democracy often means the rule by an assembly of three or four hundred imbeciles."
-Robert Anton Wilson-
"Freedom is not merely the opportunity to do as one pleases; neither is it merely the opportunity to choose between set alternatives. Freedom is, first of all, the chance to formulate the available choices, to argue over them -- and then, the opportunity to choose."
-C. Wright Mills-
(1916-1962)
"Even more significant of the inherent weakness of the collectivist theories is the extraordinary paradox that from the assertion that society is in some sense more than merely the aggregate of all individuals their adherents regularly pass by a sort of intellectual somersault to the thesis that in order that the coherence of this larger entity be safeguarded it must be subjected to conscious control, that is, to the control of what in the last resort must be an individual mind. It thus comes about that in practice it is regularly the theoretical collectivist who extols individual reason and demands that all forces of society be made subject to the direction of a single mastermind, while it is the individualist who recognizes the limitations of the powers of individual reason and consequently advocates freedom as a means for the fullest development of the powers of the interindividual process."
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
"The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"Do not blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who have so enthusiastically acclaimed and adored him and rejoiced in their loss of freedom and danced in his path and given him triumphal processions. Blame the people who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of the new wonderful good society which shall now be Rome's, interpreted to mean more money, more ease, more security, and more living fatly at the expense of the industrious."
-Marcus Tullius Cicero-
(106-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman
"Government is instituted to protect property of every sort. ... This being the end of government, that alone is a just government, which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Essay entitled Property, published March 27, 1792 in the NATIONAL GAZETTE, and
reprinted in THE PAPERS OF JAMES MADISON, Vol. 14, p. 266 (University of Virginia Press 1982).
"We are Socialists, we are enemies of the capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with it's unfair salaries, with it's unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions."
-Adolf Hitler
(1889-1945) German Nazi Dictator
May 1 1927
"In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
"The more laws and restrictions there are, the poorer people become."
-Lao-Tzu-
[Li Erh] (570-490 BC) 'Old Sage', Father of Taoism
Source: Tao Te Ching
"During the time of the Soviet Union the role of the state in economy was made absolute, which eventually lead to the total non-competitiveness of the economy. That lesson cost us very dearly. I am sure nobody would want history to repeat itself.
We should also be aware that for during the last months, we have been witnessing the washout of the entrepreneurship spirit. That includes the principle of the personal responsibility -- of a businessman, an investor or a share-holder -- for his or her own decisions. There are no grounds to suggest that by putting the responsibility over to the state, one can achieve better results.
Another thing -- handling crisis must not turn into financial populism, into rejecting a responsible macro-economic policy. Unreasonable expansion of the budget deficit, accumulation of the national debt -- are as destructive as an adventurous stock market game."
-Vladimir Putin-
Source: Key-note speech, Davos World Economic Forum, 28 January, 2009
"There's a difference between us. You think the people of this country exist to provide you with position. I think your position exists to provide those people with freedom. And I go to make sure that they have it."
-William Wallace-
Braveheart
"Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought."
-Graham Greene-
(1904-1991)
"As the death toll mounts -- as many as 25 million in the former Soviet Union, 65 million in China, 1.7 million in Cambodia, and on and on -- the authors systematically show how and why, wherever the millenarian ideology of Communism was established, it quickly led to crime, terror, and repression. An extraordinary accounting, this book amply documents the unparalleled position and significance of Communism in the hierarchy of violence that is the history of the twentieth century."
-Harvard University Press-
Source: Harvard University Press' review of The Black Book of Communism (1999)
"Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on 'I am not too sure.' "
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes...known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.… No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Political Observations, 1795
"This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer. "
-Will Rogers-
"But to ban guns because criminals use them is to tell the innocent and law-abiding that their rights and liberties depend not on their own conduct, but on the conduct of the guilty and the lawless, and that the law will permit them to have only such rights and liberties as the lawless will allow. ... For society does not control crime, ever, by forcing the law-abiding to accommodate themselves to the expected behavior of criminals. Society controls crime by forcing the criminals to accommodate themselves to the expected behavior of the law-abiding."
-Jeff Snyder-
Source: "Who's Under Assault in the 'Assault Weapon' Ban?", American Rifleman, October 1994, p. 53; excerpted from the Washington Times, August 25, 1994
"Riding a bike is 113 times more dangerous than hunting with all those 'gun nuts'! The NSC [National Safety Council] reports that out of 100,000 bicyclists 905 had injuries requiring hospital treatment. Out of the same number of fisherman, 141 required treatment and out of 100,000 golfers 104 were injured. Please compare that to the 8 hunters out of 100,000 who were injured in 1991 (last year for data)."
-The Proponent-
Source: Proud Hunters, The Proponent, December, 1995, P. 3.
"To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them."
-George Mason-
(1725-1792), drafted the Virgina Declaration of Rights, ally of James Madison and George Washington
Source: June 14, 1788, in the Virginia Convention on the ratification of the Constitution,
in_Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution,_
Jonathan Elliot, ed., v.3 p.380 (Philadelphia, 1836)
"The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head.
Put it in his hand and it's good-bye to the Bill of Rights."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"No kingdom can be secured otherwise than by arming the people. The possession of arms is the distinction between a freeman and a slave. He, who has nothing, and who himself belongs to another, must be defended by him, whose property he is, and needs no arms. But he, who thinks he is his own master, and has what he can call his own, ought to have arms to defend himself, and what he possesses; else he lives precariously, and at discretion."
-James Burgh-
(1714-1775) was an English Whig politician
Source: "Political Disquisitions: Or, an Enquiry into Public Errors, Defects, and Abuses" (London, 1774-1775)
"Conventional society has as its guiding, unspoken, maxim the censorious attitude: If we can't make the unconventional people act like us, the least we can do is make them miserable."
-Sydney Harris-
"I love agitation and investigation and glory in defending unpopular truth against popular error."
-James A. Garfield-
(1831-1881) 20th President of the United States (1881)
"Thus arbitrary power will have divided men of superior intelligence into two groups: the former will be seditious, the latter corrupt..."
-Benjamin Constant-
[Henri-Benjamin Constant de Rebecque] (1767-1830) Swiss-born thinker, writer and French politician.
Source: The Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation (1814), reprinted in Political Writings, translated and edited by Bancamaria Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 126. Later editions than the 1814 one had "despotism" instead of "abitrary power."
"Treaties do not confer powers not authorized by the Constitution."
-Reid v Covert, 354 US 1 (1957)-
"As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy."
-Abraham Lincoln-
and yet he would enslave entire states, and be their master...
“Socialized medicine is the keystone to the arch of the socialist state.”
-Vladimir Lenin-
Source: No record of Lenin speaking or writing this has been found. The quote first appeared in Lawrence Sullivan's 'The Case Against Socialized Medicine' (1948) and later appeared in a pamphlet circulated in huge quantities by the American Medical Association entitled 'The Voluntary Way is the American Way.'
“Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished ... The social psychologist of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for more than one generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen.”
-Johann Gottlieb Fichte-
(1762-1814) German philosopher, psychologist, considered the father of German nationalism
Source: Prussian University in Berlin, 1810, quoted by The Impact of Science on Society by Bertrand Russell, 1952
"If the public are bound to yield obedience to laws to which they cannot give their approbation, they are slaves to those who make such laws and enforce them."
-John Adams-
As Candidus, Boston Gazette, January 20, 1772
“Are we at last brought to such a humiliating and debasing degradation, that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own defence? Where is the difference between having our arms in our own possession and under our own direction, and having them under the management of Congress? If our defence be the real object of having those arms, in whose hands can they be trusted with more propriety, or equal safety to us, as in our own hands?”
-Patrick Henry-
June 9, 1788
"Any single man must judge for himself whether circumstances warrant obedience or resistance to the commands of the civil magistrate; we are all qualified, entitled, and morally obliged to evaluate the conduct of our rulers. This political judgment, moreover, is not simply or primarily a right, but like self-preservation, a duty to God. As such it is a judgment that men cannot part with according to the God of Nature. It is the first and foremost of our inalienable rights without which we can preserve no other."
-John Locke-
(1632-1704) English philosopher and political theorist. Considered the ideological progenitor of the American Revolution and who, by far, was the most often non-biblical writer quoted by the Founding Fathers of the USA.
"The attack on economics sprang rather from a dislike of the application of scientific methods to the investigation of social problems. The existence of a body of reasoning which prevented people from following their first impulsive reactions, and which compelled them to balance indirect effects, which could be seen only by exercising the intellect, against intense feeling caused by the direct observation of concrete suffering, then as now, occasioned intense resentment."
-FA Hayek-
(1933)
"[g]uard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are ruined."
-Patrick Henry-
A Speech to the Virginia Ratifying Convention, June 5, 1778
William Roper: "So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!"
Sir Thomas More: "Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?"
William Roper: "Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!"
Sir Thomas More: "Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!"
-'A Man for All Seasons'-
"It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished. But if innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, perhaps to die, then the citizen will say, 'whether I do good or whether I do evil is immaterial, for innocence itself is no protection,' and if such an idea as that were to take hold in the mind of the citizen that would be the end of security whatsoever."
-John Adams-
"That these are our grievances which we have thus laid before his majesty, with that freedom of language and sentiment which becomes a free people claiming their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate."
–Thomas Jefferson-
A Summary View of the Rights of British America, August, 1774
"If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace."
-Thomas Paine-
"The time is now near at hand which must probably determine whether Americans are to be freemen or slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their houses and farms are to be pillaged and destroyed, and themselves consigned to a state of wretchedness from which no human efforts will deliver them."
-George Washington-
"... as all history informs us, there has been in every State & Kingdom a constant kind of warfare between the governing & governed: the one striving to obtain more for its support, and the other to pay less. And this has alone occasioned great convulsions, actual civil wars, ending either in dethroning of the Princes, or enslaving of the people. Generally indeed the ruling power carries its point, the revenues of princes constantly increasing, and we see that they are never satisfied, but always in want of more. The more the people are discontented with the oppression of taxes; the greater need the prince has of money to distribute among his partisans and pay the troops that are to suppress all resistance, and enable him to plunder at pleasure. There is scarce a king in a hundred who would not, if he could, follow the example of Pharaoh, get first all the peoples money, then all their lands, and then make them and their children servants for ever."
-Benjamin Franklin-
"It is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth - and listen to the song of that siren, till she transforms us into beasts. Is this the part of wise men, engaged in a great and arduous struggle for liberty? Are we disposed to be of the number of those, who having eyes, see not, and having ears, hear not, the things which so nearly concern their temporal salvation? For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it might cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst, and to provide for it."
-Patrick Henry-
"Show me a young Conservative and I'll show you someone with no heart. Show me an old Liberal and I'll show you someone with no brains."
-Winston Churchill-
"The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them."
-Patrick Henry-
"Parliamentary government is simply a mild and disguised form of compulsion. We agree to try strength by counting heads instead of breaking heads, but the principle is exactly the same. ... The minority gives way not because it is convinced that it is wrong, but because it is convinced that it is a minority."
-James Fitzjames Stephen-
"So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men."
-Voltaire-
ODE TO THE WELFARE STATE
Democratic Dialogue
Father must I go to work?
No my lucky son,
We’re living now on Easy Street
On dough from Washington.
We’ve left it up to Uncle Sam
So don’t get exercised.
Nobody has to give a damn –
We’ve all been subsidized.
But if Sam treats us all so well
And feeds us milk and honey,
Please daddy, tell me what the hell
He’s going to use for money.
Don’t worry Bub, there’s not a hitch
In this here noble plan –
He simply soaks the filthy rich
And helps the common man.
But father, won’t there come a time
When they run out of cash
And we have left them not a dime
When things will go to smash?
My faith in you is shrinking, son,
You nosy little brat;
You do too much thinking, son,
To be a Democrat.
-Rep Clarence J. Brown-
R-Ohio
A poem put into the Congressional Record
NY Daily News, November 4, 1949, in response to a Harry S Truman speech.
"Violent resistance against the power of the state is the last resort of the minority in its effort to break loose from the oppression of the majority. ... The citizen must not be so narrowly circumscribed in his activities that, if he thinks differently from those in power, his only choice is either to perish or to destroy the machinery of state."
-Ludwig von Mises-
(1881-1973) Economist and social philosopher
Source: Liberalism. The Classical Tradition (1927), Fourth American Edition (Irvington-on-Hudson: Foundation for Economic Education, 1996), p. 59
"Let us render the tyrant no aid; let us not hold the light by which he can trace the footprints of our flying brother."
-Frederick Douglass-
[Frederick Baily] (1818-1895), escaped slave, Abolitionist, author, editor of the North Star and later the New National Era
Source: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself [1845] (Toronto: New American Library, 1968), p. 106
"Back in my teaching days, many years ago, one of the things I liked to ask the class to consider was this: Imagine a government agency with only two tasks: (1) building statues of Benedict Arnold and (2) providing life-saving medications to children. If this agency's budget were cut, what would it do?
The answer, of course, is that it would cut back on the medications for children. Why? Because that would be what was most likely to get the budget cuts restored. If they cut back on building statues of Benedict Arnold, people might ask why they were building statues of Benedict Arnold in the first place."
-Thomas Sowell-
"... in all countries where personal freedom is valued, however much each individual may rely on legal redress, the right of each to carry arms -- and these the best and the sharpest -- for his own protection in case of extremity, is a right of nature indelible and irrepressible, and the more it is sought to be repressed the more it will recur."
-James Paterson-
(1823-1894) English jurist, historian
Source: Commentaries on the Liberty of the Subject and the Laws of England Relating to the Security of the Person, (London, 1877), Vol. 1, p. 441; quoted in Joyce Malcolm, To Keep and Bear Arms. The Origins of an Anglo-American Right (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 169-170
"A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body."
-John Stuart Mill-
(1806-1873) English philosopher and economist
Source: On Liberty
"Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society... then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them... We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant."
-Karl R. Popper-
"It's the misfortune of all Countries,
that they sometimes lie under a unhappy necessity
to defend themselves by Arms
against the ambition of their Governors,
and to fight for what's their own.
If those in government are heedless of reason,
the people must patiently submit to Bondage,
or stand upon their own Defence;
which if they are enabled to do,
they shall never be put upon it,
but their Swords may grow rusty in their hands;
for that Nation is surest to live in Peace,
that is most capable of making War;
and a Man that hath a Sword by his side,
shall have least occasion to make use of it."
-John Trenchard-
(1662-1723)
Source: and Walter Moyle (1672-1721), "An Argument, shewing; that a standing Army is Inconsistent with a Free Government and Absolutely Destructive to the Constitution of the English Monarchy," (London, 1697)
"The tragedy of the police state is that it always regards all opposition as a crime, and there are no degrees."
-Lord Vansittart-
(1881-1957)
Source: Speech, 1947
"The state represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the state is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence."
-Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi-
(1869-1948)
"The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women..."
-Judge Learned Hand-
(1872-1961), Judge, U. S. Court of Appeals
Source: Speech, 21 May 1944
"If what is best in mankind, and what its progress depends on, manifests itself primarily in the individual and only secondarily in the mass, then our objectives should be to maintain such freedom as allows the individual to think and speak for himself."
-Louis J. Halle-
(1910-1998) Professor at the Graduate Institute of International Studies, Geneva; policy maker at U.S. Department of State
Source: The Ideological Imagination, 1972
"The type and formula of most schemes of philanthropy or humanitarianism is this: A and B put their heads together to decide what C shall be made to do for D. The radical vice of all these schemes, from a sociological point of view, is that C is not allowed a voice in the matter, and his position, character, and interests, as well as the ultimate effects on society through C's interests, are entirely overlooked. I call C the Forgotten Man."
-William Graham Sumner-
(1840-1910) American academic and professor at Yale College
Source: William Graham Sumner's Essay, "The Forgotten Man"
"The Government of the absolute majority instead of the Government of the people is but the Government of the strongest interests; and when not efficiently checked, it is the most tyrannical and oppressive that can be devised."
-John C. Calhoun-
"If you think there is freedom of the press in the United States, I tell you there is no freedom of the press... They come out with the cheap shot. The press should be ashamed of itself. They should come to both sides of the issue and hear both sides and let the American people make up their minds."
-Bill Moyers-
(1934- ) Journalist
Source: Columbia Journalism Review, March/April 1982
Umm... "Both" sides...?
"Social positivism only accepts duties, for all and towards all. Its constant social viewpoint cannot include any notion of rights, for such notion always rests on individuality. We are born under a load of obligations of every kind, to our predecessors, to our successors, to our contemporaries. These obligations then increase or accumulate, for it is some time before we can return any service. ... Any human right is therefore as absurd as immoral. Since there are no divine rights anymore, this concept must therefore disappear completely as related only to the preliminary regime and totally inconsistent with the final state where there are only duties based on functions."
-Auguste Comte-
[Isidore Marie Auguste François Xavier Comte] (1798-1857) French philosopher, was the founder of Positivism and Sociology
Source: Le catéchisme positiviste (1852), reproduit in Alain Laurent, L'Individu et ses ennemis (Paris: Hachette, 1987), pp. 255-256.
"Those who are convinced they have a monopoly on The Truth always feel that they are only saving the world when they slaughter the heretics."
-Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.-
(1888-1965)
"Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves."
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
"Countries are well cultivated, not as they are fertile, but as they are free."
-Charles de Montesquieu-
[Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat] (1689-1755) Baron de Montesquieu
"Government, as we know it, is the real enemy. It produces nothing except distortions of social life, through war, taxation, regulation, and the general redistribution of wealth and resources."
-Joe Sobran-
"'Need' now means wanting someone else's money.
'Greed' now means wanting to keep your own.
'Compassion' is when a politician arranges the transfer."
-Joe Sobran-
"We do not need more intellectual power, we need more moral power. We do not need more knowledge, we need more character. We do not need more government, we need more culture. We do not need more law, we need more religion. We do not need more of the things that are seen, we need more of the things that are unseen.... If the foundation is firm, the superstructure will stand."
-Calvin Coolidge-
(1873-1933), 30th US President
"So when any of the four pillars of government, are mainly shaken, or weakened (which are religion, justice, counsel, and treasure), men had need to pray for fair weather."
-Francis Bacon-
(1561-1626) Philosopher, British Lord Chancellor
"The very scientist who, in the service of the sinful king, was the brain behind the horror of the labyrinth, quite as readily can serve the purposes of freedom. But the hero-heart must be at hand. ... Centuries of husbandry, decades of diligent culling, the work of numerous hearts and hands, have gone into the hackling, sorting, and spinning of this tightly twisted yarn. Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us — the labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path, and where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world."
-Joseph Campbell-
"In 1913, exactly a century ago, the United States was a flourishing, economically advanced country. Its real output per capita was the world's highest. It produced a great abundance of agricultural products and was a leading exporter of cotton, wheat, and many other farm products. Yet it also had the world's largest industrial sector, producing as much manufactured output as France, Germany, and the United Kingdom combined. It brought forth new technological marvels almost daily, and its cities featured well paved and lighted streets, automobiles, modern sewerage and water-supply systems, central electrical-supply systems, skyscrapers, street cars, subways, and frequent intercity train service. During the preceding fifty years, its real income per capita had grown by about 2 percent per year, on average, and its total real output by about 4 percent per year, on average. All races, classes, and regions participated in this progress. In 1913, the rate of unemployment was 4.3 percent, and the price level was roughly the same as its average during the nineteenth century.
Yet the United States in 1913 had no federal income tax, no central bank, no social security taxes, no general sales taxes, no Securities and Exchange Commission, no Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, no Department of Health and Human Services, no National Labor Relations Board, no federal this, that, and the other as far as the eye can see."
-Robert Higgs-
with a look at life in the United States before the institution of the Federal Reserve and the income tax. Needless to say, it's pretty much been downhill ever since.
"All religions united with government are more or less inimical to liberty. All, separated from government, are compatible with liberty."
-Henry Clay-
(1777-1852) U. S. Senator, Speaker of the House of Representatives
Source: Speech, 24 March 1818
"Freedom of religion means the right of the individual to choose and to adhere to whichever religious beliefs he may prefer, to join with others in religious associations to express these beliefs, and to incur no civil disabilities because of his choice..."
-Joseph L. Blau-
(1909-1986) Professor Emeritus of Religion, Columbia University
Source: Cornerstones of Religious Freedom in America 1949, quoted from Menendez and Doerr, The Great Quotations on Religious Freedom
"It is in our lives and not our words that our religion must be read."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"When I shall learn that in France the citizen, by whatever description he is qualified, is in a perfect state of legal security with regard to his life, to his property, to the uncontrolled disposal of his person, to the free use of his industry, and his faculties; that he is protected in the beneficial enjoyment of the estates to which, by the course of settled law, he was born, or is provided with a fair compensation for them; that he is maintained in the full fruition of the advantages belonging to the state and condition of life in which he had lawfully engaged himself, or is supplied with an equitable equivalent; when I am assured that a simple citizen may decently express his sentiments upon public affairs without hazard to his life or liberty, even though against a predominant and fashionable opinion; when I know all this of France, I shall be as well pleased"
-Edmund Burke-
"Blandishments will not fascinate us, nor will threats of a 'halter' intimidate. For, under God, we are determined that wheresoever, whensoever, or howsoever we shall be called to make our exit, we will die free men."
-Josiah Quincy-
"To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonoured. That is government; that is it's justice; that is it's morality."
-Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
(1809-1865) French mutualist political philosopher
Source: The General Idea of the Revolution in the 19th Century, 1851
"Men naturally rebel against the injustice of which they are victims. Thus, when plunder is organized by law for the profit of those who make the law, all the plundered classes try somehow to enter -- by peaceful or revolutionary means -- into the making of laws. According to their degree of enlightenment, these plundered classes may propose one of two entirely different purposes when they attempt to attain political power: Either they may wish to stop lawful plunder, or they may wish to share in it."
-- Frederic Bastiat
(1801-1850) French economist, statesman, and author. He did most of his writing during the years just before -- and immediately following -- the French Revolution of February 1848
Source: "The Law" by Frederic Bastiat (1848)
"To tax the community for the advantage of a class is not protection, it is plunder."
-Benjamin Disraeli-
(1804-1881) Prime Minister of England, British statesman, novelist
"The natural effort of every individual to better his own condition is so powerful that it is alone, and without any assistance, not only capable of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity, but of surmounting a hundred impertinent obstructions with which the folly of human laws too often encumbers its operations."
-Adam Smith-
(1723-1790) Scottish philosopher and economist
"Congress will ever exercise their powers to levy as much money as the people can pay. They will not be restrained from direct taxes by the consideration that necessity does not require them."
-Melancton Smith-
(1744-1798) opponent of Alexander Hamilton during New York's ratifying convention
"I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Letter to William Ludlow, 1824
"A first grader should understand that his or her culture isn't a rational invention; that there are thousands of other cultures and they all work pretty well; that all cultures function on faith rather than truth; that there are lots of alternatives to our own society. Cultural relativity is defensible and attractive. It's also a source of hope. It means we don't have to continue this way if we don't like it."
-Kurt Vonnegut-
"When more of the people's sustenance is exacted through the form of taxation than is necessary to meet the just obligations of government, such exaction becomes ruthless extortion and a violation of the fundamental principles of a free government."
-Grover Cleveland-
(1837-1908) 22nd & 24th US President
Source: Second Annual Message, December 1886
"From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs."
-Karl Marx-
(1818-1883) Father of Communism, Author of the 'Communist Manifesto'
Source: The Criticism of the Gotha Program, 1875
"Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle."
-Franklin D. Roosevelt-
(1882-1945), 32nd US President
Source: Franklin D. Roosevelt: "Address at Worcester, Mass.," October 21, 1936
"I don't like the income tax. Every time we talk about these taxes we get around to the idea of 'from each according to his capacity and to each according to his needs'. That's socialism. It's written into the Communist Manifesto. Maybe we ought to see that every person who gets a tax return receives a copy of the Communist Manifesto with it so he can see what's happening to him."
-T. Coleman Andrews-
Commissioner of Internal Revenue
Source: May 25, 1956 in US. News & World Report
"We are all doubtless bound to contribute a certain portion of our income to the support of charitable and other useful public institutions. But it is a part of our duty also to apply our contributions in the most effectual way we can to secure this object. The question then is whether this will not be better done by each of us appropriating our whole contribution to the institutions within our reach, under our own eye, and over which we can exercise some useful control? Or would it be better that each should divide the sum he can spare among all the institutions of his State or the United States? Reason and the interest of these institutions themselves, certainly decide in favor of the former practice."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on the objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: 1792, in disapproval of Congress appropriating $15,000 to assist some French refugees
"To lay taxes to provide for the general welfare of the United States, that is to say, 'to lay taxes for the purpose of providing for the general welfare.' For the laying of taxes is the power, and the general welfare the purpose for which the power is to be exercised. They are not to lay taxes ad libitum for any purpose they please; but only to pay the debts or provide for the welfare of the Union."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"The war against illegal plunder has been fought since the beginning of the world. But how is... legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. Then abolish this law without delay ... If such a law is not abolished immediately it will spread, multiply and develop into a system."
-Frederic Bastiat-
(1801-1850) French economist, statesman, and author. He did most of his writing during the years just before -- and immediately following -- the French Revolution of February 1848
Source: "The Law" by Frederic Bastiat (1848)
"An unlimited power to tax involves, necessarily, a power to destroy;
because there is a limit beyond which no institution and no property can bear taxation."
-Justice John Marshall-
(1755-1835) US Supreme Court Chief Justice
"The root of the evil... lay not in corruption but in the system which bred it, the alliance between industrialists and politicians which produced benefits in the form of tariffs, public lands, and federal subsidies."
-Samuel P. Hays-
Source: The Response to Industrialism 1885-1914, p. 26, describing the view of E.L. Godkin, who founded the weekly Nation
"We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debt, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our calling and our creeds... [we will] have no time to think, no means of calling our miss-managers to account but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers... And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for [another ]... till the bulk of society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery... And the fore-horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Letter to Samuel Kercheval, Monticello, July 12, 1816
"Because of what appears to be a lawful command on the surface, many Citizens, because of their respect for what appears to be law, are cunningly coerced into waiving their rights due to ignorance."
-United States Supreme Court-
Source: US. v. Minker, 350 US 179 at 187
"Let me point this out now. Your income tax is 100 percent voluntary tax, and your liquor tax is 100 percent enforced tax. Now, the situation is as different as night and day. Consequently, your same rules just will not apply..."
-Dwight E. Avis-
former head of the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax Division of the IRS
Source: testifying before a House Ways and Means subcommittee in 1953
"Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes. Over and over again the Courts have said that there is nothing sinister in so arranging affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everyone does it, rich and poor alike and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands."
-Judge Learned Hand-
(1872-1961), Judge, U. S. Court of Appeals
Source: in the case of Gregory v. Helvering 69 F.2d 809, 810 (2d Cir. 1934), aff'd, 293 U.S. 465, 55 S.Ct. 266, 79 L.Ed. 596 (1935)
"No man - prince, peasant, pope - has all the light, who says else is a mountebank. I claim no private lien on truth, only a liberty to seek it, prove it in debate, and to be wrong a thousand times to reach a single rightness. It is that liberty they fear. They want us to be driven to God like sheep, not running to him like lovers, shouting joy!"
-Morris West-
"The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"To lay with one hand the power of government on the property of the citizen, and with the other to bestow it on favored individuals... is none the less robbery because it is... called taxation."
-United States Supreme Court-
Source: Loan Association v. Topeka (18__ )
"Legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of ways; hence, there are an infinite number of plans for organizing it: tariffs, protection, bonuses, subsidies, incentives, the progressive income tax, free education, the right to employment, the right to profit, the right to wages, the right to relief, the right to the tools of production, interest free credit, etc., etc. And in the aggregate of all these plans, in respect to what they have in common, legal plunder, that goes under the name of socialism."
-Frederic Bastiat-
(1801-1850) French economist, statesman, and author. He did most of his writing during the years just before -- and immediately following -- the French Revolution of February 1848
Source: Essays, 61
"Moral Action is that great and only Experiment, in which all riddles of the most manifold appearances explain themselves. Whoso understands it, and in rigid sequence of Thought can lay it open, is forever master of Nature."
-Novalis-
"It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning."
-Henry Ford-
(1863-1947) Founder of Ford Motor Company
"Our federal tax system is, in short, utterly impossible, utterly unjust and completely counterproductive, [it] reeks with injustice and is fundamentally un-American... it has earned a rebellion and it's time we rebelled."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
Source: May 1983, Williamsburg, VA
"... [the 16th Amendment] conferred no new power of taxation... [and]... prohibited the ... power of income taxation possessed by Congress from the beginning from being taken out of the category of indirect taxation to which it inherently belonged..."
-United States Supreme Court-
Source: Stanton v. Baltic Mining (1916)
"If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order, he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible. He will therefore have to use what knowledge he can achieve, not to shape the results as the craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather to cultivate a growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner in which the gardener does this for his plants."
-Friedrich Hayek-
"I know, both by reason and by experience, that if you ever need a gun, whether in Katmandu or Los Angeles, at that moment you will have never needed anything so badly in your life."
-Carmine Sarracino-
American author, poet, professor
Source: American Guardian, p. 40, September, 1998
"[A] public policy of simply discouraging people from owning or using firearms is not, in and of itself, a constitutionally permissible objective, any more than discouraging people from religious observance would be permissible to some oh-so-progressive government that considered religion as hopelessly declassé as progressives nowadays consider the right to keep and bear arms .... And any statute or regulation that burdens the right to keep and bear arms on the ground that guns are a public health hazard should enjoy the same frosty reception in court that would be given a statute or regulation that burdened the free exercise of religion as a mental hazard."
-Daniel D. Polsby-
(1945-) Dean of the Law School and Professor of Law at George Mason University
Source: Treating the Second Amendment Like Normal Constitutional Law, REASON, March 1996, at 36.
"Tell the American people never to lose their guns. As long as they keep their guns in their hands, whatever happened here [China] will never happen there."
-Donald S. MacAlvaney-
American writer, editor of The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor
Source: quoting a female student from Beijing Red China repeating her parents last words to her, Toward A New World Order, 44 (2nd ed. 1992).
"The object of this clause [the right of the people to keep and bear arms] is to secure a well-armed militia.... But a militia would be useless unless the citizens were enabled to exercise themselves in the use of warlike weapons. To preserve this privilege, and to secure to the people the ability to oppose themselves in military force against the usurpations of government, as well as against enemies from without, that government is forbidden by any law or proceeding to invade or destroy the right to keep and bear arms."
-John Norton Pomeroy-
(1828-1885) American lawyer, legal writer
Source: An Introduction to the Constitutional Law of the United States 239, at 152 (New York, Hurd & Houghton 3d ed., rev. & enl. 1875).
"The only idea they have ever manifested as to what is a government of consent, is this -- that it is one to which everybody must consent, or be shot."
-Lysander Spooner-
(1808-1887) Political theorist, activist, abolitionist
"The monetary managers are fond of telling us that they have substituted 'responsible money management' for the gold standard. But there is no historic record of responsible paper money management ... The record taken as a whole is one of hyperinflation, devaluation and monetary chaos."
-Henry Hazlitt-
"Governments, whatever their pretensions otherwise, try to preserve themselves by holding the individual down ... Government itself, indeed, may be reasonably defined as a conspiracy against him. Its one permanent aim, whatever its form, is to hobble him sufficiently to maintain itself."
-H. L. Mencken-
"We are taxed in our bread and our wine, in our incomes and our investments, on our land and on our property not only for base creatures who do not deserve the name of men, but for foreign nations, complaisant nations who will bow to us and accept our largesse and promise us to assist in the keeping of the peace - these mendicant nations who will destroy us when we show a moment of weakness or our treasury is bare, and surely it is becoming bare! We are taxed to maintain legions on their soil, in the name of law and order and the Pax Romana, a document which will fall into dust when it pleases our allies and our vassals. We keep them in precarious balance only with our gold. Is the heartblood of our nation worth these? Were they bound to us with ties of love, they would not ask our gold. They take our very flesh, and they hate and despise us. And who shall say we are worthy of more? ... When a government becomes powerful it is destructive, extravagant and violent; it is an usurer which takes bread from innocent mouths and deprives honorable men of their substance, for votes with which to perpetuate itself."
-Marcus Tullius Cicero-
(106-43 B.C.) Roman Statesman, Philosopher and Orator
54 B.C.
"One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny, and is likely to interfere with happiness in all kinds of ways."
-Bertrand Russell-
"Every law is a gun."
-Stefan Molyneux-
"The lust for power, for dominating others, inflames the heart more than any other passion."
-Cornelius Tacitus-
(55-117 A.D.)
Source: The Histories
"... ours is a sick profession marked by incompetence, lack of training, misconduct and bad manners. Ineptness, bungling, malpractice, and bad ethics can be observed in court houses all over this country every day ... these incompetents have a seeming unawareness of the fundamental ethics of the profession. ... the harsh truth is that ... we may well be on our way to a society, overrun by hordes of lawyers, hungry as locusts, and brigades of judges in numbers never before contemplated."
-Justice Warren E. Burger-
Chief Justice, U. S. Supreme Court
"Strange times are these in which we live when old and young are taught in falsehood's school. And the one man who dares to tell the truth is called at once a lunatic and fool."
-Plato-
(429-347 BC)
"A stupid man's report of what a clever man says is never accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something that he can understand."
-Bertrand Russell-
"Socialism is not in the least what it pretends to be. It is not the pioneer of a better and finer world, but the spoiler of what thousands of years of civilization have created. It does not build, it destroys. For destruction is the essence of it. It produces nothing, it only consumes what the social order based on private ownership in the means of production has created."
-Ludwig von Mises-
(1881-1973) Economist and social philosopher
Source: "Socialism", 1922
"When all government, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the Center of all Power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: (1821) in a letter to Gideon Granger.
"The value of paper money is precisely the value of a politician's promise, as high or low as you put that; the value of gold is protected by the inability of politicians to manufacture it."
-Sir William Rees-Mogg-
"Freedom is the only worthy goal in life. It is won by disregarding things that lie beyond our control ... stop aspiring to be anyone other than your own best self: for that does fall within your control."
–Epictetus-
"[Y]ou will understand the game behind the curtain too well not to perceive the old trick of turning every contingency into a resource for accumulating force in the government."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: letter to Thomas Jefferson, March 14, 1794
'Never let a crisis go to waste...?'
"The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau. What an alluring utopia! What a noble cause to fight!"
-Ludwig von Mises-
(1881-1973) Economist and social philosopher
"It's ours to right the great wrong done,
Ten thousand years ago --
The State, conceived in blood and hate,
Remains our only foe!
Oh, join us, brothers, join us, sisters,
Victory is nigh!
Come meet your fate, destroy the State,
And raise black banners high!"
-Murray N. Rothbard-
(1926-1995) Dean of the Austrian School of Economics
"Reason obeys itself; and ignorance does whatever is dictated to it."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
Source: Rights of Man
"Government is instituted for the common good; for the protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness of the people; and not for profit, honor, or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men; therefore, the people alone have an incontestable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to institute government; and to reform, alter, or totally change the same, when their protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness require it."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804)
Source: Federalist No. 22, December 14, 1787
"Our legislators are not sufficiently appraised of the rightful limits of their power; that their true office is to declare and enforce our natural rights and duties, and to take none of them from us. No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another; and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him; every man is under the natural duty of contributing to the necessities of the society; and this is all the laws should enforce on him; and, no man having the right to be the judge between himself and another, it is his natural duty to submit to the umpirage of an impartial third [party]. When the laws have declared and enforced all this, they have fulfilled their functions; and the idea is quite unfounded, that on entering into society we give up any natural right."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: letter to Francis W. Gilmer, June 7, 1816
"The demand that defective people be prevented from propagating equally defective offspring... represents the most humane act of mankind."
-Adolf Hitler-
(1889-1945) German Nazi Dictator
Source: Mein Kampf
"Be it or be it not true that Man is shapen in iniquity and conceived in sin, it is unquestionably true that Government is begotten of aggression, and by aggression."
-Herbert Spencer-
(1820-1903) British author, economist, philosopher
1850
"[The Income Tax is] a vicious, inequitable, unpopular, impolitic and socialist act."
-New York Times-
1894
"Tax reform is taking the taxes off thingsthat have been taxed in the past and putting taxes on things that haven't been taxed before."
-Art Buchwald-
(1925-2006) American Humorist and Columnist
"If the major opportunities for future growth of government lie in the area of conventional taxation, are there any defenses available to the citizenry? ... Perhaps the most fruitful advice comes in two parts. The first piece of advice is to avoid war and the rumor of war: this is history's greatest boon to the tax man. ... The second piece of advice is to seek ways of inhibiting government's ability conveniently to increase its collections. Possibly the very increase in that ability that is in prospect can be turned to account by a constitutional provision which forbade the income tax, and perhaps even the storage of information regarding individual incomes by third parties, including government."
-Benjamin Ward-
(1926-2002) first black New York City Police Commissioner
Source: "Taxes and the Size of Government," American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings, Vol. 72, No. 2 (May 1982), p. 350.
"Three groups spend other people's money: children, thieves, politicians. All three need supervision."
-Dick Armey-
(1940- ) U.S. Congressman, TX-R
"After the 16th Amendment was ratified, an income tax was imposed starting in 1913 with rates ranging from 1 percent to 7 percent with the top rate applying only to incomes in excess of $500,000. By 1916 that top rate had risen to 15 percent, on income in excess of $2,000,000. The top rate exceeded 90 percent at its peak in the early 1950s. The first 1040 form -- instructions and all -- took up only four pages. Today there are some 4,000 pages of tax forms and instructions. American workers and business are forced to spend more than 5.4 billion man-hours every year figuring out their taxes. Since those hours could be put to a more productive use, and almost surely would be in the absence of today’s incomprehensible tax code, the result is a large dead-weight output loss of some $200 billion each year. ... The IRS now has more enforcement personnel than the EPA, BATF, OSHA, FDA, and DEA combined. With its 115,000-man workforce, it has the power to search the property and financial documents of American citizens without a search warrant and to seize property from American citizens without a trial. It routinely does both. Economist James L. Payne has written a most revealing analysis of the IRS, a 1993 book entitled Costly Returns. He arrives at a stunning conclusion, the total cost to collect our federal taxes, including the effects on the economy as a whole adds up to an amazing 65 percent of all the tax dollars received annually. The U.S. tax system, says Payne, has produced hundreds of thousands of victims of erroneous IRS penalties, liens, levies, and tax advice. In answering taxpayer questions, for example, the IRS telephone information service has in previous years given about one-third of all callers -- as many as 8.5 million Americans -- the wrong answers to their questions. A 1987 General Accounting Office study found that 47 percent of a random sample of IRS correspondence -- including demands for payments -- contained errors. Incredibly a GAO audit of the IRS in 1993 found widespread evidence of financial malfeasance and gross negligence at the agency. The IRS could not account for 64 percent of its congressional appropriation!"
-Dr. Lawrence W. Reed-
(1953-) President of the Foundation for Economic Education
Source: Taxes and Tyranny, THE UNREPORTED NEWS, August 27, 1995.
"At what exact point, then should one resist the communists? ... How we burned in the prison camps later thinking: what would things have been like if every security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if during periods of mass arrests people had simply not sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand. ... The Organs [police] would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers ... and notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt."
-Alexander Solzhenitsyn-
(1918-2008) Russian novelist, Soviet dissident, imprisoned for 8 years for critizing Stalin in a personal letter, Nobel Prize for Literature, 1970
Source: Gulag Archipelago
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
–Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn-
“Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners.”
-Edward Abbey-
"People go funny in the head when talking about politics. The evolutionary reasons for this are so obvious as to be worth belaboring: In the ancestral environment, politics was a matter of life and death. And sex, and wealth, and allies, and reputation... When, today, you get into an argument about whether "we" ought to raise the minimum wage, you're executing adaptations for an ancestral environment where being on the wrong side of the argument could get you killed... Politics is an extension of war by other means. Arguments are soldiers. Once you know which side you're on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side; otherwise it's like stabbing your soldiers in the back - providing aid and comfort to the enemy."
-Eliezer Yudkowsky-
"Americans think their danger is terrorists. They don't understand the terrorists cannot take away habeas corpus, the Bill of Rights, the Constitution.... The terrorists are not anything like the threat we face from our own government in the name of fighting terrorism.... The American constitutional system is near to being overthrown."
-Paul Craig Roberts-
"That this privilege of giving or of withholding our monies is an important barrier against the undue exertion of prerogative, which if left altogether without control may be exercised to our great oppression; and all history shews how efficacious is its intercession for redress of grievances and re-establishment of rights, and how improvident would be the surrender of so powerful a mediator"
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Reply to Lord North's Conciliatory Proposition, July 25, 1775. Papers 1:225
"The collection of taxes which are not absolutely required, which do not beyond reasonable doubt contribute to the public welfare, is only a species of legalized larceny. The wise and correct course to follow in taxation is not to destroy those who have already secured success, but to create conditions under which everyone will have a better chance to be successful."
-Calvin Coolidge-
(1873-1933), 30th US President
"A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.”
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Speech, Constitutional Convention (1787-06-29), from Max Farrand's Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, vol. I[1] (1911), p. 465
"A Union founded on consent can never be cemented by force. This is the testimony of the Fathers."
-Congressman Clement L. Vallandigham (D-Ohio)-
August 2, 1862
"The very word 'secrecy' is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it."
-John F. Kennedy-
"Shame on the men who can court exemption from present trouble and expense at the price of their own posterity's liberty!"
-Samuel Adams-
(1722-1803), was known as the "Father of the American Revolution."
Source: writing as "Candidus," February 3, 1776
"Standing armies consist of professional soldiers who owe their livelihood and income to the government. Unlike civilians who render periodic service in local militia, professional soldiers do not own property and therefore do not have any source of income other than the government’s military paymaster. Thus, they are more likely to serve the government’s interests, regardless of whether its leaders are dishonest and corrupt or not. In fact, standing armies may even promote rapacious foreign or domestic policies if such policies enrich the army. In contrast, arms bearing, property owning citizen militiamen have a stake in the health of the republic as a whole and can be trusted to act in the republic’s best interests, whether those interests call for action in support of or against the political leadership of the nation."
-Anthony J. Dennis-
Officer and lawyer for Aetna Life and Casualty Company, author, B.A. cum laude from Tufts University; J.D. from Northwestern University School of Law
Source: Article: Clearing the Smoke from the right to Bear Arms and the Second Amendment, 29 AKRON L. REV. 57, 76-77 (Fall 1995).
"Is it not proven beyond all dispute that there is no limit to the enormities which men will commit when they are once persuaded that they are keepers of other men's consciences? To spread religion by any means, and to crush heresy by all means is the practical inference from the doctrine that one man may control another's religion. Given the duty of a state to foster some one form of faith, and by the sure inductions of our nature slowly but certainly persecution will occur. To prevent for ever the possibility of Papists roasting Protestants, Anglicans hanging Romish priests, and Puritans flogging Quakers, let every form of state-churchism be utterly abolished, and the remembrance of the long curse which it has cast upon the world be blotted out for ever."
-Charles Spurgeon-
"Do you wish to know when that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by Compulsion -- when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing -- when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors -- when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you -- when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming self-sacrifice -- you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
Source: Atlas Shrugged, P. 385 (1957)
"We have depended on government for so much for so long that we as people have become less vigilant of our liberties. As long as the government provides largesse for the majority, the special interest lobbyists will succeed in continuing the redistribution of welfare programs that occupies most of Congress's legislative time."
-Dr. Ron Paul-
(1935-) American physician, US Congressman (R-TX), US Presidential candidate
Source: Sept 17, 1997 speech to Congress
"[T]here are, at bottom, basically two ways to order social affairs, Coercively, through the mechanisms of the state -- what we can call political society. And voluntarily, through the private interaction of individuals and associations -- what we can call civil society. ... In a civil society, you make the decision. In a political society, someone else does. ... Civil society is based on reason, eloquence, and persuasion, which is to say voluntarism. Political society, on the other hand, is based on force."
-Edward H. Crane-
Founder and president of the Cato Institute
"An individual should not have too much freedom. A nation should have absolute freedom."
-Sun Yat-sen-
(1866-1925) Chinese revolutionary, first president and founding father of the Republic of China ("Nationalist China")
"I believe the States can best govern our home concerns, and the General Government our foreign ones. I wish, therefore, to see maintained that wholesome distribution of powers established by the constitution for the limitation of both; and never to see all offices transferred to Washington, where, further withdrawn from the eyes of the people, they may more secretly be bought and sold as at market."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: letter to Judge William Johnson, June 12, 1823
"Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one."
-Thomas Paine-
"The relative freedom which we enjoy depends of public opinion. The law is no protection. Governments make laws, but whether they are carried out, and how the police behave, depends on the general temper in the country. If large numbers of people are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it; if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them."
-George Orwell-
"Collectivism is a doctrine that holds that the individual has no rights, and the ultimate standard of value is the group to which 'he belongs.' Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage—the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors. Racism claims that the content of a man’s mind (not his cognitive apparatus, but its content) is inherited; that a man’s convictions, values and character are determined before he is born, by physical factors beyond his control. This is the caveman’s version of the doctrine of innate ideas -- or of inherited knowledge -- which has been thoroughly refuted by philosophy and science. Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes. It is a barnyard or stock-farm version of collectivism, appropriate to a mentality that differentiates between various breeds of animals, but not between animals and men. Like every form of determinism, racism invalidates the specific attribute which distinguishes man from all other living species: his rational faculty. Racism negates two aspects of man’s life: reason and choice, or mind and morality, replacing them with chemical predestination."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
Source: Racism, The Virtue of Selfishness, 126
"So long as you are a slave to the opinions of the many you have not yet approached freedom or tasted its nectar ... But I do not mean by this that we ought to be shameless before all men and to do what we ought not; but all that we refrain from and all that we do, let us not do or refrain from merely because it seems to the multitude somehow honorable or base, but because it is forbidden by reason and the god within us."
-Julian-
"An elective despotism was not the government we fought for, but one which should not only be founded on true free principles, but in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among general bodies of magistracy, as that no one could transcend their legal limits without being effectually checked and restrained by the others."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"What is strong wins: that is the universal law. If only it were not so often what is stupid and evil!"
-Nietzsche-
Notes (1873)
"When you run in debt; you give to another power over your liberty."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
"Avoid occasions of expense ... and avoid likewise the accumulation of debt not only by shunning occasions of expense but by vigorous exertions to discharge the debts, not throwing upon posterity the burden which we ourselves ought to bear."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
"Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed; everything else is public relations."
-George Orwell-
"The theory of natural monopoly is an economic fiction. No such thing as a 'natural' monopoly has ever existed. The history of the so-called public utility concept is that the late 19th and early 20th-century 'utilities' competed vigorously, and like all other industries, they did not like competition. They first secured government-sanctioned monopolies, and then, with the help of a few influential economists, they constructed an ex post facto rationalization for their monopoly power. ... The theory of natural monopoly is a 19th-century economic fiction that defends 19th-century (or 18th-century, in the case of the U.S. Postal Service) monopolistic privileges and has no useful place in the 21st-century American economy."
-Thomas J. DiLorenzo-
Source: June 14, 1995 at the CATO Institute conference examining the question Postal Service in the 21st Century: Time to Privatize?
"You say that I have been dished up to you as an anti-federalist, and ask me if it be just. My opinion was never worthy enough of notice to merit citing; but since you ask it, I will tell it to you. I am not a federalist. What I disapproved from the first moment also, was the want of a bill of rights, to guard liberty against the legislative as well as the executive branches of the government; that is to say, to secure freedom in religion, freedom of the press, freedom from monopolies, freedom from unlawful imprisonment, freedom from a permanent military, and a trial by jury, in all cases determinable by the laws of the land."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: March 13th 1789, Jefferson letter to Francis Hopkinson
"To the size of the state there is a limit, as there is to plants, animals and implements, for none of these retain their facility when they are too large."
-Aristotle-
(384-322 BC) Greek philosopher
"But the indissoluble link of union between the people of the several States of this confederated nation is, after all, not in the RIGHT, but in the HEART. If the day should ever come (may Heaven avert it!) when the affections of the people of these States shall be alienated from each other, when the fraternal spirit shall give way to cold indifference, or collision of interests shall fester into hatred, the bonds of political association - will not long hold together parties no longer attracted by the magnetism of conciliated interests and kindly sympathies; and far better will it be for the people of the disunited States to part in friendship with each other than to be held together by constraint. Then will be the time for reverting to the precedents which occurred at the formation and adoption of the Constitution, to form again a more perfect Union, by dissolving that which could no longer bind, and to leave the separated parts to be reunited by the law of political gravitation to the center."
-John Quincy Adams-
(1767-1848) 6th US President
Source: in his discourse before the New York Historical Society, in 1839
"It has been thought a considerable advance towards establishing the principles of Freedom, to say, that government is a compact between those who govern and those that are governed: but this cannot be true, because it is putting the effect before the cause; for as man must have existed before governments existed, there necessarily was a time when governments did not exist, and consequently there could originally exist no governors to form such a compact with. The fact therefore must be, that the individuals themselves, each in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a compact with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
"We must, therefore, emphasize that 'we' are not the government; the government is not 'us.' The government does not in any accurate sense 'represent' the majority of the people. But, even if it did, even if 70 percent of the people decided to murder the remaining 30 percent, this would still be murder and would not be voluntary suicide on the part of the slaughtered minority. No organicist metaphor, no irrelevant bromide that 'we are all part of one another,' must be permitted to obscure this basic fact."
-Murray N. Rothbard-
(1926-1995) Dean of the Austrian School of Economics
Source: Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays (Auburn: Mises Institute, 2000 [1974]), pp. 55-88.
"Freedom had been hunted round the globe; reason was considered as rebellion; and the slavery of fear had made men afraid to think. But such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing."
-Thomas Paine-
"The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion."
-Albert Camus-
"Liberty is not collective, it is personal. All liberty is individual liberty."
-Calvin Coolidge-
(1873-1933), 30th US President
Source: Speech, 1924
“A national government is a government of the people of a single state or nation, united as a community by what is termed the 'social compact,’ and possessing complete and perfect supremacy over persons and things, so far as they can be made the lawful objects of civil government. A federal government is distinguished from a national government by its being the government of a community of independent and sovereign states, united by compact."
-Black's Law Dictionary-
Source: Piqua Branch Bank v. Knoup, 6 Ohio St. 393. [Black's Law Dictionary, Revised Fourth Edition, 1968, p. 1176]
"Freedom is the emancipation from the arbitrary rule of other men."
-Mortimer Adler-
(1902-2001)
"There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him."
-Frederick Douglass-
1852 speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”
"The most important thing to do in your life is to not interfere with somebody else's life."
-Frank Zappa-
on The Howard Stern Show, 1987
"All men by nature are equal in that equal right that every man hath to his natural freedom, without being subjected to the will or authority of any other man; being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions."
-John Locke-
(1632-1704) English philosopher and political theorist. Considered the ideological progenitor of the American Revolution and who, by far, was the most often non-biblical writer quoted by the Founding Fathers of the USA.
Source: Second Treatise on Government (Chapter 2) 1698
"A rational anarchist believes that concepts such as 'state' and 'society' and 'government' have no existence save as physically exemplified in the acts of self-responsible individuals. He believes that it is impossible to shift blame, share blame, distribute blame ... as blame, guilt, responsibility are matters taking place inside human beings singly and nowhere else. But being rational, he knows that not all individuals hold his evaluations, so he tries to live perfectly in an imperfect world ... aware that his effort will be less than perfect yet undismayed by self-knowledge of self-failure."
-The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress-
"Fear can only prevail when victims are ignorant of the facts."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"You know what's evil about politics? It turns people into enemies when they should and would naturally be friends in a normal society. In the marketplace you are happy to cooperate with anyone to mutual betterment. But in politics, it's all about hating your neighbor. If a person who believes all of civilization rests on a Romney win would naturally and rightly regard all Obama voters as moral threats, wreckers of the good life itself. And the demographics of voting are rather predictable. You can often tell quickly how a person will or will not vote, by appearance alone. That creates prejudice, bias, and hate. So politics creates these stupid battles between people - for absolutely no reason - and wars against the brotherhood of man. It creates the divisions it pretends to heal."
-Jeffrey A. Tucker-
"When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, "This you may not read, this you may not see, this you are forbidden to know," the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything -- you can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him."
-Robert A. Heinlein-
(1907-1988) American writer
"There can be no socialism without a state, and as long as there is a state, there is socialism. The state, then, is the very institution that puts socialism into action; and as socialism rests on aggressive violence directed against innocent victims, aggressive violence is the nature of any state."
-Hans-Hermann Hoppe-
Chapter VIII :The Socio-Psychological Foundations of Socialism or: The Theory of the State - A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism
"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is hard business. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself."
-Rudyard Kipling-
Arthur Gordon, "Interview with an Immortal", Reader’s Digest, 1935
"There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution."
-John Adams-
Letter to Jonathan Jackson (2 October 1780)
"Crime and politics, little girl. Situation is always... fluid."
-Badger-
"Certainly there are examples of countries where the people remain relatively free after the people have been disarmed, but there are no examples of a totalitarian state being created or existing where the people have personal arms."
-Neal Knox-
Source: quoted by Jeff Cooper in Jeff Cooper’s Commentaries, Vol. 4, No. 7.
"I don’t know why liberals want to disarm the law-abiding population, but I do know that not a single argument proffered stands the light of facts. Armed citizens deter far more crimes than the police, and far more lives are saved by the intended victim being armed than are lost in firearm accidents."
-Paul Craig Roberts
(1939- ) Economist, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration ("Father of Reaganomics"), former editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Scripps Howard News Service.
Source: Houston Chronicle, Sept. 13, 1993
"By a declaration of rights, I mean one which shall stipulate freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of commerce against monopolies, trial by juries in all cases, no suspensions of the habeas corpus, no standing armies. These are fetters against doing evil, which no honest government should decline."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Jefferson letter to Mr. A. Donald, on February 7th 1788
"An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life."
-Robert A. Heinlein-
(1907-1988) American writer
"There is no position which depends on clearer principles, than that every act of a delegated authority, contrary to the tenor of the commission under which it is exercised, is void. No legislative act, therefore, contrary to the Constitution, can be valid. To deny this, would be to affirm, that the deputy is greater than his principal; that the servant is above his master; that the representatives of the people are superior to the people themselves; that men acting by virtue of powers, may do not only what their powers do not authorize, but what they forbid."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804)
Source: The Federalist No. 78.
"The dignity and stability of government in all its branches, the morals of the people, and every blessing of society depend so much upon an upright and skillful administration of justice, that the judicial power ought to be distinct from both the legislative and executive, and independent upon both, that so it may be a check upon both, and both should be checks upon that."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: John Adams, Thoughts on Government, 1776
"Constitutions are checks upon the hasty action of the majority. They are the self-imposed restraints of a whole people upon a majority of them to secure sober action and a respect for the rights of the minority."
-William Howard Taft-
(1857-1930) 27th US President
Source: Veto Message, Arizona Enabling Act, 1911
"The right of a citizen to bear arms, in lawful defense of himself or the State, is absolute. He does not derive it from the State government. It is one of the 'high powers' delegated directly to the citizen, and 'is excepted out of the general powers of government.' A law cannot be passed to infringe upon or impair it, because it is above the law, and independent of the lawmaking power."
-Cockrum v. State-
24 Tex. 394 [1859]
"Do not be merciful, but be just, for mercy is bestowed upon the guilty criminal, while Justice is all that the innocent man requires."
-Khalil Gibran-
"Since it was first recognized in [the] Magna Carta, trial by jury has been a prized shield against oppression ...."
-U.S. Supreme Court-
Source: Glasser v. United States, 315 U.S. 60, 84 (1942)
"The common notion that free speech prevails in the United States always makes me laugh."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"There are many prices we pay for freedoms secured by the First Amendment; the risk of undue influence is one of them, confirming what we have long known: Freedom is hazardous, but some restraints are worse."
-Justice Warren E. Burger-
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
-Niels Bohr-
(1885-1962) Danish Physicist
"It is now well established that the Constitution protects the right to receive information and ideas. ... This right to receive information and ideas, regardless of their social worth, ... is fundamental to our free society."
-Thurgood Marshall-
(1908-1993) first Black US Supreme Court Justice
Source: Stanley v. Georgia, 1969
"The dilemma of the critic has always been that if he knows enough to speak with authority, he knows too much to speak with detachment."
-Raymond Chandler-
"The ruling class has the schools and press under its thumb. This enables it to sway the emotions of the masses."
-Albert Einstein-
(1879-1955) Physicist and Professor, Nobel Prize 1921
"In the highest antiquity, the people did not know that there were rulers. In the next age they loved them and praised them. In the next they feared them; in the next they despised them."
-Lao-Tzu-
[Li Erh] (570-490 BC) 'Old Sage', Father of Taoism
"One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in Kings, is that nature disapproves it, otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule, by giving mankind an ASS FOR A LION."
-Thomas Paine-
"My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs). The most improper job of any man is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity."
-J.R.R. Tolkien-
The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien
"Nay, all laws must fall, human societies that subsist by them be dissolved, and all innocent persons be exposed to the violence of the most wicked, if men might not justly defend themselves against injustice by their own natural right, when the ways prescribed by publick authority cannot be taken."
-Algernon Sidney-
(1622-1683) English statesman, writer, Whig leader
Source: Discourses Concerning Government 266-67 (1763)
"If oppression and wrong should gain the ascendancy, and injustice stalk abroad in the land, and all else fail him; nevertheless his humblest roof, and all things that are sheltered beneath it, would find, somehow, someway, a final refuge and protection in the Supreme Court of the United States."
-Edward J. Phelps-
(1822-1900) American diplomat, Envoy to Court of St. James's in Britain
"To vest a few fallible men -- prosecutors, judges, jurors -- with vast powers of literary or artistic censorship, to convert them into what J.S. Mill called the "moral police" is to make them despotic arbiters of literary products... If one day they ban mediocre books as obscene, another day they may do otherwise to a work of a genius. Originality, not too plentiful, should be cherished, not stifled. An author's imagination may be cramped if he must write with an eye on prosecutors or juries…"
-Jerome D. Frank-
(1889-1957)
Source: Second Circuit of Appeals, 1956
"No danger flowing from speech can be deemed clear and present unless the incidence of the evil apprehended is so imminent that it may befall before there is an opportunity for full discussion. Only an emergency can justify repression."
-Justice Louis D. Brandeis-
(1856-1941) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: Whitney v. California, 1927
"What is objectionable, what is dangerous about extremists is not that they are extreme, but that they are intolerant. The evil is not what they say about their cause, but what they say about their opponents."
-Robert F. Kennedy-
(1925-1968), US Senator, Attorney General
Source: The Pursuit of Justice, 1964
"The pages of history shine on instances of the jury's exercise of it's prerogative to disregard instructions of the judge."
-U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia-
Source: US v. Dougherty, 473 F 2nd 1113, 1139, (1972)
"The percentage of correct decisions which individuals make is very high when they are risking their own money and their own future. The percentage of correct decisions is very low when made by politicians, so-called intellectuals, and others, regardless of their intelligence, who are not faced with the discipline of having to pay for their own mistakes with their own earnings."
-A.W. Stewart-
"If the freedom of religion, guaranteed to us by law in theory, can ever rise in practice under the overbearing inquisition of public opinion, then and only then will truth, prevail over fanaticism."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living."
-R. Buckminster Fuller-
"Peace has other governments that don't go through the will of politicians."
-Mia Couto-
"Rain, the Dreamsend" (tr. Austen Hyde)
"If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that Government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable."
-Justice William J. Brennan-
(1906-1997) U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: 1989
"The function of the censor is to censor. He has a professional interest in finding things to suppress."
-Thomas I. Emerson-
(1907-1991) Lines Professor of Law, Yale University, author
Source: Law and Contemporary Problems (1955)
"The only valid censorship of ideas is the right of people not to listen."
-Tommy Smothers-
American Comedian
"Without some form of censorship, propaganda in the strict sense of the word is impossible. In order to conduct propaganda there must be some barrier between the public and the event."
-Walter Lippmann-
(1889-1974) American writer, journalist, and political commentator
Source: Public Opinion, 1922
And typically, this "noble gatekeeper" is the propagandist, in the form of the expressly prohibited censor, government...
"The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights, cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
"The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.... It makes no difference who you vote for -- the two parties are really one party representing four percent of the people."
-Gore Vidal-
"Government control gives rise to fraud, suppression of truth, intensification of the black market and to artificial scarcity. Above all, it unmans the people and deprives them of initiative, it undoes the teaching of self-help they have been learning for a generation. It makes them spoon-fed."
-Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi-
3rd November 1947, The Delhi Diary
“The really dangerous American fascist... is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power... They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective, toward which all their deceit is directed, is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection."
-Henry A. Wallace-
quoted in the New York Times, April 9, 1944
"Immoral means cannot bring moral ends, for the ends are pre-existent in the means... Destructive means cannot bring constructive ends, because the means represent the- ideal-in-the-making and the-end-in-progress. ...All this is saying that, in the final analysis, means and ends must cohere because the end is pre-existent in the means, and ultimately destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends."
-Martin Luther King, Jr.-
Strength to Love
"But with respect to future debt; would it not be wise and just for that nation to declare in the constitution they are forming that neither the legislature, nor the nation itself can validly contract more debt, than they may pay within their own age, or within the term of 19 years."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: letter to James Madison, 6 September 1789
"Divide and rule, the politician cries; unite and lead, is watchword of the wise."
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe-
"Government, in its very essence, is opposed to all increase in knowledge. Its tendency is always towards permanence and against
change...[T]he progress of humanity, far from being the result of government, has been made entirely without its aid and in the face if its constant and bitter opposition."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"Censorship is the mother of metaphor."
-Jorge Luis Borges-
(1899-1986), Argentine Poet
Source: Argentine Poet
"When you want to help people, you tell them the truth.
When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear."
-Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
Source: Conservative Chronicle, September 13, 1995
"The illegitimate use of a state by economic interests for their own ends is based upon a preexisting illegitimate power of the state to enrich some persons at the expense of others. Eliminate that illegitimate power of giving differential economic benefits and you eliminate or drastically restrict the motive for wanting political influence."
-Robert Nozick-
"Paradoxical as it may seem, men and women who are free to pursue individualism and material wealth turn out to be the most compassionate of all."
-Lawrence Lindsey-
Source: Financial Times, London, Nov 22, 2001
"The fact that most people think that being selfish means harming one's fellow man, that pursuing one's own self-interest equates to behaving brutally or irrationally, is, as Ms. Rand noted, a 'psychological confession' on their part. In fact it is against one's own long-term self-interest to behave irrationally or trample others. Such actions are the exact opposite of selfish -- they're self-destructive."
-Wayne Dunn-
American writer
Source: The Rational View
"INDIVIDUALISM: The term 'individualism' has a great variety of meanings in social and political philosophy. There are at least three types that can be distinguished: (1) ontological individualism, (2) methodological individualism, and (3) moral or political individualism. Ontological individualism is the doctrine that social reality consists, ultimately, only of persons who choose and act. Collectives, such as a social class, state, or a group, cannot act so they are not considered to have a reality independent of the actions of persons. Methodological individualists hold that the only genuinely scientific propositions in social science are those that can be reduced to the actions, dispositions, and decisions of individuals. Political or moral individualism is the theory that individuals should be left, as far as possible, to determine their own futures in economic and moral matters. Key thinkers include Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Robert Nozick, John Locke, and Herbert Spencer."
-Stephen Grabill-
Source: Stephen Grabill and Gregory M. A. Gronbacher
"Freedom is an intellectual achievement which requires disavowal of collectivism and embrace of individualism."
-Onkar Ghate-
Senior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute
"Individualism regards man -- every man -- as an independent, sovereign entity who possesses an inalienable right to his own life, a right derived from his nature as a rational being. Individualism holds that a civilized society, or any form of association, cooperation or peaceful co-existence among men, can be achieved only on the basis of the recognition of individual rights -- and that a group, as such, has no rights other than the individual rights of its members."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
"Politically, true individualism means recognizing that one has a right to his own life and happiness. But it also means uniting with other citizens to preserve and defend the institutions that protect that right."
-Shawn E. Klein
American professor of philosophy, author
Source: Community and American Individualism. A commentary from the Navigator Special: The Assault on Civilization, posted October 17, 2001. Published in the November 2001 Navigator
"I will now tell you what I do not like. First, the omission of a bill of rights, providing clearly, and without the aid of sophism, for freedom of religion, freedom of the press, protection against standing armies, restriction of monopolies, the eternal and unremitting force of the habeas corpus laws, and trials by jury in all matters of fact triable by the laws of the land, and not by the laws of nations. ... Let me add that a bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular; and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: December 20th, 1787, Jefferson letter to James Madison about his concerns regarding the Constitution.
"You are not to inquire how your trade may be increased, nor how you are to become a great and powerful people, but how your liberties can be secured; for liberty ought to be the direct end of your government."
-Patrick Henry-
"A passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one nation the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions; by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained, and by exciting jealousy, ill-will, and a disposition to retaliate, in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld. And it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens who devote themselves to the favorite nation, facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity; gilding, with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good, the foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: Washington's Farewell Address 1796
"We hold that what one man cannot morally do, a million men cannot morally do, and government, representing many millions of men, cannot do."
-Auberon Herbert-
(1838-1906) English author
"The people cannot delegate to government the power to do anything which would be unlawful for them to do themselves."
-John Locke-
(1632-1704) English philosopher and political theorist. Considered the ideological progenitor of the American Revolution and who, by far, was the most often non-biblical writer quoted by the Founding Fathers of the USA.
"This right to life, this right to liberty, and this right to pursue one’s happiness is unabashedly individualistic, without in the slightest denying at the same time our thoroughly social nature. It’s only that our social relations, while vital to us all, must be chosen - that is what makes the crucial difference."
-Tibor R. Machan-
Professor, author, research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University
Source: Collectivist Thinking Is Rife in the USA, March 01, 2004
"To be apt in quotation is a splendid and dangerous gift. Splendid, because it ornaments a man's speech with other men's jewels; dangerous, for the same reason."
-Robertson Davies-
"The well-informed mind is so easily swayed by charismatic ignorance."
-Dilbert-
"Self confidence is the ability to exercise restraint in the face of disrespect and still show respect in response."
-Simon Sinek-
"To be a socialist is to submit the I to the thou; socialism is sacrificing the individual to the whole."
-Joseph Goebbels-
(1897-1945) German Reich Minister of Propaganda (1933-1945), National Socialist German Workers' Party ("Nazi")
"Comrades! We must abolish the cult of the individual decisively, once and for all."
-Nikita Khrushchev-
(1894-1971) Premier of the Soviet Union
Source: addressing the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, 2-25-56
"The Nazis are well remembered for murdering well over 11 million people in the implementation of their slogan, 'The public good before the private good,' the Chinese Communists for murdering 62 million people in the implementation of theirs, 'Serve the people,' and the Soviet Communists for murdering more than 60 million people in the implementation of Karl Marx's slogan, 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.' Anyone who defends any of these, or any variation of them, on the grounds of their 'good intentions' is an immoral (NOT 'amoral') enabler of the ACTUAL (not just the proverbial) road to hell."
-Rick Gaber-
Libertarian writer
"We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good."
-Hillary Clinton-
(1947- ) Wife of President Bill Clinton, US Senator (NY-D)
Source: June 28, 2004 fundraiser for Senator Barbara Boxer in San Francisco
"If it's true that we are here to help others, then what exactly are the others here for?"
-Robert Anton Wilson-
American writer
"Republicans don't know how to defend morally an individual's right to achieve wealth and to keep it, and that is why they fail. ... It's part and parcel with their ambivalence over the individualist heritage of the nation. ... One of the things that people have to understand is that the American Revolution was truly an epic revolution in the way individuals were perceived in relation to the rest of the society. Throughout history individuals had always been cogs in some machine; they'd always been something to be sacrificed for the king, the tribe, the gang, the chieftain, the society around them, the race, whatever, and the real revolution, in America especially, was a moral revolution. It was a moral revolution in that ... suddenly, with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the individual, his life, his well-being, his property, his happiness became central to our values, and thatis what really made America unique. People came here from all over the world to try to escape the kind of oppression they had and experienced in the past. They came here for freedom; they came here for self-expression and self-realization, and America offered them that kind of a place."
-Robert Bidinotto-
"[T]he prerogatives of the federal government were carefully defined, and it was stipulated that any prerogative not comprised within that definition was to be retained by the states. Thus state government remained the rule; the federal government was the exception."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
Democracy in America [1835-1840]
"Only the incompetent wait until the last extremity to use force, and by then, it is usually too late to use anything, even prayer."
-H. Beam Piper-
(1904-1964) Author
Source: A Slave Is A Slave
"It doesn't take a majority to make a rebellion; it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"Anarchy is no guarantee that some people won't kill, injure, kidnap, defraud, or steal from others. Government is a guarantee that some will."
-Gustave de Molinari-
"There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man."
-Patrick Rothfuss-
"I'm not afraid of you, Doctor. You're a good man. Good men have too many rules."
"Good men do not NEED rules. Today is NOT the day to find out why I have so many..."
-Doctor Who-
"If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein."
-Justice Robert Jackson-
Board of Education v. Barnette (1943), declaring it unconstitutional to compel the Pledge of Allegiance
"Any society that needs disclaimers has too many lawyers."
-Erik Pepke-
"[There is a] strong correlation between market freedom and lower government corruption -- not terribly surprising, since the effect of increasing regulatory power is to shift 'cheating' from the private to the public sphere."
-Julian Sanchez-
Source: Cheating Heart, Does capitalism teach people to break the rules?
Reason Magazine, July 2004
"The art of politics, under democracy, is simply the art of ringing it. Two branches reveal themselves. There is the art of the demagogue, and there is the art of what may be called, by a shot-gun marriage of Latin and Greek, the demaslave. They are complementary, and both of them are degrading to their practitioners. The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots. The demaslave is one who listens to what these idiots have to say and then pretends that he believes it himself."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
Source: "Notes On Democracy"
"The old phrase, "Government of the people, by the people, for the people", represents a true ideal. It is best for the people as a whole. It is even more clearly the best for the development of the individual man and woman. And since in the end, the character and the prosperity of the nation depend on the character of the individuals that compose it, the form of government which best promotes individual development is the best for the people as a whole."
-Robert Cecil-
1st Viscount Cecil of Chelwood
"A world of unseen dictatorship is conceivable, still using the forms of democratic government."
-Kenneth Boulding-
(1910-1993) British-American economist, educator, peace activist, poet, religious mystic, devoted Quaker, systems scientist, and interdisciplinary philosopher
Source: University of Michigan, quoted in The Hidden Persuaders
"Democracy tends to ignore, even deny, threats to its existence because it loathes doing what is needed to counter them. It awakens only when the danger becomes deadly, imminent, evident. By then, either there is too little time left for it to save itself, or the price of survival has become crushingly high."
-Jean-Francois Revel-
[Jean-Francois Ricard] (1924-2006) French politician, journalist, author, philosopher, member of the Académie française
"I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly."
-Michel de Montaigne-
[Michel Eyquem De Montaigne] (1532-1592) French Renaissance scholar, philosopher, writer
"The great trouble with religion - any religion - is that a religionist, having accepted certain propositions by faith, cannot thereafter judge those propositions by evidence. One may bask at the warm fire of faith or choose to live in the bleak uncertainty of reason – but one cannot have both."
-Robert A. Heinlein-
(1907-1988) American writer
Source: From the science fiction novel ‘Friday’ by Robert A. Heinlein Pg. 253
"The right of property is the guardian of every other right, and to deprive the people of this, is in fact to deprive them of their liberty."
-Arthur Lee-
(1740-1792) Virgina delegate to the Continental Congress in 1782
"Compare this [U.S. taxation] to the plight of medieval serfs. They only had to give the lord of the manor a third of their output and they were considered slaves. So what does that make us."
-Daniel Mitchell-
Economist
"Either you think -- or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you."
-F. Scott Fitzgerald-
"Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding."
-Albert Einstein-
(1879-1955) Physicist and Professor, Nobel Prize 1921
"I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"[C]ivilization means, above all, an unwillingness to inflict unnecessary pain ... those of us who heedlessly accept the commands of authority cannot yet claim to be civilized men."
-Harold J. Laski-
(1893-1950)
Source: The Dangers of Obedience.
"Jefferson refused to pin his hopes on the occasional success of honest and unambitious men; on the contrary, the great danger was that philosophers would be lulled into complacence by the accidental rise of a Franklin or a Washington. Any government which made the welfare of men depend on the character of their governors was an illusion."
-Daniel J. Boorstin-
"It is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners."
-Albert Camus-
(1913-1960) French Algerian author
"The people who burned witches at the stake never for one moment thought of their act as violence; rather they thought of it as an act of divinely mandated righteousness. The same can be said of most of the violence we humans have ever committed."
-Gil Bailie-
College Fellow at Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology, author, lecturer
"We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear. Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders."
-John Perry Barlow-
"As for politics, I'm an anarchist. I hate governments and rules and fetters. Can't stand caged animals. People must be free."
-Charlie Chaplin-
"General education is the best preventive of the evils now most dreaded. In the civilized countries of the world, the question is how to distribute most generally and equally the property of the world. As a rule, where education is most general the distribution of property is most general.... As knowledge spreads, wealth spreads. To diffuse knowledge is to diffuse wealth. To give all an equal chance to acquire knowledge is the best and surest way to give all an equal chance to acquire property."
-Rutherford B. Hayes-
"The public welfare demands that constitutional cases must be decided according to the terms of the Constitution itself, and not according to judges’ views of fairness, reasonableness, or justice."
-Justice Hugo L. Black-
(1886-1971) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: Lecture, Columbia University, 1968
"No man has received from nature the right to give orders to others. Freedom is a gift from heaven, and every individual of the same species has the right to enjoy it as soon as he is in enjoyment of his reason."
-Denis Diderot-
"Any man who thinks he can be happy and prosperous by letting the Government take care of him, better take a closer look at the American Indian."
-Henry Ford-
"Anarchy is rules without rulers. Statism is rulers without rules."
-The Art of Not Being Governed-
"We still find the greedy hand of government thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry, and grasping at the spoil of the multitude. Invention is continually exercised to furnish new pretenses for revenue and taxation. It watches prosperity as its prey and permits none to escape without a tribute."
-Thomas Paine-
"The successful politician owes his power to the fact that he moves within the accepted framework of thought, that he thinks and talks conventionally. It would be almost a contradiction in terms for a politician to be a leader in the field of ideas. His task in a democracy is to find out what the opinions held by the largest number are, not to give currency to new opinions which may become the majority view in some distant future."
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
"Poltical campaigns are designedly made into emotional orgies which endeavor to distract attention from the real issues involved, and they actually paralyze what slight powers of cerebration (thinking) man can normally muster."
-James Harvey Robinson-
(1863-1936) American historian
"No government knows any limits to its power except the endurance of the people."
-Lysander Spooner-
(1808-1887) Political theorist, activist, abolitionist
"We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the Courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who would pervert the Constitution."
-Abraham Lincoln-
"The career of a politician mainly consists in making one part of the nation do what it does not want to do, in order to please and satisfy the other part of the nation. It is the prolonged sacrifice of the rights of some persons at the bidding and for the satisfaction of other persons. The ruling idea of the politician - stated rather bluntly - is that those who are opposed to him exist for the purpose of being made to serve his ends, if he can get power enough in his hands to force these ends upon them."
-Auberon Herbert-
(1838-1906) English author
"...there is no such entity as 'the public' - since the public is merely a number of individuals - the idea that 'the public interest' supersedes private interests and rights can have but one meaning: that the interests and rights of some individuals take precedence over the interests and rights of others."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
"All governments are more or less combinations against the people...and as rulers have no more virtue than the ruled...the power of government can only be kept within its constituted bounds by the display of a power equal to itself, the collected sentiment of the people."
-Benjamin Franklin Bache-
(1769-1798) American journalist, printer and publisher, founded the Philadephia Aurora, grandson of Benjamin Franklin
Source: Philadelphia Aurora, 1794
"It has often been said that power corrupts. But it is perhaps equally important to realize that weakness, too, corrupts. Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many. Hatred, malice, rudeness, intolerance, and suspicion are the faults of weakness. The resentment of the weak does not spring from any injustice done to them but from their sense of inadequacy and impotence. We cannot win the weak by sharing our wealth with them. They feel our generosity as oppression."
-Eric Hoffer-
(1902-1983) American author, philosopher, awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
"When the same man, or set of men, holds the sword and the purse, there is an end of liberty."
-George Mason-
(1725-1792), drafted the Virgina Declaration of Rights, ally of James Madison and George Washington
"And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangstersget control. History has proven that. All power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely."
-Lord Acton-
[John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton] (1834-1902), First Baron Acton of Aldenham
"What, then, do they want a government for? Not to regulate commerce; not to educate the people; not to teach religion, not to administer charity; not to make roads and railways; but simply to defend the natural rights of man -- to protect person and property -- to prevent the aggressions of the powerful upon the weak -- in a word, to administer justice. This is the natural, the original, office of a government. It was not intended to do less: it ought not to be allowed to do more."
-Herbert Spencer-
"Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race. All through history, mankind has been bullied by scum. Those who lord it over their fellows and toss commands in every direction and would boss the grass in the meadow about which way to bend in the wind are the most depraved kind of prostitutes. They will submit to any indignity, perform any vile act, do anything to achieve power. The worst off-sloughings of the planet are the ingredients of sovereignty. Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy the whores are us."
-P. J. O'Rourke-
(1947- ) US humorist, journalist, & political commentator
Source: Parliament of Whores
"The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments."
-William E. Borah-
(1865-1940) U. S. Senator
"The State, both in its genesis and by its primary intention, is purely anti-social. It is not based on the idea of natural rights, but on the idea that the individual has no rights except those that the State may provisionally grant him. It has always made justice costly and difficult of access, and has invariably held itself above justice and common morality whenever it could advantage itself by so doing."
-Albert Jay Nock-
(1870-1945)
"...above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare them for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood..."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
[Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clerel, le Comte de Tocqueville] (1805-1859) French historian
"Facilis descensus Averni: noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis;
sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras. hoc opus, hic labor est.
The gates of hell are open night and day;
Smooth the descent, and easy is the way:
But to return, and view the cheerful skies,
In this the task and mighty labor lies."
-John Dryden-
(translation)
"He brings disaster upon his nation who never sows a seed, or lays a brick, or weaves a garment, but makes politics his occupation."
-Khalil Gibran-
"Economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value; political power exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction. The businessman's tool is values; the bureucrat's tool is fear."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
"Whoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before would deserve better of mankind and do more essential service to his country than the whole race of politicians put together."
-Jonathan Swift-
(1667-1745) Anglo-Irish Poet and Satirist
"We should...be able to see that our interest would be best served not by asking the state to promulgate our values but by forbidding the state to promulgate any values at all. If the state can espouse some value that we love, it can, with equal justice, espouse others we do not love."
-Richard Mitchell-
(1929-2002) Professor at Glassboro State College, NJ, author, founder and publisher of The Underground Grammarian
"Prohibition was introduced as a fraud; it has been nursed as a fraud. It is wrapped in the livery of Heaven, but it comes to serve the devil. It comes to regulate by law our appetites and our daily lives. It comes to tear down liberty and build up fanaticism, hypocrisy, and intolerance. It comes to confiscate by legislative decree the property of many of our fellow citizens. It comes to send spies, detectives, and informers into our homes; to have us arrested and carried before courts and condemned to fines and imprisonments. It comes to dissipate the sunlight of happiness, peace, and prosperity in which we are now living and to fill our land with alienations, estrangements, and bitterness. It comes to bring us evil - only evil - and that continually. Let us rise in our might as one and overwhelm it with such indignation that we shall never hear of it again as long as grass grows and water runs."
-Roger Quarles Mills-
(1832-1911) US Congressman (1873-1892), US Senator (1892-1899) TX-D
Source: from an 1887 speech by Roger Q. Mills of Texas. It was quoted more than once during the December, 1914 debate in Congress
"What is the best government? That which teaches us to govern ourselves."
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe-
(1749-1832)
"There is nothing so bad that politics cannot make it worse."
-Thomas Sowell-
"But you must remember, my fellow-citizens, that eternal vigilance by the people is the price of liberty, and that you must pay the price if you wish to secure the blessing."
-Andrew Jackson-
(1767-1845) 7th US President
Source: in his Farewell Address, (1837-March-04)
"Civilization is nothing else but the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort."
-José Ortega y Gasset-
(1883-1955)
"In war, truth is the first casualty."
-Aeschylus-
(525-456 BC) Greek playwright
"[W]ar is a question, under our constitution, not of Executive, but of Legislative cognizance. It belongs to Congress to say whether the Nation shall of choice dismiss the olive branch and unfurl the banners of War."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804)
Source: Americanus #1, January 31, 1794.
"No protracted war can fail to endanger the freedom of a democratic country."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
[Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clerel, le Comte de Tocqueville] (1805-1859) French historian
"Among other grand achievements, F. A. Hayek had a remarkable career pointing out the flaws in collectivism. One of his keenest insights was that, paradoxically, any collectivist system necessarily depends on one individual (or small group) to make key social and economic decisions. In contrast, a system based on individualism takes advantage of the aggregate, or 'collective,' information of the whole society; through his actions each participant contributes his own particular, if incomplete, knowledge -- information that could never be tapped by the individual at the head of a collectivist state."
-Sheldon Richman-
Editor of The Freeman, author, journalist
"It would be a healthy exercise for every politician to look in the mirror every morning and remind himself that he holds office only because, in a two-man race against another mediocrity, a modest majority of those half-informed people who imagined that their votes mattered reckoned that he was the lesser evil. And they weren't too sure about that."
-Joseph Sobran-
"There is in fact a manly and legitimate passion for equality that spurs all men to wish to be strong and esteemed. This passion tends to elevate the lesser to the rank of the greater. But one also finds in the human heart a depraved taste for equality which impels the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level and which reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
Democracy in America
"It is strangely absurd to suppose that a million of human beings, collected together, are not under the same moral laws which bind each of them separately."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"Nullification is not a 'defense' recognized by law, but rather a mechanism that permits a jury, as community conscience, to disregard the strict requirements of law where it finds that those requirements cannot justly be applied in a particular case."
-David L. Bazelon-
(1909-1993) Chief Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit
Source: U.S. v. Dougherty, 473 F. 2d 1113, 42 (dissent) (1972).
"Therefore, the jury have the power of deciding an issue upon a general verdict. And, if they have, is it not an absurdity to suppose that the law would oblige them to find a verdict according to the direction of the court, against their own opinion, judgment, and conscience? ... [I]s a juror to give his verdict generally, according to [the judge’s] direction, or even to find the fact specially, and submit the law to the court? Every man, of any feeling or conscience, will answer, no. It is not only his right, but his duty, in that case, to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment, and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: Diary entry February 12, 1771, reprinted in The Works of John Adams, 254-255 (C. Adams ed. 1850).
"Jury Nullification encourages participation in the judicial process, which in turn furthers the legitimization of the legal system. Jury Nullification also serves to inject community values and standards into the administration of our laws. Ordinary citizens are given the chance to infuse community values into the judicial process in the interests of fairness and justice and at the same time provide a signal to lawmakers that they have drifted too far from the Democratic will... History is replete with examples that Jury Nullification serves as a corrective 'veto' power of the people over both legislative and judicial rigidity and tyranny."
-Justice William C. Goodle-
Washington Supreme Court
"Coming of age in a fascist police state will not be a barrel of fun for anybody, much less for people like me, who are not inclined to suffer Nazis gladly and feel only contempt for the cowardly flag-suckers who would gladly give up their outdated freedom to live for the mess of pottage they have been conned into believing will be freedom from fear."
-Hunter S. Thompson-
"Of the liberty of conscience in matters of religious faith, of speech and of the press; of the trial by jury of the vicinage in civil and criminal cases; of the benefit of the writ of habeas corpus; of the right to keep and bear arms... If these rights are well defined, and secured against encroachment, it is impossible that government should ever degenerate into tyranny."
-James Monroe-
(1758-1831), 5th US President
"The right of juries to decide questions of law was widely accepted in the colonies, especially in criminal cases. Prior to 1850, the judge and jury were viewed as partners in many jurisdictions. The jury could decide questions of both law and fact, and the judge helped guide the decision-making process by comments on the witnesses and the evidence. Legal theory and political philosophy emphasized the importance of the Jury in divining natural law, which was thought to be a better source for decision than the 'authority of black letter maxim.' Since natural law was accessible to lay people, it was held to be the duty of each juror to determine for himself whether a particular rule of law embodied the principles of the higher natural law. Indeed, it was argued that the United States Constitution embodied a codification of natural rights so that 'the reliance by the jury on a higher law was usually viewed as a constitutional judgment.'"
-Kane & Miller Friedenthal-
Source: Civil Procedure, p 476-77, chapter 11, Jury Trial; 2 The Judge Jury Relationship (West Publishing Company 1985).
"Jury nullification is a doctrine based on the concept that 'jurors have the inherent right to set aside the instructions of the judge and to reach a verdict of acquittal based upon their own consciences, and the defendant has the right to be so instructed.' Though jury nullification may seem like a shocking proposal today, it is by no means a new idea. In fact, jury nullification was first espoused nearly three and one half centuries ago."
-M. Kristine Creagan-
Source: Jury Nullification: Assessing Recent Legislative Developments, 43 CASE W. RES. 1101(1993) quoting Alan W. Scheflin, Jury Nullification: The Right to Say No, 45 CAL. L. REV. 168 (1972).
"There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice."
-Charles-Louis De Secondat-
(1689-1755) Baron de Montesquieu
Source: The Spirit of the Laws, 1748
"Under any conditions, anywhere, whatever you are doing, there is some ordinance under which you can be booked."
-Robert D. Sprecht-
Rand Corporation
"Today the grand jury is the total captive of the prosecutor who, if he is candid, will concede that he can indict anybody, at any time, for almost anything, before any grand jury."
-William J. Campbell-
Judge, U. S. District Court
Source: Newsweek, 22 August 1977
"If it weren't for lawyers, we wouldn't need them."
-A. K. Griffin-
"We have a criminal jury system which is superior to any in the world; and its efficiency is only marred by the difficulty of finding twelve men every day who don't know anything and can't read."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910)
"A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves."
-Edward R. Murrow-
"'Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed?' said Dr. Ferris. 'We want them broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against -- then you'll know that this is not the age for beautiful gestures. We're after power and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick, and you'd better get wise to it. There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted -- and you create a nation of law-breakers -- and then you cash in on guilt. Now, that's the system, Mr. Rearden, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with.'"
–Ayn Rand-
Atlas Shrugged [1957]
"Let us revise our views and work from the premise that all laws should be for the welfare of society as a whole and not directed at the punishment of sins."
-John Biggs, Jr.-
(1895-1979) former Chief Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit (1945-65)
"The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant."
-John Stuart Mill-
(1806-1873) English philosopher and economist
"We enact many laws that manufacture criminals, and then a few that punish them."
-Benjamin R. Tucker-
(1854-1939)
Source: Instead of a Book, 1893
"I cannot say that our country could have no secret police without becoming totalitarian, but I can say with great conviction that it cannot become totalitarian without a centralized national police."
-Justice Robert H. Jackson-
(1892-1954), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: The Supreme Court in the American System of Government, 1955
"Better to die fighting for freedom than be a prisoner all the days of your life."
-Bob Marley-
"There is in all of us a strong disposition to believe that anything lawful is also legitimate. This belief is so widespread that many persons have erroneously held that things are 'just' because the law makes them so."
-Frederic Bastiat-
(1801-1850) French economist, statesman, and author. He did most of his writing during the years just before -- and immediately following -- the French Revolution of February 1848.
Source: "The Law" by Frederic Bastiat (1848)
"I say that you cannot administer a wicked law impartially. You can only destroy. You can only punish. I warn you that a wicked law, like cholera, destroys everyone it touches -- its upholders as well as its defiers."
-Jerome Lawrence & Robert E. Lee-
Source: the book, Inherit the Wind
"To declare that in the administration of criminal law the end justifies the means -- to declare that the Government may commit crimes in order to secure conviction of a private criminal -- would bring terrible retribution."
-Justice Louis D. Brandeis
(1856-1941) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: 1912
"It should be clear by now that a nation can be no stronger abroad than she is at home. Only an America which practices what it preaches about equal rights and social justice will be respected by those whose choice affects our future. Only an America which has fully educated its citizens is fully capable of tackling the complex problems and perceiving the hidden dangers of the world in which we live. And only an America which is growing and prospering economically can sustain the worldwide defenses of freedom, while demonstrating to all concerned the opportunities of our system and society."
-John F. Kennedy-
"Oh, judge, your damn laws: the good people don't need them and the bad people don't follow them so what good are they?"
-Ammon Hennacy-
(1893-1970) Catholic anarchist, pacifist, vegetarian, draft refuser in two world wars, tax resister, "one-person revolution in America."
Source: Whenever Ammon was arrested for any number of reasons, mostly for "illegal" picketing, instead of pleading guilty or innocent he would plead 'anarchy'. This was his reply to the judge's statement 'But Ammon you broke the law.'
"Schisms do not originate in a love of truth, which is a source of courtesy and gentleness, but rather in an inordinate desire for supremacy. From all these considerations it is clearer than the sun at noonday, that the true schismatics are those who condemn other men's writings, and seditiously stir up the quarrelsome masses against their authors, rather than those authors themselves, who generally write only for the learned, and appeal solely to reason. In fact, the real disturbers of the peace are those who, in a free state, seek to curtail the liberty of judgment which they are unable to tyrannize over."
-Baruch Spinoza-
"Perhaps it will be said that this consent is not a specific, but a general one, and that the citizen is understood to have assented to every thing his representative may do, when he voted for him. But suppose he did not vote for him; and on the contrary did all in his power to get elected some one holding opposite views — what then? The reply will probably be that, by taking part in such an election, he tacitly agreed to abide by the decision of the majority. And how if he did not vote at all? Why then he cannot justly complain of any tax, seeing that he made no protest against its imposition. So, curiously enough, it seems that he gave his consent in whatever way he acted — whether he said yes, whether he said no, or whether he remained neuter! A rather awkward doctrine this. Here stands an unfortunate citizen who is asked if he will pay money for a certain proffered advantage; and whether he employs the only means of expressing his refusal or does not employ it, we are told that he practically agrees; if only the number of others who agree is greater than the number of those who dissent. And thus we are introduced to the novel principle that A's consent to a thing is not determined by what A says, but by what B may happen to say!"
–Herbert Spencer-
The Right to Ignore the State
"All human history is the struggle between systems that attempt to shackle the human personality in the name of some intangible good on the one hand and systems that enable and expand the scope of human personality in the pursuit of extremely tangible aims. The American system is the most successful in the world because it harmonizes best with the aims and longings of human personality while allowing the best protection to other personalities."
-Ben Stein-
social conservative, military interventionist (IIRC)
"[When a victimless criminal] is treated as an enemy of society, he almost necessarily becomes one. Forced into criminal acts, immersed in underworld-related supply networks, and ever-conscious of the need to evade the police, his outlooks as well as behavior become more and more anti-social."
-Edwin M. Schur-
American professor, sociologist, lawyer, economist, author
Source: Schur, Edwin (1974) Victimless crimes: Two sides of controversy. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall.
"He didn't know the right people. That's all a police record means in this rotten crime-ridden country."
-Raymond Chandler-
(1888-1959) American writer of detective novels
"The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own."
-Aldous Huxley-
"It makes no difference whether a good man has defrauded a bad man, or a bad man defrauded a good man, or whether a good or bad man has committed adultery: the law can look only to the amount of damage done."
-Aristotle-
(384-322 BC) Greek philosopher
Source: Nicomachean Ethics, 340 B.C
What?! No!! What about 'privilege'...?!
"The public good is in nothing more essentially interested, than in the protection of every individual’s private rights."
-Sir William Blackstone-
(1723-1780)
Source: Commentaries on the Laws of England, 1765-69
"It is left, therefore, to the juries, if they think the permanent judges are under any bias whatever in any cause, to take on themselves to judge the law as well as the fact. They never exercise this power but when they suspect partiality in the judges, and by the exercise of this power they have been the firmest bulwarks of English liberty."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Letter to Abbe Arnoux, Paris, July 19, 1789
"The number of laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm."
-P. D. Ouspensky-
(1878-1947)
Source: A New Model of the Universe, 1931
"None of the modes by which a magistrate is appointed, popular election, the accident of the lot, or the accident of birth, affords, as far as we can perceive, much security for his being wiser than any of his neighbours. The chance of his being wiser than all his neighbours together is still smaller."
-Thomas Babington Macaulay-
(1800-1859) [Lord Macaulay] 1st Baron Macaulay, British historian
Source: "Southey's Colloquies on Society" par. SC.62
"It is not because we have been free, but because we have a right to be free, that we ought to demand freedom. Justice and liberty have neither birth nor race, youth nor age."
-Sir James MacKintosh-
(1765-1832) Scottish historian and statesman
Source: Vindicae Gallicae, 1791
"In dealing with the State, we ought to remember that its institutions are not aboriginal, though they existed before we were born; that they are not superior to the citizen; that every one of them was once the act of a single man; every law and usage was a man's expedient to meet a particular case; that they all are imitable, all alterable; we may make as good; we may make better."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-
(1803-1882)
Source: Essays, Second Series (1844)
"There is one, and only one, thing in modern society more hideous than crime -- namely, repressive justice."
-Simone Weil-
(1909-1943)
Source: Human Personality
"In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law ... That would lead to anarchy. An individual who breaks a law that his conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law."
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-
(1929-1968), US civil rights leader
Words, words, words, are the stumbling-blocks in the way of truth. Until you think of things as they are, and not of the words that misrepresent them, you cannot think rightly. Words produce the appearance of hard and fast lines where there are none. Words divide; thus we call this a man, that an ape, that a monkey, while they are all only differentiations of the same thing. To think of a thing they must be got rid of: they are the clothes that thoughts wear — only the clothes. I say this over and over again, for there is nothing of more importance. Other men's words will stop you at the beginning of an investigation. A man may play with words all his life, arranging them and rearranging them like dominoes. If I could think to you without words you would understand me better."
-Samuel Butler-
"I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice."
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
"The possession of power over others is inherently destructive both to the possessor of the power and to those over whom it is exercised."
-George D. Herron-
(1862-1925)
Source: in The Cry For Justice (Upton Sinclair) 1920
"Freedom is independence of the compulsory will of another, and in so far as it tends to exist with the freedom of all according to a universal law, it is the one sole original inborn right belonging to every man in virtue of his humanity."
-Immanuel Kant-
(1724-1804) German philosopher
"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. No one in this world, so far as I know -- and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me -- has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people."
-H.L. Mencken-
"Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us."
-Justice William O. Douglas-
(1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
"It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster."
-Voltaire-
[François Marie Arouet] (1694-1778)
"There are three estates in Parliament but in the Reporters' Gallery yonder there sits a Fourth Estate more important far than they all. It is not a figure of speech or witty saying, it is a literal fact, very momentous to us in these times."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
Source: Attributed
“Whenever you put your faith in big government for any reason, sooner or later you wind up an apologist for mass murder.”
-Karl Hess-
"I was taught when I was a young reporter that it's news when we say it is. I think that's still true -- it's news when 'we' say it is. It's just who 'we' is has changed. Members of the public, people with modems, people with cell phones are now producers, editors. They can push and push and push on a story until it ends up being acknowledged by everyone."
-David Carr-
columnist for The New York Times
"Quis costodiet ipsos custodes?"
("Who will watch the watchers?")
-Juvenal-
[Decimus Junius Juvenalis] (c.55-c.128 AD) Roman satirical poet
"The function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it invites a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger. Speech is often provocative and challenging. It may strike at prejudices and preconceptions and have profound unsettling effects as it passes for acceptance of an idea."
-Justice William O. Douglas-
(1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Terminello v. Chicago, 1949
"For the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are."
-Niccolo Machiavelli-
(1469-1527) Italian Statesman and Political Philosopher
Source: Discourses, 1513-1517
"People may or may not say what they mean... but they always say something designed to get what they want."
-David Mamet-
American playwright
"Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups … So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing."
-Philip K. Dick-
"The press must grow day in and day out -- it is our Party's sharpest and most powerful weapon."
-Josef Stalin-
(1879-1953) Communist leader of the USSR
Source: Speech at The Twelfth Congress of the R.C.P.(B.) (19 April 1923)
"The real searcher after truth will not receive the old because it is old, or reject the new because it is new. He will not believe men because they are dead, or contradict them because they are alive. With him an utterance is worth the truth, the reason it contains, without the slightest regard to the author. He may have been a king or serf -- a philosopher or servant, -- but the utterance neither gains nor loses in truth or reason. Its value is absolutely independent of the fame or station of the man who gave it to the world."
-Robert G. Ingersoll-
(1833-1899) American political leader, orator
(or of the infamy...)
"There is no kind of dishonesty into which otherwise good people more easily and frequently fall than that of defrauding the government."
-Benjamin Franklin-
"And to say that society ought to be governed by the opinion of the wisest and best, though true, is useless. Whose opinion is to decide who are the wisest and best?"
-Thomas Babington Macaulay-
(1800-1859) [Lord Macaulay] 1st Baron Macaulay, British historian
Source: "Southey's Colloquies on Society" par. SC.60
(why, the best and wisest, of course...)
"The first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means."
-Georges Bernanos-
(1888-1949)
Source: The Last Essays of Georges Bernanos, 1955
"There is a higher court than courts of justice and that is the court of conscience. It supercedes all other courts."
-Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi-
(1869-1948)
"A good end cannot sanctify evil means; nor must we ever do evil, that good may come of it."
-William Penn-
(1644-1718)
Source: Some Fruits of Solitude in Reflections and Maxims
"These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated. Britain, with an army to enforce her tyranny, has declared that she has a right (not only to TAX) but "to BIND us in ALL CASES WHATSOEVER" and if being bound in that manner, is not slavery, then is there not such a thing as slavery upon earth. Even the expression is impious; for so unlimited a power can belong only to God."
-Thomas Paine-
December 23, 1776
"If language is not correct,
then what is said is not what is meant;
if what is said is not what is meant,
then what must be done remains undone;
if this remains undone,
morals and art will deteriorate;
if justice goes astray,
the people will stand about in helpless confusion.
Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said.
This matters above everything."
-Confucius-
[Kung Fu-tse] (551-479 B.C.)
"No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore to us the belief in our own guidance."
-Henry Miller-
"Truth does not become more true by virtue of the fact that the entire world agrees with it, nor less so even if the whole world disagrees with it."
-Maimonides-
(1135-1204) Jewish philosopher
"Statesmen, my dear Sir, may plan and speculate for liberty, but it is religion and morality alone, which can establish the principles upon which freedom can securely stand. The only foundation of a free Constitution is pure virtue, and if this cannot be inspired into our People in a greater Measure than they have it now, they may change their rulers and the forms of government, but they will not obtain a lasting liberty."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
June 21, 1776
Source: letter to Zabdiel Adams, 21 June 1776, (Reference: Our Sacred Honor, Bennett (371))
"Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest prop of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked: Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice? And let us with caution indulge in the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle... Observe good faith and justice toward all nations. Cultivate peace and harmony with all. Religion and morality enjoin this conduct; and can it be that good policy does not equally enjoin it?"
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: George Washington's Farewell Address, September 17, 1796
"We hold it for a fundamental and undeniable truth, that religion, or the duty we owe our Creator and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence. The religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate. This right is in its nature an unalienable right."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
"When New Zealanders emigrate to Australia, the average IQ of both countries increases."
-Sir Robert Muldoon-
Former NZ Prime Minister
(likely stolen from...)
"When the Okies left Oklahoma and moved to California, they raised the average intelligence level in both states."
-Will Rogers-
"Unlimited power is in itself a bad and dangerous thing. Human beings are not competent to exercise it with discretion. God alone can be omnipotent, because his wisdom and his justice are always equal to his power. There is no power on earth so worthy of honor in itself, or clothed with rights so sacred, that I would admit its uncontrolled and all-predominant authority. When I see that the right and the means of absolute command are conferred on any power whatever, be it called a people or a king, an aristocracy or a republic, I say there is the germ of tyranny, and I seek to live elsewhere, under other laws."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
"'Bipartisan' usually means that a larger-than-usual deception is being carried out."
-George Carlin-
"Anarchy is the only slight glimmer of hope. Not the popular conception of it -- men in black cloaks lurching around with hidden bombs -- but a freedom of every man personally for himself."
-Mick Jagger-
"Individuality is the aim of political liberty. By leaving to the citizen as much freedom of action and of being as comports with order and the rights of others, the institutions render him truly a free man. He is left to pursue his means of happiness in his own manner."
-James Fenimore Cooper-
(1789-1851) American Novelist
Source: The American Democrat, 1838
"Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties... They valued liberty both as an end and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty."
-Justice Louis D. Brandeis-
(1856-1941) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: Whitney v. California, 1927
"I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them."
-Thomas Jefferson
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"The makers of our constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness... They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred, as against the government, the right to be let alone -- the most comprehensive of the rights and the right most valued by civilized men."
-Justice Louis D. Brandeis-
(1856-1941) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: Olmstead v. United States, 1928
"Neither the trappings of robes, nor temples of stone, nor a fixed liturgy, nor an extensive literature or history is required to meet the test of beliefs cognizable under the Constitution as religious. So far as our law is concerned, one person's religious beliefs held for one day are presumptively entitled to the same protection as the beliefs of millions which have been shared for thousands of years."
-Judge Jack B. Weinstein-
(1921-) United States federal judge
Source: New York State, 1977
"Just as the right to speak and the right to refrain from speaking are complementary components of a broader concept of individual freedom, so also the individual’s freedom to choose his own creed is the counterpart of his right to refrain from accepting the creed established by the majority."
-Justice John Paul Stevens-
U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Wallace v. Jaffree, 1985
"Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule -- and both commonly succeed, and are right."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"He therefore is the truest friend to the liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue, and who, so far as his power and influence extend, will not suffer a man to be chosen into any office of power and trust who is not a wise and virtuous man... The sum of all is, if we would most truly enjoy this gift of Heaven, let us become a virtuous people."
-Samuel Adams-
(1722-1803), was known as the "Father of the American Revolution."
"Anti-social behavior is a trait of intelligence in a world full of conformists."
-Nikola Tesla-
"Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all."
-Edmund Burke-
"The Anarchists are right in everything; in the negation of the existing order, and in the assertion that, without authority, there could not be worse violence than that of authority under existing conditions. They are mistaken only in thinking that Anarchy can be instituted by a revolution. 'To establish Anarchy.' 'Anarchy will be instituted.' But it will be instituted only by there being more and more people who do not require protection from governmental power, and by there being more and more people who will be ashamed of applying this power."
-Leo Tolstoy-
"We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart."
-H. L. Mencken
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"Whether or not legislation is truly moral is often a question of who has the power to define morality."
-Jerome H. Skolnick-
"Laws which prescribe what everyone must believe, and forbid men to say or write anything against this or that opinion, are often passed to gratify, or rather to appease the anger of those who cannot abide independent minds."
-Baruch Spinoza-
(1632-1677)
Source: Theological Political Treatise, 1670
"If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a state has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch. Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds."
-Justice Thurgood Marshall-
(1908-1993) first Black US Supreme Court Justice
Source: Stanley v. Georgia, 1969
"It is bad policy to fear the resentment of an enemy."
-Ethan Allen-
"Considering the natural lust for power so inherent in man, I fear the thirst of power will prevail to oppress the people."
-George Mason-
(1725-1792), drafted the Virgina Declaration of Rights, ally of James Madison and George Washington
Source: The Papers of George Mason, 1052 (Robert A. Rutland Ed., 1970)
"When you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship."
-Harry S. Truman-
(1884-1972), 33rd US President
"He is free who knows how to keep in his own hands the power to decide at each step, the course of his life, and who lives in a society which does not block the exercise of that power."
-Salvador De Madariaga-
(1886-1978 ), Spanish writer, diplomat, and historian, noted for his service at the League of Nations
Source: New York Times, 29 January 1957
"It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become prey to the active. The conditions upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime, and the punishment of his guilt."
-John Philpot Curran-
(1750-1814) Irish Orator, Statesman, Judge
Source: Speech on the Right of Election of Lord Mayor of Dublin, July 10, 1790
"[N]o country can be well governed unless its citizens as a body keep religiously before their minds that they are the guardians of the law and that the law officers are only the machinery for its execution, nothing more."
-Mark Twain
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910)
"It is an established fact that alcoholism, cocainism, and morphinism are deadly enemies of life, of health, and of the capacity for work and enjoyment; and a utilitarian must therefore consider them as vices. But this is far from demonstrating that the authorities must interpose to suppress these vices by commercial prohibitions, nor is it by any means evident that such intervention on the part of the government is really capable of suppressing them or that, even if this end could be attained, it might not therewith open up a Pandora's box of other dangers, no less mischievous than alcoholism and morphinism."
-Ludwig von Mises-
1927
"For who can endure a doctrine which would allow only dentists to say whether our teeth were aching, only cobblers to say whether our shoes hurt us, and only governments to tell us whether we were being well governed?"
-C. S. Lewis-
(1898-1963), British novelist
"Mankind is at its best when it is most free. This will be clear if we grasp the principle of liberty. We must recall that the basic principle is freedom of choice, which saying many have on their lips but few in their minds."
-Dante Alighieri-
(1265-1320) Italian Poet
Source: Letters
"To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality."
General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, translated by John Beverly Robinson (London: Freedom Press, 1923), pp. 293-294.
-Pierre-Joseph Proudhon-
"The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are. Never under any circumstances admit that his success may be due to his own efforts, to the productive contribution he has made to the whole community. Always attribute his success to the exploitation, the cheating, the more or less open robbery of others.
Never under any circumstances admit that your own failure may be owing to your own weaknesses, or that the failure of anyone else may be due to his own defects — his laziness, incompetence, improvidence, or stupidity. Never believe in the honesty or disinterestedness of anyone who disagrees with you.
This basic hatred is the heart of Marxism. This is its animating force. You can throw away the dialectical materialism, the Hegelian framework, the technical jargon, the 'scientific' analysis, and millions of pretentious words, and you still have the core: the implacable hatred and envy that are the raison d'être for all the rest."
-Henry Hazlitt-
Marxism in One Minute
"Is freedom anything else than the right to live as we wish? Nothing else."
-Epictetus-
(ca 55-135 A.D.) Greek philospher
"A right is not what someone gives you; it's what no one can take from you."
-Ramsey Clark
(1927-) US Attorney General (1967-69)
Source: New York Times, 2 October 1977
"It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Notes on the State of Virginia, 1784
"Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Nations and peoples who forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms."
-Robert Heinlein-
"The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling, against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them."
-John Stuart Mill-
(1806-1873) English philosopher and economist
Source: On Liberty, 1859
"It is a maxim among lawyers that whatever hath been done before may be done again, and therefore they take special care to record all the decisions formerly made against common justice and the general reason of mankind. These, under the name of precedents, they produce as authorities to justify the most iniquitous opinions, and the judges never fail of directing them accordingly."
-Jonathan Swift-
(1667-1745) Irish author
Source: Gulliver’s Travels, 1726
"Do not expect justice where might is right."
-Plato-
(429-347 BC)
Source: Phaedrus, 360 B.C.
"Good men must not obey the laws too well."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-
(1803-1882)
"[T]hough not unqualified, a citizen's right to film government officials, including law enforcement officers, in the discharge of their duties in a public space is a basic, vital, and well-established liberty safeguarded by the First Amendment."
-First Circuit Court of Appeals-
Glik v. Cunniffe
"It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer"
-Sir William Blackstone-
"Blackstone's formulation"
"An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates his duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
Source: Dissertation on First Principles of Government, 7 July 1795
"All bad precedents began as justifiable measures."
-Gaius Julius Caesar-
(100-44 B.C.) Roman emperor
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-
(1929-1968), US civil rights leader
Letter from the Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963
"The Prince himself has no distinction, either of garments, or of a crown; but is only distinguished by a sheaf of corn carried before him; as the high priest is also known by his being preceded by a person carrying a wax light. They have but few laws, and such is their constitution that they need not many. They very much condemn other nations whose laws, together with the commentaries on them, swell up to so many volumes; for they think it an unreasonable thing to oblige men to obey a body of laws that are both of such a bulk, and so dark as not to be read and understood by every one of the subjects."
-Thomas More-
"You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having both at once."
-Robert A. Heinlein-
(1907-1988) American writer
Source: The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
"The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair."
-H.L. Mencken-
"If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no recourse left but in the exertion of that original right of self-defense which is paramount to all positive forms of government..."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804)
Source: The Federalist No. 28.
"There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confide itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing."
-Andrew Jackson-
(1767-1845) 7th US President
Source: July 10, 1832, Veto of the Bank Bill
"The internal effects of a mutable policy are [...] calamitous. It poisons the blessings of liberty itself. It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man who knows what the law is today can guess what it will be tomorrow."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: "Federalist" # 62, in The Federalist (Indianapolis: Modern Library and National Foundation for Education in American Citizenship, n.d.), p. 406
"It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is today, can guess what it will be tomorrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?"
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Federalist Papers 62
"An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it."
-Col. Jeff Cooper-
"Sovereignty itself is, of course, not subject to law, for it is the author and source of law; but in our system, while sovereign powers are delegated to the agencies of government, sovereignty itself remains with the people, by whom and for whom all government exists and acts."
-Yick Yo v. Hopkins, 118 U.S. 356 1886-
"All see, and most admire, the glare which hovers round the external trappings of elevated office. To me there is nothing in it, beyond the lustre which may be reflected from its connection with a power of promoting human felicity."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: letter to Catherine Macaulay Graham, 1790
"The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create whatever the form of government, a real despotism. A just estimate of that love of power, and proneness to abuse it, which predominates in the human heart is sufficient to satisfy us of the truth of this position."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: George Washington's Farewell Address, September 17, 1796
"The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the republican model of government, are justly considered deeply, perhaps as finally, staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: First Inaugural Address, 1789, Ref: George Washington: A Collection, W.B. Allen, ed. (462)
"Truth always rests with the minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion -- and who, therefore, in the next instant (when it is evident that the minority is the stronger) assume its opinion ... while Truth again reverts to a new minority."
-Soren Kierkegaard
(1813-1855) Danish philosopher
"It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere."
-Voltaire-
[François Marie Arouet] (1694-1778)
"The ideal form of government is democracy tempered with assassination."
-Voltaire-
[François Marie Arouet] (1694-1778)
"Freedom is the right to be wrong, not the right to do wrong."
-John G. Diefenbaker-
(1895-1979) Prime Minister of Canada
"Law logic -- an artificial system of reasoning, exclusively used in courts of justice, but good for nothing anywhere else."
-John Quincy Adams-
(1767-1848) 6th US President
"In view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens."
-John Marshall Harlan-
(1899-1971) U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896
"Laws are like cobwebs which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through."
-Jonathan Swift-
(1667-1745) Anglo-Irish Poet and Satirist
Source: A Critical Essay upon the Faculties of the Mind, 1707, & Gullivers Travels, 1726
"To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt."
-Elizabeth Cady Stanton-
(1815-1902) American social activist, abolitionist, and leading figure of the early women's rights movement.
"Do not separate text from historical background. If you do, you will have perverted and subverted the Constitution, which can only end in a distorted, bastardized form of illegitimate government."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
"The framers of the constitution employed words in their natural sense; and, where they are plain and clear, resort to collateral aids to interpretation is unnecessary, and cannot be indulged in to narrow or enlarge the text; but where there is ambiguity or doubt, or where two views may well be entertained, contemporaneous and subsequent practical construction is entitled to the greatest weight."
-Justice Melville Weston Fuller-
(1833-1910) Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, 1888-1910
Source: delivering the opinion of the court in MCPHERSON v. BLACKER, 146 U.S. 1 (1892)
"If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law."
-Henry David Thoreau-
(1817-1862)
"Nothing can destroy a government more quickly than its failure to observe its own laws, or worse, its disregard of the charter of its own existence."
-Justice Tom C. Clark-
(1899-1977) US Attorney General, 1945-1949, Associate Justice of theSupreme Court of the United States, 1949-1967
Source: delivering the opinion of the Court in MAPP v. OHIO, 367 U.S. 643 (1961)
"When a legislature undertakes to proscribe the exercise of a citizen's constitutional rights it acts lawlessly and the citizen can take matters into his own hands and proceed on the basis that such a law is no law at all."
-Justice William O. Douglas-
(1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
"The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants."
-Albert Camus-
(1913-1960) French Algerian author
"There comes a time when a moral man can't obey a law which his conscience tells him is unjust."
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-
(1929-1968), US civil rights leader
"Unnecessary laws are not good laws, but traps for money."
-Thomas Hobbes-
(1588-1679) English philosopher, political theorist
Source: Leviathan, 1651
"Ense petit placidam sub libertate quietem"
(By the sword we seek peace, but peace only under liberty)
-Massachusetts State Motto-
"Why is patriotism thought to be blind loyalty to the government and the politicians who run it, rather than loyalty to the principles of liberty and support for the people? Real patriotism is a willingness to challenge the government when it’s wrong."
-Ron Paul-
2012
"I define anarchist society as one where there is no legal possibility for coercive aggression against the person or property of
any individual."
-Murray Rothbard-
"People want government to do all manner of things, things that if done privately would lead to condemnation and jail sentences. Some want government to give money to farmers, poor folk, college students, senior citizens and businesses. There’s no Santa Claus or tooth fairy. The only way government can give money to one person is to forcibly take it from another person. If I privately used the same method to raise money for a “deserving” college student, homeless person or businessman, I’d face theft charges. Others among us want government to protect wild wolves, bears and the Stephens kangaroo rat even if it results in gross violations of private property and loss of lives. The problem is that some people disagree with having their earnings taken to satisfy someone else’s wishes. They don’t want the Corps of Engineers and Fish and Wildlife Service dictating to them what they can and cannot do with their property to ensure a habitat for the kangaroo rat. Force and threats must be used. Here’s the question: Could the average American kill a person who resolutely refuses to give up his earnings so Congress can give it to farmers? Could you kill a person who insists on using all of his property, even though some wolves have set up a den on it? You say, “What do you mean, Williams -- kill?” Here’s the scenario: The Corps of Engineers commands me not to remove debris from a drainage ditch on my property, placed there by beavers building a dam, because the debris creates a wetland. I remove it anyway. The Corps of Engineers fines me. I refuse to pay the unjust fine. The Corps of Engineers threatens to seize my land. I say no, you won’t: it’s my land, and I’ll protect it. A politician sends marshals to take it, and I get killed defending it."
-Walter E. Williams-
(1936- ) Columnist, Professor of Economics at George Mason University
Source: CONSERVATIVE CHRONICLE, September 20, 1995
"[T]he main evil of the present democratic institutions of the united states does not raise ... from their weakness, but from their irresistible strength. I am not so much alarmed at the excessive liberty which reigns in that country as at the inadequate securities which one finds there against tyranny."
-Alexis De Tocqueville-
[Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clerel, le Comte de Tocqueville] (1805-1859) French historian
Source: Democracy in America, 1835
"Let us disappoint the Men who are raising themselves upon the ruin of this Country."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: November 20th, 1772, the Votes and Proceedings of the Town of Boston were printed as a Pamphlet and sent to each Town stating the Rights of the Colonists.
"We create the government that screws you, and then you’re supposed to thank us for protecting you from it."
-Vin Weber-
(1952-) US Congressman (R-MN)
"Distrust of authority should be the first civic duty."
-Norman Douglas-
"Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bedroom windows. Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could."
-William F. Buckley, Jr.-
(1925-2008) American author and journalist, founded 'National Review'
"I consider marijuana the worst of all narcotics, far worse than the use of morphine or cocaine. Under its influence men become beasts... Marijuana destroys life itself. I have no sympathy with those who sell this weed. The government is going to enforce this new law to the letter."
-Judge John Foster Symes-
(1878-1951) United States federal judge
Source: October 5, 1937, when sentencing Samuel R. Caldwell (the first person to be charged under the new Marijuana Tax Stamp Act passed 3 days earlier) to four years of hard labour in Leavenworth Penitentiary, plus a $1,000 fine. Caldwell served every day of his sentence and died one year later after his release.
"Most marijuana smokers are Negroes, Hispanics, jazz musicians, and entertainers. Their satanic music is driven by marijuana, and marijuana smoking by white women makes them want to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers, and others. It is a drug that causes insanity, criminality, and death -- the most violence-causing drug in the history of mankind."
-Harry J. Anslinger-
(1892-1975) Assistant Prohibition Commissioner in the Bureau of Prohibition, first Commissioner of the Treasury Department's Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) (1930-1962, 32 years), US Representative to the United Nations Narcotics Commission
"We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason."
-Daryl Gates-
Los Angeles Police Chief
"Of great importance to the public is the preservation of this personal liberty; for if once it were left in the power of any the highest magistrate to imprison arbitrarily whomever he or his officers thought proper, (as in France it is daily practised by the crown,) there would soon be an end of all other rights and immunities. Some have thought that unjust attacks, even upon life or property, at the arbitrary will of the magistrate, are less dangerous to the commonwealth than such as are made upon the personal liberty of the subject. To bereave a man of life, or by violence to confiscate his estate, without accusation or trial, would be so gross and notorious an act of despotism, as must at once convey the alarm of tyranny throughout the whole kingdom; but confinement of the person, by secretly hurrying him to jail, where his sufferings are unknown or forgotten, is a less public, a less striking, and therefore a more dangerous engine of arbitrary government."
-William Blackstone-
"Should we believe self-serving, ever-growing drug enforcement/drug treatment bureaucrats, whose pay and advancement depends on finding more and more people to arrest and 'treat'? More Americans die in just one day in prisons, penitentiaries, jails and stockades than have ever died from marijuana throughout history. Who are they protecting? From what?"
-Dr. Fred Oerther-
Source: Portland, Oregon, September 1986
"The First Amendment issue here is, as the parties frame it, fairly narrow: is there a constitutionally protected right to videotape police carrying out their duties in public? Basic First Amendment principles, along with case law from this and other circuits, answer that question unambiguously in the affirmative."
-Judge Kermit Victor Lipez-
(1941-) Senior United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit
Aug 26, 2011
Source: writing the opinion of the court in Glik v. Cunniffe, 655 F.3d 78, 82 (1st Cir. 2011), (quoting Mills v. Alabama, 384 U.S. 214, 218 (1966))
"The Illinois eavesdropping statute restricts a medium of expression commonly used for the preservation and communication of information and ideas, thus triggering First Amendment scrutiny. Illinois has criminalized the nonconsensual recording of most any oral communication, including recordings of public officials doing the public’s business in public and regardless of whether the recording is open or surreptitious. Defending the broad sweep of this statute, the State’s Attorney relies on the government’s interest in protecting conversational privacy, but that interest is not implicated when police officers are performing their duties in public places and engaging in public communications audible to persons who witness the events. Even under the more lenient intermediate standard of scrutiny applicable to content-neutral burdens on speech, this application of the statute very likely flunks. The Illinois eavesdropping statute restricts far more speech than necessary to protect legitimate privacy interests; as applied to the facts alleged here, it likely violates the First Amendment’s free-speech and free-press guarantees."
-Judge Diane Schwerm Sykes
(1957-) Federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, former Justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court
Source: in the ruling for the U.S Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, ALCU of Illinois v. Anita Alvarez (2012)
"Police may have no right to privacy in carrying out official duties in public. But the civilians they interact with do."
-Judge Richard Allen Posner-
(1939-) American jurist, legal theorist and economist. Federal judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago, Senior Lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School
Source: U.S Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, ALCU of Illinois v. Anita Alvarez (2012) (Dissenting)
"May it not be asked of every intelligent friend to the liberties of his country, whether the power exercised in such an act as this ought not to produce great and universal alarm? Whether a rigid execution of such an act, in time past, would not have repressed that information and communication among the people which is indispensable to the just exercise of their electoral rights? And whether such an act, if made perpetual, and enforced with rigor, would not, in time to come, either destroy our free system of government, or prepare a convulsion that might prove equally fatal to it? "
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Jan 1800, regarding the Sedition Act of 1798, Report on the Virginia Resolutions
"A statute intended to prevent unwarranted intrusions into a citizen’s privacy cannot be used as a shield for public officials who cannot assert a comparable right of privacy in their public duties. Such action impedes the free flow of information concerning public officials and violates the First Amendment right to gather such information. ... The [Illinois Eavesdropping Statute] includes conduct that is unrelated to the statute’s purpose and is not rationally related to the evil the legislation sought to prohibit. For example, a defendant recording his case in a courtroom has nothing to do with an intrusion into a citizen’s privacy but with distraction. ... The court finds the Illinois Eavesdropping Statute is unconstitutional on its face and as applied to the defendant as the statute is violative of substantive due process."
-Judge David Frankland-
Circuit Court Judge for Crawford County, Illinois
Source: In a 12-page order entered September 15, 2011, in People v Michael D. Allison, No 2009-CF-50, Judge David K. Frankland of the circuit court of Crawford County held that the Illinois Eavesdropping Act is unconstitutional in that it violates substantive due process and the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. Michael Allison faced up to to 75 years in prison for recording his encounters with police officers and a judge.
"Two wars necessitated vast curtailments of liberty, and we have grown, though grumblingly, accustomed to our chains. The increasing complexity and precariousness of our economic life have forced Government to take over many spheres of activity once left to choice or chance. Our intellectuals have surrendered first to the slave-philosophy of Hegel, then to Marx, finally to the linguistic analysts.
As a result, classical political theory, with its Stoical, Christian, and juristic key-conceptions (natural law, the value of the individual, the rights of man), has died. The modern State exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good -- anyway, to do something to us or to make us something. Hence the new name 'leaders' for those who were once 'rulers'. We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, 'Mind your own business.' Our whole lives are their business.
I write 'they' because it seems childish not to recognize that actual government is and always must be oligarchical. Our effective masters must be more than one and fewer than all. But the oligarchs begin to regard us in a new way."
-C. S. Lewis-
(1898-1963), British novelist
Source: Willing Slaves of the Welfare State, first published in The Observer on July 20, 1958
"Justice without force is impotent, force without justice is tyranny. Unable to make what is just strong, we have made what is strong just."
-Blaise Pascal-
(1623- 1662) French mathematician and philosopher
Source: Pensées
"The government is the potent omnipresent teacher. For good or ill it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that the end justifies the means -- to declare that the government may commit crimes -- would bring terrible retribution."
-Justice Louis D. Brandeis-