"Every law consistent with the Constitution will have been made in pursuance of the powers granted by it. Every usurpation or law repugnant to it cannot have been made in pursuance of its powers. The latter will be nugatory and void."
-Thomas Jefferson-
Elliot, p. 4:187-88
"... the laws of Congress are restricted to a certain sphere, and when they depart from this sphere, they are no longer supreme or binding. In the same manner the states have certain independent power, in which their laws are supreme."
-Alexander Hamilton-
Elliot, 2:362
"Clearly, a federal law which is contrary to the Constitution is no law at all; it is null, void, invalid. And a Supreme Court decision, which is not a 'law,' has no 'supremacy' -- 'even if it is faithfully interpreting the Constitution. So it is the height of absurdity to claim that a Supreme Court decision that manifestly violates the Constitution is the 'supreme law of the land.'"
-William Jasper-
"All laws that are proper and correct, and all obligations entered into which are not violative of the constitution should be kept inviolate. But if they are violative of the constitution, then the compact between the rulers and the ruled is broken and the obligation ceases to be binding."
-John Taylor-
Journal of Discourses, 26: 350-351. February 20, 1884
"He who tampers with the currency robs labor of its bread."
-Daniel Webster-
(1782-1852), US Senator
"When money is controlled by a few it gives that few an undue power and control over labor and the resources of the country. Labor will have its best return when the laborer can control its disposal."
-Leland Stanford-
[Amasa Leland Stanford] (1824-1893) American tycoon, industrialist, politician and founder of Stanford University
"Capital is a result of labor, and is used by labor to assist it in further production. Labor is the active and initial force, and labor is therefore the employer of capital."
-Henry George-
(1839-1897)
"Socialism proposes no adequate substitute for the motive of enlightened selfishness that today is at the basis of all human labor and effort, enterprise and new activity."
-William Howard Taft-
(1857-1930) 27th US President
"The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state."
-John Kenneth Galbraith-
(1908-2006) Canadian-born economist, Harvard professor
"The long-term solution to 'your government can kill you with impunity' is not 'then don't piss it off.'"
-Bill Alleman-
"Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism as it is a merge of state and corporate power."
-Benito Mussolini
(1883-1945), Italian dictator during WW2
Source: http://www.publiceye.org/fascist/corporatism.html
"Fascism and corporatism are both government and business in bed together. The only difference is who's on top."
-Bill Alleman-
"The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government mismanagement rather than by any inherent instability of the private economy. ... Roosevelt's policies were very destructive. Roosevelt's policies made the depression longer and worse than it otherwise would have been."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
"I go on the principle that a public debt is a public curse, and in a Republican Government a greater curse than any other."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
"We have plenty of freedom in this country but not a great deal of independence."
-John W. Raper-
(1870-1950)
Source: What This World Needs, 1954
"So low and hopeless are the finances of the United States, that, the year before last Congress was obliged to borrow money even, to pay the interest of the principal which we had borrowed before. This wretched resource of turning interest into principal, is the most humiliating and disgraceful measure that a nation could take, and approximates with rapidity to absolute ruin: Yet it is the inevitable and certain consequence of such a system as the existing Confederation."
-William Richardson Davie-
(1756-1820) Governor of North Carolina (1798-1799), North Carolina delegate to the 1787-88 Constitutional Convention
Source: speech in the Proceedings and Debates of the Convention of North-Carolina, Convened at Hillsborough, on Monday the 21st Day of July, 1788, for the Purpose of Deliberating and Determining on the Constitution Recommended by the General Convention at Philadelphia, the 17th Day of September, 1787: To Which is Prefixed the Said Constitution (Edenton, N.C.: Hodge and Wills, 1789)
"We shall have World Government, whether or not we like it. The only question is whether World Government will be achieved by conquest or consent."
-James Paul Warburg-
(1896-1969) son of Paul Moritz Warburg, nephew of Felix Warburg and of Jacob Schiff, both of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. which poured millions into the Russian Revolution through James' brother Max, banker to the German government, Chairman of the CFR
Source: February 17, 1950, appearance before the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations
"This Act (the Federal Reserve Act, Dec. 23rd 1913) establishes the most gigantic trust on earth. When the President signs this bill, the invisible government by the Monetary Power will be legalized. The people may not know it immediately, but the day of reckoning is only a few years removed. The trusts will soon realize that they have gone too far even for their own good. The people must make a declaration of independence to relieve themselves from the Monetary Power. This they will be able to do by taking control of Congress. Wall Streeters could not cheat us if you Senators and Representatives did not make a humbug of Congress... The greatest crime of Congress is its currency system. The worst legislative crime of the ages is perpetrated by this banking bill. The caucus and the party bosses have again operated and prevented the people from getting the benefit of their own government."
-Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr.
(1859-1924) Congressman (R-MN), father of famous aviator
Source: December 22, 1913, the day before President Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act, in a speech before the House of Representatives
"We have in this country one of the most corrupt institutions the world has ever known. I refer to the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Banks, hereinafter called the FED. They are not government institutions. They are private monopolies which prey upon the people of these United States for the benefit of themselves and their foreign customers..."
-Louis McFadden-
(1876-1936) US Congressman (R-PA) (1915-1935), Chairman of House Banking and Currency Committee. Poisoned in 1936.
Source: Speech in Congress, June 10, 1932
"Mr. Chairman, I see no reason why citizens of the United States should be terrorized into surrendering their property to the International Bankers who own and control the Federal Reserve."
-Louis McFadden-
(1876-1936) US Congressman (R-PA) (1915-1935), Chairman of House Banking and Currency Committee. Poisoned in 1936.
Source: 9 March 1933, in his Speech to the House of Representatives, Congressional Record
"... our whole monetary system is dishonest, as it is debt-based... We did not vote for it. It grew upon us gradually but markedly since 1971 when the commodity-based system was abandoned."
-The Earl of Caithness-
Source: in a speech to the House of Lords, 1997
"And I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Letter to John Taylor (28 May 1816) ME 15:23
"Trusting too much to others' care is the ruin of many; for, as the almanac says, in the affairs of this world men are saved not by faith, but by the want of it; but a man's own care is profitable; for, saith Poor Dick, learning is to the studious, and riches to the careful, as well as power to the bold, and Heaven to the virtuous.
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
Source: The Way to Wealth (1758)
"But what madness must it be to run in debt for these superfluities! We are offered, by the terms of this vendue, six months' credit; and that perhaps has induced some of us to attend it, because we cannot spare the ready money, and hope now to be fine without it. But, ah, think what you do when you run in debt; you give to another power over your liberty. If you cannot pay at the time, you will be ashamed to see your creditor; you will be in fear when you speak to him, you will make poor pitiful sneaking excuses, and by degrees come to lose you veracity, and sink into base downright lying; for, as Poor Richard says, the second vice is lying, the first is running in debt. And again to the same purpose, lying rides upon debt's back."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
Source: The Way to Wealth (1758)
"Your creditor has authority at his pleasure to deprive you of your liberty, by confining you in gaol [jail] for life, or to sell you for a servant, if you should not be able to pay him! When you have got your bargain, you may, perhaps, think little of payment; but creditors, Poor Richard tells us, have better memories than debtors, and in another place says, creditors are a superstitious sect, great observers of set days and times. The day comes round before you are aware, and the demand is made before you are prepared to satisfy it. Or if you bear your debt in mind, the term which at first seemed so long, will, as it lessens, appear extreamly short. Time will seem to have added wings to his heels as well as shoulders. "
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
Source: The Way to Wealth (1758)
"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
"An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it. Truth stands, even if there be no public support. It is self sustained."
-Mahatma Gandhi-
"But the mild voice of reason, pleading the cause of an enlarged and permanent interest, is but too often drowned, before public bodies as well as individuals, by the clamors of an impatient avidity for immediate and immoderate gain."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Federalist No. 42, January 22, 1788
"Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked: 'Account Overdrawn.'"
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
Source: Atlas Shrugged, p. 385-386, (1957)
"That's what a Congressman or a Senator is for -- to see that too much money don't accumulate in the national Treasury."
-Will Rogers-
(1879-1935) American humorist
"The good of the people must be the great purpose of government. By the laws of nature and of reason, the governors are invested with power to that end. And the greatest good of the people is liberty. It is to the state what health is to the individual."
-Denis Diderot-
"The powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent meetings and conferences. The apex of the systems was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world's central banks which were themselves private corporations. Each central bank...sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world."
-Carroll Quigley-
(1910-1977) Professor of History at Georgetown University,
member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR),
mentor to Bill Clinton
Source: in his book Tragedy and Hope, 1966, pg 324
"The Federal Reserve Bank of New York is eager to enter into close relationship
with the Bank for International Settlements.... The conclusion is impossible to
escape that the State and Treasury Departments are willing to pool the banking
system of Europe and America, setting up a world financial power independent of
and above the Government of the United States.... The United States under
present conditions will be transformed from the most active of manufacturing
nations into a consuming and importing nation with a balance of trade against
it."
-Louis McFadden-
(1876-1936) US Congressman (R-PA) (1915-1935), Chairman of House Banking and Currency Committee. Poisoned in 1936.
Source: quoted in the New York Times (June 1930)
"I, however, place economy among the first and most important republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: letter to William Plumer, July 21, 1816
"If you want irresponsible politicians to spend less, you must give them less to spend."
-Irwin Schiff-
(libertarian)
"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-
(1949-) American baseball player
"All questions of power, arising under the constitution of the United States, whether they relate to the federal or a state government, must be considered of great importance. The federal government being formed for certain purposes, is limited in its powers, and can in no case exercise authority where the power has not been delegated. The states are sovereign; with the exception of certain powers, which have been invested in the general government, and inhibited to the states. No state can coin money, emit bills of credit, pass ex post facto laws, or laws impairing the obligation of contracts, &c. If any state violate a provision of the constitution, or be charged with such violation to the injury of private rights, the question is made before this tribunal; to whom all such questions, under the constitution, of right belong. In such a case, this court is to the state, what its own supreme court would be, where the constitutionality of a law was questioned under the constitution of the state. And within the delegation of power, the decision of this court is as final and conclusive on the state, as would be the decision of its own court in the case stated."
-Justice John McLean-
(1785-1861) U. S. Congressman for Ohio (1813-16), U.S. Postmaster General, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1830-61), presidential candidate for the Whig and Republican parties
Source: Craig v. Missouri, 4 Peters 410 (1830) [29 U.S. 410, 464]
"One hundred and seventy-three despots would surely be as oppressive as one."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Federalist No. 48, February 1, 1788
"A question arises whether all the powers of government, legislative, executive, and judicial, shall be left in this body? I think a people cannot be long free, nor ever happy, whose government is in one Assembly."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
"The salient feature of America in the Age of Obama is a failed government class institutionally committed to living beyond its means, and a citizenry too many of whom are content to string along."
-Mark Steyn-
(1959-) Canadian columnist
"Will people ever be wise enough to refuse to follow bad leaders or to take away the freedom of other people?"
-Eleanor Roosevelt-
"[A] limited Constitution ... can be preserved in practice no other way than through the medium of courts of justice, whose duty it must be to declare all acts contrary to the manifest tenor of the Constitution void. Without this, all the reservations of particular rights or privileges would amount to nothing ... To deny this would be to affirm … 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)
"I am commonly opposed to those who modestly assume the rank of champions of liberty, and make a very patriotic noise about the people. It is the stale artifice which has duped the world a thousand times, and yet, though detected, it is still successful. I love liberty as well as anybody. I am proud of it, as the true title of our people to distinction above others; but ... I would guard it by making the laws strong enough to protect it."
-Fisher Ames-
(1758-1808), American statesman, orator and political writer
Source: letter to George Richard Minot, June 23, 1789
"We are, heart and soul, friends to the freedom of the press. It is however, the prostituted companion of liberty, and somehow or other, we know not how, its efficient auxiliary. It follows the substance like its shade; but while a man walks erect, he may observe that his shadow is almost always in the dirt. It corrupts, it deceives, it inflames. It strips virtue of her honors, and lends to faction its wildfire and its poisoned arms, and in the end is its own enemy and the usurper's ally, It would be easy to enlarge on its evils. They are in England, they are here, they are everywhere. It is a precious pest, and a necessary mischief, and there would be no liberty without it."
-Fisher Ames-
(1758-1808), American statesman, orator and political writer
Source: Review of the Pamphlet on the State of the British Constitution, 1807
"The nature and intention of government … are social. Based on the idea of natural rights, government secures those rights to the individual by strictly negative intervention, making justice costless and easy of access; and beyond that it does not go. The State, on the other hand, 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-
"[T]he income tax is incompatible with a free society. The IRS routinely intrudes on our basic civil liberties and privacy rights -- and its intrusions are getting worse all the time. I want an America where it is no longer the government's business how much money you make and what you do with it."
-Stephen Moore-
Director of Fiscal Policies, The CATO Institute
Source: testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee
"It has often been found that profuse expenditures, heavy taxation, absurd commercial restrictions, corrupt tribunals, disastrous wars, seditions, persecutions, conflagrations, inundation, have not been able to destroy capital so fast as the exertions of private citizens have been able to create it."
-Thomas Babington Macaulay-
(1800-1859) [Lord Macaulay] 1st Baron Macaulay, British historian
"You cannot make children learn music or anything else without to some degree converting them into will-less adults. You fashion them into accepters of the status quo – a good thing for a society that needs obedient sitters at dreary desks, standers in shops, mechanical catchers of the 8:30 suburban train – a society, in short, that is carried on the shabby shoulders of the scared little man – the scared-to-death conformist."
-A. S. Neill-
"It has been said that all Government is an evil. It would be more proper to say that the necessity of any Government is a misfortune. This necessity however exists; and the problem to be solved is, not what form of Government is perfect, but which of the forms is least imperfect."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: to an unidentified correspondent, 1833
"Inflation has now been institutionalized at a fairly constant 5% per year. This has been determined to be the optimum level for generating the most revenue without causing public alarm. A 5% devaluation applies, not only to the money earned this year, but to all that is left over from previous years. At the end of the first year, a dollar is worth 95 cents. At the end of the second year, the 95 cents is reduced again by 5%, leaving its worth at 90 cents, and so on. By the time a person has worked 20 years, the government will have confiscated 64% of every dollar he saved over those years. By the time he has worked 45 years, the hidden tax will be 90%. The government will take virtually everything a person saves over a lifetime."
-G. Edward Griffin-
American Historian, Author
"The refunding of the national debt at a lower rate of interest should be accomplished without compelling the withdrawal of the national-bank notes, and thus disturbing the business of the country."
-James A. Garfield-
(1831-1881) 20th President of the United States (1881)
Source: Inaugural Address, March 14, 1881
"Felix qui nihil debet." ("Happy is he who owes nothing.")
-Roman Proverb-
Source: Proverb from ancient Rome
"One of the problems that the marijuana reform movement consistently faces is that everyone wants to talk about what marijuana does, but no one ever wants to look at what marijuana prohibition does. 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."
-Richard Cowan-
(1940- ) National Director of NORML (1992-95)
"It is not the business of government to make men virtuous or religious, or to preserve the fool from the consequences of his own folly. Government should be repressive no further than is necessary to secure liberty by protecting the equal rights of each from aggression on the part of others, and the moment governmental prohibitions extend beyond this line they are in danger of defeating the very ends they are intended to serve."
-Henry George-
(1839-1897) American political economist
Source: The Functions of Government, Social problems, vol 12, (1884)
"No-knock police raids destroy Americans’ right to privacy and safety. People’s lives are being ruined or ended as a result of unsubstantiated assertions by anonymous government informants. ... Unfortunately, no-knock raids are becoming more common as federal, state, and local politicians and law enforcement agencies decide that the war on drugs justified nullifying the Fourth Amendment. ... No-knock raids in response to alleged narcotics violations presume that the government should have practically unlimited power to endanger some people’s lives in order to control what others ingest."
-James Bovard-
American author, lecturer
Source: OOOPS—YOU’RE DEAD... The Body Count from NO-KNOCK RAIDS is climbing. ARE YOU NEXT?
"When they took the 4th Amendment, I was quiet because I didn't deal drugs. When they took the 6th Amendment, I was quiet because I was innocent. When they took the 2nd Amendment, I was quiet because I didn't own a gun. Now they have taken the 1st Amendment, and I can only be quiet."
-Lyle Myhr-
"Let natural consequences teach responsible behavior. One of the kindest things we can do is to let the natural or logical consequences of people's actions teach them responsible behavior. They may not like it or us, but popularity is a fickle standard by which to measure character development. Insisting on justice demands more true love, not less. We care enough for their growth and security to suffer their displeasure."
-Stephen Covey-
"Whoever will be free must make himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man's lap. What is freedom? To have the will to be responsible for one's self."
-Max Stirner-
"We must recognize that it is a cardinal sin against democracy to support a man for public office because he belongs to a given creed or to oppose him because he belongs to a given creed. It is just as evil as to draw the line between class and class, between occupation and occupation in political life. No man who tries to draw either line is a good American. True Americanism demands that we judge each man on his conduct, that we so judge him in private life and that we so judge him in public life."
-Theodore Roosevelt-
"All forms of tampering with human beings, getting at them, shaping them against their will to your own pattern, all thought control and conditioning is, therefore, a denial of that in men which makes them men and their values ultimate."
-Isaiah Berlin-
(1909-1997)
Source: Two Concepts of Liberty, 1958
"Thanks to the war on drugs, nearly 700,000 people were arrested in the United States for possession of marijuana in 1997, while 400,000 currently sit in prison for drug crimes -- more than the entire prison population of Britain, Germany and Belgium -- for what is a consensual act. Nearly $35 billion a year is spent on arresting, prosecuting and jailing drug criminals in the US -- $400 million in Canada -- to hammer at a crime which essentially harms no one but the drug user."
-Steven Martinovich-
Source: The Tainted Truth, REALMENSCH April 30, 1999
And hardly necessarily even them...
"My own view rests on the premise that nullification can and should serve an important function in the criminal process ... The doctrine permits the jury to bear on the criminal process a sense of fairness and particularized justice ... The drafters of legal rules cannot anticipate and take account of every case where a defendant’s conduct is “unlawful” but not blameworthy, any more than they can draw a bold line to mark the boundary between an accident and negligence. It is the jury -- as spokesmen for the community’s sense of values -- that must explore that subtle and elusive boundary. ... I do not see any reason to assume that jurors will make rampantly abusive use of their power. Trust in the jury is, after all, one of the cornerstones of our entire criminal jurisprudence, and if that trust is without foundation we must reexamine a great deal more than just the nullification doctrine."
-Chief Judge David L. Bazelon-
U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C. Circuit
Source: U.S. V. Dougherty, 473 F. 2D 1113, 1141-42 (Dissent) (1972)
"Some police chiefs for years have warned that we are “militarizing” our nation’s police. “Smart bombs” are used to enter drug dens. Officers are clad in paramilitary garb including battle helmets. Armored “urban” assault vehicles are tactically utilized on city streets. Cops are trained in military tactics. You cannot train officers in such a manner and then expect them to behave like “Officer Friendly” .... The FBI is an investigatory agency. Originally, they weren’t even armed. Why are lawyers and accountants being transformed into G.I. Joes? When such occurs we come dangerously close to establishing a National Police Force, something not intended by the framers of the U.S. Constitution."
-Police Chief James J. Kouri-
First Vice President National Association of Chiefs of Police
Source: Letter To The American Spectator, April, 1996
"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
"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
They are merely "simply a waste of time" only at their absolutely most benign...
"The more prohibitions you have, the less virtuous people will be."
-Lao-Tzu-
[Li Erh] (570-490 BC) 'Old Sage', Father of Taoism
Source: Tao Te Ching
"Political correctness is really a subjective list put together by the few to rule the many -- a list of things one must think, say, or do. It affronts the right of the individual to establish his or her own beliefs."
-Mark Berley-
Source: Argos, Spring 1998
"Not every item of news should be published. Rather must those who control news policies endeavor to make every item of news serve a certain purpose."
-Joseph Paul Goebbels-
(1897-1945) Nazi Propaganda Minister
Source: Diary, 14 March 1943
"No more fatuous chimera has ever infested the brain than that you can control opinions by law or direct belief by statute, and no more pernicious sentiment ever tormented the heart than the barbarous desire to do so. The field of inquiry should remain open, and the right of debate must be regarded as a sacred right."
-William E. Borah-
(1865-1940) U. S. Senator
Source: 1917
"And what is this liberty, whose very name makes the heart beat faster and shakes the world? Is it not the union of all liberties -- liberty of conscience, of education, of association, of the press, of travel, of labor, of trade?"
-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 (1848)
"To silence criticism is to silence freedom."
-Sidney Hook-
(1902-1989) American, former Marxist philosopher/professor turned Democratic Socialist, CIA operative, recipient of 1985 Presidential Medal of Freedom from Reagan
Source: New York Times Magazine, 30 September 1951
"A bureaucrat is the most despicable of men, though he is needed as vultures are needed, but one hardly admires vultures whom bureaucrats so strangely resemble. I have yet to meet a bureaucrat who was not petty, dull, almost witless, crafty or stupid, an oppressor or a thief, a holder of little authority in which he delights, as a boy delights in possessing a vicious dog. Who can trust such creatures?"
-Marcus Tullius Cicero-
(106-43 B.C.) Roman Statesman, Philosopher and Orator
Source: A Pillar of Iron, a novel based on the life of Cicero by Taylor Caldwell (1965), p. 451
"We must give full weight to Sir Charles's reminder that millions in the East are still half starved. To these my fears would seem very unimportant. A hungry man thinks about food, not freedom. We must give full weight to the claim that nothing but science, and science globally applied, and therefore unprecedented Government controls, can produce full bellies and medical care for the whole human race: nothing, in short, but a world Welfare State. It is a full admission of these truths which impresses upon me the extreme peril of humanity at present."
-C. S. Lewis-
(1898-1963), British novelist
Source: Willing Slaves of the Welfare State, first published in The Observer on July 20, 1958
"A central lesson of science is that to understand complex issues (or even simple ones), we must try to free our minds of dogma and to guarantee the freedom to publish, to contradict, and to experiment. Arguments from authority are unacceptable."
-Carl Sagan-
"The merit of our Constitution was, not that it promotes democracy, but checks it."
-Horatio Seymour-
(1810-1886) Governor of New York
"[Some people] have a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to lower the powerful to their own level, and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom. I believe that it is easier to establish an absolute and despotic government amongst a people in which the conditions of society are equal, than amongst any other; and I think that, if such a government were once established amongst such a people, it would not only oppress men, but would eventually strip each of them of several of the highest qualities of humanity. Despotism, therefore, appears to me peculiarly to be dreaded in democratic times."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
[Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clerel, le Comte de Tocqueville] (1805-1859) French historian
"The Greeks... labored under the delusion that their democracy was a guarantee of peace and plenty, not realizing that unrestrained majority rule always destroys freedom, puts the minority at the mercy of the mob, and works at cross-purposes to the effective use of human energy and individual initiative."
-Henry Grady Weaver-
(1889-1949)
Source: "The Mainspring of Human Progress," 1947
"If men use their liberty in such a way as to surrender their liberty, are they thereafter any the less slaves? If people by a plebiscite elect a man despot over them, do they remain free because the despotism was of their own making?"
-Herbert Spencer-
(1820-1903) British author, economist, philosopher
1884
"When a legislature decides to steal some of our rights and plans to use police force to accomplish it, what's the real difference between them and the thief? Darn little! They hide behind the excuse that they're legislating democratically. The fact they do it by a majority vote has no moral significance whatsoever. Numerical might does not constitute right, no more than a lynch mob can justify its act because a majority participated."
-H. L. Richardson-
[Hubert Leon "Bill" Richardson] California state senator (1966-1988), author, Founder and Chairman of Gun Owners of America
Source: Compromise ... Never Justified When Principle Is Involved, The Gun Owners, December, 1995
"The disposition of all power is to abuses, nor does it at all mend the matter that its possessors are a majority. Unrestrained political authority, though it be confided to masses, cannot be trusted without positive limitations, men in bodies being but an aggregation of the passions, weaknesses and interests of men as individuals."
-James Fenimore Cooper-
(1789-1851)
Source: The American Democrat, 1838
"Sometimes, when leading families or merchants organized a government for their city, they not only provided for some power sharing through voting but took pains to reduce the probability that the government's chief executive could assume autocratic power. For a time in Genoa, for example, the chief administrator of the government had to be an outsider -- and thus someone with no membership in any of the powerful families in the city. Moreover, he was constrained to a fixed term of office, forced to leave the city after the end of his term, and forbidden from marrying into any of the local families. In Venice, after a doge who attempted to make himself autocrat was beheaded for his offense, subsequent doges were followed in official processions by a sword-bearing symbolic executioner as a reminder of the punishment intended for any leader who attempted to assume dictatorial power."
-Mancur Olson-
Source: Power and Prosperity. Outgrowing Communist and Capitalist Dictatorships (New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. 39
"Anybody that wants the Presidency so much that he'll spend two years organizing and campaigning for it is not to be trusted with the office."
-David Broder-
(1929- ) Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author, television talk show pundit, and university professor
"To permit every interest group, especially those who claim to be victimized by unfair expression, their own legislative exceptions to the First Amendment so long as they succeed in obtaining a majority of legislative votes in their favor demonstrates the potentially predatory nature of what defendants seek through this Ordinance."
-Sarah Evans Barker-
Judge, U. S. District Court
Source: Decision overturning Indianapolis Pornography Ordinance, 19 November, 1984
"It is precisely for the protection of the minority that constitutional limitations exist. Majorities need no such protection. They can take care of themselves."
-Illinois Supreme Court-
(1910)
Source: Ring V. Board Of Education
"There is no maxim in my opinion which is more liable to be misapplied, and which therefore needs elucidation than the current one that the interest of the majority is the political standard of right and wrong... . In fact it is only reestablishing under another name and a more specious form, force as the measure of right... ."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: letter to James Monroe, October 5, 1786
"An unjust law is no law at all."
-Augustine of Hippo-
"The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then get elected and prove it."
-P. J. O'Rourke-
"As to the American tradition of non-meddling, Anarchism asks that it be carried down to the individual himself. It demands no jealous barrier of isolation; it knows that such isolation is undesirable and impossible; but it teaches that by all men's strictly minding their own business, a fluid society, freely adapting itself to mutual needs, wherein all the world shall belong to all men, as much as each has need or desire, will result. And when Modern Revolution has thus been carried to the heart of the whole world — if it ever shall be, as I hope it will — then may we hope to see a resurrection of that proud spirit of our fathers which put the simple dignity of Man above the gauds of wealth and class, and held that to be an American was greater than to be a king. In that day there shall be neither kings nor Americans — only Men; over the whole earth, MEN."
-Voltairine de Cleyre-
"Any persons may attempt to unite kindred spirits, but, whatever their hopes and longings, none have the right to impose their vision of unity upon the rest."
-Robert Nozick
"Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.
-Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville-
(29 July 1805 – 16 April 1859)
Translation from Hayek, 'The Road to Serfdom'
12 September 1848, "Discours prononcé à l'assemblée constituante le 12 Septembre 1848 sur la question du droit au travail", Oeuvres complètes, vol. IX, p. 546
"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-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville-
(29 July 1805 – 16 April 1859)
'Democracy in America', Book One, Chapter III, Part I
Often misquoted as: Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom
"I think that democratic communities have a natural taste for freedom: left to themselves, they will seek it, cherish it, and view any privation of it with regret. But for equality, their passion is ardent, insatiable, incessant, invincible: they call for equality in freedom; and if they cannot obtain that, they still call for equality in slavery."
-Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville-
(29 July 1805 – 16 April 1859)
'Democracy in America', Book Two, Chapter I
"English character and English freedom depend comparatively little on the form which the Constitution assumes at Westminster. A centralised democracy may be as tyrannical as an absolute monarch; and if the vigour of the nation is to continue unimpaired, each individual, each family, each district, must preserve as far as possible its independence, its self-completeness, its powers and its privilege to manage its own affairs and think its own thoughts."
-James Anthony Froude-
(1818-1894) British author and historian
Source: Short Studies on Great Subjects, 1872
"Tis a Mistake to think this Fault [tyranny] is proper only to Monarchies; other Forms of Government are liable to it, as well as that. For where-ever the Power that is put in any hands for the Government of the People, and the Preservation of their Properties, is applied to other ends, and made use of to impoverish, harass, or subdue them to the Arbitrary and Irregular Commands of those that have it: There it presently becomes Tyranny, whether those that thus use it are one or many."
-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.
"While democracy must have its organizations and controls, its vital breath is individual liberty."
-Justice Charles Evans Hughes-
(1862-1948) Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court
"I am far from denying that newspapers in democratic countries lead citizens to do very ill-considered things in common; but without newspapers there would be hardly any common action at all. So they mend many more ills than they cause."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
(1805-1859) French historian
Source: Democracy in America, 1835
"Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself."
-Carl Gustav Jung
(1875-1961)
"The Seven Deadly Sins of the Press:
- Concentrated Power of the Big Press.
- Passing of competition and the coming of monopoly.
- Governmental control of the press.
- Timidity, especially in the face of group and corporate pressures.
- Big Business mentality.
- Clannishness among the newspaper publishers that has prevented them
from criticizing each other.
- Social blindness."
-Max Lerner-
(1902-1992) US political columnist, educator
"Thought that is silenced is always rebellious. Majorities, of course, are often mistaken. This is why the silencing of minorities is necessarily dangerous. Criticism and dissent are the indispensable antidote to major delusions."
-Alan Barth-
(1906-1979) served on the editorial board of The Washington Post for thirty years
Source: The Loyalty of Free Men, 1951
"Party is the madness of many for the gain of a few."
-Alexander Pope-
(1688-1744) English poet
Source: Thoughts on Various Subjects; published in Swift's Miscellanies (1727)
"True, it is evil that a single man should crush the herd, but see not there the worse form of slavery, which is when the herd crushes out the man."
-Antoine De Saint-Exupery-
(1900-1944)
Source: Citadelle, 1948
"When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies, to be met not with cooperation but with conquest; to be subjugated and mastered. We learn, at the last, to look at our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community; men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear, only a common desire to retreat from each other, only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force."
-Robert F. Kennedy-
"And what sort of philosophical doctrine is this -- that numbers confer unlimited rights, that they take from some persons all rights over themselves, and vest these rights in others. ... How, then, can the rights of three men exceed the rights of two men? In what possible way can the rights of three men absorb the rights of two men, and make them as if they had never existed. ... It is not possible to suppose, without absurdity, that a man should have no rights over his own body and mind, and yet have a 1/10,000,000th share in unlimited rights over all other bodies and minds?"
-Auberon Herbert-
(1838-1906) English author
Source: "The Ethics of Dynamite", Contemporary Review, May 1894; reproduced in The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State, and Other Essays by Auberon Herbert (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1978), pp. 202-203
"Ten million ignorances do not constitute one knowledge."
-Clemens von Metternich-
(1773-1859) German-Austrian politician
"The tyranny of a multitude is a multiplied tyranny."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country."
-Edward Bernays-
(1891-1995) "Father" of modern public relations (PR) and director of the U.S. Committee on Public Information during World War I, on government propaganda
Source: writing in "Propaganda" from "Food & Water Journal'' (1928)
"It must be admitted that the tendency of the human race toward liberty is largely thwarted, especially in France. This is greatly due to a fatal desire -- learned from the teachings of antiquity -- that our writers on public affairs have in common: They desire to set themselves above mankind in order to arrange, organize, and regulate it according to their fancy."
-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: What Is Liberty? "The Law" by Frederic Bastiat (1848)
"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
"Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first."
-Charles de Gaulle-
"The purpose of government is to rein in the rights of the people."
-Bill Clinton-
[William Jefferson Blythe III] (1946- ), 42nd US President
Source: No reliable source found. Often attributed to an interview on MTV in 1993 or from a speech at Philadelphia City Hall, May 28, 1993
"Having gathered all power to itself, [the State] has become the sole focus of all conflict, and it must construct totalitarian defences to match its total exposure."
-Anthony de Jasay-
(1925- ) Hungarian writer
Source: The State [1985] (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1998), p. 287
"Characteristically, however, the overthrow of the dictator simply means that there will be another dictator. ... the policies they follow will probably not be radically different. If we look around the world, we quickly realize that these policies will not be radically different from those that would be followed by a democracy either."
-Gordon Tullock-
(1922-2014) American economist, professor of law and economics at George Mason University School of Law
Source: Autocracy (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1987), p. 20
"Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties."
-Areopagitica-
"Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
(1805-1859) French historian
"Democracy, then, in the centralizing, pattern-making, absolutist shape which we have given to it is, it is clear, the time of tyranny's incubation."
-Bertrand de Jouvenel-
(1903-1987)
Source: Du Pouvoir. Histoire naturelle de sa croissance [1945] (Paris: Hachette, 1972), p. 36; English translation: On Power: The Natural History of Its Growth (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1993), p. 15.
"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 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-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: in a letter to Thomas Jefferson in 1788
"To speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government. Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it. After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule, is not because they are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest.
But a government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it. Can there not be a government in which majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience? -- in which majorities decide only those questions to which the rule of expediency is applicable? 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. It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience. 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-
(1817-1862) American author, poet, philosopher, polymath, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and transcendentalist
Source: Civil Disobedience (1849)
"To include freedom in the very definition of democracy is to define a process not by its actual characteristics as a process but by its hoped for results. This is not only intellectually invalid, it is, in practical terms, blinding oneself in advance to some of the unwanted consequences of the process."
-Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
"We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910)
"I don't care who does the electing, so long as I get to do the nominating."
-William Marcy Tweed-
(1823-1878) American politician, "Boss Tweed" was convicted for stealing millions of dollars from New York City, died in jail. Tweed was head of Tammany Hall, the Democratic Party political machine that played a major role in the politics of 19th century New York.
"There can be no assumption that today’s majority is “right” and the Amish or others like them are “wrong.” A way of life that is odd or even erratic but interferes with no right or interests of others is not to be condemned because it is different."
-Justice Warren E. Burger-
(1907-1995) Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1969-1986)
Source: Wisconsin v. Yoder, 15 May 1972
"In any free society, the conflict between social conformity and individual liberty is permanent, unresolvable, and necessary."
-Kathleen Norris-
[Kathleen Thompson,wife of C.G. Norris] (1880-1966) American novelist
"Democracy, which began by liberating man politically, has developed a dangerous tendency to enslave him through the tyranny of majorities and the deadly power of their opinion."
-Ludwig Lewisohn-
(1883-1955)
Source: The Modern Drama, 1915
"The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it."
-H. L. Mencken
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people. When the people give way, their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards. The nature of the encroachment upon the American constitution is such, as to grow every day more and more encroaching. Like a cancer, it 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, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole society."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: Novanglus Letters, 1774
.. said the author of the 'Alien and Sedition Acts'...
"Democracy arose from men thinking that if they are equal in any respect they are equal in all respects."
-Aristotle-
(384-322 BC) Greek philosopher
Source: Politics, v, c.322 B.C.
"Tyranny seldom announces itself. ... In fact, a tyranny may exist without an individual tyrant. A whole government, even a democratically elected one, may be tyrannical."
-Joseph Sobran-
(1946-2010) Columnist
"The principle that the majority have a right to rule the minority, practically resolves all government into a mere contest between two bodies of men, as to which of them shall be masters, and which of them slaves; a contest, that -- however bloody -- can, in the nature of things, never be finally closed, so long as man refuses to be a slave."
-Lysander Spooner-
(1808-1887) Political theorist, activist, abolitionist
1867
Source: No Treason, The Constitution of No Authority. (1870)
"In matters of conscience, the law of majority has no place."
-Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi-
(1869-1948)
"Politics, n. Strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles."
-Ambrose Bierce-
(1842-1914) Humorist
"Get all the fools on your side and you can be elected to anything."
-Frank Dane-
"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/
"Constitutional rights may not be infringed simply because the majority of the people choose that they be."
-Supreme Court of the United States-
Source: Westbrook v. Mihaly 2 Cal. 3d 756
"Molon labe." (Come and take them)
-Greek King Leonidas-
to Persian King Xerxes at the Battle of Thermopylae (480 BCE) in response to the Persian demand that the Greeks lay down their weapons and surrender. Quote was published in Plutarch’s Apophthegmata Laconica 51.11
"False is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand real advantages for one imaginary or trifling inconvenience; that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it; that has no remedy for evils except destruction. The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes.
Can it be supposed that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity, the most important of the code, will respect the less important and arbitrary ones, which can be violated with ease and impunity, and which, if strictly obeyed, would put an end to personal liberty... and subject innocent persons to all the vexations that the guilty alone ought to suffer?
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. They ought to be designated as laws not preventive but fearful of crimes, produced by the tumultuous impression of a few isolated facts, and not by thoughtful consideration of the inconveniences and advantages of a universal decree."
-Cesare Beccaria-
(1735-1794) [Bonesana, Marchese di] Italian nobleman, criminologist, and penal reformer
Source: Dei delitti e delle pene, [On Crimes and Punishments] ch.38 (1764)
Translation is as quoted by Thomas Jefferson in his _Commonplace Book_, 314 (G. Chinard ed. 1926), which was "the source book and repertory of Jefferson's ideas on government." Id. at 4
"I know the sense of helplessness that people feel. I know the urge to arm yourself because that's what I did. I was trained in firearms. I walked to the hospital when my husband was sick. I carried a concealed weapon and I made the determination if somebody was going to try and take me out, I was going to take them with me."
-Dianne Feinstein-
(1933-) US Senator (D-CA), 38th Mayor of San Francisco (1978-1988)
Source: April 3, 2013, speech for the Commonwealth Club
"In short, is not liberty the freedom of every person to make full use of his faculties, so long as he does not harm other persons while doing so? Is not liberty the destruction of all despotism -- including, of course, legal despotism? Finally, is not liberty the restricting of the law only to its rational sphere of organizing the right of the individual to lawful self- defense; of punishing injustice?"
-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: What Is Liberty? "The Law" by Frederic Bastiat (1848)
"Waiting periods are only a step. Registration is only a step. The prohibition of private firearms is the goal."
-Janet Reno-
US Attorney General
Private firearms rightly disquiet tyrannical government. That's arguably their most important function.
"The supposed quietude of a good man allures the ruffian; while on the other hand, arms like laws, discourage and keep the invader and the plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property. 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 one half the world deprived of the use of them..."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
Source: I Writings of Thomas Paine at 56, 1984
"The people never give up their liberties, but under some delusion."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
Source: Speech at a County Meeting at Bucks
"If the author of the Declaration of Independence were to utter such a sentiment today, the Post Office Department could exclude him from the mail, grand juries could indict him for sedition and criminal syndicalism, legislative committees could seize his private papers ... and United States Senators would be clamoring for his deportation that he ... should be sent back to live with the rest of the terrorists."
-Frank I. Cobb-
(1869-1923) American Journalist
Source: New York World
"Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervour - 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 by furnishing the exorbitant sums demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real."
-General Douglas MacArthur-
(1880-1964) WWII Supreme Allied Commander of the Southwest Pacific, Supreme United Nations Commander
1957
Source: Whan, ed. "A Soldier Speaks: Public Papers and Speeches of General of the Army Douglas MacArthur," (1965); Nation, August 17, 1957
"One of the things that bothers me most is the growing belief in the country that security is more important than freedom.
It ain't."
-Lyn Nofziger-
[Franklyn C. Nofziger] (1924-2006) American journalist, political consultant, author, Press Secretary for President Reagan
"There are all kinds of devices invented for the protection and preservation of countries: defensive barriers, forts, trenches, and the like... But prudent minds have as a natural gift one safeguard which is the common possession of all, and this applies especially to the dealings of democracies. What is this safeguard? Skepticism. This you must preserve. This you must retain. If you can keep this, you need fear no harm."
-Demosthenes-
(384 B.C.-322 B.C.)
Source: Oration
"SOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher. Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one ..."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
Source: Common Sense, February 14, 1776
"All men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot by any compact deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety."
-George Mason-
"And now that the legislators and do-gooders have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: May they reject all systems, and try liberty; for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works."
-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 (1848)
"Once 'our people' get themselves into a position to make policy, they cease being 'our people'."
-M. Stanton Evans-
(1934- ) American journalist, author, educator and political activist
"The law is an adroit mixture of customs that are beneficial to society, and could be followed even if no law existed, and others that are of advantage to a ruling minority, but harmful to the masses of men, and can be enforced on them only by terror."
-Peter Kropotkin-
[Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin] (1842-1921) Russian zoologist, activist, philosopher, economist, writer, scientist, evolutionary theorist, geographer and one of the world's foremost anarcho-communists
Source: Words of a Rebel
"It seems to me very important to continue to distinguish between two evils. It may be necessary temporarily to accept a lesser evil, but one must never label a necessary evil as good."
-Margaret Mead-
Or, for that matter, necessarily "necessary"...
"I would like to call upon America to be more careful with its trust ... and prevent those ... because of short-sightedness and still others out of self-interest, from falsely using the struggle for peace and for social justice to lead you down a false road. Because they are trying to weaken you; they are trying to disarm your strong and magnificent country in the face of this fearful threat. ... I call upon you: ordinary working men of America ... do not let yourselves become weak."
-Alexander Solzhenitsyn-
June 30, 1975
"I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement."
-Calvin Coolidge-
(1873-1933), 30th US President
"Saying it's okay for the government to spy on you because you're innocent and you have 'nothing to hide'... Is like saying it's okay for the government to censor free speech because you have 'nothing to say.'"
-Edward Snowden-
(1983-) IT security specialist, NSA whistleblower
"Who is the fascist? Individualism and the political philosophy of limited government is not only inconsistent with but is the exact opposite of fascism and Nazism. Under fascism and Nazism, the state reigns supreme with absolute power over everyone and all forms of property. It can well be asked: who is the fascist, when the president of the United States and many Democrats and Republicans in congress call for expanded authority for the FBI and other federal security agencies to intrude into the lives of the American citizenry? Who is the fascist, when the call is made for increased power for the FBI to undertake “roving wiretapping” or have easier access to the telephone and credit-card records of the general population? Who is the fascist, when the proposal is made to make it easier for the FBI to investigate and infiltrate any political organization or association because the government views it as a potential terrorist danger?"
-Richard M. Ebeling-
(1950- ) Author, Professor of Economics, Hillsdale College
Source: The Oklahoma Tragedy and the Mass Media, The Tyranny of Gun Control, 83 (Future of Freedom Foundation 1997).
"Nothing whatever but the constitutional law, the political structure, of these United States protects any American from arbitrary seizure of his property and his person, from the Gestapo and the Storm Troops, from the concentration camp, the torture chamber, the revolver at the back of his neck in a cellar."
-Rose Lane-
[Rose Wilder Lane] (1886-1968) American journalist, travel writer, novelist, and political theorist
"Nothing is so galling to a people not broken in from 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-
(1800-1859) [Lord Macaulay] 1st Baron Macaulay, British historian
Source: "Southey's Colloquies on Society" par. SC.69
"National Socialism is a religion. All we lack is a religious genius capable of uprooting outmoded religious practices and putting new ones in their place. We lack traditions and ritual. One day soon National Socialism will be the religion of all Germans. My Party is my church, and I believe I serve the Lord best if I do his will, and liberate my oppressed people from the fetters of slavery. That is my gospel."
-Joseph Paul Goebbels-
(1897-1945) Nazi Propaganda Minister
Source: Geobbels' diary, 16 October 1928
"Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of,
the lack of evidence."
-Richard Dawkins-
(1941-) British evolutionary biologist, author, and media commentator
"Do we desire to be cradled, and then carried throughout life to our graves by this partisan propelled bureaucratic monstrosity? ... as individuals of sovereign dignity, are we now so terrified, bewildered, and impotent that our main purpose is to seek asylum from the potential hazards of freedom? Have we no faith in our natural strengths and abilities?"
-Sergei Hoff-
former Montana Deputy Sheriff
Source: 'Our Fears and Denials Will Enslave Us' by Sergei Hoff, October 23, 2004
"We think ourselves possessed, or, at least, we boast that we are so, of liberty of conscience on all subjects, and of the right of free inquiry and private judgment in all cases, and yet how far are we from these exalted privileges in fact! There exists, I believe, throughout the whole Christian world, a law which makes it blasphemy to deny or doubt the divine inspiration of all the books of the Old and New Testaments, from Genesis to Revelations. In most countries of Europe it is punished by fire at the stake, or the rack, or the wheel. In England itself it is punished by boring through the tongue with a red-hot poker. In America it is not better; even in our own Massachusetts, which I believe, upon the whole, is as temperate and moderate in religious zeal as most of the States, a law was made in the latter end of the last century, repealing the cruel punishments of the former laws, but substituting fine and imprisonment upon all those blasphemers upon any book of the Old Testament or New. Now, what free inquiry, when a writer must surely encounter the risk of fine or imprisonment for adducing any argument for investigating into the divine authority of those books? Who would run the risk of translating Dupuis? But I cannot enlarge upon this subject, though I have it much at heart. I think such laws a great embarrassment, great obstructions to the improvement of the human mind. Books that cannot bear examination, certainly ought not to be established as divine inspiration by penal laws. It is true, few persons appear desirous to put such laws in execution, and it is also true that some few persons are hardy enough to venture to depart from them. But as long as they continue in force as laws, the human mind must make an awkward and clumsy progress in its investigations. I wish they were repealed. The substance and essence of Christianity, as I understand it, is eternal and unchangeable, and will bear examination forever, but it has been mixed with extraneous ingredients, which I think will not bear examination, and they ought to be separated. Adieu."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: one of his last letters to Thomas Jefferson, January 23, 1825
"The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it."
-John Hay-
(1838-1905) American statesman, diplomat, author, journalist, and private secretary and assistant to Abraham Lincoln
Source: Castilian Days, II, 1872
"That distinct sovereignties could exist under one government, emanating from the same people, was a phenomenon in the political world, which the wisest statesmen in Europe could not comprehend; and of its practicability many in our own country entertained the most serious doubts. Thus far the friends of liberty have had great cause of triumph in the success of the principles upon which our government rests. But all must admit that the purity and permanency of this system depend on its faithful administration. The states and the federal government have their respective orbits, within which each must revolve. If either cross the sphere of the other, the harmony of the system is destroyed, and its strength is impaired. It would be as gross usurpation on the part of the federal government, to interfere with state rights, by an exercise of powers not delegated; as it would be for a state to interpose its authority against a law of the union."
-Justice John McLean-
(1785-1861) U.S. Congressman for Ohio (1813-16), U.S. Postmaster General, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1830-61), presidential candidate for the Whig and Republican parties
Source: Craig v. Missouri, 4 Peters 410 (1830) [29 U.S. 410, 464]
"No one can read our Constitution without concluding that the people who wrote it wanted their government severely limited; the words 'no' and 'not' employed in restraint of government power occur 24 times in the first seven articles of the Constitution and 22 more times in the Bill of Rights."
-Rev. Edmund A. Opitz-
(1914-2006) American minister, author
"The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same."
-Stendhal-
[Marie-Henri Beyle] (1783-1842) French writer
"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-
(1856-1924) 28th US President
Speech, 1912
"There should be a sympathy with freedom, a desire to give it scope, founded not upon visionary ideas, but upon the long experience of many generations within the shores of this happy isle, that in freedom you lay the firmest foundations both of loyalty and order; the firmest foundations for the development of individual character; and the best provision for the happiness of the nation at large."
-William Ewart Gladstone-
"Freedom is not a luxury that we can indulge in when at last we have security and prosperity and enlightenment; it is, rather, antecedent to all of these, for without it we can have neither security nor prosperity nor enlightenment."
-Henry Steele Commager-
(1902-1998) Historian and author
Source: Freedom, Loyalty and Dissent, 1954
"Authority intoxicates,
And makes mere sots of magistrates;
The fumes of it invade the brain,
And make men giddy, proud and vain."
-Samuel Butler-
(1835-1902)
"All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: speech at the Constitutional Convention, July 11, 1787
"The Civil War is not ended: I question whether any serious civil war ever does end."
-T. S. Eliot-
"The War between the States... produced the foundation for the kind of government we have today: consolidated and absolute, based on the unrestrained will of the majority, with force, threats, and intimidation being the order of the day. Today's federal government is considerably at odds with that envisioned by the framers of the Constitution. ... [The War] also laid to rest the great principle enunciated in the Declaration of Independence that 'Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed'."
-Walter E. Williams-
(1936- ) Columnist, Professor of Economics at George Mason University
"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
-Isaac Asimov-
"These six things doth the LORD hate: yea, seven are an abomination unto him: A proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, An heart that deviseth wicked imaginations, feet that be swift in running to mischief, A false witness that speaketh lies, and he that soweth discord among brethren."
-King Solomon-
Source: The Holy Bible, Proverbs 6:16
"Most of the change we think we see in life Is due to truths being in and out of favor."
-Robert Frost-
(1874-1963) American poet, received four Pulitzer Prizes
Source: "The Black Cottage," North of Boston, 1914
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."
-Blaise Pascal-
(1623- 1662) French mathematician and philosopher
"The war made possible for us the solution of a whole series of problems that could never have been solved in normal times."
-Joseph Paul Goebbels-
(1897-1945) Nazi Propaganda Minister
Source: The Göebbels Diaries, 1942-1943
"The worst thing that can happen to a good cause is not to be skillfully attacked, but to be ineptly defended."
-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)
"The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else. If it had been possible he would have settled the matter otherwise, and without bloodshed. He doesn't boast of his own death or of others'. But he does not repent. He suffers and keeps his mouth shut; if anything, others then exploit him, making him a myth, while he, the man worthy of esteem, was only a poor creature who reacted with dignity and courage in an event bigger than he was."
-Umberto Eco-
"The most common characteristic of all police states is intimidation by surveillance. Citizens know they are being watched and overheard. Their mail is being examined. Their homes can be invaded."
-Vance Packard-
(1914-1996) American journalist, social critic, and author
Source: The People Shapers, 1977
"Why suspend the habeas corpus in insurrections and rebellions? Examine the history of England. See how few of the cases of the suspension of the habeas corpus law have been worthy of that suspension. They have been either real treasons, wherein the parties might as well have been charged at once, or sham plots, where it was shameful they should ever have been suspected. Yet for the few cases wherein the suspension of the habeas corpus has done real good, that operation is now become habitual and the minds of the nation almost prepared to live under its constant suspension."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: letter to James Madison, 1788
"A writ having for its object to bring a party before a court or judge; especially, one to inquire into the cause of a person's imprisonment or detention by another, with the view to protect the right to personal liberty."
Definition of 'habeas corpus'
"The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience."
-Albert Camus-
(1913-1960) French Algerian author
"All propaganda must be so popular and on such an intellectual level, that even the most stupid of those toward whom it is directed will understand it... Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way around, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise."
-Adolf Hitler
(1889-1945) German Nazi Dictator
1935
Source: Mein Kampf, p. 197. 14th Edition.
"We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans..."
-Bill Clinton-
[William Jefferson Blythe III] (1946- ), 42nd US President
Source: March 1, 1993 during a press conference in Piscataway, NJ. Ref: USA Today, 11 March 1993, page 2A
"Every collectivist revolution rides in on a Trojan horse of 'emergency'. It was the tactic of Lenin, Hitler, and Mussolini. In the collectivist sweep over a dozen minor countries of Europe, it was the cry of men striving to get on horseback. And 'emergency' became the justification of the subsequent steps. This technique of creating emergency is the greatest achievement that demagoguery attains."
-Herbert Hoover-
(1874-1964), 31st US President
"The concept of military necessity is seductively broad, and has a dangerous plasticity. Because they invariably have the visage of overriding importance, there is always a temptation to invoke security "necessities" to justify an encroachment upon civil liberties. For that reason, the military-security argument must be approached with a healthy skepticism."
-Justice William J. Brennan-
(1906-1997) U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Brown v. Glines, 444 US 348 (1980)
"The inherent right in the people to reform their government, I do not deny; and they have another right, and that is to resist unconstitutional laws without overturning the government."
-Daniel Webster-
(1782-1852) US Senator
"If you want a Big Brother, you get all that comes with it."
-Erich Fromm-
(1900-1980)
Source: Escape from Freedom
"To oppose corruption in government is the highest obligation of patriotism."
-G. Edward Griffin
Historian, Author
Source: his book, The Freedom Manifesto, 2001
"Government is like fire. If it is kept within bounds and under the control of the people, it contributes to the welfare of all. But if it gets out of place, if it gets too big and out of control, it destroys the happiness and even the lives of the people."
-Harold E. Stassen-
(1907-2001) 25th Governor of Minnesota - R
"...The Bill of Rights is a literal and absolute document. The First Amendment doesn't say you have a right to speak out unless the government has a 'compelling interest' in censoring the Internet. The Second Amendment doesn't say you have the right to keep and bear arms until some madman plants a bomb. The Fourth Amendment doesn't say you have the right to be secure from search and seizure unless some FBI agent thinks you fit the profile of a terrorist. The government has no right to interfere with any of these freedoms under any circumstances."
-Harry Browne-
(1933-2006) American libertarian writer, politician, and free-market investment analyst. Libertarian candidate for US President 1996 & 2000
1966
"For you see, the world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes."
-Benjamin Disraeli-
(1804-1881) Prime Minister of England, British statesman, novelist
Source: his novel 'Coningsby, the New Generation', 1844
"The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it."
-Dr. Joseph Mengele-
(1911- 979) Nazi German SS officer and a physician in the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, known for performing grisly human experiments on camp inmates, including children, for which Mengele was called the "Angel of Death" (German: Todesengel)
"Any formal attack on ignorance is bound to fail because the masses are always ready to defend their most precious possession -- their ignorance.
-Hendrik van Loon-
(1882-1944) Dutch-American historian and journalist
Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: letter to Thomas Jefferson, May 13, 1798; reproduced in Jack N. Rakove (Ed.), James Madison: Writings (1999), p. 588.
"Nothing is as terrible to see as ignorance in action."
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe-
(1749-1832)
Source: engraved on a plaque at the Naval War College
"The entire American political system is a con, a sleazy mix of legalized bribes, auctioning off of favors, revolving doors between government agencies and the corporations they enrich and the blatant hypocrisy of snake-oil salespeople who know the marks (voters) face a false choice between two parties that are the same poison sold under different labels."
-Charles Hugh Smith-
American writer
Source: If Your BS Detector Isn't Shrieking, It's Broken, June 08, 2015
"Liberalism is a moral manipulation that exaggerates inequity and unfairness in American life in order to justify overreaching public policies and programs. Liberalism undermines the spirit of self-help and individual responsibility. For liberals in academia, the fact that black college students earn lower grades and have a higher dropout rate than any group besides reservation Indians means that blacks remain stymied and victimized by white racism. Thus, their push for affirmative action and other race-based programs is to assuage their guilt and shame for America’s past by having people around with black skin color. The heck with the human being inside that skin."
-Walter E. Williams-
(1936- ) Columnist, Professor of Economics at George Mason University
Source: 'Shame,' 2015 Creators.com
"Man, no doubt, owes many other moral duties to his fellow men; such as to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, care for the sick, protect the defenceless, assist the weak, and enlighten the ignorant. But these are simply moral duties, of which each man must be his own judge, in each particular case, as to whether, and how, and how far, he can, or will, perform them. But of his legal duty — that is, of his duty to live honestly towards his fellow men — his fellow men not only may judge, but, for their own protection, must judge. And, if need be, they may rightfully compel him to perform it. They may do this, acting singly, or in concert. They may do it on the instant, as the necessity arises, or deliberately and systematically, if they prefer
to do so, and the exigency will admit of it."
-Lysander Spooner-
"Once you begin to take yourself seriously as a leader or as a follower, as a modern or as a conservative, then you become a self- conscious, biting, and scratching little animal whose work is not of the slightest value or importance to anybody."
-Virginia Woolf-
"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
"We have on the one hand a desperate need; hunger, sickness, and the dread of war. We have, on the other, the conception of something that might meet it: omnicompetent global technocracy. Are not these the ideal opportunity for enslavement? This is how it has entered before; a desperate need (real or apparent) in the one party, a power (real or apparent) to relieve it, in the other."
-C. S. Lewis-
(1898-1963), British novelist
Source: Willing Slaves of the Welfare State, first published in The Observer on July 20, 1958
"Laws do not persuade just because they threaten."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist
A.D. 65
"Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burned women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears."
-Justice Louis D. Brandeis-
(1856-1941) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: Whitney v. California, 1927
"Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear."
-Harry S. Truman-
(1884-1972), 33rd US President
Source: message to Congress, August 8, 1950
"Terrorism is the war of the poor. War is the terrorism of the rich."
-Leon Uris-
(1924-2003) American novelist
Source: _Trinity, a Novel of Ireland_, 1976
"Socialism is the idea that violent force is an appropriate response to peaceful, voluntary exchange."
-Frank Fleming-
Source: Twitter Oct 13, 205
"You know, if government were a product, selling it would be illegal. Government is a health hazard. Governments have killed many more people than cigarettes or unbuckled seat belts ever have."
-P. J. O'Rourke-
(1947- ) US humorist, journalist, & political commentator
Source: "The Liberty Manifesto"
"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) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
Source: Common Sense, 1776
"Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others."
-Edward Abbey-
"We must scrupulously guard the civil rights and civil liberties of all our citizens, whatever their background. We must remember that any oppression, any injustice, any hatred, is a wedge designed to attack our civilization."
-Franklin D. Roosevelt-
"Hundreds of thousands of rouble notes are being issued daily by our treasury. This is done, not in order to fill the coffers of the State with practically worthless paper, but with the deliberate intention of destroying the value of money as a means of payment. ...
Experience has taught us it is impossible to root out the evils of capitalism merely by confiscation and expropriation… The simplest way to exterminate the very spirit of capitalism is therefore to flood the country with notes of a high face-value without financial guarantees of any sort. ... [T]he great illusion of the value and power of money, on which the capitalist state is based will have been definitely destroyed."
-Vladimir Ilyich Lenin-
[Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov] (1870 - 1924), First Leader of the Soviet Union
Source: an interview with Lenin published in the Daily Chronicle and the New York Times on April 23, 1919
"I believe we are on an irreversible trend towards more freedom and democracy, but that could change."
-Dan Quayle-
"We are so concerned to flatter the majority that we lose sight of how very often it is necessary, in order to preserve freedom for the minority, let alone for the individual, to face that majority down."
-William F. Buckley, Jr.-
(1925-2008) American author and journalist, founded 'National Review'
Source: The Jeweler’s Eye, 1968
"The fact is that there is a serious danger of this country becoming a pluto-democracy; that is, a sham republic with the real government in the hands of a small clique of enormously wealthy men, who speak through their money, and whose influence, even today, radiates to every corner of the United States."
-William Gibbs McAdoo-
(1863-1941) US Senator (D-CA), Secretary of Treasury, President Wilson's national campaign vice-chairman
Source: in Crowded Years (1974)
"The legislative department is everywhere extending the sphere of its activity and drawing all power into its impetuous vortex."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Federalist No. 48, February 1, 1788
"Government spending on business only aggravates the problem. Too many business have successfully lobbied for special favors and treatment by seeking mandates for their products, subsidies (in the form of cash payments from the government), and regulations and tariffs to keep more efficient competitors at bay. Crony capitalism is much easier than competing in an open market. But it erodes our overall standard of living and stifles entrepreneurs by rewarding the politically favored rather than those who provide what consumers want."
-Charles Koch-
(1935-) American businessman and philanthropist
Source: Koch, Charles (March 1, 2011). "Why Koch Industries Is Speaking Out". The Wall Street Journal.
"It is apparent from the whole context of the Constitution as well as the history of the times which gave birth to it, that it was the purpose of the Convention to establish a currency consisting of the precious metals. These were adopted by a permanent rule excluding the use of a perishable medium of exchange, such as certain agricultural commodities recognized by the statutes of some States as tender for debts, or the still more pernicious expedient of paper currency."
-Andrew Jackson-
(1767-1845) 7th US President
Source: 8th Annual Message to Congress, December 5, 1836.
"Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a law breaker, it breeds contempt for the law."
-Justice Louis D. Brandeis-
(1856-1941) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: Olmstead v. U.S., 277 US 438, 1928
"The system of banking we have both equally and ever reprobated. I contemplate it as a blot left in all our constitutions, which, if not covered, will end in their destruction, which is already hit by the gamblers in corruption, and is sweeping away in its progress the fortunes and morals of our citizens. Funding I consider as limited, rightfully, to a redemption of the debt within the lives of a majority of the generation contracting it; every generation coming equally, by the laws of the Creator of the world, to the free possession of the earth he made for their subsistence, unincumbered by their predecessors, who, like them, were but tenants for life."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: The Works of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 11 (Correspondence and Papers 1808-1816) > TO JOHN TAYLOR > paragraph 790
"History will also give Occasion to expatiate on the Advantage of Civil Orders and Constitutions, how Men and their Properties are protected by joining in Societies and establishing Government; their Industry encouraged and rewarded, Arts invented, and Life made more comfortable: The Advantages of Liberty, Mischiefs of Licentiousness, Benefits arising from good Laws and a due Execution of Justice, &c. Thus may the first Principles of sound Politicks be fix'd in the Minds of Youth."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
Source: Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania, 1749
"Instead of fostering a system that enables people to help themselves, America is now saddled with a system that destroys value, raises costs, hinders innovation and relegates millions of citizens to a life of poverty, dependency and hopelessness. This is what happens when elected officials believe that people’s lives are better run by politicians and regulators than by the people themselves. Those in power fail to see that more government means less liberty, and liberty is the essence of what it means to be American. Love of liberty is the American ideal."
-Charles Koch-
(1935-) American businessman and philanthropist
Source: Koch, Charles (April 3, 2014). 'Instead of welcoming free debate, collectivists engage in character assassination.' "Charles Koch: I'm Fighting to Restore a Free Society". The Wall Street Journal.
"Everything is destroyed by its own particular vice:
the destructive power resides within.
Rust destroys iron, moths destroy clothes,
the worm eats away the wood;
but greatest of all evils is envy,
impious habitant of corrupt souls,
which ever was, is, and shall be a consuming disease."
-Menander-
(342 BC-292 BC)
"Besides, to lay and collect internal taxes in this extensive country must require a great number of congressional ordinances, immediately operation upon the body of the people; these must continually interfere with the state laws and thereby produce disorder and general dissatisfaction till the one system of laws or the other, operating upon the same subjects, shall be abolished."
-Federal Farmer-
Anonymous writer who wrote a methodical assessment of the proposed United States Constitution
Source: Antifederalist Letter, October 10, 1787
"When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that an old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had only one before."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics."
-Thomas Sowell-
"Government ought not to be invested with power to control the affections, any more than the consciences of citizens. A man has at least as good a right to choose his wife, as he has to choose his religion. His taste may not suit his neighbors; but so long as his deportment is correct, they have no right to interfere with his concerns."
-Lydia Maria Child-
"The priceless heritage of our society is the unrestricted constitutional right of each member to think as he will. Thought control is a copyright of totalitarianism, and we have no claim to it. It is not the function of the government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error. We could justify any censorship only when the censors are better shielded against error than the censored."
-Robert H. Jackson-
"Now those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth, and let me remind you they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyranny."
-Barry Goldwater
(1909-1998) US Senator (R-Arizona)
Source: Senator Goldwater's Acceptance Speech at the Republican National Convention, 1964
"Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies. Absolute power does corrupt, and those who seek it must be suspect and must be opposed."
-Barry Goldwater-
"What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it his heaven."
-Friedrich Hoelderlin-
[Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin ] (1770-1843) German poet
"The threat of people acting in their own enlightened and rational self-interest strikes bureaucrats, politicians and social workers as ominous and dangerous."
-W. G. Hill-
"The great non sequitur committed by defenders of the State, including classical Aristotelian and Thomist philosophers, is to leap from the necessity of society to the necessity of the State."
-Murray N. Rothbard-
(1926-1995) Dean of the Austrian School of Economics
"Life is too short to pursue every human act to its most remote consequences; "for want of a nail, a kingdom was lost" is a commentary on fate, not the statement of a major cause of action against a blacksmith."
-Antonin Scalia-
"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 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
"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
"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)
"... when the struggle seems to be drifting definitely towards a world social democracy, there may still be very great delays and disappointments before it becomes an efficient and beneficent world system. Countless people ... will hate the new world order ... and will die protesting against it. When we attempt to evaluate its promise, we have to bear in mind the distress of a generation or so of malcontents, many of them quite gallant and graceful-looking people."
-H. G. Wells-
(1866-1946)
Source: in his book entitled "The New World Order" (1939)
"Here is the Golden Rule of sound citizenship, the first and greatest lesson in the study of politics: You get the same order of criminality from any State to which you give power to exercise it; and whatever power you give the State to do things FOR you carries with it the equivalent power to do things TO you."
-Albert Jay Nock-
(1870-1945)
Source: The Criminality of the State, America Mercury Magazine, March, 1939
"You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
You cannot help small men by tearing down big men.
You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
You cannot lift the wage-earner by pulling down the wage-payer.
You cannot help the poor man by destroying the rich.
You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income.
You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.
You cannot establish security on borrowed money.
You cannot build character and courage by taking away men's initiative and independence.
You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves."
-William Boetcker-
(1873-1962) German-born Presbyterian clergyman
Source: "The Ten Cannots" (1916)
often falsely attributed to Abraham Lincoln:
"All forms of tampering with human beings, getting at them, shaping them against their will to your own pattern, all thought control and conditioning is, therefore, a denial of that in men which makes them men and their values ultimate."
-Isaiah Berlin-
(1909-1997)
Source: Two Concepts of Liberty, 1958
"Nature has two voices, the one high, the other low; one is in sweet accord with reason and justice, and the other apparently at war with both. The more men know of the essential nature of things, and of the true relation of mankind, the freer they are from prejudice of every kind. The child is afraid of the giant form of his own shadow. This is natural, but he will part with his fears when he is older and wiser. So ignorance is full of prejudice, but it will disappear with enlightenment."
-Frederick Douglass-
"The bosom of America is open to receive not only the Opulent and respectable Stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all Nations And Religions; whom we shall wellcome to a participation of all our rights and previleges, if by decency and propriety of conduct they appear to merit the enjoyment."
-George Washington-
"Whoever claims the right to redistribute the wealth produced by others is claiming the right to treat human beings as chattel."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
"The more one considers the matter, the clearer it becomes that redistribution is in effect far less a redistribution of free income from the richer to the poorer, as we imagined, than a redistribution of power from the individual to the State."
-Bertrand de Jouvenel-
(1903-1987)
Source: The Ethics of Redistribution [1952] (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1990), p. 72.
"The United States was made by men of all races and colors, not for white men, but for the refuge and defense of man. If it does not rest upon the natural rights of man, it rests nowhere. If it does not exist by the consent of governed then any exclusion is possible, and it is a shorter step from an exclusive white man's government to an exclusively rich white man's government, than it is from a system for mankind to one for white men. The spirit which excludes some men today because they are of a certain color, may exclude others tomorrow because they are of a certain poverty or a certain church or a certain birthplace. There is no safety, no guarantee, no security in a prejudice. If we build strong and long, we must build upon moral principle."
-George William Curtis-
"The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation."
-Vladimir Ilyich Lenin-
[Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov] (1870 - 1924), First Leader of the Soviet Union
Source: Attributed, no source found among Lenin's writings
"We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are determined to destroy this system under all conditions."
-Adolf Hitler-
(1889-1945) German Nazi Dictator
Source: Hitler's speech on May 1, 1927. Cited in: Toland, John (1992). Adolf Hitler. Anchor Books. pp. 224-225. ISBN 0385037244
"The notion that the church, the press, and the universities should serve the state is essentially a Communist notion. In a free society these institutions must be wholly free -- which is to say that their function is to serve as checks upon the state."
-Alan Barth-
(1906-1979) served on the editorial board of The Washington Post for thirty years
Source: The Loyalty of Free Men, 1951
"Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity. … In the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches and the media by transforming the consciousness of society."
-Antonio Gramsci-
(1891-1937) Italian Marxist theoretician and politician, “class warrior”
Source: 1915
"The fact is that up to now a free society has not been good for the intellectual. It has neither accorded him a superior status to sustain his confidence nor made it easy for him to acquire an unquestioned sense of social usefulness. For he derives his sense of usefulness mainly from directing, instructing, and planning -- from minding other people's business -- and is bound to feel superfluous and neglected where people believe themselves competent to manage individual and communal affairs, and are impatient of supervision and regulation. A free society is as much a threat to the intellectual's sense of worth as an automated economy is to the workingman's sense of worth. Any social order that can function with a minimum of leadership will be anathema to the intellectual."
-Eric Hoffer-
(1902-1983) American author, philosopher, awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
"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
"Fascism recognises the real needs which gave rise to socialism and trade-unionism, giving them due weight in the guild or corporative system in which diverent interests are coordinated and harmonised in the unity of the State."
-Benito Mussolini-
(1883-1945), Italian dictator during WW2
Source: Benito Mussolini, 1935, The Doctrine of Fascism, Firenze: Vallecchi Editore, (p.15)
"The physical capacity to coerce others can never generate a moral obligation to obey the dictates of [government] power."
-George H. Smith-
Source: The System of Liberty (2013), p. 147.
"Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed."
-Josef Stalin-
(1879-1953) Communist leader of the USSR
"We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, and scorn toward those who disagree with us."
-Vladimir Ilyich Lenin-
[Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov] (1870 - 1924), First Leader of the Soviet Union
"As we all learned from the sorry experience of state-sanctioned bureaucracies in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, decentralization [in education] is crucial to both freedom and excellence."
-Jerry Brown
[Edmund Gerald Brown, Jr.] (1938- ) US politician, Attorney General and former governor of California, former Mayor of Oakland, CA, former chair of the California Democratic Party
"How far should one accept the rules of the society in which one lives? To put it another way: at what point does conformity become corruption? Only by answering such questions does the conscience truly define itself."
-Kenneth Tynan-
"And here we encounter the seeds of government disaster and collapse -- the kind that wrecked ancient Rome and every other civilization that allowed a sociopolitical monster called the welfare state to exist."
-Barry Goldwater-
(1909-1998) US Senator (R-Arizona)
"If you suppose that good intentions justify intruding on the lives and properties of your fellow citizens: Do you appreciate being the target of somebody else's good intentions, or haven't you had that particular dubious pleasure yet?"
-Cat Farmer-
"What protection teaches us, is to do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war."
-Henry George-
1886
"The fundamental source of all your errors, sophisms and false reasonings is a total ignorance of the natural rights of mankind. Were you once to become acquainted with these, you could never entertain a thought, that all men are not, by nature, entitled to a parity of privileges. You would be convinced, that natural liberty is a gift of the beneficent Creator to the whole human race, and that civil liberty is founded in that; and cannot be wrested from any people, without the most manifest violation of justice."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804)
Source: The Farmer Refuted, February 23, 1775
"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 need.' 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
"Capital must protect itself in every way ...Debts must be collected and loans and mortgages foreclosed as soon as possible. When through a process of law the common people have lost their homes, they will be more tractable and more easily governed by the STRONG ARM OF THE LAW (police) applied by the central power of leading financiers. People without homes will not quarrel with their leaders. This is well known among our principle men now engaged in forming an imperialism of capitalism to govern the world. By dividing the people we can get them to expend their energies in fighting over questions of no importance to us except as TEACHERS OF THE COMMON HERD."
-Civil Servants' Year Book-
January 1934
Source: Civil Servants' Year Book, "The Organizer"
"Marx's Kapital is not a treatise on socialism; it is a gerrymand against the bourgeoisie. It was supposed to be written for the working class, but the working man respects the bourgeoisie and wants to be a bourgeoisie. Marx never got a hold of him for a moment. It was the revolting sons of the bourgeoisie itself, like myself, that painted the flag red. The middle and upper classes are the revolutionary element in society. The proletariat is the conservative element."
-George Bernard Shaw-
(1856-1950) Irish comic dramatist
Source: 'Who I Am and What I Think' (1901)
"Unfortunately, the fundamental concepts of dignity, respect, equality before the law and personal freedom are under attack by the nation’s own government. That’s why, if we want to restore a free society and create greater well-being and opportunity for all Americans, we have no choice but to fight for those principles."
-Charles Koch-
(1935-) American businessman and philanthropist
Source: Koch, Charles (April 3, 2014). 'Instead of welcoming free debate, collectivists engage in character assassination.' "Charles Koch: I'm Fighting to Restore a Free Society". The Wall Street Journal.
"If the question relates to any point of public liberty, or if it be one of those in which the judges may be suspected of bias, the jury undertake to decide both law and fact. If they be mistaken, a decision against right, which is casual only, is less dangerous to the State, and less afflicting to the loser, than one which makes part of a regular and uniform system."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"Many now believe that with the rise of the totalitarian State the world has entered upon a new era of barbarism. It has not. The totalitarian State is only the State; the kind of thing it does is only what the State has always done with unfailing regularity, if it had the power to do it, wherever and whenever its own aggrandizement made that kind of thing expedient. Give any State like power hereafter, and put it in like circumstances, and it will do precisely the same kind of thing. The State will unfailingly aggrandize itself, if only it has the power, first at the expense of its own citizens, and then at the expense of anyone else in sight. It has always done so, and always will."
-Albert Jay Nock-
(1870-1945)
Source: The Criminality of the State, America Mercury Magazine, March, 1939
"Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived in their relation to the State."
-Benito Mussolini-
(1883-1945), Italian dictator during WW2
Source: New York Times, 11 January 1935
"Society is composed of men, and every man is a FREE agent. Since man is free, he can choose; since he can choose, he can err; since he can err, he can suffer. I go further: He must err and he must suffer; for his starting point is ignorance, and in his ignorance he sees before him an infinite number of unknown roads, all of which save one lead to error."
-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: Harmonies, XXX
"Government, in my humble opinion, should be formed to secure and to enlarge the exercise of the natural rights of its members; and every government, which has not this in view, as its principal object, is not a government of the legitimate kind."
-James Wilson-
(1742-1798) Member of Continental Congress, signed Declaration of Independence; U.S. Supreme Court Justice and delegate from Pennsylvania
Source: Lectures on Law, 1791
“If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. Were an opinion a personal possession of no value except to the owner; if to be obstructed in the enjoyment of it were simply a private injury, it would make some difference whether the injury was inflicted only on a few persons or on many. But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”
-John Stuart Mill-
“Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion”
"Here I close my opinion. I could not say less in view of questions of such gravity that go down to the very foundations of the government. If the provisions of the Constitution can be set aside by an Act of Congress, where is the course of usurpation to end? The present assault upon capital is but the beginning. It will be but the stepping-stone to others, larger and more sweeping, till our political contests will become a war of the poor against the rich; a war growing in intensity and bitterness."
-Justice Stephen J. Field-
(1816-1899) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: United States Supreme Court opinion, Pollock v. Farmers Loan & Trust Co. (1898)
"The framers of the constitution knew human nature as well as we do. They too had lived in dangerous days; they too knew the suffocating influence of orthodoxy and standardized thought. They weighed the compulsions for restrained speech and thought against the abuses of liberty. They chose liberty."
-Justice William O. Douglas-
(1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Beauharnais v.Illinois, 342 U.S. 250, 287 (1952)
"Bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: First Inaugural Address, 4 March 1801
"You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it."
-Dr. Adrian Rogers-
(1931-2005) American pastor
"I started out by viewing the marketplace as a cruel place, where you need intervention by government and lawyers to protect people. But after watching the regulators work, I have come to believe that markets are magical and the best protectors of the consumer. It is my job to explain the beauties of the free market."
-John Stossel-
(1947-) American consumer reporter, investigative journalist, author and columnist
Source: interview in The Oregonian.
"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-
(1819-1892)
Source: Notes Left Over, 1881
"Wealth comes from successful individual efforts to please one’s fellow man ... that’s what competition is all about: “out pleasing” your competitors to win over the consumers."
-Walter E. Williams-
(1936- ) Columnist, Professor of Economics at George Mason University
Source: All It Takes is Guts
"[E]conomic liberty and creative entrepreneurship are the basis of any solution to today’s social and economic difficulties. Blaming business, setting wages, and attempting to run the economy by decree from Washington only exacerbates the problems. Consider the minimum wage. It seems so simple: Tell business to pay its workers more. But a hike in the minimum wage is essentially a tax, punishing precisely those companies that hire workers with the least skills."
-Doug Bandow-
(1954- ) columnist, author, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute
Source: Big business is not to blame, THE WASHINGTON TIMES, October 13, 1995.
"Those who see their lives as spoiled and wasted crave equality and fraternity more than they do freedom. If they clamor for freedom, it is but freedom to establish equality and uniformity. The passion for equality is partly a passion for anonymity: to be one thread of the many which make up a tunic; one thread not distinguishable from the others. No one can then point us out, measure us against others and expose our inferiority."
-Eric Hoffer-
(1902-1983) American author, philosopher, awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
"The system of private property is the most important guaranty of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not."
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
"We must not overlook the role that extremists play. They are the gadflies that keep society from being too complacent."
-Abraham Flexner-
(1866-1959)
Source: Universities, 1930
"It is the highest impertinence and presumption, therefore, in kings and ministers, to pretend to watch over the economy of private people, and to restrain their expence, either by sumptuary laws, or by prohibiting the importation of foreign luxuries. They are themselves always, and without any exception, the greatest spendthrifts in the society. Let them look well after their own expence, and they may safely trust private people with theirs. If their own extravagance does not ruin the state, that of their subjects never will."
-Adam Smith-
(1723-1790) Scottish philosopher and economist
1776
Source: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations par. II.3.36
"Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer."
-Ludwig von Mises-
(1881-1973) Economist and social philosopher
"[The Income Tax is] a vicious, inequitable, unpopular, impolitic and socialist act."
-New York Times-
1894
"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
"Only the rare taxpayer would be likely to know that he could refuse to produce his records to IRS agents... Who would believe the ironic truth that the cooperative taxpayer fares much worse than the individual who relies upon his constitutional rights."
-Judge Walter Joseph Cummings Jr.-
(1916-1999) U.S. Federal Judge, United States Solicitor General
Source: in US. v. Dickerson (7th Circuit 1969)
"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
"[T]he burden of government is not measured by how much it taxes, but by how much it spends."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
"I wanted the American eagle to go screaming into the Pacific... Why not spread its wings over the Philippines, I asked myself?...
I said to myself, Here are a people who have suffered for three centuries. We can make them as free as ourselves, give them a government and country of their own, put a miniature of the American Constitution afloat in the Pacific, start a brand new republic to take its place among the free nations of the world. It seemed to me a great task to which we had addressed ourselves.
But I have thought some more, since then, and I have read carefully the treaty of Paris, and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem. It should, it seems to me, be our pleasure and duty to make those people free, and let them deal with their own domestic questions in their own way.
And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land."
–Mark Twain-
published in the New York Herald, October 15, 1900
"Taxes on capital, taxes on labor, inflation, bureaucratic regulation, minimum wage laws, are all - to different degrees - unnecessary slices of the wedge that stand between an individual's effort and reward for that effort."
-Jack Kemp-
(1935-2009) American politician, collegiate and professional footballplayer
"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).
"[T]he tax code has been piling up, year after year, a symbol of everything gone wrong in America, of arrogant rulers and lost freedom, just waiting for us to pick the whole thing up and heave it away. It has to happen. Free people can put up with such laws only for so long."
-Richard Armey-
(1940- ) U.S. Congressman (R-TX) (1985–2003), House Majority Leader (1995–2003).
"Congress has doubled the IRS budget over the past 10 years -- making that agency one of the fastest growing non-entitlement programs. It has increased its employment by 20 percent. The IRS’s powers to investigate and examine taxpayers transcend those of any other law enforcement agency. Virtually all of the constitutional rights regarding search and seizure, due process, and jury trial simply do not apply to the IRS."
-Daniel Pilla-
Founder and director of the Tax Freedom Institute
"However accurate or inaccurate the agency’s numbers may be, tax law explicitly presumes that the IRS is always right -- and implicitly presumes that the taxpayer is always wrong -- in any dispute with the government. In many cases, the IRS introduces no evidence whatsoever of its charges; it merely asserts that a taxpayer had a certain amount of unreported income and therefore owes a proportionate amount in taxes, plus interest and penalties."
-James Bovard-
(1956- ) American author, lecturer
Source: The IRS vs. You, American Spectator, P. 42, November 1995
"Today’s political leaders demonstrate their low opinion of the public with every social law they pass. They believe that, if given the right to chose, the citizenry will probably make the wrong choice. Legislators do not think any more in terms of persuading people; they feel the need to force their agenda on the public at the point of a bayonet and the barrel of a gun, in the name of the IRS, the SEC, the FDA, the DEA, the EPA, or a multitude of other ABCs of government authority."
-Mark Skousen-
(1947-) American economist, investment analyst, newsletter editor, college professor and author
Source: Persuasion versus Force
"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
"Today government touches everything in America and harms almost everything it touches. Federal, state, and local governments together spend 42 out of every 100 dollars we earn. Those who do the taxing and spending have long since ceased to work for the people as a whole. Rather, they work for themselves and for their clients -- the education industry, the welfare culture,
public-employee unions, etc.."
-Malcolm Wallop-
(1933- ) Founder of Frontiers of Freedom, rancher, businessman, former U.S. Army Officer, former US Senator from Wyoming
Source: February 21, 1995 at Hillsdale College’s Shavano Institute for National Leadership seminar “Taking on Big Government: Agenda for the 1990s,” in Dallas, Texas.
"Our U.S. government each year spends roughly 30 percent more money than it takes in. It took 39 Presidents and 200 years to accumulate a debt of $1 trillion dollars. But it has taken only the past 12 years for that debt to triple to more than $5.9 trillion. Interest payments on the deficit alone add up to more than what our government pays for unemployment compensation, veteran's benefits, postal operations, housing, education, and highways combined. Saddled with this tremendous burden, it is impossible for our businesses to invest, harder for families to afford homes and medical care, and difficult for the United States to play its role in matters of national and international economic security."
-James Bilbray-
US Congressman (D-NV)
"Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor. Seizing the results of someone’s labor is equivalent to seizing hours from him and directing him to carry on various activities."
-Robert Nozick-
Harvard Philosopher
"At the start of this nation’s unique experiment with individual sovereignty and limited government, “Taxation without representation is tyranny” was the watchword of the American Revolution. For our Founding Fathers, a level of taxation of only a few cents on a dollar, siphoned off to a faraway and arrogant bureaucracy, was enough to ignite a revolution enough to grab the trusty musket off the wall. Today, in contrast, if we dare to startle the more panicky among us by buying a good rabbit gun, the government’s there at the cash register to check our papers and seize $46 on every $100."
-Ralph Reiland-
Professor of Economics, Robert Morris College
Source: Taxed to Death
"[If Parliament] may take from me one shilling in the pound,
what security have I for the other nineteen?"
-Richard Henry Lee-
(1732-1794) Founding Father
"The question is not what anybody deserves. The question is who is to take on the God-like role of deciding what everybody else deserves. You can talk about 'social justice' all you want. But what death taxes boil down to is letting politicians take money from widows and orphans to pay for goodies that they will hand out to others, in order to buy votes to get re-elected. That is not social justice or any other kind of justice."
-Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
"No government has ever commanded the resources at the disposal of our ungodly Leviathan, which consumes about 25 percent of the product of the world’s richest country. It is driven by a voracious alliance of government’s own employees, and those who receive benefits from the state. At least 90 million Americans either depend directly on government handouts or jobs, and each private worker must support not only himself and his family, but also carry a government worker on his shoulders."
-Tom Bethel-
Source: Freedom and Its Enemies, American Spectator, June, 1999 P. 19
"Power always corrupts, and the power of government to tell people how to live their lives or to transfer money from those who earn it to others is always a temptation to corruption. Taxes and regulations reduce people’s incentive to produce wealth, and government transfer programs reduce people’s incentive to work, to save, and to help family and friends in case of sickness, disability, or retirement. ...[I]t is nonetheless clear that government enterprises are less efficient, less innovative, and more wasteful than private firms.... [C]ompare what it’s like to call American Express versus the IRS to correct problems. Or compare a private apartment building with public housing."
-David Boaz-
(1953-) Author, executive vice president of the Cato Institute
Source: LIBERTARIANISM, A PRIMER, p. 13 (The Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster, 1997)
"The blame for [the national debt] lies with the Congress and the President, with Democrats and Republicans alike, most all of whom have been unwilling to make the hard choices or to explain to the American people that there is no such thing as a free lunch."
-Warren Rudman-
(1930- ) US Senator (R-NH)
... Warren Rudman, who had no problem, even long after his Senate tenure, continuing to prosecute the obscenely expensive, in blood and treasure, "War on People Who Use (Some) Drugs"™
"There ain't no ticks like poly-ticks. Bloodsuckers all."
-Davy Crockett-
(1786-1836) American hunter, frontiersman, soldier and politician
"Those who take the most from the table, teach contentment. Those for whom the taxes are destined, demand sacrifice. Those who eat their fill, speak to the hungry, of wonderful times to come. Those who lead the country into the abyss, call ruling difficult, for ordinary folk."
-Bertolt Brecht-
(1898-1956) German dramatist, stage director, and poet
"National Health? Socialized pension funds? State-controlled television? Search and seizure laws? Forfeiture laws? If we're not living in the Soviet Union of the United States, we certainly have returned to 1776 and 'taxation without representation.' "
-Michael Moriarty-
(1941) American-Canadian stage and screen actor, jazz musician
"No Gulag, evidently, can deter the advocates of state power from believing in their own virtue and in the morality of the power they exercise. We are all Hobbesians now. Virtue is presumed to reside in the state. Its reliance on compulsion is seen as fulfilling, not undermining, morality. Our communicators, oddly employed in the private sector, work tirelessly to ensure that state control is maintained, our taxes stay high, the official message is promoted. The people know, and can only know, a tiny fraction of what Leviathan does, and what they know is what these partisans tell them."
-Tom Bethel-
Source: Freedom and Its Enemies, AMERICAN SPECTATOR, June, 1999 p. 19
"Governments last as long as the undertaxed can defend themselves against the overtaxed."
-Bernard Berenson-
(1865-1959) American art historian
"We can't constantly explain to our voters that taxpayers have to be on the hook for certain risks, rather than those who make a lot of money taking those risks."
-Angela Merkel-
(1954- ) German Chancellor, first female Chancellor of Germany
"No taxation without representation."
-Jonathan Mayhew-
(1720-1766) Founding Father, clergyman, minister
1765
"Taxation without representation is tyranny."
-James Otis-
(1725-1783)
Source: Watchword (coined 1761?) of the American Revolution. See Samuel Eliot Morison, 'James Otis', Dict. Am. Biog., xiv.102
"Our federal government, which was intended to operate as a very limited constitutional republic, has instead become a virtually socialist leviathan that redistributes trillions of dollars. We can hardly be surprised when countless special interests fight for the money. The only true solution to the campaign money problem is a return to a proper constitutional government that does not control the economy. Big government and big campaign money go hand-in-hand."
-Dr. Ron Paul-
(1935-) American physician, US Congressman (R-TX), US Presidential candidate
Source: Why Is There So Much Money in Politics?, February 4, 2002
"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
"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-
(1897-1969) American historian, journalist, author
"No matter what anyone may say about making the rich and the corporations pay taxes, in the end they come out of the people who toil."
-Calvin Coolidge-
(1873-1933), 30th US President
"For liberalism, the individual is the end, and society the means. For fascism, society is the end, individuals the means, and its whole life consists in using individuals as instruments for its social ends."
-Alfredo Rocco-
(1875-1925)
Source: The Political Doctrine of Fascism
"We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men — not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular. This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy's methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities. As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home."
-Edward R. Murrow-
"Is there any reason why the American people should be taxed to guarantee the debts of banks, any more than they should be taxed to guarantee the debts of other institutions, including merchants, the industries, and the mills of the country?"
-Senator Carter Glass-
(1858-1946) Newspaper publisher, US Senator (D-VA), author of the Banking Act of 1933, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury under President Woodrow Wilson.
"The Original Sin which brought us to the brink of bankruptcy and dictatorship was the Federal Income Tax Amendment and its illegitimate child, Federal Aid."
-Tom Anderson-
"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-
[François Marie Arouet] (1694-1778)
1764
"And yet we have what purports, or professes, or is claimed, to be a contract -- the Constitution -- made eighty years ago, by men who are now all dead, and who never had any power to bind us, but which (it is claimed) has nevertheless bound three generations of men, consisting of many millions, and which (it is claimed) will be binding upon all the millions that are to come; but which nobody ever signed, sealed, delivered, witnessed, or acknowledged; and which few persons, compared with the whole number that are claimed to be bound by it, have ever read, or even seen, or ever will read, or see."
-Lysander Spooner-
No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority
"The Constitution says: 'We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.' The meaning of this is simply We, the people of the United States, acting freely and voluntarily as individuals, consent and agree that we will cooperate with each other in sustaining such a government as is provided for in this Constitution. The necessity for the consent of 'the people' is implied in this declaration. The whole authority of the Constitution rests upon it. If they did not consent, it was of no validity. Of course it had no validity, except as between those who actually consented. No one's consent could be presumed against him, without his actual consent being given, any more than in the case of any other contract to pay money, or render service. And to make it binding upon any one, his signature, or other positive evidence of consent, was as necessary as in the case of any other-contract. If the instrument meant to say that any of 'the people of the United States' would be bound by it, who did not consent, it was a usurpation and a lie. The most that can be inferred from the form, 'We, the people,' is, that the instrument offered membership to all 'the people of the United States;' leaving it for them to accept or refuse it, at their pleasure."
-Lysander Spooner-
No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority
"A just security to property is not afforded by that government, under which unequal taxes oppress one species of property and reward another species."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Essay on Property, March 29, 1792
"The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing."
-Jean Baptiste Colbert-
(1619-1693), French economist and Minister of Finance under King Louis XIV
"It would be thought a hard government that should tax its people one tenth part."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
"[S]ince 1933 those in control of the Government, realizing that the power to tax is the power to destroy, have appeared before the Committee on Ways and Means with the proposal to tax firearms. While they narrowed it down to machine guns on the ground that it would prevent bandits from using firearms of a certain size, yet the thought was there of getting control of the private firearms of this country. I know that our chairman of the Ways and Means Committee and others on that committee were on the alert, sensed the danger, and accordingly went no further than partial taxation and regulation, but I think every member of the committee saw the purpose and the motive of the proposed tax."
-Daniel A. Reed-
US Congressman (R-NY)
Source: 87 Congressional Record 7103 (1941).
"The reason this country continues its drift toward socialism and big nanny government is because too many people vote in the expectation of getting something for nothing, not because they have a concern for what is good for the country. A better educated electorate might change the reason many persons vote. If children were forced to learn about the Constitution, about how government works, about how this nation came into being, about taxes and about how government forever threatens the cause of liberty perhaps we wouldn't see so many foolish ideas coming out of the mouths of silly old men."
-Lyn Nofziger-
[Franklyn C. Nofziger] (1924-2006) American journalist, political consultant, author, Press Secretary for President Reagan
"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
"There is only one success: to be able to spend your life in your own way, and not to give others absurd maddening claims upon it."
-Christopher Darlington Morley-
(1890-1957)
"A tax supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state."
-Isabel Paterson-
(1886-1961) Canadian-American journalist, author, political philosopher, literary critic
"To take from one because it is thought that his own industry and that of his father's 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 whole profit of the issuance of money has provided the capital of the great banking business as it exists today. Starting with nothing whatever of their own, they have got the whole world into their debt irredeemably, by a trick.
This money comes into existence every time the banks 'lend' and disappears every time the debt is repaid to them. So that if industry tries to repay, the money of the nation disappears. This is what makes prosperity so 'dangerous' as it destroys money just when it is most needed and precipitates a slump.
There is nothing left now for us but to get ever deeper and deeper into debt to the banking system in order to provide the increasing amounts of money the nation requires for its expansion and growth. An honest money system is the only alternative."
-Frederick Soddy-
(1877-1956) British author, professor, Nobel Prize for Chemistry, 1921
Congressman Patman: "How did you get the money to buy those two billion dollars worth of Government securities in 1933?"
Governor Eccles: "Out of the right to issue credit money."
Patman: "And there is nothing behind it, is there, except our Government's credit?"
Eccles: "That is what our money system is. If there were no debts in our money system, there wouldn't be any money."
Congressman Fletcher: "Chairman Eccles, when do you think there is a possibility of returning to a free and open market, instead of this pegged and artificially controlled financial market we now have?"
Governor Eccles: "Never, not in your lifetime or mine."
-Marriner Stoddard Eccles-
(1890-1977) US banker, economist, and Chairman of the Federal Reserve (1934-48)
Source: during hearings of the House Committee on Banking and Currency, September 30, 1941. Members of the Federal Reserve Board call themselves "Governors." Governor Marriner Eccles was Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board at the time of these hearings.
"If Congress has the right under the Constitution to issue paper money, it was given to be used by themselves, not to be delegated to individuals
or corporations."
-Andrew Jackson-
(1767-1845) 7th US President
"When you or I write a check there must be sufficient funds in our account to cover that check, but when the Federal Reserve writes a check, it is creating money."
-Boston Federal Reserve Bank-
Source: in a publication titled "Putting It Simply"
"Some people think the Federal Reserve Banks are US government institutions. They are not... they are private credit monopolies which prey upon the people of the US for the benefit of themselves and their foreign and domestic swindlers, and rich and predatory money lenders. The sack of the United States by the Fed is the greatest crime in history. Every effort has been made by the Fed to conceal its powers, but the truth is the Fed has usurped the government. It controls everything here and it controls all our foreign relations. It makes and breaks governments at will."
-Louis McFadden-
(1876-1936) US Congressman (R-PA) (1915-1935), Chairman of House Banking and Currency Committee. Poisoned in 1936.
Source: June 10, 1932
"Most Americans have no real understanding of the operation of the international money lenders. The accounts of the Federal Reserve System have never been audited. It operates outside of the control of Congress and manipulates the credit of the United States."
-Barry Goldwater-
(1909-1998) US Senator (R-Arizona)
"As I watch government at all levels daily eat away at our freedom, I keep thinking how prosperity and government largesse have combined to make most of us fat and lazy and indifferent to, or actually in favor of, the limits being placed on that freedom."
-Lyn Nofziger-
[Franklyn C. Nofziger] (1924-2006) American journalist, political consultant, author, Press Secretary for President Reagan
"The Founding Fathers of this great land had no difficulty whatsoever understanding the agenda of bankers, and they frequently referred to them and their kind as, quote, 'friends of paper money.' They hated the Bank of England, in particular, and felt that even were we successful in winning our independence from England and King George, we could never truly be a nation of freemen, unless we had an honest money system. Through ignorance, but moreover, because of apathy, a small, but wealthy, clique of power brokers have robbed us of our Rights and Liberties, and we are being raped of our wealth. We are paying the price for the near-comatose levels of complacency by our parents, and only God knows what might become of our children, should we not work diligently to shake this country from its slumber! Many a nation has lost its freedom at the end of a gun barrel, but here in America, we just decided to hand it over voluntarily. Worse yet, we paid for the tyranny and usurpation out of our own pockets with "voluntary" tax contributions and the use of a debt-laden fiat currency!"
-Peter Kershaw-
Author of the 1994 booklet "Economic Solutions"
"... but if circumstances should at any time oblige the government to form an army of any magnitude, that army can never be formidable to the liberties of the people, while there is a large body of citizens, little if at all inferior to them in discipline and use of arms, who stand ready to defend their rights..."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804)
Source: Federalist, No. 29
"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.
"It's a mistake to think that poor people get the benefit from the welfare system. It's a total fraud. Most welfare go to the rich of this country: the military-industrial complex, the bankers, the foreign dictators, it's totally out of control. [...] This idea that the government has services or goods that they can pass on is a complete farce. Governments have nothing. They can't create anything, they never have. All they can do is steal from one group and give it to another at the destruction of the principles of freedom, and we ought to challenge that concept."
-Dr. Ron Paul-
(1935-) American physician, US Congressman (R-TX), US Presidential candidate
Source: TV interview, 1987
"Forced to choose, the poor, like the rich, love money more than political liberty; and the only political freedom capable of enduring is one that is so pruned as to keep the rich from denuding the poor by ability or subtlety and the poor from robbing the rich by violence or votes."
-Will Durant-
(1885-1981) American psychologist, philosopher
"A hand from Washington will be stretched out and placed upon every man's business; the eye of the federal inspector will be in every man's counting house.... The law will of necessity have inquisical features, it will provide penalties, it will create complicated machinery. Under it, men will be hauled into courts distant from their homes. Heavy fines imposed by distant and unfamiliar tribunals will constantly menace the taxpayer. An army of federal inspectors, spies, and detectives will descend upon the state."
-Richard E. Byrd-
(1888-1947) Polar explorer, Virginia House Speaker
Source: 1910, predicting the consequences of a federal income tax
"The moment the slave resolves that he will no longer be a slave, his fetters fall. ... Freedom and slavery are mental states. Therefore, the first thing to say to yourself: 'I shall no longer accept the role of a slave. I shall not obey orders as such but shall disobey them when they are in conflict with my conscience'."
-Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi-
(1869-1948)
Source: M. K. Gandhi quoted in Gene Sharp, The Politics Of Nonviolent Action (1973), p. 59.
"Liberty, human dignity, a higher standard of living is fundamental. And, steadily, I think, people are beginning to realise that you don't have those things unless you have a pretty large private enterprise sector. Any Iron Curtain country has neither liberty, nor a very high standard of living. The two things go, economic and political freedom, go together. I've been right in the forefront of saying that, here, in the States, and it's very interesting to me now, to see a number of articles from people who are taking up the same theme. They are disturbed that Socialism is reducing liberty and freedom for ordinary people, and that's really what matters. "
-Margaret Thatcher-
(1925-2013) British Prime Minister (1979–1990)
Source: 1976 Feb 5, TV Interview for Thames TV 'This Week'
"A State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands -- even for beneficial purposes -- will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished."
-John Stuart Mill-
(1806-1873) English philosopher and economist
"In 1897, troops from the greatest empire the world had ever seen marched down London's mall for Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee. Seventy years later, Britain had government health care, a government-owned car industry, massive government housing, and it was a shriveled high-unemployment socialist basket-case living off the dwindling cultural capital of its glorious past. In 1945, America emerged from the Second World War as the preeminent power on earth. Seventy years later . . . Let's not go there."
-Mark Steyn-
(1959-) Canadian columnist
Source: National Review Online, Feb 14, 2009
"To the extent that these [New Deal policies] developed, they were tortured interpretations of a document [the Constitution] intended to prevent them."
-Rexford Tugwell-
(1891-1979) American agricultural economist, served in FDR's administration, one of the chief intellectual contributors to the New Deal, director of the New York City Planning Commission, Governor of Puerto Rico, and a professor at various universities.
1968
Source: quoted by Roger Pilon, Restoring Constitutional Government, CATO’S LETTER #9, p. 3, published by the Cato Institute (1995)
"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
"He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetuate it."
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-
(1929-1968), US civil rights leader
"We've witnessed a fire sale of American liberties at bargain basement prices, in return for the false promise of more security... The America being designed right now won't resemble the America we've been defending... The danger isn't that Big Brother may storm the castle gates. The danger is that Americans don't realize that he is already inside the castle walls."
-Wayne LaPierre-
CEO of National Rifle Association
"I know no class of my fellowmen, however just, enlightened, and humane, which can be wisely and safely trusted absolutely with the liberties of any other class."
-Frederick Douglass-
[Frederick Baily] (1818-1895), escaped slave, Abolitionist, author, editor of the North Star and later the New National Era
"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
"Among the several cloudy appellatives which have been commonly employed as cloaks for misgovernment, there is none more conspicuous in this atmosphere of illusion
than the word 'Order'."
-Jeremy Bentham
(1748-1832) English jurist, philosopher, and legal and social reformer
Source: The Book of Fallacies, 1824
"Actually, it is not strange that during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the human race was regarded as inert matter, ready to receive everything -- form, face, energy, movement, life -- from a great prince or a great legislator or a great genius. These centuries were nourished on the study of antiquity. And antiquity presents everywhere -- in Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome -- the spectacle of a few men molding mankind according to their whims, thanks to the prestige of force and of fraud. But this does not prove that this situation is desirable. It proves only that since men and society are capable of improvement, it is naturally to be expected that error, ignorance, despotism, slavery, and superstition should be greatest towards the origins of history. The writers quoted above were not in error when they found ancient institutions to be such, but they were in error when they offered them for the admiration and imitation of future generations. Uncritical and childish conformists, they took for granted the grandeur, dignity, morality, and happiness of the artificial societies of the ancient world. They did not understand that knowledge appears and grows with the passage of time; and that in proportion to this growth of knowledge, might takes the side of right, and society regains possession of itself."
-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 Error of the Socialist Writers, "The Law" by Frederic Bastiat (1848)
"Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies. Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically, as in England and America in the nineteenth century under laissez-faire. To check the growth of inequality, liberty must be sacrificed, as in Russia after 1917. Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom, and in the end superior ability has its way."
-Will Durant-
(1885-1981) American psychologist, philosopher
"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.
"Economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life that can be separated from the rest; it is the control of the means for all our ends."
-Ludwig von Mises-
(1881-1973) Economist and social philosopher, escaped from NAZI Germany
Source: Human Action
"You can't save free markets by socialism, I don't know where this idea ever came from. You save free markets by promoting free markets and sound money and balanced budgets. The whole reason why nobody wants to address the real problem is, we're spending a trillion dollars a year overseas running an empire, and it's coming to an end. This country is bankrupt, and we won't admit it. Eventually though, the dollar will go bust, and we will bring our troops home, and we will live within our means, but we ought to do it sensibly, rather than waiting for the collapse of the dollar, and this is what we're doing, we're on the verge of destroying our dollar. And then, you think we have problems now, problems then will be a lot worse, it'd look like the Weimar Republic, or a third world nation. And a lot of people know that, and they're scared to death, but we don't need to be making the problem worse by just propping up everything with more government programs, more inflation, and more helicopters, it won't work."
-Dr. Ron Paul-
(1935-) American physician, US Congressman (R-TX), US Presidential candidate
Source: Fox Business Network, October 14, 2008
"I have been writing & speaking what were once called novelties, for twenty five or thirty year, & have not now one disciple. Why? Not that what I said was not true; not that it has not found intelligent receivers but because it did not go from any wish in me to bring men to me, but to themselves."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-
"The state tends to expand in proportion to its means of existence and to live beyond its means, and these are, in the last analysis, nothing but the substance of the people. Woe to the people that cannot limit the sphere of action of the state! Freedom, private enterprise, wealth, happiness, independence, personal dignity, all vanish."
-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: Sophisms, 141
"Protectionism is a misnomer. The only people protected by tariffs, quotas and trade restrictions are those engaged in uneconomic and wasteful activity. Free trade is the only philosophy compatible with international peace and prosperity."
-Dr. Walter Block-
Senior Economist, The Fraser Institute
"I have never seen more senators express discontent with their jobs. ... I think the major cause is that, deep down in our hearts, we have been accomplices to doing something terrible and unforgivable to this wonderful country. Deep down in our hearts, we know that we have bankrupted America and that we have given our children a legacy of bankruptcy. ... We have defrauded our country to get ourselves elected."
-John C. Danforth-
(1936- ) US Senator (MO-R)
Source: in an interview in The Arizona Republic on April 22, 1992
"In U.S. politics, 'compassion' means giving money and privileges to well organized interest groups at everyone else's expense."
-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
"That erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all, it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues, and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else...Their purpose, in brief, is to make docile and patriotic citizens, to pile up majorities, and to make John Doe and Richard Doe as nearly alike, in their everyday reactions and ways of thinking, as possible."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived and dishonest — but the myth — persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic."
-John F. Kennedy-
"The liberty of every individual is only the reflection of his own humanity, or his human right through the conscience of all free men, his brothers and his equals. I can feel free only in the presence of and in relationship with other men. In the presence of an inferior species of animal I am neither free nor a man, because this animal is incapable of conceiving and consequently recognizing my humanity. I am not myself free or human until or unless I recognize the freedom and humanity of all my fellowmen. Only in respecting their human character do I respect my own."
-Mikhail Bakunin-
"To combat socialism Bismarck put through between 1883 and 1889 a program for social security far beyond anything known in other countries. It included compulsory insurance for workers against old age, sickness, accident and incapacity, and though organized by the State it was financed by employers and employees. It cannot be said that it stopped the rise of the Social Democrats or the trade unions, but it did have a profound influence on the working class in that it gradually made them value security over political freedom and caused them to see in the State, however conservative, a benefactor and a protector. Hitler, as we shall see, took full advantage of this state of mind. In this, as in other matters, he learned much from Bismarck. “I studied Bismarck’s socialist legislation,” Hitler remarks in Mein Kampf (p. 155), “in its intention, struggle and success.” "
-William L. Shirer-
(1904-1993) American journalist, war correspondent, historian, author
Source: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960, 96.)
"Jobs really come in the productive sector of the economy. The real jobs are where people are producing goods or services which other people will buy. Now, dependent on those people producing those goods, are a lot of others in the public sector. Now if you run up the public sector, you can only do it by draining money out of industry and commerce. But that's where the jobs are. And one of the reasons why you have to cut public expenditure is to get the money back out of the public sector, into industry and commerce, so that they, in fact, can invest, and improve, and expand; because that's where the secure jobs are."
-Margaret Thatcher-
(1925-2013) British Prime Minister (1979–1990)
Source: 1976 Feb 5, TV Interview for Thames TV 'This Week'
"It is curious that people tend to regard government as a quasi-divine, selfless, Santa Claus organization. Government was constructed neither for ability nor for the exercise of loving care; government was built for the use of force and for necessarily demagogic appeals for votes. If individuals do not know their own interests in many cases, they are free to turn to private experts for guidance. It is absurd to say that they will be served better by a coercive, demagogic apparatus."
-Murray N. Rothbard-
(1926-1995) Dean of the Austrian School of Economics
Source: Power and Market: Government and the Economy
"Let anyone who believes that a high standard of living is the achievement of labor unions and government controls ask himself the following question: If one had a “time machine” and transported the united labor chieftains of America, plus three million government bureaucrats, back to the tenth century—would they be able to provide the medieval serf with electric light, refrigerators, automobiles, and television sets?"
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
Source: Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
"State intervention in economic production arises only when private initiative
is lacking or insufficient, or when the political interests of the State are
involved. This intervention may take the form of control, assistance or direct
management."
-Benito Mussolini-
(1883-1945), Italian dictator during WW2
Source: The Corporate State and its Organization, from the The Labour Charter (Promulgated by the Grand Council of Fascism on April 21, 1927), Ref: Fascism: Doctrine and Institutions, Rome: 'Ardita' Publishers, (1935) p.136
"Socialism itself can hope to exist only for brief periods here and there, and then only through the exercise of the extremest terrorism. For this reason it is secretly preparing itself for rule through fear and is driving the word “justice” into the heads of the half-educated masses like a nail so as to rob them of their reason... and to create in them a good conscience for the evil game they are to play."
-Friedrich Nietzsche-
(1844-1900)
SSource: Human, All Too Human
"I also made it quite clear that Socialism means equality of income or nothing,
and that under socialism you would not be allowed to be poor. You would be
forcibly fed, clothed, lodged, taught, and employed whether you like it or not.
If it were discovered that you had not character enough to be worth all this
trouble, you might possibly be executed in a kindly manner; but whilst you were
permitted to live you would have to live well."
-George Bernard Shaw-
(1856-1950) Irish comic dramatist, member of the socialist Fabian Society
Source: The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, by George Bernard Shaw, pg 470, 1928
1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc.
-Karl Marx-
(1818- 1883) Father of Communism, Author of the 'Communist Manifesto'
Source: Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848, Marx/Engels
"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. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain."
-Frédéric 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
"If something is wrong for you or me, it is also wrong for the cop, the soldier, the mayor, the governor, the general, the Fed chairman, the president. Theft does not become acceptable when they call it taxation, counterfeiting when they call it monetary policy, kidnapping when they call it the draft, mass murder when they call it foreign policy. We understand that it is never acceptable to wield violence nor the threat of violence against the innocent, whether by the mugger or the politician."
-Lew Rockwell-
[Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.] (1944- ) Chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute
"...only those who have the will and the power to shoot down their fellow men, are the real rulers in this, as in all other (so-called) civilized countries; for by no others will civilized men be robbed, or enslaved."
-Lysander Spooner-
(1808-1887) Political theorist, activist, abolitionist
Source: No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority
"By virtue of exchange, one man's prosperity is beneficial to all others."
-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: his book, Economic Harmonies
"The experience that was had in ... the taking away of private property, and the possession of it in community, by a commonwealth ... was found to breed much confusion and discontent; and retard much employment which would have been to the general benefit.... For the young men that were most able and fit for labor and service objected that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men's wives and children, without any recompense.... The strong man or the resourceful man had no more share of food, clothes, etc., than the weak man who was not able to do a quarter the other could; this was thought injustice. The aged and graver men, who were ranked and equalized in labor, food, clothes, etc., with the meaner and younger ones, thought it some indignity and disrespect to them."
-William Bradford-
(c.1590-1657) American colonist, helped found the Plymouth Colony, signatory to the Mayflower Compact, served as Plymouth Colony Governor
1623
Source: Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation, 1606-1646.
"In our country, the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State."
-Alexander Solzhenitsyn-
(1918-2008) Russian novelist, Soviet dissident, imprisoned for 8 years for critizing Stalin in a personal letter, Nobel Prize for Literature, 1970
"These men - ..., the politicians, ... - use their position, their knowledge, and their power of disseminating misinformation to arouse and stimulate the latent instinct for bloodshed. When they have succeeded, they say they are reluctantly forced to war by the pressure of public opinion."
-Bertrand Russell-
[Bertrand Arthur William Russell] (1872-1970) Philosopher, educator
Source: "War and Non-Resistance," Atlantic Monthly, August 1915, p. 274.
"Who lies for you will lie against you."
-Bosnian Proverb-
"He who inflicts a vile and unjust harm by using the power and the force with which he is invested, does not conquer; the true victory is to have on one's side Right naked and entire."
-Luís de Camões-
"If man chooses oblivion, he can go right on leaving his fate to his political leaders. If he chooses Utopia, he must initiate an enormous education program -- immediately, if not sooner."
-R. Buckminster Fuller-
"Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future."
-Niels Bohr-
"As the Founding Fathers knew well, a government that does not trust its honest, law-abiding, taxpaying citizens with the means of self-defense is not itself worthy of trust. Laws disarming honest citizens proclaim that the government is the master, not the servant, of the people."
-Jeffrey R. Snyder-
American attorney, author
Source: A Nation of Cowards, 113 Public Interest (Fall 1993)
"A freedom fighter learns the hard way that it is the oppressor who defines the nature of the struggle,and the oppressed is often left no recourse but to use methods that mirror those of the oppressor. At a point, one can only fight fire with fire."
-Nelson Mandela-
(1918-2013) South African anti-apartheid revolutionary, imprisoned for 27 years, President of South Africa (1994-1999)
Source: Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela
"The right of the people to keep and bear arms has been recognized by the General Government; but the best security of that right after all is, the military spirit, that taste for martial exercises, which has always distinguished the free citizens of these States... Such men form the best barrier to the liberties of America."
-Gazette of the United States-
Source: October 14, 1789, p.211, col.2
"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-
(1948- ) U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Adarand v. Federico Pena
"A truly free society is based on a vision of respect for people and what they value. In a truly free society, any business that disrespects its customers will fail, and deserves to do so. The same should be true of any government that disrespects its citizens. The central belief and fatal conceit of the current administration is that you are incapable of running your own life, but those in power are capable of running it for you. This is the essence of big government and collectivism."
-Charles Koch-
(1935-) American businessman and philanthropist
Source: Koch, Charles (April 3, 2014). 'Instead of welcoming free debate, collectivists engage in character assassination.' "Charles Koch: I'm Fighting to Restore a Free Society". The Wall Street Journal.
"Try this thought experiment. Pretend you're a tyrant. Among your many liberty-destroying objectives are extermination of blacks, Jews and Catholics. Which would you prefer, a United States with political power centralized in Washington, powerful government agencies with detailed information on Americans and compliant states or power widely dispersed over 50 states, thousands of local jurisdictions and a limited federal government?"
-Walter E. Williams-
(1936- ) Columnist, Professor of Economics at George Mason University
"The unhappy legacies of authoritarianism can be removed only if the concept of absolute power as the basis of government is replaced by the concept of confidence as the mainspring of political authority: the confidence of the people in their right and ability to decide the destiny of their nation, mutual confidence between the people and their leaders and, most important of all, confidence in the principles of justice, liberty and human rights."
-Aung San Suu Kyi-
"Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place."
-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
June 1850
Source: "The Law" by Frederic Bastiat (1848)
"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)
"Can we truly expect those who aim to exploit us to be trusted to educate us?"
-Eric Schaub-
Individualist, writer, activist, speaker
Source: The Common Man
"The devil’s best trick is to persuade you that he doesn’t exist!"
-Charles Baudelaire-
(1821-1867) French poet, critic and translator
Source: in his 1864 short story, “The Generous Gambler”
"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society."
-Edward Bernays-
(1891-1995) "Father" of modern public relations (PR) and director of the U.S. Committee on Public Information during World War I, on government propaganda
Source: Bernays, Propaganda (1928), chapter 1.
"I wouldn't call it fascism exactly, but a political system nominally controlled by an irresponsible, dumbed down electorate who are manipulated by dishonest, cynical, controlled mass media that dispense the propaganda of a corrupt political establishment can hardly be described as democracy either."
-Edward Zehr-
(1936-2001) Columnist
"All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia."
-George Orwell-
"Politicians deserve two terms: one in office, one in prison."
-Anon-
"This government is acknowledged by all, to be one of enumerated powers. The principle, that it can exercise only the powers granted to it, would seem too apparent, to have required to be enforced by all those arguments, which its enlightened friends, while it was depending before the people, found it necessary to urge; that principle is now universally admitted."
-Chief Justice Marshall-
(1755-1835) US Supreme Court Chief Justice
Source: McCulloch v. Maryland
"The trouble with most folks isn't so much their ignorance, as knowing so many things that ain't so."
-Josh Billings-
[Henry Wheeler Shaw] (1818-1885) American humorist and lecturer
"The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any."
-Alice Walker-
Author
"The power of authority is never more subtle and effective than when it produces a psychological "atmosphere" or "climate" favorable to the life of certain modes of belief, unfavorable, and even fatal, to the life of others."
-Arthur Balfour-
(1848-1930)
Source: The Foundations of Belief, 1895
"Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage."
-H.L. Mencken-
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
-Mahatma Gandhi-
"The people made the Constitution, and the people can unmake it. It is the creature of their own will, and lives only by their will."
-Supreme Court Justice John Marshall-
Cohens v. Virginia (1821)
"No one understood better than Stalin that the true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade, but to produce a uniform pattern of public utterance in which the first trace of unorthodox thought immediately reveals itself as a jarring dissonance."
-Alan Bullock-
[Alan Louis Charles Bullock, Baron Bullock] (1914-2004) British historian
Source: in Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (1991)
"The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
Source: Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution
"The fatal attraction of government is that it allows busybodies to impose decisions on others without paying any price themselves. That enables them to act as if there were no price, even when there are ruinous prices -- paid by others."
-Thomas Sowell
(1930- ) Writer and economist
"Censorship reflects a society’s lack of confidence in itself.It is the landmark of an authoritarian regime..."
-Justice Potter Stewart-
(1915-1985), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Ginsberg v. United States, 1966
"Chief among the spoils of victory is the privilege of writing the history."
-Mark Alexander-
Editor/Publisher of Patriot Post
Source: Patriot Post, No. 06-07; Published 17 February 2006
"The enormous gap between what U.S. leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology."
-Michael Parenti-
political scientist and author
"If you take all the machinery in the world and dump it in the ocean, within months more than half of all humanity will die and within another six months they’d almost all be gone; if you took all the politicians in the world, put them in a rocket, and sent them to the moon, everyone would get along fine."
-Buckminster Fuller-
"School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is."
-Ivan Illich
(1926-2002) Austrian philosopher, author, social critic
"I begin by taking. I shall find scholars later to demonstrate my perfect right."
-Frederick the Great-
(1712-1786) King of Prussia, Frederick II
"To die for an idea: it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"The most absolute authority is that which penetrates into a man’s innermost being and concerns itself no less with his will than with his actions."
-Jean-Jacques Rousseau-
(1712-1778) Political philosopher, educationist and essayist
Source: The Social Contract, 1762
"Fame is proof that the people are gullible."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-
(1803-1882)
"History is fables agreed upon."
-Voltaire-
[François Marie Arouet] (1694-1778)
"That's not a lie, it's a terminological inexactitude."
-Alexander Haig-
(1924-2010) Secretary of State for President Ronald Reagan
Source: During a TV interview, defending himself against accusations of lying in 1983. Quoted by Rutledge, Leigh W., "Would I Lie To You?", Plume, 1998, ISBN 0-452-27931-3, p. 81.
"History is an account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools."
-Ambrose Bierce-
(1842-1914) Humorist
"There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics."
-Benjamin Disraeli-
(1804-1881) Prime Minister of England, British statesman, novelist
1844
Source: attributed to Disraeli in Mark Twain's Autobiography, 1924
"Democracy consists of choosing your dictators, after they've told you what you think it is you want to hear."
-Alan Corenk-
"Our constitutions purport to be established by 'the people,' and, in theory, 'all the people' consent to such government as the constitutions authorize. But this consent of 'the people' exists only in theory. It has no existence in fact. Government is in reality established by the few; and these few assume the consent of all the rest, without any such consent being actually given."
-Lysander Spooner-
(1808-1887) Political theorist, activist, abolitionist
And for generations in perpetuity...
"The real damage from terrorist attacks doesn't come from the explosion. The real damage is done after the explosion, by the victims, who repeatedly and determinedly attack themselves, giving over reason in favor of terror. Every London cop who stops someone from taking a picture of a public building, every TSA agent who takes away your kid's toothpaste, every NSA spook who wiretaps your email, does the terrorist's job for him. Terrorism is about magnifying one mediagenic act of violence into one hundred billion acts of terrorized authoritarian idiocy."
-Cory Doctorow-
"The laws of this nature are those which forbid to wear arms, disarming those only who are not disposed to commit the crime which the laws mean to prevent. Can it be supposed, that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity, and the most important of the code, will respect the less considerable and arbitrary injunctions, the violation of which is so easy, and of so little comparative importance? Does not the execution of this law deprive the subject of that personal liberty, so dear to mankind and to the wise legislator? and does it not subject the innocent to all the disagreeable circumstances that should only fall on the guilty? It certainly makes the situation of the assaulted worse, and of the assailants better, and rather encourages than prevents murder, as it requires less courage to attack unarmed than armed persons."
-Cesare Beccaria-
(1735-1794) [Bonesana, Marchese di] Italian nobleman, criminologist, and penal reformer
Source: Dei delitti e delle pene, [On Crimes and Punishments] ch.38 (1764)
Translation is as quoted by Thomas Jefferson in his _Commonplace Book_, 1809 Edition, which was "the source book and repertory of Jefferson's ideas on government."
"A principal source of errors and injustice are false ideas of utility. For example: that legislator has false ideas of utility who considers particular more than general conveniencies, who had rather command the sentiments of mankind than excite them, who dares say to reason, 'Be thou a slave;' who would sacrifice a thousand real advantages to the fear of an imaginary or trifling inconvenience; who would deprive men of the use of fire for fear of their being burnt, and of water for fear of their being drowned; and who knows of no means of preventing evil but by destroying it."
-Cesare Beccaria-
(1735-1794) [Bonesana, Marchese di] Italian nobleman, criminologist, and penal reformer
Source: Dei delitti e delle pene, [On Crimes and Punishments] ch.38 (1764)
Translation is as quoted by Thomas Jefferson in his _Commonplace Book_, 1809 Edition, which was "the source book and repertory of Jefferson's ideas on government."
"Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric."
-Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
"Popular revolt against a ruthless, experienced modern dictatorship, which enjoys a monopoly over weapons and communications, ... is simply not a possibility in the modern age."
-George F. Kennan-
(1904-2005) US advisor, diplomat, political analyst, and Pulitzer-prize winning historian
1964
"What luck for the rulers that men do not think."
-Adolf Hitler-
(1889-1945) German Nazi Dictator
"We must never lose sight of the fact that the law has a moral foundation, and we must never fail to ask ourselves not only what the law is, but what the law should be."
-Anthony Kennedy-
No, what the law is allowed to be. Much immorality arised when your "law" presumes above its delegated authority.
"Seems to be a deep instinct in human beings for making everything compulsory that isn't forbidden."
-Manuel Garcia O'Kelly Davis-
Manuel Garcia O'Kelly Davis
Source: "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress"
"Where once a tyrant had to wish that his subjects had but one common neck that he might strangle them all at once, all he has to do now is to 'educate the people' so that they will have but one common mind to delude."
-Richard Mitchell-
(1929-2002) Professor at Glassboro State College, NJ, author, founder and publisher of The Underground Grammarian
Source: The Underground Grammarian
"How strangely will the Tools of a Tyrant pervert the plain Meaning of Words!"
-Samuel Adams-
(1722-1803), was known as the "Father of the American Revolution."
Source: letter to John Pitts, January 21, 1776
"The restriction of knowledge to an elite group destroys the spirit of the society and leads to its intellectual impoverishment."
-Albert Einstein-
(1879-1955) Physicist and Professor, Nobel Prize 1921
"Censorship is the commonest social blasphemy because it is mostly concealed, built into us by indolence, self-interest and cowardice."
-John Osborne-
(1929-1994) British playwright
"No nation, ancient or modern, ever lost the liberty of speaking freely, writing, or publishing their sentiments, but forthwith lost their liberty in general and became slaves."
-John Peter Zenger-
(1697-1746)
"It has been discovered that the best way to insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery."
-Benjamin Disraeli-
(1804-1881) Prime Minister of England, British statesman, novelist
"Teachers are directed to instruct their pupils... and to awaken in them a sense of their responsibility toward the community of the nation."
-Bernhard Rust-
(1883-1945) Minister of Science, Education and National Culture (Reichserziehungsminister) in Nazi Germany
Source: from "Racial Instruction and the National Community," 1935
"Purveyors of political correctness will, in the final analysis, not even allow others their judgments... They celebrate "difference," but they will not allow people truly to be different -- to think differently, and to say what they think."
-Mark Berley-
Source: Argos, Spring 1998
"Alliance: In international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other's pockets that they cannot separately plunder a third."
-Ambrose Bierce-
(1842-1914) Humorist
"It is very comforting to believe that leaders who do terrible things are, in fact, mad. That way, all we have to do is make sure we don't put psychotics in high places and we've got the problem solved."
-Thomas Wolfe-
Author
"When all think alike, no one is thinking very much."
-Walter Lippmann-
(1889-1974) American writer, journalist, and political commentator
"It is futile to fight against, if one does not know what one is fighting for."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
Source: Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 1966
"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-
(1907-1995) Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1969-1986)
"Fascism, communism and national socialism all share in common the explicit premise that the individual must subordinate himself to society's needs, or as Hitler would phrase it: 'Society's needs come before the individual needs.'"
-A. E. Samaan-
Christian-Palestinian and Central American Hispanic author, artist, photographer
Source: 'From a Race of Masters to a Master Race'
"What we have to remember is that not everything is under our control. If people are free in any meaningful sense of the word, that means they are at liberty to foul up their lives as much as make something grand of them. That's a gamble we all take. That's the risk of liberty. Nobody wants others to screw up their lives, but each must be free to do so for themselves."
-Joel Miller-
Source: his book, Bad Trip: How the War against Drugs Is Destroying America, 2005
"I want gay married people to be able to protect their marijuana plants with guns."
-Tim Moen-
Canadian Libertarian candidate, Fort McMurray, Alberta
Source: First Libertarian candidate to run in McMurray, March 4, 2014
"Debate, it seems to me, is one of the most useful of human inventions. It is the mother and father of all free inquiry and honest thought. It tests ideas, detects errors and promotes clear thinking. A man cannot stand up before it without exposing his whole intellectual stock of goods."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910)
Source: Autobiography
"The wizards represent all that the true 'muggle' most fears: They are plainly outcasts and comfortable with being so. Nothing is more unnerving to the truly conventional than the unashamed misfit!"
-J. K. Rowling-
Applies to libertarians, too...
"I would to God Shakspeare had lived later, & promenaded in Broadway … that the muzzle which all men wore on their soul in the Elizebethan day, might not have intercepted Shakspers full articulations. For I hold it a verity, that even Shakspeare, was not a frank man to the uttermost. And, indeed, who in this intolerant universe is, or can be? But the Declaration of Independence makes a difference."
-Herman Melville-
Less and less, sadly, every day...
"I want to die a slave to principles. Not to men."
-Emiliano Zapata-
"Vices are those acts by which a man harms himself or his property. Crimes are those acts by which one man harms the person or property of another. Vices are simply the errors which a man makes in his search after his own happiness. Unlike crimes, they imply no malice toward others, and no interference with their persons or property. In vices, the very essence of crime -- that is, the design to injure the person or property of another -- is wanting. It is a maxim of the law that there can be no crime without criminal intent; that is, without the intent to invade the person or property of another. But no one ever practices a vice with any such criminal intent. He practices his vice for his own happiness solely, and not from any malice toward others. Unless this clear distinction between vices and crimes be made and recognized by the laws, there can be on earth no such thing as individual right, liberty, or property, and the corresponding coequal rights of another man to the control of his own person and property."
-Lysander Spooner-
(1808-1887) Political theorist, activist, abolitionist
Source: Vices are Not Crimes, A Vindication of Moral Liberty (1875)
"We need true tax reform that will at least make a start toward restoring for our children the American Dream that wealth is denied to no one, that each individual has the right to fly as high as his strength and ability will take him.... But we cannot have such reform while our tax policy is engineered by people who view the tax as a means of achieving changes in our social structure."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
"Anyone who says that economic security is a human right, has been too much babied. While he babbles, other men are risking and losing their lives to protect him. They are fighting the sea, fighting the land, fighting disease and insects and weather and space and time, for him, while he chatters that all men have a right to security and that some pagan god -- Society, The State, The Government, The Commune -- must give it to them. Let the fighting men stop fighting this inhuman earth for one hour, and he will learn how much security there is."
-Rose Wilder Lane-
"People are tired of liberty. They have had a surfeit of it. Liberty is no longer a chaste and austere virgin... Today’s youth are moved by other slogans... Order, Hierarchy, Discipline."
-Benito Mussolini-
(1883-1945), Italian dictator during WW2
Source: Speech, March 1923
"Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
"All the martyrs in the history of the world are not sufficient to establish the correctness of an opinion. Martyrdom, as a rule, establishes the sincerity of the martyr, — never the correctness of his thought. Things are true or false in themselves. Truth cannot be affected by opinions; it cannot be changed, established, or affected by martyrdom. An error cannot be believed sincerely enough to make it a truth."
-Robert G. Ingersoll-
"The very purpose of the Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials, and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts....[F]undamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections."
-Justice Robert Jackson-
1943
"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)
"Those who formally rule take their signals and commands not from the electorate as a body, but from a small group of men. This group will be called the Establishment. It exists even though that existence is stoutly denied. It is one of the secrets of the American social order... A second secret is the fact that the existence of the Establishment - the ruling class - is not supposed to be discussed."
-Arthur S. Miller-
George Washington University Professor of Law
"When the political columnists say 'Every thinking man' they mean themselves, and when candidates appeal to 'Every intelligent voter' they mean everybody who is going to vote for them."
-Franklin P. Adams-
(1881-1960)
Source: Nods and Becks (1944)
"It is a matter of record that in the German Election of 1933, the Communist Party was ordered by its leaders to vote for the Nazis - with the explanation that they could later fight the Nazis for power, but first they had to help destroy their common enemy: capitalism and its parliamentary form of government."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
Source: " 'Extremism' or The Art of Smearing", Chapter 17 of Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
"Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future."
-John F. Kennedy-
(1917-1963) 35th US President
"O liberty! O liberty! What crimes are committed in thy name!"
-Madame Jeanne-Marie Roland-
(1754-1793)
Source: November 8, 1793, her last words before being executed on the guillotine, quoted in Alphonse de Lamartine's Histoire des Girondins
"I've never had a problem with drugs. I've had problems with the police."
-Keith Richards-
(1943-) British musician, songwriter and founding member of The Rolling Stones
"Freedom is the right to question and change the established way of doing things. It is the continuous revolution of the marketplace. It is the understanding that allows us to recognize shortcomings and seek solutions."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
Source: Address to students at Moscow State University, 05/31/88
"A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a great society."
-Walter Lippmann-
(1889-1974) American writer, journalist, and political commentator
"There is no such thing, at this date of the world's history, in America as an independent press. You know it and I know it.
There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone.
The business of the journalists is to destroy the truth;
to lie outright;
to pervert;
to vilify;
to fawn at the feet of mammon, and
to sell his country and his race for his daily bread.
You know it and I know it and what folly is this toasting an independent press? We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."
-John Swinton-
(1829-1901) Former Head of Editorial Staff for the New York Times was one of America's best loved newspapermen.
Called by his peers "The Dean of his Profession"
1880, At a banquet in his honor
Source: Labor's Untold Story, by Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais, published by United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America, NY, 1955/1979
"To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries."
-Virginia Woolf-
(1882-1941)
Source: The Moment and Other Essays, 1948
"Whatever the individual motives of the censors may be, censorship is a form of social control. It is a means of holding a society together, of arresting the flux which censors fear. And since the fear cannot be appeased, the demands for censorship mount in volume and intensity. And one form of censorship can easily lead to other forms."
-Carey McWilliams-
(1905-1980) American author, editor, and lawyer
Source: Censorship: For And Against, 1971
"If the political-correctness fascists get their way, we can safely assume it will be correct-thinking, "political cleansing" squads deciding what we can or cannot say on the Intenet. These people fear public debate and demand homogenization of "acceptable" attitudes compatible with their emotional, utopian idealism."
-Charles W. Moore-
Source: Barquentine Ventures Online Journal, 8 July 1999
"The oppression of any people for opinion’s sake has rarely had any other effect than to fix those opinions deeper, and render them more important."
-Hosea Ballou-
(1771-1852)
"Persecution produced its natural effect on them.
It found them a sect; it made them a faction."
-Thomas Babington Macaulay-
(1800-1859) [Lord Macaulay] 1st Baron Macaulay, British historian
Source: History of England, 1849
"Suppression of expression conceals the real problems confronting a society and diverts public attention from the critical issues. It is likely to result in neglect of the grievances which are the actual basis of the unrest, and this prevent their correction."
-Thomas I. Emerson-
(1907-1991) Lines Professor of Law, Yale University, author
Source: Yale Law Journal, 1963
"And let us remind readers regularly, in editorials, in our promotional advertising, in speeches to civic groups and others, that advertising helps people to live better and saves them money. This fact needs constant selling."
-Paul Miller-
(1906-1991) President and CEO of Gannett Newspaper Chain (1957-78), President and Chairman of Associated Press (1963-77)
Source: quoted in Editor & Publisher, September 16, 1961
"It is the advertiser who provides the paper for the subscriber. It is not to be disputed, that the publisher of a newspaper in this country, without a very exhaustive advertising support, would receive less reward for his labor than the humblest mechanic."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804)
"Men willingly believe what they wish."
-Gaius Julius Caesar-
(100-44 B.C.) Dictator of the Roman Republic
"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
"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."
-Oscar Wilde-
(1854-1900)
Source: De Profundis, 1905
"During a war, news should be given out for instruction rather than information."
-Joseph Paul Goebbels
(1897-1945) Nazi Propaganda Minister
"According to Gestapo records... they had little need to engage in direct spying on the citizens since the citizens themselves were more than willing to do their spying for them."
-Kort E. Patterson-
Source: Port of Call, August/September 1999
And remember, if you see something, say something...
"Fascist intellectuals, such as Ugo Spirito, made the round of conferences preaching the virtues of postcapitalism fascism and in fact tried to nudge the structure in a 'leftist' direction by calling for more collective control and even corporative ownership of the economy. Mussolini looked abroad to find that Franklin Roosevelt was merely seeking to emulate Italy's innovations."
-Charles S. Maier-
Historian, professor, Director of the Center for European Studies
Source: In Search of Stability: Explorations in Historical Political Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 81.
"Since National Socialism came to power, I have striven to make its consequences milder for its victims and to prepare the way for a change. In that, my conscience drove me -- and in the end, that is a man's duty."
-Helmuth James-
[Helmuth James Graf von Moltke] (1907-1945) Count of Moltke, German jurist, executed by Nazi government for 'treason'
Source: January 1945, in a letter written while in custody before being executed, he revealed his motivation for resistance to his two sons.
"This manual of the Communist Party should be in the hands of every loyal American, that they may be alerted to the fact that it is not always by armies and guns that a nation is conquered."
-Kenneth Goff-
Author and a one time dues-paying member of the Communist Party
Source: in his book, "THE SOVIET ART OF BRAINWASHING - A Synthesis of the Russian Textbook on Psycho-politics"
"Institutions purely democratic must, sooner, or later, destroy liberty or civilization or both."
-Thomas Babington Macaulay-
(1800-1859) [Lord Macaulay] 1st Baron Macaulay, British historian
Source: Letter to H.S. Randall, May 23, 1857
"A democracy is a government in the hands of men
of low birth, no property, and vulgar employments."
-Aristotle-
(384-322 BC) Greek philosopher
"Liberty has never lasted long in a democracy,
nor has it ever ended in anything better than despotism."
-Fisher Ames-
(1758-1808), American statesman, orator and political writer
"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."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Federalist No. 10, November 23, 1787
"Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve."
-George Bernard Shaw-
(1856-1950) Irish comic dramatist
"The tendency of democracies is, in all things, to mediocrity."
-James Fenimore Cooper-
(1789-1851) American Novelist
Source: The American Democrat, XIV, 1838
"Democracy, with its promise of international peace, has been no better guarantee against war than the old dynastic rule of kings."
-Jan C. Smuts-
(1870-1950) South African and British Commonwealth politician and military leader, Prime Minister of South Africa (1939-48), helped found both the League of Nations and the United Nations (he wrote the preamble of the UN Charter)
Source: Address at St. Andrews University, 1934
"Repeal that [welfare] law, and you will soon see a change in their manners. ... Six days shalt thou labor, though one of the old commandments long treated as out of date, will again be looked upon as a respectable precept; industry will increase, and with it plenty among the lower people; their circumstances will mend, and more will be done for their happiness by inuring them to provide for themselves, than could be done by dividing all your estates among them."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
Source: On the Price of Corn, and Management of the Poor, London Chronicle, November 29, 1766
"The evil of democracy is not the triumph of quantity,
but the triumph of bad quality."
-Guido De Ruggiero-
(1888-1948) Italian philosopher, professor of Italian politics
Source: The History of European Liberalism, II, 1927
"Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor."
-James Russell Lowell-
(1819-1891) American author and diplomatist
Source: The Biglow Papers, II, 1862
"Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people."
-Oscar Wilde-
(1854-1900)
Source: The Soul of Man Under Socialism, 1891
"People often say that, in a democracy, decisions are made by a majority of the people. Of course, that is not true. Decisions are made by a majority of those who make themselves heard and who vote -- a very different thing."
-Walter H. Judd-
(1898-1994) Minnesota legislator, physician, missionary, and orator
I think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country... Only the emergency that makes it immediately dangerous to leave the correction of evil counsels to time warrants making any exception to the sweeping command, 'Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech.'
-Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.-
(1841-1935) US Supreme Court Justice, also known as "The Great Dissenter"
Source: Abrams et al v. United States, 1919
"The bourgeoisie is many times stronger than we. To give it the weapon of freedom of the press is to ease the enemy’s cause, to help the class enemy. We do not desire to end in suicide, so we will not do this."
-Vladimir Ilyich Lenin-
[Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov] (1870 - 1924), First Leader of the Soviet Union
Source: Pravda, 1912
"The intellectually stifling results of censorship -- while deplorable in any setting -- would be all the more abominable if allowed to exist within the college environment."
-William M. Anderson, Jr.-
President of Mary Washington College
Source: Letter, 7 December 1983
"Liberty means, not the mere voting at elections, but the free and fearless exercise of the mental faculties, and that self-possession which springs out of well-reasoned opinions and consistent practice."
-Frances Wright-
"When a nation threatens another nation the people of the latter forget their factionalism, their local antagonisms, their political differences, their suspicions of each other, their religious hostilities, and band together as one unit. Leaders know that, and that is why so many of them whip up wars during periods of national crisis, or when the people become discontented and angry. The leaders stigmatize the enemy with every vice they can think of, every evil and human depravity. They stimulate their people’s natural fear of all other men by channeling it into a defined fear of just certain men, or nations. Attacking another nation, then, acts as a sort of catharsis, temporarily, on men’s fear of their immediate neighbors. This is the explanation of all wars, all racial and religious hatreds, all massacres, and all attempts at genocide."
-Taylor Caldwell-
"The late multiplication of banking companies in both parts of the United Kingdom, an event by which many people have been much alarmed, instead of diminishing, increases the security of the public. ... By dividing the whole circulation into a greater number of parts, the failure of any one company, an accident which, in the course of things, must sometimes happen, becomes of less consequence to the public. This free competition, too, obliges all bankers to be more liberal in their dealings with their customers, lest their rivals should carry them away. In general, if any branch of trade, or any division of labour, be advantageous to the public, the freer and more general the competition, it will always be the more so."
-Adam Smith-
'Wealth of Nations'
"There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader. ... This ... is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil."
-John Adams-
"The attempt to silence a man is the greatest honour you can bestow on him. It means that you recognise his superiority to yourself."
-Joseph Sobran-
(1946-2010) Columnist
Source: Universal Press Syndicate
"Let me make the superstitions of a nation and I care not who makes its laws or its songs either."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910)
"Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them."
-George Orwell-
[Eric Arthur Blair] (1903-1950) British author
Source: his book, '1984'
"Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim."
-George Santayana-
[Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás] (1863-1952) Spanish-born philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist
"In 1883, a small group of Socialists met in London, announcing their intentions of converting the British economic system from capitalism to socialism. This group chose the name 'Fabian Society.' One of the leading members of the Fabian Society, author George Bernard Shaw, perhaps summed it up best when he said, quote: '... Socialism means equality of income or nothing... under socialism you would not be allowed to be poor. You would be forcibly fed, clothed, lodged, taught, and employed whether you like it or not. If it were discovered that you had not character enough to be worth all this trouble, you might possibly be executed in a kindly manner; but whilst you were permitted to live you would have to live well.' "
-Edgar Wallace Robinson-
Source: in his 1980 booklet titled "Rolling Thunder"
"In questions of power, then, let no more be said of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"The real rulers in Washington are invisible and exercise power from behind the scenes."
-Justice Felix Frankfurter-
(1882-1965) U.S. Supreme Court Justice
"The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom."
-Justice William O. Douglas-
(1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Public Utilities Commission v Pollack, 1952
"The aim of socialism is not only to abolish the present division of mankind into small states and all-national isolation, not only to bring the nations closer to each other, but also to merge them."
-Vladimir Ilyich Lenin-
[Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov] (1870 - 1924), First Leader of the Soviet Union
"I'm never quite sure what you mean by consensus politics. I believe that what most people want in their lives, is what the Conservative Party wants to have for them. I believe that our policies are fundamentally common sense policies. Just let's take taxation for an example. Wherever I go I hear enormous resentment about the amount which people are paying out of their own pay packet in tax. And, this goes right across the income ranges. Socialism started by saying it was going to tax the rich, very rapidly it was taxing the middle income groups. Now, it's taxing people quite highly with incomes way below average and pensioners with incomes way below average. You look at the figure on the beginning of a pay slip, sometimes it can look quite high, look along the slip to the other end, and see how many deductions you've had off, those deductions have increased enormously under Socialism ...
Public expenditure, which they always boast about, is financed out of the pay packet in our pockets. People are saying that they really think too much is being taken out of the pay packet for someone to spend on their behalf, and they'd rather be left with more, and it's now well-known that Socialist Governments put up taxes and Conservative Governments take them down. It's part of our fundamental belief giving the people more choice to spend their own money in their own way."
-Margaret Thatcher-
(1925-2013) British Prime Minister (1979–1990)
Source: 1976 Feb 5, TV Interview for Thames TV 'This Week'
"Like it or not, we have placed our destiny in the hands of the experts. A politician is, after all, a kind of expert, if self-styled. Even the fact that competent experts must serve under politicians of mediocre intelligence and little foresight is a problem that we are stuck with, because the experts themselves cannot agree on any major world issue. A logocracy of quarreling experts might be no better than the rule of the mediocrities to which we are subject. The declining intellectual quality of political leadership is the result of the growing complexity of the world. Since no one, be he endowed with the highest wisdom, can grasp it in its entirety, it is those who are least bothered by this who strive for power."
-Stanisław Lem-
"The demagogue is usually sly, a detractor of others, a professor of humility and disinterestedness, a great stickler for equality as respects all above him, a man who acts in corners, and avoids open and manly expositions of his course, calls blackguards gentlemen, and gentlemen folks, appeals to passions and prejudices rather than to reason, and is in all respects, a man of intrigue and deception, of sly cunning and management, instead of manifesting the frank, fearless qualities of the democracy he so prodigally professes. The man who maintains the rights of the people on pure grounds, may be distinguished from the demagogue by the reverse of all these qualities. He does not flatter the people, even while he defends them, for he knows that flattery is a corrupting and dangerous poison. Having nothing to conceal, he is frank and fearless, as are all men with the consciousness of right motives. He oftener chides than commends, for power needs reproof and can dispense with praise. He who would be a courtier under a king, is almost certain to be a demagogue in a democracy."
-The American Democrat-
"How do you tell a Communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
Source: Remarks in Arlington, Virginia, September 25, 1987
"No good government but what is republican... the very definition of a republic is 'an empire of laws, and not of men.'"
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: "Thoughts on Government" January, 1776
"Always stand on principle, even if you stand alone."
-John Quincy Adams-
(1767-1848) 6th US President
"We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and
discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into
physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights
of meeting physical force with soul force."
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-
(1929-1968), US civil rights leader
Source: Speech delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. on August 28, 1963.
"There are two freedoms -- the false, where a man is free to do what he likes; the true, where a man is free to do what he ought."
-Charles Kingsley-
(1819-1875) English clergyman, university professor, historian, and novelist
"All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward."
-Ellen Glasgow-
(1873-1945) Pulitzer Prize winning American novelist
"There is no greater fallacy than the belief that aims and purposes are one thing, while methods and tactics are another... All human experience teaches that methods and means cannot be separated from the ultimate aim."
-Emma Goldman-
(1869-1940)
Source: My Disillusionment in Russia, 1923
"Is there a greater tragedy imaginable than that, in our endeavour consciously to shape our future in accordance with high ideals, we should in fact unwittingly produce the very opposite of what we have been striving for?"
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
"It is a governing principle of nature, that the agency which can produce most good, when perverted from its proper aim, is most productive of evil. It behooves the well-intentioned, therefore, vigorously to watch the tendency of even their most highly-prized institutions, since that which was established in the interests of the right, may so easily become the agent of the wrong."
-James Fenimore Cooper-
(1789-1851) American Novelist
"If a passion for freedom is not in vogue, patriots may sound the alarm till they are weary. The Act of Habeas Corpus, by which prisoners may insist on being brought to trial within a limited time, is the corner-stone of our liberty."
-Horace Walpole-
"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-
"The executive branch of this government never has, nor will suffer, while I preside, any improper conduct of its officers to escape with impunity."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: letter to Gouverneur Morris, 1795
"[There can be no] rational administration of government when good men are held in the same esteem as bad ones."
-Polybius-
(ca. 203-120 BC,) Greek historian
"It is a great importance to set a resolution, not to be shaken, never to tell an untruth. There is no vice so mean, so pitiful, so contemptible and he who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual, he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world's believing him. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all it's good dispositions."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"Fraud may consist as well in the suppression of what is true as in the representation of what is false. If a man professing to answer a question, select those facts only which are likely to give a credit to the person of whom he speaks, and keep back the rest, he is a more artful knave than he who tells a direct falsehood."
-Justice Heath-
English Jurist
Source: Tapp v. Lee (1803), 3 Bos. & Pull, 371; Park, J., Foster v. Charles (1830), 4 M. & P. 70.
"An honest answer is the sign of true friendship."
-Proverb-
Source: The Holy Bible, Proverbs 24:26
"Congress is continually appointing fact-finding committees, when what we really need are some fact-facing committees."
-Roger Allen-
"A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both."
-Dwight D. Eisenhower-
(1890-1969), 34th US President, WWII General
Source: first inaugural address, 20 January 1953
"Over the 20th century, the federal government has assumed a vast and unprecedented set of powers. Not only has the exercise of those powers upset the balance between federal and state governments; run roughshod over individuals, families, and firms; and reduced economic opportunity for all; but most of what the federal government does today -- to put the point as plainly and candidly as possible -- is illegitimate because done without explicit constitutional authority. The time has come to start returning power to the states and the people, to relimit federal power in our fundamental law, to restore constitutional government."
-Roger Pilon-
Vice President for Legal Affairs for the Cato Institute
Source: Restoring Constitutional Government, Cato's Letter #9, p. 1, published by the Cato Institute (1995).
"That frequent recurrence to fundamental principles, and a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, industry and frugality, are absolutely necessary to preserve the blessings of liberty, and keep government free. The people ought, therefore, to pay particular attention to these points, in the choice of officers and representatives, and have a right to exact a due and constant regard to them, from their legislators and magistrates, in the making and executing such laws as are necessary for the good government of the State."
-Vermont Declaration of Rights-
Source: Article 16
"Not to be, but to seem, virtuous -- it is a formula whose utility we all discovered in the nursery."
-C. S. Lewis-
(1898-1963), British novelist
"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-
(1950- ) Author
"If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem. It is true that you may fool all the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all of the time; but you can't fool all of the people all the time."
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
"Of all the properties which belong to honorable men, not one is so highly prized as that of character."
-Henry Clay-
(1777-1852) U. S. Senator, Speaker of the House of Representatives
"Integrity is doing the right thing, even if nobody is watching."
-Jim Stovall-
(1958-) American writer, blind
"No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which one is true."
-Nathaniel Hawthorne-
(1804-1864) American writer
"It is not the fact of liberty but the way in which liberty is exercised that ultimately determines whether liberty itself survives."
-Dorothy Thompson-
(1894-1961)
Source: Ladies Home Journal, May 1958
"Fidelity to the public requires that the laws be as plain and explicit as possible, that the less knowing may understand, and not be ensnared by them, while the artful evade their force."
-Samuel Cooke-
(1709-1783) Pastor of the Second Church in Cambridge
Source: May 30, 1770, Sermon before the Massachusets Bay provincial House of Representatives
"You ask yourself not if this or that is expedient, but if it is right."
-Alan Paton-
(1903-1988) South African author, anti-apartheid activist.
"Once we start to worry too often and too deeply about what certain individuals and what certain groups think about us, then we might start selling our souls for the sake of expediency."
-Otis Chandler-
(1927-2006) Publisher of the Los Angeles Times (1960-1980)
Source: 1969
"The contention that an injury can amount to a crime only when inflicted by intention is no provincial or transient notion. It is as universal and persistent in mature systems of law as belief in freedom of the human will and a consequent ability and duty of the normal individual to choose between good and evil."
-US Supreme Court-
1952
"Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
"Farce, gross incompetence, and tragedy is the hallmark of big centralized government, wherever it develops. Big centralized government has developed in the United States year after year since the 1930s, and it has both solidified and metastasized since 9-11. Today, we live at the will and by the grace of a dystopian and grasping government. There is not an exceptional amount of time left before this government collapses, but before it does, we the people will suffer far more than we have suffered to date. Banking collapses, mortgage fraud at the highest levels, government bailouts, currency printing, and inflation in food and energy are just a foretaste of the future, led by the same Washington public-private cartel we have suffered for decades. . . .
I believe our government -- outdated, unrestrained by the Constitution and soon to default on every debt it has taken on in our name -- cannot long endure. But unlike those who run and benefit from our modern American nationalism, corporatism and socialism, I do not fear average Americans seeking self-government, rule of law and liberty.
That's why on Sept. 11, I will not be celebrating America's undeclared wars on countries that had nothing to do with the Sept. 11 attacks 10 years ago. I will not be attending remembrances of victims of that day, because those remembrances refuse to count American liberty, rule of law and freedom of trade and movement uppermost on that list of the sacrificed. I will not attend any program offered by a religious or political organization that seeks to ride a federal government bandwagon to confirm some imperative of war against Islam halfway around the world, or that seeks to promote the false concept of a culture war as somehow God's intent for America.
On this 10-year anniversary, I intend to go about my business as usual, and say a prayer of gratitude for the small freedoms I have left. In the afternoon, I'll be in Charlottesville, Va., learning about local apprenticeship and crafts demonstrations. In the evening, I'll check the livestock and gather the eggs. I won't allow what I personally experienced that day in the Pentagon, nor the subsequent government drumbeats for war, waving the Sept. 11 banner, to diminish my awareness of the meaning of liberty. . . .
The real battle for Americans today is a battle to reassert our independence from an overbearing and unsustainable state. Today, we can all celebrate that there are fundamental cracks in the federal state's veneer, and we can be grateful for the options we still have in our own lives to live free, to practice charity and faith, creativity and productivity and to rediscover our own power as individuals and communities."
-Karen Kwiatkowski-
(1960-) retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel, included duties as Pentagon desk officer and a variety of roles for the National Security Agency, author, columnist
9 Sep 2011
"From the utopian viewpoint, the United States constitution is a singularly hard-bitten and cautious document, for it breathes the spirit of skepticism about human altruism and incorporates a complex system of checks, balances and restrictions, so that everybody is holding the reins on everybody else."
-Chad Walsh-
Source: From Utopia to Nightmare, 1962
"If you want to be free, there is but one way; it is to guarantee an equally full measure of liberty to all your neighbors. There is no other."
-Carl Schurz-
(1829-1906) German revolutionary, author, newspaper editor, journalist, Union Army general during US Civil War, first German-born U.S. Senator (MO-R)
"The civilized man has a moral obligation to be skeptical, to demand the credentials of all statements that claim to be facts."
-Bergan Evans
(1904-1978)
Source: The Natural History of Nonsense, 1946
"It is a mindless philosophy that assumes that one's private beliefs have nothing to do with public office. Does it make sense to entrust those who are immoral in private with the power to determine the nation's moral issues and, indeed, its destiny? .... The duplicitous soul of a leader can only make a nation more sophisticated in evil."
-Dr. Ravi Zacharias-
"It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money as long as you have it."
-Edwin Way Teale-
(1889-1980)
Source: Circle of the Seasons, 1953
"I have found some of the best reasons I ever had for remaining at the bottom simply by looking at the men at the top."
-Frank Moore Colby-
(1865–1925) American educator, writer
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what's right."
-Isaac Asimov-
(1920-1992) American author and professor of biochemistry at Boston University
"Conformities are called for much more eagerly today than yesterday... skeptics, liberals, individuals with a taste for private life and their own inner standards of behavior, are objects of fear and derision and targets of persecution for either side... in the great ideological wars of our time."
-Isaiah Berlin-
(1909-1997)
Source: Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century, 1950
"There can be no public or private virtue unless the foundation of action is the practice of truth."
-George Jacob Holyoake-
(1817-1906) English secularist
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public."
-Theodore Roosevelt-
(1858-1919) 26th US President
"Without an unfettered press, without liberty of speech, all of the outward forms and structures of free institutions are a sham, a pretense -- the sheerest mockery. If the press is not free; if speech is not independent and untrammeled; if the mind is shackled or made impotent through fear, it makes no difference under what form of government you live, you are a subject and not a citizen."
-William E. Borah-
(1865-1940) U. S. Senator
Source: Remarks to the Senate, 19 April 1917
"Every man who says frankly and fully what he thinks is so far doing a public service. We should be grateful to him for attacking most unsparingly our most cherished opinions."
-Sir Leslie Stephen-
(1832-1904), literary essayist, author
Source: The Suppression of Poisonous Opinions, 1883
"There is no inherent misdirection in holding unorthodox views. Indeed, the autonomous individual, free from compulsive conformance and unquestioned assumptions, is likely to be unorthodox... They stimulate the climate of controversy without which political democracy becomes an empty formalism."
-Snell Putney-
Source: The Adjusted American, 1964
"By academic freedom I understand the right to search for truth and to publish and teach what one holds to be true. This right implies also a duty; one must not conceal any part of what one has recognized to be true."
-Albert Einstein-
(1879-1955) Physicist and Professor, Nobel Prize 1921
Source: Letter on his seventy-fifth birthday, 1954
"He who sees the truth, let him proclaim it, without asking who is for it or who is against it."
-Henry George-
(1839-1897) American political economist
Source: The Land Question, 1881
"You must study to be frank with the world: frankness is the child of honesty and courage. Say just what you mean to do on every occasion, and take it for granted that you mean to do right."
-Robert E. Lee-
(1807-1870) General-in-Chief of the Confederate States army
"In 1956, I shall not go to the polls. I have not registered. I believe that democracy has so far disappeared in the United States that no two evils exist. There is but one evil party with two names, and it will be elected despite all I can do or say."
-W.e.b. DuBois-
"War is merely the continuation of policy by other means."
-Carl von Clausewitz-
"Character in many ways is everything in leadership. It is made up of many things, but I would say character is really integrity. When you delegate something to a subordinate, for example, it is absolutely your responsibility, and he must understand this. You as a leader must take complete responsibility for what the subordinate does. I once said, as a sort of wisecrack, that leadership consists of nothing but taking responsibility for everything that goes wrong and giving your subordinates credit for everything that goes well. "
-Dwight D. Eisenhower-
... this as we rapidly approach a character-free 2016 presidential election...
"Wise politicians will be cautious about fettering the government with restrictions that cannot be observed, because they know that every break of the fundamental laws, though dictated by necessity, impairs that sacred reverence which ought to be maintained in the breast of rulers towards the constitution of a country."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804)
Source: Federalist No. 25, 21 December 1787. Reference: Hamilton, Federalist No. 25 (167)
"When a man assumes a public trust, he should consider himself as public property."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"Not every item of news should be published. Rather must those who control news policies endeavor
to make every item of news serve a certain purpose."
-Joseph Paul Goebbels-
(1897-1945) Nazi Propaganda Minister
Source: Diary, 14 March 1943
"For those who stubbornly seek freedom, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination. These are easy to perceive in the totalitarian societies, much less so in the system of 'brainwashing under freedom' to which we are subjected and which all too often we serve as willing or unwitting instruments."
-Noam Chomsky-
(1928- ) American linguist and political writer
"The battle for the world is the battle for definitions."
-Thomas Szasz-
(1920-2012) Hungarian-American Professor of Psychiatry, Author, Libertarian
"The party ... must not become a servant of the masses, but their master. ... 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
1935
Source: writing about his Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers' Party, or NAZI) in Mein Kampf (1935)
"Academies that are founded at public expense are instituted not so much to cultivate men's natural abilities as to restrain them."
-Baruch Spinoza-
(1632-1677)
"I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is Mass Psychology. ...It's importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda ...Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated."
-Bertrand Russell-
[Bertrand Arthur William Russell] (1872-1970) Philosopher, educator
"It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is."
-Bill Clinton-
[William Jefferson Blythe III] (1946- ), 42nd US President
Source: Excerpt from Grand Jury testimony, Sep 21, 1998
"The road to tyranny, we must remember, begins with the destruction of the truth."
-Bill Clinton-
[William Jefferson Blythe III] (1946- ), 42nd US President
Source: speech at the University of Connecticut, Oct 15, 1997
"The other thing we have to do is to take seriously the role in this problem of... older men who prey on underage women... There are consequences to decisions and... one way or the other, people always wind up being held accountable."
-Bill Clinton-
[William Jefferson Blythe III] (1946- ), 42nd US President
Source: June 13, 1996, in a speech endorsing a national effort against teen pregnancy
"You can't get rich in politics unless you're a crook."
-Harry S. Truman-
(1884-1972), 33rd US President
Source: Attributed
"The measure of a man's character is what he would do if he knew he never would be found out."
-Thomas Babington Macaulay-
(1800-1859) [Lord Macaulay] 1st Baron Macaulay, British historian
"No legacy is so rich as honesty."
-William Shakespeare-
(1564-1616) Playwright
Source: All's Well That Ends Well, Act 3, Scene 5 (c. 1604)
"Integrity is what we do, what we say, and what we say we do."
-Don Galer-
"The reality is, if we tell the truth, we only have to tell the truth once. If you lie, you have to keep lying forever."
-Rabbi Wayne Dosick-
"The man who fears no truths has nothing to fear from lies."
-Sir Francis Bacon-
(1561-1626) English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, orator, and author
"Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: "You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society."
-Doris Lessing-
"The highest proof of virtue is to possess boundless power without abusing it."
-Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay-
"An attitude of moderation is apt to be misunderstood when passions are greatly excited and when victory is apt to rest with the extremists on one side or the other; yet I think it is in the long run the only wise attitude..."
-Theodore Roosevelt-
"If liberty is worth keeping and free representative government worth saving, we must stand for all American fundamentals—not some, but all. All are woven into the great fabric of our national well-being. We cannot hold fast to some only, and abandon others that, for the moment, we find inconvenient. If one American fundamental is prostrated, others in the end will surely fall."
-Albert J. Beveridge-
(1862-1927) American historian, US Senator (R-IN)
1920
"The peak of tolerance is most readily achieved by those who are not burdened by convictions."
-Alexander Chase-
Source: Perspectives, 1966
"There can be no compromise on basic principles.
There can be no compromise on moral issues.
There can be no compromise on matters of knowledge,
of truth, of rational conviction."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
"Integrity is its own reward."
-Dr. Laura Schlessinger-
"He does not believe, that does not live according to his belief."
-Dr. Thomas Fuller-
(1608-1661) English clergyman, writer
Source: "The Church History of Britain"
"The quixotic desire to do good, be universally fair and make everybody happy is understandable [...] There is only one problem with this approach. We are a court."
-Justice Janice Brown-
(1949-) federal judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Associate Justice of the California Supreme Court (1996-2005)
Source: Justice Janice Brown California Supreme Court, quoted in Gathering Mob: Part II by Thomas Sowell
"The fate of the country does not depend on how you vote at the polls -- the worst man is as strong as the best at that game; it does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot-box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning."
-Henry David Thoreau-
(1817-1862) American author, poet, philosopher, polymath, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and transcendentalist
Source: Slavery in Massachusetts (1854)
"We must pity the poor wretched, timid soul who is too faint-hearted to resist his oppressors. He sings the song of the dammed: “I can’t fight back; I have too much to lose; I own too much property; I have worked too hard to get what I have; They will put me out of business if I resist; I might go to jail; I have my family to think about.” Such poor miserable creatures have misplaced values and are hiding their cowardice behind pretended family responsibility -- blindly refusing to see that the most glorious legacy that one can bequeath to posterity is liberty; and that the only true security is liberty."
-Marvin Cooley-
"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
"When even one American -- who has done nothing wrong -- is forced by fear to shut his mind and close his mouth, then all Americans are in peril."
-Harry S. Truman-
(1884-1972), 33rd US President
August 14, 1951
Source: Address at the Dedication of the New Washington Headquarters of the American Legion
"To make your children capable of honesty is the beginning of education."
-John Ruskin-
(1819-1900) British author, artist, social critic
"As part of the conversation with student leaders, we talked about the concept of Zero Tolerance. While I appreciate the desire for such a policy, it is unachievable under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The challenge we all face is to find the balance between wanting to eliminate expressions of racism and bigotry and supporting the free speech guaranteed by the First Amendment. If we value freedom of speech, we must acknowledge that some may find the expressions of others unwelcome, painful, or even, offensive. We can, however, speak out and condemn such expressions, and we can work to create a more welcoming and inclusive environment."
-Mark Kennedy-
President of University of North Dakota
Source: October 05, 2016, Statement from the University of North Dakota
"Apply just the right amount of force — never too much, never too little. All of us know of people who have failed to accomplish what they set out to do because of not properly gauging the amount of effort required. At one extreme, they fall short of the mark; at the other, they do not know when to stop."
-Jigoro Kano-
"You become a libertarian when you realize that it's wrong to hurt people and take their stuff. You become an anarchist when you realize that there are no exceptions."
-Parrish Miller-
"Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right, from the frame of their nature, to knowledge, as their great Creator, who does nothing in vain, has given them understandings, and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean, of the characters and conduct of their rulers."
-John Adams-
A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law (1765)
"If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible."
-Henry David Thoreau-
(1817-1862) American author, poet, philosopher, polymath, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and transcendentalist
"The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those who speak it."
-George Orwell-
[Eric Arthur Blair] (1903-1950) British author
"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
"If by the liberty of the press were understood merely the liberty of discussing the propriety of public measures and political opinions, let us have as much of it as you please: But if it means the liberty of affronting, calumniating and defaming one another, I, for my part, own myself willing to part with my share of it, whenever our legislators shall please so to alter the law and shall chearfully consent to exchange my liberty of abusing others for the privilege of not being abused myself."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
Source: An Account of the Supremest Court of Judicature in Pennsylvania, viz. The Court of the Press, 12 September 1789, Reference: Franklin Collected Works, Lemay, ed., 1152.
"The press is hostile to the idea of liberty. Most people in the press are for big government. Most people think that the solution to anything, whether it's health care problems, education, whatever it is -- it's got to be more government."
-Harry Browne-
(1933-2006) American libertarian writer, politician, and free-market investment analyst. Libertarian candidate for US President 1996 & 2000
July 4, 2002
"Whoever controls the media, controls the mind."
-Jim Morrison-
(1943-1971) Musician
"I could think of no worse example for nations abroad, who for the first time were trying to put free electoral procedures into effect, than that of the United States wrangling over the results of our presidential election, and even suggesting that the presidency itself could be stolen by thievery at the ballot box."
-Thomas Jefferson
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"We are reluctant to admit that we owe our liberties to men of a type that today we hate and fear -- unruly men, disturbers of the peace, men who resent and denounce what Whitman called 'the insolence of elected persons' -- in a word, free men."
-Gerald W. Johnson-
(1890-1980)
Source: American Freedom and the Press, 1958
"We should be unfaithful to ourselves if we should ever lose sight of the danger to our liberties if anything partial or extraneous should infect the purity of our free, fair, virtuous, and independent elections."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: Inaugural Address, March 4, 1797
"I guess truth can hurt you worse in an election than about anything that can happen to you."
-Will Rogers-
(1879-1935) American humorist
"Those who, by the essence of their belief, are committed to Direct Action only are — just who? Why, the non-resistants; precisely those who do not believe in violence at all! Now do not make the mistake of inferring that I say direct action means non-resistance; not by any means. Direct action may be the extreme of violence, or it may be as peaceful as the waters of the Brook of Siloa that go softly. 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-
"The fabric of democracy is always fragile everywhere because it depends on the will of citizens to protect it, and when they become scared, when it becomes dangerous for them to defend it, it can go very quickly."
-Margaret Atwood-
"I have always said that my whole public life was an experiment to determine whether an intelligent people would sustain a man in acting sensibly on each proposition that arose, and in doing nothing for mere show or demagogical effect."
-James A. Garfield-
"A government resting on the minority is an aristocracy, not a republic, and could not be safe with a numerical and physical force against it, without a standing army, an enslaved press and a disarmed populace."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: The Federalist No. 46.
"Ballots are the rightful, and peaceful, successors of bullets; and that when ballots have fairly, and constitutionally, decided, there can be no successful appeal, back to bullets; that there can be no successful appeal, except to ballots themselves, at succeeding elections."
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
Hypocrite.
"The possession of unlimited power will make a despot of almost any man. There is a possible Nero in the gentlest human creature that walks."
-Thomas Bailey Aldrich-
(1836-1907)
Source: Ponkapog Papers, 1903
"The only shape in which equality is really connected with justice is this -- justice presupposes general rules. If these general rules are to be maintained at all, it is obvious that they must be applied equally to every case which satisfies their terms."
-James Fitzjames Stephens-
(1829-1894)
Source: Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, 1873
"At the foundation of our civil liberties lies the principle that denies to government officials an exceptional position before the law and which subjects them to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen."
-Justice Louis D. Brandeis-
(1856-1941) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: Burdeau v. McDowell, 1921
"If the legislature clearly misinterprets a Constitutional provision, the frequent repetition of the wrong will not create a right."
-Amos v. Mosley-
Source: 77 SO 619. Also see Kingsley v. Metril, 99 NW 1044
"Complaints are every where heard from our most considerate and virtuous citizens, equally the friends of public and private faith, and of public and personal liberty, that our governments are too unstable; that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties; and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice, and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Federalist no. 10
"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
"Money is always to be found when men are to be sent to the frontiers to be destroyed: when the object is to preserve them, it is no longer so."
-Voltaire-
"Without general elections, without unrestrained freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution... in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element."
-Rosa Luxemburg-
(1880-1919)
Source: in The Russian Revolution
"The short memories of the American voters is what keeps our politicians in office."
-Will Rogers-
(1879-1935) American humorist
"[A] function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve it's high purpose when it indices a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with things 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 presses for understanding."
-Justice Potter Stewart-
(1915-1985), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: in Free Speech and Political Protest [Marvin Summers], 1967
"It is the growing custom to narrow control, concentrate power, disregard and disfranchise the public; and assuming that certain powers by divine right of money-raising or by sheer assumption, have the power to do as they think best without consulting the wisdom of mankind."
-W. E. B. Du Bois-
(1868-1963) Professor, Civil Rights Activist, NAACP Founding Member
Source: The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois
"The people’s right to obtain information does not, of course, depend on any assured ability to understand its significance or use it wisely. Facts belong to the people simply because they relate to interests that are theirs, government that is theirs, and votes that they may desire to cast, for they are entitled to an active role in shaping every fundamental decision of state."
-Edmond Cahn-
Source: The Predicament of Democratic Man, 1961
"They only care about frivolous things. When I was a boy, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly ... impatient of restraint."
-Hesiod-
Greek poet, ~700BC
“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
-Douglas Adams-
"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."
-George Orwell-
[Eric Arthur Blair] (1903-1950) British author
Source: Animal Farm, 1945
"Without deviation, without exception, without any ifs, buts, or whereases, freedom of speech means that you shall not do something to people either for the views they express, or the words they speak or write."
-Justice Hugo L. Black-
(1886-1971) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: One Man's Stand For Freedom, 1963
"Truth and news are not the same thing."
-Katharine Graham-
(1917-2001) American publisher, owner of Washington Post and Newsweek magazine.
"To argue against any breach of liberty from the ill use that may be made of it, is to argue against liberty itself, since all is capable of being abused."
-Lord George Lyttleton-
(1709-1773)
"The trade of governing has always been monopolized by the most ignorant and the most rascally individuals of mankind."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
"Together we have come to realize that for most men the right to learn is curtailed by the obligation to attend school."
-Ivan Illich-
(1926-2002) Austrian philosopher, author, social critic
Source: Deschooling Society, 1971
"The first goal and primary function of the U.S. public school is not to educate good people, but good citizens. It is the function which we call - in enemy nations - 'state indoctrination.'"
-Jonathan Kozol-
(1936- ) American writer, educator, activist, best known for his books on public education in the US
"Honor is like an island, rugged and without a beach; once we have left it, we can never return."
-Nicolas Boileau-Despraux-
"It is hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head."
-Sally Kempton-
Writer
Source: "Cutting Loose," by Sally Kempton. Esquire, July 1970
"Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up."
-C. S. Lewis-
"Gold is the money of kings; silver is the money of gentlemen; barter is the money of peasants; but debt is the money of slaves."
-Franz-
"Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest."
-Denis Diderot-
"When goods don’t cross borders, Soldiers will."
-Frederic Bastiat-
Did Bastiat say “when goods don’t cross borders, soldiers will”?
"They have gun control in Cuba. They have universal health care in Cuba. So why do they want to come here?"
-Paul Harvey-
[Paul Harvey Aurandt] (1918-2009) American radio broadcaster
Source: August 31, 1994
"Schools have not necessarily much to do with education... they are mainly institutions of control, where basic habits must be inculcated in the young. Education is quite different and has little place in school."
-Sir Winston Churchill-
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
"Government will not fail to employ education
to strengthen its hands and perpetuate its institutions."
-William Godwin-
(1756-1836)
"I don't want my children fed or clothed by the state, but if I had to choose, I would prefer that to their being educated by the state."
-Max Victor Belz-
Iowa grain dealer
"Government schools can't teach reading, writing, and arithmetic -- why should we trust them to teach morality, respect, and character? If public education does for ethics what it's done for learning, we'll end up with a generation of immoral, disrespectful, and characterless students."
-Steve Dasbach-
Chair of the Libertarian National Committee (1993-1998) and its National Executive Director (1998-2002)
"Men had better be without education than be educated by their rulers; for their education is but the mere breaking in of the steer to the yoke; the mere discipline of the hunting dog, which, by dint of severity, is made to forego the strongest impulse of his nature, and instead of devouring his prey, to hasten with it to the feet of his master."
-Thomas Hodgskin-
Source: Mechanics' Magazine , 11 October 1823, Ref: Class and Conflict in Nineteenth-century England, 1815-1850, by Patricia Hollis
"Just as there is a very short distance between the U.S. and Cuba, there is a very short distance between a democracy and a dictatorship where the government gets to decide what to do, how to think, and how to live. And sometimes your freedom is not taken away at gunpoint, but instead it is done one piece of paper at a time, one seemingly meaningless rule at a time, one small silencing at a time. Never allow the government -- or anyone else -- to tell you what you can or cannot believe or what you can and cannot say or what your conscience tells you to have to do or not do."
-Armando Valladares-
(1937-) Cuban poet, diplomat, and human rights activist
Source: Armando Valladares speech receiving the 2016 Canterbury Medal
"Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
"It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong."
-Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
"The dominant purpose of the First Amendment was to prohibit the widespread practice of government suppression of embarrassing information."
-Justice William O. Douglas-
(1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: New York Times v. Unites States (Pentagon Papers)
"Avoid any specific discussion of public policy at public meetings."
-Quintus Tullius Cicero-
(c.102-43 B.C.), Roman general; brother of Cicero the orator
"The idea that political speech had to be protected at any cost dates to Colonial days, during which the press and the public were not allowed to express themselves freely on matters of public concern. The King and his government often used restrictive measures, such as licensing of printing presses and the doctrine of seditious libel, to silence unfavorable public comment."
-Craig R. Smith-
Source: All Speech Is Created Equal, 1986, Washington, D.C., Freedom of Expression Foundation
"If there is a bedrock principle of the First Amendment, it is that the 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: Texas vs. Johnson, 1989
"The First Amendment was designed to protect offensive speech, because nobody ever tries to ban the other kind."
-Mike Godwin-
staff counsel, Electronic Freedom Foundation
"Everybody is in favor of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people's idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone says anything back, that is an outrage."
-Sir Winston Churchill-
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
Source: Speech, House of Commons, 1943
"Perhaps this is why so many intellectuals despise the market. It reveals truths they cannot access, no matter how brilliant, credentialled, studied they might be. The market cuts through every conceit, every preconceived notion of what should be, and presents reality as it is. You can resent it and decry it. Or you can see within it the marvelous revelation of the human personality as it looks when people behave as if they have rights and freedom."
-Jeffrey A. Tucker-
"Top Selling Christmas Gifts Since 1983"
“Where powers are assumed which have not been delegated a nullification of the act is the rightful remedy: that every state has a natural right, in cases not within the compact to nullify of their own authority all assumptions of power by others within their limits.”
-Thomas Jefferson-
"The limit where freedom begins and ends, where its rights and duties come together, is called law, and the State itself must bow to the law."
-Albert Camus-
"I have not come here with reference to any flag but that of freedom. If your Union does not symbolize universal emancipation, it brings no Union for me. If your Constitution does not guarantee freedom for all, it is not a Constitution I can ascribe to. If your flag is stained by the blood of a brother held in bondage, I repudiate it in the name of God. I came here to witness the unfurling of a flag under which every human being is to be recognized as entitled to his freedom. Therefore, with a clear conscience, without any compromise of principles, I accepted the invitation of the Government of the United States to be present and witness the ceremonies that have taken place today. And now let me give the sentiment which has been, and ever will be, the governing passion of my soul: 'Liberty for each, for all, and forever!'"
-William Lloyd Garrison-
"Printers are educated in the Belief, that when Men differ in Opinion, both sides ought equally to have the Advantage of being heard by the Public; and that when Truth and Error have fair Play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter: Hence [printers] cheerfully serve all contending Writers that pay them well, without regarding on which side they are of the Question in Dispute."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
Source: “An Apology for Printers,” Pennsylvania Gazette, 10 June 1731
"A forbidden writing is thought to be a certain spark of truth, that flies up in the face of them who seek to tread it out."
-Sir Francis Bacon-
(1561-1626) Philosopher, British Lord Chancellor
Source: The Advancement of Learning, 1605
"Search for the truth is the noblest occupation of man; its publication is a duty."
-Anne Louise Germaine de Stael-
(1766-1817) French author
"Progressives understand that their program for a government-centered society becomes more plausible the more people believe that work -- individual striving -- is unavailing. Government grows as fatalism grows, and fatalism grows as progressivism inculcates in people the demoralizing -- make that de-moralizing -- belief that they are victims of circumstances."
-George Will-
Journalist
Source: Purdue Has the President America Needs, Jun. 15, 2016
"THE most widespread form of child abuse in the United States is parents' sending children to the government to be educated."
-Neal Boortz-
(1945- ) Radio talk show host, columnist
"The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level."
-Norman Mailer-
(1923-2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and film director
"All animals are created equal but some animals are more equal than others."
-George Orwell-
[Eric Arthur Blair] (1903-1950) British author
Source: in "Animal Farm"
"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
"A tyrant... is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader."
-Plato-
(429-347 BC)
Source: The Republic
"The road to tyranny, we must never forget, begins with the destruction of the truth."
-Bill Clinton-
[William Jefferson Blythe III] (1946- ), 42nd US President
Source: 10/15/95, University of Connecticut
"I used to be employed as a field engineer servicing [a major broadcast network's] distribution equipment, specifically their affiliates' satellite dishes. I've had many talks with TV newsmen. The most telling was one who confessed that he didn't think he could continue his job and live with himself because he daily saw 'the difference between what I am forced to report and what's really happening.' He told me that, at the first meeting with 'corporate's' news director [from the corporate holding company that owned the station, not the network], the ND told them that 'our job as reporters was to shape public opinion.' When someone protested that their job was to discover and report the truth, the ND responded, 'Whatever the public's perception is is the truth and it's your job to make sure that they have the proper perceptions.' That man's statement is always in the back of my mind whenever I see or read anything in the 'news,' that the job of reporters today is not to report hard, verifiable facts but rather to shape public opinion using selected facts presented in carefully arranged fashion."
-Chris Meissen-
"The Right of all members of society to form their own beliefs and communicate them freely to others must be regarded as an essential principle of a democratically organized society."
-Thomas I. Emerson-
(1907-1991) Lines Professor of Law, Yale University, author
Source: Toward A General Theory of the First Amendment, 1966
"It has been well said that really up-to-date liberals do not care what people do, as long as it is compulsory."
-George Will-
(1941-) American newspaper columnist, journalist, and author
"The Radical Centre seem to have the same obsession with control that the fascists and communists had, but unlike them, it is control for control's sake rather than in the service of some clear ideology ... They do not seek the triumph of Volk or the dictatorship of the proletariat, they just seek to replace all social interactions with politically mediated interactions. They seek to regulate everything via a total state that ... just wants a world in which nothing whatsoever is private, everything is political. Their symbol is not the Hammer and Sickle or the Swastika, it is the CCTV camera."
-Perry de Havilland-
British founder of Samizdata
"The Information Age offers much to mankind, and I would like to think that we will rise to the challenges it presents. But it is vital to remember that information — in the sense of raw data — is not knowledge, that knowledge is not wisdom, and that wisdom is not foresight. But information is the first essential step to all of these."
-Arthur C. Clarke-
"Give them a corrupt House of Lords,
give them a venal House of Commons,
give them a tyrannical Prince,
give them a truckling court,
and let me have but an unfettered press.
I will defy them to encroach a hair’s breadth
upon the liberties of England."
-Richard Brinsley Sheridan-
(1751-1816) Irish playwright and Whig statesman
Source: Speech in the House of Commons, 6 February 1810
"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,
"Where men cannot freely convey their thoughts to one another, no other liberty is secure."
-William E. Hocking-
(1873-1966)
Source: Freedom of the Press, 1947
"The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected."
-Gilbert Keith Chesterton-
(1874-1936) British essayist, critic, poet, and novelist
"Being a politician means never having to say you're sorry. You don't have to say, 'I never should have voted to subsidize that ridiculous Enron project in India.' ... After all, they're greedy businessmen and you're a selfless public servant."
-Harry Browne-
(1933-2006) American libertarian writer, politician, and free-market investment analyst. Libertarian candidate for US President 1996 & 2000
"In a free market, consumer sovereignty and competition tend to create instability when sellers learn to game the system too well... In a technocratic system, it is more difficult for consumers to exercise countervailing power. Innovative competitors are often precluded by regulation. Suppliers tend to apply concentrated lobbying power to protect their interests, while the diffuse interests of the consumer are poorly represented in the political process. ... Centralized, regulated systems look good on paper, and they may be effective as they start. However, market systems learn faster, because competitive innovation prevents a market from getting captured by the incumbents who have learned how to game the system."
-Arnold Kling-
(1954-) American economist, scholar
"[Socialism] is a creed even more denigrating than Catholicism, but it offers more tangible bribes for its acceptance."
-Auberon Herbert-
(1838-1906) English author
"... 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. For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do? 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?"
-Alexander Hamilton-
Federalist No. 84
A blind squirrel, a stopped clock, etc. ...
"The plan of the convention declares that the power of Congress ... shall extend to certain enumerated cases. This specification of particulars evidently excludes all pretension to a general legislative authority, because an affirmative grant of special powers would be absurd, as well as useless, if a general authority was intended."
-Alexander Hamilton-
Federalist No. 83
"The superficial distinctions of Fascism, Bolshevism, Hitlerism, are the concern of journalists and publicists; the serious student sees in them only one root-idea of a complete conversion of social power into State power."
-Albert Jay Nock-
(1870-1945)
"The State governments possess inherent advantages, which will ever give them an influence and ascendancy over the National Government, and will for ever preclude the possibility of federal encroachments. That their liberties, indeed, can be subverted by the federal head, is repugnant to every rule of political calculation."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: speech to the New York Ratifying Convention, June 17, 1788
"Big business in America today and for some years has been openly at war with competition and, thus, at war with laissez-faire capitalism. ... The left's attack on corporate capitalism is, when examined, an attack on economic forms possible only in collusion between authoritarian government and bureaucratized, nonentrepreneurial business. It is unfortunate that many New Leftists are so uncritical as to accept this premise as indicating that all forms of capitalism are bad ..."
-Karl Hess-
(1923-1994) American speechwriter, author.
"Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the ease with which the many are governed by the few."
-David Hume-
(1711-1766)
Source: First Principles of Government, 1742
"The history books say that during the Progressive era, government trustbusters reined in business. Nonsense. Progressive 'reforms' -- railroad regulation, meat inspection, drug certification and the rest -- were done at the behest of big companies that wanted competition managed. They knew regulation would burden smaller companies more than themselves. The strategy works."
-John Stossel-
(1947-) American consumer reporter, investigative journalist, author and columnist
"Freedom from something is not enough. It should also be freedom for something. Freedom is not safety but opportunity. Freedom ought to be a means to enable the press to serve the proper functions of communication in a free society."
-Zechariah Chaffee, Jr.-
(1865-1957)
Source: Nieman Reports, April 1948
"The right of freely examining public characters and measures, and of free communication among the people thereon … has ever been justly deemed the only effectual guardian of every other right."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Virginia Resolutions, December 21, 1798
"You say that freedom of utterance is not for time of stress, and I reply with the sad truth that only in time of stress is freedom of utterance in danger... Only when free utterance is suppressed is it needed, and when it is needed it is most vital to justice."
-William Allen White-
(1868-1944)
Source: The Editor and his People, 1924
"The right to discuss freely and openly, by speech, by the pen, by the press, all political questions, and to examine the animadvert upon all political institutions is a right so clear and certain, so interwoven with our other liberties, so necessary, in fact, to their existence, that without it we must fall into despotism and anarchy."
-William Cullen Bryant-
(1794-1878)
Source: New York Evening Post, 18 November 1837
"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)
"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 may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst and provide for it."
-Patrick Henry-
(1736-1799) US Founding Father
Source: Patrick Henry, Speech at the Second Virginia Convention at St. John's Church in Richmond, Virginia (23 March 1775); first published in Life and Character of Patrick Henry (1817) by William Wirt
"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
"There are no hopeless situations; There are only men who have grown hopeless about them."
-Clare Boothe Luce-
(1903-1987) American author, playwright, journalist, ambassador, wife of Henry Luce, publisher/founder of Time, Life and Fortune
"In education markets, like the Asian tutoring industry, top teachers are superstars who get to design curricula for thousands or even millions of students and train scores or hundreds of other teachers to use their effective methods. Quality providers expand and are emulated by competitors, and there is a powerful incentive for meaningful innovation. ... One teacher in Korea’s private tutoring sector made $2 million last year because his web-based employer has profit sharing and he’s brilliant at what he does, so he gets tons of students. That’s what should have happened to [Jaime] Escalante. That’s the sort of success that should greet excellence in education at all levels. It doesn’t because we don’t have a market."
-Andrew J. Coulson-
"Why is it that millions of children who are pushouts or dropouts amount to business as usual in the public schools, while one family educating a child at home becomes a major threat to universal public education and the survival of democracy?"
-Stephen Arons-
Source: Compelling Belief: The Culture of American Schooling
"In a republican nation whose citizens are to be led by reason and persuasion and not by force, the art of reasoning becomes of first importance."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
1824
"Character is the accumulated confidence that individual men and women acquire from years of doing the right thing, over and over again, even when they don't feel like it. People with character understand that their lives are filled with events and choices that are significant, above all, not because of the short term success or failure of the search for money or position, but because the choices we make are actually making us into one kind of person, or another. Our life of choices is a life-long labor to make ourselves into a person who has begun to respond adequately to the awesome gift we received from God when He made us in His image."
-Alan Keyes-
(1950- ) US Politician
"The central task of education is to implant a will and facility for learning; it should produce not learned but learning people. The truly human society is a learning society, where grandparents, parents, and children are students together."
-Eric Hoffer-
(1902-1983) American author, philosopher, awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
"Nannyism is fascism on training wheels."
-R. L. Root-
“If an American is to amount to anything he must rely upon himself, and not upon the State; he must take pride in his own work, instead of sitting idle to envy the luck of others. He must face life with resolute courage, win victory if he can, and accept defeat if he must, without seeking to place on his fellow man a responsibility which is not theirs.”
-Theodore Roosevelt-
(1858-1919) 26th US President
"Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. "
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Notes on Virginia,1782
"Instead of giving money to found colleges to promote learning, why don't they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as good as the Prohibition one did, why, in five years we would have the smartest race of people on earth!"
-Will Rogers-
(1879-1935) American humorist
"My aim is not the establishment of an anarchist society or the total destruction of the state. Here I differ from anarchists. I do not believe that it is possible to destroy the modern state. It is pure imagination to think that some day this power will be overthrown. From a pragmatic standpoint there is no chance of success. Furthermore, I do not believe that anarchist doctrine is the solution to the problem of organization in society and government. I do not think that if anarchism were to succeed we should have a better or more livable society. Hence I am not fighting for the triumph of this doctrine. On the other hand, it seems to me that an anarchist attitude is the only one that is sufficiently radical in the face of a general statist system."
-Jacques Ellul-
"There are only two means by which men can deal with one another: guns or logic. Force or persuasion. Those who know that they cannot win by means of logic, have always resorted to guns."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
"It is unwise to be too sure of one's own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err."
-Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi-
(1869-1948)
"Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody is looking."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections."
-John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton-
"Sometimes people use 'respect' to mean 'treating someone like a person' and sometimes they use 'respect' to mean 'treating someone like an authority'.
And sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say 'if you won’t respect me I won’t respect you' and they mean 'if you won’t treat me like an authority I won’t treat you like a person'.
And they think they’re being fair but they aren’t, and it’s not okay."
-stimmyabby-
"When the truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie."
-Yevtushenko-
Soviet dissident poet
"If you charge too much, you're accused of price gauging. If you charge too little, you're accused of predatory pricing. If you charge the same as the market, you're accused of collusion."
-Walter Block-
"Let the laws be clear, uniform and precise; to interpret laws is almost always to corrupt them."
-Voltaire-
[François Marie Arouet] (1694-1778)
"Whenever we take away the liberties of those whom we hate, we are opening the way to loss of liberty for those we love."
-Wendell L. Willkie-
(1892-1944) Republican presidential candidate, 1940
"A people who extend civil liberties only to preferred groups start down the path either to dictatorship of the right or the left."
-William O. Douglas-
(1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: New York Times, 20 January 1980
"If I give you a forty five percent chance at lethal injection, a fifty percent chance at the electric chair, and a five percent chance for escape which are you going to vote for? The electric chair, because you're likely to win?"
-Michael Badnarik-
(1954- ) American software engineer, political figure, and former radio talk show host
"Not being able to govern events, I govern myself."
-Michel de Montaigne-
[Michel Eyquem De Montaigne] (1532-1592) French Renaissance scholar, philosopher, writer
"It was not the tycoons of big business, it was not the working classes, it was the intellectuals who reversed the trend toward political freedom and revived the doctrines of the absolute State, of totalitarian government rule, of the government's right to control the lives of the citizens in any manner it pleases. This time, it was not in the name of the "divine right of kings," but in the name of the divine right of the masses. The basic principle was the same: the right to enforce at the point of a gun the moral doctrines of whoever happens to seize control of the machinery of government."
-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
"The eyes of the world being thus on our Country, it is put the more on its good behavior, and under the greater obligation also, to do justice to the Tree of Liberty by an exhibition of the fine fruits we gather from it."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: letter to James Monroe, December 16, 1824
"If justice be a natural principle, then it is necessarily an immutable one; and can no more be changed — by any power inferior to that which established it — than can the law of gravitation, the laws of light, the principles of mathematics, or any other natural law or principle whatever; and all attempts or assumptions, on the part of any man or body of men — whether calling themselves governments, or by any other name — to set up their own commands, wills, pleasure, or discretion, in the place of justice, as a rule of conduct for any human being, are as much an absurdity, an usurpation, and a tyranny, as would be their attempts to set up their own commands, wills, pleasure, or discretion in the place of any and all the physical, mental, and moral laws of the universe. If there be any such principle as justice, it is, of necessity, a natural principle; and, as such, it is a matter of science, to be learned and applied like any other science. And to talk of either adding to, or taking from, it, by legislation, is just as false, absurd, and ridiculous as it would be to talk of adding to, or taking from, mathematics, chemistry, or any other science, by legislation."
-Lysander Spooner-
"You think following the rules will buy you a nice life, even if the rulse make you a slave."
-Malcom Reynolds-
Firefly
"Ignorance is king. Many would not profit by his abdication. Many enrich themselves by means of his dark monarchy. They are his Court, and in his name they defraud and govern, enrich themselves and perpetuate their power. Even literacy they fear, for the written word is another channel of communication that might cause their enemies to become united. Their weapons are keen-honed, and they use them with skill. They will press the battle upon the world when their interests are threatened, and the violence which follows will last until the structure of society as it now exists is leveled to rubble, and a new society emerges. I am sorry: But that is how I see it. "
-Walter M. Miller, Jr.-
"The less government interferes with private pursuits, the better for general prosperity."
-Martin Van Buren-
kakistocracy: Government under the control of a nation's worst or least-qualified citizens.
"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: in "Neither Left Nor Right"
"The Left/Right scale is a misleading way of comparing political systems. It
doesn't measure anything."
-Marshall Fritz-
(1943 -2008) American libertarian activist, founded the Advocates for Self-Government, and The Alliance for the Separation of School & State
"If you depart from moral absolutes, you go into a bottomless pit. Communism
and Naziism were catastrophic evils which both derived from moral relativism.
Their differences were minor compared to their similarities."
-Paul Johnson-
American historian
"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 [our] 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 squandered on unworthy men; and the rights of the citizen will be violated or disregarded. If [our] 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-
(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.
"Destroy the family, you destroy the country."
-Vladimir Ilyich Lenin-
[Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov] (1870 - 1924), First Leader of the Soviet Union
"The abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power."
-William Shakespeare-
(1564-1616) Playwright
"A feeble executive implies a feeble execution of the government. A feeble execution is but another phrase for a bad execution; and a government ill executed, whatever may be its theory, must be, in practice, a bad government."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: Federalist No. 70, 1788
"Communism is not a creation of the masses to overthrow the Banking establishment, but rather a creation of the Banking establishment to overthrow and enslave the people."
-Anthony J. Hilder-
American activist, author, film maker, talk show host, broadcaster and former actor
"When government will expropriate any wealth that people create, the present value of future output can actually be less than the value of the country's tangible resources. The power of predatory government to destroy wealth is truly awesome."
-Arnold Kling-
(1954-) American economist, scholar, and blogger
"(i) A person is justified in using reasonable force against a public servant if the person reasonably believes the force is necessary to:
(1) protect the person or a third person from what the person reasonably believes to be the imminent use of unlawful force;
(2) prevent or terminate the public servant’s unlawful entry of or attack on the person’s dwelling, curtilage, or occupied motor vehicle; or
(3) prevent or terminate the public servant’s unlawful trespass on or criminal interference with property lawfully in the person’s possession, lawfully in possession of a member of the person’s immediate family, or belonging to a person whose property the person has authority to protect."
-Indiana Code-
Source: Indiana Code, § 1. IC 35-41-3-2
"Government is instituted to protect property of every sort; as well that which lies in the various rights of individuals, as that which the term particularly expresses. 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 on Property, March 29, 1792
"As the federal government has progressively become larger over the decades, every significant introduction of government regulation, taxation and spending has been to the benefit of some big business."
-Timothy P. Carney-
"The ['Hillary Care'] plan prescribed some eye popping maximum fines: $5,000 for refusing to join the government mandated health plan; $5,000 for failing to pay premiums on time; 15 years in prison for doctors who received ‘anything of value’ in exchange for helping patients short circuit bureaucracy; $10,000 a day for faulty physician paperwork; and $50,000 for unauthorized patient treatment. When told the plan could bankrupt small businesses, Mrs. Clinton said, 'I can’t be responsible for every under-capitalized small business in America.'"
-Tony Snow-
(1955-2008) White House Press Secretary for the George W. Bush administration
Source: reporting on Hillary's health care plan, to which Zoh Hieronimus added, "Perhaps Hillary’s legacy will be that she made fascism seem lady-like."
"Socialism, failing to work as it always does. This time in Venezuela. You talk about giving everybody something free and all of a sudden, there’s no food to eat. And who do you think is the richest person in Venezuela? The daughter of Hugo Chavez. Hello!"
-Vin Scully-
[Vincent Edward Scully] (1927-) legendary American sportscaster
Source: June 17, 2016, during Los Angeles Dodgers game against the Milwaukee Brewers
"If voting changed anything, they would make it illegal."
-Emma Goldman-
(1869-1940) anarchist political activist, lionized as a free-thinking "rebel woman"
"Enron, of course, is exactly the kind of corporation which could not exist in pure capitalism. As a creature, in effect, of politicians, it was deliberately converted from a small pipeline company into an international conglomerate by conniving scoundrels who designed it from the beginning to use the power of their politician-friends to give it government contracts, subsidies, monopoly powers, and favorable regulations to force prospective customers to do business with them, essentially at gunpoint. Obviously, this is fascism, not capitalism, and what you get more and more of when you work to transform what was once the rule of clear-cut law into the rule of men (especially agenda-driving, nuance-inventing judges and lawyers)."
-Rick Gaber-
Libertarian writer
"Clinton realized that America could not economically afford the Protocol Gore negotiated. The Clinton-Gore's Energy Department found Kyoto would lead to $400 billion a year in lost output. ... Gore tries to throw Enron on the back of the current administration. But it was Enron Board Chairman Kenneth Lay who sold Clinton-Gore on Kyoto's cap and trade system. Gore, Clinton, and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin met with Lay on Aug. 7, 1997 to go over goals and procedures for the Kyoto session. ... The corporate smoking memo here was not that from an ExxonMobil adviser to oppose Dr. Watson, but the Enron internal memo saying Kyoto 'would do more to promote Enron's business than almost any other regulatory initiative'."
-Ken Adelman-
(1946-) American diplomat, political writer, policy analyst
"Whereas it has been proposed that the United States of America
become a part of a world federal government; and ...
this program...would entail the surrender of our national sovereignty
and...bring into being a form of government whose authority would
supercede that of the Constitution of The United States Government; and
...institute a system of laws where-by American citizens
could be tried by aliens in controversion of the provisions
of the Constitution of the United States; and
...the Veterans of Foreign Wars is composed solely of men who have worn
the uniform of the United States on foreign shores and in hostile waters
in time of war and from their personal experiences
are familiar with the traditions and operations of other countries; and
...many of our comrades rest forever in foreign soil and
their sacrifices were made to retain the dignity
and sovereignty of the United States of America:
Now therefore, be it Resolved by the Fiftieth Annual Convention
of the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States,
That we hereby declare that we are unalterably opposed
to any program which would entail the surrender of any part
of the sovereignty of the United States of America
in favor of a world government..."
-Veterans of Foreign Wars-
Source: "VFW Resolution No. 27", 1949, House Committee on Foreign Affairs Hearing, 81st Cong., 1st Sess. 10/12-13/1949 - Congressional Record
"No nation which refuses to exercise forbearance and to respect the freedom and rights of others can long remain strong and retain the confidence and respect of other nations. No nation ever loses its dignity or good standing by conciliating its differences and by exercising great patience with, and consideration for, the rights of other nations."
-Franklin D. Roosevelt-
"Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one's thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down. They know its power. Thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers, founded in injustice and wrong, are sure to tremble, if men are allowed to reason of righteousness, temperance, and of a judgment to come in their presence. Slavery cannot tolerate free speech. Five years of its exercise would banish the auction block and break every chain in the South."
-Frederick Douglass-
A Plea for Free Speech
"Some young men seem to labor under the misapprehension that since the draft is a violation of their rights, compliance with the draft law would constitute a moral sanction of that violation. This is a serious error. A forced compliance is not a sanction. All of us are forced to comply with many laws that violate our rights, but so long as we advocate the repeal of such laws, our compliance does not constitute a sanction. Unjust laws have to be fought ideologically; they cannot be fought or corrected by means of mere disobedience and futile martyrdom. To quote from an editorial on this subject in the April 1967 issue of Persuasion: 'One does not stop the juggernaut by throwing oneself in front of it. . . .'"
-Ayn Rand-
"While boasting of our noble deeds we're careful to conceal the ugly fact that by an iniquitous money system we have nationalized a system of oppression which, though more refined, is not 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
Source: 1872, in reference to the National Bank Act of 1863
"The colonies would gladly have borne the little tax on tea and other matters, had it not been that England took away from the colonies their money, which created great unemployment and dissatisfaction. Within a year, the poor houses were filled. The hungry and homeless walked the streets everywhere. The inability of the colonists to get power to issue their own money permanently out of the hands of George III and the International Bankers was probably the Prime reason for the Revolutionary War."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
Source: as quoted from his autobiography
"Thus, our national circulating medium is now at the mercy of loan transactions of banks, which lend, not money, but promises to supply money they do not possess."
-Irving Fisher-
(1867-1947) American economist
Source: 100% Money, 1935
"The Fed was largely responsible for converting what might have been a garden-variety recession, although perhaps a fairly severe one, into a major catastrophe. Instead of using its powers to offset the depression, it presided over a decline in the quantity of money by one-third from 1929 to 1933 ... Far from the depression being a failure of the free-enterprise system, it was a
tragic failure of government."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
Source: Two Lucky People, 233
"I am myself persuaded, on the basis of extensive study of the historical evidence, that... the severity of each of the contractions - 1920-21, 1929-33, and 1937-38 - is directly attributable to acts of commission and omission by the Reserve authorities and would not have occurred under earlier monetary and banking arrangements.''
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
Source: 'Capitalism and Freedom'
"The power to determine the quantity of money... is too important, too pervasive, to be exercised by a few people, however public-spirited, if there is any feasible alternative. There is no need for such arbitrary power... Any system which gives so much power and so much discretion to a few men, [so] that mistakes - excusable or not - can have such far reaching effects, is a bad system. It is a bad system to believers in freedom just because it gives a few men such power without any effective check by the body politic - this is the key political argument against an independent central bank."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
"The drive of the Rockefellers and their allies is to create a one-world government combining supercapitalism and communism under the same tent, all under their control... Do I mean conspiracy? Yes I do. I am convinced there is such a plot, international in scope, generations old in planning, and incredibly evil in intent."
-Larry P. McDonald-
(1935-1983) U.S. Congressman (GA-D), killed in the Korean Airlines flight 007 that was shot down by the Soviets
1976
"In fact, the big corporations who understand the regulatory game can actually benefit from it. They can lobby for expensive regulations only the largest corporations can afford, effectively keeping upstarts and competitors at bay."
-Radley Balko-
"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 Graber-
"Give me control over a man's economic actions, and hence over his means of survival, and except for a few occasional heroes, I'll promise to deliver to you men who think and write and behave as I want them to."
-Benjamine A. Rooge-
"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
"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
"The Great Depression was not caused by laissez faire but by the actions of well-intended politicians and bureaucrats. The Federal Reserve System, after all, was not created in response to the Great Depression, but in 1913. Soon thereafter it began experimenting with its awesome powers, expanding the money supply during the roaring ‘20s, propping up the pound sterling in London, extending credit so Europeans could buy American agricultural products. All the while, Congress was becoming more and more protectionist. When the Fed reversed policies in 1929 and actually shrunk the money supply by a third over the next three years and Congress culminated its protectionist tendencies with the Smoot-Hawley tariff, the collapse was underway. The fact that Hoover then raised taxes and Roosevelt kept wages artificially high guaranteed the massive unemployment that marked the 1930s. Government caused and exacerbated the Great Depression."
-Edward H. Crane-
Founder and president of the Cato Institute
Source: April 6, 1995, at a meeting of the Philanthropy Roundtable
"Society cannot leap into Communism from capitalism without going through a socialist stage of development."
-Nikita Khrushchev-
(1894-1971) Premier of the Soviet Union
Source: Time magazine, May 23, 1960
"[The task is to] covertly lower the standard of living, the whole social structure, of America so that we can be merged with all other nations."
-Rowan Gaither-
[Horace Rowan Gaither, Jr.] (1909-1961) Attorney, investment banker, President of the Ford Foundation (1953-1956)
1954
Source: stated to Congressional Reese Commission investigator Norman Dodd
"Look, I think you're tackling public expenditure from the wrong end, if I might say so. Why don't you look at it as any housewife has to look at it? She has to look at her expenditure every week or every month, according to what she can afford to spend, and if she overspends one week or month, she's got to economise the next. Now governments really ought to look at it from the viewpoint of 'What can we afford to spend?' They've already put up taxes, and yet the taxes they collect are not enough for the tremendous amount they're spending. They're having to borrow to a greater extent than ever before, and future generations will have to repay. Now, if anyone tells me that a Chancellor of the [Denis Healey] Exchequer can put up public expenditure in two years by -- and it's a tremendous figure -- twenty thousand million pounds, and he doesn't know where to get it down by about three thousand million pounds, then he ought never to have been in charge of the nation's finances ... never!"
-Margaret Thatcher
(1925-2013) British Prime Minister (1979–1990)
Source: 1976 Feb 5, TV Interview for Thames TV 'This Week'
"Government does not tax to get the money it needs; government always finds a need for the money it gets."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
"You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer."
-Sir Winston Churchill-
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
"The great trouble with you Americans is that you are still under the influence of that second-rate -- shall I say third-rate? -- mind, Karl Marx."
-H. G. Wells-
(1866-1946) Author
"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.
"Thus corporations finally claimed the full rights enjoyed by individual citizens while being exempted from many of the responsibilities and liabilities of citizenship. Furthermore, in being guaranteed the same right to free speech as individual citizens, they achieved, in the words of Paul Hawken, 'precisely what the Bill of Rights was intended to prevent: domination of public thought and discourse.' The subsequent claim by corporations that they have the same right as any individual to influence the government in their own interest pits the individual citizen against the vast financial and communications resources of the corporation and mocks the constitutional intent that all citizens have an equal voice in the political debates surrounding important issues."
-David C. Korten-
Source: in his book, When Corporations Rule the World, 2001
"The public is hedged about by so many goddam bookkeepers that no time is left in which to produce. More time is spent in carrying out garbage than in carrying in food."
-Martin H. Fischer-
"Ruff's Third Law of Economic Dynamics: "An economy in motion tends to stay in motion, and an economy at rest tends to stay at rest. A free market is constantly in motion. A centrally planned market slows until it eventually dies completely."
-Mike Ruff-
"Free enterprise capitalism exists only when people in the private sector are free to pursue their own interests without direction from government. When politicians start passing laws to tell them what to do, or bureaucrats start issuing edicts to tell them what to do, it is no longer capitalism; it's fascism."
-Rick Gaber-
American writer
"The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity -- much less dissent."
-Gore Vidal-
(1925- )novelist, essayist, playwright, and provocateur
"What's right with America is a willingness to discuss what's wrong with America."
-Harry C. Bauer-
Professor Emeritus of Librarianship, University of Washington, Seattle
"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
"There is not a syllable in the plan under consideration which directly empowers the national courts to construe the laws according to the spirit of the Constitution."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: Federalist No. 81, 1788
"It is emphatically the province and duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is. Those who apply the rule to particular cases must, of necessity, expound and interpret that rule. If two laws conflict with each other, the Courts must decide on the operation of each. So, if a law be in opposition to the Constitution, if both the law and the Constitution apply to a particular case, so that the Court must either decide that case conformably to the law, disregarding the Constitution, or conformably to the Constitution, disregarding the law, the Court must determine which of these conflicting rules governs the case. This is of the very essence of judicial duty. If, then, the Courts are to regard the Constitution, and the Constitution is superior to any ordinary act of the Legislature, the Constitution, and not such ordinary act, must govern the case to which they both apply."
-John Marshall-
(1755-1835) US Supreme Court Chief Justice
Source: Marbury v. Madison, February 23, 1803
"The province of the Court is solely to decide on the rights of individuals... Questions, in their nature political or which are, by the Constitution and laws, submitted to the Executive, can never be made in this court."
-John Marshall-
(1755-1835) US Supreme Court Chief Justice
Source: Marbury v. Madison, February 23, 1803
"We all know nations that can be identified by the flight of writers from their shores. These are regimes whose fear of unmonitored writing is justified because truth is trouble. It is trouble for the warmonger, the torturer, the corporate thief, the political hack, the corrupt justice system, and for a comatose public. Unpersecuted, unjailed, unharrassed writers are trouble for the ignorant bully, the sly racist, and the predators feeding off the world’s resources. The alarm, the disquiet, writers raise is instructive because it is open and vulnerable, because if unpoliced it is threatening. Therefore the historical suppression of writers is the earliest harbinger of the steady peeling away of additional rights and liberties that will follow.
-Toni Morrison-
"If Men are to be precluded from offering their sentiments on a matter, which may involve the most serious and alarming consequences, that can invite the consideration of Mankind; reason is of no use to us — the freedom of Speech may be taken away — and, dumb & silent we may be led, like sheep, to the Slaughter."
-George Washington-
"I acknowledge, in the ordinary course of government, that the exposition of the laws and Constitution devolves upon the judicial. But I beg to know upon what principle it can be contended that any one department draws from the Constitution greater powers than another in marking out the limits of the powers of the several departments."
-James Madison
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: speech in the Congress of the United States, June 17, 1789
"To follow foolish precedents, and wink with both our eyes, is easier than to think."
-William Cowper-
(1731-1800) English poet, hymnodist
"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."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: Thoughts on Government, 1776
"You want to know what fascism is like? It is like your New Deal!"
-Benito Mussolini-
(1883-1945), Italian dictator during WW2
Source: to Grover Whalen, 1939
"The single most exciting thing you encounter in government is competence, because it's so rare."
-Daniel Patrick Moynihan-
(1927-2003) American politician, U.S. Senator (NY-D)
"What is a Constitution? It is the form of government, delineated by the mighty hand of the people, in which certain first principles of fundamental law are established. The Constitution is certain and fixed; it contains the permanent will of the people, and is the supreme law of the land; it is paramount to the power of the Legislature, and can be revoked or altered only by the authority that made it."
-William Paterson-
(1745-1806) New Jersey statesman, a signer of the U.S. Constitution, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, 2nd governor of New Jersey (1790-1793)
Source: VanHorne's Lessee v. Dorrance, 1795
"The great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachment of the others."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Federalist No. 10, November 23, 1787
"So long as [men] hold the tribal notion that the individual is sacrificial fodder for the collective, that some men have the right to rule others by force, and that some (any) alleged 'good' can justify it -- there can be no peace within a nation and no peace among nations."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
Source: in The Roots of War
"Union bosses will continue to use workers’ dues money as a slush fund to support controversial causes and organizations as long as union officials are empowered to order a worker fired simply for refusing to pay money to the union,"
-Patrick Semmons-
Vice president at the National Right to Work Foundation
Source: Washington Free Beacon, AUgust 3, 2015
"From the fact that people are very different it follows that, if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position, and that the only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently. Equality before the law and material equality are therefore not only different but are in conflict with each other; and we can achieve either one or the other, but not both at the same time."
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
Source: The Constitution Of Liberty
"At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to state this or that or the other, but it is "not done"... Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals."
-George Orwell-
[Eric Arthur Blair] (1903-1950) British author
"Democracy is essentially coercive. The winner gets to use public authority to impose their policies on the losers."
-John Chubb-
Source: John Chubb and Terry Moe
"What seems fair enough against a squalid huckster of bad liquor may take on a different face, if used by a government determined to suppress political opposition under the guise of sedition."
-Judge Learned Hand-
(1872-1961), Judge, U. S. Court of Appeals
Source: United States v. Kirschenblatt, 1926
"I think they've [Labour Government] made the biggest financial mess that any government's ever made in this country for a very long time, and Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people's money. It's quite a characteristic of them. They then start to nationalise everything, and people just do not like more and more nationalisation, and they're now trying to control everything by other means. They're progressively reducing the choice available to ordinary people. "
-Margaret Thatcher-
(1925-2013) British Prime Minister (1979–1990)
Source: 1976 Feb 5, TV Interview for Thames TV 'This Week'
"Great abuses in the world are begotten, or, to speak more boldly, all the abuses of the world are begotten, by our being taught to be afraid of professing our ignorance, and that we are bound to accept all things we are not able to refute: we speak of all things by precepts and decisions. The style at Rome was that even that which a witness deposed to having seen with his own eyes, and what a judge determined with his most certain knowledge, was couched in this form of speaking: 'it seems to me.' They make me hate things that are likely, when they would impose them upon me as infallible."
-Michel de Montaigne-
"I did not hate the author of my misfortunes — truth and justice acquit me of that; I rather pitied the hard destiny to which he seemed condemned. But I thought with unspeakable loathing of those errors, in consequence of which every man is fated to be, more or less, the tyrant or the slave. I was astonished at the folly of my species, that they did not rise up as one man, and shake off chains so ignominious, and misery so insupportable. So far as related to myself, I resolved — and this resolution has never been entirety forgotten by me — to hold myself disengaged from this odious scene, and never fill the part either of the oppressor or the sufferer."
-William Godwin-
"Man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all."
-Aristotle-
"I honestly believe that sound commercialism is the best test of true value in art. People work hard for their money and if they won’t part with it for your product the chances are that your product hasn’t sufficient value. An artist or writer hasn’t any monopoly .... If the public response to his artistry is lacking, he’d do well to spend more time analyzing what’s the matter with his work, and less time figuring what’s the matter with the public."
-Berton Braley-
(1882-1966) Poet, philosopher, reporter
Source: Pegasus Pulls A Hack: Memoirs Of A Modern Minstrel
"Historically, it has been Big Business, not consumers or progressives, who have been primarily responsible for creating most government regulatory agencies. ... Indeed, virtually all regulatory agencies have had the effect of limiting entry and competition in the industries they oversee."
-Bruce Bartlett-
(1951-) American historian, area of expertise is supply-side economics, served as a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and as a Treasury official under George H. W. Bush
"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
"Communists have always played an active role in the fight by colonial countries for their freedom, because the short-term objects of communism would always correspond with the long-term objects of freedom movements."
-Nelson Mandela-
(1918-2013) South African anti-apartheid revolutionary, imprisoned for 27 years, President of South Africa (1994-1999)
"The years ahead will be great ones for our country, for the cause of freedom and the spread of civilization. The West will not contain Communism, it will transcend Communism. We will not bother to denounce it, we'll dismiss it as a sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
"You can't make socialists out of individualists. Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming where everyone is interdependent."
-Rosalie M. Gordon-
American author
Source: 'What Happened to Our Schools?' (1956) writing about John Dewey's attitude towards progressive education.
The quote is popularly attributed to John Dewey himself
"I spent 33 years in the Marines. Most of my time being a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the rape of half-a-dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street..."
-Major General Smedley Darlington Butler-
(1881-1940) Major General USMC, "Old Gimlet Eye'' and "Hell Devil Darling", most highly decorated military man from the pre-World War II era.
"Give a good man great powers and crooks grab his job."
-Rick Gaber-
Libertarian writer
"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."
-Financial Times-
Source: London, Nov 22, 2001
"The virtue of a democratic system with a [constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech] is that it readily enables the people, over time, to be persuaded that what they took for granted is not so, and to change their laws accordingly."
-Justice Antonin Scalia-
(1936-2016) American jurist, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
Source: United States v. Virginia, 26 June 1996
"Any man who tries to incite class hatred, sectional hate, hate of creeds, any kind of hatred in our community, though he may affect to do so in the interest of the class he is addressing, is in the long run with absolute certainty that class’s own worst enemy."
-Theodore Roosevelt-
(1858-1919) 26th US President
"If we would be free, if we mean to hold inviolate those inestimable privileges for which we have so long contended, if we mean not basely to abandon the noble cause for which we have so long endured, and to which we have pledged ourselves never to abandon, until the glorious object of our contest should be obtained, then we must fight! I repeat Sir, we must fight! A call to arms and an appeal to the God of hosts is all that we have left."
-Patrick Henry-
(1736-1799) US Founding Father
Source: "The War Inevitable" speech to the Virginia Convention, March 23, 1775
"Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it."
-Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
"If you don't know where you're going, when you get there you'll be lost."
-Yogi Berra-
[Lawrence Peter "Yogi" Berra] (1925-) American Major League Baseball catcher, outfielder, and manager
"Now all acts of legislature apparently contrary to natural right and justice, are, in our laws, and must be in the nature of things, considered as void. The laws of nature are the laws of God: A legislature must not obstruct our obedience to him from whose punishments they cannot protect us. All human constitutions which contradict His laws, we are in conscience bound to disobey. Such have been the adjudications of our courts of justice."
-George Mason-
(1725-1792), drafted the Virgina Declaration of Rights, ally of James Madison and George Washington
"Many of the deliberate con artists are the "true believers" of fanatical religious or political sects who actually accept the dogma that it is a mortal sin for you to take care of yourself and your family first and in any way exercise your right to the pursuit of happiness while their precious cause is in any way neglected, underfunded or even unaccepted."
-Rick Graber-
Source: Selfishness vs."Selfishness"
"To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labor tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution."
-Samuel Johnson-
(1709-1784)
"Liberals seem to assume that, if you don't believe in their particular political solutions, then you don't really care about the people that they claim to want to help."
-Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
"A Galileo could no more be elected president of the United States than he could be elected Pope of Rome. Both high posts are reserved for men favored by God with an extraordinary genius for swathing the bitter facts of life in bandages of self-illusion."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right, from the frame of their nature, to knowledge, as their great Creator, who does nothing in vain, has given them understandings, and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge; I mean, of the characters and conduct of their rulers."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: Dissertation on Canon and Feudal Law, 1765
"Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good."
-Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
"Many people consider the things government does for them to be social progress but they regard the things government does for others as socialism."
-Earl Warren-
"Fascist rebelliousness always occurs where fear of the truth turns a revolutionary emotion into illusions. In its pure form, fascism is the sum total of all irrational reactions of the average human character. To the narrow-minded sociologist who lacks the courage to recognize the enormous role played by the irrational in human history, the fascist race theory appears as nothing but an imperialistic interest or even a mere "prejudice." The violence and the ubiquity of these 'race prejudices' show their origin from the irrational part of the human character. The race theory is not a creation of fascism. No: fascism is a creation of race hatred and its politically organized expression."
-Wilhelm Reich-
“Then I realized that it really is a philosophy that we’re talking about, you know — the nonaggression axiom, that the government should be bound by the same moral laws that the rest of us are. Once you realize that, you’re like, ‘Oh!’ Your entire world opens up, and then your entire paradigm changes.”
-Glenn "Kane" Jacobs-
"Democracy says that the popular vote can take right away and once taken away the act is sanctioned and upheld by all laws, human and divine. I deny it. I say it is a wrong, however it is perpetuated. Why, mothers. What do you care how you are robbed of your babe? The question is not how it is done, the outrage is that it is done at all. No matter whether it is done by an individual or a conspiracy of many individuals in a community agreeing and concerting according to the forms of law. If the poor babe is torn from your heart, that is the unspeakable wrong. Not the manner in which it is perpetrated."
-Owen Lovejoy-
"It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, 1756
"Those in society who are in charge of schools must never forget that the parents have been appointed by God himself as the first and principal educators of their children and that their right is completely inalienable."
-Pope John Paul II-
[Karol Józef Wojtyła] (1920-2005) Polish-born Roman Catholic Pope (1978-2005)
"History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid."
-Dwight D. Eisenhower-
(1890-1969), 34th US President, WWII General
"The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously."
-Hubert H. Humphrey-
(1911-1978) US Vice-President, US Senator (D-MN)
Source: Speech, Madison, WI, 23 August 1965
"When I have a difficult subject before me — when I find the road narrow, and can see no other way of teaching a well established truth except by pleasing one intelligent man and displeasing ten thousand fools — I prefer to address myself to the one man, and to take no notice whatever of the condemnation of the multitude; I prefer to extricate that intelligent man from his embarrassment and show him the cause of his perplexity, so that he may attain perfection and be at
peace."
-Maimonides-
"Government by agreement is only possible provided that we do not require the government to act in fields other than those in which we can obtain true agreement."
-F.A. Hayek-
... provided we don't allow the government to act ...
"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
"It is time to admit that public education operates like a planned economy. It's a bureaucratic system where everybody's role is spelled out in advance, and there are few incentives for innovation and productivity. It's not a surprise when a school system doesn't improve. It more resembles a Communist economy than our own market economy."
-Albert Shanker-
(1928-1997) former president of the American Federation of Teachers
Source: Wall Street Journal, October 2, 1989
"The notion that journalism can regularly produce a product that violates the fundamental interests of media owners and advertisers … is absurd."
-Robert McChesney-
Research Professor in the Institute of Communications Research and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
"Society attacks early when the individual is helpless."
-B. F. Skinner-
(1904-1990) American psychologist, author, inventor, advocate for social reform and poet
"If Americans wish to preserve a country they will recognize, then the first step is to recognize the enemy. Public education is the enemy. The entertainment industry is the enemy. The corporate culture is the enemy. The advertising industry is the enemy. And most of the politicians in both parties are the enemy. An enemy is defined as anybody, or any organization, which is attacking the traditional beliefs of Americans."
-Charley Reese-
(1937-2013) American syndicated columnist
"Our tightly controlled educational system mocks the promise of democracy. With a closed educational system we simply cannot have an open political system. The current situation allows the government and big business to manufacture and maintain our culture for us, and in turn, control remains in the hands of the experts and institutions. The ability to change this situation is in the hands of the individuals and families who understand why change is necessary."
-Helen Hegener-
author, co-publisher of Home Education Magazine
Source: Alternatives in Education
"A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: letter to W. T. Barry, August 4, 1822, Ref: Letters and other Writings of James Madison, vol. 3
(276)
"Only the educated are free."
-Epictetus-
(ca 55-135 A.D.) Greek philospher
Source: Discourses
"I have indeed two great measures at heart, without which no republic can maintain itself in strength:
1. That of general education, to enable every man to judge for himself what will secure or endanger his freedom.
2. To divide every county into hundreds, of such size that all the children of each will be within reach of a central school in it."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: in a letter to John Tyler, 1810.
The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Memorial Edition 12:393 (Lipscomb and Bergh, editors), 1903-04
"To educate a man is to unfit him to be a slave."
-Frederick Douglass-
[Frederick Baily] (1818-1895), escaped slave, Abolitionist, author, editor of the North Star and later the New National Era
"If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare, and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare, they may take the care of religion into their own hands; they may appoint teachers in every State, county and parish and pay them out of their public treasury; they may take into their own hands the education of children, establishing in like manner schools throughout the Union; they may assume the provision of the poor; they may undertake the regulation of all roads other than post-roads; in short, every thing, from the highest object of state legislation down to the most minute object of police, would be thrown under the power of Congress.... Were the power of Congress to be established in the latitude contended for, it would subvert the very foundations, and transmute the very nature of the limited Government established by the people of America."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836) Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: On the Cod Fishery Bill, granting Bounties. February 7, 1792, referring to a bill to subsidize cod fisherman
Or to subsidize dairy farmers. We'd best watch out for that...
"Wherever is found what is called a paternal government, there is found state education. It has been discovered that the best way to insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery."
-Benjamin Disraeli-
(1804-1881) Prime Minister of England, British statesman, novelist
Source: (1874)
"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
"Education rears disciples, imitators, and routinists, not pioneers of new ideas and creative geniuses. The schools are not nurseries of progress and improvement, but conservatories of tradition and unvarying modes of thought."
-Ludwig von Mises-
(1881-1973) Economist and social philosopher
"Often, the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it."
-Mark Twain
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910)
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.
"Our schools are, in a sense, factories, in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life. The specifications for manufacturing come from the demands of twentieth-century civilization, and it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down."
-Ellwood P. Cubberley-
(1868-1941) American educator, author, Dean of the Stanford University School of Education
"To be nobody but yourself -- in a world which is doing it's best,
night and day, to make you like everybody else -- means to fight the
hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting."
-e. e. cummings-
(1894-1962) American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright
"In all countries, in all centuries, the primary reason for government to set up schools is to undermine the politically weak by convincing their children that the leaders are good and their policies are wise. The core is religious intolerance. The sides simply change between the Atheists, Catholics, Protestants, Unitarians, etc., depending whether you are talking about the Soviet Union, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, America, etc. A common second reason is to prepare the boys to go to war and the girls to cheer them on."
-Marshall Fritz-
(1943 -2008) American libertarian activist, founded the Advocates for Self-Government, and The Alliance for the Separation of School & State
"Liberty without learning is always in peril and learning without liberty is always in vain."
-John F. Kennedy-
(1917-1963) 35th US President
"Growth and mastery come only to those who vigorously self-direct. Initiating, creating, doing, reflecting, freely associating, enjoying privacy -- these are precisely what the structures of schooling are set up to prevent, on one pretext or another."
-John Taylor Gatto-
(1937-) American school teacher of 29 years, author, New York State Teacher of the Year, 1991
Source: The Underground History of American Education, 2001
"Education is unique among consumer products -- when it fails to work as advertised, it's the customer that gets labelled as defective."
-Kevin Killion-
"History is written by the victor."
-Latin Proverb-
"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
"I care not what puppet is placed on the throne of England to rule the Empire, ... The man that controls Britain's money supply controls the British Empire. And I control the money supply."
-Baron Nathan Mayer Rothschild-
(1777-1836) London financier, one of the founders of the international Rothschild banking dynasty
Source: Attributed - no source
"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
"The population of the world is gradually dividing into two classes, Anarchists and criminals."
-Benjamin Tucker-
"The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do."
-Samuel P. Huntington-
"Truth persuades by teaching, but does not teach by persuading."
-Tertullian-
"I have not come into this world to make men better, but to make use of their weaknesses."
-Adolf Hitler-
"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)
"Beware the greedy hand of government, thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
"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 federal government has taken too much tax money from the people, too much authority from the states, and too much liberty with the Constitution."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th 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
"Government is the people's business and every man, woman and child
becomes a shareholder with the first penny of tax paid."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
"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
"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
"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
"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 smallest of which minorities is one, the individual...
"... every tax or rate, forcibly taken from an unwilling person, is immoral and oppressive."
-Auberon Herbert-
(1838-1906) English author
Source: "The Principles of Voluntaryism" [1897], reproduced in The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State, and Other Essays by Auberon Herbert (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1978), p. 393
"Any politician who starts shouting election-year demagoguery about the rich and the poor should be asked, 'What about the other 90 percent of the people?' "
-Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
"By establishing reading societies, and subscription libraries, and taking these under our direction, and supplying them through our labors, we may turn the public mind which way we will."
-Adam Weishaupt-
(1748-1830?) [Spartacus] Professor of Natural and Canon Law at Germany's Ingolstadt University,
founded The Order of the Illuminati on May 1, 1776.
He designed the very plan of world domination that is still in use today to enslave the world's masses.
"It is thus necessary that the individual should finally come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of the nation, that the position of the individual is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole."
-Adolf Hitler-
(1889-1945) German Nazi Dictator
Source: speaking in Buckeburg on Oct. 7, 1933
"Believe nothing merely because you have been told it. Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect for the teacher. But whatsoever, after due examination and analysis, you find to be kind, conducive to the good, the benefit, the welfare of all beings -- that doctrine believe and cling to, and take it as your guide."
-Buddha-
[Gautama Siddharta] (563 - 483 BC), Hindu Prince, founder of Buddhism
"The highest result of education is tolerance."
-Helen Keller-
(1880-1968) Blind-Deaf Author
"The philosophy of the classroom today will be the philosophy of government tomorrow."
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
"It seems now that the place where you see the most obvious censorship is on college campuses -- the precise place where you would expect to see the least."
-Alan Charles Kors-
Source: The Shadow University, 1998
"The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men's fatal striving to control society — a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals."
-Friedrich Hayek-
"It's no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."
-Jiddu Krishnamurti-
"It's often been observed that the first casualty of war is the truth. But that's a lie, too, in its way. The reality is that, for most wars to begin, the truth has to have been sacrificed a long time in advance."
-L. Neil Smith-
"[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, 655 F.3d 78, 85 (1st Cir. 2011
"You, sir, are only lingering out the period that shall bring with it your defeat. You have yet scarce began upon the war, and the further you enter, the faster will your troubles thicken. What you now enjoy is only a respite from ruin; an invitation to destruction; something that will lead on to our deliverance at your expense. We know the cause which we are engaged in, and though a passionate fondness for it may make us grieve at every injury which threatens it, yet, when the moment of concern is over, the determination to duty returns. We are not moved by the gloomy smile of a worthless king, but by the ardent glow of generous patriotism. We fight not to enslave, but to set a country free, and to make room upon the earth for honest men to live in. In such a case we are sure that we are right; and we leave to you the despairing reflection of being the tool of a miserable tyrant."
-Thomas Paine-
The American Crisis 4, 1777
"Many false opinions may be exchanged for true ones, without in the least altering the habits of mind of which false opinions are made. … I am now convinced, that no great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible, until a great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought."
-John Stuart Mill-
"Let it [the Constitution] be taught in schools, seminaries and in colleges; let it be written in primers, in spelling books and in almanacs; let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, enforced in courts of justice. In short, let it become the political religion of the nation."
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
"We must abandon the prevalent belief in the superior wisdom of the ignorant."
-Daniel Boorstin-
(1914-2004) American historian, professor, attorney, writer, Librarian of the United States Congress (1975-1987)
"Suffering is but another name for the teaching of experience, which is the parent of instruction and the schoolmaster of life."
-Horace-
[Quintus Horatius Flaccus] (65-8BC) Roman poet
"I believe much trouble and blood would be saved if we opened our hearts more. I will tell you in my way how the Indian sees things. The white man has more words to tell you how they look to him, but it does not require many words to speak the truth. If the white man wants to live in peace with the Indian... we can live in peace. There need be no trouble. Treat all men alike.... give them all the same law. Give them all an even chance to live and grow. You might as well expect the rivers to run backward as that any man who is born a free man should be contented when penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases. We only ask an even chance to live as other men live. We ask to be recognized as men. Let me be a free man...free to travel... free to stop... free to work... free to choose my own teachers... free to follow the religion of my Fathers... free to think and talk and act for myself."
-Chief Joseph-
(1840-1904) Chief of the Wal-lam-wat-kain (Wallowa) band of Nez Perce Indians
"I believe that we learn best when we, not others are deciding what we are going to learn, and when we are choosing the people, materials, and experiences from which we will be learning."
-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 conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking."
-John Kenneth Galbraith-
(1908-2006) Canadian-born economist, Harvard professor
"The road to hell is paved with good intentions."
-Late 16th Century Proverb-
"God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910)
"In the United States of America, satire is protected speech, even if the object of the satire doesn’t get it."
-Al Franken-
And even if the object is a "minority"...
"War is the health of the state."
-Randolph Bourne-
"The only real criterion for a 'true' libertarian is that disagreements about best options ought not be resolved with violence."
-Bill McGonigle-
"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. Even today, there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions. Even today, there is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment. That I do not intend to permit to the extent that it is in my control. And no official of my Administration, whether his rank is high or low, civilian or military, should interpret my words here tonight as an excuse to censor the news, to stifle dissent, to cover up our mistakes or to withhold from the press and the public the facts they deserve to know."
-John F. Kennedy-
"Unity is the great goal toward which humanity moves irresistibly. But it becomes fatal, destructive of the intelligence, the dignity, the well-being of individuals and peoples whenever it is formed without regard to liberty, either by violent means or under the authority of any theological, metaphysical, political, or even economic idea. That patriotism which tends toward unity without regard to liberty is an evil patriotism, always disastrous to the popular and real interests of the country it claims to exalt and serve."
-Mikhail Bakunin-
More significantly, involuntary unity, which is by definition without regard to liberty.
"So, you listen to me. Listen to me! Television is not the truth. Television's a god-damned amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers, and football players. We're in the boredom-killing business... We deal in illusions, man. None of it is true! But you people sit there day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds. We're all you know. You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you. You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube. You even think like the tube. This is mass madness. You maniacs. In God's name, you people are the real thing. We are the illusion."
-Howard Beale-
Source: on-camera television newsman Howard Beale in Network (1976) by Paddy Chayefsky
"There is no such crime as a crime of thought; there are only crimes of action."
-Clarence S. Darrow-
(1857-1938)
"Human nature itself is evermore an advocate for liberty. There is also in human nature a resentment of injury, and indignation against wrong. A love of truth and a veneration of virtue. These amiable passions, are the "latent spark"… If the people are capable of understanding, seeing and feeling the differences between true and false, right and wrong, virtue and vice, to what better principle can the friends of mankind apply than to the sense of this difference?"
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: the Novanglus, 1775
"In all criminal cases whatever, the jury shall have the right to determine the law, and the facts under the direction of the Court as to the law, and the right of new trials as in civil cases."
-Oregon Constitution-
Source: Article I, Section 16
"I want to make one thing clear. This war against our constitution is not being fought way off in Madagascar or in Mandalay. It is being fought here—in our schools, our colleges, our churches, our women’s clubs. It is being fought with our money, channeled through the State Department. It is being fought twenty-four hours a day—while we remain asleep. How many of you Senators know what the UN is doing to change the teaching of the children in your own home town? The UN is at work there, every day and night, changing the teachers, changing the teaching materials, changing the very words and tones—changing all the essential ideas which we imagine our schools are teaching to our young folks. How in the name of Heaven are we to sit here, approve these programs, appropriate our own people’s money—for such outrageous “orientation” of our own children, and of the men and women who teach our children, in this Nation’s schools?"
-William Jenner-
(1908-1985) U.S. Senator (IN-R)
Source: Congressional Record (1952)
"Vote Labor, and you build castles in the air. Vote Conservative, and you can live in them."
-David Frost-
(1939-2013) English journalist, comedian, writer, media personality, television host
"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-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: John Adams, Letter to Jonathan Jackson, October 1780
"All government, in its essence, is organized exploitation, and in virtually all of its existing forms it is the implacable enemy of every industrious and well-disposed man."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"The more profound problem, however, is the degree to which many academic intellectuals, especially in the humanities, have lost their ability to distinguish the 'state' from 'society'."
-Stephen Cox-
(1948-) American professor of literature, editor of Liberty magazine
Source: "Assumptions of Power" Reason magazine, March, 1993
"The three branches of government number considerably more than three and are not, in any sense, 'branches' since that would imply that there is something they are all attached to besides self-aggrandizement and our pocketbooks. ... Government is not a machine with parts; it's an organism. When does an intestine quit being an intestine and start becoming an asshole?"
-P. J. O'Rourke-
(1947- ) US humorist, journalist, & political commentator
"No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny."
-Hannah Arendt-
(1906-1975)
Source: The New Yorker, 12 September 1970
"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 received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors: they purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense 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 to be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men."
-Samuel Adams-
(1722-1803), was known as the "Father of the American Revolution."
"Anyone who tells you that 'It Can't Happen Here' is whistling past the graveyard of history. There is no 'house rule' that bars tyranny coming to America. History is replete with republics whose people grew complacent and descended into imperial butchery and chaos."
-Mike Vanderboegh-
(1953- ) Alabama Minuteman
"Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear."
-Albert Camus-
(1913-1960) French Algerian author
"And I cannot see, why arms should be denied to any man who is not a slave, since they are the only true badges of liberty."
-Andrew Fletcher-
[Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun] (1655-1716) Scottish writer, politician
Source: A Discourse of Government with Relation to Militias, 1737
"False is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand real advantages for one imaginary or trifling inconvenience; that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it; that has no remedy for evils except destruction."
-Cesare Beccaria-
(1735-1794) [Bonesana, Marchese di] Italian nobleman, criminologist, and penal reformer
Source: Dei delitti e delle pene, [On Crimes and Punishments] ch.38 (1764)
Translation is as quoted by Thomas Jefferson in his _Commonplace Book_, 314 (G. Chinard ed. 1926), which was "the source book and repertory of Jefferson's ideas on government." Id. at 4.
"Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been and ever will be pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Federalist No. 51, February 8, 1788
"...and in all cases of libels, the jury shall have the right to determine the law and the facts, under the direction of the court, as in other cases."
-Texas Constitution-
Source: Article I, Section 8
"[T]o consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions ... would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy.
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Letter to William C. Jarvis, September 28, 1820
"As I have stood in the crosshairs of those who target Second Amendment freedoms, I've realized that firearms are not the only issue. No, it's much, much bigger than that. I've come to understand that a cultural war is raging across our land, in which, with Orwellian fervor, certain acceptable thoughts and speech are mandated."
-Charlton Heston-
(1923-2008) American actor, former president of National Rifle Association
"When you disarm peaceful citizens, crime and violence explode.."
-Jarret Wollstein-
Source: The Tyranny of Gun Control, 11 (Future of Freedom Foundation 1997)
"It was during the eighteenth century -- a period of boastful satisfaction with the nice balances within the English constitution -- that Englishmen came to accept the Whig view of the utility of an armed citizenry. The armed citizen was not only affirmed to be protecting himself but, together with his fellows, provided the ultimate check on tyranny."
-Joyce Lee Malcolm-
Professor of law, historian, and Constitutional scholar
Source: To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 128
"I am convinced that we can do to guns what we've done to drugs: create a multi-billion dollar underground market over which we have absolutely no control."
-George L. Roman-
1992
"If the Fed had a war on abortion like its war on poverty or war on drugs, within 5 years men would be having abortions!"
-Harry Browne-
(1933-2006) American libertarian writer, politician, and free-market investment analyst. Libertarian candidate for US President 1996 & 2000
"The growth of drug-related crime is a far greater evil to society as a whole than drug taking. Even so, because we have been seduced by the idea that governments should legislate for our own good, very few people can see how dangerously absurd the present policy is."
-John Casey-
"Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be; and this national weakness finds its nemesis in the stock market."
-The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money-
"O Lord, give us faith. Give us faith in Thee; faith in our sons; faith in each other; faith in our united crusade. Let not the keenness of our spirit ever be dulled. Let not the impacts of temporary events, of temporal matters of but fleeting moment — let not these deter us in our unconquerable purpose. With Thy blessing, we shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy. Help us to conquer the apostles of greed and racial arrogances. Lead us to the saving of our country, and with our sister nations into a world unity that will spell a sure peace — a peace invulnerable to the schemings of unworthy men. And a peace that will let all of men live in freedom, reaping the just rewards of their honest toil. Thy will be done, Almighty God. Amen."
-Franklin D. Roosevelt-
What an incredible hypocrite.
"A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep."
-Saul Bellow-
"Of all wild beasts preserve me from a tyrant; and of all tame, a flatterer."
-Ben Jonson-
"Libertarianism is not a version of legal positivism. We have no central plan summed up in three letters. We do not know, as intellectuals, more than society knows through experience. We have no intention of overriding evolved cultural outcomes that reflect the organic desires of people in their lives. We seek no power at all but rather the increase of the maximum possible liberty for all. Libertarianism is humble toward how society should work or it is not libertarianism at all. "
-Jeffrey Tucker-
"So this is how liberty dies: to thunderous applause."
-Padmé Amidala-
Star Wars: The Phantom Menace
"Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions."
-Joyce Carol Oates-
"All I ask is equal freedom. When it is denied, as it always is, I take it anyhow."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"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 Viriginia, Query XVII (1781-1785)
"Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way to the common feelings of mankind."
-Edward Gibbon-
(1737-1794) English historian and Member of Parliament
"Drug offenses ... may be regarded as the prototypes of non-victim crimes today. The private nature of the sale and use of these drugs has led the police to resort to methods of detection and surveillance that intrude upon our privacy, including illegal search, eavesdropping, and entrapment.
Indeed, the successful prosecution of such cases often requires police infringement of the constitutional protections that safeguard the privacy of individuals."
-John Kaplan-
Jackson Eli Reynolds professor of law at Stanford University, Special Attorney US Dept of Justice, author
Source: "Crime and Justice" from the series 'Courses by Newspaper' appearing in numerous American newspapers in October 1977
[T]he drug prohibition laws have led to wholesale destruction of civil liberties. The War on Drugs has now become a War on the Constitution, and the American people have become, in the eyes of their government, a society of suspects.
-David B. Kopel-
American author, attorney, political science researcher. contributing editor to several publications
Source: Crime and Punishment Symposium: A System in Collapse: Peril or Protection? The Risks and Benefits of Handgun Prohibition, 12 ST. LOUIS U. PUB. L. REV. 285, 319 (1993).
"The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking; he can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn fool, and he might possibly be a damned soul; but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog."
-Gilbert Keith Chesterton-
(1874-1936) British essayist, critic, poet, and novelist
Source: Broadcast talk, June 11, 1935
"[A]fter 20 years on the bench, I have concluded that Federal drug laws are a disaster. It is time to get the Government out of drug enforcement. ... If the possession or distribution of drugs were no longer a Federal crime, other levels of government would face the choice of enforcement or ... decriminalizing. ... The variety, complexity and importance of these questions make it exceedingly clear that the Federal Government has no business being involved in any of them. What might be a hopeful solution in New York, could be a disaster in Idaho, and only State legislatures and city governments, not Congress, can pass laws tailored to local needs. ... It [Congress] should repeal all Federal laws that prohibit or regulate their distribution ..."
-Judge Whitman Knapp-
(1909-2004) US Federal Judge (U.S. Dist. Ct., South. Dist. of N.Y.)
Source: May 9, 1993, letter to editor, New York Times.
Or, government could just, y'know, obey its charter, which delegates to it no 'prohibition' authority...
"Zealotry of either kind -- the puritan's need to regiment others or the victim's passion for blaming everyone except himself -- tends to produce a depressing civic stupidity. Each trait has about it the immobility of addiction. Victims become addicted to being victims: they derive identity, innocence and a kind of devious power from sheer, defaulting helplessness. On the other side, the candlesnuffers of behavioral and political correctness enact their paradox, accomplishing intolerance in the name of tolerance, regimentation in the name of betterment."
-Lance Morrow-
(1939- ) Essayist, professor
"If the words 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' don't include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn't worth the hemp it was written on."
-Terence McKenna-
(1946-2000) Writer, philosopher, and ethnobotanist
"Totalitarianism begins in contempt for what you have. The second step is the notion: 'Things must change—no matter how, Anything is better than what we have.' Totalitarian rulers organize this kind of mass sentiment, and by organizing it articulate it, and by articulating it make the people somehow love it. They were told before, thou shalt not kill; and they didn’t kill. Now they are told, thou shalt kill; and although they think it’s very difficult to kill, they do it because it's now part of the code of behavior. They learn whom to kill and how to kill and how to do it together. This is the much talked about Gleichschaltung—the coordination process. You are coordinated not with the powers that be, but with your neighbor — coordinated with the majority. But instead of communicating with the other you are now glued to him. And you feel of course marvelous. Totalitarianism appeals to the very dangerous emotional needs of people who live in complete isolation and in fear of one another."
-Hannah Arendt-
(1906-1975) German-American political theorist, escaped Nazi Germany
Source: 'Hannah Arendt: From an Interview' Comments made in 1974 during an interview with the French writer Roger Errera and published in October 26, 1978 issue of The NewYork Review of Books Interview
"Conscience is the most sacred of all property."
-James Madison
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Essay on Property, March 29, 1792
"A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded."
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
"I think that prohibition of drugs is the most immoral program that the United States has ever engaged in. It's destroyed civil rights at home and it is responsible for thousands of deaths abroad."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
" 'Extremism' is a word deliberately chosen for its vagueness and used by intellectual slobs who are too desperate, sneaky or lazy to say exactly what they mean. Its only purpose is to deliberately try to confuse the difference between people who are extremely good (usually because of devotion to their principles) with people who are extremely bad. The sleazeballs who use this supposedly scary, yet undefined word are not only trying to smear people of conviction and integrity, but they're also trying to divert attention away from the fact that they are obviously not people of principle themselves."
-Rick Gaber-
Libertarian writer
"The sooner we all learn to make a decision between disapproval and censorship, the better off society will be... Censorship cannot get at the real evil, and it is an evil in itself."
-Granville Hicks-
(1901-1982)
"The right to freedom of expression is justified first of all as the right of an individual purely in his capacity as an individual. It derives from the widely accepted premise of Western thought that the proper end of man is the realization of his character and potentialities as a human being."
-Thomas I. Emerson-
(1907-1991) Lines Professor of Law, Yale University, author
Source: Yale Law Journal, 1963
"Far from failing in its intended task, our educational system is in fact succeeding magnificently, because its aim is to keep the American people thoughtless enough to go on supporting the system."
-Richard Mitchell-
(1929-2002) Professor at Glassboro State College, NJ, author, founder and publisher of The Underground Grammarian
Source: The Underground Grammarian
"Most people are willing to pay more to be amused than to be educated."
-Robert C. Savage-
Source: Life Lessons
"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
"Weak logic, inconsistencies and alienation from the people are common features of authoritarianism. The relentless attempts of totalitarian regimes to prevent free thought and new ideas and the persistent assertion of their own lightness bring on them an intellectual stasis which they project on to the nation at large. Intimidation and propaganda work in a duet of oppression, while the people, lapped in fear and distrust, learn to dissemble and to keep silent. And all the time the desire grows for a system which will lift them from the position of 'rice-eating robots' to the status of human beings who can think and speak freely and hold their heads high in the security of their rights."
-Aung San Suu Kyi-
"Lives were being ruined and few hands were raised in help. Since when do you have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?"
-Lillian Hellman-
"All that time is lost which might be better employed."
-Jean-Jacques Rousseau-
Like oh, say, the time doing your taxes...
"The law of progress holds that everything now must be better than what was there before. Don’t you see if you want something better, and better, and better, you lose the good. The good is no longer even being measured."
-Hannah Arendt-
(1906-1975) German-American political theorist, escaped Nazi Germany
Source: 'Hannah Arendt: From an Interview' Comments made in 1974 during an interview with the French writer Roger Errera and published in October 26, 1978 issue of The NewYork Review of Books Interview.
"We should never define libertarian positions in terms coined by liberals and conservatives, nor as some variant of their positions. We are not fiscally conservative and socially liberal. We are libertarians, who believe in individual liberty and personal responsibility on all issues at all times."
-Harry Browne-
(1933-2006) American libertarian writer, politician, and free-market investment analyst. Libertarian candidate for US President 1996 & 2000
"The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"The fabric of American empire ought to rest on the solid basis of THE CONSENT OF THE PEOPLE. The streams of national power ought to flow from that pure, original fountain of all legitimate authority."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: Federalist No. 22, December 14, 1787
"The creation of the world -- said Plato -- is the victory of persuasion over force... Civilization is the maintenance of social order, by its own inherent persuasiveness as embodying the nobler alternative. The recourse to force, however unavoidable, is a disclosure of the failure of civilization, either in the general society or in a remnant of individuals... Now the intercourse between individuals and between social groups takes one of these two forms: force or persuasion. Commerce is the great example of intercourse by way of persuasion. War, slavery, and governmental compulsion exemplify the reign of force."
-Alfred North Whitehead-
(1861-1947)
Source: in Adventures of Ideas
"Any person or any so-called 'political spectrum' that equates live-and-let-livers with control freaks is even more evil than the worst control freaks themselves."
-Bert Rand-
"You can't give the government the power to do good without also giving it the power to do bad - in fact, to do anything it wants."
-Harry Browne-
(1933-2006) American libertarian writer, politician, and free-market investment analyst. Libertarian candidate for US President 1996 & 2000
"Using governmental force to impose a vision on others is intellectual sloth."
-Ken Schoolland-
Former U.S. International Trade Commission economist, Former Special Advisor to the White House, executive of International Society for Individual Liberty
"A moderate is either someone who has no moral code of his own, or if he does, then he's someone who doesn't have the guts to take sides between good and evil."
-Rick Gaber-
Libertarian writer
"Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: letter to Thomas Jefferson, October 17, 1788
"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
"Liberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker. But if we had not, our fathers have earned and bought it for us, at the expense of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, 1765
"An honorable Peace is and always was my first wish! I can take no delight in the effusion of human Blood; but, if this War should continue, I wish to have the most active part in it."
-John Paul Jones-
(1747-1792) Scottish sailor, US naval fighter in the American Revolutionary War
Source: letter to Gouverneur Morris, Sept 2, 1782
"There is no such thing as an achieved liberty: like electricity, there can be no substantial storage and it must be generated as it is enjoyed, or the lights go out."
-Justice Robert H. Jackson-
(1892-1954), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: American Bar Association Journal, 1953
"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
"The people of the various provinces are strictly forbidden to have in their possession any swords, bows, spears, firearms, or other types of arms. The possession of these elements makes difficult the collection of taxes and dues, and tends to permit uprising. Therefore, the heads of provinces, official agents, and deputies are ordered to collect all the weapons mentioned above and turn them over to the government."
-Toyotomi Hideyoshi-
(1536-1598) Japanese Chancellor of the Realm, preeminent daimyo, warrior, general and politician of the Sengoku period
Source: as Shogun of Japan, August 29, 1558
"We are told there is no cause to fear. When we consider the great powers of Congress, there is great cause of alarm. They can disarm the militia. If they were armed, they would be a resource against great oppressions. The laws of a great empire are difficult to be executed. If the laws of the union were oppressive, they could not carry them into effect, if the people were possessed of the proper means of defence."
-William Lenoir-
Source: advocating for the addition of a Bill of Rights to the Federal Constitution in the North Carolina 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.4 p.203 (Philadelphia, 1836)
"The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie -- a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days -- but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please."
-Hannah Arendt-
(1906-1975) German-American political theorist, escaped Nazi Germany
Source: 'Hannah Arendt: From an Interview' Comments made in 1974 during an interview with the French writer Roger Errera and published in October 26, 1978 issue of The NewYork Review of Books Interview.
"What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core."
-Hannah Arendt-
(1906-1975) German-American political theorist, escaped Nazi Germany
Source: On Revolution (1963), ch. 2.
"It becomes all therefore who are friends of a Government based on free principles to reflect, that by denying the possibility of a system partly federal and partly consolidated, and who would convert ours into one either wholly federal or wholly consolidated, in neither of which forms have individual rights, public order, and external safety, been all duly maintained, they aim a deadly blow at the last hope of true liberty on the face of the Earth."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Notes on Nullification
"Happily for America, happily, we trust, for the whole human race, they pursued a new and more noble course. They accomplished a revolution which has no parallel in the annals of human society."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Federalist No. 14, November 20, 1787
"The diversity in the faculties of men from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Federalist No. 10, November 23, 1787
"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
That's how a FREE society would work, anyway...
"Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"Politicians are always realistically maneuvering for the next election. They are obsolete as fundamental problem-solvers."
-Buckminster Fuller-
Was it ever otherwise...?
"The duties of man consist in alternate action and meditation, mutually aiding and relieving each other; and both, directed with undeviating aim, to the progressive improvement of himself and his fellow creatures. Heaven has given him in charge, to promote the happiness and well-being of himself, his wife, his children, his kindred, his neighbors, his fellow citizens, his country, and his kind; and the great problem of legislation is, so to organize the civil government of a community, that this gradation of duties, may be made to harmonize in all its parts — that in the operation of human institutions upon social action, self-love and social may be made the same."
-John Quincy Adams-
"America was founded on the principle of inalienable rights, not dictated duties. The Declaration of Independence states that every human being has a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It does not state that he is born a slave to the needs of others."
-Alex Epstein-
American writer
Source: John McCain’s Deadly Moral Code (2000.08.12 ) Capitalism Magazine
"There is a place for government in the affairs of men, and our Declaration of Independence tells us precisely what that place is. The role of government is to protect individuals in their God-given individual rights. Freedom is the natural birthright of man, but all that government can do in behalf of freedom is to let the individual alone, and it should secure him in his rights by making others let him alone."
-Rev. Edmund A. Opitz-
(1914-2006) American minister, author
"If the American Revolution had produced nothing but the Declaration of Independence, it would have been worthwhile."
-Samuel Eliot Morison-
(1887-1976) Rear Admiral USNR, Naval historian
1965
"On the distinctive principles of the Government ... of the U. States, the best guides are to be found in ... The Declaration of Independence, as the fundamental Act of Union of these States."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, 1825
Stated differently, you wanna know the original intent of the Constitution? Look to the original grievances of the Declaration.
"Because we fear the responsibility for our actions, we have allowed ourselves to develop the mentality of slaves. Contrary to the stirring sentiments of the Declaration of Independence, we now pledge "our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor" not to one another for our mutual protection, but to the state, whose actions continue to exploit, despoil, and destroy us."
-Butler D. Shaffer-
Professor, Southwestern University School of Law
June 9, 2003
"The War between the States... produced the foundation for the kind of government we have today: consolidated and absolute, based on the unrestrained will of the majority, with force, threats, and intimidation being the order of the day. Today's federal government is considerably at odds with that envisioned by the framers of the Constitution. ... [The War] also laid to rest the great principle enunciated in the Declaration of Independence that 'Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed'."
-Walter E. Williams-
(1936- ) Columnist, Professor of Economics at George Mason University
"Why then sir, why do we longer delay? Why still deliberate? Let this happy day give birth to an American Republic. Let her arise not to devastate and to conquer but to reestablish the reign of peace and law. The eyes of Europe are fixed upon us. She demands of us a living example of freedom that may exhibit a contrast in the felicity of the citizen to the ever-increasing tyranny which desolates her polluted shores. She invites us to prepare an asylum where the unhappy may find solace, and the persecuted repose. If we are not this day wanting in our duty, the names of the American legislators of 1776 will be placed by posterity at the side of all of those whose memory has been and ever will be dear to virtuous men and good citizens."
-Richard Henry Lee-
(1732-1794) Founding Father
Source: introduced the resolution to adopt the Declaration of Independence in June of 1776.
"The law isn’t justice. It’s a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be."
-Raymond Chandler-
"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
"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)
"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
"The essential characteristic of Western civilization that distinguishes it from the arrested and petrified civilizations of the East was and is its concern for freedom from the state."
-Ludwig Von Mises-
(1881-1973) Economist and social philosopher
"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
"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
"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-
(1865-1936)
"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they have resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they suppress."
-Frederick Douglass-
[Frederick Baily] (1818-1895), escaped slave, Abolitionist, author, editor of the North Star and later the New National Era
"I have never had a feeling, politically, that did not spring from ... the Declaration of Independence ... that all should have an equal chance. This is the sentiment embodied in the Declaration of Independence ... I would rather be assassinated on this spot than surrender it."
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
"The secret dread of modern intellectuals, liberals and conservatives alike, the unadmitted terror at the root of their anxiety, which all of their current irrationalities are intended to stave off and to disguise, is the unstated knowledge that Soviet Russia is the full, actual, literal, consistent embodiment of the morality of altruism, that Stalin did not corrupt a noble ideal, that this is the only way altruism has to be or can ever be practiced. If service and self-sacrifice are a moral ideal, and if the "selfishness" of human nature prevents men from leaping into sacrificial furnaces, there is no reason -- no reason that a mystic moralist could name -- why a dictator should not push them in at the point of bayonets -- for their own good, or the good of humanity, or the good of posterity, or the good of the latest bureaucrat's five-year plan. There is no reason that they can name to oppose any atrocity. The value of a man's life? His right to exist? His right to pursue his own happiness? These are concepts that belong to individualism and capitalism -- to the antithesis of the altruist morality."
-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
"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
"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
"True, it is evil that a single man should crush the herd, but see not there the worse form of slavery, which is when the herd crushes out the man."
-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry-
(1900-1944) French writer, poet, aristocrat, journalist, aviator
Source: Citadelle, 1948 (posthumously)
"The last stage but one of every civilisation, is characterised by the forced political unification of its constituent parts, into a single greater whole."
-Arnold J. Toynbee-
(1889-1975) British historian
Source: 'The Study of History'
"The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Rusian-born American author
"It is not the fact of liberty but the way in which liberty is exercised that ultimately determines whether liberty itself survives."
-Dorothy Thompson-
(1894-1961)
"The state is the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies, too; and this lie creeps from its mouth: `I, the state, am the people.'... Everything about it is false; it bites with stolen teeth. "
-Friedrich Nietzsche-
(1844-1900)
Source: from "Thus Spake Zarathustra"
"History suggests that the cause of national decline is, as a rule, that the state in the nation concerned has sought to do too much rather than too little. This applies as much to the Roman Empire as to the Spanish. "
-Hugh Thomas-
(1931- ) Baron Thomas of Swynnerton, British historian
Source: "An Unfinished History of the World" by Hamish Hamilton (1979)
"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 state remains, as it was in the beginning, the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"Integrity is not a conditional word. It doesn't blow in the wind or change with the weather. It is your inner image of yourself, and if you look in there and see a man who won't cheat, then you know he never will. Integrity is not a search for the rewards of integrity. Maybe all you ever get for it is the largest kick in the ass the world can provide. It is not supposed to be a productive asset. Crime pays a lot better. I can bend my own rules way, way over, but there is a place where I finally stop bending them."
-John D. MacDonald-
“Narcotics police (Prohibitionists) are an enormous, corrupt international bureaucracy … and now fund a coterie of researchers who provide them with ‘scientific support’ … fanatics who distort the legitimate research of others. … The anti-marijuana campaign is a cancerous tissue of lies, undermining law enforcement, aggravating the drug problem, depriving the sick of needed help, and suckering well-intentioned conservatives and countless frightened parents.”
-William F. Buckley-
Commentary in The National Review, April 29, 1988
"The only index by which to judge a government or a way of life is by the quality of the people it acts upon. No matter how noble the objectives of a government, if it blurs decency and kindness, cheapens human life, and breeds ill will and suspicion — it is an evil government."
-Eric Hoffer-
"In debates between anarchists and statists, the burden of proof clearly should rest on those who place their trust in the state. Anarchy's mayhem is wholly conjectural; the state's mayhem is undeniably, factually horrendous."
-Robert Higgs-
"It is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits."
-Aristotle-
"A young man is not a proper hearer of lectures on political science; for he is inexperienced in the actions that occur in life, but its discussions start from these and are about these; and, further, since he tends to follow his passions, his study will be vain and unprofitable, because the end aimed at is not knowledge but action."
-Aristotle-
"Decent people, virtually by definition, do not seek to exercise political power over their fellows. ... Honorable people, taking a wrong turn and blundering into positions of political leadership, would last no longer than a nun in a brothel. If ruthless rivals did not displace them at the earliest opportunity, the scrupulous people would soon remove themselves in disgust. People who lack pugnacity do not succeed as prize fighters; people who lack a talent for lying, stealing and, if need be, abetting homicide do not succeed in modern politics."
-Robert Higgs-
"The work of the individual still remains the spark that moves mankind forward."
-Igor Sikorsky-
(1889-1972) Aviation pioneer
"The only part of the conduct of anyone for which he is amenable to society is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign."
-John Stuart Mill-
(1806-1873) English philosopher and economist
"The mania for giving the Government power to meddle with the private affairs of cities or citizens is likely to cause endless trouble, through the rivaly of schools and creeds that are anxious to obtain official recognition, and there is great danger that our people will lose our 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, to prescribe when his child may be born and when he may die, 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-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910)
"Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist
"To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying 'Amen' to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive."
-Robert Louis Stevenson-
(1850-1895)
"By pursuing his own interest [every individual] frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good."
-Adam Smith-
(1723-1790) Scottish philosopher and economist
Source: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), Book IV, Chap. 2 (New York: Random House, 1937, p. 423)
"There is no happiness, there is no liberty, there is no enjoyment of life, unless a man can say, when he rises in the morning, I shall be subject to the decision of no unwise judge today."
-Daniel Webster-
(1782-1852), US Senator
Source: Speech, 10 March 1931
"The idea that men are created free and equal is both true and misleading: men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other."
-David Reisman-
American Sociologist
"The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to prevailing superstition or taboo."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
Source: Minority Report
"True education makes for inequality;
the inequality of individuality,
the inequality of success,
the glorious inequality of talent, of genius;
for inequality, not mediocrity,
individual superiority, not standardization,
is the measure of the progress of the world."
-Felix E. Schelling-
(1858-1945) American educator
"Our dependency makes slaves out of us, especially if this dependency is a dependency of our self esteem. If you need encouragement, pats on the back from everybody, then you make everybody your judge."
-Fritz Perls-
"To change masters is not to be free."
-Jose Marti y Perez-
(1853-1895)
"A declaration is not a government; a creed is not enough. The Founders recognized that there were seeds of anarchy in the idea of individual freedom, an intoxicating danger in the idea of equality, for if everybody is truly free, without the constraints of birth or rank or an inherited social order — if my notion of faith is no better or worse than yours, and my notions of truth and goodness and beauty are as true and good and beautiful as yours — then how can we ever hope to form a society that coheres? Enlightenment thinkers like Hobbes and Locke suggested that free men would form governments as a bargain to ensure that one man's freedom did not become another man's tyranny; that they would sacrifice individual license to better preserve their liberty."
-The Audacity of Hope-
Yeah, and...? This is so hopelessly confused...
"Freedom of thought is the only guarantee against an infection of people by mass myths, which, in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demagogues, can be transformed into bloody dictatorships."
-Andrei Sakharov-
(1921-1989)
Source: Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom, 1968
"We fought the Revolutionary War for no taxation without representation, it seems to me that we are much worse off today, because we are heavily taxed, and only the king's corporations control this Country, together with mob rule, of the special interests."
-James Montgomery-
(1771-1854) Scottish-born hymnodist, poet and editor
"Government does not cause affluence. Citizens of totalitarian countries have plenty of government and nothing of anything else."
-P. J. O'Rourke-
(1947- ) US humorist, journalist, & political commentator
Source: "Eat the Rich"
"Love your country but fear its government."
-Daniel Webster-
(1782-1852), US Senator
"I believe that if the people of this nation fully understood what Congress has done to them over the last 49 years, they would move on Washington; they would not wait for an election... It adds up to a preconceived plan to destroy the economic and social independence of the United States!"
-George W. Malone-
(1890-1961) U.S. Senator (Nevada)
1957
Source: speaking before Congress
"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
"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)
"Individual liberty is individual power, and as the power of a community is a mass compounded of individual powers, the nation which enjoys the most freedom must necessarily be in proportion to its numbers the most powerful nation."
-John Quincy Adams-
(1767-1848) 6th US President
Source: Letter to James Lloyd, 1 October 1822
"Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence."
-Albert Einstein-
(1879-1955) Physicist and Professor, Nobel Prize 1921
"No one can be free unless he is independent... In reality, he who is served is limited in his independence..."
-Maria Montessori-
(1870-1952)
"Utopians...consider individual freedom as the stumbling block on which the grandiose idea of mankind's totalization may flounder."
-Thomas Molnar-
Source: Utopia: The Perennial Heresy, 1967
"And that the said Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press, or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms; or to raise standing armies, unless necessary for the defense of the United States, or of some one or more of them; or to prevent the people from petitioning, in a peaceable and orderly manner, the federal legislature, for a redress of grievances; or to subject the people to unreasonable searches and seizures of their persons, papers or possessions."
-Samuel Adams-
(1722-1803), was known as the "Father of the American Revolution."
Source: Debates and Proceedings in the Convention of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 1788 (Pierce & Hale, eds., Boston, 1850)
"Dost thou not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?"
-Count Axel Oxenstierna-
[Axel Gustafsson Oxenstierna af Södermöre] (1583-1654) Count of Södermöre, Swedish statesman
Source: Count Axel Oxenstierna of Sweden (letter to his son, 1648)
"Order is not pressure which is imposed on society from without but an equilibrium which is set up from within."
-José Ortega y Gasset-
(1883-1955)
1927
"I do esteem individual liberty above everything. What is a nation for, but to secure the maximum liberty to every individual?"
-D. H. Lawrence-
(1885-1938)
Source: Letter, 12 July 1916
"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
"Liberty is quite as much a moral as a political growth, -- the result of free individual action, energy, and independence."
-Samuel Smiles-
(1812-1904) Scottish author and reformer
"The whole of the Bill [of Rights] is a declaration of the right of the people at large or considered as individuals... It establishes some rights of the individual as unalienable and which consequently, no majority has a right to deprive them of."
-Albert Gallatin-
of the NY Historical Society
October 7, 1789
"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
"Freedom is not a fixed and possessed thing. It is a quality of life. And like action itself, it is something experienced only by individuals."
-Neil A. McDonald-
Source: Politics: A Study of Control Behavior, 1965
"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"
"Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
Source: "Common Sense"
"Reactionism is not the same thing as conservatism. It’s far more potent a brew. Reactionary thought begins, usually, with acute despair at the present moment and a memory of a previous golden age. It then posits a moment in the past when everything went to hell and proposes to turn things back to what they once were. It is not simply a conservative preference for things as they are, with a few nudges back, but a passionate loathing of the status quo and a desire to return to the past in one emotionally cathartic revolt. If conservatives are pessimistic, reactionaries are apocalyptic. If conservatives value elites, reactionaries seethe with contempt for them. If conservatives believe in institutions, reactionaries want to blow them up. If conservatives tend to resist too radical a change, reactionaries want a revolution. Though it took some time to reveal itself, today’s Republican Party — from Newt Gingrich’s Republican Revolution to today’s Age of Trump — is not a conservative party. It is a reactionary party that is now at the peak of its political power."
-Andrew Sullivan-
"The rights of all are equal: justice, poised and balanced in eternal calm, will shake from the golden scales in which are weighed the acts of men, the very dust of prejudice and caste: No race, no color, no previous condition, can change the rights of men."
-Robert G. Ingersoll-
"America was born of revolt, flourished on dissent, became great through experimentation."
-Henry Steele Commager-
(1902-1998) Historian and author
"Freedom for supporters of the government only, for members of one party only -- no matter how big its membership may be -- is no freedom at all. Freedom is always freedom for the man who thinks differently."
-Rosa Luxemburg-
(1880-1919)
"If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless
and ineffectual. "
-Frank Herbert-
(1920-1986)
Source: "The Dosadi Experiment"
"A shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases."
-Carl Gustav Jung-
(1875-1961)
Source: Modern Man in Search of a Soul, 1933
"A society committed to the search for truth must give protection to, and set a high value upon, the independent and original mind, however angular, however rasping, however, socially unpleasant it may be; for it is upon such minds in large measure, that the effective search for truth depends."
-Caryl Parker Haskins-
(1908-2001) Scientist, author, inventor, philanthropist, governmental advisor and pioneering entomologist in the study of ant biology
Source: New York Times, 9 December 1963
"The individual is the true reality of life. A cosmos in himself, he does not exist for the State, nor for that abstraction called 'society,' or the 'nation,' which is only a collection of individuals."
-Emma Goldman-
(1869-1940)
Source: The Place of the Individual in Society
"I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races. There is physical difference between the two which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together."
-Abraham Lincoln-
"Government has within it a tendency to abuse its powers."
-John C. Calhoun-
(1782-1850) American statesman
"By far the most numerous and most flagrant violations of personal liberty and individual rights are performed by governments. The major crimes throughout history, the ones executed on the largest scale, have been committed not by individuals or bands of individuals but by governments, as a deliberate policy of those governments, that is, by the official representatives of governments, acting in their official capacity."
-John Hospers-
(1918-2011) Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Southern California, author
"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
"China, Cuba, countries where the only freedoms are those bestowed on a whim by the state -- these countries jail their kids for burning the flag. We do not. America was created around dissent. Our freedom is founded upon the right to make known our opinion without threat of government interdiction -- Old Glory is the ultimate, tangible expression of this national belief."
-Marvin Johnson-
a Legislative Counsel for the ACLU
Source: circa 2001
"Government power must be dispersed. If government is to exercise power, better in the county than in the state, better in the state than in Washington. If I do not like what my local community does, be it in sewage disposal, or zoning, or schools, I can move to another local community, and though few may take this step, the mere possibility acts as a check. If I do not like what Washington imposes, I have few alternatives in this world of jealous nations."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
Source: "Capitalism and Freedom"
"While I was at the hotel to-day, an elderly gentleman called upon me to know whether I was really in favor of producing a perfect equality between the negroes and white people. [Great Laughter.] While I had not proposed to myself on this occasion to say much on that subject, yet as the question was asked me I thought I would occupy perhaps five minutes in saying something in regard to it. I will say then 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, [applause]-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 there 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 other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. I say upon this occasion I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the negro should be denied every thing. I do not understand that because I do not want a negro woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. [Cheers and laughter.] My understanding is that I can just let her alone. I am now in my fiftieth year, and I certainly never have had a black woman for either a slave or a wife. So it seems to me quite possible for us to get along without making either slaves or wives of negroes. I will add to this that I have never seen, to my knowledge, a man, woman or child who was in favor of producing a perfect equality, social and political, between negroes and white men. … I will also add to the remarks I have made (for I am not going to enter at large upon this subject,) that I have never had the least apprehension that I or my friends would marry negroes if there was no law to keep them from it, [laughter] but as Judge Douglas and his friends seem to be in great apprehension that they might, if there were no law to keep them from it, [roars of laughter] I give him the most solemn pledge that I will to the very last stand by the law of this State, which forbids the marrying of white people with negroes. [Continued laughter and applause.]"
-Abraham Lincoln-
fourth Lincoln-Douglas debate, held in Charleston, South Carolina
"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."
-H.L. Mencken-
1880-1956
"The only freedom which counts is the freedom to do what some other people think to be wrong. There is no point in demanding freedom to do that which all will applaud. All the so-called liberties or rights are things which have to be asserted against others; who claim that if such things are to be allowed, their own rights are infringed or their own liberties threatened. This is always true, even when we speak of the freedom to worship, of the right of free speech or association, or of public assembly. If we are to allow freedoms at all there will constantly be complaints that either the liberty itself or the way in which it is exercised is being abused, and, if it is a genuine freedom, these complaints will often be justified. There is no way of having a free society in which there is not abuse. Abuse is the very hallmark of liberty."
-Lord Chief Justice Baron Hailsham-
"The Dilemma of Democracy" --66.231.221.224 01:17, 16 August 2015 (UTC)
"I am certain, however, that nothing has done so much to destroy the judicial safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice."
-Friedrich A. Hayek-
"We need not adopt the values of the people whose rights we defend."
-Jeffery Tucker-
"For my friends, anything. For my enemies, the law."
-Oscar Benavides-
"While I have considered the preservation of the constitutional power of the General Government to be the foundation of our peace and safety at home and abroad, I yet believe that the maintenance of the rights and authority reserved to the states and to the people, not only are essential to the adjustment and balance of the general system, but the safeguard to the continuance of a free government. I consider it as the chief source of stability to our political system, whereas the consolidation of the states into one vast republic, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of that ruin which has overwhelmed all those that have preceded it."
-Robert E. Lee-
letter to Lord Acton
"The majority is never right. Never, I tell you! That's one of these lies in society that no free and intelligent man can ever help rebelling against. Who are the people that make up the biggest proportion of the population -- the intelligent ones or the fools? I think we can agree it's the fools, no matter where you go in this world, it's the fools that form the overwhelming majority."
-Henrik Ibsen-
(1828-1906) Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet
"Those who have ever valued liberty for its own sake believed that to be free to choose, and not to be chosen for, is an unalienable ingredient in what makes human beings human."
-Isaiah Berlin-
(1909-1997)
Source: Five Essays on Liberty, 1969
"When we lose the right to be different, we lose the privilege to be free."
-Justice Charles Evans Hughes-
(1862-1948) Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court
"Whatever power you give to the good cops, goes to the bad ones, too. Never forget that."
-Phillip J. Birmingham-
"No man has ever ruled other men for their own good."
-George Herron
(1862-1925) American clergyman, lecturer, writer, and Christian socialist activist
"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
"....it is always easier to tell people what to do than to find out what is happening..."
-Martin Pawley-
"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: May 3, 1854, President vetoed a bill
"The principle that the end justifies the means is in individualist ethics regarded as the denial of all morals. In collectivist ethics it becomes necessarily the supreme rule."
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
Source: The Road to Serfdom (1944)
"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
"If Congress can determine what constitutes the general welfare and can appropriate money for its advancement, where is the limitation to carrying into execution whatever can be effected by money?"
-William Drayton-
(1776-1846) US Congressman for South Carolina (1825-1833), banker, and author
1828
"The law, unfortunately, has always been retained on the side of power; laws have uniformly been enacted for the protection and perpetuation of power."
-Thomas Cooper-
(1759-1839)
Source: Liberty of the Press, 1830
"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)
"The tendency of all strong governments has always been to suppress liberty, partly in order to ease the processes of rule, partly from sheer disbelief in innovation."
-John A. Hobson-
(1858-1940)
Source: Free Thought in the Social Sciences, 1926
"Freedom is the emancipation from the arbitrary rule of other men."
-Mortimer Adler-
(1902-2001)
"The plea of necessity, that eternal argument of all conspirators."
-William Henry Harrison-
(1773-1841), 9th U. S. President
Source: Letter to Simon Bolivar, 27 September 1829
"Emergency does not create power. Emergency does not increase granted power or remove or diminish the restrictions imposed upon power granted or reserved. The Constitution was adopted in a period of grave emergency. Its grants of power to the federal government and its limitations of the power of the States were determined in the light of emergency, and they are not altered by emergency."
-Justice Charles Evans Hughes-
(1862-1948) Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court
Source: Home Building & Loan Assn v. Blairsdell, 1934
"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
"It will be found an unjust and unwise jealousy to deprive a man of his natural liberty upon the supposition he may abuse it."
-Oliver Cromwell-
(1599-1658) British Lord General of the Army, Lord Protector of the Realm
Source: Address, First Protectorate Parliament, 1654
"The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its 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 man than that any of its provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government. Such a doctrine leads directly to anarchy or despotism, but the theory of necessity on which it is based is false; for the government, within the Constitution, has all the powers granted to it, which are necessary to preserve its existence; as has been happily proved by the result of the great effort to throw off its just authority."
-Justice David Davis-
(1815-1886) U.S. Supreme Court Justice 1862-1877
Source: Ex parte Milligan 71 U.S. 2 (1866) DAVIS, J., Opinion of the Court
"It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones. "
-Calvin Coolidge-
(1873-1933), 30th US President
"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)
"Ponder the capriciousness of human nature, which allows momentary appetites and fleeting attitudes to set the courses for entire lives and future responsibilities."
-Ann Gray-
Author
Source: "BRIARS: The House of Heirs", 2002
"Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution, of course, lays out the delegated, enumerated, and therefore limited powers of Congress. Only through a deliberate misreading of the general welfare and commerce clauses of the Constitution has the federal government been allowed to overreach its authority and extend its tendrils into every corner of civil society."
-Edward H. Crane-
Founder and president of the Cato Institute
Source: A Constitution of Liberty, Cato Institute 1995 Annual Report
"The dangers of a concentration of all power in the general government of a confederacy so vast as ours are too obvious to be disregarded."
-Franklin Pierce-
(1804-1869) U.S. President
Source: Inaugural Address, 4 March 1853
"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
"But our society -- unlike most in the world -- presupposes that freedom and liberty are in a frame of reference that makes the individual, not government, the keeper of his tastes, beliefs, and ideas; that is the philosophy of the First Amendment; and it is this article of faith that sets us apart from most nations in the world."
-William O. Douglas-
(1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: dissenting, Paris Adult Theatre I v. Slaton
"The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"Indeed, the ABA [American Bar Association] is truly a creature of these post-modern times. Its governing members view the political sphere and judicial sphere as one in the same, and worship raw power as the ultimate and only currency in social transactions. The modern ABA thus has embraced an ideology that views the rule of law as a mere extension of politics, and in a self-fulfilling confirmation of that view, conflates law and politics with unashamedly liberal policy prescriptions."
-Ray Gifford-
(attorney with law firm of Baker & Hostetler in Denver, Co)
Source: The ABA Strait-jacket, THE DEFENDER, October/November 1995.
"How should it happen that the individual should be without rights, but the combination of individuals should possess unlimited rights?"
-Auberon Herbert-
(1838-1906) English author
"The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interest."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
"Laws are maintained in credit, not because they are essentially just, but because they are laws. It is the mystical foundation of their authority; they have none other."
-Michel de Montaigne-
[Michel Eyquem De Montaigne] (1532-1592) French Renaissance scholar, philosopher, writer
Source: Essays, 1575
"The end cannot justify the means for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced."
-Aldous Huxley-
(1894-1963) Author
Source: Ends and Means, 1937
"If the federal government should overpass the just bounds of its authority and make a tyrannical use of its powers, the people, whose creature it is, must appeal to the standard they have formed, and take such measures to redress the injury done to the Constitution as the exigency may suggest and prudence justify."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: Federalist No. 33, 3 January 1788
"But constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it, and to carry his authority as far as it will go."
-Charles-Louis de Secondat-
(1689-1755) Baron de Montesquieu
"There is as far as I know, no example in history, of any state voluntarily ceding power from the centre to its constituent parts."
-Charles Handy-
Source: 'The Age of Unreason'
"Madness is rare in individuals, but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule."
-Friedrich Nietzsche-
(1844-1900)
"Responsibility, in order to be reasonable, must be limited to objects within the power of the responsible party, and in order to be effectual, must relate to operations of that power, of which a ready and proper judgment can be formed by the constituents."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: Federalist No. 63, 1788
"The IRS is an extraordinary example of the end justifying the means. The means of this agency is growth. It is interesting that the revenue officers within the IRS refer to taxpayers as 'inventory'. The IRS embodies the political realities of the selfish human desire to dominate others. Thus the end of this gigantic pretense of officialdom is power, pure and simple. The meek may inherit the earth, but they will never receive a promotion in an agency where efficiency is measured by the number of seizures of taxpayers' property and by the number of citizens and businesses driven into bankruptcy."
-George Hansen-
Congressman and author of "To Harass Our People"
"Socialism is after all, the Viagra of politics..."
-Michael Pierce-
"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
Senators, I beseech you. Oops, 17th Amendment. Too late...
"The greatest danger to liberty today comes from the men who are most needed and most powerful in modern government, namely, the efficient expert administrators exclusively concerned with what they regard as the public good."
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
"Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose."
-Friedrich Nietzsche-
(1844-1900)
Source: The Anti-Christ
"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
"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
Statists/authoritarians and libertarians, by any other name...
"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
"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
"The struggle is always between the individual and his sacred right to express himself and... the power structure that seeks conformity, suppression and obedience."
-Justice William O. Douglas-
(1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
"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
"The way to have good and safe government is not to trust it all to one, but to divide it among the many, distributing to everyone exactly the functions in which he is competent ...
- To let the National Government be entrusted with the defense of the nation, and its foreign and federal relations ...
- The State Governments with the Civil Rights, Laws, Police and administration of what concerns the State generally.
- The Counties with the local concerns, and each ward direct the interests within itself.
It is by dividing and subdividing these Republics from the great national one down through all its subordinations until it ends in the administration of everyman's farm by himself, by placing under everyone what his own eye may superintend, that all will be done for the best."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Jefferson letter to Joseph Cabell, Febrary 2, 1816, Writings W., 6:544
"Any power must be an enemy of mankind which enslaves the individual by power and by force, whether it arises under the Fascist or the Communist flag. All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development accorded to the individual."
-Albert Einstein-
(1879-1955) Physicist and Professor, Nobel Prize 1921
Source: 15 September 1933
"There have existed, in every age and every country, two distinct orders of men -- the lovers of freedom and the devoted advocates of power."
-Robert Y. Hayne-
(1791-1839 ) U.S. Senator for S.C.
Source: Speech, 21 January 1830
"A free man is he that, in those things which by his strength and wit he is able to do, is not hindered to do what he has a will to."
-Thomas Hobbes-
(1588-1679) English philosopher, political theorist
Source: Leviathan, 1651
"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use."
-Galileo Galilei-
Astronomer (1564 - 1642)
"It is within the police power of the state to prohibit public use of fighting words that create a danger of breach of the peace, but simply to prohibit public use of fighting words is too broad. Those words may sometimes be used in situations where there is no danger."
-Ithiel De Sola Pool-
Source: Technologies Of Freedom: On Free Speech in an Electronic Age, 1983
"Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them."
-Laurence J. Peter-
"The growth of federal power and programs over this century -- involving the regulation of business, the expansion of "civil rights," the production of environmental goods, and much else -- has taken place in large measure through the power of Congress to regulate "commerce among the states." That power has been read so broadly by the modern Court that Congress today can regulate anything that even "affects" commerce, which in principle is everything. As a result, save for the restraints imposed by the Bill of Rights, the commerce power is now essentially plenary, which is hardly what the Framers intended when they enumerated Congress’s powers. Indeed, if they had meant for Congress to be able to do anything it wanted under the commerce power, the enumeration of Congress’s other powers -- to say nothing of the defense of the doctrine of enumerated powers throughout the Federalist Papers -- would have been pointless. The purpose of the commerce clause quite simply, was to enable Congress to ensure the free flow of commerce among the states. Under the Articles of Confederation, state legislatures had enacted tariffs and other protectionist measures that impeded interstate commerce. To break the logjam, Congress was empowered to make commerce among the states "regular." In fact, the need to do so was one of the principal reasons behind the call for a new constitution."
-Roger Pilon-
Vice President for Legal Affairs for the Cato Institute
Source: Restoring Constitutional Government, Cato's Letter #9, p. 6, published by the Cato Institute (1995)
"Do not expect justice where might is right."
-Plato-
(429-347 BC)
Source: Phaedrus, 360 B.C.
"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 A. Heinlein-
(1907-1988) American writer
"Freedom... refer[s] to a social relationship among people -- namely, the absence of force as a prospective instrument of decision making. Freedom is reduced whenever a decision is made under threat of force, whether or not force actually materializes or is evident in retrospect."
-Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
"An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: letter to John Melish, January 13, 1813
"The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves."
-William Hazlitt-
(1778-1830)
Source: Political Essays (1819). 'The Times' Newspaper
"True liberty cannot exist apart from the full rights of property, for property is the only crystallized form of free faculties... The whole meaning of socialism is a systematic glorification of force... No literary phrases about social organisms are potent enough to evaporate the individual, who is the prime, indispensable, irreducible element."
-Auberon Herbert-
(1838-1906) English author
"Governments do not govern, but merely control the machinery of government, being themselves controlled by the hidden hand."
-Benjamin Disraeli-
(1804-1881) Prime Minister of England, British statesman, novelist
"It's never more important to move slowly and carefully before granting the state new powers than in the wake of tragedies."
-Brian Doherty-
(1968-) American journalist, author, Senior Editor at Reason magazine
Source: Tragic Government, Reason, May, 1997, p 9
"Great nations are simply the operating fronts of behind-the-scenes, vastly ambitious individuals who had become so effectively powerful because of their ability to remain invisible while operating behind the national scenery."
-Buckminster Fuller-
[Richard Buckminster Fuller] (1895-1983) American visionary, designer, architect, poet, author, and inventor
Source: 'Critical Path'
"Watch out for the fellow who talks about putting things in order! Putting things in order always means getting other people under your control."
-Denis Diderot-
(1713-1784)
"The man who craves disciples and wants followers is always more or less of a charlatan. The man of genuine worth and insight wants to be himself; and he wants others to be themselves, also."
-Elbert Hubbard-
(1856-1915)
"Absolute power turns its possessors not into a God but an anti-God. For God turned clay into men, while the absolute despot turns men into clay."
-Eric Hoffer-
(1902-1983) American author, philosopher, awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
"If ever the Time should come, when vain & aspiring Men shall possess the highest Seats in Government, our Country will stand in Need of its experienced Patriots to prevent its Ruin."
-Samuel Adams-
"Presidents don't have power. Their job is to draw attention away from it."
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Best deep state summary...?
"The greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence. In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one could argue, to whom one could present grievances, on whom the pressures of power could be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant."
-Hannah Arendt-
(1906-1975)
German-American political theorist who wrote extensively on totalitarianism
"[It is a basic principle of a tyrant] to unarm his people of weapons, money, and all means whereby they resist his power."
-Sir Walter Raleigh-
(1554-1618)
Source: 3 The Works of Sir Walter Raleigh 22 (T. Birch ed. 1829)
"If an individual is born with the obligation to obey, who is born with the right to command?"
-Tom G. Palmer-
(1956-) Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute
Source: Myths of Individualism, Volume XVIII Number 5 Cato Policy Report p. 12 (September/October 1996).
"Unlimited Power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it."
-William Pitt, Sr.-
(1708-1778) 1st Earl of Chatham, English Statesman, Orator
January 9, 1770
"[T]he State's criminality is nothing new and nothing to be wondered at. It began when the first predatory group of men clustered together and formed the State, and it will continue as long as the State exists in the world, because the State is fundamentally an anti-social institution, fundamentally criminal. The idea that the State originated to serve any kind of social purpose is completely unhistorical. It originated in conquest and confiscation -- that is to say, in crime. It originated for the purpose of maintaining the division of society into an owning-and-exploiting class and a propertyless dependent class -- that is, for a criminal purpose. No State known to history originated in any other manner, or for any other purpose. Like all predatory or parasitic institutions, its first instinct is that of self-preservation. All its enterprises are directed first towards preserving its own life, and, second, towards increasing its own power and enlarging the scope of its own activity. For the sake of this it will, and regularly does, commit any crime which circumstances make expedient."
-Albert Jay Nock-
(1870-1945)
Source: The Criminality of the State, America Mercury Magazine, March, 1939
"Nothing is less productive than to make more efficient what should not be done at all."
-Peter Drucker-
(1909-2005) American writer, management consultant, and self-described “social ecologist.” Widely considered to be the father of “modern management."
"One of the central assumptions of the concept of democracy, perhaps its most central assumption, is that by and large human beings are better judges of their own interests…. The operating maxim of the democratic ideology is, “Whoever wears the shoe knows best where it pinches.”"
-Sidney Hook-
(1902-1989) American Marxist philosopher
Source: Political Power and Personal Freedom, 1959
"Force (is) the vital principle and immediate parent of despotism."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"Is freedom anything else than the right to live as we wish?
Nothing else."
-Epictetus-
(ca 55-135 A.D.) Greek philospher
"Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows."
-George Orwell-
[Eric Arthur Blair] (1903-1950) British author
Source: his book, '1984', 1949
"To freemen, threats are impotent.
[Lat., Nulla enim minantis auctoritas apud liberos est.]"
-Marcus Tullius Cicero-
(106-43 B.C.) Roman Statesman, Philosopher and Orator
"All lawful authority comes from God to the people."
-Constitution of the Irish Free State-
Source: Constitution of the Irish Free State, Preamble, 1922
"Distrust everyone in whom the impulse to punish is powerful."
-Friedrich Nietzsche-
(1844-1900)
Source: Thus Spoke Zarathustra
"My faith is that the only soul a man must save is his own."
-Justice William O. Douglas-
(1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
"It is maintained that a society is free only when dissenting minorities have room to throw their weight around. As a matter of fact, a dissenting minority feels free only when it can impose its will on the majority: what it abominates most is the dissent of the majority."
-Eric Hoffer-
(1902-1983) American author, philosopher, awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
"History has taught us time and again that political power always raises its angry fist when timeless principles are lost. We know that without the scale of 'self-evident truths' grounded in the 'laws of nature and nature's God,' every culture eventually finds itself subject to the rule of the gang or the tyranny of the individual. Recognizing this, scholars of all ages have confidently given their hearts and minds to the words, 'You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.'"
-Everett Piper-
President of Oklahoma Wesleyan University
Source: 'Bethlehem, Not Berkeley, Is the Birthplace of Free Speech,' The Christian Post, Apr 27, 2017
"The Greeks... labored under the delusion that their democracy was a guarantee of peace and plenty, not realizing that unrestrained majority rule always destroys freedom, puts the minority at the mercy of the mob, and works at cross-purposes to the effective use of human energy and individual initiative."
-Henry Grady Weaver-
(1889-1949)
Source: "The Mainspring of Human Progress," 1947
"People demand freedom only when they have no power."
-Friedrich Nietzsche-
(1844-1900)
"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) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: Federalist Paper 79 (regarding payment of Judges)
"Forcing people to be more 'unselfish' creates animosity instead of good will. Trying to control selfish others is a cure worse than the disease. ... In trying to control others, we find ourselves controlled. We point fingers at the dictators, the Communists, the politicians, and the international cartels. We are blithely unaware that our desire to control selfish others creates and sustains them. Like a stone thrown in a quiet pond, our desire to control our neighbors ripples outward, affecting the political course of our community, state, nation, and world. Yet we know not what we do. We attempt to bend our neighbors to our will, sincere in our belief that we are benevolently protecting the world from their folly and short-sightedness. We seek control to create peace and prosperity, not realizing that this is the very means by which war and poverty are propagated. In fighting for our dream without awareness, we become the instruments of its destruction. If we could only see the pattern!"
-Dr. Mary J. Ruwart-
(1949- )
Source: Healing Our World, Introduction.
"Throughout the history of the United States, war has been the primary impetus behind the growth and development of the central state. It has been the lever by which presidents and other national officials have bolstered the power of the state in the face of tenacious popular resistance."
-Bruce D. Porter-
(1952- ) Professor of political science at Brigham Young University
Source: "War and the Rise of the State", 1994
"We recognize the force of the argument that the effects of war under modern conditions may be felt in the economy for years and years, and that if the war power can be used in days of peace to treat all the wounds which war inflicts on our society, it may not only swallow up all other powers of Congress but largely obliterate the Ninth and the Tenth Amendments as well."
-Justice William O. Douglas-
(1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: delivering the opinion of the Supreme Court, Woods v. Cloyd W. Miller Co., 333 U.S. 138, 143-144 (1948)
"Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms [of government] those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"[I]t is a truth which the experience of all ages has attested, that the people are always most in danger, when the means of injuring their rights are in the possession of those of whom they entertain the least suspicion."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: writing as "Publius" in _Federalist No. 25,_ December 21, 1787
"Freedom means freedom from forces and circumstances which would turn man into a thing, which would impose on man the passivity and predictability of matter. By this test, absolute power is the manifestation most inimical to human uniqueness. Absolute power wants to turn people into malleable clay."
-Eric Hoffer-
(1902-1983) American author, philosopher, awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
"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
"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
"Goodness without wisdom always accomplished evil."
-Robert A. Heinlein-
(1907-1988) American writer
Source: "Stranger in a Strange Land"
"Courage without conscience is a wild beast."
-Robert G. Ingersoll-
(1833-1899) American political leader, orator
"In order to rally people, governments need enemies. They want us to be afraid, to hate, so we will rally behind them. And if they do not have a real enemy, they will invent one in order to mobilize us."
-Thích Nhất Hạnh-
"WHY PEOPLE ESPOUSE ANARCHY: Because they believe that kindness is better than cruelty, cooperation is better than conflict, truth is better than lies, reason is better than force, honesty is better than deception, peace is better than war, beauty is better than ugliness, love is better than hatred, wealth is better than poverty, generosity is better than selfishness, progress is better than decline, health is better than sickness, gentleness is better than violence, innocence is better than guilt, wisdom is better than folly, respect is better than contempt, intelligence is better than stupidity, freedom is better than slavery, sanity is better than lunacy, honor is better than treachery, and justice is better than injustice.
WHY PEOPLE ESPOUSE THE STATE: Because they believe that anarchy won’t work or because they are evil."
-Robert Higgs-
"Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable."
-John Kenneth Galbraith-
"The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit."
-Milton Friedman-
"Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor Liberty to purchase power."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
Source: Benjamin Franklin, in the Poor Richard's Almanack of 1738
"Those in power need checks and restraints lest they come to identify the common good for their own tastes and desires, and their continuation in office as essential to the preservation of the nation."
-Justice William O. Douglas-
(1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: We, The Judges, 1956
"Political liberty is nothing else but the diffusion of power."
-Lord Hailsham-
[Quintin McGarel Hogg] (1872-1950) British lawyer and politician
Source: The Case for Conservatism, 1947
"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)
"Vitality springs from diversity -- which makes for real progress so long as there is mutual toleration, based on the recognition that worse may come from an attempt to suppress differences than from acceptance of them. For this reason, the kind of peace that makes progress possible is best assured by the mutual checks created by a balance of forces-alike in the sphere of internal politics and of international relations."
-B. H. Liddell Hart-
(1895-1970) British military historian and strategist
"Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and a house divided against a house falleth."
-Jesus of Nazareth-
Source: The Holy Bible, Luke 11:17
"You know your country is dying when you have to make a distinction between what is moral and ethical, and what is legal."
-John De Armond-
"We must daily decide whether the threats we face are real, whether the solutions we are offered will do any good, whether the problems we're told exist are in fact real problems, or non-problems. Every one of us has a sense of the world, and we all know that this sense is in part given to us by what other people and society tell us; in part generated by our emotional state, which we project outward; and in part by our genuine perceptions of reality. In short, our struggle to determine what is true is the struggle to decide which of our perceptions are genuine, and which are false because they are handed down, or sold to us, or generated by our own hopes and fears."
-Michael Crichton-
"The Bill of Rights was not written to protect governments from trouble. It was written precisely to give the people the constitutional means to cause trouble for governments they no longer trusted."
-Henry Steele Commager-
"Liberty is the luxury of self-discipline, that those nations historically who have failed to discipline themselves have had discipline imposed by others."
-Alistair Cooke-
Source: America
"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
"By giving the government unlimited powers, the most arbitrary rule can be made legal; and in this way a democracy may set up the most complete despotism imaginable."
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
Source: The Road to Serfdom
"The liberty of the individual is the greatest thing of all, it is on this and this alone that the true will of the people can develop."
-Alexander Ivanovich Herzen-
(1812- 1870)
Source: From the Other Shore, 1849
"In questions of science the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual."
-Galileo Galilei-
Astronomer (1564 - 1642)
"The strongest man in the world is he who stands alone."
-Henrik Ibsen-
(1828-1906) Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet
"Constitutions are made of paper; Bayonets are made of steel."
-French Aphorism-
"One sword keeps another in the sheath."
-George Herbert-
(1593-1633) Welsh born English poet, orator and Anglican priest.
Source: Jacula Prudentum, 1651
"For those looking for security, be forewarned that there's nothing more insecure than a political promise."
-Harry Browne-
(1933-2006) American libertarian writer, politician, and free-market investment analyst. Libertarian candidate for US President 1996 & 2000
"You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. Yet in their hearts there is unspoken – unspeakable! – fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts! Words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home, all the more powerful because they are forbidden. These terrify them. A little mouse – a little tiny mouse! – of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic."
-Sir Winston Churchill-
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
"[R]estricting arms to the military and police eviscerates the principle that power should flow from the people to government, and turns the government into a master rather than a servant."
-Robert Dowlut-
General Counsel for the National Rifle Association
Source: Arms: A Right to Self-Defense Against Criminals and Despots, 8 Stanford L. & Policy Rev. 25 (1997).
"Anyone who confuses liberty lovers with nazis or other fascists is waaaayy too stupid (or evil) to deserve respect."
-Bert Rand-
"Power may be at the end of a gun, but sometimes it's also at the end of the shadow or the image of a gun."
-Jean Genet-
"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."
"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 world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth -- that the error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it is cured on one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"'Balanced' is a code for 'denied': a right to free speech that must be 'balanced' against so exhaustive a list of other supposed values means a right that can be exercised only when those in power judge that the speech in question is innocuous to them."
-Ronald Dworkin-
Source: Index on Censorship, March 1997
"Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an excess, that itself will need reforming."
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge-
(1772-1834) English poet, critic, philosopher, and a leader of the British Romantic movement
"Force always attracts men of low morality. "
-Albert Einstein-
(1879-1955) Physicist and Professor, Nobel Prize 1921
"They said it couldn't be done but sometimes it doesn't work out that way."
-Casey Stengel-
[Charles Dillon Stengel] (1890-1975) Legendary baseball manager
"The preservation of freedom is the protective reason for limiting and decentralizing governmental power. But there is also a constructive reason. The great advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science or in literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
Source: "Capitalism and Freedom"
"Collectivism holds that the individual has no rights, that his life and work belong to the group (to 'society,' to the tribe, the state, the nation) and that the group may sacrifice him at its own whim to its own interests. The only way to implement a doctrine of that kind is by means of brute force -- and statism has always been the political corollary of collectivism."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
"Those who believe themselves to be masters of all they survey are mistaken. There is no such thing as absolute power and the delusion that one is in possession of such power constitutes absolute corruption. This delusion leads, resolutely, to the downfall of its adherents."
-Daniel Pouzzner-
"People unfit for freedom -- who cannot do much with it -- are hungry for power. The desire for freedom is an attribute of a 'have' type of self. It says: leave me alone and I shall grow, learn, and realize my capacities. The desire for power is basically an attribute of a 'have not' type of self."
-Eric Hoffer-
(1902-1983) American author, philosopher, awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
"Nothing can be more readily disproved than the old saw, 'You can't keep a good man down.' Most human societies have been beautifully organized to keep good men down."
-John W. Gardner-
(1912-2002) US Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare under President Lyndon Johnson, President of the Carnegie Corporation, founder Common Cause and Independent Sector
"It is not the function of the government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error."
-Justice Robert H. Jackson-
(1892-1954), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: US Supreme Court, American Communications Association v. Douds, 339 U.S. 382, 442 (1950)
"The American public highly overrates its sense of humor. We're great belly laughers and prat fallers, but we never really did have a real sense of humor. Not satire anyway. … When we realize finally that we aren't God's given children, we'll understand satire. Humor is really laughing off a hurt, grinning at misery."
-Bill Mauldin-
I'm offended...!
"Aggression is simply another name for government. Aggression, invasion, government are interchangeable terms. The essence of government is control, or the attempt to control. He who attempts to control another is a governor, an aggressor, an invader; and the nature of such invasion is not changed, whether it be made of the ordinary criminal, or by one man upon all other men, after the manner of an absolute monarch, or by all other men upon one man, after the manner of a modern democracy."
-Benjamin Tucker-
"But remember, Fascism is a right-wing ideology, and capitalist and individualist etc. Because the Left says so. You can't believe those lying fascists who claimed they were socialists!"
-Benito Mussolini-
"Fascism... believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace. War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon peoples who have the courage to meet it... It may be expected that this is will be the century of authority, a century of the Left, a century of Fascism. For the nineteenth century was a century of individualism... It may be expected that this will be a century of collectivism and hence the century of the State."
-Benito Mussolini-
"If the average man had had his way there would probably never have been any state. Even today he resents it, classes death with taxes, and yearns for that government which governs least. If he asks for many laws it is only because he is sure that his neighbor needs them; privately he is an unphilosophical anarchist, and thinks laws in his own case superfluous. In the simplest societies there is hardly any government."
-Will Durant-
"It [the State] has taken on a vast mass of new duties and responsibilities; it has spread out its powers until they penetrate to every act of the citizen, however secret; it has begun to throw around its operations the high dignity and impeccability of a State religion; its agents become a separate and superior caste, with authority to bind and loose, and their thumbs in every pot. But it still remains, as it was in the beginning, the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men. "
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
1926
"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
"Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us?"
-Justice William O. Douglas-
(1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
"Each individual of the society has a right to be protected by it in the enjoyment of his life, liberty, and property, according to standing laws. He is obliged, consequently, to contribute his share to the expense of this protection; and to give his personal service, or an equivalent, when necessary. But no part of the property of any individual can, with justice, be taken from him, or applied to public uses, without his own consent, or that of the representative body of the people. In fine, the people of this commonwealth are not controllable by any other laws than those to which their constitutional representative body have given their consent."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: Thoughts on Government, 1776
"Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are ruined.... O sir, we should have fine times, indeed, if to punish tyrants, it were only sufficient to assemble the people!"
-Patrick Henry-
(1736-1799) US Founding Father
"The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false."
-Paul Johnson-
"I have never met a more dedicated bunch of people than I did working in the union, at every level. The work is difficult and demanding, and very few people would do it if they didn’t believe in its righteousness. However, the conviction that you know what’s best insulates you against reflecting morally on your own actions and it teaches you to begin assessing morality in terms of either the ends justifying the means, or even worse, of mere good intention justifying those means."
-Ben Johnson-
Former president of AFT Vermont and Vermont AFL-CIO
Source: Time for organized labor to end forced dues, August 22, 2017, The Washington Times
"It is a general popular error to suppose the loudest complainers for the public to be the most anxious for its welfare."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
"All of us necessarily hold many casual opinions that are ludicrously wrong simply because life is far too short for us to think through even a small fraction of the topics that we come across."
-Julian Simon-
[Julian Lincoln Simon] (1932-1998) Professor of economics, author, Senior Fellow at the Cato
"One evening, when I was yet in my nurse’s arms, I wanted to touch the tea urn, which was boiling merrily... My nurse would have taken me away from the urn, but my mother said 'Let him touch it.' So I touched it -- and that was my first lesson in the meaning of liberty."
-John Ruskin-
(1819-1900) British author, artist, social critic
Source: The Story of Arachne, 1870
"Of all the inanimate objects, of all men’s creations, books are the nearest to us, for they contain our very thoughts, our ambitions, our indignations, our illusions, our fidelity to truth, and our persistent leaning toward error."
-Joseph Conrad-
(1857-1924)
Source: Notes on Life and Letters
"This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice."
-Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.-
(1841-1935) US Supreme Court Justice, also known as "The Great Dissenter"
Source: Martin Yant, Presumed Guilty: When Innocent People Are Wrongly Convicted 11 (1991) (quoting Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.)
"I am prepared to die, but there is no cause for which I am prepared to kill."
-Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi-
(1869-1948)
"From a comparative perspective, the United States is unusual if not unique in the lack of restraints on freedom of expression. It is also unusual in the range and effectiveness of methods employed to restrain freedom of thought... Where the voice of the people is heard, elite groups must insure their voice says the right things."
-Noam Chomsky-
(1928- ) American linguist and political writer
Source: Index On Censorship, July/August 1986
... and the web hadn't even kicked into gear yet...
"There is no real wealth but the labor of man."
-Percy Bysshe Shelley-
(1792-1822) British poet
"The United States was supposed to have a limited government because the founders knew government power attracts demagogues and despots as surely as horse manure attracts horseflies."
-Rick Gaber-
Libertarian writer
"There are…certain freedoms that are like circuses. Their very existence, so long as they are individual and enjoyed chiefly individually as by spectators, diverts men’s mind from the loss of other, more fundamental, social and economic and political rights."
-Robert Nisbet-
(1913-1996) American sociologist, author
Source: Twilight of Authority, 1975
"The main vice of capitalism is the uneven distribution of prosperity. The main vice of socialism is the even distribution of misery."
-Sir Winston Churchill-
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
"When we have begun to take charge of our lives, to own ourselves, there is no longer any need to ask permission of someone."
-George O'Neil-
(1896-1940) American poet, playwright, novelist and film writer
"Neither current events nor history show that the majority rule, or ever did rule."
-Jefferson Davis-
(1808-1889) President of the Confederate States of America (1861-1865)
"[When] Men are not allowed to think freely
about chemistry and biology,
why should they be allowed to think freely
about political philosophy?"
-Auguste Comte-
[Isidore Marie Auguste François Xavier Comte] (1798-1857) French philosopher, was the founder of Positivism and Sociology
Source: The Positive Philosophy, 1830-40
"From that point on, the extraordinary system of spies and informers which has played an important part in the political work of the French state into our own time took shape. (Sartine, who became lieutenant general de police in 1759, is supposed to have said to Louis XV, 'Sire, when three people are chatting in the street one of them is surely my man.') Eighteenth-century police manuals like those of Colquhoun in England or Lemaire in France are no less than general treatises on the government's full repertoire of domestic regulation, coercion, and surveillance."
-Charles Tilly-
Source: The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), p.60.
"Some informants spied on their neighbors because they actually believed the propaganda… Some denounced their enemies in order to settle personal grudges. Some were driven by their own fears to attempt to deflect attention away from themselves…Some were motivated by the sense of power turning in their neighbors gave them."
-Kort E. Patterson
Source: Port of Call, August/September 1999
"The liberty of the press is most generally approved when it takes liberties with the other fellow, and leaves us alone."
-Edgar Watson Howe-
(1853-1937)
Source: Country Town Sayings, 1911
"The majority of us are for free speech when it deals with subjects concerning which we have no intense feelings."
-Edmund B. Chaffee-
(1887-1936)
"If you believe everything you read, you better not read."
-Japanese Proverb-
"Our job is to give people not what they want, but what we decide they ought to have."
-Richard Salant-
(1914-1993) former President of CBS News
"News reporters are certainly liberal and left of center."
-Walter Cronkite-
former CBS News anchor
"The news is like a ship. If you take hands off the wheel, it pulls hard to the left."
-Roger Ailes-
(1940-2017) American television executive. Chairman and CEO of Fox News
Source: Fox News Is Dropping Its ‘Fair & Balanced’ Slogan, by Gabriel Sherman, New York Magazine, June 14, 2017
"There's nothing so absurd that if you repeat it often enough, people will believe it."
-William James-
(1842-1910) The father of modern Psychology
"Terrorism is the best political weapon for nothing drives people harder than a fear of sudden death."
-Adolf Hitler-
(1889-1945) German Nazi Dictator
"Note the difference between a right and a privilege. A right, in the abstract, is a fact; it is not a thing to be given, established, or conferred; it is. Of the exercise of a right power may deprive me; of the right itself, never. Privilege, in the abstract, does not exist; there is no such thing. Rights recognized, privilege is destroyed. But, in the practical, the moment you admit a supreme authority, you have denied rights. Practically the supremacy has all the rights, and no matter what the human race possesses, it does so merely at the caprice of that authority."
-Voltairine de Cleyre-
"While birds can fly, only humans can argue.
Argument is the affirmation of our being.
It is the principal instrument of human intercourse.
Without argument the species would perish.
As a subtle suggestion, it is the means by which we aid another.
As a warning, it steers us from danger.
As exposition, it teaches.
As an expression of creativity, it is the gift of ourselves.
As a protest, it struggles for justice.
As a reasoned dialogue, it resolves disputes.
As an assertion of self, it engenders respect.
As an entreaty of love, it expresses our devotion.
As a plea, it generates mercy.
As charismatic oration it moves multitudes and changes history.
We must argue -- to help, to warn, to lead, to love, to create,
to learn, to enjoy justice, to be."
-Gerry Spence-
Lawyer and author
Source: from his book, How To Argue And Win Every Time
"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
"Truth has always been found to promote the best interests of mankind."
-Percy Bysshe Shelley-
(1792-1822) British poet
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-
(1803-1882) English writer and lexicographer
Source: Essays. First Series. "Self-Reliance," 1841
"Freedom of speech means that you shall not do something to people either for the views they have, or the views they express, or the words they speak or write."
-Hugo L. Black-
(1886-1971) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: 1963
"The people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, or to publish their sentiments; and the freedom of the press, as one of the great bulwarks of liberty, shall be inviolable."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: First draft of what became the First Amendment, 8 June 1789
"I am for the First Amendment from the first word to the last. I believe it means what it says."
-Justice Hugo L. Black-
(1886-1971) US Supreme Court Justice
"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 … 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."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: Farewall Address
"Our republic and its press will rise and fall together."
-Joseph Pulitzer-
(1847-1911) Hungarian-born American newspaper publisher after whom the Pulitzer Prize was named.
"Ego trips by coteries of self-exalting people are treated in the media as idealism, rather than the petty tyranny it is."
-Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
"We are going to impose our agenda on the coverage by dealing with the issues and subjects we choose to deal with."
-Richard M. Cohan-
Senior Producer of CBS political news
"The news media in general are liberals."
-Barbara Walters-
"The New York Times is deliberately pitched to the liberal point of view."
-Herman Dismore-
foreign editor of the N.Y. Times from 1950 to 1960
"The efficiency of the truly national leader consists primarily in preventing the division of the attention of a people, and always in concentrating it on a single enemy."
-Adolf Hitler-
(1889-1945) German Nazi Dictator
Source: Mein Kampf, 1925-27
"Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
"Republicans campaign like Libertarians and govern like Democrats."
-Harry Browne-
(1933-2006) American libertarian writer, politician, and free-market investment analyst. Libertarian candidate for US President 1996 & 2000
"Totalitarianism spells simplification: an enormous reduction in the variety of aims, motives, interests, human types, and, above all, in the categories and units of power."
-Eric Hoffer-
(1902-1983) American author, philosopher, awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
Source: The Ordeal of Change, 1964
"A little government involvement is just as dangerous as a lot -- because the first leads inevitably to the second."
-Harry Browne-
(1933-2006) American libertarian writer, politician, and free-market investment analyst. Libertarian candidate for US President 1996 & 2000
"The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact."
-Justice Robert H. Jackson-
(1892-1954), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Terminiello v. City of Chicago (1949), dissenting in twenty-four page decision.
"Under the privilege of the First Amendment many, many ridiculous things are said."
-John Kenneth Galbraith-
(1908-2006) Canadian-born economist, Harvard professor
Source: PBS Firing Line, 9 December 1989
"Wherever there’s a disagreement among Republicans, I’m for one of those disagreements. I’m all for it. The president’s with Russia? I’m with John McCain and Lindsey Graham, I’m for NATO! Why? [It’s a] wedge. Wedges have to be schisms, schisms have to be divides."
-Rahm Emanuel-
Source: Speaking to an audience at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business in California, 02/06/2017
"Few things are more irritating than when someone who is wrong is also very effective in making his point.”
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910)
"The more a government strives to curtail freedom of speech, the more obstinately is it resisted; not indeed by the avaricious … but by those whom good education, sound morality, and virtue have rendered more free. Men in general are so constituted that there is nothing they will endure with so little patience as that views which they believe to be true should be counted crimes against the laws. … Under such circumstances they do not think it disgraceful, but most honorable, to hold the laws in abhorrence, and to refrain from no action against the government."
-Tractatus Theologico-Politicus-
"The constitutional right of free speech has been declared to be the same in peace and war. In peace, too, men may differ widely as to what loyalty to our country demands, and an intolerant majority, swayed by passion or by fear, may be prone in the future, as it has been in the past, to stamp as disloyal opinions with which it disagrees."
-Justice Louis D. Brandeis-
(1856-1941) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: Schaefer v. U. S., 1920
"Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation, must begin by subduing Freedom of Speech... Without Freedom of Thought, there can be no such Thing as Wisdom; and no such Thing as publick Liberty, without Freedom of Speech..."
-Cato-
John Trenchard (1662-1723) & Thomas Gordon (169?-1750)
Source: Letters, 1720
"But this is slavery, not to speak one’s thought."
-Euripides-
(480-406 B.C.)
Source: The Phoenician Women, 411-409 B.C.
"A free press stands as one of the great interpreters between the government and the people. To allow it to be fettered is to fetter ourselves."
-George Sutherland-
(1862-1942) U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Grosjean v. American Press Co., 1936
"To speak his thoughts is every freeman's right,
in peace and war, in council and in fight."
-Homer-
(sometime between 1050-850 BC) legendary Greek epic poet
Source: The Iliad
"There is only one remedy for ignorance and thoughtlessness, and that is literacy. Millions and millions of children would today stand in no need of sex education or consumer education or anti-racism education or any of those fake educations, if they had had in the first place 'an' education."
-Richard Mitchell-
(1929-2002) Professor at Glassboro State College, NJ, author, founder and publisher of The Underground Grammarian
Source: The Underground Grammarian
"Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between church and State."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: letter to a Committee of the Danbury Baptist Association, Connecticut, January 1st 1802
"The bill for establishing religious freedom, the principles of which had, to a certain degree, been enacted before, I had drawn in all the latitude of reason & right. It still met with opposition; but, with some mutilations in the preamble, it was finally passed; and a singular proposition proved that it's protection of opinion was meant to be universal. Where the preamble declares that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed, by inserting the word 'Jesus Christ,' so that it should read 'a departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion.' The insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of it's protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Autobiography, 1821
"Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus."
-Michael Crichton-
(1942-2008) American author, producer, director, and screenwriter
"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-
(1933- )
Source: "Inventing Reality" (1986)
"The surest way to ruin a promising career in economics, whether professional or academic, is to venture into the 'cranks and crackpots' world of suggestions for reform of the financial system."
-Michael Rowbotham-
British economist
"It is largely because civilization enables us constantly to profit from knowledge which we individually do not possess and because each individual's use of his particular knowledge may serve to assist others unknown to him in achieving their ends that men as members of civilized society can pursue their individual ends so much more successfully than they could alone."
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
"Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people, being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties, and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in the various parts of the country, and among the different orders of people, it shall be the duty of legislators and magistrates… to cherish the interest of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: Thoughts on Government, 1776
Compare with NH Constitution, [Art.] 83. [Encouragement of Literature, etc.; Control of Corporations, Monopolies, etc.]
Knowledge and learning, generally diffused through a community, being essential to the preservation of a free government; and spreading the opportunities and advantages of education through the various parts of the country, being highly conducive to promote this end; it shall be the duty of the legislators and magistrates, in all future periods of this government, to cherish the interest of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries and public schools, to encourage private and public institutions, rewards, and immunities for the promotion of agriculture, arts, sciences, commerce, trades, manufactures, and natural history of the country ...
June 2, 1784
"Contrary to everything our rulers tell us, and everything that our schoolteachers are teaching the children of this nation, the biggest threat to the lives and well-being of the American people lies not with some foreign government. The biggest threat to the American people today lies with the United States government. And while gun ownership stands as a barrier to potential, Nazi-like behavior, the 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. It entails the repeal of all laws that permit such conduct. And it means the privatization of most of the bureaucrats who work for the U.S. government."
-Jacob G. Hornberger-
Source: The Nazi Mind-Set in America, THE TYRANNY OF GUN CONTROL, p.63 (Future of Freedom Foundation 1997).
"In the hands of the state, compulsory public education becomes a tool for political control and manipulation -- a prime instrument for the thought police of the society. And precisely because every child passes through the same indoctrination process -- learning the same 'official history,' the same 'civic virtues,' the same lessons of obedience and loyalty to the state -- it becomes extremely difficult for the independent soul to free himself from the straightjacket of the ideology and values the political authorities wish to imprint upon the population under its jurisdiction. For the communists, it was the class struggle and obedience to the Party and Comrade Stalin; for the fascists, it was worship of the nation -- state and obedience to the Duce; for the Nazis, it was race purity and obedience to the Fuhrer. The content has varied, but the form has remained the same. Through the institution of compulsory state education, the child is to be molded like wax into the shape desired by the state and its educational elite. We should not believe that because ours is a freer, more democratic society, the same imprinting procedure has not occurred even here, in America. Every generation of school-age children has imprinted upon it a politically correct ideology concerning America's past and the sanctity of the role of the state in society. Practically every child in the public school system learns that the 'robber barons' of the 19th century exploited the common working man; that unregulated capitalism needed to be harnessed by enlightened government regulation beginning in the Progressive era at the turn of the century; that wild Wall Street speculation was a primary cause of the Great Depression; that only Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal saved America from catastrophe; and that American intervention in foreign wars has been necessary and inevitable, with the United States government required to be a global leader and an occasional world policeman."
-Richard M. Ebeling-
(1950- ) Author, Professor of Economics, Hillsdale College
Source: Introduction to 'Separating School & State: How to Liberate America's Families' (Sheldon Richman, 1994)
"The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good."
-Dr. Samuel Johnson-
(1709-1784)
"We must protect the freedoms of even those who hate us, and that we may find objectionable. If we fail in this task, we become victims of the precedents we create."
-Judge Robert Doumar-
(1930-) Senior U.S. District Judge of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia
"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
"I doubt if the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and for power -- power to oppress others. The oppressed want above all to imitate their oppressors; they want to retaliate."
-Eric Hoffer-
(1902-1983) American author, philosopher, awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
Source: quoted in Eric Hoffer: An American Odyssey (Calvin Tompkins), 1968
"We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."
-Viktor Frankl-
(1905-1997) former prisoner of a Nazi concentration camp
"Many academicians and self-styled intellectuals, with a habitually arrogant and condescending attitude, treat the rest of the world with contempt. These so-called 'intelligentsia' congratulate themselves for, not only having high IQs and lots of education in their particular fields, but for having achieved the allegedly momentous insight that free-market capitalism and pure altruism are ultimately incompatible (duh). Yet they're still too damned stupid to realize, and too damned ignorant to acknowledge, that altruism is NOT the only moral code available to mankind. (It is, in fact, the bloodiest and most regressive one of all). This stunted thinking has resulted in their committing the intellectual atrocity of rejecting the capitalism and freedom instead of the altruism and coercion."
-Rick Gaber-
Libertarian writer
"It is sometimes said that toleration should be refused to the intolerant. In practice this would destroy it... The only remedy for dogmatism and lies is toleration and the greatest possible liberty of expression."
-Joyce Cary-
(1888-1957)
Source: Power in Men, 1939
"The power of the Right is principle, and the principle of the Left is power. Understand this and you will understand the basis of modern politics."
-J.T. Young-
"The village atheist has the right to be heard; he has no right to be heeded. While he has a right not to have his own children indoctrinated in what he believes are false and foolish teachings, he has no right to dictate what other children may be taught."
-Patrick J. Buchanan-
(1938- ) American politician, author, syndicated columnist and broadcaster
"In necessariis unitas, in dubiis libertas, in omnibus caritas."
(Unity in things Necessary, Liberty in things Unnecessary, and Charity in all.)
-Rupertus Meldenius-
Peter Meiderlin
Source: Paraenesis votiva pro Pace Ecclesiae ad Theologos Augustanae Confessionis, Auctore Ruperto Meldenio Theologo (c. 1627)
"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
"Welfare rights are pseudo-rights: They rely on the force of law to take private property for the use of others without compensation and without consent. Public charity is forced charity; it is not a virtue but a vice."
-James A. Dorn-
V.P. for academic affairs at the Cato Institute, director of Cato’s project on Civil Society
Source: Wrapped in the pretense of morality, The Washington Times, August 29, 1995
"Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being."
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe-
(1749-1832)
"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.
"[It is not the purpose nor right of Congress]
to attend to what generosity and humanity require,
but to what the Constitution and their duty require."
-William Branch Giles-
(1762-1830) American statesman, US Senator and Congressman from Virginia, 24th Governor of Virginia
Source: 1796, spoken on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives concerning a proposed relief measure for fire victims
"Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
"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
"Peace if possible, but truth at any rate."
-Martin Luther-
(1483-1546) Christian reformer
"Blessed are the peacemakers:
for they shall be called the children of God."
-Jesus of Nazareth-
Source: The Holy Bible, Matthew 5:9
"Practical religion consists in doing good: and the only way of serving God is that of endeavoring to make His creation happy. All preaching that has not this for its object is nonsense and hypocrisy."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
"To love truth for truth's sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues."
-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.
"Honesty demands that we boldly pursue ideas tested by time, defended by reason, validated by experience, and confirmed by revelation. We will only find truth when we place our confidence in it and not in ourselves. We will only learn when we love truth enough to measure all ideas with a measuring rod outside of those things being measured and are willing to discard those ideas we find to be "intolerable," inferior, and useless."
-Everett Piper-
President of Oklahoma Wesleyan University
Source: 'Bethlehem, Not Berkeley, Is the Birthplace of Free Speech,' The Christian Post, Apr 27, 2017
"Tolerance is a better guarantee of freedom than brotherly love; for a man may love his brother so much that he feels himself thereby appointed his brother’s keeper."
-Everett Dean Martin-
(1880-1941)
Source: Liberty, 1930
"Once one assumes an attitude of intolerance, there is no knowing where it will take one. Intolerance, someone has said, is violence to the intellect and hatred is violence to the heart."
-Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi-
(1869-1948)
1942
"There are different forms of anarchy and different currents in it. I must, first say very simply what anarchy I have in view. By anarchy I mean first an absolute rejection of violence. Hence I cannot accept either nihilists or anarchists who choose violence as a means of action."
-Jacques Ellul-
"To bargain freedom for security is the devil's bargain. Having made the bargain, one enjoys neither freedom nor security."
-Gerry Spence-
"I know that it can be very easy, under the intensive pressures of a campaign, for even well-intentioned people to fall into shady tactics — to rationalize this on the grounds that what is at stake is of such importance to the Nation that the end justifies the means. And both of our great parties have been guilty of such tactics in the past. In recent years, however, the campaign excesses that have occurred on all sides have provided a sobering demonstration of how far this false doctrine can take us. The lesson is clear: America, in its political campaigns, must not again fall into the trap of letting the end, however great that end is, justify the means. I urge the leaders of both political parties, I urge citizens, all of you, everywhere, to join in working toward a new set of standards, new rules and procedures to ensure that future elections will be as nearly free of such abuses as they possibly can be made. This is my goal. I ask you to join in making it America's goal."
-Richard Nixon-
"There are two things which cannot be attacked in front: ignorance and narrow-mindedness. They can only be shaken by the simple development of the contrary qualities. They will not bear discussion."
-John Dalberg-Acton-
1st Baron Acton
"Free inquiry entails recognition of civil liberties as integral to its pursuit, that is, a free press, freedom of communication, the right to organize opposition parties and to join voluntary associations, and freedom to cultivate and publish the fruits of scientific, philosophical, artistic, literary, moral and religious freedom."
-Paul Kurtz-
Source: “A Secular Humanist Declaration,” in On The Barricades, 1989
"Public Choice theory, if nothing else, has taught economists to consider the state as it is, not as it should be in a dream world: the state is a potential tyrant, not a benevolent God."
-Pierre Lemieux-
"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
"I have accepted a seat in the House of Representatives, and thereby have consented to my own ruin, to your ruin, and to the ruin of our children. I give you this warning that you may prepare your mind for your fate."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: Letter to Benjamin Rush, 4 April 1809
Oh, just wait until he's President...
"The general [federal] government will tend to monarchy, which will fortify itself from day to day, instead of working its own cures."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Letter to George Washington, Philadelphia, May 23, 1792
"All over the Union, people are coming to feel that they have no control over the course of affairs... ‘We vote; we are offered the platform we want; we elect the men who stand on that platform; and we get absolutely nothing.’ So they begin to ask: ‘What is the use of voting? We know that the machines of both parties are subsidized by the same persons, and therefore it is useless to turn in either direction.’ "
-Woodrow Wilson-
And he was sublimely good with that.
"We Americans have no commission from God to police the world."
-Benjamin Harrison-
(1833-1901) 23rd US President
"[S]ince the substitution of an industrial for the agricultural order of society and the conquest of the industrial by the financial, the government of the Western nations, whether monarchical or republican, had passed into the invisible hands of a plutocracy, international in power and grasp. It was, I venture to suggest, this semioccult power which, automatically, rather than calculatedly, pushed the mass of the American people into the cauldron [of World War I]."
-Major General J.F.C. Fuller-
[John Frederick Charles Fuller] (1878-1966) British Army officer, military historian, strategist
Source: Decisive Battles of the U.S.A., 1776-1918, (1942) p.396
"Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb."
-Nadine Gordimer-
(1923-) South African writer, political activist, Nobel Prize in Literature (1991)
"Foreign influence is truly the Grecian horse to a republic. We cannot be too careful to exclude its influence."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: Pacificus, No. 6, July 17, 1793
"Force without wisdom falls of its own weight."
-Horace-
[Quintus Horatius Flaccus] (65-8BC) Roman poet
Source: Odes
"Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves, therefore, are its only safe depositories."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"Righteousness is easy in retrospect."
-Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.-
(1917-2007) Author, historian
"“The power of morality is the greatest of all intellectual powers -– and mankind’s tragedy lies in the fact that the vicious moral code men have accepted destroys them by means of the best within them.”"
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
"How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within oneself? There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light."
-Barry Lopez-
(1945-) American author, essayist, writer
Source: Arctic Dreams
"He who says there is no such thing as an honest man, you may be sure is himself a knave."
-George Berkeley-
(1685-1753) Irish philosopher, known as Bishop Berkeley (Bishop of Cloyne)
"The liar’s punishment is not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else."
-George Bernard Shaw-
(1856-1950) Irish comic dramatist
"The purest treasure mortal times afford Is spotless reputation."
-William Shakespeare-
(1564-1616) Playwright
"Goodness is beauty in the best estate."
-Christopher Marlowe-
(c.1564-1593) English playwright, poet and translator of the Elizabethan era, known as Kit Marlowe
"Conscience is, in most, an anticipation of the opinion of others."
-Henry Taylor-
"Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910)
"Dogma demand authority, rather than intelligent thought, as the source of opinion; it requires persecution of heretics and hostility to unbelievers; it asks of its disciples that they should inhibit natural kindness in favor of systematic hatred."
-Bertrand Russell-
(1872-1970) Philosopher, educator
"[T]hough of all poses a moral pose is the most offensive, still to have a pose at all is something."
-Oscar Wilde-
(1854-1900) Irish poet and playwright
Source: The Critic as Artist, 1890
"It is incredible that only idiots are absolutely sure of salvation. It is incredible that the more brain you have the less your chance is. There can be no danger in honest thought, and if the world ever advances beyond what it is to-day, it must be led by men who express their real opinions."
-Robert G. Ingersoll-
(1833-1899) American political leader, orator
Source: The Great Infidels (1881)
"Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are."
-George Santayana-
[Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás] (1863-1952) Spanish-born philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist
Source: The Life of Reason, 1905
"If we are ever in doubt about what to do, it is a good rule to ask ourselves what we shall wish on the morrow that we had done."
-John Lubbock-
(1834-1913) English naturalist, banker, statesman
"There is no limit to what you can accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
Source: Sign on his desk
"I have a dream that one day
this nation will rise up and
live out the true meaning of its creed:
'We hold these truths to be self-evident:
that all men are created equal.' ...
I have a dream that my four little children
will one day live in a nation where
they will not be judged by the color of their skin
but by the content of their character.
I have a dream today."
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-
(1929-1968), US civil rights leader
Source: Speech delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. on August 28, 1963.
"The limitation of riots, moral questions aside, is that they cannot win and their participants know it. Hence, rioting is not revolutionary but reactionary because it invites defeat. It involves an emotional catharsis, but it must be followed by a sense of futility."
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-
(1929-1968), US civil rights leader
Source: The Trumpet of Conscience
"The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges. But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred."
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-
(1929-1968), US civil rights leader
Source: Speech delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. on August 28, 1963.
"Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens — and real diseases are useful material. Epidemic diseases usually elicit a call to ban the entry of foreigners, immigrants. And xenophobic propaganda has always depicted immigrants as bearers of disease… Such is the extraordinary potency and efficacy of the plague metaphor: it allows a disease to be regarded both as something incurred by vulnerable "others" and as (potentially) everyone's disease."
-Susan Sontag-
"Between a balanced republic and a democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos."
-Chief Justice John Marshall-
"Men since the beginning of time have sought peace. Various methods through the ages have been attempted to devise an international process to prevent or settle disputes between nations. From the very start workable methods were found in so far as individual citizens were concerned, but the mechanics of an instrumentality of larger international scope have never been successful. Military alliances, balances of power, Leagues of Nations, all in turn failed, leaving the only path to be by way of the crucible of war. The utter destructiveness of war now blocks out this alternative. We have had our last chance. If we will not devise some greater and more equitable system, Armageddon will be at our door."
-Douglas MacArthur-
"It is the aim of public life to arrange that all forms of power are entrusted, so far as possible, to men who effectively consent to be bound by the obligation towards all human beings which lies upon everyone, and who understand the obligation. Law is the quality of the permanent provisions for making this aim effective."
-Simone Weil-
"Many of those who attack capitalism know very well that their situation under any other economic system will be less favorable. Nevertheless, with full knowledge of this fact, they advocate a reform, e.g., socialism, because they hope that the rich, whom they envy, will also suffer under it."
-Ludwig von Mises-
(1881-1973) Economist and social philosopher
"In an ironic sense, Karl Marx was right. We are witnessing today a great revolutionary crisis -- a crisis where the demands of the economic order are colliding directly with those of the political order. But the crisis is happening not in the free, non-Marxist West, but in the home of Marxism-Leninism, the Soviet Union.... [Communism will be] left on the ash heap of history."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
"President Vladimir Putin could never have imagined anyone so ignorant or so willing to destroy their people like Obama much less seeing millions vote for someone like Obama. They read history in America don't they? Alas, the schools in the U.S. were conquered by the Communists long ago and history was revised thus paving the way for their Communist presidents."
-Xavier Lerma-
Russian columnist for Pravda
Source: Obama's Soviet Mistake, Pravda, 19.11.2012
"The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under the name of 'liberalism' they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without knowing how it happened."
-Norman Thomas-
(1884-1968) six-time U.S. Presidential candidate for the Socialist Party of America
Source: 1948 - from an interview during the presidential campaign,
[Ed. note: Norman Thomas and Gus Hall, the U.S. Communist Party Candidate, both quit American politics, agreeing that the Republican and Democratic parties had adopted every plank on the Communist/Socialist and they no longer had an alternate party platform on which to run.]
"Basically National Socialism and Marxism are the same."
-Adolf Hitler-
(1889-1945) German Nazi Dictator
Source: Speech, 1941
"Professionalism implies knowledge based in evidence, not in authority. Such lines are blurred in the era of identity politics and the normalization of pseudo-disciplines such as Gender Studies, Black Studies, Queer Studies, Fat Studies, Disability Studies, Chicano Studies and White Studies and Indigenous Studies, all of which are taught based on the “authority” of Marxism, and all of whose primary purpose is to demonize “oppressors” – the “patriarchy,” white “colonialists” and the U.S. in general – and to recruit activists for organized perpetuation of the identity grievance industry."
-Barabara Kay
Source: The Left’s Siege of Our Universities (2017)
"There had been many things I had not really understood. I had regarded the Communist Party as a poor man’s party, and thought the presence of certain men of wealth within it accidental. I now saw this was no accident. I regarded the Party as a monolithic organization with the leadership in the National Committee and the National Board. Now I saw this was only a facade placed there by the movement to create the illusion of the poor man’s party; it was in reality a device to control the “common man” they so raucously championed."
-Dr. Bella Dodd-
(1904-1969) head of the New York State Teachers Union , member of the Communist Party of America (CPUSA) in the 1930s and 1940s, later a vocal anti-communist
Source: School of Darkness, Chapter 16 (1954)
"Capitalism and communism stand at opposite poles. Their essential difference is this:
The communist seeing the rich man and his fine home says, “No man should have so much.”
The capitalist seeing the same thing says, “All men should have as much.” "
-Phelps Adams-
(1903-1991) Chief Washington correspondent for The New York Sun (1928-50), adminstrative vice president for United States Steel (1950-67)
"Man exists for his own sake and not to add a laborer to the State."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-
(1803-1882)
Source: Journal, 1839
"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
"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
"If you depart from moral absolutes, you go into a bottomless pit.
Communism and Naziism were catastrophic evils which both derived from moral relativism.
Their differences were minor compared to their similarities."
-Paul Johnson-
Historian
"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."
-Sir Winston Churchill-
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
November 21, 1943
"The path we’re embarked upon, in the name of good, is a familiar one. The unspeakable horrors of Nazism, Stalinism, and Maoism did not begin in the ‘30s and ‘40s with the men usually associated with those names. Those horrors were simply the end result of a long evolution of ideas leading to the consolidation of power in central government in the name of 'social justice.' It was decent but misguided Germans, who would have cringed at the thought of extermination and genocide, who built the Trojan Horse for Hitler to take over. We Americans promote disrespect for our Constitution, rule of law and private property in our pursuit of 'social justice.' But the scum that rises to the top has an agenda of command and control that’s leading toward totalitarianism. And, incidentally, it’s no coincidence that most of those at the top are lawyers -- people with a special, seemingly tutored, contempt for our Constitution and rule of law."
-Walter E. Williams-
(1936- ) Columnist, Professor of Economics at George Mason University
Source: Conservative Chronicle, September 20, 1995
"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
"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
"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")
"The maxim, that governments ought to train the people in the way in which they should go, sounds well. But is there any reason for believing that a government is more likely to lead the people in the right way than the people to fall into the right way of themselves?"
-Thomas Babington Macaulay-
(1800-1859) [Lord Macaulay] 1st Baron Macaulay, British historian
Source: "Southey's Colloquies on Society" par. SC.60
"When you run in debt; you give to another power over your liberty."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
"With the exception only of the period of the gold standard, practically all governments of history have used their exclusive power to issue money to defraud and plunder the people."
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
"A power has risen up in the government greater than the people themselves, consisting of many and various powerful interests, combined in one mass, and held together by the cohesive power of the vast surplus in banks."
-John C. Calhoun-
(1782-1850) American statesman
June 27, 1836
Source: http://www.devvy.com/9612.html
"If thou lend money to any of my people that is poor by thee, thou shalt not be to him an usurer, neither shalt thou lay upon him usury."
-The Bible-
Source: Exodus 22:25
"Take no usury of him, or increase... thou shalt not give him thy money upon usury."
-The Bible-
Source: Leviticus 25:36-37
"Unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon usury: That the Lord thy God bless thee."
-The Bible-
Source: Deuteronomy 23:20
"A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves."
-Bertrand de Jouvenel-
(1903-1987)
"Only a debt-backed system of paper money could finance the great wars, the social improvements and the fevered dreams of the 20th century."
-Brian Maher-
Managing Editor, The Daily Reckoning
Source: June 10, 2017, "Debt-Based Money Corrodes Society"
"Those who swallow down usury cannot arise except as one whom Satan has prostrated by his touch does rise. That is because they say, trading is only like usury; and Allah has allowed trading and forbidden usury. To whomsoever then the admonition has come from his Lord, then he desists, he shall have what is already passed, and his affairs are in the hands of Allah; and whoever returns to it - these are the inmates of the fire; they shall abide in it..."
-Qur'an-
Source: From the Qur'an, Surah Al-Baqarah
"If the legislature clearly misinterprets a constitutional provision, the frequent repitition of the wrong will not create a right."
-Amos v. Mosley-
Source: Amos v. Mosley, 74 Fla. 555; 77 So. 619.
"Economic necessity cannot justify a disregard of cardinal constitutional guarantee."
-Riley v. Carter-
Source: Riley v. Carter, 165 Okal. 262; 25 P. 2d 666; 79 ALR 1018.
"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 whole secret of existence is to have no fear.
Never fear what will become of you, depend on no one.
Only the moment you reject all help are you freed."
-Buddha-
[Gautama Siddharta] (563 - 483 BC), Hindu Prince, founder of Buddhism
"The average man does not want to be free.
He simply wants to be safe."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"Those who created this country chose freedom. With all of its dangers. And do you know the riskiest part of that choice they made? They actually believed that we could be trusted to make up our own minds in the whirl of differing ideas. That we could be trusted to remain free, even when there were very, very seductive voices – taking advantage of our freedom of speech – who were trying to turn this country into the kind of place where the government could tell you what you can and cannot do."
-Nat Hentoff
(1925-2017)American historian, novelist, jazz and country music critic, and syndicated columnist
Source: The Day They Came To Arrest The Book, 1982
"Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first."
-Ronald Reagan-
"Suppose Germany had developed two bombs before we had any bombs. And suppose Germany had dropped one bomb, say, on Rochester and the other on Buffalo, and then having run out of bombs she would have lost the war. Can anyone doubt that we would then have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and that we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them? But, again, don't misunderstand me. The only conclusion we can draw is that governments acting in a crisis are guided by questions of expediency, and moral considerations are given very little weight, and that America is no different from any other nation in this respect."
-Leó Szilárd-
"Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."
-Abraham Lincoln-
All ya had to do was stop violating your oath and prosecuting it, Abe. That's on you...
"If we can cultivate in the world the idea that aggressive war-making is the way to the prisoner's dock rather than the way to honors, we will have accomplished something toward making the peace more secure."
-Robert H. Jackson-
"It is sufficiently obvious, that persons and property are the two great subjects on which Governments are to act; and that the rights of persons, and the rights of property, are the objects, for the protection of which Government was instituted. These rights cannot well be separated."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Speech at the Virginia Convention, December 2, 1829
"When people put their ballots in the boxes, they are, by that act, inoculated against the feeling that the government is not theirs. They then accept, in some measure, that its errors are their errors, its aberrations their aberrations, that any revolt will be against them. It's a remarkably shrewd and rather conservative arrangement when one thinks of it."
-John Kenneth Galbraith-
Source: The Age Of Uncertainty (1977), Chapter 12, p. 330.
Every individual has the right to use force for lawful self-defense. It is for this reason that the collective force -- which is only the organized combination of the individual forces -- may lawfully be used for the same purpose; and it cannot be used legitimately for any other purpose."
-Frédéric Bastiat-
The Law
"It is not true that the function of law is to regulate our consciences, our ideas, our wills, our education, our opinions, our work, our trade, our talents, or our pleasures. The function of law is to protect the free exercise of these rights, and to prevent any person from interfering with the free exercise of these same rights by any other person."
-Frédéric Bastiat-
The Law
"You jus' may be great at hangin' paper around the big cities, but us country boys is not entirely brainless. When it comes to the law, nothin' is understood."
-Dragline-
Cool Hand Luke
"Freedom of the press is perhaps the freedom that has suffered the most from the gradual degradation of the idea of liberty."
-Albert Camus-
(1913-1960) French Algerian author
Source: Resistance, Rebellion and Death, 1961
"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalistic System was to debauch the currency... Lenin was certainly right. 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 can diagnose."
-John Maynard Keynes-
(1883-1946) British economist
Source: The Economic Consequences of the Peace, 1920, page 235
"Politics is war without bloodshed
while war is politics with bloodshed."
-Mao Tse-Tung-
Premier of China (1893 - 1976)
"If it's a despot you would dethrone, see first that his throne erected within you is destroyed."
-Khalil Gibran-
(1883-1931) Lebanese-American philosophical essayist, novelist, mystical poet, and artist
Source: 1923
"Liberty will not descend to a people, a people must raise themselves to liberty; it is a blessing that must be earned before it can be enjoyed."
-Charles Caleb Colton-
(1780-1832) English cleric, writer and collector
"Truth: the most deadly weapon ever discovered by humanity.
Capable of destroying entire perceptual sets, cultures, and realities.
Outlawed by all governments everywhere.
Possession is normally punishable by death."
-John Gilmore-
(1935-2016) American true crime writer, author of Hollywood memoirs, and novelist
"Of all the tyrannies on human kind the worst is that which persecutes the mind."
-John Dryden-
(1631-1700) English Poet
Source: The Hind and the Panther, 1687
"... political reporters love to write about politics as if they are merely disinterested observers of political events and the public's perceptions of them, when in fact they play a very key role in shaping those events and perceptions."
-Greg Sargent-
Columnist for the Los Angeles Times
"Every man – in the development of his own personality – has the right to form his own beliefs and opinions. Hence, suppression of belief, opinion and expression is an affront to the dignity of man, a negation of man’s essential nature."
-Thomas I. Emerson-
(1907-1991) Lines Professor of Law, Yale University, author
Source: Toward A General Theory of the First Amendment, 1966
"While the right to talk may be the beginning of freedom, the necessity of listening is what makes the right important."
-Walter Lippmann-
(1889-1974) American writer, journalist, and political commentator
"Sitting here, we are not at liberty to add one jot of power to the national government beyond what the people have granted by the constitution; and, on the other hand, we are bound to support that constitution as it stands, and to give a fair and rational scope to all the powers which it clearly contains."
-Houston v. Moore-
Source: Houston v. Moore, 18 U.S. 1 (1820)
"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
"When your response to everything that is wrong with the world is to say, 'there ought to be a law,' you are saying that you hold freedom very cheap."
-Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
"A functioning police state needs no police."
-William S. Borroughs-
(1914-1997) American writer, artist
Source: The Naked Lunch, 1959
"Aside from the most committed libertarians, few Americans would list a lack of freedom in their lives as their most pressing concern. That is not to deny that militant leftism, the administrative state, and the imperial judiciary threaten liberty—they most emphatically do. Nor is it to argue that conservatives should not care for liberty. Rather it is to recognize that the average American, including the average Republican voter, is not a libertarian, has come to expect quite a lot from the federal government, and cares as much, if not more, about security than liberty (or opportunity for that matter, unless he is young and on the make). "
-David Azerrad-
Director of the B. Kenneth Simon Center for Principles and Politics, AWC Family Foundation Fellow at The Heritage Foundation
Source: A fusionist ‘conservatarian’ GOP must now also accommodate Trumpism. Part II in a series., The Amercan Spectator, 10/16/2017
"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)
"I support people having a gun in public full stop, not just in your home. We don't have the right to bear arms because of burglars; we have the right to bear arms to resist the supreme power of a corrupt and abusive government. It's not about duck hunting; it's about the ability of the individual. It's the same reason we have freedom of speech."
-Vince Vaughn-
(1970-) American actor, producer, screenwriter, and comedian
Source: British GQ
"History is clear that the first ten amendments to the Constitution were adopted to secure certain common law rights of the people, against invasion by the Federal Government."
-Bell v. Hood-
Source: Bell v. Hood, 71 F. Supp., 813, 816 (1947) U.S.D.C., So. Dist. CA
"Constitutional provisions for the security of person and property should be liberally construed. It is the duty of the courts to be watchful of constitutional rights against any stealthy encroachments thereon."
-Boyd v. U.S.-
Source: Boyd v. U.S., 116 U.S. 635
"It is the theory of all modern civilized governments that they protect and foster the liberty of the citizen; it is the practice of all of them to limit its exercise, and sometimes very narrowly."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"In the midst of these pleasing ideas we should be unfaithful to ourselves if we should ever lose sight of the danger to our liberties if anything partial or extraneous should infect the purity of our free, fair, virtuous, and independent elections."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: Inaugural Address, March 4, 1797
"Let us reform our schools, and we shall find little reform needed in our prisons."
-John Ruskin-
(1819-1900) British author, artist, social critic
"I have no fear that the result of our experiment will be that men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Letter to David Hartley; 1787
"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
"I always counsel my first-year students never to support a law they are not willing to kill to enforce. Officials who fail to take into account the obvious fact that the laws they're so eager to pass will be enforced at the point of a gun cannot fairly be described as public servants. ... Don't ever fight to make something illegal unless you're willing to risk the lives of your fellow citizens to get your way."
-Stephen L. Carter-"
Yale Law School
"Risk", hell. "Threaten" is more appropriate...
"The world is in greater peril from those who tolerate or encourage evil than from those who actually commit it."
-Albert Einstein-
"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. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."
-James Madison--
"'The greatest good for the greatest number' is a high-sounding phrase but contrary to the very basis of our nation, unless it is accompanied by recognition that we have certain rights which cannot be infringed upon, even if the individual stands outvoted by all of his fellow citizens. Without this recognition, majority rule is nothing more than mob rule."
- Ronald Wilson Reagan-
1964
"No legal plunder: This is the principle of justice, peace, order, stability, harmony, and logic. Until the day of my death, I shall proclaim this principle with all the force of my lungs (which alas! is all too inadequate)."
-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
"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
"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
"No person was ever honored for what he received. Honor has been the reward for what he gave."
-Calvin Coolidge-
(1873-1933), 30th US President
"It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, 1756
"No people will tamely surrender their Liberties, nor can any be easily subdued, when knowledge is diffused and Virtue is preserved. On the Contrary, when People are universally ignorant, and debauched in their Manners, they will sink under their own weight without the Aid of foreign Invaders."
-Samuel Adams-
(1722-1803), was known as the "Father of the American Revolution."
Source: letter to James Warren, 4 November 1775. Reference: Our Sacred Honor, Bennett (261)
"Liberty is one of the choicest gifts that heaven hath bestowed upon man, and exceeds in value all the treasures which the earth contains within its bosom, or the sea covers. Liberty, as well as honor, man ought to preserve at the hazard of his life, for without it life is insupportable."
-Cervantes-
[Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra] (1547-1616) Spanish writer
"He that is good, will infallibly become better, and he that is bad, will as certainly become worse; for vice, virtue and time are three things that never stand still."
-Charles Caleb Colton-
(1780-1832) English cleric, writer and collector
"I shall not counsel or maintain any suit or proceeding which shall appear to me to be unjust, nor any defense except such as I believe to be honestly debatable under the law of the land."
-American Bar Association-
Source: Oath for Candidates Seeking Admission to the Bar, 1925
"The spirit of liberty is not merely, as multitudes imagine, a jealousy of our own particular rights, but a respect for the rights of others, and an unwillingness that any man, whether high or low, should be wronged and trampled under foot."
-William Ellery Channing-
(1780-1842)
"Every process which arises from our physical being and is related to it, is an event which lies outside of our volition. Every social process, however, arises from human intentions and human goal setting and occurs within the limits of our volition. Consequently, it is not subject to the concept of natural necessity. … We are here stating no prejudiced opinion, but merely an established fact. Every result of human purposiveness is of indisputable importance for man's social existence, but we should stop regarding social processes as deterministic manifestations of a necessary course of events. Such a view can only lead to the most erroneous conclusions and contribute to a fatal confusion in our understanding of historical events."
-Rudolf Rocker-
"The attributes of sovereignty are now enjoyed by every state in the Union."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: Commentaries on the Constitution, Vol. III, p 287
"In the United States, Sovereignty resides in the people, who act through the organs established by the Constitution."
-Chisholm v. Georgia-
Source: Chisholm v. Georgia, 2 Dall 419, 471
"Not only, therefore, can there be no loss of separate and independent autonomy to the states, through their union under the Constitution, but it may be not unreasonably said that the preservation of the states, and the maintenance of their governments, are as much within the design and care of the Constitution as the preservation of the Union and the maintenance of the national government. The Constitution, in all its provisions, looks to an indestructible Union, composed of indestructible states."
-Texas v. White-
Source: Texas v. White, 7 Wall 700, 725; 19 L. ed. 227, 237
"But as the plan of the [Constitutional] convention aims only at a partial union or consolidation, the State governments would clearly retain all the rights of sovereignty which they before had, and which were not, by that act, EXCLUSIVELY delegated to the United States."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: The Federalist Papers, No. 32. The Same Subject Continued Concerning the General Power of Taxation From the Daily Advertiser. Thursday, January 3, 1788.
"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
"[We should be] determined... to sever ourselves from the union we so much value rather than give up the rights of self-government... in which alone we see liberty, safety and happiness."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: letter to Madison in August 1799
"[T]he people as ultimate sovereigns, retain the ultimate power -- and even the duty -- to overthrow any government that fails to respect their authority."
-Glenn Harlan Reynolds-
(1960- ) Beauchamp Brogan Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee
Source: The Right to Keep and Bear Arms Under the Tennessee Constitution, A Case Study in Civic Republican Thought, 61 TENN. L. R. 647, 652 (1994)
"It is only when the people become ignorant and corrupt, when they degenerate into a populace, that they are incapable of exercising their sovereignty. Usurpation is then an easy attainment, and an usurper soon found. The people themselves become the willing instruments of their own debasement and ruin."
-James Monroe-
(1758-1831), 5th US President
Source: First Inaugural Address, 1817
"It is federal, because it is the government of States united in a political union, in contradistinction to a government of individuals, that is, by what is usually called, a social compact. To express it more concisely, it is federal and not national because it is the government of a community of States, and not the government of a single State or Nation."
-John C. Calhoun-
(1782-1850) American statesman
Source: 1850, John C. Calhoun's essay entitled A Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States
"The sovereignty fetish is still so strong in the public mind, that there would appear to be little chance of winning popular assent to American membership in anything approaching a super-state organization. Much will depend on the kind of approach which is used in further popular education."
-Council on Foreign Relations-
Source: "American Public Opinion and Postwar Security Commitments", 1944
"We deplore the division of humankind on nationalistic grounds. We have reached a turning point in human history where the best option is to transcend the limits of national sovereignty and to move towards the building of a world community. We look toward the development of a system of world law, world order, based upon transnational government."
-Humanist Manifesto, Article 12-
Humanists propose that the United Nations care for and control all peoples of the earth.
"The United Nations is the greatest fraud in all History. Its purpose is to destroy the United States."
-John E. Rankin-
Served 16 terms as Mississippi’s First District Representative in the U.S. House of Representatives
1945
"The main purpose of the Council on Foreign Relations is promoting the disarmament of U.S. sovereignty and national independence and submergence into an all powerful, one world government."
-Rear Admiral Chester Ward-
Rear Admiral US Navy (retired), CFR member for 16 years, Judge Advocate General of the Navy 1956-60
"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
"But if we are to be told by a foreign Power ... what we shall do, and what we shall not do, we have Independence yet to seek, and have contended hitherto for very little."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: letter to Alexander Hamilton, 8 May 1796, Reference: The Writings of George Washington, Fitzpatrick, ed., vol. 35 (40)
"Once a matter has become, in one way or another, the subject of regulation by the United Nations, be it by resolution or the General Assembly or by convention between member States [Nations] at the insistence of the United Nations, that subject ceases to be a matter being 'essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of the member States...'"
-Moses Moskowitz-
UN Staff Member
Source: "American Bar Association Journal", April, 1949
"I solemnly affirm to exercise in all loyalty, discretion and conscience the functions entrusted to me as a member of the international service of the United Nations, to discharge those functions and regulate my conduct with the interest of the United Nations only in view, and not to seek or accept instructions in respect to the performance of my duties from any government or other authority external to the organization."
-United Nations' Loyalty Oath-
"...there is no provision in the Charter itself that contemplates ending war. It is true the Charter provides for force to bring peace, but such use of force is itself war... The Charter is a war document not a peace document... Not only does the Charter Organization not prevent future wars, but it makes it practically certain that we shall have future wars, and as to such wars it takes from us the power to declare them, to choose the side on which we shall fight, to determine what forces and military equipment we shall use in the war, and to control and command our sons who do the fighting."
-J. Reuben Clark, Jr.-
One-time U.S. Under-secretary of State, and Ambassador to Mexico
Source: Regarding the U.N. Charter, September 20th , 1945
"Human rights are not a privilege conferred by government. They are every human being's entitlement by virtue of his humanity. The right to life does not depend, and must not be contingent, on the pleasure of anyone else, not even a parent or sovereign. ... You must weep that your own government, at present, seems blind to this truth."
-Mother Teresa-
[Agnes Gonxha Beiaxhiu] (1910-1997) Humanitarian, Nobel Peace Prize 1979
"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)
"The Union was formed by the voluntary agreement of the states; and these, in uniting together, have not forfeited their nationality, nor have they been reduced to the condition of one and the same people. If one of the states chooses to withdraw from the compact, it would be difficult to disapprove its right of doing so, and the Federal Government would have no means of maintaining its claims directly either by force or right."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
(1805-1859) French historian
Source: Democracy in America, 1835
"The Thirteen States are Thirteen Sovereign bodies."
-Oliver Ellsworth-
(1745-1807) USA Founding father, third Chief Justice of the United States
Source: Commentaries on the Constitution, Vol. III, p 287
"The Government made by a number of Sovereign States."
-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.
Source: Commentaries on the Constitution, Vol. III, p 287
"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
"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)
"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
"Of the laws of nature on which the condition of man depends, that which is attended with the greatest number of consequences is the necessity of labor for obtaining the means of subsistence, as well as the means of the greatest part of our pleasures. This is no doubt the primary cause of government; for if nature had produced spontaneously all the objects which we desire, and in sufficient abundance for the desires of all, there would have been no source of dispute or of injury among men, nor would any man have possessed the means of ever acquiring authority over another. The results are exceedingly different when nature produces the objects of desire not in sufficient abundance for all. The source of dispute is then exhaustless, and every man has the means of acquiring authority over others in proportion to the quantity of those objects which he is able to possess. In this case the end to be obtained through government as the means, is to make that distribution of the scanty materials of happiness which would insure the greatest sum of it in the members of the community taken altogether, preventing every individual or combination of individuals from interfering with that distribution or making any man to have less than his share."
-James Mill-
"The drafters of the Constitution had made one simple but far-reaching error. They'd assumed that the people selected by The People to manage the nation would be as honest and honorable as they'd been. One could almost hear the 'Oops!' emanating from all those old graves."
-Tom Clancy-
"It would be a dangerous delusion were a confidence in the men of our choice to silence our fears for the safety of our rights; that confidence is every where the parent of despotism; free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence; it is jealousy, and not confidence, which prescribes limited constitutions to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power; that our Constitution has accordingly fixed the limits to which, and no farther, our confidence may go; and let the honest advocate of confidence read the Alien and Sedition Acts, and say if the Constitution has not been wise in fixing limits to the government it created, and whether we should be wise in destroying those limits; let him say what the government is, if it be not a tyranny, which the men of our choice have conferred on the President, and the President of our choice has assented to and accepted, over the friendly strangers, to whom the mild spirit of our country and its laws had pledged hospitality and protection; that the men of our choice have more respected the bare suspicions of the President than the solid rights of innocence, the claims of justification, the sacred force of truth, and the forms and substance of law and justice. In questions of power, then, let no more be said of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"Foolish liberals who are trying to read the Second Amendment out of the constitution by claiming it’s not an individual right or that it’s too much of a safety hazard don’t see the danger of the big picture. They’re courting disaster by encouraging others to use this same means to eliminate portions of the Constitution they don’t like."
-Alan Dershowitz-
(1938- ) Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School
Source: The Conceptual Foundations of Anglo-American Jurisprudence in Religion and Reason, 82 Mich L. Rev., 204 (Dan Gifford), 1995
"The Framers of the First Amendment were not concerned with preventing government from abridging their freedom to speak about crops and cockfighting, or with protecting the expressive activity of topless dancers, which of late has found some shelter under the First Amendment. Rather, the Framers cherished unabridged freedom of political communication."
-George Will-
(1941-) American newspaper columnist, journalist, and author
"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."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: Thoughts on Government, 1776
"Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
"If you own your life, then you have the right to defend yourself against anyone who would deprive you of it. ... And, if you have the right of self-defense, it follows that you have the right to act ... to obtain means appropriate to that defense. That brings us to firearms, particularly the handgun, which so many people would outlaw. The handgun has been called the equalizer ..., and for good reason. It affords smaller, weaker people the chance to defend themselves against bigger, stronger people who threaten them. Handguns offer the otherwise defenseless a convenient, practical, inexpensive method of safeguarding themselves and their families. Banishing handguns -- even if the big and strong were also denied them -- would leave the small and the weak defenseless."
-Sheldon Richman-
V.P. of Future of Freedom Foundation, author
Source: The Right to Life Equals the Right to Possess Firearms, The Tyranny of Gun Control, 40 (Future of Freedom Foundation 1997).
"A just fear of an imminent danger, though there be no blow given, is a lawful cause of war."
-Sir Francis Bacon-
(1561-1626) Philosopher, British Lord Chancellor
"The first step in saving our liberty is to realize how much we have already lost, how we lost it, and how we will continue to lose it unless fundamental political changes occur."
-James Bovard-
(1956- ) American author, lecturer
Source: Lost Rights, 1994
"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."
-Judge Alex Kozinski-
(1950-) US Circuit Judge of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (1985-2017)
Source: Silveira v. Lockyer, 328 F. 3d 567 - Court of Appeals, 9th Circuit 2003, Dissent by Judge KOZINSKI
"If men, through fear, fraud, or mistake, should in terms renounce or give up any natural right, the eternal law of reason and the grand end of society would absolutely vacate such renunciation. The right to freedom being the gift of Almighty God, it is not in the power of man to alienate this gift and voluntarily become a slave."
-Samuel Adams-
(1722-1803), was known as the "Father of the American Revolution."
Samuel Adams instigated the Boston Tea Party, was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, called for the first Continental Congress, and served as a member of Congress until 1781.
Samuel Adams formed the Committees of Correspondence, which were largely responsible for the unity and cohesion of the Colonists preceding the Revolution.
The original committee, formed in Boston, had three goals:
(1) To delineate the rights of Colonists as men;
(2) To detail how these rights had been violated;
(3) To publicize these rights and the violations thereof throughout the Colonies.
"It is unreasonable ... to oblige a man not to attempt the defense of his own life."
-Charles de Montesquieu-
[Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat] (1689-1755) Baron de Montesquieu
Source: The Spirit of Laws 64.
"The great object is that every man be armed. Everyone who is able may have a gun."
-Patrick Henry-
(1736-1799) US Founding Father
Source: in the Virginia Convention on the ratification of the Constitution, June 14, 1788,
in_Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution,_
Jonathan Elliot, ed., v.3 p.386 (Philadelphia, 1836)
"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."
-Jeffrey R. 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
"I have no reason to suppose, that he, who would take away my liberty, would not, when he had me in his power, take away every thing else."
-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, 202 §. 18 (1690)
"Whosoever uses force without Right ... puts himself into a state of War with those, against whom he uses it, and in that state all former Ties are canceled, all other Rights cease, and every one has a Right to defend himself, and to resist the Aggressor."
-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 153-54 (Chicago 1955).
"Self-defence is a part of the law of nature; nor can it be denied the community, even against the king himself..."
-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, 390 §. 233 (1690)
"The enemies of freedom do not argue; they shout and they shoot."
-William Ralph Inge-
(1860-1954) English author, Anglican prelate
Source: The End of an Age
"[It is] a natural Right which the people have reserved to themselves, confirmed by the [English] Bill of rights, to keep arms for their own defense; and as Mr. Blackstone observes, it is to be made use of when the sanctions of Society and law are found insufficient to restrain the violence of oppression."
-Boston Evening Post-
Source: A Journal of the Times, March 27, 1769, printed May 25, 1769.
"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)
"[Self-defense is] justly called the primary law of nature, so it is not, neither can it be in fact, taken away by the laws of society."
-Sir William Blackstone-
(1723-1780)
Source: 3 William Blackstone, Commentaries 139
"The purpose of the right to bear arms is twofold; to allow individuals to protect themselves and their families, and to ensure a body of armed citizenry from which a militia could be drawn, whether that militia’s role was to protect the nation, or to protect the people from a tyrannical government."
-Glenn Harlan Reynolds-
Assoc. Prof. of Law, Univ. of Tennessee
Source: A Critical Guide to the Second Amendment, 62 TENN. L. R. 461, 475 (1995).
"A people armed and free forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition and is a bulwark for the nation against foreign invasion and domestic oppression."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
"In March, 1982, Kennesaw, Georgia, passed a mandatory gun ownership ordinance which requires all heads of households to own a firearm -- handgun, rifle or shotgun. In 1982, our crime against persons, which include murder, rape, armed robbery, aggravated assault and residential burglary, decreased 74%. In 1983 these same crimes decreased [an additional] 46%. ... I would also like you to be aware that our population has increased in excess of 20% since 1982. We have had no accidents nor incidents involving our citizens with regards to firearms. ... It is a pleasure to see our senior citizens strolling the streets at night without fear of becoming a victim of violent crime."
-Robert L. Ruble-
Chief of Police, Kennesaw, Georgia
Source: November 5, 1984, unpublished letter to Ann Landers
"It is an ancient truth that freedom cannot be legislated into existence, so it is no less obvious that freedom cannot be censored into existence. And any who act as if freedom's defenses are found in suppression and suspicion and fear confess a doctrine that is alien to America."
-Dwight D. Eisenhower-
(1890-1969), 34th US President, WWII General
Source: Letter, 24 June 1953
"It is unclear how disarming law-abiding citizens would better protect them from the dangers and threats posed by those who would flout the law. It is at just such times that the constitutional right to self-defense is most precious and must be protected from government overreach."
-Rick Scott-
(1959-) Governor of Florida
Source: in rejecting Tampa Bay politicians request seeking suspension of the concealed-carry laws outside the Republican and Democratic national conventions
"Today, the people who would use guns to violate rights have little trouble getting them, while those who would use them to defend their rights have increasing trouble getting them. ... Gun control is in effect a subsidy for criminals."
-Sheldon Richman-
V.P. of Future of Freedom Foundation, author
Source: The Right to Life Equals the Right to Possess Firearms, The Tyranny of Gun Control, 41 (Future of Freedom Foundation 1997).
"Despite the vision and farseeing wisdom of our wartime heads of state, the physicists have felt the peculiarly intimate responsibility for suggesting, for supporting, and in the end, in large measure, for achieving the realization of atomic weapons. Nor can we forget that these weapons, as they were in fact used, dramatized so mercilessly the inhumanity and evil of modern war. In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose."
-Robert Oppenheimer-
"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
"From the east to the west blow the trumpet to arms!
Through the land let the sound of it flee;
Let the far and the near all unite, with a cheer,
In defense of our Liberty Tree."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
"Sovereignty inheres in the right to issue money. And the American sovereignty belongs by right to the people, and their representatives in Congress have the right to issue money and to determine the value thereof. And 120 million, 120 million suckers have lamentably failed to insist on the observation of this quite decided law. ... Now the point at which embezzlement of the nation's funds on the part of her officers becomes treason can probably be decided only by jurists, and not by hand-picked judges who support illegality."
-Ezra Pound-
(1885-1972) American poet
April 9, 1942
"I remember that a wise friend of mine did usually say, 'That which is everybody's business is nobody's business'."
-Izaak Walton-
(c. 1593-1683) English writer
"The several states composing the United States of America are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government; but by a compact under the style and title of a Constitution for the United States, and of amendments thereto, they constituted a general government for special purposes [and] delegated to that government certain definite powers and whensoever the general government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force. To this compact each state acceded as a state, and is an integral party, its co-states forming, as to itself, the other party. The government created by this compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself, since that would have made its discretion, and not the Constitution the measure of its powers."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: in his draft of the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 which were written in response to an attempt by Congress to expand the criminal jurisdiction of the federal government through a set of laws entitled the "Alien and Sedition Laws."
"[T]his Assembly doth explicitly and peremptorily declare, that it views the powers of the Federal Government, as resulting from the compact, to which the States are parties, as limited by the plain sense and intention of the instrument constituting the compact as no further valid than they are authorized by the grants enumerated in that compact; and that in case of a deliberate, palpable and 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, and for maintaining within their respective limits, the authorities, rights and liberties appertaining to them."
-Virginia Resolution of 1798-
Source: in response to the federal government's "Alien and Sedition Laws."
"The judiciary of the United States is the subtle corps of sappers and miners constantly working under ground to undermine the foundations of our confederated fabric. They are construing our constitution from a coordination of a general and special government to a general and supreme one alone. This will lay all things at their feet... We shall see if they are bold enough to take the daring stride their five lawyers have lately taken. If they do, then... I will say, that 'against this every man should raise his voice,' and more, should uplift his arm."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: (Letter to T. Ritchie, 1820). THE POLITICAL WRITINGS OF THOMAS JEFFERSON 152-153 (Dumbauld Ed. 1955)
"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: The Federalist Papers at 184-188
"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-
(1909-1998) US Senator (R-Arizona)
Source: Acceptance speech, Republican presidential nomination, 16 July 1964
"Crime is rampant because the law-abiding, each of us, condone it, excuse it, permit it, submit to it. We permit and encourage it because we do not fight back, immediately, then and there, where it happens. Crime is not rampant because we do not have enough prisons, because judges and prosecutors are too soft, because the police are hamstrung with absurd technicalities. The defect is there, in our character. We are a nation of cowards and shirkers."
-Jeffrey R. Snyder-
American attorney, author
Source: A Nation of Cowards, 113 Public Interest (Fall 1993)
"[Individuals] have a right to defend themselves and recover by force what by unlawful force is taken from them."
-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 174 (Chicago 1955)
"And they are ignorant that the purpose of the sword is to save every man from slavery."
-Lucanus-
[Marcus Annaeus Lucan] (A.D. 39-65)
Source: De Bello Civili (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Loeb Classical Library, 1988), IV, 579, p. 216
"The difference between a politician and a pickpocket is that the pickpocket doesn't get indignant when you tell him to keep his hands to himself."
-Joseph Sobran-
(1946-2010) Columnist
"The first ten amendments were proposed and adopted largely because of fear that Government might unduly interfere with prized individual liberties. The people wanted and demanded a Bill of Rights written into their Constitution. The amendments embodying the Bill of Rights were intended to curb all branches of the Federal Government in the fields touched by the amendments—Legislative, Executive, and Judicial."
-Justice Hugo L. Black-
(1886-1971) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: Adamson v. California, 332 U.S. 46, 71 (Dissent) (1947).
"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
"[F]or everybody has a natural right to defend his own person and property against aggressors, but also to go to the assistance and defence of everybody else, whose person or property is invaded. The natural right of each individual to defend his own person and property against an aggressor, and to go to the assistance and defence of every one else whose person or property is invaded, is a right without which men could not exist on earth."
-Lysander Spooner-
(1808-1887) Political theorist, activist, abolitionist
Source: Vices are Not Crimes, A Vindication of Moral Liberty (1875)
"Truth resides in every human heart, and one has to search for it there, and to be guided by truth as one sees it. But no one has a right to coerce others to act according to his own view of truth."
-Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi-
(1869-1948)
"The right to unite freely and to separate freely is the first and most important of all political rights."
-Mikhail A. Bakunin-
(1814-1876)
Source: Proposition Motivee, 1868
"Individualism is at once an ethical-psychological concept and an ethical-political one. As an ethical-psychological concept, individualism holds that a human being should think and judge independently, respecting nothing more than the sovereignty of his or her mind; thus, it is intimately connected with the concept of autonomy. As an ethical-political concept, individualism upholds the supremacy of individual rights ..."
-Nathaniel Branden-
(1930-) Canadian psychotherapist, writer
Source: Capitalism: The Libertarian Vision
"[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
"What is freedom? It means not being a slave to any circumstance, to any restraint, to any chance."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist
Source: Letters to Lucilius, 65 A.D.
"If I want to be free from any other man’s dictation, I must understand that I can have no other man under my control."
-William Graham Sumner-
(1840-1910) American academic and professor at Yale College
Source: The Forgotten Man and Other Essays, 1918
"The only sure bulwark of continuing liberty is a government strong enough to protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and well enough informed to maintain its sovereign control over the government."
-Franklin D. Roosevelt-
(1882-1945), 32nd US President
"What spectacle can be more edifying or more seasonable, than that of Liberty and Learning, each leaning on the other for their mutual & surest support?"
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: letter to W.T. Barry, August 4, 1822
"Conservatism, though a necessary element in any stable society, is not a social program; in its paternalistic, nationalistic and power adoring tendencies it is often closer to socialism than true liberalism; and with its traditionalistic, anti-intellectual, and often mystical propensities it will never, except in short periods of disillusionment, appeal to the young and all those others who believe that some changes are desirable if this world is to become a better place."
-Friedrich Hayek-
"Nationalism is always an effort in a direction opposite to that of the principle which creates nations. The former is exclusive in tendency, the latter inclusive. In periods of consolidation, nationalism has a positive value, and is a lofty standard. But in Europe everything is more than consolidated, and nationalism is nothing but a mania, a pretext to escape from the necessity of inventing something new, some great enterprise."
-José Ortega y Gasset-
"The noblest and most fruitful work of the human intelligence is to make a clean sweep of every enforced idea — of advantages or meanings — and to go right through appearances in search of the eternal bases. Thus you will clearly see the moral law at the beginning of all things, and the conception of justice and equality will appear to you beautiful as daylight."
-Henri Barbusse-
"We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still. First: the opinion which it is attempted to suppress by authority may possibly be true. Those who desire to suppress it, of course deny its truth; but they are not infallible. They have no authority to decide the question for all mankind, and exclude every other person from the means of judging. To refuse a hearing to an opinion, because they are sure that it is false, is to assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty. All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility. Its condemnation may be allowed to rest on this common argument, not the worse for being common. Unfortunately for the good sense of mankind, the fact of their fallibility is far from carrying the weight in their practical judgment, which is always allowed to it in theory; for while every one well knows himself to be fallible, few think it necessary to take any precautions against their own fallibility, or admit the supposition that any opinion, of which they feel very certain, may be one of the examples of the error to which they acknowledge themselves to be liable."
-On Liberty-
"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)
"A juror who is forced by the judge’s instructions to convict a defendant whose conduct he applauds or at the least feels is justifiable, will lose respect for the legal system. . . . A juror compelled to decide against his own judgment will rebel at the system that made him a traitor to himself."
-Alan W. Scheflin-
Professor of Law at Santa Clara University School of Law in California
Source: Jury Nullification: The Right to Say No, 45 S. CAL. L. REV. 168, 183 (1972)
"What is the fairest fruit of the English Tree of Liberty? The security of our rights and of the law, and that no man shall be brought to trial where there is a prejudice against him."
-Thomas Erskine-
(1750-1823)
Source: Defense of Thomas Paine, 20 December 1792
"Jurors have found, again and again, and at critical moments, according to what is their sense of the rational and just. If their sense of justice has gone one way, and the case another, they have found “against the evidence,” ... the English common law rests upon a bargain between the Law and the people: The jury box is where the people come into the court: The judge watches them and the people watch back. A jury is the place where the bargain is struck. The jury attends in judgment, not only upon the accused, but also upon the justice and the humanity of the Law."
-E. P. Thompson-
1978
"The jury in all criminal cases, shall be the judges of the law and the facts."
-Georgia, Declaration of Rights, Art.I, Sec.II, Para. I-
"In all criminal cases whatsoever, the jury shall have the right to determine the law and the facts."
-Indiana Constitution-
Source: Indiana Constitution Article I, Section 19
"[N]o American should retreat an inch on the right of jurors to acquit if they perceive the law or its administration to be unjust.
-Charley Reese-
(1937-2013) American syndicated columnist
Source: Don’t sacrifice justice to law, CONSERVATIVE CHRONICLE, May 1, 1996
"Ours is an accusatorial and not an inquisitorial system -- a system in which the state must establish guilt by evidence independently and freely secured and may not by coercion prove its charge against an accused out of his own mouth."
-Felix Frankfurter-
(1882-1965) U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: 1961
"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
"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 not what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
Source: Second Speech on Conciliation, 1775
"Society's demands for moral authority and character increase as the importance of the position increases."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
"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. I have no fear of constitutional amendments properly adopted, but I do fear the rewriting of the Constitution by judges under the guise of interpretation."
-Justice Hugo L. Black-
(1886-1971) US Supreme Court Justice
"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
"Stripped of all its covering, the naked question is, whether ours is a federal or consolidated government; a constitutional or absolute one; a government resting solidly on the basis of the sovereignty of the States, or on the unrestrained will of a majority; a form of government, as in all other unlimited ones, in which injustice, violence, and force must ultimately prevail."
-John C. Calhoun-
(1782-1850) American statesman
1831
"The fault lies not with our technologies but with our systems."
-Roger Levian-
"Censorship of anything, at any time, in any place, on whatever pretense, has always been and will always be the last resort of the boob and the bigot."
-Eugene O'Neill-
(1888-1953)
"Freedom, morality, and the human dignity of the individual consists precisely in this; that he does good not because he is forced to do so, but because he freely conceives it, wants it, and loves it."
-Mikhail A. Bakunin-
(1814-1876)
Source: God and The State, 1871
"Don't try to be different. Just be good. To be good is different enough."
-Arthur Freed-
[Arthur Grossman] (1894-1973) American lyricist, film producer
"A 'No' uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a 'Yes' merely uttered to please, or worse, to avoid trouble."
-Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi-
(1869-1948)
"To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men."
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
"How did it happen? How did our national government grow from a servant with sharply limited powers into a master with virtually unlimited power? In part, we were swindled. There are occasions when we have elevated men and political parties to power that promised to restore limited government and then proceeded, after their election, to expand the activities of government. But let us be honest with ourselves. Broken promises are not the major causes of our trouble. Kept promises are. All too often we have put men in office who have suggested spending a little more on this, a little more on that, who have proposed a new welfare program, who have thought of another variety of 'security.' We have taken the bait, preferring to put off to another day the recapture of freedom and the restoration of our constitutional system. We have gone the way of many a democratic society that has lost its freedom by persuading itself that if 'the people' rule, all is well."
-Barry Goldwater-
(1909-1998) US Senator (R-Arizona)
"Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one."
-Charles Mackay-
(1814-1889) Scottish poet, journalist, author, anthologist, novelist, and songwriter
Source: 1841, "Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds"
"The objector and the rebel
who raises his voice against
what he believes to be
the injustice of the present
and the wrongs of the past
is the one who hunches the world along."
-Clarence S. Darrow-
(1857-1938)
Source: Address to the Court, The Communist Trial, People v. Lloyd, 1920
"As long as people will accept crap, it will be financially profitable to dispense it."
-Dick Cavett-
(1936-) American television personality, former talk show host
"No more duty can be urged upon those who are entering the great theater of life than simple loyalty to their best convictions."
-Edwin Hubbel Chapin-
(1814-1880) US clergyman, author, speaker
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit."
-Aristotle-
(384-322 BC) Greek philosopher
"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) English author, poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer
"We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing,
while others judge us by what we have already done."
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow-
(1807-1882) American poet
Source: Kavanagh, 1849
"Ill habits gather by unseen degrees --
As brooks make rivers, rivers run to seas."
-John Dryden-
(1631-1700) English Poet
"Every wrong seems possible today, and is accepted. I don't accept it."
-Pablo Casals-
[Pau Casals i Defilló] (1876-1973) Catalan cellist and conductor
"[F]alsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd 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
"Lying can never save us from another lie."
-Vaclav Havel-
(1936-2011) Czech writer, philosopher, dissident, statesman, last President of Czechoslovakia
"To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves."
-Will Durant-
(1885-1981) American psychologist, philosopher
"Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself."
-William Faulkner-
(1897-1962)
"Pity the poor, wretched, timid soul, too faint hearted to resist his oppressors. He sings the songs of the damned, 'I cannot resist, I have too much to lose, they might take my property or confiscate my earnings, what would my family do, how would they survive?' He hides behind pretended family responsibility, failing to see that the most glorious legacy that we can bequeath to our posterity is liberty!"
-W. Vaughn Ellsworth-
American author, defended himself against IRS in 1977
"He who sees the truth, let him proclaim it, without asking who is for it or who is against it."
-Henry George-
(1839-1897) American political economist
Source: The Land Question, 1881
"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, p.291 (1991)
"Human reason can neither predict nor deliberately shape its own future. Its advances consist in finding out where it has been wrong."
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
"I protect my right to be a Catholic by preserving your right to believe as a Jew, a Protestant, or non-believer, or as anything else you choose. We know that the price of seeking to force our beliefs on others is that they might some day force theirs on us. This freedom is the fundamental strength of our unique experiment in government. In the complex interplay of forces and considerations that go into the making of our laws and policies, its preservation must be a pervasive and dominant concern."
-Mario Cuomo-
"Labor was the first price, the original purchase - money that was paid for all things
-Adam Smith-
(1723-1790) Scottish philosopher and economist
"We are more especially called upon to maintain the principles of free discussion in case of unpopular sentiments or persons, as in no other case will any effort to maintain them be needed."
-Edward Beecher-
(1803-1895)
"The beginning of philosophy is the recognition of the conflict between opinions."
-Epictetus-
(ca 55-135 A.D.) Greek philospher
Source: Discourses, ca. 110 A.D.
"The [classical] liberal, of course, does not deny that there are some superior people -- he is not an egalitarian -- but he denies that anyone has authority to decide who these superior people are."
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
Source: "Why I Am Not a Conservative," postcript to The Constitution of Liberty [1960] (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1972), p. 402
"Liberty, equality -- bad principles! The only true principle for humanity is justice; and justice to the feeble is protection and kindness."
-Henri-Frédéric Amiel-
(1821-1881) Swiss philosopher, poet
"Your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart to give yourself to it."
-Buddha-
[Gautama Siddharta] (563 - 483 BC), Hindu Prince, founder of Buddhism
"Everything in the world is purchased by labor."
-David Hume-
(1711-1776) Scottish philosopher, historian and economist
"The non-producers now receive the larger share of what those who labor produce. The result is natural. Discontent culminates in exactly the same ratio that intelligence sustains aspiration."
-Frederick Douglass-
[Frederick Baily] (1818-1895), escaped slave, Abolitionist, author, editor of the North Star and later the New National Era
"The poor despise labor when performed by slaves."
-George Mason-
(1725-1792), drafted the Virgina Declaration of Rights, ally of James Madison and George Washington
"Large fortunes are all founded either on the occupation of land, or lending or the taxation of labor."
-John Ruskin-
(1819-1900) British author, artist, social critic
"Governors have no Right to seek and take what they please; by this, instead of being content with the Station assigned them, that of honorable Servants of the Society, they would soon become Absolute Masters, Despots,and Tyrants. Hence, as a private Man has a Right to say what Wages he will give in his private Affairs, so has a Community to determine what they will give and grant of their Substance for the Administration of public Affairs."
-Samuel Adams-
(1722-1803), was known as the "Father of the American Revolution."
Source: The Votes and Proceedings of the Freeholders and Other Inhabitants of the Town of Boston in Town Meeting Assembled, According to Law. Published by Order of the Town. Nov 20 1772
"In short, it is the greatest Absurdity to suppose it in the Power of one or any Number of Men, at the entering into Society, to renounce their essential natural Rights or the Means of preserving those Rights, when the grand End of civil Government, from the very Nature of its Institution, is for the Support, Protection and Defense of those very Rights: The principal of which, as is before observed, are Life, Liberty, and Property."
-Samuel Adams-
(1722-1803), was known as the "Father of the American Revolution."
Source: The Votes and Proceedings of the Freeholders and Other Inhabitants of the Town of Boston in Town Meeting Assembled, According to Law. Published by Order of the Town. Nov 20 1772
"The Legislative has no Right to absolute arbitrary Power over the Lives and Fortunes of the People: Nor can Mortals assume a Prerogative not only too high for Men but for Angels, and therefore reserv’d for the Exercise of the Deity alone."
-Samuel Adams-
(1722-1803), was known as the "Father of the American Revolution."
Source: The Votes and Proceedings of the Freeholders and Other Inhabitants of the Town of Boston in Town Meeting Assembled, According to Law. Published by Order of the Town. Nov 20 1772
"Tis a Mistake to think this Fault [tyranny] is proper only to Monarchies; other Forms of Government are liable to it, as well as that. For where-ever the Power that is put in any hands for the Government of the People, and the Preservation of their Properties, is applied to other ends, and made use of to impoverish, harass, or subdue them to the Arbitrary and Irregular Commands of those that have it: There it presently becomes Tyranny, whether those that thus use it are one or many."
-John Locke-
(1632-1704) English philosopher and political theorist
"[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
1690
"The Natural Liberty of Man is to be free from any Superior Power on Earth, and not to be under the Will or Legislative Authority of Man, but to have only the Law of Nature for his Rule."
-John Locke-
(1632-1704) English philosopher and political theorist
Source: Two Treatises on Government, 1690
"It is a principle incorporated into the settled policy of America, that as peace is better than war, war is better than tribute."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: letter to the Dey of Algiers, August, 1816
"Objects of the most stupendous magnitude, and measure in which the lives and liberties of millions yet unborn are intimately interested, are now before us. We are in the very midst of a revolution the most complete, unexpected and remarkable of any in the history of nations."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: letter to William Cushing, June 9, 1776
"Knavery seems to be so much the striking feature of its [America's] inhabitants that it may not in the end be an evil that they will become aliens to the kingdom."
-King George III-
(1738-1820) King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (1760-1820)
"In time of war all countries behave equally badly, because the power of action is handed over to stupid and obstinate men."
-Kenneth Clark-
"[T]he flames kindled on the Fourth of July 1776, have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism; on the contrary, they will consume these engines and all who work them."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
1821
"Convinced that the republican is the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind, my prayers & efforts shall be cordially distributed to the support of that we have so happily established. It is indeed an animating thought that, while we are securing the rights of ourselves & our posterity, we are pointing out the way to struggling nations who wish, like us, to emerge from their tyrannies also. Heaven help their struggles, and lead them, as it has done us, triumphantly thro' them."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Letter to William Hunter, 11 March 1790
"If every person has the right to defend -- even by force -- his person, his liberty, and his property, then it follows that a group of men have the right to organize and support a common force to protect these rights constantly. Thus the principle of collective right -- its reason for existing, its lawfulness -- is based on individual right. And the common force that protects this collective right cannot logically have any other purpose or any other mission than that for which it acts as a substitute. Thus, 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 individuals or groups."
-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 (1848)
"Life, faculties, production -- in other words, individuality, liberty, property -- this is man. And in spite of the cunning of artful political leaders, these three gifts from God precede all human legislation and are superior to it."
-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 (1848)
"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
"Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom. But the tumult soon subsides."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
January 1776
Source: Common Sense, February 14, 1776, Introduction
"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)
"If the American Revolution had produced nothing but the Declaration of Independence, it would have been worthwhile.... The beauty and cogency of the preamble, reaching back to remotest antiquity and forward to an infinite future, having lifted the hearts of millions of men and will continue to do.... These words are more revolutionary than anything written by Robespierre, Marx, or Lenin, more explosive than the atom, a continual challenge to ourselves as well as an inspiration to the oppressed of all the world."
-Samuel Eliot Morison-
(1887-1976) Rear Admiral USNR, Naval historian
"Men being by nature all free, equal and independent, no one can be put out of his estate and subjected to the political power of another without his own consent which is done by agreeing with other men, to join and unite into a community for their comfortable, safe, and peaceable living in a secure enjoyment of their properties."
-John Locke-
(1632-1704) English philosopher and political theorist
Source: Second Treatise on Government (Chapter 95) 1698
"Among the natural Rights of the Colonists are these: First, a Right to Life; secondly, to Liberty; thirdly, to Property; together with the Right to support and defend them in the best Manner they can. Those are evident Branches of, rather than Deductions from, the Duty of Self-Preservation, commonly called the first Law of Nature."
-Samuel Adams-
(1722-1803), was known as the "Father of the American Revolution."
Source: The Votes and Proceedings of the Freeholders and Other Inhabitants of the Town of Boston in Town Meeting Assembled, According to Law. Published by Order of the Town. Oct 1772
"Government cannot make us equal; it can only recognize, respect, and protect us as equal before the law. That [affirmative action] programs may have been motivated, in part, by good intentions cannot provide refuge from the principle that under our Constitution, the government may not make distinctions on the basis of race."
-Justice Clarence Thomas-
(1948- ) U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Adarand v. Federico Pena
"You can't say you love your country and hate your government."
-Bill Clinton-
[William Jefferson Blythe III] (1946- ), 42nd US President
Source: 1995 (After the OKC bombing)
Spoken like a self-serving government...
"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
Source: "The Law" by Frederic Bastiat (1850)
In the immortal words of "superior" Nancy Pelosi, "Are you serious...?!"
"Politics, as a practise, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds."
-Henry Brooks Adams-
(1838-1918) Pulitzer prize-winning historian (1919), great-grandson of John Adams, grandson of John Quincy Adams, and son of US Secretary of State, Charles Adams
Source: The Education of Henry Adams, ch. 1 (1907)
"In our country, the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State."
-Alexander Solzhenitsyn-
(1918-2008) Russian novelist, Soviet dissident, imprisoned for 8 years for critizing Stalin in a personal letter, Nobel Prize for Literature, 1970
"It is indeed probable that more harm and misery have been caused by men determined to use coercion to stamp out a moral evil than by men intent on doing evil."
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
Source: The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), p. 146
"The laws of man may bind him in chains or may put him to death, but they never can make him wise, virtuous, or happy."
-John Quincy Adams-
(1767-1848) 6th US President
"Every crime is born of necessity. If you want less crime, you must change the conditions. Poverty makes crime. Want, rags, crusts, misfortune - all these awake the wild beast in man, and finally he takes, and takes contrary to law, and becomes a criminal. And what do you do with him? You punish him. Why not punish a man for having consumption? The time will come when you will see that that is just as logical. What do you do with the criminal? You send him to the penitentiary. Is he made better? Worse. The first thing you do is to try to trample out his manhood, by putting an indignity upon him. You mark him. You put him in stripes. At night you put him in darkness. His feeling for revenge grows. You make a wild beast of him, and he comes out of that place branded in body and soul, and then you won't let him reform if he wants to."
-Robert G. Ingersoll-
(1833-1899) American lawyer, Civil War veteran, political leader, orator of United States during the Golden Age of Free Thought, nicknamed "The Great Agnostic"
Source: A Lay Sermon, 1886
"People unfit for freedom — who cannot do much with it — are hungry for power. The desire for freedom is an attribute of a 'have' type of self. It says: leave me alone and I shall grow, learn, and realize my capacities. The desire for power is basically an attribute of a 'have-not' type of self. If Hitler had had the talents and the temperament of a genuine artist, if Stalin had had the capacity to become a first-rate theoretician, if Napoleon had had the makings of a great poet or philosopher they would hardly have developed the all-consuming lust for absolute power. Freedom gives us a chance to realize our human and individual uniqueness. Absolute power can also bestow uniqueness: to have absolute power is to have the power to reduce all the people around us to puppets, robots, toys, or animals, and be the only man in sight. Absolute power achieves uniqueness by dehumanizing others."
-Eric Hoffer-
"How strangely will the Tools of a Tyrant pervert the plain Meaning of Words!"
-Samuel Adams-
(1722-1803), was known as the "Father of the American Revolution."
Source: letter to John Pitts, January 21, 1776
"It is not only vain, but wicked, in a legislature to frame laws in opposition to the laws of nature, and to arm them with the terrors of death. This is truly creating crimes in order to punish them."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Note on the Crimes Bill, 1779
"To disregard such a deliberate choice of words and their natural meaning, would be a departure from the first principle of constitutional interpretation. "In expounding the Constitution of the United States," said Chief Justice Taney in Holmes v. Jennison, 14 U.S. 540, 570-1, "every word must have its due force and appropriate meaning; for it is evident from the whole instrument, that, no word was unnecessarily used, or needlessly added. The many discussions which have taken place upon the construction of the Constitution, have proved the correctness of this proposition; and shown the high talent, the caution and the foresight of the illustrious men who framed it. Every word appears to have been weighed with the utmost deliberation and its force and effect to have been fully understood."
-Wright v. United States-
Source: in Wright v. United States, 302 U.S. 583 (1938), quoting Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney (1777-1864)
"The worst tyrants are those which establish themselves in our own breasts."
-William Ellery Channing-
(1780-1842) American Unitarian preacher
Source: Spiritual Freedom, 1830
"Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all."
-Hypatia of Alexandria-
(355? - 415 CE), Female Mathematician, Astronomer, and Philosopher
"From the moment the first leader of the first clan in human history took charge, he busied himself with this question: 'What can I say and do that will make my people react the way I want them to.' He was the first Pavlov. He was the first psychologist, the first propagandist, the first mind-control boss. His was the first little empire. Since then, only the means and methods have changed."
-Jon Rappoport-
American author, investigative reporter, writer
Source: The Underground
"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
"...Virtue, morality, and religion. This is the armor, my friend, and this alone that renders us invincible. These are the tactics we should study. If we lose these, we are conquered, fallen indeed...so long as our manners and principles remain sound, there is no danger."
-Patrick Henry-
(1736-1799) US Founding Father
"All Men have a Right to remain in a State of Nature as long as they please: And in case of intolerable Oppression, civil or religious, to leave the Society they belong to and enter into another. When Men enter into Society, it is by voluntary Consent, and they have a Right to demand and insist upon the performance of such Conditions and previous Limitations as form an equitable original Compact."
-Samuel Adams-
(1722-1803), was known as the "Father of the American Revolution."
Source: The Votes and Proceedings of the Freeholders and Other Inhabitants of the Town of Boston in Town Meeting Assembled, According to Law. Published by Order of the Town. Nov 20 1772
"If for no other reason, personal pride should prompt every governor and state legislator to take a secessionist attitude they were not elected to be lackeys of the federal bureaucracy."
-Frank Chodorov-
(1887-1966) American author, publisher
1952
"No country upon earth ever had it more in its power to attain these blessings than United America. Wondrously strange, then, and much to be regretted indeed would it be, were we to neglect the means and to depart from the road which Providence has pointed us to so plainly; I cannot believe it will ever come to pass."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: 1788, in a letter to Benjamin Lincoln, Ref: George Washington: A Collection, W.B. Allen, ed. (521)
"The right of ordinary citizens to possess weapons is the most extraordinary, most controversial, and least understood of those liberties secured by Englishmen and bequeathed to their American colonists. It lies at the very heart of the relationship between the individual and his fellows, and between the individual and his government."
-Joyce Lee Malcolm-
(1941-) American professor of law, historian, and Constitutional scholar
Source: To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. IX
"An appeal is when you ask one court to show its contempt for another court."
-Finley Peter Dunne-
(1867-1936) American humorist, writer
"The only kind of freedom that the mob can imagine is freedom to annoy and oppress its betters, and that is precisely the kind that we mainly have."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"The strongest of all warriors are these two -- Time and Patience."
-Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi-
(1828-1910) Russian writer
Source: War and Peace (1865–1867; 1869), Bk. X, ch. 16
"The loyalists in the beginning of the late war objected to associating, arming and fighting, in defense of our liberties, because these measures were not constitutional. A free people should always be left... with every possible power to promote their own happiness."
-Pennsylvania Gazette-
April 23, 1788
"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)
"I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"One byproduct of individualism is benevolence -- a general attitude of good will towards one's neighbors and fellow human beings. Benevolence is impossible in a society where people violate each others' rights."
-Glenn Woiceshyn-
Canadian writer
Source: Capitalism Magazine, 1998.03.07
"Count it the greatest sin to prefer life to honor, and for the sake of living to lose what makes life worth having."
-Juvenal-
[Decimus Junius Juvenalis] (c.55-c.128 AD) Roman satirical poet
"If moral behavior were simply following rules, we could program a computer to be moral."
-Samuel P. Ginder-
Rear Admiral of the US Navy, WW2
"Be fit for more than the thing you are now doing. Let every one know that you have a reserve in yourself; that you have more power than you are now using. If you are not too large for the place you occupy, you are too small for it."
-James A. Garfield-
(1831-1881) 20th President of the United States (1881), assassinated
"Perfect Freedom is reserved for the man who lives by his own work, and in that work does what he wants to do."
-R. G. Collingwood-
(1889-1943) English philosopher and historian
"Then liberty, like day,
Breaks on the soul, and by a flash from Heaven
Fires all the faculties with glorious joy."
-William Cowper-
(1731-1800) English poet, hymnodist
Source: Task (bk. V, l. 882)
"Virtue is harder to be got than a knowledge of the world; and, if lost in a young man, is seldom recovered."
-John Locke-
(1632-1704) English philosopher and political theorist
"Morality may consist solely in the courage of making a choice."
-Léon Blum-
(1872-1950) Prime Minister of France
"When you choose the lesser of two evils, always remember that it is still an evil."
-Max Lerner
(1902-1992) Russian-born American journalist and educator
Source: Actions and Passions, 1949
"It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind."
-George Bernard Shaw-
(1856-1950) Irish comic dramatist
Source: quoted in Amnesty Update, January/February 1990
"Totalitarianism begins in contempt for what you have. The second step is the notion: 'Things must change — no matter how, Anything is better than what we have.' Totalitarian rulers organize this kind of mass sentiment, and by organizing it articulate it, and by articulating it make the people somehow love it. They were told before, thou shalt not kill; and they didn’t kill. Now they are told, thou shalt kill; and although they think it’s very difficult to kill, they do it because it's now part of the code of behavior. They learn whom to kill and how to kill and how to do it together. This is the much talked about Gleichschaltung — the coordination process. You are coordinated not with the powers that be, but with your neighbor — coordinated with the majority. But instead of communicating with the other you are now glued to him. And you feel of course marvelous. Totalitarianism appeals to the very dangerous emotional needs of people who live in complete isolation and in fear of one another."
-Hannah Arendt-
(1906-1975) German-American political theorist, escaped Nazi Germany
Source: 'Hannah Arendt: From an Interview' Comments made in 1974 during an interview with the French writer Roger Errera and published in October 26, 1978 issue of The NewYork Review of Books Interview.
"If you cannot convince them, confuse them."
-Harry S. Truman-
(1884-1972), 33rd US President
"Based on the idea of natural rights, government secures those rights to the individual by strictly negative intervention, making justice costless and easy of access; and beyond that it does not go. The State, on the other hand, 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.
So far from encouraging a wholesome development of social power, it has invariably, as Madison said, turned every contingency into a resource for depleting social power and enhancing State power. As Dr. Sigmund Freud has observed, it can not even be said that the State has ever shown any disposition to suppress crime, but only to safeguard its own monopoly of crime."
-Albert Jay Nock-
Our Enemy, the State
"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
"It is precisely this clinging to victimhood as a means of demonstrating one’s virtue and advancing one’s well-being that has led us into a society in which welfare and quotas are “civil rights,” government handouts are “entitlements,” and payment to girls having babies out of wedlock are “compassionate,” while hard-working, ambitious people are “greedy,” punishment of crime is “oppression,” and an independent thinker who stands for courage and self-reliance is dismissed as an “Uncle Tom.”"
-J. Tucker Alford-
Source: Heroics, Letter to The American Spectator, P. 72, February, 1996.
"Government schools will teach children that government is wonderful."
-Neal Boortz-
(1945- ) Radio talk show host, columnist
"Tyranny, like fog in the well known poem, often creeps in silently 'on little cat feet.'"
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
"Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to."
-Theodore Dalrymple-
[Anthony Malcolm Daniels] (1949-) English writer (generally using the pen name Theodore Dalrymple), retired prison doctor and psychiatrist
Source: Our Culture, What’s Left Of It, by Jamie Glazov, Interview with Theodore Dalrymple, FrontPageMagazine.com, August 31, 2005
"The minute you read something that you can't understand, you can almost be sure it was drawn up by a lawyer."
-Will Rogers-
(1879-1935) American humorist
"The history of civilized man is the history of the incessant conflict between liberty and authority. Each victory for liberty marked a new step in the world's progress; so we can measure the advance of civilization by the amount of freedom acquired by human institutions."
-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)
"And here is the difference between the Libertarians and the Authoritarians: the latter have no confidence in liberty; they believe in compelling people to be good, assuming that people are totally depraved; the former believe in letting people be good, and maintain that humanity grows better and better as it gains more and more liberty. If Libertarians were merely to ask that liberty be tried in any one of the other fields of human expression they would meet the same opposition as their pioneer predecessors; but such is their confidence in the advantages of liberty that they demand, not that it be tried in one more instance only, but that it be universally adopted."
-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 first great struggle for liberty was in the realm of thought. The libertarians reasoned that freedom of thought would be good for mankind; it would promote knowledge, and increased knowledge would advance civilization. But the authoritarians protested that freedom of thought would be dangerous, that people would think wrong, that a few were divinely appointed to think for the people."
-Charles T. Sprading-
(1871-1959) Libertarian activist, writer
Source: Liberty and The Great Libertarians, 1913
"Freedom degenerates unless it has to struggle in its own defence."
-Lord Acton-
[John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton] (1834-1902), First Baron Acton of Aldenham
"Freedom is a new religion, the religion of our time."
-Heinrich Heine-
(1797-1856) German poet, journalist, essayist, literary critic
"I wish men to be free, as much from mobs as kings,—from you as me."
-Lord Byron-
[George Gordon Noel Byron] (1788-1824), The 6th Baron Byron of Rochdale
"The persecuting spirit has its origin morally in the disposition of man to domineer over his fellow creatures; intellectually, in the assumption that one's own opinions are infallibly correct."
-John Fiske-
(1842-1901) American philosopher, historian
"It is not the disease, but the physician; it is the pernicious hand of government alone which can reduce a whole people to despair."
-Junius-
the pseudonym of a writer who contributed a series of letters to the London Public Advertiser, from January 21, 1769 to January 21, 1772
"All truth is safe, and nothing else is safe; and he who keeps back the truth or withholds it from men, from motives of expediency, is either a coward, or a criminal, or both."
-Max Muller-
(1823-1900) German-born philologist, Orientalist
"People take different roads seeking fulfillment & happiness. Just because they're not on your road doesn't mean they've gotten lost."
-H. Jackson Brown, Jr.-
(1940-) American author
"Everyone may seek his own happiness in the way that seems good to himself, provided that he infringe not such freedom of others to strive after a similar end as is consistent with the freedom of all according to a possible general law."
-Immanuel Kant-
(1724-1804) German philosopher
"There is one thing in the world more wicked than the desire to command, and that is the will to obey."
-William Kingdon Clifford-
(1845-1879) English mathematician, philosopher
"When you stretch the truth, watch out for the snapback."
-Bill Copeland-
(1946-2010) American poet, writer and historian
"It is always the best policy to tell the truth, unless, of course, you are an exceptionally good liar."
-Jerome K. Jerome-
(1859-1927) English writer, humorist
"Respect for the truth is an acquired taste."
-Mark Van Doren-
(1894-1972) Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, professor, and critic
Source: Liberal Education, 1943
"Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions that differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions."
-Albert Einstein-
(1879-1955) Physicist and Professor, Nobel Prize 1921
"If we were all given by magic the power to read each other's thoughts, I suppose the first effect would be to dissolve all friendships."
-Bertrand Russell-
[Bertrand Arthur William Russell] (1872-1970) Philosopher, educator
"There's one way to find out if a man is honest - ask him. If he says, 'Yes,' you know he is a crook."
-Groucho Marx-
(1890-1977) American comedian and film and television star
"He who is not sure of his memory, should not undertake the trade of lying."
-Michel de Montaigne-
[Michel Eyquem De Montaigne] (1532-1592) French Renaissance scholar, philosopher, writer
"People who are brutally honest get more satisfaction out of the brutality than out of the honesty."
-Richard J. Needham-
(1912-1996) Canadian humour columnist
"Today I bent the truth to be kind, and I have no regret, for I am far surer of what is kind than I am of what is true."
-Robert Brault-
"The truth needs so little rehearsal."
-Barbara Kingsolver-
(1955-) American novelist, essayist and poet
Source: Animal Dreams
"It takes two to lie. One to lie and one to listen."
-Homer Simpson-
Source: from the television show The Simpsons
"I don't mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy."
-Samuel Butler-
(1835-1902) Victorian-era English author
Source: Note-Books, 1912
"The truth brings with it a great measure of absolution, always."
-R. D. Laing-
[Ronald David Laing] (1927 -1989) Scottish psychiatrist
"Honesty is the first chapter of the book of wisdom."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"He is the freeman whom the truth makes free,
And all are slaves besides."
-William Cowper-
(1731-1800) English poet, hymnodist
"No man has a good enough memory to make a successful liar."
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
"The truth is more important than the facts."
-Frank Lloyd Wright-
(1867-1959) American architect, designer, writer, and educator
"Honesty is never seen sitting astride the fence."
-Lemuel K. Washburn-
(1846-1927) American Freethought writer
Source: Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911
"The Constitution is a delusion and a snare if the weakest and humblest man in the land cannot be defended in his right to speak and his right to think as much as the strongest in the land."
-Clarence S. Darrow-
(1857-1938)
Source: The Communist Trial, People v. Lloyd, 1920
"The Bill of Rights is a born rebel. It reeks with sedition. In every clause it shakes its fist in the face of constituted authority... It is the one guarantee of human freedom to the American people."
-Frank I. Cobb-
(1869-1923) American Journalist
Source: LaFollette’s Magazine, January 1920
"Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people, being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties, and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in the various parts of the country, and among the different orders of people, it shall be the duty of legislators and magistrates... to cherish the interest of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: John Adams, Thoughts on Government, 1776
"Free trade consists simply in letting people buy and sell as they want to buy and sell. It is protection that requires force, for it consists in preventing people from doing what they want to do. Protective tariffs are as much applications of force as are blockading squadrons, and their object is the same — to prevent trade. The difference between the two is that blockading squadrons are a means whereby nations seek to prevent their enemies from trading; protective tariffs are a means whereby nations attempt to prevent their own people from trading. What protection teaches us, is to do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war."
-Henry George-
"I have never been hurt by anything I didn't say."
-Calvin Coolidge-
(1872-1933) 30th US President
"Without free speech no search for truth is possible... no discovery of truth is useful. Better a thousand fold abuse of free speech than denial of free speech. The abuse dies in a day, but the denial slays the life of the people."
-Charles Bradlaugh-
(1833-1891) English political activist and atheist, founded the National Secular Society in 1866
Source: Speech, 1890
"The liberty of the press would be an empty sound, and no man would venture to write on any subject, however pure his purpose, without an attorney at one elbow and a counsel at the other. From minds thus subdued by the fear of punishment, there could issue no works of genius to expand the empire of human reason."
-Thomas Erskine-
(1750-1823) Lord Chancellor of England
Source: Trial of John Stockdale, 9 December 1789
"If you admit that to silence your opponent by force is to win an intellectual argument, then you admit the right to silence people by force."
-Hans Eysenck-
(1916-1997) German-born psychologist, spent professional career in Great Britain
"You thus have no rights at all over our freedom of thought, you princes; no jurisdiction over that which is true or false; no right to determine the objects of our inquiry or to set limits to it; no right to hinder us from communicating the results, whether they be true or false, to whomever or however we wish."
-Johann Gottlieb Fichte-
(1762-1814) German philosopher, psychologist, considered the father of German nationalism
"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)
"Freedom of speech and freedom of action [is meaningless] without freedom to think. And there is no freedom of thought without doubt."
-Bergan Evans-
(1904-1978)
Source: The Natural History of Nonsense, 1946
"Censorship is advertising paid by the government."
-Federico Fellini-
(1920-1993) Italian film director and screenwriter
"Complete and accurate surveillance as a means of control is probably a practical impossibility. What is much more likely is a loss of privacy and constant inconvenience as the wrong people gain access to information, as one wastes time convincing the inquisitors that one is in fact innocent, or as one struggles to untangle the errors of the errant machine."
-Victor Ferkiss-
Source: Technological Man: The Myth and the Reality, 1969
"Society can exist only on the basis that there is some amount of polished lying and that no one says exactly what he thinks."
-Lin Yutang-
(1895-1976) Chinese writer, translator, linguist, philosopher and inventor
"Truth is the most valuable thing we have, so I try to conserve it."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910) American author and humorist
"I am different from Washington; I have a higher, grander standard of principle. Washington could not lie. I can lie, but I won't."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910) American author and humorist
"Truth always originates in a minority of one, and every custom begins as a broken precedent."
-Nancy Astor-
(1879-1964) Member of Parliament, United Kingdom
"Such being the happiness of the times, that you may think as you wish, and speak as you think.
[Lat., Rara temporum felicitate, ubi sentire quae velis, et quae sentias dicere licet.]"
-Cornelius Tacitus-
(55-117 A.D.) Senator and historian of the Roman Empire
"Under the surface of this global civilization, a great and secret war is taking place. The two opponents hold different conceptions of Reality. On one side, those who claim that humans operate purely on the basis of stimulus-response, like machines; on the other side, those who believe there is a gigantic thing called freedom. Phase One of the war is already over. The stimulus-response people have won. In Phase Two, people are waking up to the far-reaching and devastating consequences of the Pavlovian program."
-Jon Rappoport-
American author, investigative reporter, writer
Source: The Underground
"Does it not seem a vast waste of valuable human material that the pioneers of thought, those who by their genius dare to clear unknown paths in the arts and sciences and in government, should have to conform to the dictates of that non-creative, slow-moving mass, the majority? An appeal to the majority is a resort to force and not an appeal to intelligence; the majority is always ignorant, and by increasing the majority we multiply ignorance. The majority is incapable of initiative, its attitude being one of opposition toward everything that is new. If it had been left to the majority, the world would never have had the steamboat, the railroad, the telegraph, or any of the conveniences of modern life."
-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)
"Collective judgment of new ideas is so often wrong that it is arguable that progress depends on individuals being free to back their own judgment despite collective disapproval."
-Sir William Arthur Lewis-
(1915-1991) Saint Lucian economist, Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics (1979)
"The question about progress has become the question whether we can discover any way of submitting to the worldwide paternalism of a technocracy without losing all personal privacy and independence. Is there any possibility of getting the super Welfare State's honey and avoiding the sting?"
-C. S. Lewis-
(1898-1963), British novelist
Source: Willing Slaves of the Welfare State, first published in The Observer on July 20, 1958
"Depressed? Of course we're all depressed. We've been so quickly, violently, and irreconcilably plucked from nature, from physical labor, from kinship and village mentality, from every natural and primordial anti-depressant. The further society 'progresses,' the grander the scale of imbalance. Just as fluoride is put in water to prevent dental caries, we'll soon find government mandating Prozac in our water to prevent mental caries."
-M. Robin D'Antan-
"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."
-Henry Grady Weaver-
(1889-1949) American author, General Motors marketing executive who made the cover of Time in 1938
"You're obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That's the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world."
-Octave Mirbeau-
(1848-1917) French journalist, art critic, pamphleteer, novelist, and playwright
Source: Torture Garden, "The Mission," Chapter 8 (1899 - Le Jardin des supplices)
"Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things."
-Russell Baker-
(1925- ) American Pulitzer Prize-winning writer
"The illusion of freedom [in America] will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater."
-Frank Zappa-
(1940-1993) American Musician
"The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain."
-Colin Wilson-
(1931-2013) English writer, philosopher and novelist
"It may be safety received as an axiom in our political system, that the State government…afford security…against the national authority."
-Alexander Hamilton-
"The State governments, by their original constitutions, are invested with complete sovereignty."
-Alexander Hamilton-
"Do they [the anti-Federalists] require that, in the establishment of the Constitution, the States should be regarded as distinct and independent sovereigns? They are so regarded by the Constitution proposed."
-James Madison-
"But it will not follow from this doctrine that acts of the larger society [Federal] which are not pursuant to its constitutional powers, but which are invasions of the residuary authorities of the smaller societies [States], will become the supreme law of the land. These will be merely acts of usurpation and will deserve to be treated as such.
It will not, I presume, have escaped observation, that it expressly confines this supremacy to laws made pursuant to the Constitution.
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."
-Alexander Hamilton-
"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 writer, theorist, philosopher, 19th century individualist, member of the Parliament of the U.K.
"The test for whether one is living in a police state is that those who are charged with enforcing the law are allowed to break the laws with impunity."
-Jon Roland-
(1944-) founder of the Constitution Society
"The scapegoat has always had the mysterious power of unleashing man's ferocious pleasure in torturing, corrupting, and befouling."
-Francois Mauriac-
(1885-1970) French novelist, dramatist, critic, poet, journalist, member of the Académie française, Nobel Prize in Literature (1952)
Source: Second Thoughts, 1961
"To the frustrated, freedom from responsibility is more attractive than freedom from restraint. They are eager to barter their independence for relief from the burdens of willing, deciding and being responsible for inevitable failure. They willingly abdicate the directing of their lives to those who want to plan, command and shoulder all responsibility."
-Eric Hoffer-
(1902-1983) American author, philosopher, awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
"Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it."
-Germaine Greer-
(1939- ) Australian feminist
"The skeptic does not mean him who doubts, but him who investigates or researches, as opposed to him who asserts and thinks he has found."
-Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo-
(1864-1936) Spanish Basque essayist, novelist, poet, playwright, philosopher, professor
Source: Essays and Soliloquies, 1924
"Hypocrisy is a fashionable vice, and all fashionable vices pass for virtue."
-Molière-
[Jean-Baptiste Poquelin] (1622-1673) French playwright
"A true party-man hates and despises candour."
-Adam Smith-
(1723-1790) Scottish philosopher and economist
Source: The Theory of Moral Sentiments par. III.I.85
"I detest that man, who hides one thing in the depths of his heart, and speaks forth another."
-Homer-
(sometime between 1050-850 BC) legendary Greek epic poet
"Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself."
-Justice Potter Stewart-
(1915-1985), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
"Those wearing Tolerance for a label
Call other views intolerable."
-Phyllis McGinley-
(1905-1978)
Source: 1954
"What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man! Who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment & death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment ... inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: letter to Jean Nicholas Demeunier, January 24, 1786
"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) American abolitionist, advocate for Native Americans, orator, lawyer
Source: Liberty and the Great Libertarians (C. Spradling)
Like, say, flags. Or anthems. Or governments ostensibly instituted expressly to protect liberties...
"What you do speaks so loud I cannot hear what you say."
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
Physician, heal thyself...
"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) American libertarian author, editor, educational theorist, Georgist, social critic
"The house of delusions is cheap to build but drafty to live in, and ready at any instant to fall."
-A. E. Housman-
[Alfred Edward Housman] (1859-1936) British writer
Source: October 3, 1892 at University College, London
"Laws: We know what they are, and what they are worth! They are spider webs for the rich and mighty, steel chains for the poor and weak, fishing nets in the hands of the government."
-Pierre-Joseph Proudhon-
(1809-1865) French mutualist political philosopher
"What are the moral convictions most fondly held by barbarous and semi-barbarous people? They are the convictions that authority is the soundest basis of belief; that merit attaches to readiness to believe; that the doubting disposition is a bad one, and skepticism is a sin."
-Thomas Henry Huxley-
(1825-1895) English biologist
Source: On The Advisableness of Improving Natural Knowledge,1866
"Party is known to encourage prejudice, and to lead men astray in the judgment of character. Thus it is we see one half the nation extolling those that the other half condemns, and condemning those that the other half extols. Both cannot be right, and as passions, interests and prejudices are all enlisted on such occasions, it would be nearer the truth to say that both are wrong. Party is an instrument of error, by pledging men to support its policy, instead of supporting the policy of the state. Thus we see party measures almost always in extremes, the resistance of opponents inducing the leaders to ask for more than is necessary. Party leads to vicious, corrupt and unprofitable legislation, for the sole purpose of defeating party. Thus have we seen those territorial divisions and regulations which ought to be permanent, as well as other useful laws, altered, for no other end than to influence an election. Party, has been a means of entirely destroying that local independence, which elsewhere has given rise to a representation that acts solely for the nation, and which, under other systems is called the country party, every legislator being virtually pledged to support one of two opinions; or, if a shade of opinion between them, a shade that is equally fettered, though the truth be with neither."
-The American Democrat-
"All powers not given are retained."
-George Nicholas-
"Any law not warranted by the Constitution is a bare-faced usurpation."
-James Iredell-
"The State retains all the Rights of Sovereignty which it has not expressly parted with to the Congress of the United States."
-Samuel Adams-
"Every extension of the administrative authority beyond its just constitutional limits, is absolutely an act of usurpation."
-St. George Tucker-
"In the general Constitution, its powers are enumerated"
-Edmund Randolph-
"There is always more goodness in the world than there appears to be, because goodness is of its very nature modest and retiring."
-Evelyn Beatrice Hall-
On the other hand, the most effective evil pulls off the impression...
"Although the legal and ethical definitions of right are the antithesis of each other, most writers use them as synonyms. They confuse power with goodness, and mistake law for justice."
-Charles T. Sprading-
(1871-1959) Libertarian activist, writer
Source: Freedom and its Fundamentals
"Alas, how many have been persecuted for the wrong of having been right?"
-Jean-Baptiste Say-
(1767-1832) French economist, businessman
Source: A Treatise on Political Economy, 1803
"Video meliora, proboque;
Deteriora sequor."
(I see the better way, and approve it;
I follow the worse.)
-Ovid-
[Publius Ovidius Naso ] (43 BC- AD 18) Roman poet during the reign of Augustus
"The worst of all deceptions is self-deception."
-Plato-
(429-347 BC) Greek philosopher
"We have met the enemy and he is us."
-Walt Kelly-
(1913- 1973) Comic strip artist for 'Pogo'
Source: Pogo: We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us, 1972
"Every nation gets the government it deserves."
-Joseph de Maistre-
(1753-1821) Savoyard lawyer, diplomat, writer, and philosopher
Source: Correspondance diplomatique, tome 2. Paris : Michel Lévy frères libraires éditeurs, 1860, p.196.
"To pretend to know when you do not know is a disease."
-Lao-Tzu-
[Li Erh] (570-490 BC) 'Old Sage', Father of Taoism
"[T]here seems to have been an actual decline in rational thinking. The United States had become a place where entertainers and professional athletes were mistaken for people of importance. They were idolized and treated as leaders; their opinions were sought on everything and they took themselves just as seriously—after all, if an athlete is paid a million or more a year, he knows he is important ... so his opinions of foreign affairs and domestic policies must be important, too, even though he proves himself to be ignorant and subliterate every time he opens his mouth."
-Robert A. Heinlein-
(1907-1988) American writer
Source: To Sail Beyond the Sunset, 1987
"All the public business in Congress now connects itself with intrigues, and there is great danger that the whole government will degenerate into a struggle of cabals."
-John Quincy Adams-
(1767-1848) 6th US President
Source: Journal entry (January 1819)
Oh, John. If you only knew...
"Can any of you seriously say the Bill of Rights could get through Congress today? It wouldn't even get out of committee."
-F. Lee Bailey-
famous trial attorney
Source: Newsweek, 17 April 1967
"Among those who dislike oppression are many who like to oppress."
-Napoleon Bonaparte-
(1769-1821) French emperor
Source: Political Aphorisms (1848)
"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
"Big Brother in the form of an increasingly powerful government and in an increasingly powerful private sector will pile the records high with reasons why privacy should give way to national security, to law and order, to efficiency of operation, to scientific advancement and the like."
-Justice William O. Douglas-
(1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Points of Rebellion, 1969
"Judges ... rule on the basis of law, not public opinion, and they should be totally indifferent to pressures of the times."
-Justice Warren E. Burger-
(1907-1995) Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1969-1986)
Source: Christian Science Monitor, 11 February 1987
"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
"Be not intimidated... nor suffer yourselves to be wheedled out of your liberties by any pretense of politeness, delicacy, or decency. These, as they are often used, are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery and cowardice."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, 1765
"Government of the self was the original basis for republican government, reflecting the view that civil society was much more than politics. Society was made up of men and women who gave order to their lives by entering into associations on a voluntary basis, quite apart from government, for all the various reasons of fellowship, philanthrophy,
faith and commerce."
-Hans L. Eicholz-
Senior Fellow at the Liberty Fund
"The Democrats and Republicans stand at two extremes, characterized by which parts of our lives they emphasize their desire to control. Libertarians reject both extremes in favor of the government leaving control of your life to you."
-Michael Badnarik-
(1954- ) American software engineer, political figure, and former radio talk show host
"What occurs to me in reading their book is that the new American approach to social control is so much more sophisticated and pervasive that it really deserves a new name. It isn't just propaganda any more, it's 'prop-agenda'. It's not so much the control of what we think, but the control of what we think about. When our governments want to sell us a course of action, they do it by making sure it's the only thing on the agenda, the only thing everyone's talking about. And they pre-load the ensuing discussion with highly selected images, devious and prejudicial language, dubious linkages, weak or false 'intelligence' and selected 'leaks'. "
-Brian Eno-
(1948- ) English musician, composer, record producer, singer, and visual artist
Source: on Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber's "Weapons of Mass Deception"
"The word 'politics' is derived from the word 'poly', meaning 'many', and the word 'ticks', meaning 'blood sucking parasites.'"
-Larry Hardiman-
"If a million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing."
-Anatole France-
[Jacques Anatole Thibault] (1844-1924)
"You have all the characteristics of a popular politician: a horrible voice, bad breeding, and a vulgar manner."
-Aristophanes-
(450-385 BC) Greek comedy writer
Source: Knights, 424 B.C.
"What orators lack in depth they make up for in length."
-Charles-Louis de Secondat-
(1689-1755) Baron de Montesquieu
"Politics is made up largely of irrelevancies."
-Dalton Camp-
"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-
"A free society cannot be the substitution of a ‘new order’ for the old order; it is the extension of spheres of free action until they make up most of social life."
-Paul Goodman-
"Do not seek to find hope among your leaders. They are the repositories of poison. Their interest in you extends only so far as their ability to control you. For you, they seek duty and obedience, and they will ply you with the language of stirring faith. They seek followers, and woe to those who question, or voice challenge. Civilization after civilization, it is the same. The world falls to tyranny with a whisper. The frightened are ever keen to bow to a perceived necessity, in the belief that necessity forces conformity, and conformity a certain stability. In a world shaped into conformity, dissidents stand out, are easily branded and dealt with. There is no multitude of perspectives, no dialogue. The victim assumes the face of the tyrant, self-righteous and intransigent, and wars breed like vermin. And people die."
-Steven Erikson-
"Socialism is rape, Capitalism is consensual sex."
-Ben Shapiro-
"I have been one of those who have carried the fight for complete freedom of information in the United Nations. And while accepting the fact that some of our press, our radio commentators, our prominent citizens and our movies may at times be blamed legitimately for things they have said and done, still I feel that the fundamental right of freedom of thought and expression is essential. If you curtail what the other fellow says and does, you curtail what you yourself may say and do. In our country we must trust the people to hear and see both the good and the bad and to choose the good."
-Eleanor Roosevelt-
"As long as the law may be diverted from its true purpose -- that it may violate property instead of protecting it -- then everyone will want to participate in making the law, either to protect himself against plunder or to use it for plunder. Political questions will always be prejudicial, dominant, and all-absorbing. There will be fighting to gain access to the legislature as well as fighting within it."
-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)
"Any one of the strange laws we suffer is a compromise between a fad and a vested interest."
-Gilbert Keith Chesterton-
(1874-1936) British essayist, critic, poet, and novelist
Source: Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox, 1933
"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) American science fiction writer
Source: Dune, 1965
"Causes that live by politics, die by politics."
-Steven F. Hayward-
American author, political commentator, and policy scholar
Source: Climate Change Has Run Its Course, Wall Street Journal, June 4, 2018
"While it would be silly and ungracious to insist that intelligent deliberation on public issues is nowhere found in modern communities, it would be naive to imagine that wise deliberation can survive the constant pounding from self-interested political behavior. Benevolence in public institutions has a short half-life no matter how noble its original intentions.'
'Once [a] program is in place, its day-to-day administration falls into the hands of a professional cadre besieged by powerful interest groups whose influence grows as public interest wanes. . . . A slow process of disintegration and reconfiguration sets in, transforming and expanding a program from within."
-Richard A. Epstein'
(1943-) Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law at the New York University School of Law
Source: Principles for a Free Society
"I refuse to apologize for my ability --
I refuse to apologize for my success --
I refuse to apologize for my money.
If this is evil, make the most of it."
-Ayn Rand-
[Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum] (1905-1982) Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter
Source: Atlas Shrugged
"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
"Coercion by government, the main fear of our founding fathers, is now its most common attribute."
-Philip K. Howard-
New York attorney
Source: The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America (New York: Random House 1994)
"To do evil that good may come of it is for bunglers in politics as well as morals."
-William Penn-
(1644-1718)
"From the saintly and single-minded idealist to the fanatic is often but a step."
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
"I know that most men -- not only those considered clever, but even those who are very clever and capable of understanding most difficult scientific, mathematical, or philosophic, problems -- can seldom discern even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as obliges them to admit the falsity of conclusions they have formed, perhaps with much difficulty -- conclusions of which they are proud, which they have taught to others, and on which they have built their lives."
-Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi-
(1828-1910) Russian writer
Source: What is Art? (1896)
"In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying."
-Adolf Hitler-
(1889-1945) German Nazi Dictator
1935
Source: Mein Kampf, p. 197(?) 14th Edition
"If the author of the Declaration of Independence were to utter such a sentiment today, the Post Office Department could exclude him from the mail, grand juries could indict him for sedition and criminal syndicalism, legislative committees could seize his private papers ... and United States Senators would be clamoring for his deportation that he ... should be sent back to live with the rest of the terrorists."
-Frank I. Cobb-
(1869-1923) American Journalist
Source: New York World
"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)
"If politicians don't respect the law, why should citizens respect politicians?"
-Debra Saunders-
American newspaper columnist
"There are two methods, or means, and only two, whereby man's needs and desires can be satisfied. One is the production and exchange of wealth; this is the economic means. The other is the uncompensated appropriation of wealth produced by others; this is the political means."
-Albert Jay Nock-
(1870-1945) American libertarian author, editor, educational theorist, Georgist, social critic
"Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance."
-Hannah Arendt-
"Money is a singular thing. It ranks with love as man's greatest source of joy. And with death as his greatest source of anxiety. Over all history it has oppressed nearly all people in one of two ways: either it has been abundant and very unreliable, or reliable and very scarce."
-John Kenneth Galbraith-
"Protection of political speech advanced two important democratic goals: 1) an informed citizenry that would be capable of making educated decisions on matters of public concern, and 2) a free and open marketplace of ideas wherein the truth would ultimately prevail… Only through a vigorous and spirited public debate could citizens be educated about the actions of their government and react responsibly."
-Craig R. Smith-
Source: All Speech Is Created Equal, 1986
"Error of opinion may be tolerated when reason is left free to combat it."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: First Inaugural Address, 4 March 1801
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."
-George Orwell-
[Eric Arthur Blair] (1903-1950) British author
"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'
"If somebody smokes a joint, we're gonna go in and bust them? We're gonna raid houses in case somebody has a banned substance? Confiscate their houses? My God, if people don't see that as an abuse of force, of too much government, then we're just not communicating."
-Charles Koch-
(1935-) American businessman and philanthropist
Source: USA TODAY April 24, 2015
"Marijuana in its natural form is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man. By any measure of rational analysis marijuana can be safely used within a supervised routine of medical care. ... It would be unreasonable, arbitrary and capricious for DEA to continue to stand between those sufferers and the benefits of this substance in light of the evidence in this record."
-Judge Francis L. Young-
DEA Chief Administrative Law
Source: Ruling in the matter of Marijuana Rescheduling Petition, September 6, 1988
"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
"Censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion... In the long run it will create a generation incapable of appreciating the difference between independence of thought and subservience."
-Henry Steele Commager-
(1902-1998) Historian and author
Source: Freedom, Loyalty and Dissent, 1954
"To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind for it."
-Michel De Montaigne-
[Michel Eyquem De Montaigne] (1532-1592) French Renaissance scholar, philosopher, writer
Source: Essays
"If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it? The recent practice of propaganda has proved that it is possible, at least up to a certain point and within certain limits."
-Edward L. Bernays-
(1891-1995) Austrian-American pioneer in the field of public relations and propaganda, "the father of public relations," nephew of Sigmund Freud
Source: in his book “Propaganda” (1928)
"I shall have liberty to think for myself without molesting others or being molested myself."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: letter to his brother-in-law, Richard Cranch, August 29, 1756, explaining how his independent opinions would create much difficulty in the ministry, in Edwin S Gaustad, Faith of Our Fathers: Religion and the New Nation (1987) p. 88, quoted from Ed and Michael Buckner, "Quotations that Support the Separation of State and Church"
"The political spirit is the great force in throwing the love of truth and accurate reasoning into a secondary place."
-John Viscount Morley-
(1838-1923), of Blackburn
Source: On Compromise, 1874
"If a law to donate aid to any farmer or cattleman who has had poor crops or lost his cattle comes within the meaning of the phrase “to provide for the General Welfare of the United States,” why should not similar gifts be made to grocers, shopkeepers, miners, and other businessmen who have made losses through financial depression, or to wage earners out of employment? Why is not their property equally within the purview of the General Welfare?"
-Charles Warren-
(1868-1954) American lawyer, legal scholar, awarded Pulitzer Prize in 1923
Source: Congress As Santa Clause, 1932
"A liberal's like to be lax
When recommending a tax.
With a glut in his heart
And his brain low a quart,
He will give you the shirts off our backs."
-F. R. Duplantier-
American writer, editor
Source: Politickles: Limericks Lampooning the Lunatic Left, January 1, 2010
"If one understands that Socialism is not a 'share the wealth' program but is in reality a method to consolidate and control the wealth, then the seeming paradox of super rich men promoting Socialism becomes no paradox at all. Instead it becomes logical, even the perfect tool of power-seeking megalomaniacs. Communism, or more accurately Socialism, is not a movement of the down-trodden masses but of the economic elite."
-Gary Allen-
(1936-86) American journalist
"Free speech is about as good a cause as the world has ever known. But it…gets shoved aside in favor of things which at a given moment more vital…everybody favors free speech in the slack moments when no axes are being ground."
-Heywood Broun-
(1888-1939) American journalist, founded the American Newspaper Guild
Source: New York World, 23 October 1926
"All these people talk so eloquently about getting back to good old-fashioned values…and I say let’s get back to the good old-fashioned First Amendment of the good old-fashioned Constitution of the United States – and to hell with the censors! Give me knowledge or give me death!"
-Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.-
(1922-2007) American author
"As so often before, liberty has been wounded in the house of its friends. Liberty in the wild and freakish hands of fanatics has once more, as frequently in the past, proved the effective helpmate of autocracy and the twin-brother of tyranny."
-Otto Hermann Kahn-
(1867-1934) German-born American investment banker, collector, philanthropist
"In the US, voters cast ballots for individual candidates who are not bound to any party program except rhetorically, and not always then. Some Republicans are more liberal than some Democrats, some libertarians are more radical than some socialists, and many local candidates run without any party identification. No American citizen can vote intelligently without knowledge of the ideas, political background, and commitments of each individual candidate."
-Ben H. Bagdikian-
(1920- ) Armenian-born author, dean emeritus of the University of California at Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, former editor at the Washington Post
Source: 1982
"I do not subscribe to the doctrine that the people are the slaves and property of their government. I believe that government is for the use of the people, and not the people for the use of the government."
-Gerrit Smith-
(1797-1874)
Source: Speech, House of Representatives, 27 June 1854
"I am an adherent of the ideal of democracy, although I know well the weaknesses of the democratic form of government. Social equality and economic protection of the individual have always seemed to me the important communal aims of the state. Although I am a typical loner in daily life, my consciousness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice keeps me from feeling isolated."
-Albert Einstein-
"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)
"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
"Were I to define the British constitution, therefore, I should say, it is a limited monarchy, or a mixture of the three forms of government commonly known in the schools, reserving as much of the monarchical splendor, the aristocratical independency, and the democratical freedom, as are necessary that each of these powers may have a control, both in legislation and execution, over the other two, for the preservation of the subject's liberty."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: Boston Gazette, 27 Jan 1766, Adams Papers, V I, pp 167-168
"If a majority are capable of preferring their own private interest, or that of their families, counties, and party, to that of the nation collectively, some provision must be made in the constitution, in favor of justice, to compel all to respect the common right, the public good, the universal law, in preference to all private and partial considerations... And that the desires of the majority of the people are often for injustice and inhumanity against the minority, is demonstrated by every page of history... To remedy the dangers attendant upon the arbitrary use of power, checks, however multiplied, will scarcely avail without an explicit admission some limitation of the right of the majority to exercise sovereign authority over the individual citizen... In popular governments [democracies], minorities [individuals] constantly run much greater risk of suffering from arbitrary power than in absolute monarchies..."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: "On Government", (1778)
"It is the greatest inequality to try to make unequal things equal."
-Aristotle-
(384-322 BC) Greek philosopher
"The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."
-Marcus Aurelius-
[Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus] (121-180) Roman emperor (161-180)
"I can’t think of anything that would do more toward putting us back on the road to liberty and personal responsibility than for the average American, and for the news media, to come to the understanding that we are not a democracy, nor were we supposed to be."
-Neal Boortz-
(1945- ) Radio talk show host, columnist
"In a free society, standards of public morality can be measured only by whether physical coercion -- violence against persons or property -- occurs. There is no right not to be offended by words, actions or symbols."
-Richard E. Sincere, Jr.-
"Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
(1805-1859) French historian
Equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome.
"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-
(1937-2013) American syndicated columnist
Source: The Orlando Sentinel, 11/03/98
"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 death."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
"Democracy...is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike."
-Plato-
(429-347 BC) Greek philosopher
Source: The Republic, ca. 390 B.C.
"American democracy must be a failure because it places the supreme authority in the hands of the poorest and most ignorant part of the society."
-Thomas Babington Macaulay-
(1800-1859) [Lord Macaulay] 1st Baron Macaulay, British historian
"I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty, or civilization, or both."
-Thomas Babington Macaulay-
(1800-1859) [Lord Macaulay] 1st Baron Macaulay, British historian
"Did I say 'republic?' By God, yes, I said 'republic!' Long live the glorious republic of the United States of America. Damn democracy. It is a fraudulent term used, often by ignorant persons but no less often by intellectual fakers, to describe an infamous mixture of socialism, graft, confiscation of property and denial of personal rights to individuals whose virtuous principles make them offensive."
-Westbrook Pegler-
(1894-1969) American journalist, writer
Source: New York Journal American of January 25th and 26th, 1951, under the titles "Upholds Republic of U.S. Against Phony Democracy" and "Democracy in the U.S. Branded Meaningless."
"Socialism is but Catholicism addressing itself not to the soul but to the sense of men... [Both implore you to] accept authority, accept the force which it employs, resign yourself to all-powerful managers, give up the free choice and the free act... They both seek to sacrifice man."
-Auberon Herbert-
(1838-1906) English writer, theorist, philosopher, 19th century individualist, member of the Parliament of the U.K.
"If you establish a democracy, you must in due time reap the fruits of a democracy. You will in due season have great impatience of the public burdens, combined in due season with great increase of the public expenditure. You will in due season have wars entered into from passion and not from reason; and you will in due season submit to peace ignominiously sought and ignominiously obtained, which will diminish your authority and perhaps endanger your independence. You will in due season find your property is less valueable, and your freedom less complete."
-Benjamin Disraeli-
(1804-1881) Prime Minister of England, British statesman, novelist
Source: Speech in the House of Commons, March 31, 1850
"The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is non-interference with their own particular ways of being happy, provided those ways do not assume to interfere by violence with ours."
-William James-
(1842-1910) American psychologist, philosopher, medical doctor, author, 'The father of modern Psychology'
Source: William James. Talks to Students. 1899 "What Makes a Life Significant?"
"Liberty is the most jealous and exacting mistress that can beguile the brain and soul of man. From him who will not give her all, she will have nothing. She knows that his pretended love serves but to betray. But when once the fierce heat of her quenchless, lustrous eyes have burned into the victim's heart, he will know no other smile but hers."
-Clarence S. Darrow-
(1857-1938)
1920
"Liberty exists in proportion to wholesome restraint; the more restraint on others to keep off from us, the more liberty we have."
-Daniel Webster-
(1782-1852) US Senator
1847
"The resolution [the famous Virginia Resolutions of 1798] supposes that dangerous powers, not delegated, may not only be usurped and executed by the other departments, but that the judicial department also may exercise or sanction dangerous powers beyond the grant of the Constitution; and, consequently, that the ultimate right of the parties to the Constitution [i.e., the states], to judge whether the compact has been dangerously violated, must extend to violations by one delegated authority, as well as by another; by the judiciary, as well as by the executive, or the legislature.
However true, therefore, it may be, that the judicial department, is, in all questions submitted to it by the forms of the Constitution, to decide in the last resort, this resort must necessarily be deemed the last in relation to the authorities of the other departments of the government; not in relation to the rights of the parties to the constitutional compact, from which the judicial as well as the other departments hold their delegated trusts."
-James Madison-
"I believe that all other political states are in fact variations or outgrowths of a basic state of anarchy; after all, when you mention the idea of anarchy to most people they will tell you what a bad idea it is because the biggest gang would just take over. Which is pretty much how I see contemporary society. We live in a badly developed anarchist situation in which the biggest gang has taken over and have declared that it is not an anarchist situation -- that it is a capitalist or a communist situation. But I tend to think that anarchy is the most natural form of politics for a human being to actually practice."
-Alan Moore-
"We do not now differ in our judgment concerning the controversies of past generations, and fifty years hence our children will not be divided in their opinions concerning our controversies. They will surely bless their fathers and their fathers' God that the Union was preserved, that slavery was overthrown, and that both races were made equal before the law. We may hasten or we may retard, but we can not prevent, the final reconciliation. Is it not possible for us now to make a truce with time by anticipating and accepting its inevitable verdict? Enterprises of the highest importance to our moral and material well-being unite us and offer ample employment of our best powers. Let all our people, leaving behind them the battlefields of dead issues, move forward and in their strength of liberty and the restored Union win the grander victories of peace."
-James A. Garfield-
"Envy is the basis of Democracy."
-Bertrand Russell-
[Bertrand Arthur William Russell] (1872-1970) Philosopher, educator
Source: The Conquest of Happiness, VI, 1930
"There are all kinds of devices invented for the protection and preservation of countries: defensive barriers, forts, trenches, and the like... But prudent minds have as a natural gift one safeguard which is the common possession of all, and this applies especially to the dealings of democracies. What is this safeguard? Skepticism. This you must preserve. This you must retain. If you can keep this, you need fear no harm."
-Demosthenes-
(384 B.C.-322 B.C.)
Source: Oration
"When it becomes dominated by a collectivist creed, democracy will inevitably destroy itself."
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
Source: The Road to Serfdom, pg 73 (1944)
"[T]he main evil of the present democratic institutions of the united states does not raise, as is often asserted in Europe, 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
"Democracy does not guarantee equality of conditions -- it only guarantees equality of opportunity."
-Irving Kristol-
(1920-2009) American columnist, journalist, and writer
"Participation is an instrument of conquest because it encourages people to give their consent to being governed. ... Deeply embedded in people's sense of fair play is the principle that those who play the game must accept the outcome. Those who participate in politics are similarly committed, even if they are consistently on the losing side. Why do politicians plead with everyone to get out and vote? Because voting is the simplest and easiest form of participation by masses of people. Even though it is minimal participation, it is sufficient to commit all voters to being governed, regardless of who wins."
-Theodore Lowi-
Source: INCOMPLETE CONQUEST, (1981), pp. 25-26
"If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
-John Stuart Mill-
(1806-1873) English philosopher and economist
Source: On Liberty, 1859
"Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power. Consequently those who live under the dominion of Puritanism become exceedingly desirous of power. Now love of power does far more harm than love of drink or any of the other vices against which Puritans protest. Of course, in virtuous people love of power camouflages itself as love of doing good, but this makes very little difference to its social effects. It merely means that we punish our victims for being wicked, instead of for being our enemies. In either case, tyranny and war result. Moral indignation is one of the most harmful forces in the modem world, the more so as it can always be diverted to sinister uses by those who control propaganda."
-Bertrand Russell-
[Bertrand Arthur William Russell] (1872-1970) Philosopher, educator
Source: The Recrudescence of Puritanism, in Sceptical Essays, 1928
"If by the mere force of numbers a majority should deprive a minority of any clearly written constitutional right, it might, in a moral point of view, justify revolution."
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
Source: First Inaugural Address, 4 March 1861
"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-
[Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum] (1905-1982) Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter
"From this view of the subject, it may be concluded, that a pure Democracy, by which I mean a society, consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the Government in person, can admit no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will in almost every case, be felt by the majority of the whole; a communication and concert results from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party, or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is, that such 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. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed, that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions. "
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: The Federalist X, 1787
"Those who have been intoxicated with power... can never willingly abandon it."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
"A lawyer with a briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns."
-Mario Puzo-
(1920-1999) Novelist
Source: The Godfather
"No people is wholly civilized where a distinction is drawn between stealing an office and stealing a purse."
-Theodore Roosevelt-
(1858-1919) 26th US President
"The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold."
-Aristotle-
(384-322 BC) Greek philosopher
"Power corrupts. But it does more than that. Power attracts the corrupt, then corrupts them further."
-Don Matthews-
(1939-2017 ) a.k.a. "The Don", former head coach of several teams in the Canadian Football League, known as the winningest coach in the CFL
"The first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means."
-Georges Bernanos-
(1888-1949) French author
Source: The Last Essays of Georges Bernanos, 1955
"The deterioration of every government begins with the decay of the principles on which it was founded."
-Charles de Montesquieu-
[Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat] (1689-1755) Baron de Montesquieu
Source: The Spirit of the Laws, VIII, 1752
"All bad precedents began as justifiable measures."
-Gaius Julius Caesar-
(100-44 B.C.) Dictator of the Roman Republic
"Never could an increase of comfort or security be a sufficient good to be bought at the price of liberty."
-Hilaire Belloc-
(1870-1953) French-born British writer
"Let us rise up and be thankful, for if we didn't learn a lot today, at least we learned a little, and if we didn't learn a little, at least we didn't get sick, and if we got sick, at least we didn't die; so, let us all be thankful."
-Buddha-
[Gautama Siddharta] (563 - 483 BC), Hindu Prince, founder of Buddhism
"When I'm not thanked at all, I'm thanked enough; I've done my duty, and I've done no more."
-Henry Fielding-
(1707-1754) English novelist and dramatist
"I thank Thee first because I was never robbed before; second, because although they took my purse they did not take my life; third, because although they took my all, it was not much; and fourth because it was I who was robbed, and not I who robbed."
-Matthew Henry-
(1662-1714) Welsh-English nonconformist minister, author
Source: Arnold Gingrich, Coronet, Volume 17 (1944), which characterizes the quote as a diary entry.
"There is no act, however virtuous, for which ingenuity may not find some bad motive."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: letter to Edward Dowse, April 19, 1803
"Toward no crimes have men shown themselves so cold-bloodedly cruel as in punishing differences of opinion."
-James Russell Lowell-
(1819-1891) American author and diplomatist
Source: Literary Essays
"The experience that was had in ... the taking away of private property, and the possession of it in community, by a commonwealth ... was found to breed much confusion and discontent; and retard much employment which would have been to the general benefit.... For the young men that were most able and fit for labor and service objected that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men's wives and children, without any recompense.... The strong man or the resourceful man had no more share of food, clothes, etc., than the weak man who was not able to do a quarter the other could; this was thought injustice. The aged and graver men, who were ranked and equalized in labor, food, clothes, etc., with the meaner and younger ones, thought it some indignity and disrespect to them."
-William Bradford-
(c.1590-1657) American colonist, helped found the Plymouth Colony, signatory to the Mayflower Compact, served as Plymouth Colony Governor
1623
Source: Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation, 1606-1646
"What can you ever really know of other people's souls -- of their temptations, their opportunities, their struggles? One soul in the whole creation you do know: and it is the only one whose fate is placed in your hands. If there is a God, you are, in a sense, alone with Him. You cannot put Him off with speculations about your next door neighbours or memories of what you have read in books."
-C. S. Lewis-
"The citizen who thinks he sees that the commonwealth's political clothes are worn out, and yet holds his peace and does not agitate for a new suit, is disloyal; he is a traitor. That he may be the only one who thinks he sees this decay, does not excuse him; it is his duty to agitate anyway, and it is the duty of the others to vote him down if they do not see the matter as he does."
-Mark Twain-
"Remind students that one of the central missions of the university, which justifies its existence, is to get at the truth. That requires honest debate, patience, intellectual honesty, investigation, and a lot of hard work. But it also is not for the faint of heart. And that is a lesson that is almost never transmitted today. That offense, bruising thoughts, and unpleasant facts simply go with the territory. They are an intrinsic feature of an open society, and they never can be entirely avoided."
-Amy Wax-
University of Pennsylvania law professor
Source: Nov. 8 2018 speech at The Heritage Foundation
"Our lack of constant awareness has also permitted us to accept definitions of freedom that are not necessarily consistent with the actuality of being free. Because we have learned to confuse the word with the reality the word seeks to describe, our vocabulary has become riddled with distorted and contradictory meanings smuggled into the language."
-Butler D. Shaffer-
Professor, Southwestern University School of Law
Source: Calculated Chaos, 1985
"Freedom can exist only in the society of knowledge. Without learning, men are incapable of knowing their rights."
-Dr. Benjamin Rush-
(1745-1813) signed the Declaration of Independence, physician, politician, social reformer, humanitarian, educator, founder of Dickinson College
1786
"Rousseau had it backwards. We are NOT born free. We are born in the chains of the random and the reflexive, and are ignorant and unreasonable by simple nature. We must learn to be free, to organize the random and detect the reflexive, to acquire the knowledge of particulars and the powers of reason. The examined life is impossible if we cannot examine, order, classify, define, distinguish, always in minute particulars."
-Richard Mitchell-
(1929-2002) Professor at Glassboro State College, NJ, author, founder and publisher of The Underground Grammarian
"Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence."
-Abigail Adams-
(1744-1818) wife of John Adams
1780
"But how shall we educate men to goodness, to a sense of one another, to a love of truth? And more urgently, how shall we do this in a bad time?"
-Daniel Joseph Berrigan-
(1921-2016)American Jesuit priest, anti-war activist, Christian pacifist, playwright, poet, author
"You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him to find it within himself."
-Galileo Galilei-
(1564-1642) Italian astronomer, physicist, engineer, philosopher, and mathematician
"My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself."
-George Bernard Shaw-
(1856-1950) Irish comic dramatist
"What is education? Properly speaking, there is no such thing as education. Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another. Whatever the soul is like, it will have to be passed on somehow, consciously or unconsciously, and that transition may be called education. ... What we need is to have a culture before we hand it down. In other words, it is a truth, however sad and strange, that we cannot give what we have not got, and cannot teach to other people what we do not know ourselves."
-Gilbert Keith Chesterton-
(1874-1936) British essayist, critic, poet, and novelist
Source: Illustrated London News, July 5, 1924
"For what is meant by saying that a government ought to educate the people? Why should they be educated? What is the education for? Clearly, to fit the people for social life -- to make them good citizens. And who is to say what are good citizens? The government: there is no other judge. And who is to say how these good citizens may be made? The government: there is no other judge. Hence the proposition is convertible into this -- a government ought to mold children into good citizens, using its own discretion in settling what a good citizen is and how the child may be molded into one."
-Herbert Spencer-
(1820-1903) British author, economist, philosopher
Source: 1850
"A general State education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mold 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
"The purpose of education is to make the choices clear to people, not to make the choices for people."
-Peter McWilliams-
(1949-2000) Poet, author
Source: Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do, 1996
"[A]ny provider that commands 90 percent of the market -- whether we're talking about software, phone service, or heating oil -- is, by definition, a monopoly. Our government employs thousands of bureaucrats to track down and break up monopolies on the grounds that monopolies stifle competition and thereby produce bad products at high prices. Doesn't it strike anyone as strange that the same government protects its own monopoly in education? And stranger still, that nearly everyone accepts this state of affairs as normal -- as something that has always been and must always be? ... [C]ompetition forces public schools into making long-overdue repairs. And it offers poor parents the choices they desperately desire."
-Jennifer A. Grossman-
Source: How Philanthropy Is Revolutionizing Education, IMPRIMIS, Feb. 1999, Vol. 28, Number 2., p. 3.
"Who besides a degraded rabble would voluntarily present itself to be graded and classified like meat? No wonder school is compulsory."
-John Taylor Gatto-
(1937-2018) American school teacher of 29 years, author, New York State Teacher of the Year, 1991
Source: The Underground History of American Education, 2001
"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
"Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts."
-Henry Brooks Adams-
(1838-1918) Pulitzer prize-winning historian (1919), great-grandson of John Adams, grandson of John Quincy Adams, and son of US Secretary of State, Charles Adams
Source: The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography, 1918
"I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays and have things arranged for them that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas."
-Agatha Christie-
[Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller, Lady Mallowan] (1890-1976) English crime writer of novels, short stories and plays. Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. She also wrote romances under the name Mary Westmacott
"...[A] fool cannot be protected from his folly. If you attempt to do so, you will not only arouse his animosity but also you will be attempting to deprive him of whatever benefit he is capable of deriving from experience. Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig."
-Robert A. Heinlein-
(1907-1988) American writer
Source: Time Enough for Love (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons) 51: (1973)
"When school children start paying union dues, that's when I'll start representing the interests of school children."
-Albert Shanker-
(1928-1997) president of the United Federation of Teachers (1964-1985), president of the American Federation of Teachers (1974-1997)
"At every hour of every day, I can tell you on which page of which book each school child in Italy is studying."
-Benito Mussolini-
(1883-1945) Italian dictator during WW2, founder of Italian Fascism, 'Il Duce'
"The public expects too much from teachers because educationists have led it to believe teachers could be substitute parents, psychotherapists, cops, social workers, dieticians, nursemaids, babysitters, and nose wipers and still do a decent job teaching kids to read, write, and do math. Instead of saying no, educationists have added courses in environmental education, death education, personal hygiene, self-esteem, driver's ed, job readiness, sexual harassment, radon studies, yoga, yogurt awareness, and god-knows-what-else."
-Charlie Sykes-
(1954-) American political commentator, author
Source: Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good About Themselves But Can't Read, Write, or Add (1996)
"[T]he child should be taught to consider his instructor... superior to the parent in point of authority.... The vulgar impression that parents have a legal right to dictate to teachers is entirely erroneous.... Parents have no remedy as against the teacher."
-John Swett-
(1830-1913) Superintendent of California Public School System, "Father of the California public school" system, "Horace Mann of the Pacific"
John, you're fired.
"We who are engaged in the sacred cause of education are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause."
-Horace Mann-
(1796-1859) American education reformer, abolitionist, first secretary of education in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Massachusetts House of Representatives (1827-1833), Massachusetts Senate (1833-1837)
"If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare, and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare, they may take the care of religion into their own hands; they may appoint teachers in every State, county and parish and pay them out of their public treasury; they may take into their own hands the education of children, establishing in like manner schools throughout the Union; they may assume the provision of the poor; they may undertake the regulation of all roads other than post-roads; in short, every thing, from the highest object of state legislation down to the most minute object of police, would be thrown under the power of Congress. ... Were the power of Congress to be established in the latitude contended for, it would subvert the very foundations, and transmute the very nature of the limited Government established by the people of America."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
"The test of every religious, political,
or educational system, is the man which it forms.
If a system injures the intelligence it is bad.
If it injures the character it is vicious.
If it injures the conscience it is criminal."
-Henri Frederic Amiel-
(1821-1881) Swiss philosopher, poet
Source: Journal, 17 June 1852
"To educate a man in mind, and not in morals, is to educate a menace to society."
-Theodore Roosevelt-
(1858-1919) 26th US President
"A nation of well informed men who have been taught to know and prize the rights which God has given them cannot be enslaved. It is in the region of ignorance that tyranny begins."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
"Intellectual freedom is the right of every individual to both seek and receive information from all points of view without restriction. It provides for free access of all expressions of ideas through which any and all sides of a question, cause or movement may be explored."
-American Library Association-
Source: Office of Intellectual Freedom, 2002
"What's the difference between a bright, inquisitive five-year-old, and a dull, stupid nineteen-year-old? Fourteen years of the British educational system."
-Bertrand Russell-
[Bertrand Arthur William Russell] (1872-1970) Philosopher, educator
"Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
"The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority.
The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority.
The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking."
-A. A. Milne-
[Alan Alexander Milne] (1882-1956) English author
"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt."
-Bertrand Russell-
[Bertrand Arthur William Russell] (1872-1970) Philosopher, educator
"A teacher is never a giver of truth -- he is a guide, a pointer to the truth that each student must find for himself. A good teacher is merely a catalyst."
-Bruce Lee-
[Lee Jun-fan] (1940-1973) Hong Kong American martial artist, actor, martial arts instructor, filmmaker, and the founder of Jeet Kune Do
"Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,
Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,
Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law,
Whereas it is essential to promote the development of friendly relations between nations,
Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,
Whereas Member States have pledged themselves to achieve, in co-operation with the United Nations, the promotion of universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms,
Whereas a common understanding of these rights and freedoms is of the greatest importance for the full realization of this pledge,
Now, Therefore THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY proclaims THIS UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction.
Article 1.
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
Article 2.
Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.
Article 3.
Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.
Article 4.
No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.
Article 5.
No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
Article 6.
Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.
Article 7.
All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.
Article 8.
Everyone has the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law.
Article 9.
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.
Article 10.
Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.
Article 11.
(1) Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence.
(2) No one shall be held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offence was committed.
Article 12.
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
Article 13.
(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.
(2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.
Article 14.
(1) Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.
(2) This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.
Article 15.
(1) Everyone has the right to a nationality.
(2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.
Article 16.
(1) Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.
(2) Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses.
(3) The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.
Article 17.
(1) Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.
(2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.
Article 18.
Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.
Article 19.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Article 20.
(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.
(2) No one may be compelled to belong to an association.
Article 21.
(1) Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.
(2) Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.
(3) The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.
Article 22.
Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.
Article 23.
(1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
(2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.
(3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.
(4) Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.
Article 24.
Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.
Article 25.
(1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
(2) Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.
Article 26.
(1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.
(2) Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.
(3) Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.
Article 27.
(1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
(2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.
Article 28.
Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.
Article 29.
(1) Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.
(2) In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.
(3) These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.
Article 30.
Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein."
-Universal Declaration of Human Rights-
"In different places over the years I have had to prove that socialism, which to many western thinkers is a sort of kingdom of justice, was in fact full of coercion, of bureaucratic greed and corruption and avarice, and consistent within itself that socialism cannot be implemented without the aid of coercion. Communist propaganda would sometimes include statements such as "we include almost all the commandments of the Gospel in our ideology". The difference is that the Gospel asks all this to be achieved through love, through self-limitation, but socialism only uses coercion. This is one point. Untouched by the breath of God, unrestricted by human conscience, both capitalism and socialism are repulsive."
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn-
"The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types -- the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution."
-G.K. Chesterton-
"No use to shout at them to pay attention. If the situations, the materials, the problems before the child do not interest him, his attention will slip off to what does interest him, and no amount of exhortation of threats will bring it back."
-John Holt-
(1923-1985) American author and educator, proponent of homeschooling, and pioneer in youth rights theory
"The desire to know is natural to good men."
-Leonardo da Vinci-
(1452-1519) Italian inventor, artist, polymath, the "Universal Genius" or "Renaissance Man"
"Liberty is the prevention of control by others. This requires self-control and, therefore, religious and spiritual influences; education, knowledge, well-being."
-Lord Acton-
[John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton] (1834-1902), First Baron Acton of Aldenham
1887
Source: Lord Acton, Selected Writings of Lord Acton: Essays in Religion, Politics, and Morality, ed. J. Rufus Fears, 3 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1988), 3:490
"To live his life in his own way, to call his house his castle, to enjoy the fruits of his own labour, to educate his children as his conscience directs, to save for their prosperity after his death --- these are wishes deeply ingrained in civilised man. Their realization is almost as necessary to our virtues as to our happiness. From their total frustration disastrous results both moral and psychological might follow."
-C. S. Lewis-
(1898-1963), British novelist
Source: Willing Slaves of the Welfare State, first published in The Observer on July 20, 1958
"Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents...."
-John Taylor Gatto-
(1937-2018) American school teacher of 29 years, author, New York State Teacher of the Year, 1991
Source: The Underground History of American Education, 2001
"One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself."
-Leonardo da Vinci-
(1452-1519) Italian inventor, artist, polymath, the "Universal Genius" or "Renaissance Man"
"Nothing enrages me more than when people criticize my criticism of school by telling me that schools are not just places to learn math and spelling, they are places where children learn a vaguely defined thing called socialization. I know. I think schools generally do an effective and terribly damaging job of teaching children to be infantile, dependent, intellectually dishonest, passive and disrespectful to their own developmental capacities."
-Seymour Papert-
(1928-2016) South African-born MIT mathematician, computer scientist, educator, pioneer in artificial intelligence, inventor of the Logo programming language
"The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed."
-Steve Biko-
(1946-1977) Anti-apartheid activist in South Africa, fatally beaten while in police custody
"Above all things I hope the education of the common people will be attended to, convinced that on their good sense we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"There are three schoolmasters for everybody that will employ them - the senses, intelligent companions, and books."
-Rev. Henry Ward Beecher-
(1813-1887) American abolitionist, clergyman
"Knowledge and human power are synonymous."
-Sir Francis Bacon-
(1561-1626) Philosopher, British Lord Chancellor
"The greatest Glory of a free-born People,
Is to transmit that Freedom to their Children."
-William Havard-
(1889-1956) Welsh military chaplain (WWI), bishop of Church in Wales, and rugby union international player
"If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run -- and often in the short one -- the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative."
-Arthur C. Clarke-
"Banning weapons is the most white privilege idea ever. Rich liberals scoffing at the idea that a person might need to defend their own life is a tower so ivory you can't look at it in direct sunlight. It's the personal safety equivalent of 'just have the maid do it'."
-Caleb Howe-
"Who then is free? The wise who can command his passions, who fears not want, nor death, nor chains, firmly resisting his appetites and despising the honors of the world, who relies wholly on himself, whose angular points of character have all been rounded off and polished."
-Horace-
[Quintus Horatius Flaccus] (65-8BC) Roman poet
25 B.C.
"To most of us nothing is so invisible as an unpleasant truth. Though it is held before our eyes, pushed under our noses, rammed down our throats -- we know it not."
-Eric Hoffer-
(1902-1983) American author, philosopher, awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
"I freed thousands of slaves. I could have freed thousands more if they had known they were slaves."
-Harriet Tubman-
[Araminta Ross] (c.1820-1913) African-American abolitionist, humanitarian, and Union spy during the U.S. Civil War. After escaping from captivity, she made thirteen missions to rescue over seventy slaves using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad
"We can ignore reality, but we cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality."
-Ayn Rand-
"I am myself persuaded, on the basis of extensive study of the historical evidence, that... the severity of each of the contractions - 1920-21, 1929-33, and 1937-38 - is directly attributable to acts of commission and omission by the Reserve authorities and would not have occurred under earlier monetary and banking arrangements."
-Milton Friedman-
"That alien friends are under the jurisdiction and protection of the laws of the States wherein they are; tha no power over them has been delegated to the United States ... An Act concerning aliens, which assumes powers over alien friends, not delegated by the Constitution, is not law, but is altogether void, and of no force."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"I choose free libraries as the best agencies for improving the masses of the people, because they give nothing for nothing. They only help those who help themselves. They never pauperize. They reach the aspiring and open to these chief treasures of the world -- those stored up in books. A taste for reading drives out lower tastes."
-Andrew Carnegie-
(1835-1919) Scottish-American industrialist, philanthropist
Source: Andrew Carnegie in New York Herald, June 1900
"Let us by wise and constitutional measures promote intelligence among the people as the best means of preserving our liberties."
-James Monroe-
(1758-1831), 5th US President
Source: First Inaugural Address, 4 March 1817
"A native American who cannot read or write is as rare an appearance... as a comet or an earthquake."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: 1765
"Hitherto the plans of the educationalists have achieved very little of what they attempted, and indeed we may well thank the beneficent obstinacy of real mothers, real nurses, and (above all) real children for preserving the human race in such sanity as it still possesses."
-C. S. Lewis-
(1898-1963), British novelist
"It's not that I feel that school is a good idea gone wrong, but a wrong idea from the word go. It's a nutty notion that we can have a place where nothing but learning happens, cut off from the rest of life."
-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
"School is the first impression children get of organized society. Like most first impressions it is the lasting one. Life is dull and stupid, only Coke provides relief. And other products, too, of course."
-John Taylor Gatto-
(1937-2018) American school teacher of 29 years, author, New York State Teacher of the Year, 1991
Source: The Underground History of American Education, 2001
"Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910) American author and humorist
"The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled."
-Plutarch-
(c.45-125 A.D.) Greek Priest of the Delphic Oracle
"Think! It ain't illegal 'yet.'"
-George Clinton-
(1941-) American singer, songwriter, bandleader, record producer
Source: Lunchmeataphobia ('Think, It Ain't Illegal Yet!), 1978
"But it was in making education not only common to all, but in some sense compulsory on all, that the destiny of the free republics of America was practically settled."
-James Russell Lowell-
(1819-1891) American author and diplomatist
If welfare isn't guaranteed, then education is "in some sense compulsory on all".
"If the aborigine drafted an IQ test, all of Western civilization would presumably flunk it."
-Stanley Garn-
(1922-2007) American human biologist, professor of anthropology
"It is precisely because education is the road to equality and citizenship, that it has been made more elusive for Negroes than many other rights. The walling off of Negroes from equal education is part of the historical design to submerge him in second class status. Therefore, as Negroes have struggled to be free they have had to fight for the opportunity for a decent education."
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-
(1929-1968) US civil rights leader
14 March 1964
"Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone."
-Jesus of Nazareth-
Source: Holy Bible, Matthew 23:23
"It comes as news to most people to learn that practically all important ethical teachers -- Moses, Aristotle, Jesus, Mohammed, and Saint Thomas Aquinas, for instance -- have denounced lending at interest as usury and as morally wrong."
-Lawrence Dennis-
Source: Saturday Review of Literature #661, June 24, 1933
"Nothing can be more exactly and seriously true than what is there [the very words only of Jesus] stated; that but a short time elapsed after the death of the great reformer of the Jewish religion, before his principles were departed from by those who professed to be his special servants, and perverted into an engine for enslaving mankind, and aggrandising their oppressors in Church and State; that the purest system of morals ever before preached to man, has been adulterated and sophisticated by artificial constructions, into a mere contrivance to filch wealth and power to themselves; that rational men not being able to swallow their impious heresies, in order to force them down their throats, they raise the hue and cry of infidelity, while themselves are the greatest obstacles to the advancement of the real doctrines of Jesus, and do in fact constitute the real Anti-Christ."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: letter to Samuel Kerchreview, January 19, 1810
"In every declining civilization there is a small 'remnant' of people who adhere to the right against the wrong; who recognize the difference between good and evil and who will take an active stand for the former and against the latter; who can still think and discern and who will courageously take a stand against the political, social, moral, and spiritual rot or decay of their day."
-Donald S. McAlvaney-
Source: Toward a New World Order, 360 (2nd ed. 1992)
"But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts us absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many lifeless bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas."
-Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.-
(1922-2007) American author
"Christmas is a time when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay for it. Deficits are when adults tell the government what they want and their kids pay for it."
-Richard Lamm-
[Richard Douglas "Dick" Lamm] (1935- ) American politician, lawyer, governor of Colorado (D) (1975-1987), 1996 US presidential candidate for the Reform Party
"The whole freedom of man consists either in spiritual or civil liberty."
-John Milton-
(1608-1674) English Poet
"And this I must fight against: any idea, 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 this is the one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system."
-John Steinbeck-
(1902-1968) Author, Nobel laureate
Source: East of Eden, 1952
"Truth never damages a cause that is just."
-Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi-
(1869-1948)
"The idea that anarchism must fail because under anarchy no one can make others obey the rules is stunningly stupid. On any given day, even in a world pervaded by states and their dictates, nearly everything that people do or refrain from doing is so not because the state threatens them with violence for acting otherwise, but because they find conformity with rules — honesty, promise keeping, careful handling of goods, avoidance of opportunism, and so forth — to be in their interest. The world does not run on the state’s threats of violence; it runs in spite of those threats.
Many sanctions besides violence and threats of violence may be — and are even in the world in which we now live — effective sanctions for adherence to law and order. Ostracization of dishonest dealers, for example, works wonders, and in the world of modern communications it can be more effective than ever."
-Robert Higgs-
"It is better to go to defeat with free will than to live in a meaningless security as a cog in a machine."
-Isaac Asimov-
"Appetitus rationi pareat."
Let your desires be ruled by reason.
-Cicero-
"You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid monotonous work, chances are you'll end up boring, stupid and monotonous. Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such significant moronizing mechanisms as television and education. People who are regimented all their lives, handed off to work from school and bracketed by the family in the beginning and the nursing home at the end, are habituated to hierarchy and psychologically enslaved. Their aptitude for autonomy is so atrophied that their fear of freedom is among their few rationally grounded phobias."
-Bob Black-
"Through the myth it creates, propaganda imposes a complete range of intuitive knowledge, susceptible of only one interpretation, unique and one-sided, and precluding any divergence. This myth becomes so powerful that it invades every arena of consciousness, leaving no faculty or motivation intact. It stimulates in the individual a feeling of exclusiveness, and produces a biased attitude."
-Jacques Ellul-
"All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take root in our personal experience."
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe-
(1749-1832) German writer, statesman
"There are only two forces in the world, the sword and the spirit. In the long run the sword will always be conquered by the spirit."
-Napoleon Bonaparte-
(1769-1821) French emperor
"No citizen enjoys genuine freedom of religious conviction until the state is indifferent to every form of religious outlook from Atheism to Zoroastrianism."
-Harold J. Laski-
(1893-1950) British political theorist, economist, author, and lecturer
Source: Grammar of Politics, 1925
"I know of but one freedom and that is the freedom of the mind."
-Antoine De Saint-Exupery-
(1900-1944) French writer, poet, aristocrat, journalist, and pioneering aviator
Source: The Wisdom of the Sands, 1950
"Each progressive spirit is opposed by a thousand mediocre minds appointed to guard the past."
-Maurice Maeterlinck-
(1862-1949) Belgian playwright, poet, and essayist
"Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good."
-Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi-
(1869-1948)
"It is not my intention to do away with government. It is, rather, to make it work -- work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back. Government can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity, not stifle it. It is no coincidence that our present troubles parallel and are proportionate to the intervention and intrusion in our lives that result from unnecessary and excessive growth of government. ... We shall reflect the compassion that is so much a part of your makeup. How can we love our country and not love our countrymen, and loving them, not reach out a hand when they fall, heal them when they are sick, and provide opportunities to make them self-sufficient so they will be equal in fact and not just in theory? ... We are a nation under God, and I believe God intended for us to be free. It would be fitting and good, I think, if on each Inauguration Day in future years it should be declared a day of prayer."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
Source: First Inaugural Address, 1981
"Talent develops in tranquillity, character in the full current of human life."
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe-
(1749-1832) German writer, statesman
"A human being is a part of the whole, called by us, "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security."
-Albert Einstein-
(1879-1955) Physicist and Professor, Nobel Prize 1921
And every time we appeal to force-monopoly government to restrict some peaceful other's liberty, we reject that compassion. Essentially by definition. Every... single... time.
"This is the sum of all true righteousness:
deal with others as thou wouldst thyself be dealt by.
Do nothing to thy neighbor which thou
wouldst not have him do to thee hereafter."
-The Mahabharata-
Hindu epic poem, circa 800 BCE
"In ancient times the State absorbed authorities not its own, and intruded on the domain of personal freedom. In the Middle Ages it possessed too little authority, and suffered others to intrude. Modern States fall habitually into both excesses. The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities. Liberty, by this definition, is the essential condition and guardian of religion..."
-John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton-
"Liberty, if I understand it at all, is a general principle, and the clear right of all the subjects within the realm, or of none. Partial freedom seems to me a most invidious mode of slavery. But, unfortunately, it is the kind of slavery the most easily admitted in times of civil discord; for parties are but too apt to forget their own future safety in their desire of sacrificing their enemies. People without much difficulty admit the entrance of that injustice of which they are not to be the immediate victims … great determined measures are not commonly so dangerous to freedom. They are marked with too strong lines to slide into use. … But the true danger is, when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and by parts."
-Edmund Burke-
"All parties without exception, when they seek for power, are varieties of absolutism.
-Pierre-Joseph Proudhon-
"Dr. Reich vastly offended many people by his sociological theory, which holds that fascism is just an exaggerated form of the basic structure of sex-negative societies and has existed under other names in every civilization based on sexual repression. In this theory, the character and muscular armor of the average citizen — a submissive and frightened attitude anchored in body reflexes — causes the average person to want a strong authority figure above them. Tyranny, in this model, is not created by tyrants alone but by neurotic masses who want tyrants."
-Robert Anton Wilson-
"Through all time, so far as history informs us, wherever mankind have attempted to live in peace with each other, both the natural instincts, and the collective wisdom of the human race, have acknowledged and prescribed, as an indispensable condition, obedience to this one only universal obligation: viz., that each should live honestly towards every other. The ancient maxim makes the sum of a man’s legal duty to his fellow men to be simply this: " To live honestly, to hurt no one, to give to every one his due." This entire maxim is really expressed in the single words, to live honestly; since to live honestly is to hurt no one, and give to every one his due."
-Lysander Spooner-
"Nothing doth more hurt in a state than that cunning men pass for wise."
-Francis Bacon
"The only time my education was interrupted was when I was in school."
-George Bernard Shaw-
(1856-1950) Irish comic dramatist
"College isn't the place to go for ideas."
-Helen Keller-
(1880-1968) Blind-Deaf Author
“Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.”
-Vladimir Ilyich Lenin-
[Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov] (1870-1924) First Leader of the Soviet Union
"Compassion is the use of public funds to buy votes."
-Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
"Confronted with such a tight regulation, can man pretend to be free because the tyranny he is subjected to derives from the law? Of course, the legal power is not called 'tyranny' since it appears to be established by the general will in the common interest, and since, in any event, occurrences of arbitrary power are infrequent. But a master's equity does not mean that his subjects are not slaves. ... And when their servitude lasts and their thoughts follow their behavior, the state becomes totalitarian and subjection is complete. Since it is legal servitude, the regime is still said to be democratic. Such is the hypocrisy of political language."
-Georges Ripert-
(1880-1958) French lawyer, Secretary of State for Public Instruction and Youth in the Vichy Regime
Source: Le Déclin du Droit. Etude sur la législation contemporaine (Paris: Librairie Générale de Droit et de Jurisprudence, 1949), p. 69
"To curtail free expression strikes twice at intellectual freedom, for whoever deprives another of the right to state unpopular views necessarily deprives others of the right to listen to those views."
-C. Van Woodward-
(1908-1999) American historian
Source: “Report On Free Speech,” New York Times, 28 January 1975
"To open his lips is crime in a plain citizen."
-Quintus Ennius-
(c.239 BC - c.169 BC) Considered the father of Roman poetry
"God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide."
-Rebecca West-
(1892-1983) British author, journalist, literary critic and travel writer
Source: Censorship: For And Against, 1971
"Freedom of speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself. What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist."
-Salman Rushdie-
(1947-) British-Indian novelist and essayist
Source: "The right to be downright offensive" by Jonathan Duffy in BBC News Magazine (21 December 2004)
"What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don't like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don't expect freedom to survive very long."
-Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
"No matter whose lips that would speak, they must be free and ungagged. The community which dares not protect its humblest and most hated member in the free utterance of his opinions, no matter how false or hateful, is only a gang of slaves. If there is anything in the universe that can’t stand discussion, let it crack."
-Wendell Phillips-
(1811-1884) American abolitionist, advocate for Native Americans, orator, lawyer
Source: Speech, 1863
"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it... Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate.... Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-
(1929-1968) US civil rights leader
"I firmly believe that the Gandhian philosophy of nonviolent resistance is the only logical and moral approach to the solution of the race problem in the United States."
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-
(1929-1968) US civil rights leader
1957
"The nation relies upon public discussion as one of the indispensable means to attain correct solutions to problems of social welfare. Curtailment of free speech limits this open discussion. Our whole history teaches that adjustment of social relations through reason is possible when free speech is maintained."
-Stanley Forman Reed-
(1884-1980) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
"When men can freely communicate their thoughts and their sufferings, real or imagined, their passions spend themselves in air, like gunpowder scattered upon the surface – but pent up by terrors, they work unseen, burst forth in a moment, and destroy everything in its course. Let reason be opposed to reason, and argument to argument, and every good government will be safe."
-Thomas Erskine-
(1750-1823) Lord Chancellor of England
"Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictory word, preserves contact – it is silence which isolates."
-Thomas Mann-
(1875-1955) German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, Nobel Prize in Literature (1929)
Source: The Magic Mountain
"It is not uncommon for ignorant and corrupt men to falsely charge others with doing what they imagine they themselves, in their narrow minds and experience, would have done under the circumstances."
-John Hessin Clarke-
(1857-1995) Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court
Source: Valdez v. United States, 1917
"I have seen gross intolerance show in support of tolerance."
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge-
(1772-1834) English poet, critic, philosopher, and a leader of the British Romantic movement
Source: Biographia Literaria, 1817
"Where the principle of difference [between political parties] is as substantial and as strongly pronounced as between the republicans and the monocrats of our country, I hold it as honorable to take a firm and decided part and as immoral to pursue a middle line, as between the parties of honest men and rogues, into which every country is divided."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Thomas Jefferson to William Branch Giles, 1795. ME 9:317
"Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself."
-Carl Gustav Jung-
(1875-1961)
"Democracy and liberty are not the same. Democracy is little more than mob rule, while liberty refers to the sovereignty of the individual."
-Walter E. Williams-
(1936- ) Columnist, Professor of Economics at George Mason University
"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
"Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens,) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake; since history and experience prove, that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of Republican Government. But that jealousy, to be useful, must be impartial; else it becomes the instrument of the very influence to be avoided, instead of a defence against it. Excessive partiality for one foreign nation, and excessive dislike of another, cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one side, and serve to veil and even second the arts of influence on the other. Real patriots, who may resist the intrigues of the favorite, are liable to become suspected and odious; while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people, to surrender their interests."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: Farewell Address, September 17, 1796, Ref: George Washington: A Collection, W.B. Allen, ed. (521)
"Good government is the most dangerous government, because it deprives people of the need to look after themselves."
-Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi-
(1869-1948)
"Self-reliance is the only road to true freedom, and being one's own person is its ultimate reward."
-Patricia Sampson-
(1921-1998)
"When men hire themselves out to shoot other men to order, asking nothing about the justice of their cause, I don't care if they are shot themselves."
-Herbert Spencer-
"I am concerned about the attitude of a candidate or his sponsors with respect to the rights of American citizens to assemble peaceably and to express publicly their views and opinions on important social and economic issues. There can be no constitutional democracy in any community which denies to the individual his freedom to speak and worship as he wishes. The American people will not be deceived by anyone who attempts to suppress individual liberty under the pretense of patriotism."
-Franklin D. Roosevelt-
"Liberty sets the mind free, fosters independence and unorthodox thinking and ideas. But it does not offer instant prosperity or happiness and wealth to everyone. This is something that politicians in particular must keep in mind."
-Boris Yeltsin-
Especially since politicians can't offer prosperity or happiness EVER -- instant or otherwise...
"That the power to tax involves the power to destroy; that the power to destroy may defeat and render useless the power to create."
-Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall-
1819
"I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it and see it still."
-Ronald Reagan-
"All lawful authority, legislative, and executive, originates from the people."
-James Burgh-
(1714-1775) was an English Whig politician
Source: "Political Disquisitions: Or, an Enquiry into Public Errors, Defects, and Abuses" (London, 1774-1775)
"The essential characteristic of Western civilization that distinguishes it from the arrested and petrified civilizations of the East was and is its concern for freedom from the state. The history of the West, from the age of the Greek polis down to the present-day resistance to socialism, is essentially the history of the fight for liberty against the encroachments of the officeholders."
-Ludwig Von Mises-
(1881-1973) Economist and social philosopher
"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 affairs. Let the General Government be reduced to foreign concerns only, and let our affairs be disentangled from those of all other nations, except as to commerce, which the merchants will manage the better, the more they are left free to manage for themselves, and our General Government may be reduced to a very simple organization, and a very inexpensive one; a few plain duties to be performed by a few servants."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: March 1800
"The 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 and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. 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."
-Justice Robert H. Jackson-
(1892-1954), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: West Virginia Board of Education vs. Barnette, 1943
"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
"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
"Apologists for activist government never tire of telling us that the benevolent state is our protector and that without it we'd be at the mercy of monsters. It is about time that we understood that the U.S. government does more to endanger the American people than any imagined monsters around the world…by pursuing its Grand Foreign Policy of meddling anywhere and everywhere."
-Sheldon Richman-
V.P. of Future of Freedom Foundation, author
Source: Liberty, Security, and the War on Terrorism (2010)
"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) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: The Federalist Papers Federalist No. 85
Right up until passage of the 17th Amendment...
"The worth of a state, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it."
-John Stuart Mill-
(1806-1873) English philosopher and economist
"The True Gentleman is the man whose conduct proceeds from good will and an acute sense of propriety, and whose self-control is equal to all emergencies; who does not make the poor man conscious of his poverty, the obscure man of his obscurity, or any man of his inferiority or deformity; who is himself humbled if necessity compels him to humble another; who does not flatter wealth, cringe before power, or boast of his own possessions or achievements; who speaks with frankness but always with sincerity and sympathy; whose deed follows his word; who thinks of the rights and feelings of others, rather than his own; and who appears well in any company, a man with whom honor is sacred and virtue safe."
-John Walter Wayland-
1899
"Tis the upright mind that holds true sovereignty."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: Tragedies, Thyestes, line 380; (Chorus)
"They can only set free men free ...
And there is no need of that:
Free men set themselves free."
-James Oppenheim-
(1882-1932), was an American poet, novelist, and editor
Source: The Slave
"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
"The 4th Amendment and the personal rights it secures have a long history. At the very core stands the right of a man to retreat into his own home and there be free from unreasonable governmental intrusion."
-Justice Potter Stewart-
(1915-1985) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
Source: Bartkus v. Illinois, 5 March 1961
"While rationalism at the individual level is a plea for more personal autonomy from cultural norms, at the social level it is often a claim -- or arrogation -- of power to stifle the autonomy of others."
-Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
"If I want to be free from any other man’s dictation, I must understand that I can have no other man under my control."
-William Graham Sumner-
(1840-1910) American academic and professor at Yale College
"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]
c. 1300
"English character and English freedom depend comparatively little on the form which the Constitution assumes at Westminster. A centralised democracy may be as tyrannical as an absolute monarch; and if the vigour of the nation is to continue unimpaired, each individual, each family, each district, must preserve as far as possible its independence, its self-completeness, its powers and its privilege to manage its own affairs and think its own thoughts."
-- James Anthony Froude
(1818-1894) British author and historian
Source: Short Studies on Great Subjects, 1872
http://libertytree.ca/quotes/James.Froude.Quote.0C30
"Thoughts are free and are subject to no rule. On them rests the freedom of man, and they tower above the light of nature."
-Philippus Aureolus Paracelsus-
[Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim] (1493-1541)
"You are not what you think you are; What you think – you are."
-Red Pritchard-
"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) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: The Federalist No. 79
"Learned institutions ought to be favorite objects with every free people. They throw that light over the public mind which is the best security against crafty and dangerous encroachments on public liberty."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
"The State... has had a vested interest in promoting attitudes that would tend to make us skeptical of our own abilities, fearful of the motives of others, and emotionally dependent upon external authorities for purpose and direction in our lives."
-Butler D. Shaffer-
Professor, Southwestern University School of Law
Source: Calculated Chaos, 1985
"There is only one success: to be able to spend your life in your own way, and not to give others absurd maddening claims upon it."
-Christopher Darlington Morley-
(1890-1957)
"A man may have to die for our country: but no man must, in any exclusive sense, live for his country. He who surrenders himself without reservation to the temporal claims of a nation, or a party, or a class is rendering to Caesar that which, of all things, most emphatically belongs to God: himself."
-C. S. Lewis-
(1898-1963), British novelist
"Here in America we are descended in spirit from revolutionaries and rebels -- men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine."
-Dwight D. Eisenhower-
(1890-1969), 34th US President, WWII General
Source: Speech, Columbia University, 1954
"The Republic was not established by cowards; and cowards will not preserve it ... This will remain the land of the free only so long as it is the home of the brave."
-Elmer Davis-
(1890-1958), American writer, commentator
-Thomas Jefferson-
Elliot, p. 4:187-88
"... the laws of Congress are restricted to a certain sphere, and when they depart from this sphere, they are no longer supreme or binding. In the same manner the states have certain independent power, in which their laws are supreme."
-Alexander Hamilton-
Elliot, 2:362
"Clearly, a federal law which is contrary to the Constitution is no law at all; it is null, void, invalid. And a Supreme Court decision, which is not a 'law,' has no 'supremacy' -- 'even if it is faithfully interpreting the Constitution. So it is the height of absurdity to claim that a Supreme Court decision that manifestly violates the Constitution is the 'supreme law of the land.'"
-William Jasper-
"All laws that are proper and correct, and all obligations entered into which are not violative of the constitution should be kept inviolate. But if they are violative of the constitution, then the compact between the rulers and the ruled is broken and the obligation ceases to be binding."
-John Taylor-
Journal of Discourses, 26: 350-351. February 20, 1884
"He who tampers with the currency robs labor of its bread."
-Daniel Webster-
(1782-1852), US Senator
"When money is controlled by a few it gives that few an undue power and control over labor and the resources of the country. Labor will have its best return when the laborer can control its disposal."
-Leland Stanford-
[Amasa Leland Stanford] (1824-1893) American tycoon, industrialist, politician and founder of Stanford University
"Capital is a result of labor, and is used by labor to assist it in further production. Labor is the active and initial force, and labor is therefore the employer of capital."
-Henry George-
(1839-1897)
"Socialism proposes no adequate substitute for the motive of enlightened selfishness that today is at the basis of all human labor and effort, enterprise and new activity."
-William Howard Taft-
(1857-1930) 27th US President
"The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state."
-John Kenneth Galbraith-
(1908-2006) Canadian-born economist, Harvard professor
"The long-term solution to 'your government can kill you with impunity' is not 'then don't piss it off.'"
-Bill Alleman-
"Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism as it is a merge of state and corporate power."
-Benito Mussolini
(1883-1945), Italian dictator during WW2
Source: http://www.publiceye.org/fascist/corporatism.html
"Fascism and corporatism are both government and business in bed together. The only difference is who's on top."
-Bill Alleman-
"The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government mismanagement rather than by any inherent instability of the private economy. ... Roosevelt's policies were very destructive. Roosevelt's policies made the depression longer and worse than it otherwise would have been."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
"I go on the principle that a public debt is a public curse, and in a Republican Government a greater curse than any other."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
"We have plenty of freedom in this country but not a great deal of independence."
-John W. Raper-
(1870-1950)
Source: What This World Needs, 1954
"So low and hopeless are the finances of the United States, that, the year before last Congress was obliged to borrow money even, to pay the interest of the principal which we had borrowed before. This wretched resource of turning interest into principal, is the most humiliating and disgraceful measure that a nation could take, and approximates with rapidity to absolute ruin: Yet it is the inevitable and certain consequence of such a system as the existing Confederation."
-William Richardson Davie-
(1756-1820) Governor of North Carolina (1798-1799), North Carolina delegate to the 1787-88 Constitutional Convention
Source: speech in the Proceedings and Debates of the Convention of North-Carolina, Convened at Hillsborough, on Monday the 21st Day of July, 1788, for the Purpose of Deliberating and Determining on the Constitution Recommended by the General Convention at Philadelphia, the 17th Day of September, 1787: To Which is Prefixed the Said Constitution (Edenton, N.C.: Hodge and Wills, 1789)
"We shall have World Government, whether or not we like it. The only question is whether World Government will be achieved by conquest or consent."
-James Paul Warburg-
(1896-1969) son of Paul Moritz Warburg, nephew of Felix Warburg and of Jacob Schiff, both of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. which poured millions into the Russian Revolution through James' brother Max, banker to the German government, Chairman of the CFR
Source: February 17, 1950, appearance before the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations
"This Act (the Federal Reserve Act, Dec. 23rd 1913) establishes the most gigantic trust on earth. When the President signs this bill, the invisible government by the Monetary Power will be legalized. The people may not know it immediately, but the day of reckoning is only a few years removed. The trusts will soon realize that they have gone too far even for their own good. The people must make a declaration of independence to relieve themselves from the Monetary Power. This they will be able to do by taking control of Congress. Wall Streeters could not cheat us if you Senators and Representatives did not make a humbug of Congress... The greatest crime of Congress is its currency system. The worst legislative crime of the ages is perpetrated by this banking bill. The caucus and the party bosses have again operated and prevented the people from getting the benefit of their own government."
-Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr.
(1859-1924) Congressman (R-MN), father of famous aviator
Source: December 22, 1913, the day before President Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act, in a speech before the House of Representatives
"We have in this country one of the most corrupt institutions the world has ever known. I refer to the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Banks, hereinafter called the FED. They are not government institutions. They are private monopolies which prey upon the people of these United States for the benefit of themselves and their foreign customers..."
-Louis McFadden-
(1876-1936) US Congressman (R-PA) (1915-1935), Chairman of House Banking and Currency Committee. Poisoned in 1936.
Source: Speech in Congress, June 10, 1932
"Mr. Chairman, I see no reason why citizens of the United States should be terrorized into surrendering their property to the International Bankers who own and control the Federal Reserve."
-Louis McFadden-
(1876-1936) US Congressman (R-PA) (1915-1935), Chairman of House Banking and Currency Committee. Poisoned in 1936.
Source: 9 March 1933, in his Speech to the House of Representatives, Congressional Record
"... our whole monetary system is dishonest, as it is debt-based... We did not vote for it. It grew upon us gradually but markedly since 1971 when the commodity-based system was abandoned."
-The Earl of Caithness-
Source: in a speech to the House of Lords, 1997
"And I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Letter to John Taylor (28 May 1816) ME 15:23
"Trusting too much to others' care is the ruin of many; for, as the almanac says, in the affairs of this world men are saved not by faith, but by the want of it; but a man's own care is profitable; for, saith Poor Dick, learning is to the studious, and riches to the careful, as well as power to the bold, and Heaven to the virtuous.
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
Source: The Way to Wealth (1758)
"But what madness must it be to run in debt for these superfluities! We are offered, by the terms of this vendue, six months' credit; and that perhaps has induced some of us to attend it, because we cannot spare the ready money, and hope now to be fine without it. But, ah, think what you do when you run in debt; you give to another power over your liberty. If you cannot pay at the time, you will be ashamed to see your creditor; you will be in fear when you speak to him, you will make poor pitiful sneaking excuses, and by degrees come to lose you veracity, and sink into base downright lying; for, as Poor Richard says, the second vice is lying, the first is running in debt. And again to the same purpose, lying rides upon debt's back."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
Source: The Way to Wealth (1758)
"Your creditor has authority at his pleasure to deprive you of your liberty, by confining you in gaol [jail] for life, or to sell you for a servant, if you should not be able to pay him! When you have got your bargain, you may, perhaps, think little of payment; but creditors, Poor Richard tells us, have better memories than debtors, and in another place says, creditors are a superstitious sect, great observers of set days and times. The day comes round before you are aware, and the demand is made before you are prepared to satisfy it. Or if you bear your debt in mind, the term which at first seemed so long, will, as it lessens, appear extreamly short. Time will seem to have added wings to his heels as well as shoulders. "
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
Source: The Way to Wealth (1758)
"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
"An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it. Truth stands, even if there be no public support. It is self sustained."
-Mahatma Gandhi-
"But the mild voice of reason, pleading the cause of an enlarged and permanent interest, is but too often drowned, before public bodies as well as individuals, by the clamors of an impatient avidity for immediate and immoderate gain."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Federalist No. 42, January 22, 1788
"Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked: 'Account Overdrawn.'"
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
Source: Atlas Shrugged, p. 385-386, (1957)
"That's what a Congressman or a Senator is for -- to see that too much money don't accumulate in the national Treasury."
-Will Rogers-
(1879-1935) American humorist
"The good of the people must be the great purpose of government. By the laws of nature and of reason, the governors are invested with power to that end. And the greatest good of the people is liberty. It is to the state what health is to the individual."
-Denis Diderot-
"The powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent meetings and conferences. The apex of the systems was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world's central banks which were themselves private corporations. Each central bank...sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world."
-Carroll Quigley-
(1910-1977) Professor of History at Georgetown University,
member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR),
mentor to Bill Clinton
Source: in his book Tragedy and Hope, 1966, pg 324
"The Federal Reserve Bank of New York is eager to enter into close relationship
with the Bank for International Settlements.... The conclusion is impossible to
escape that the State and Treasury Departments are willing to pool the banking
system of Europe and America, setting up a world financial power independent of
and above the Government of the United States.... The United States under
present conditions will be transformed from the most active of manufacturing
nations into a consuming and importing nation with a balance of trade against
it."
-Louis McFadden-
(1876-1936) US Congressman (R-PA) (1915-1935), Chairman of House Banking and Currency Committee. Poisoned in 1936.
Source: quoted in the New York Times (June 1930)
"I, however, place economy among the first and most important republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: letter to William Plumer, July 21, 1816
"If you want irresponsible politicians to spend less, you must give them less to spend."
-Irwin Schiff-
(libertarian)
"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-
(1949-) American baseball player
"All questions of power, arising under the constitution of the United States, whether they relate to the federal or a state government, must be considered of great importance. The federal government being formed for certain purposes, is limited in its powers, and can in no case exercise authority where the power has not been delegated. The states are sovereign; with the exception of certain powers, which have been invested in the general government, and inhibited to the states. No state can coin money, emit bills of credit, pass ex post facto laws, or laws impairing the obligation of contracts, &c. If any state violate a provision of the constitution, or be charged with such violation to the injury of private rights, the question is made before this tribunal; to whom all such questions, under the constitution, of right belong. In such a case, this court is to the state, what its own supreme court would be, where the constitutionality of a law was questioned under the constitution of the state. And within the delegation of power, the decision of this court is as final and conclusive on the state, as would be the decision of its own court in the case stated."
-Justice John McLean-
(1785-1861) U. S. Congressman for Ohio (1813-16), U.S. Postmaster General, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1830-61), presidential candidate for the Whig and Republican parties
Source: Craig v. Missouri, 4 Peters 410 (1830) [29 U.S. 410, 464]
"One hundred and seventy-three despots would surely be as oppressive as one."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Federalist No. 48, February 1, 1788
"A question arises whether all the powers of government, legislative, executive, and judicial, shall be left in this body? I think a people cannot be long free, nor ever happy, whose government is in one Assembly."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
"The salient feature of America in the Age of Obama is a failed government class institutionally committed to living beyond its means, and a citizenry too many of whom are content to string along."
-Mark Steyn-
(1959-) Canadian columnist
"Will people ever be wise enough to refuse to follow bad leaders or to take away the freedom of other people?"
-Eleanor Roosevelt-
"[A] limited Constitution ... can be preserved in practice no other way than through the medium of courts of justice, whose duty it must be to declare all acts contrary to the manifest tenor of the Constitution void. Without this, all the reservations of particular rights or privileges would amount to nothing ... To deny this would be to affirm … 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)
"I am commonly opposed to those who modestly assume the rank of champions of liberty, and make a very patriotic noise about the people. It is the stale artifice which has duped the world a thousand times, and yet, though detected, it is still successful. I love liberty as well as anybody. I am proud of it, as the true title of our people to distinction above others; but ... I would guard it by making the laws strong enough to protect it."
-Fisher Ames-
(1758-1808), American statesman, orator and political writer
Source: letter to George Richard Minot, June 23, 1789
"We are, heart and soul, friends to the freedom of the press. It is however, the prostituted companion of liberty, and somehow or other, we know not how, its efficient auxiliary. It follows the substance like its shade; but while a man walks erect, he may observe that his shadow is almost always in the dirt. It corrupts, it deceives, it inflames. It strips virtue of her honors, and lends to faction its wildfire and its poisoned arms, and in the end is its own enemy and the usurper's ally, It would be easy to enlarge on its evils. They are in England, they are here, they are everywhere. It is a precious pest, and a necessary mischief, and there would be no liberty without it."
-Fisher Ames-
(1758-1808), American statesman, orator and political writer
Source: Review of the Pamphlet on the State of the British Constitution, 1807
"The nature and intention of government … are social. Based on the idea of natural rights, government secures those rights to the individual by strictly negative intervention, making justice costless and easy of access; and beyond that it does not go. The State, on the other hand, 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-
"[T]he income tax is incompatible with a free society. The IRS routinely intrudes on our basic civil liberties and privacy rights -- and its intrusions are getting worse all the time. I want an America where it is no longer the government's business how much money you make and what you do with it."
-Stephen Moore-
Director of Fiscal Policies, The CATO Institute
Source: testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee
"It has often been found that profuse expenditures, heavy taxation, absurd commercial restrictions, corrupt tribunals, disastrous wars, seditions, persecutions, conflagrations, inundation, have not been able to destroy capital so fast as the exertions of private citizens have been able to create it."
-Thomas Babington Macaulay-
(1800-1859) [Lord Macaulay] 1st Baron Macaulay, British historian
"You cannot make children learn music or anything else without to some degree converting them into will-less adults. You fashion them into accepters of the status quo – a good thing for a society that needs obedient sitters at dreary desks, standers in shops, mechanical catchers of the 8:30 suburban train – a society, in short, that is carried on the shabby shoulders of the scared little man – the scared-to-death conformist."
-A. S. Neill-
"It has been said that all Government is an evil. It would be more proper to say that the necessity of any Government is a misfortune. This necessity however exists; and the problem to be solved is, not what form of Government is perfect, but which of the forms is least imperfect."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: to an unidentified correspondent, 1833
"Inflation has now been institutionalized at a fairly constant 5% per year. This has been determined to be the optimum level for generating the most revenue without causing public alarm. A 5% devaluation applies, not only to the money earned this year, but to all that is left over from previous years. At the end of the first year, a dollar is worth 95 cents. At the end of the second year, the 95 cents is reduced again by 5%, leaving its worth at 90 cents, and so on. By the time a person has worked 20 years, the government will have confiscated 64% of every dollar he saved over those years. By the time he has worked 45 years, the hidden tax will be 90%. The government will take virtually everything a person saves over a lifetime."
-G. Edward Griffin-
American Historian, Author
"The refunding of the national debt at a lower rate of interest should be accomplished without compelling the withdrawal of the national-bank notes, and thus disturbing the business of the country."
-James A. Garfield-
(1831-1881) 20th President of the United States (1881)
Source: Inaugural Address, March 14, 1881
"Felix qui nihil debet." ("Happy is he who owes nothing.")
-Roman Proverb-
Source: Proverb from ancient Rome
"One of the problems that the marijuana reform movement consistently faces is that everyone wants to talk about what marijuana does, but no one ever wants to look at what marijuana prohibition does. 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."
-Richard Cowan-
(1940- ) National Director of NORML (1992-95)
"It is not the business of government to make men virtuous or religious, or to preserve the fool from the consequences of his own folly. Government should be repressive no further than is necessary to secure liberty by protecting the equal rights of each from aggression on the part of others, and the moment governmental prohibitions extend beyond this line they are in danger of defeating the very ends they are intended to serve."
-Henry George-
(1839-1897) American political economist
Source: The Functions of Government, Social problems, vol 12, (1884)
"No-knock police raids destroy Americans’ right to privacy and safety. People’s lives are being ruined or ended as a result of unsubstantiated assertions by anonymous government informants. ... Unfortunately, no-knock raids are becoming more common as federal, state, and local politicians and law enforcement agencies decide that the war on drugs justified nullifying the Fourth Amendment. ... No-knock raids in response to alleged narcotics violations presume that the government should have practically unlimited power to endanger some people’s lives in order to control what others ingest."
-James Bovard-
American author, lecturer
Source: OOOPS—YOU’RE DEAD... The Body Count from NO-KNOCK RAIDS is climbing. ARE YOU NEXT?
"When they took the 4th Amendment, I was quiet because I didn't deal drugs. When they took the 6th Amendment, I was quiet because I was innocent. When they took the 2nd Amendment, I was quiet because I didn't own a gun. Now they have taken the 1st Amendment, and I can only be quiet."
-Lyle Myhr-
"Let natural consequences teach responsible behavior. One of the kindest things we can do is to let the natural or logical consequences of people's actions teach them responsible behavior. They may not like it or us, but popularity is a fickle standard by which to measure character development. Insisting on justice demands more true love, not less. We care enough for their growth and security to suffer their displeasure."
-Stephen Covey-
"Whoever will be free must make himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man's lap. What is freedom? To have the will to be responsible for one's self."
-Max Stirner-
"We must recognize that it is a cardinal sin against democracy to support a man for public office because he belongs to a given creed or to oppose him because he belongs to a given creed. It is just as evil as to draw the line between class and class, between occupation and occupation in political life. No man who tries to draw either line is a good American. True Americanism demands that we judge each man on his conduct, that we so judge him in private life and that we so judge him in public life."
-Theodore Roosevelt-
"All forms of tampering with human beings, getting at them, shaping them against their will to your own pattern, all thought control and conditioning is, therefore, a denial of that in men which makes them men and their values ultimate."
-Isaiah Berlin-
(1909-1997)
Source: Two Concepts of Liberty, 1958
"Thanks to the war on drugs, nearly 700,000 people were arrested in the United States for possession of marijuana in 1997, while 400,000 currently sit in prison for drug crimes -- more than the entire prison population of Britain, Germany and Belgium -- for what is a consensual act. Nearly $35 billion a year is spent on arresting, prosecuting and jailing drug criminals in the US -- $400 million in Canada -- to hammer at a crime which essentially harms no one but the drug user."
-Steven Martinovich-
Source: The Tainted Truth, REALMENSCH April 30, 1999
And hardly necessarily even them...
"My own view rests on the premise that nullification can and should serve an important function in the criminal process ... The doctrine permits the jury to bear on the criminal process a sense of fairness and particularized justice ... The drafters of legal rules cannot anticipate and take account of every case where a defendant’s conduct is “unlawful” but not blameworthy, any more than they can draw a bold line to mark the boundary between an accident and negligence. It is the jury -- as spokesmen for the community’s sense of values -- that must explore that subtle and elusive boundary. ... I do not see any reason to assume that jurors will make rampantly abusive use of their power. Trust in the jury is, after all, one of the cornerstones of our entire criminal jurisprudence, and if that trust is without foundation we must reexamine a great deal more than just the nullification doctrine."
-Chief Judge David L. Bazelon-
U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C. Circuit
Source: U.S. V. Dougherty, 473 F. 2D 1113, 1141-42 (Dissent) (1972)
"Some police chiefs for years have warned that we are “militarizing” our nation’s police. “Smart bombs” are used to enter drug dens. Officers are clad in paramilitary garb including battle helmets. Armored “urban” assault vehicles are tactically utilized on city streets. Cops are trained in military tactics. You cannot train officers in such a manner and then expect them to behave like “Officer Friendly” .... The FBI is an investigatory agency. Originally, they weren’t even armed. Why are lawyers and accountants being transformed into G.I. Joes? When such occurs we come dangerously close to establishing a National Police Force, something not intended by the framers of the U.S. Constitution."
-Police Chief James J. Kouri-
First Vice President National Association of Chiefs of Police
Source: Letter To The American Spectator, April, 1996
"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
"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
They are merely "simply a waste of time" only at their absolutely most benign...
"The more prohibitions you have, the less virtuous people will be."
-Lao-Tzu-
[Li Erh] (570-490 BC) 'Old Sage', Father of Taoism
Source: Tao Te Ching
"Political correctness is really a subjective list put together by the few to rule the many -- a list of things one must think, say, or do. It affronts the right of the individual to establish his or her own beliefs."
-Mark Berley-
Source: Argos, Spring 1998
"Not every item of news should be published. Rather must those who control news policies endeavor to make every item of news serve a certain purpose."
-Joseph Paul Goebbels-
(1897-1945) Nazi Propaganda Minister
Source: Diary, 14 March 1943
"No more fatuous chimera has ever infested the brain than that you can control opinions by law or direct belief by statute, and no more pernicious sentiment ever tormented the heart than the barbarous desire to do so. The field of inquiry should remain open, and the right of debate must be regarded as a sacred right."
-William E. Borah-
(1865-1940) U. S. Senator
Source: 1917
"And what is this liberty, whose very name makes the heart beat faster and shakes the world? Is it not the union of all liberties -- liberty of conscience, of education, of association, of the press, of travel, of labor, of trade?"
-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 (1848)
"To silence criticism is to silence freedom."
-Sidney Hook-
(1902-1989) American, former Marxist philosopher/professor turned Democratic Socialist, CIA operative, recipient of 1985 Presidential Medal of Freedom from Reagan
Source: New York Times Magazine, 30 September 1951
"A bureaucrat is the most despicable of men, though he is needed as vultures are needed, but one hardly admires vultures whom bureaucrats so strangely resemble. I have yet to meet a bureaucrat who was not petty, dull, almost witless, crafty or stupid, an oppressor or a thief, a holder of little authority in which he delights, as a boy delights in possessing a vicious dog. Who can trust such creatures?"
-Marcus Tullius Cicero-
(106-43 B.C.) Roman Statesman, Philosopher and Orator
Source: A Pillar of Iron, a novel based on the life of Cicero by Taylor Caldwell (1965), p. 451
"We must give full weight to Sir Charles's reminder that millions in the East are still half starved. To these my fears would seem very unimportant. A hungry man thinks about food, not freedom. We must give full weight to the claim that nothing but science, and science globally applied, and therefore unprecedented Government controls, can produce full bellies and medical care for the whole human race: nothing, in short, but a world Welfare State. It is a full admission of these truths which impresses upon me the extreme peril of humanity at present."
-C. S. Lewis-
(1898-1963), British novelist
Source: Willing Slaves of the Welfare State, first published in The Observer on July 20, 1958
"A central lesson of science is that to understand complex issues (or even simple ones), we must try to free our minds of dogma and to guarantee the freedom to publish, to contradict, and to experiment. Arguments from authority are unacceptable."
-Carl Sagan-
"The merit of our Constitution was, not that it promotes democracy, but checks it."
-Horatio Seymour-
(1810-1886) Governor of New York
"[Some people] have a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to lower the powerful to their own level, and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom. I believe that it is easier to establish an absolute and despotic government amongst a people in which the conditions of society are equal, than amongst any other; and I think that, if such a government were once established amongst such a people, it would not only oppress men, but would eventually strip each of them of several of the highest qualities of humanity. Despotism, therefore, appears to me peculiarly to be dreaded in democratic times."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
[Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clerel, le Comte de Tocqueville] (1805-1859) French historian
"The Greeks... labored under the delusion that their democracy was a guarantee of peace and plenty, not realizing that unrestrained majority rule always destroys freedom, puts the minority at the mercy of the mob, and works at cross-purposes to the effective use of human energy and individual initiative."
-Henry Grady Weaver-
(1889-1949)
Source: "The Mainspring of Human Progress," 1947
"If men use their liberty in such a way as to surrender their liberty, are they thereafter any the less slaves? If people by a plebiscite elect a man despot over them, do they remain free because the despotism was of their own making?"
-Herbert Spencer-
(1820-1903) British author, economist, philosopher
1884
"When a legislature decides to steal some of our rights and plans to use police force to accomplish it, what's the real difference between them and the thief? Darn little! They hide behind the excuse that they're legislating democratically. The fact they do it by a majority vote has no moral significance whatsoever. Numerical might does not constitute right, no more than a lynch mob can justify its act because a majority participated."
-H. L. Richardson-
[Hubert Leon "Bill" Richardson] California state senator (1966-1988), author, Founder and Chairman of Gun Owners of America
Source: Compromise ... Never Justified When Principle Is Involved, The Gun Owners, December, 1995
"The disposition of all power is to abuses, nor does it at all mend the matter that its possessors are a majority. Unrestrained political authority, though it be confided to masses, cannot be trusted without positive limitations, men in bodies being but an aggregation of the passions, weaknesses and interests of men as individuals."
-James Fenimore Cooper-
(1789-1851)
Source: The American Democrat, 1838
"Sometimes, when leading families or merchants organized a government for their city, they not only provided for some power sharing through voting but took pains to reduce the probability that the government's chief executive could assume autocratic power. For a time in Genoa, for example, the chief administrator of the government had to be an outsider -- and thus someone with no membership in any of the powerful families in the city. Moreover, he was constrained to a fixed term of office, forced to leave the city after the end of his term, and forbidden from marrying into any of the local families. In Venice, after a doge who attempted to make himself autocrat was beheaded for his offense, subsequent doges were followed in official processions by a sword-bearing symbolic executioner as a reminder of the punishment intended for any leader who attempted to assume dictatorial power."
-Mancur Olson-
Source: Power and Prosperity. Outgrowing Communist and Capitalist Dictatorships (New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. 39
"Anybody that wants the Presidency so much that he'll spend two years organizing and campaigning for it is not to be trusted with the office."
-David Broder-
(1929- ) Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author, television talk show pundit, and university professor
"To permit every interest group, especially those who claim to be victimized by unfair expression, their own legislative exceptions to the First Amendment so long as they succeed in obtaining a majority of legislative votes in their favor demonstrates the potentially predatory nature of what defendants seek through this Ordinance."
-Sarah Evans Barker-
Judge, U. S. District Court
Source: Decision overturning Indianapolis Pornography Ordinance, 19 November, 1984
"It is precisely for the protection of the minority that constitutional limitations exist. Majorities need no such protection. They can take care of themselves."
-Illinois Supreme Court-
(1910)
Source: Ring V. Board Of Education
"There is no maxim in my opinion which is more liable to be misapplied, and which therefore needs elucidation than the current one that the interest of the majority is the political standard of right and wrong... . In fact it is only reestablishing under another name and a more specious form, force as the measure of right... ."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: letter to James Monroe, October 5, 1786
"An unjust law is no law at all."
-Augustine of Hippo-
"The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then get elected and prove it."
-P. J. O'Rourke-
"As to the American tradition of non-meddling, Anarchism asks that it be carried down to the individual himself. It demands no jealous barrier of isolation; it knows that such isolation is undesirable and impossible; but it teaches that by all men's strictly minding their own business, a fluid society, freely adapting itself to mutual needs, wherein all the world shall belong to all men, as much as each has need or desire, will result. And when Modern Revolution has thus been carried to the heart of the whole world — if it ever shall be, as I hope it will — then may we hope to see a resurrection of that proud spirit of our fathers which put the simple dignity of Man above the gauds of wealth and class, and held that to be an American was greater than to be a king. In that day there shall be neither kings nor Americans — only Men; over the whole earth, MEN."
-Voltairine de Cleyre-
"Any persons may attempt to unite kindred spirits, but, whatever their hopes and longings, none have the right to impose their vision of unity upon the rest."
-Robert Nozick
"Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.
-Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville-
(29 July 1805 – 16 April 1859)
Translation from Hayek, 'The Road to Serfdom'
12 September 1848, "Discours prononcé à l'assemblée constituante le 12 Septembre 1848 sur la question du droit au travail", Oeuvres complètes, vol. IX, p. 546
"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-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville-
(29 July 1805 – 16 April 1859)
'Democracy in America', Book One, Chapter III, Part I
Often misquoted as: Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom
"I think that democratic communities have a natural taste for freedom: left to themselves, they will seek it, cherish it, and view any privation of it with regret. But for equality, their passion is ardent, insatiable, incessant, invincible: they call for equality in freedom; and if they cannot obtain that, they still call for equality in slavery."
-Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville-
(29 July 1805 – 16 April 1859)
'Democracy in America', Book Two, Chapter I
"English character and English freedom depend comparatively little on the form which the Constitution assumes at Westminster. A centralised democracy may be as tyrannical as an absolute monarch; and if the vigour of the nation is to continue unimpaired, each individual, each family, each district, must preserve as far as possible its independence, its self-completeness, its powers and its privilege to manage its own affairs and think its own thoughts."
-James Anthony Froude-
(1818-1894) British author and historian
Source: Short Studies on Great Subjects, 1872
"Tis a Mistake to think this Fault [tyranny] is proper only to Monarchies; other Forms of Government are liable to it, as well as that. For where-ever the Power that is put in any hands for the Government of the People, and the Preservation of their Properties, is applied to other ends, and made use of to impoverish, harass, or subdue them to the Arbitrary and Irregular Commands of those that have it: There it presently becomes Tyranny, whether those that thus use it are one or many."
-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.
"While democracy must have its organizations and controls, its vital breath is individual liberty."
-Justice Charles Evans Hughes-
(1862-1948) Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court
"I am far from denying that newspapers in democratic countries lead citizens to do very ill-considered things in common; but without newspapers there would be hardly any common action at all. So they mend many more ills than they cause."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
(1805-1859) French historian
Source: Democracy in America, 1835
"Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself."
-Carl Gustav Jung
(1875-1961)
"The Seven Deadly Sins of the Press:
- Concentrated Power of the Big Press.
- Passing of competition and the coming of monopoly.
- Governmental control of the press.
- Timidity, especially in the face of group and corporate pressures.
- Big Business mentality.
- Clannishness among the newspaper publishers that has prevented them
from criticizing each other.
- Social blindness."
-Max Lerner-
(1902-1992) US political columnist, educator
"Thought that is silenced is always rebellious. Majorities, of course, are often mistaken. This is why the silencing of minorities is necessarily dangerous. Criticism and dissent are the indispensable antidote to major delusions."
-Alan Barth-
(1906-1979) served on the editorial board of The Washington Post for thirty years
Source: The Loyalty of Free Men, 1951
"Party is the madness of many for the gain of a few."
-Alexander Pope-
(1688-1744) English poet
Source: Thoughts on Various Subjects; published in Swift's Miscellanies (1727)
"True, it is evil that a single man should crush the herd, but see not there the worse form of slavery, which is when the herd crushes out the man."
-Antoine De Saint-Exupery-
(1900-1944)
Source: Citadelle, 1948
"When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies, to be met not with cooperation but with conquest; to be subjugated and mastered. We learn, at the last, to look at our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community; men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear, only a common desire to retreat from each other, only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force."
-Robert F. Kennedy-
"And what sort of philosophical doctrine is this -- that numbers confer unlimited rights, that they take from some persons all rights over themselves, and vest these rights in others. ... How, then, can the rights of three men exceed the rights of two men? In what possible way can the rights of three men absorb the rights of two men, and make them as if they had never existed. ... It is not possible to suppose, without absurdity, that a man should have no rights over his own body and mind, and yet have a 1/10,000,000th share in unlimited rights over all other bodies and minds?"
-Auberon Herbert-
(1838-1906) English author
Source: "The Ethics of Dynamite", Contemporary Review, May 1894; reproduced in The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State, and Other Essays by Auberon Herbert (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1978), pp. 202-203
"Ten million ignorances do not constitute one knowledge."
-Clemens von Metternich-
(1773-1859) German-Austrian politician
"The tyranny of a multitude is a multiplied tyranny."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country."
-Edward Bernays-
(1891-1995) "Father" of modern public relations (PR) and director of the U.S. Committee on Public Information during World War I, on government propaganda
Source: writing in "Propaganda" from "Food & Water Journal'' (1928)
"It must be admitted that the tendency of the human race toward liberty is largely thwarted, especially in France. This is greatly due to a fatal desire -- learned from the teachings of antiquity -- that our writers on public affairs have in common: They desire to set themselves above mankind in order to arrange, organize, and regulate it according to their fancy."
-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: What Is Liberty? "The Law" by Frederic Bastiat (1848)
"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
"Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first."
-Charles de Gaulle-
"The purpose of government is to rein in the rights of the people."
-Bill Clinton-
[William Jefferson Blythe III] (1946- ), 42nd US President
Source: No reliable source found. Often attributed to an interview on MTV in 1993 or from a speech at Philadelphia City Hall, May 28, 1993
"Having gathered all power to itself, [the State] has become the sole focus of all conflict, and it must construct totalitarian defences to match its total exposure."
-Anthony de Jasay-
(1925- ) Hungarian writer
Source: The State [1985] (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1998), p. 287
"Characteristically, however, the overthrow of the dictator simply means that there will be another dictator. ... the policies they follow will probably not be radically different. If we look around the world, we quickly realize that these policies will not be radically different from those that would be followed by a democracy either."
-Gordon Tullock-
(1922-2014) American economist, professor of law and economics at George Mason University School of Law
Source: Autocracy (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1987), p. 20
"Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties."
-Areopagitica-
"Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
(1805-1859) French historian
"Democracy, then, in the centralizing, pattern-making, absolutist shape which we have given to it is, it is clear, the time of tyranny's incubation."
-Bertrand de Jouvenel-
(1903-1987)
Source: Du Pouvoir. Histoire naturelle de sa croissance [1945] (Paris: Hachette, 1972), p. 36; English translation: On Power: The Natural History of Its Growth (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1993), p. 15.
"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 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-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: in a letter to Thomas Jefferson in 1788
"To speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government. Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it. After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule, is not because they are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest.
But a government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it. Can there not be a government in which majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience? -- in which majorities decide only those questions to which the rule of expediency is applicable? 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. It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience. 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-
(1817-1862) American author, poet, philosopher, polymath, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and transcendentalist
Source: Civil Disobedience (1849)
"To include freedom in the very definition of democracy is to define a process not by its actual characteristics as a process but by its hoped for results. This is not only intellectually invalid, it is, in practical terms, blinding oneself in advance to some of the unwanted consequences of the process."
-Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
"We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910)
"I don't care who does the electing, so long as I get to do the nominating."
-William Marcy Tweed-
(1823-1878) American politician, "Boss Tweed" was convicted for stealing millions of dollars from New York City, died in jail. Tweed was head of Tammany Hall, the Democratic Party political machine that played a major role in the politics of 19th century New York.
"There can be no assumption that today’s majority is “right” and the Amish or others like them are “wrong.” A way of life that is odd or even erratic but interferes with no right or interests of others is not to be condemned because it is different."
-Justice Warren E. Burger-
(1907-1995) Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1969-1986)
Source: Wisconsin v. Yoder, 15 May 1972
"In any free society, the conflict between social conformity and individual liberty is permanent, unresolvable, and necessary."
-Kathleen Norris-
[Kathleen Thompson,wife of C.G. Norris] (1880-1966) American novelist
"Democracy, which began by liberating man politically, has developed a dangerous tendency to enslave him through the tyranny of majorities and the deadly power of their opinion."
-Ludwig Lewisohn-
(1883-1955)
Source: The Modern Drama, 1915
"The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it."
-H. L. Mencken
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people. When the people give way, their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards. The nature of the encroachment upon the American constitution is such, as to grow every day more and more encroaching. Like a cancer, it 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, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole society."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: Novanglus Letters, 1774
.. said the author of the 'Alien and Sedition Acts'...
"Democracy arose from men thinking that if they are equal in any respect they are equal in all respects."
-Aristotle-
(384-322 BC) Greek philosopher
Source: Politics, v, c.322 B.C.
"Tyranny seldom announces itself. ... In fact, a tyranny may exist without an individual tyrant. A whole government, even a democratically elected one, may be tyrannical."
-Joseph Sobran-
(1946-2010) Columnist
"The principle that the majority have a right to rule the minority, practically resolves all government into a mere contest between two bodies of men, as to which of them shall be masters, and which of them slaves; a contest, that -- however bloody -- can, in the nature of things, never be finally closed, so long as man refuses to be a slave."
-Lysander Spooner-
(1808-1887) Political theorist, activist, abolitionist
1867
Source: No Treason, The Constitution of No Authority. (1870)
"In matters of conscience, the law of majority has no place."
-Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi-
(1869-1948)
"Politics, n. Strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles."
-Ambrose Bierce-
(1842-1914) Humorist
"Get all the fools on your side and you can be elected to anything."
-Frank Dane-
"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/
"Constitutional rights may not be infringed simply because the majority of the people choose that they be."
-Supreme Court of the United States-
Source: Westbrook v. Mihaly 2 Cal. 3d 756
"Molon labe." (Come and take them)
-Greek King Leonidas-
to Persian King Xerxes at the Battle of Thermopylae (480 BCE) in response to the Persian demand that the Greeks lay down their weapons and surrender. Quote was published in Plutarch’s Apophthegmata Laconica 51.11
"False is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand real advantages for one imaginary or trifling inconvenience; that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it; that has no remedy for evils except destruction. The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes.
Can it be supposed that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity, the most important of the code, will respect the less important and arbitrary ones, which can be violated with ease and impunity, and which, if strictly obeyed, would put an end to personal liberty... and subject innocent persons to all the vexations that the guilty alone ought to suffer?
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. They ought to be designated as laws not preventive but fearful of crimes, produced by the tumultuous impression of a few isolated facts, and not by thoughtful consideration of the inconveniences and advantages of a universal decree."
-Cesare Beccaria-
(1735-1794) [Bonesana, Marchese di] Italian nobleman, criminologist, and penal reformer
Source: Dei delitti e delle pene, [On Crimes and Punishments] ch.38 (1764)
Translation is as quoted by Thomas Jefferson in his _Commonplace Book_, 314 (G. Chinard ed. 1926), which was "the source book and repertory of Jefferson's ideas on government." Id. at 4
"I know the sense of helplessness that people feel. I know the urge to arm yourself because that's what I did. I was trained in firearms. I walked to the hospital when my husband was sick. I carried a concealed weapon and I made the determination if somebody was going to try and take me out, I was going to take them with me."
-Dianne Feinstein-
(1933-) US Senator (D-CA), 38th Mayor of San Francisco (1978-1988)
Source: April 3, 2013, speech for the Commonwealth Club
"In short, is not liberty the freedom of every person to make full use of his faculties, so long as he does not harm other persons while doing so? Is not liberty the destruction of all despotism -- including, of course, legal despotism? Finally, is not liberty the restricting of the law only to its rational sphere of organizing the right of the individual to lawful self- defense; of punishing injustice?"
-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: What Is Liberty? "The Law" by Frederic Bastiat (1848)
"Waiting periods are only a step. Registration is only a step. The prohibition of private firearms is the goal."
-Janet Reno-
US Attorney General
Private firearms rightly disquiet tyrannical government. That's arguably their most important function.
"The supposed quietude of a good man allures the ruffian; while on the other hand, arms like laws, discourage and keep the invader and the plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property. 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 one half the world deprived of the use of them..."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
Source: I Writings of Thomas Paine at 56, 1984
"The people never give up their liberties, but under some delusion."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
Source: Speech at a County Meeting at Bucks
"If the author of the Declaration of Independence were to utter such a sentiment today, the Post Office Department could exclude him from the mail, grand juries could indict him for sedition and criminal syndicalism, legislative committees could seize his private papers ... and United States Senators would be clamoring for his deportation that he ... should be sent back to live with the rest of the terrorists."
-Frank I. Cobb-
(1869-1923) American Journalist
Source: New York World
"Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervour - 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 by furnishing the exorbitant sums demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real."
-General Douglas MacArthur-
(1880-1964) WWII Supreme Allied Commander of the Southwest Pacific, Supreme United Nations Commander
1957
Source: Whan, ed. "A Soldier Speaks: Public Papers and Speeches of General of the Army Douglas MacArthur," (1965); Nation, August 17, 1957
"One of the things that bothers me most is the growing belief in the country that security is more important than freedom.
It ain't."
-Lyn Nofziger-
[Franklyn C. Nofziger] (1924-2006) American journalist, political consultant, author, Press Secretary for President Reagan
"There are all kinds of devices invented for the protection and preservation of countries: defensive barriers, forts, trenches, and the like... But prudent minds have as a natural gift one safeguard which is the common possession of all, and this applies especially to the dealings of democracies. What is this safeguard? Skepticism. This you must preserve. This you must retain. If you can keep this, you need fear no harm."
-Demosthenes-
(384 B.C.-322 B.C.)
Source: Oration
"SOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher. Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one ..."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
Source: Common Sense, February 14, 1776
"All men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot by any compact deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety."
-George Mason-
"And now that the legislators and do-gooders have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: May they reject all systems, and try liberty; for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works."
-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 (1848)
"Once 'our people' get themselves into a position to make policy, they cease being 'our people'."
-M. Stanton Evans-
(1934- ) American journalist, author, educator and political activist
"The law is an adroit mixture of customs that are beneficial to society, and could be followed even if no law existed, and others that are of advantage to a ruling minority, but harmful to the masses of men, and can be enforced on them only by terror."
-Peter Kropotkin-
[Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin] (1842-1921) Russian zoologist, activist, philosopher, economist, writer, scientist, evolutionary theorist, geographer and one of the world's foremost anarcho-communists
Source: Words of a Rebel
"It seems to me very important to continue to distinguish between two evils. It may be necessary temporarily to accept a lesser evil, but one must never label a necessary evil as good."
-Margaret Mead-
Or, for that matter, necessarily "necessary"...
"I would like to call upon America to be more careful with its trust ... and prevent those ... because of short-sightedness and still others out of self-interest, from falsely using the struggle for peace and for social justice to lead you down a false road. Because they are trying to weaken you; they are trying to disarm your strong and magnificent country in the face of this fearful threat. ... I call upon you: ordinary working men of America ... do not let yourselves become weak."
-Alexander Solzhenitsyn-
June 30, 1975
"I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement."
-Calvin Coolidge-
(1873-1933), 30th US President
"Saying it's okay for the government to spy on you because you're innocent and you have 'nothing to hide'... Is like saying it's okay for the government to censor free speech because you have 'nothing to say.'"
-Edward Snowden-
(1983-) IT security specialist, NSA whistleblower
"Who is the fascist? Individualism and the political philosophy of limited government is not only inconsistent with but is the exact opposite of fascism and Nazism. Under fascism and Nazism, the state reigns supreme with absolute power over everyone and all forms of property. It can well be asked: who is the fascist, when the president of the United States and many Democrats and Republicans in congress call for expanded authority for the FBI and other federal security agencies to intrude into the lives of the American citizenry? Who is the fascist, when the call is made for increased power for the FBI to undertake “roving wiretapping” or have easier access to the telephone and credit-card records of the general population? Who is the fascist, when the proposal is made to make it easier for the FBI to investigate and infiltrate any political organization or association because the government views it as a potential terrorist danger?"
-Richard M. Ebeling-
(1950- ) Author, Professor of Economics, Hillsdale College
Source: The Oklahoma Tragedy and the Mass Media, The Tyranny of Gun Control, 83 (Future of Freedom Foundation 1997).
"Nothing whatever but the constitutional law, the political structure, of these United States protects any American from arbitrary seizure of his property and his person, from the Gestapo and the Storm Troops, from the concentration camp, the torture chamber, the revolver at the back of his neck in a cellar."
-Rose Lane-
[Rose Wilder Lane] (1886-1968) American journalist, travel writer, novelist, and political theorist
"Nothing is so galling to a people not broken in from 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-
(1800-1859) [Lord Macaulay] 1st Baron Macaulay, British historian
Source: "Southey's Colloquies on Society" par. SC.69
"National Socialism is a religion. All we lack is a religious genius capable of uprooting outmoded religious practices and putting new ones in their place. We lack traditions and ritual. One day soon National Socialism will be the religion of all Germans. My Party is my church, and I believe I serve the Lord best if I do his will, and liberate my oppressed people from the fetters of slavery. That is my gospel."
-Joseph Paul Goebbels-
(1897-1945) Nazi Propaganda Minister
Source: Geobbels' diary, 16 October 1928
"Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of,
the lack of evidence."
-Richard Dawkins-
(1941-) British evolutionary biologist, author, and media commentator
"Do we desire to be cradled, and then carried throughout life to our graves by this partisan propelled bureaucratic monstrosity? ... as individuals of sovereign dignity, are we now so terrified, bewildered, and impotent that our main purpose is to seek asylum from the potential hazards of freedom? Have we no faith in our natural strengths and abilities?"
-Sergei Hoff-
former Montana Deputy Sheriff
Source: 'Our Fears and Denials Will Enslave Us' by Sergei Hoff, October 23, 2004
"We think ourselves possessed, or, at least, we boast that we are so, of liberty of conscience on all subjects, and of the right of free inquiry and private judgment in all cases, and yet how far are we from these exalted privileges in fact! There exists, I believe, throughout the whole Christian world, a law which makes it blasphemy to deny or doubt the divine inspiration of all the books of the Old and New Testaments, from Genesis to Revelations. In most countries of Europe it is punished by fire at the stake, or the rack, or the wheel. In England itself it is punished by boring through the tongue with a red-hot poker. In America it is not better; even in our own Massachusetts, which I believe, upon the whole, is as temperate and moderate in religious zeal as most of the States, a law was made in the latter end of the last century, repealing the cruel punishments of the former laws, but substituting fine and imprisonment upon all those blasphemers upon any book of the Old Testament or New. Now, what free inquiry, when a writer must surely encounter the risk of fine or imprisonment for adducing any argument for investigating into the divine authority of those books? Who would run the risk of translating Dupuis? But I cannot enlarge upon this subject, though I have it much at heart. I think such laws a great embarrassment, great obstructions to the improvement of the human mind. Books that cannot bear examination, certainly ought not to be established as divine inspiration by penal laws. It is true, few persons appear desirous to put such laws in execution, and it is also true that some few persons are hardy enough to venture to depart from them. But as long as they continue in force as laws, the human mind must make an awkward and clumsy progress in its investigations. I wish they were repealed. The substance and essence of Christianity, as I understand it, is eternal and unchangeable, and will bear examination forever, but it has been mixed with extraneous ingredients, which I think will not bear examination, and they ought to be separated. Adieu."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: one of his last letters to Thomas Jefferson, January 23, 1825
"The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it."
-John Hay-
(1838-1905) American statesman, diplomat, author, journalist, and private secretary and assistant to Abraham Lincoln
Source: Castilian Days, II, 1872
"That distinct sovereignties could exist under one government, emanating from the same people, was a phenomenon in the political world, which the wisest statesmen in Europe could not comprehend; and of its practicability many in our own country entertained the most serious doubts. Thus far the friends of liberty have had great cause of triumph in the success of the principles upon which our government rests. But all must admit that the purity and permanency of this system depend on its faithful administration. The states and the federal government have their respective orbits, within which each must revolve. If either cross the sphere of the other, the harmony of the system is destroyed, and its strength is impaired. It would be as gross usurpation on the part of the federal government, to interfere with state rights, by an exercise of powers not delegated; as it would be for a state to interpose its authority against a law of the union."
-Justice John McLean-
(1785-1861) U.S. Congressman for Ohio (1813-16), U.S. Postmaster General, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1830-61), presidential candidate for the Whig and Republican parties
Source: Craig v. Missouri, 4 Peters 410 (1830) [29 U.S. 410, 464]
"No one can read our Constitution without concluding that the people who wrote it wanted their government severely limited; the words 'no' and 'not' employed in restraint of government power occur 24 times in the first seven articles of the Constitution and 22 more times in the Bill of Rights."
-Rev. Edmund A. Opitz-
(1914-2006) American minister, author
"The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same."
-Stendhal-
[Marie-Henri Beyle] (1783-1842) French writer
"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-
(1856-1924) 28th US President
Speech, 1912
"There should be a sympathy with freedom, a desire to give it scope, founded not upon visionary ideas, but upon the long experience of many generations within the shores of this happy isle, that in freedom you lay the firmest foundations both of loyalty and order; the firmest foundations for the development of individual character; and the best provision for the happiness of the nation at large."
-William Ewart Gladstone-
"Freedom is not a luxury that we can indulge in when at last we have security and prosperity and enlightenment; it is, rather, antecedent to all of these, for without it we can have neither security nor prosperity nor enlightenment."
-Henry Steele Commager-
(1902-1998) Historian and author
Source: Freedom, Loyalty and Dissent, 1954
"Authority intoxicates,
And makes mere sots of magistrates;
The fumes of it invade the brain,
And make men giddy, proud and vain."
-Samuel Butler-
(1835-1902)
"All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: speech at the Constitutional Convention, July 11, 1787
"The Civil War is not ended: I question whether any serious civil war ever does end."
-T. S. Eliot-
"The War between the States... produced the foundation for the kind of government we have today: consolidated and absolute, based on the unrestrained will of the majority, with force, threats, and intimidation being the order of the day. Today's federal government is considerably at odds with that envisioned by the framers of the Constitution. ... [The War] also laid to rest the great principle enunciated in the Declaration of Independence that 'Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed'."
-Walter E. Williams-
(1936- ) Columnist, Professor of Economics at George Mason University
"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
-Isaac Asimov-
"These six things doth the LORD hate: yea, seven are an abomination unto him: A proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, An heart that deviseth wicked imaginations, feet that be swift in running to mischief, A false witness that speaketh lies, and he that soweth discord among brethren."
-King Solomon-
Source: The Holy Bible, Proverbs 6:16
"Most of the change we think we see in life Is due to truths being in and out of favor."
-Robert Frost-
(1874-1963) American poet, received four Pulitzer Prizes
Source: "The Black Cottage," North of Boston, 1914
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."
-Blaise Pascal-
(1623- 1662) French mathematician and philosopher
"The war made possible for us the solution of a whole series of problems that could never have been solved in normal times."
-Joseph Paul Goebbels-
(1897-1945) Nazi Propaganda Minister
Source: The Göebbels Diaries, 1942-1943
"The worst thing that can happen to a good cause is not to be skillfully attacked, but to be ineptly defended."
-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)
"The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else. If it had been possible he would have settled the matter otherwise, and without bloodshed. He doesn't boast of his own death or of others'. But he does not repent. He suffers and keeps his mouth shut; if anything, others then exploit him, making him a myth, while he, the man worthy of esteem, was only a poor creature who reacted with dignity and courage in an event bigger than he was."
-Umberto Eco-
"The most common characteristic of all police states is intimidation by surveillance. Citizens know they are being watched and overheard. Their mail is being examined. Their homes can be invaded."
-Vance Packard-
(1914-1996) American journalist, social critic, and author
Source: The People Shapers, 1977
"Why suspend the habeas corpus in insurrections and rebellions? Examine the history of England. See how few of the cases of the suspension of the habeas corpus law have been worthy of that suspension. They have been either real treasons, wherein the parties might as well have been charged at once, or sham plots, where it was shameful they should ever have been suspected. Yet for the few cases wherein the suspension of the habeas corpus has done real good, that operation is now become habitual and the minds of the nation almost prepared to live under its constant suspension."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: letter to James Madison, 1788
"A writ having for its object to bring a party before a court or judge; especially, one to inquire into the cause of a person's imprisonment or detention by another, with the view to protect the right to personal liberty."
Definition of 'habeas corpus'
"The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience."
-Albert Camus-
(1913-1960) French Algerian author
"All propaganda must be so popular and on such an intellectual level, that even the most stupid of those toward whom it is directed will understand it... Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way around, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise."
-Adolf Hitler
(1889-1945) German Nazi Dictator
1935
Source: Mein Kampf, p. 197. 14th Edition.
"We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans..."
-Bill Clinton-
[William Jefferson Blythe III] (1946- ), 42nd US President
Source: March 1, 1993 during a press conference in Piscataway, NJ. Ref: USA Today, 11 March 1993, page 2A
"Every collectivist revolution rides in on a Trojan horse of 'emergency'. It was the tactic of Lenin, Hitler, and Mussolini. In the collectivist sweep over a dozen minor countries of Europe, it was the cry of men striving to get on horseback. And 'emergency' became the justification of the subsequent steps. This technique of creating emergency is the greatest achievement that demagoguery attains."
-Herbert Hoover-
(1874-1964), 31st US President
"The concept of military necessity is seductively broad, and has a dangerous plasticity. Because they invariably have the visage of overriding importance, there is always a temptation to invoke security "necessities" to justify an encroachment upon civil liberties. For that reason, the military-security argument must be approached with a healthy skepticism."
-Justice William J. Brennan-
(1906-1997) U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Brown v. Glines, 444 US 348 (1980)
"The inherent right in the people to reform their government, I do not deny; and they have another right, and that is to resist unconstitutional laws without overturning the government."
-Daniel Webster-
(1782-1852) US Senator
"If you want a Big Brother, you get all that comes with it."
-Erich Fromm-
(1900-1980)
Source: Escape from Freedom
"To oppose corruption in government is the highest obligation of patriotism."
-G. Edward Griffin
Historian, Author
Source: his book, The Freedom Manifesto, 2001
"Government is like fire. If it is kept within bounds and under the control of the people, it contributes to the welfare of all. But if it gets out of place, if it gets too big and out of control, it destroys the happiness and even the lives of the people."
-Harold E. Stassen-
(1907-2001) 25th Governor of Minnesota - R
"...The Bill of Rights is a literal and absolute document. The First Amendment doesn't say you have a right to speak out unless the government has a 'compelling interest' in censoring the Internet. The Second Amendment doesn't say you have the right to keep and bear arms until some madman plants a bomb. The Fourth Amendment doesn't say you have the right to be secure from search and seizure unless some FBI agent thinks you fit the profile of a terrorist. The government has no right to interfere with any of these freedoms under any circumstances."
-Harry Browne-
(1933-2006) American libertarian writer, politician, and free-market investment analyst. Libertarian candidate for US President 1996 & 2000
1966
"For you see, the world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes."
-Benjamin Disraeli-
(1804-1881) Prime Minister of England, British statesman, novelist
Source: his novel 'Coningsby, the New Generation', 1844
"The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it."
-Dr. Joseph Mengele-
(1911- 979) Nazi German SS officer and a physician in the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, known for performing grisly human experiments on camp inmates, including children, for which Mengele was called the "Angel of Death" (German: Todesengel)
"Any formal attack on ignorance is bound to fail because the masses are always ready to defend their most precious possession -- their ignorance.
-Hendrik van Loon-
(1882-1944) Dutch-American historian and journalist
Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: letter to Thomas Jefferson, May 13, 1798; reproduced in Jack N. Rakove (Ed.), James Madison: Writings (1999), p. 588.
"Nothing is as terrible to see as ignorance in action."
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe-
(1749-1832)
Source: engraved on a plaque at the Naval War College
"The entire American political system is a con, a sleazy mix of legalized bribes, auctioning off of favors, revolving doors between government agencies and the corporations they enrich and the blatant hypocrisy of snake-oil salespeople who know the marks (voters) face a false choice between two parties that are the same poison sold under different labels."
-Charles Hugh Smith-
American writer
Source: If Your BS Detector Isn't Shrieking, It's Broken, June 08, 2015
"Liberalism is a moral manipulation that exaggerates inequity and unfairness in American life in order to justify overreaching public policies and programs. Liberalism undermines the spirit of self-help and individual responsibility. For liberals in academia, the fact that black college students earn lower grades and have a higher dropout rate than any group besides reservation Indians means that blacks remain stymied and victimized by white racism. Thus, their push for affirmative action and other race-based programs is to assuage their guilt and shame for America’s past by having people around with black skin color. The heck with the human being inside that skin."
-Walter E. Williams-
(1936- ) Columnist, Professor of Economics at George Mason University
Source: 'Shame,' 2015 Creators.com
"Man, no doubt, owes many other moral duties to his fellow men; such as to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, care for the sick, protect the defenceless, assist the weak, and enlighten the ignorant. But these are simply moral duties, of which each man must be his own judge, in each particular case, as to whether, and how, and how far, he can, or will, perform them. But of his legal duty — that is, of his duty to live honestly towards his fellow men — his fellow men not only may judge, but, for their own protection, must judge. And, if need be, they may rightfully compel him to perform it. They may do this, acting singly, or in concert. They may do it on the instant, as the necessity arises, or deliberately and systematically, if they prefer
to do so, and the exigency will admit of it."
-Lysander Spooner-
"Once you begin to take yourself seriously as a leader or as a follower, as a modern or as a conservative, then you become a self- conscious, biting, and scratching little animal whose work is not of the slightest value or importance to anybody."
-Virginia Woolf-
"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
"We have on the one hand a desperate need; hunger, sickness, and the dread of war. We have, on the other, the conception of something that might meet it: omnicompetent global technocracy. Are not these the ideal opportunity for enslavement? This is how it has entered before; a desperate need (real or apparent) in the one party, a power (real or apparent) to relieve it, in the other."
-C. S. Lewis-
(1898-1963), British novelist
Source: Willing Slaves of the Welfare State, first published in The Observer on July 20, 1958
"Laws do not persuade just because they threaten."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist
A.D. 65
"Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burned women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears."
-Justice Louis D. Brandeis-
(1856-1941) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: Whitney v. California, 1927
"Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear."
-Harry S. Truman-
(1884-1972), 33rd US President
Source: message to Congress, August 8, 1950
"Terrorism is the war of the poor. War is the terrorism of the rich."
-Leon Uris-
(1924-2003) American novelist
Source: _Trinity, a Novel of Ireland_, 1976
"Socialism is the idea that violent force is an appropriate response to peaceful, voluntary exchange."
-Frank Fleming-
Source: Twitter Oct 13, 205
"You know, if government were a product, selling it would be illegal. Government is a health hazard. Governments have killed many more people than cigarettes or unbuckled seat belts ever have."
-P. J. O'Rourke-
(1947- ) US humorist, journalist, & political commentator
Source: "The Liberty Manifesto"
"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) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
Source: Common Sense, 1776
"Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others."
-Edward Abbey-
"We must scrupulously guard the civil rights and civil liberties of all our citizens, whatever their background. We must remember that any oppression, any injustice, any hatred, is a wedge designed to attack our civilization."
-Franklin D. Roosevelt-
"Hundreds of thousands of rouble notes are being issued daily by our treasury. This is done, not in order to fill the coffers of the State with practically worthless paper, but with the deliberate intention of destroying the value of money as a means of payment. ...
Experience has taught us it is impossible to root out the evils of capitalism merely by confiscation and expropriation… The simplest way to exterminate the very spirit of capitalism is therefore to flood the country with notes of a high face-value without financial guarantees of any sort. ... [T]he great illusion of the value and power of money, on which the capitalist state is based will have been definitely destroyed."
-Vladimir Ilyich Lenin-
[Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov] (1870 - 1924), First Leader of the Soviet Union
Source: an interview with Lenin published in the Daily Chronicle and the New York Times on April 23, 1919
"I believe we are on an irreversible trend towards more freedom and democracy, but that could change."
-Dan Quayle-
"We are so concerned to flatter the majority that we lose sight of how very often it is necessary, in order to preserve freedom for the minority, let alone for the individual, to face that majority down."
-William F. Buckley, Jr.-
(1925-2008) American author and journalist, founded 'National Review'
Source: The Jeweler’s Eye, 1968
"The fact is that there is a serious danger of this country becoming a pluto-democracy; that is, a sham republic with the real government in the hands of a small clique of enormously wealthy men, who speak through their money, and whose influence, even today, radiates to every corner of the United States."
-William Gibbs McAdoo-
(1863-1941) US Senator (D-CA), Secretary of Treasury, President Wilson's national campaign vice-chairman
Source: in Crowded Years (1974)
"The legislative department is everywhere extending the sphere of its activity and drawing all power into its impetuous vortex."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Federalist No. 48, February 1, 1788
"Government spending on business only aggravates the problem. Too many business have successfully lobbied for special favors and treatment by seeking mandates for their products, subsidies (in the form of cash payments from the government), and regulations and tariffs to keep more efficient competitors at bay. Crony capitalism is much easier than competing in an open market. But it erodes our overall standard of living and stifles entrepreneurs by rewarding the politically favored rather than those who provide what consumers want."
-Charles Koch-
(1935-) American businessman and philanthropist
Source: Koch, Charles (March 1, 2011). "Why Koch Industries Is Speaking Out". The Wall Street Journal.
"It is apparent from the whole context of the Constitution as well as the history of the times which gave birth to it, that it was the purpose of the Convention to establish a currency consisting of the precious metals. These were adopted by a permanent rule excluding the use of a perishable medium of exchange, such as certain agricultural commodities recognized by the statutes of some States as tender for debts, or the still more pernicious expedient of paper currency."
-Andrew Jackson-
(1767-1845) 7th US President
Source: 8th Annual Message to Congress, December 5, 1836.
"Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a law breaker, it breeds contempt for the law."
-Justice Louis D. Brandeis-
(1856-1941) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: Olmstead v. U.S., 277 US 438, 1928
"The system of banking we have both equally and ever reprobated. I contemplate it as a blot left in all our constitutions, which, if not covered, will end in their destruction, which is already hit by the gamblers in corruption, and is sweeping away in its progress the fortunes and morals of our citizens. Funding I consider as limited, rightfully, to a redemption of the debt within the lives of a majority of the generation contracting it; every generation coming equally, by the laws of the Creator of the world, to the free possession of the earth he made for their subsistence, unincumbered by their predecessors, who, like them, were but tenants for life."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: The Works of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 11 (Correspondence and Papers 1808-1816) > TO JOHN TAYLOR > paragraph 790
"History will also give Occasion to expatiate on the Advantage of Civil Orders and Constitutions, how Men and their Properties are protected by joining in Societies and establishing Government; their Industry encouraged and rewarded, Arts invented, and Life made more comfortable: The Advantages of Liberty, Mischiefs of Licentiousness, Benefits arising from good Laws and a due Execution of Justice, &c. Thus may the first Principles of sound Politicks be fix'd in the Minds of Youth."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
Source: Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania, 1749
"Instead of fostering a system that enables people to help themselves, America is now saddled with a system that destroys value, raises costs, hinders innovation and relegates millions of citizens to a life of poverty, dependency and hopelessness. This is what happens when elected officials believe that people’s lives are better run by politicians and regulators than by the people themselves. Those in power fail to see that more government means less liberty, and liberty is the essence of what it means to be American. Love of liberty is the American ideal."
-Charles Koch-
(1935-) American businessman and philanthropist
Source: Koch, Charles (April 3, 2014). 'Instead of welcoming free debate, collectivists engage in character assassination.' "Charles Koch: I'm Fighting to Restore a Free Society". The Wall Street Journal.
"Everything is destroyed by its own particular vice:
the destructive power resides within.
Rust destroys iron, moths destroy clothes,
the worm eats away the wood;
but greatest of all evils is envy,
impious habitant of corrupt souls,
which ever was, is, and shall be a consuming disease."
-Menander-
(342 BC-292 BC)
"Besides, to lay and collect internal taxes in this extensive country must require a great number of congressional ordinances, immediately operation upon the body of the people; these must continually interfere with the state laws and thereby produce disorder and general dissatisfaction till the one system of laws or the other, operating upon the same subjects, shall be abolished."
-Federal Farmer-
Anonymous writer who wrote a methodical assessment of the proposed United States Constitution
Source: Antifederalist Letter, October 10, 1787
"When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that an old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had only one before."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics."
-Thomas Sowell-
"Government ought not to be invested with power to control the affections, any more than the consciences of citizens. A man has at least as good a right to choose his wife, as he has to choose his religion. His taste may not suit his neighbors; but so long as his deportment is correct, they have no right to interfere with his concerns."
-Lydia Maria Child-
"The priceless heritage of our society is the unrestricted constitutional right of each member to think as he will. Thought control is a copyright of totalitarianism, and we have no claim to it. It is not the function of the government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error. We could justify any censorship only when the censors are better shielded against error than the censored."
-Robert H. Jackson-
"Now those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth, and let me remind you they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyranny."
-Barry Goldwater
(1909-1998) US Senator (R-Arizona)
Source: Senator Goldwater's Acceptance Speech at the Republican National Convention, 1964
"Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies. Absolute power does corrupt, and those who seek it must be suspect and must be opposed."
-Barry Goldwater-
"What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it his heaven."
-Friedrich Hoelderlin-
[Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin ] (1770-1843) German poet
"The threat of people acting in their own enlightened and rational self-interest strikes bureaucrats, politicians and social workers as ominous and dangerous."
-W. G. Hill-
"The great non sequitur committed by defenders of the State, including classical Aristotelian and Thomist philosophers, is to leap from the necessity of society to the necessity of the State."
-Murray N. Rothbard-
(1926-1995) Dean of the Austrian School of Economics
"Life is too short to pursue every human act to its most remote consequences; "for want of a nail, a kingdom was lost" is a commentary on fate, not the statement of a major cause of action against a blacksmith."
-Antonin Scalia-
"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 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
"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
"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)
"... when the struggle seems to be drifting definitely towards a world social democracy, there may still be very great delays and disappointments before it becomes an efficient and beneficent world system. Countless people ... will hate the new world order ... and will die protesting against it. When we attempt to evaluate its promise, we have to bear in mind the distress of a generation or so of malcontents, many of them quite gallant and graceful-looking people."
-H. G. Wells-
(1866-1946)
Source: in his book entitled "The New World Order" (1939)
"Here is the Golden Rule of sound citizenship, the first and greatest lesson in the study of politics: You get the same order of criminality from any State to which you give power to exercise it; and whatever power you give the State to do things FOR you carries with it the equivalent power to do things TO you."
-Albert Jay Nock-
(1870-1945)
Source: The Criminality of the State, America Mercury Magazine, March, 1939
"You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
You cannot help small men by tearing down big men.
You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
You cannot lift the wage-earner by pulling down the wage-payer.
You cannot help the poor man by destroying the rich.
You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income.
You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.
You cannot establish security on borrowed money.
You cannot build character and courage by taking away men's initiative and independence.
You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves."
-William Boetcker-
(1873-1962) German-born Presbyterian clergyman
Source: "The Ten Cannots" (1916)
often falsely attributed to Abraham Lincoln:
"All forms of tampering with human beings, getting at them, shaping them against their will to your own pattern, all thought control and conditioning is, therefore, a denial of that in men which makes them men and their values ultimate."
-Isaiah Berlin-
(1909-1997)
Source: Two Concepts of Liberty, 1958
"Nature has two voices, the one high, the other low; one is in sweet accord with reason and justice, and the other apparently at war with both. The more men know of the essential nature of things, and of the true relation of mankind, the freer they are from prejudice of every kind. The child is afraid of the giant form of his own shadow. This is natural, but he will part with his fears when he is older and wiser. So ignorance is full of prejudice, but it will disappear with enlightenment."
-Frederick Douglass-
"The bosom of America is open to receive not only the Opulent and respectable Stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all Nations And Religions; whom we shall wellcome to a participation of all our rights and previleges, if by decency and propriety of conduct they appear to merit the enjoyment."
-George Washington-
"Whoever claims the right to redistribute the wealth produced by others is claiming the right to treat human beings as chattel."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
"The more one considers the matter, the clearer it becomes that redistribution is in effect far less a redistribution of free income from the richer to the poorer, as we imagined, than a redistribution of power from the individual to the State."
-Bertrand de Jouvenel-
(1903-1987)
Source: The Ethics of Redistribution [1952] (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1990), p. 72.
"The United States was made by men of all races and colors, not for white men, but for the refuge and defense of man. If it does not rest upon the natural rights of man, it rests nowhere. If it does not exist by the consent of governed then any exclusion is possible, and it is a shorter step from an exclusive white man's government to an exclusively rich white man's government, than it is from a system for mankind to one for white men. The spirit which excludes some men today because they are of a certain color, may exclude others tomorrow because they are of a certain poverty or a certain church or a certain birthplace. There is no safety, no guarantee, no security in a prejudice. If we build strong and long, we must build upon moral principle."
-George William Curtis-
"The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation."
-Vladimir Ilyich Lenin-
[Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov] (1870 - 1924), First Leader of the Soviet Union
Source: Attributed, no source found among Lenin's writings
"We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are determined to destroy this system under all conditions."
-Adolf Hitler-
(1889-1945) German Nazi Dictator
Source: Hitler's speech on May 1, 1927. Cited in: Toland, John (1992). Adolf Hitler. Anchor Books. pp. 224-225. ISBN 0385037244
"The notion that the church, the press, and the universities should serve the state is essentially a Communist notion. In a free society these institutions must be wholly free -- which is to say that their function is to serve as checks upon the state."
-Alan Barth-
(1906-1979) served on the editorial board of The Washington Post for thirty years
Source: The Loyalty of Free Men, 1951
"Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity. … In the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches and the media by transforming the consciousness of society."
-Antonio Gramsci-
(1891-1937) Italian Marxist theoretician and politician, “class warrior”
Source: 1915
"The fact is that up to now a free society has not been good for the intellectual. It has neither accorded him a superior status to sustain his confidence nor made it easy for him to acquire an unquestioned sense of social usefulness. For he derives his sense of usefulness mainly from directing, instructing, and planning -- from minding other people's business -- and is bound to feel superfluous and neglected where people believe themselves competent to manage individual and communal affairs, and are impatient of supervision and regulation. A free society is as much a threat to the intellectual's sense of worth as an automated economy is to the workingman's sense of worth. Any social order that can function with a minimum of leadership will be anathema to the intellectual."
-Eric Hoffer-
(1902-1983) American author, philosopher, awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
"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
"Fascism recognises the real needs which gave rise to socialism and trade-unionism, giving them due weight in the guild or corporative system in which diverent interests are coordinated and harmonised in the unity of the State."
-Benito Mussolini-
(1883-1945), Italian dictator during WW2
Source: Benito Mussolini, 1935, The Doctrine of Fascism, Firenze: Vallecchi Editore, (p.15)
"The physical capacity to coerce others can never generate a moral obligation to obey the dictates of [government] power."
-George H. Smith-
Source: The System of Liberty (2013), p. 147.
"Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed."
-Josef Stalin-
(1879-1953) Communist leader of the USSR
"We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, and scorn toward those who disagree with us."
-Vladimir Ilyich Lenin-
[Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov] (1870 - 1924), First Leader of the Soviet Union
"As we all learned from the sorry experience of state-sanctioned bureaucracies in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, decentralization [in education] is crucial to both freedom and excellence."
-Jerry Brown
[Edmund Gerald Brown, Jr.] (1938- ) US politician, Attorney General and former governor of California, former Mayor of Oakland, CA, former chair of the California Democratic Party
"How far should one accept the rules of the society in which one lives? To put it another way: at what point does conformity become corruption? Only by answering such questions does the conscience truly define itself."
-Kenneth Tynan-
"And here we encounter the seeds of government disaster and collapse -- the kind that wrecked ancient Rome and every other civilization that allowed a sociopolitical monster called the welfare state to exist."
-Barry Goldwater-
(1909-1998) US Senator (R-Arizona)
"If you suppose that good intentions justify intruding on the lives and properties of your fellow citizens: Do you appreciate being the target of somebody else's good intentions, or haven't you had that particular dubious pleasure yet?"
-Cat Farmer-
"What protection teaches us, is to do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war."
-Henry George-
1886
"The fundamental source of all your errors, sophisms and false reasonings is a total ignorance of the natural rights of mankind. Were you once to become acquainted with these, you could never entertain a thought, that all men are not, by nature, entitled to a parity of privileges. You would be convinced, that natural liberty is a gift of the beneficent Creator to the whole human race, and that civil liberty is founded in that; and cannot be wrested from any people, without the most manifest violation of justice."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804)
Source: The Farmer Refuted, February 23, 1775
"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 need.' 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
"Capital must protect itself in every way ...Debts must be collected and loans and mortgages foreclosed as soon as possible. When through a process of law the common people have lost their homes, they will be more tractable and more easily governed by the STRONG ARM OF THE LAW (police) applied by the central power of leading financiers. People without homes will not quarrel with their leaders. This is well known among our principle men now engaged in forming an imperialism of capitalism to govern the world. By dividing the people we can get them to expend their energies in fighting over questions of no importance to us except as TEACHERS OF THE COMMON HERD."
-Civil Servants' Year Book-
January 1934
Source: Civil Servants' Year Book, "The Organizer"
"Marx's Kapital is not a treatise on socialism; it is a gerrymand against the bourgeoisie. It was supposed to be written for the working class, but the working man respects the bourgeoisie and wants to be a bourgeoisie. Marx never got a hold of him for a moment. It was the revolting sons of the bourgeoisie itself, like myself, that painted the flag red. The middle and upper classes are the revolutionary element in society. The proletariat is the conservative element."
-George Bernard Shaw-
(1856-1950) Irish comic dramatist
Source: 'Who I Am and What I Think' (1901)
"Unfortunately, the fundamental concepts of dignity, respect, equality before the law and personal freedom are under attack by the nation’s own government. That’s why, if we want to restore a free society and create greater well-being and opportunity for all Americans, we have no choice but to fight for those principles."
-Charles Koch-
(1935-) American businessman and philanthropist
Source: Koch, Charles (April 3, 2014). 'Instead of welcoming free debate, collectivists engage in character assassination.' "Charles Koch: I'm Fighting to Restore a Free Society". The Wall Street Journal.
"If the question relates to any point of public liberty, or if it be one of those in which the judges may be suspected of bias, the jury undertake to decide both law and fact. If they be mistaken, a decision against right, which is casual only, is less dangerous to the State, and less afflicting to the loser, than one which makes part of a regular and uniform system."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"Many now believe that with the rise of the totalitarian State the world has entered upon a new era of barbarism. It has not. The totalitarian State is only the State; the kind of thing it does is only what the State has always done with unfailing regularity, if it had the power to do it, wherever and whenever its own aggrandizement made that kind of thing expedient. Give any State like power hereafter, and put it in like circumstances, and it will do precisely the same kind of thing. The State will unfailingly aggrandize itself, if only it has the power, first at the expense of its own citizens, and then at the expense of anyone else in sight. It has always done so, and always will."
-Albert Jay Nock-
(1870-1945)
Source: The Criminality of the State, America Mercury Magazine, March, 1939
"Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived in their relation to the State."
-Benito Mussolini-
(1883-1945), Italian dictator during WW2
Source: New York Times, 11 January 1935
"Society is composed of men, and every man is a FREE agent. Since man is free, he can choose; since he can choose, he can err; since he can err, he can suffer. I go further: He must err and he must suffer; for his starting point is ignorance, and in his ignorance he sees before him an infinite number of unknown roads, all of which save one lead to error."
-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: Harmonies, XXX
"Government, in my humble opinion, should be formed to secure and to enlarge the exercise of the natural rights of its members; and every government, which has not this in view, as its principal object, is not a government of the legitimate kind."
-James Wilson-
(1742-1798) Member of Continental Congress, signed Declaration of Independence; U.S. Supreme Court Justice and delegate from Pennsylvania
Source: Lectures on Law, 1791
“If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. Were an opinion a personal possession of no value except to the owner; if to be obstructed in the enjoyment of it were simply a private injury, it would make some difference whether the injury was inflicted only on a few persons or on many. But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”
-John Stuart Mill-
“Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion”
"Here I close my opinion. I could not say less in view of questions of such gravity that go down to the very foundations of the government. If the provisions of the Constitution can be set aside by an Act of Congress, where is the course of usurpation to end? The present assault upon capital is but the beginning. It will be but the stepping-stone to others, larger and more sweeping, till our political contests will become a war of the poor against the rich; a war growing in intensity and bitterness."
-Justice Stephen J. Field-
(1816-1899) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: United States Supreme Court opinion, Pollock v. Farmers Loan & Trust Co. (1898)
"The framers of the constitution knew human nature as well as we do. They too had lived in dangerous days; they too knew the suffocating influence of orthodoxy and standardized thought. They weighed the compulsions for restrained speech and thought against the abuses of liberty. They chose liberty."
-Justice William O. Douglas-
(1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Beauharnais v.Illinois, 342 U.S. 250, 287 (1952)
"Bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: First Inaugural Address, 4 March 1801
"You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it."
-Dr. Adrian Rogers-
(1931-2005) American pastor
"I started out by viewing the marketplace as a cruel place, where you need intervention by government and lawyers to protect people. But after watching the regulators work, I have come to believe that markets are magical and the best protectors of the consumer. It is my job to explain the beauties of the free market."
-John Stossel-
(1947-) American consumer reporter, investigative journalist, author and columnist
Source: interview in The Oregonian.
"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-
(1819-1892)
Source: Notes Left Over, 1881
"Wealth comes from successful individual efforts to please one’s fellow man ... that’s what competition is all about: “out pleasing” your competitors to win over the consumers."
-Walter E. Williams-
(1936- ) Columnist, Professor of Economics at George Mason University
Source: All It Takes is Guts
"[E]conomic liberty and creative entrepreneurship are the basis of any solution to today’s social and economic difficulties. Blaming business, setting wages, and attempting to run the economy by decree from Washington only exacerbates the problems. Consider the minimum wage. It seems so simple: Tell business to pay its workers more. But a hike in the minimum wage is essentially a tax, punishing precisely those companies that hire workers with the least skills."
-Doug Bandow-
(1954- ) columnist, author, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute
Source: Big business is not to blame, THE WASHINGTON TIMES, October 13, 1995.
"Those who see their lives as spoiled and wasted crave equality and fraternity more than they do freedom. If they clamor for freedom, it is but freedom to establish equality and uniformity. The passion for equality is partly a passion for anonymity: to be one thread of the many which make up a tunic; one thread not distinguishable from the others. No one can then point us out, measure us against others and expose our inferiority."
-Eric Hoffer-
(1902-1983) American author, philosopher, awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
"The system of private property is the most important guaranty of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not."
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
"We must not overlook the role that extremists play. They are the gadflies that keep society from being too complacent."
-Abraham Flexner-
(1866-1959)
Source: Universities, 1930
"It is the highest impertinence and presumption, therefore, in kings and ministers, to pretend to watch over the economy of private people, and to restrain their expence, either by sumptuary laws, or by prohibiting the importation of foreign luxuries. They are themselves always, and without any exception, the greatest spendthrifts in the society. Let them look well after their own expence, and they may safely trust private people with theirs. If their own extravagance does not ruin the state, that of their subjects never will."
-Adam Smith-
(1723-1790) Scottish philosopher and economist
1776
Source: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations par. II.3.36
"Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer."
-Ludwig von Mises-
(1881-1973) Economist and social philosopher
"[The Income Tax is] a vicious, inequitable, unpopular, impolitic and socialist act."
-New York Times-
1894
"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
"Only the rare taxpayer would be likely to know that he could refuse to produce his records to IRS agents... Who would believe the ironic truth that the cooperative taxpayer fares much worse than the individual who relies upon his constitutional rights."
-Judge Walter Joseph Cummings Jr.-
(1916-1999) U.S. Federal Judge, United States Solicitor General
Source: in US. v. Dickerson (7th Circuit 1969)
"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
"[T]he burden of government is not measured by how much it taxes, but by how much it spends."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
"I wanted the American eagle to go screaming into the Pacific... Why not spread its wings over the Philippines, I asked myself?...
I said to myself, Here are a people who have suffered for three centuries. We can make them as free as ourselves, give them a government and country of their own, put a miniature of the American Constitution afloat in the Pacific, start a brand new republic to take its place among the free nations of the world. It seemed to me a great task to which we had addressed ourselves.
But I have thought some more, since then, and I have read carefully the treaty of Paris, and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem. It should, it seems to me, be our pleasure and duty to make those people free, and let them deal with their own domestic questions in their own way.
And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land."
–Mark Twain-
published in the New York Herald, October 15, 1900
"Taxes on capital, taxes on labor, inflation, bureaucratic regulation, minimum wage laws, are all - to different degrees - unnecessary slices of the wedge that stand between an individual's effort and reward for that effort."
-Jack Kemp-
(1935-2009) American politician, collegiate and professional footballplayer
"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).
"[T]he tax code has been piling up, year after year, a symbol of everything gone wrong in America, of arrogant rulers and lost freedom, just waiting for us to pick the whole thing up and heave it away. It has to happen. Free people can put up with such laws only for so long."
-Richard Armey-
(1940- ) U.S. Congressman (R-TX) (1985–2003), House Majority Leader (1995–2003).
"Congress has doubled the IRS budget over the past 10 years -- making that agency one of the fastest growing non-entitlement programs. It has increased its employment by 20 percent. The IRS’s powers to investigate and examine taxpayers transcend those of any other law enforcement agency. Virtually all of the constitutional rights regarding search and seizure, due process, and jury trial simply do not apply to the IRS."
-Daniel Pilla-
Founder and director of the Tax Freedom Institute
"However accurate or inaccurate the agency’s numbers may be, tax law explicitly presumes that the IRS is always right -- and implicitly presumes that the taxpayer is always wrong -- in any dispute with the government. In many cases, the IRS introduces no evidence whatsoever of its charges; it merely asserts that a taxpayer had a certain amount of unreported income and therefore owes a proportionate amount in taxes, plus interest and penalties."
-James Bovard-
(1956- ) American author, lecturer
Source: The IRS vs. You, American Spectator, P. 42, November 1995
"Today’s political leaders demonstrate their low opinion of the public with every social law they pass. They believe that, if given the right to chose, the citizenry will probably make the wrong choice. Legislators do not think any more in terms of persuading people; they feel the need to force their agenda on the public at the point of a bayonet and the barrel of a gun, in the name of the IRS, the SEC, the FDA, the DEA, the EPA, or a multitude of other ABCs of government authority."
-Mark Skousen-
(1947-) American economist, investment analyst, newsletter editor, college professor and author
Source: Persuasion versus Force
"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
"Today government touches everything in America and harms almost everything it touches. Federal, state, and local governments together spend 42 out of every 100 dollars we earn. Those who do the taxing and spending have long since ceased to work for the people as a whole. Rather, they work for themselves and for their clients -- the education industry, the welfare culture,
public-employee unions, etc.."
-Malcolm Wallop-
(1933- ) Founder of Frontiers of Freedom, rancher, businessman, former U.S. Army Officer, former US Senator from Wyoming
Source: February 21, 1995 at Hillsdale College’s Shavano Institute for National Leadership seminar “Taking on Big Government: Agenda for the 1990s,” in Dallas, Texas.
"Our U.S. government each year spends roughly 30 percent more money than it takes in. It took 39 Presidents and 200 years to accumulate a debt of $1 trillion dollars. But it has taken only the past 12 years for that debt to triple to more than $5.9 trillion. Interest payments on the deficit alone add up to more than what our government pays for unemployment compensation, veteran's benefits, postal operations, housing, education, and highways combined. Saddled with this tremendous burden, it is impossible for our businesses to invest, harder for families to afford homes and medical care, and difficult for the United States to play its role in matters of national and international economic security."
-James Bilbray-
US Congressman (D-NV)
"Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor. Seizing the results of someone’s labor is equivalent to seizing hours from him and directing him to carry on various activities."
-Robert Nozick-
Harvard Philosopher
"At the start of this nation’s unique experiment with individual sovereignty and limited government, “Taxation without representation is tyranny” was the watchword of the American Revolution. For our Founding Fathers, a level of taxation of only a few cents on a dollar, siphoned off to a faraway and arrogant bureaucracy, was enough to ignite a revolution enough to grab the trusty musket off the wall. Today, in contrast, if we dare to startle the more panicky among us by buying a good rabbit gun, the government’s there at the cash register to check our papers and seize $46 on every $100."
-Ralph Reiland-
Professor of Economics, Robert Morris College
Source: Taxed to Death
"[If Parliament] may take from me one shilling in the pound,
what security have I for the other nineteen?"
-Richard Henry Lee-
(1732-1794) Founding Father
"The question is not what anybody deserves. The question is who is to take on the God-like role of deciding what everybody else deserves. You can talk about 'social justice' all you want. But what death taxes boil down to is letting politicians take money from widows and orphans to pay for goodies that they will hand out to others, in order to buy votes to get re-elected. That is not social justice or any other kind of justice."
-Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
"No government has ever commanded the resources at the disposal of our ungodly Leviathan, which consumes about 25 percent of the product of the world’s richest country. It is driven by a voracious alliance of government’s own employees, and those who receive benefits from the state. At least 90 million Americans either depend directly on government handouts or jobs, and each private worker must support not only himself and his family, but also carry a government worker on his shoulders."
-Tom Bethel-
Source: Freedom and Its Enemies, American Spectator, June, 1999 P. 19
"Power always corrupts, and the power of government to tell people how to live their lives or to transfer money from those who earn it to others is always a temptation to corruption. Taxes and regulations reduce people’s incentive to produce wealth, and government transfer programs reduce people’s incentive to work, to save, and to help family and friends in case of sickness, disability, or retirement. ...[I]t is nonetheless clear that government enterprises are less efficient, less innovative, and more wasteful than private firms.... [C]ompare what it’s like to call American Express versus the IRS to correct problems. Or compare a private apartment building with public housing."
-David Boaz-
(1953-) Author, executive vice president of the Cato Institute
Source: LIBERTARIANISM, A PRIMER, p. 13 (The Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster, 1997)
"The blame for [the national debt] lies with the Congress and the President, with Democrats and Republicans alike, most all of whom have been unwilling to make the hard choices or to explain to the American people that there is no such thing as a free lunch."
-Warren Rudman-
(1930- ) US Senator (R-NH)
... Warren Rudman, who had no problem, even long after his Senate tenure, continuing to prosecute the obscenely expensive, in blood and treasure, "War on People Who Use (Some) Drugs"™
"There ain't no ticks like poly-ticks. Bloodsuckers all."
-Davy Crockett-
(1786-1836) American hunter, frontiersman, soldier and politician
"Those who take the most from the table, teach contentment. Those for whom the taxes are destined, demand sacrifice. Those who eat their fill, speak to the hungry, of wonderful times to come. Those who lead the country into the abyss, call ruling difficult, for ordinary folk."
-Bertolt Brecht-
(1898-1956) German dramatist, stage director, and poet
"National Health? Socialized pension funds? State-controlled television? Search and seizure laws? Forfeiture laws? If we're not living in the Soviet Union of the United States, we certainly have returned to 1776 and 'taxation without representation.' "
-Michael Moriarty-
(1941) American-Canadian stage and screen actor, jazz musician
"No Gulag, evidently, can deter the advocates of state power from believing in their own virtue and in the morality of the power they exercise. We are all Hobbesians now. Virtue is presumed to reside in the state. Its reliance on compulsion is seen as fulfilling, not undermining, morality. Our communicators, oddly employed in the private sector, work tirelessly to ensure that state control is maintained, our taxes stay high, the official message is promoted. The people know, and can only know, a tiny fraction of what Leviathan does, and what they know is what these partisans tell them."
-Tom Bethel-
Source: Freedom and Its Enemies, AMERICAN SPECTATOR, June, 1999 p. 19
"Governments last as long as the undertaxed can defend themselves against the overtaxed."
-Bernard Berenson-
(1865-1959) American art historian
"We can't constantly explain to our voters that taxpayers have to be on the hook for certain risks, rather than those who make a lot of money taking those risks."
-Angela Merkel-
(1954- ) German Chancellor, first female Chancellor of Germany
"No taxation without representation."
-Jonathan Mayhew-
(1720-1766) Founding Father, clergyman, minister
1765
"Taxation without representation is tyranny."
-James Otis-
(1725-1783)
Source: Watchword (coined 1761?) of the American Revolution. See Samuel Eliot Morison, 'James Otis', Dict. Am. Biog., xiv.102
"Our federal government, which was intended to operate as a very limited constitutional republic, has instead become a virtually socialist leviathan that redistributes trillions of dollars. We can hardly be surprised when countless special interests fight for the money. The only true solution to the campaign money problem is a return to a proper constitutional government that does not control the economy. Big government and big campaign money go hand-in-hand."
-Dr. Ron Paul-
(1935-) American physician, US Congressman (R-TX), US Presidential candidate
Source: Why Is There So Much Money in Politics?, February 4, 2002
"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
"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-
(1897-1969) American historian, journalist, author
"No matter what anyone may say about making the rich and the corporations pay taxes, in the end they come out of the people who toil."
-Calvin Coolidge-
(1873-1933), 30th US President
"For liberalism, the individual is the end, and society the means. For fascism, society is the end, individuals the means, and its whole life consists in using individuals as instruments for its social ends."
-Alfredo Rocco-
(1875-1925)
Source: The Political Doctrine of Fascism
"We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men — not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular. This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy's methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities. As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home."
-Edward R. Murrow-
"Is there any reason why the American people should be taxed to guarantee the debts of banks, any more than they should be taxed to guarantee the debts of other institutions, including merchants, the industries, and the mills of the country?"
-Senator Carter Glass-
(1858-1946) Newspaper publisher, US Senator (D-VA), author of the Banking Act of 1933, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury under President Woodrow Wilson.
"The Original Sin which brought us to the brink of bankruptcy and dictatorship was the Federal Income Tax Amendment and its illegitimate child, Federal Aid."
-Tom Anderson-
"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-
[François Marie Arouet] (1694-1778)
1764
"And yet we have what purports, or professes, or is claimed, to be a contract -- the Constitution -- made eighty years ago, by men who are now all dead, and who never had any power to bind us, but which (it is claimed) has nevertheless bound three generations of men, consisting of many millions, and which (it is claimed) will be binding upon all the millions that are to come; but which nobody ever signed, sealed, delivered, witnessed, or acknowledged; and which few persons, compared with the whole number that are claimed to be bound by it, have ever read, or even seen, or ever will read, or see."
-Lysander Spooner-
No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority
"The Constitution says: 'We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.' The meaning of this is simply We, the people of the United States, acting freely and voluntarily as individuals, consent and agree that we will cooperate with each other in sustaining such a government as is provided for in this Constitution. The necessity for the consent of 'the people' is implied in this declaration. The whole authority of the Constitution rests upon it. If they did not consent, it was of no validity. Of course it had no validity, except as between those who actually consented. No one's consent could be presumed against him, without his actual consent being given, any more than in the case of any other contract to pay money, or render service. And to make it binding upon any one, his signature, or other positive evidence of consent, was as necessary as in the case of any other-contract. If the instrument meant to say that any of 'the people of the United States' would be bound by it, who did not consent, it was a usurpation and a lie. The most that can be inferred from the form, 'We, the people,' is, that the instrument offered membership to all 'the people of the United States;' leaving it for them to accept or refuse it, at their pleasure."
-Lysander Spooner-
No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority
"A just security to property is not afforded by that government, under which unequal taxes oppress one species of property and reward another species."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Essay on Property, March 29, 1792
"The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing."
-Jean Baptiste Colbert-
(1619-1693), French economist and Minister of Finance under King Louis XIV
"It would be thought a hard government that should tax its people one tenth part."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
"[S]ince 1933 those in control of the Government, realizing that the power to tax is the power to destroy, have appeared before the Committee on Ways and Means with the proposal to tax firearms. While they narrowed it down to machine guns on the ground that it would prevent bandits from using firearms of a certain size, yet the thought was there of getting control of the private firearms of this country. I know that our chairman of the Ways and Means Committee and others on that committee were on the alert, sensed the danger, and accordingly went no further than partial taxation and regulation, but I think every member of the committee saw the purpose and the motive of the proposed tax."
-Daniel A. Reed-
US Congressman (R-NY)
Source: 87 Congressional Record 7103 (1941).
"The reason this country continues its drift toward socialism and big nanny government is because too many people vote in the expectation of getting something for nothing, not because they have a concern for what is good for the country. A better educated electorate might change the reason many persons vote. If children were forced to learn about the Constitution, about how government works, about how this nation came into being, about taxes and about how government forever threatens the cause of liberty perhaps we wouldn't see so many foolish ideas coming out of the mouths of silly old men."
-Lyn Nofziger-
[Franklyn C. Nofziger] (1924-2006) American journalist, political consultant, author, Press Secretary for President Reagan
"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
"There is only one success: to be able to spend your life in your own way, and not to give others absurd maddening claims upon it."
-Christopher Darlington Morley-
(1890-1957)
"A tax supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state."
-Isabel Paterson-
(1886-1961) Canadian-American journalist, author, political philosopher, literary critic
"To take from one because it is thought that his own industry and that of his father's 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 whole profit of the issuance of money has provided the capital of the great banking business as it exists today. Starting with nothing whatever of their own, they have got the whole world into their debt irredeemably, by a trick.
This money comes into existence every time the banks 'lend' and disappears every time the debt is repaid to them. So that if industry tries to repay, the money of the nation disappears. This is what makes prosperity so 'dangerous' as it destroys money just when it is most needed and precipitates a slump.
There is nothing left now for us but to get ever deeper and deeper into debt to the banking system in order to provide the increasing amounts of money the nation requires for its expansion and growth. An honest money system is the only alternative."
-Frederick Soddy-
(1877-1956) British author, professor, Nobel Prize for Chemistry, 1921
Congressman Patman: "How did you get the money to buy those two billion dollars worth of Government securities in 1933?"
Governor Eccles: "Out of the right to issue credit money."
Patman: "And there is nothing behind it, is there, except our Government's credit?"
Eccles: "That is what our money system is. If there were no debts in our money system, there wouldn't be any money."
Congressman Fletcher: "Chairman Eccles, when do you think there is a possibility of returning to a free and open market, instead of this pegged and artificially controlled financial market we now have?"
Governor Eccles: "Never, not in your lifetime or mine."
-Marriner Stoddard Eccles-
(1890-1977) US banker, economist, and Chairman of the Federal Reserve (1934-48)
Source: during hearings of the House Committee on Banking and Currency, September 30, 1941. Members of the Federal Reserve Board call themselves "Governors." Governor Marriner Eccles was Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board at the time of these hearings.
"If Congress has the right under the Constitution to issue paper money, it was given to be used by themselves, not to be delegated to individuals
or corporations."
-Andrew Jackson-
(1767-1845) 7th US President
"When you or I write a check there must be sufficient funds in our account to cover that check, but when the Federal Reserve writes a check, it is creating money."
-Boston Federal Reserve Bank-
Source: in a publication titled "Putting It Simply"
"Some people think the Federal Reserve Banks are US government institutions. They are not... they are private credit monopolies which prey upon the people of the US for the benefit of themselves and their foreign and domestic swindlers, and rich and predatory money lenders. The sack of the United States by the Fed is the greatest crime in history. Every effort has been made by the Fed to conceal its powers, but the truth is the Fed has usurped the government. It controls everything here and it controls all our foreign relations. It makes and breaks governments at will."
-Louis McFadden-
(1876-1936) US Congressman (R-PA) (1915-1935), Chairman of House Banking and Currency Committee. Poisoned in 1936.
Source: June 10, 1932
"Most Americans have no real understanding of the operation of the international money lenders. The accounts of the Federal Reserve System have never been audited. It operates outside of the control of Congress and manipulates the credit of the United States."
-Barry Goldwater-
(1909-1998) US Senator (R-Arizona)
"As I watch government at all levels daily eat away at our freedom, I keep thinking how prosperity and government largesse have combined to make most of us fat and lazy and indifferent to, or actually in favor of, the limits being placed on that freedom."
-Lyn Nofziger-
[Franklyn C. Nofziger] (1924-2006) American journalist, political consultant, author, Press Secretary for President Reagan
"The Founding Fathers of this great land had no difficulty whatsoever understanding the agenda of bankers, and they frequently referred to them and their kind as, quote, 'friends of paper money.' They hated the Bank of England, in particular, and felt that even were we successful in winning our independence from England and King George, we could never truly be a nation of freemen, unless we had an honest money system. Through ignorance, but moreover, because of apathy, a small, but wealthy, clique of power brokers have robbed us of our Rights and Liberties, and we are being raped of our wealth. We are paying the price for the near-comatose levels of complacency by our parents, and only God knows what might become of our children, should we not work diligently to shake this country from its slumber! Many a nation has lost its freedom at the end of a gun barrel, but here in America, we just decided to hand it over voluntarily. Worse yet, we paid for the tyranny and usurpation out of our own pockets with "voluntary" tax contributions and the use of a debt-laden fiat currency!"
-Peter Kershaw-
Author of the 1994 booklet "Economic Solutions"
"... but if circumstances should at any time oblige the government to form an army of any magnitude, that army can never be formidable to the liberties of the people, while there is a large body of citizens, little if at all inferior to them in discipline and use of arms, who stand ready to defend their rights..."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804)
Source: Federalist, No. 29
"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.
"It's a mistake to think that poor people get the benefit from the welfare system. It's a total fraud. Most welfare go to the rich of this country: the military-industrial complex, the bankers, the foreign dictators, it's totally out of control. [...] This idea that the government has services or goods that they can pass on is a complete farce. Governments have nothing. They can't create anything, they never have. All they can do is steal from one group and give it to another at the destruction of the principles of freedom, and we ought to challenge that concept."
-Dr. Ron Paul-
(1935-) American physician, US Congressman (R-TX), US Presidential candidate
Source: TV interview, 1987
"Forced to choose, the poor, like the rich, love money more than political liberty; and the only political freedom capable of enduring is one that is so pruned as to keep the rich from denuding the poor by ability or subtlety and the poor from robbing the rich by violence or votes."
-Will Durant-
(1885-1981) American psychologist, philosopher
"A hand from Washington will be stretched out and placed upon every man's business; the eye of the federal inspector will be in every man's counting house.... The law will of necessity have inquisical features, it will provide penalties, it will create complicated machinery. Under it, men will be hauled into courts distant from their homes. Heavy fines imposed by distant and unfamiliar tribunals will constantly menace the taxpayer. An army of federal inspectors, spies, and detectives will descend upon the state."
-Richard E. Byrd-
(1888-1947) Polar explorer, Virginia House Speaker
Source: 1910, predicting the consequences of a federal income tax
"The moment the slave resolves that he will no longer be a slave, his fetters fall. ... Freedom and slavery are mental states. Therefore, the first thing to say to yourself: 'I shall no longer accept the role of a slave. I shall not obey orders as such but shall disobey them when they are in conflict with my conscience'."
-Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi-
(1869-1948)
Source: M. K. Gandhi quoted in Gene Sharp, The Politics Of Nonviolent Action (1973), p. 59.
"Liberty, human dignity, a higher standard of living is fundamental. And, steadily, I think, people are beginning to realise that you don't have those things unless you have a pretty large private enterprise sector. Any Iron Curtain country has neither liberty, nor a very high standard of living. The two things go, economic and political freedom, go together. I've been right in the forefront of saying that, here, in the States, and it's very interesting to me now, to see a number of articles from people who are taking up the same theme. They are disturbed that Socialism is reducing liberty and freedom for ordinary people, and that's really what matters. "
-Margaret Thatcher-
(1925-2013) British Prime Minister (1979–1990)
Source: 1976 Feb 5, TV Interview for Thames TV 'This Week'
"A State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands -- even for beneficial purposes -- will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished."
-John Stuart Mill-
(1806-1873) English philosopher and economist
"In 1897, troops from the greatest empire the world had ever seen marched down London's mall for Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee. Seventy years later, Britain had government health care, a government-owned car industry, massive government housing, and it was a shriveled high-unemployment socialist basket-case living off the dwindling cultural capital of its glorious past. In 1945, America emerged from the Second World War as the preeminent power on earth. Seventy years later . . . Let's not go there."
-Mark Steyn-
(1959-) Canadian columnist
Source: National Review Online, Feb 14, 2009
"To the extent that these [New Deal policies] developed, they were tortured interpretations of a document [the Constitution] intended to prevent them."
-Rexford Tugwell-
(1891-1979) American agricultural economist, served in FDR's administration, one of the chief intellectual contributors to the New Deal, director of the New York City Planning Commission, Governor of Puerto Rico, and a professor at various universities.
1968
Source: quoted by Roger Pilon, Restoring Constitutional Government, CATO’S LETTER #9, p. 3, published by the Cato Institute (1995)
"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
"He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetuate it."
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-
(1929-1968), US civil rights leader
"We've witnessed a fire sale of American liberties at bargain basement prices, in return for the false promise of more security... The America being designed right now won't resemble the America we've been defending... The danger isn't that Big Brother may storm the castle gates. The danger is that Americans don't realize that he is already inside the castle walls."
-Wayne LaPierre-
CEO of National Rifle Association
"I know no class of my fellowmen, however just, enlightened, and humane, which can be wisely and safely trusted absolutely with the liberties of any other class."
-Frederick Douglass-
[Frederick Baily] (1818-1895), escaped slave, Abolitionist, author, editor of the North Star and later the New National Era
"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
"Among the several cloudy appellatives which have been commonly employed as cloaks for misgovernment, there is none more conspicuous in this atmosphere of illusion
than the word 'Order'."
-Jeremy Bentham
(1748-1832) English jurist, philosopher, and legal and social reformer
Source: The Book of Fallacies, 1824
"Actually, it is not strange that during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the human race was regarded as inert matter, ready to receive everything -- form, face, energy, movement, life -- from a great prince or a great legislator or a great genius. These centuries were nourished on the study of antiquity. And antiquity presents everywhere -- in Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome -- the spectacle of a few men molding mankind according to their whims, thanks to the prestige of force and of fraud. But this does not prove that this situation is desirable. It proves only that since men and society are capable of improvement, it is naturally to be expected that error, ignorance, despotism, slavery, and superstition should be greatest towards the origins of history. The writers quoted above were not in error when they found ancient institutions to be such, but they were in error when they offered them for the admiration and imitation of future generations. Uncritical and childish conformists, they took for granted the grandeur, dignity, morality, and happiness of the artificial societies of the ancient world. They did not understand that knowledge appears and grows with the passage of time; and that in proportion to this growth of knowledge, might takes the side of right, and society regains possession of itself."
-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 Error of the Socialist Writers, "The Law" by Frederic Bastiat (1848)
"Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies. Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically, as in England and America in the nineteenth century under laissez-faire. To check the growth of inequality, liberty must be sacrificed, as in Russia after 1917. Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom, and in the end superior ability has its way."
-Will Durant-
(1885-1981) American psychologist, philosopher
"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.
"Economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life that can be separated from the rest; it is the control of the means for all our ends."
-Ludwig von Mises-
(1881-1973) Economist and social philosopher, escaped from NAZI Germany
Source: Human Action
"You can't save free markets by socialism, I don't know where this idea ever came from. You save free markets by promoting free markets and sound money and balanced budgets. The whole reason why nobody wants to address the real problem is, we're spending a trillion dollars a year overseas running an empire, and it's coming to an end. This country is bankrupt, and we won't admit it. Eventually though, the dollar will go bust, and we will bring our troops home, and we will live within our means, but we ought to do it sensibly, rather than waiting for the collapse of the dollar, and this is what we're doing, we're on the verge of destroying our dollar. And then, you think we have problems now, problems then will be a lot worse, it'd look like the Weimar Republic, or a third world nation. And a lot of people know that, and they're scared to death, but we don't need to be making the problem worse by just propping up everything with more government programs, more inflation, and more helicopters, it won't work."
-Dr. Ron Paul-
(1935-) American physician, US Congressman (R-TX), US Presidential candidate
Source: Fox Business Network, October 14, 2008
"I have been writing & speaking what were once called novelties, for twenty five or thirty year, & have not now one disciple. Why? Not that what I said was not true; not that it has not found intelligent receivers but because it did not go from any wish in me to bring men to me, but to themselves."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-
"The state tends to expand in proportion to its means of existence and to live beyond its means, and these are, in the last analysis, nothing but the substance of the people. Woe to the people that cannot limit the sphere of action of the state! Freedom, private enterprise, wealth, happiness, independence, personal dignity, all vanish."
-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: Sophisms, 141
"Protectionism is a misnomer. The only people protected by tariffs, quotas and trade restrictions are those engaged in uneconomic and wasteful activity. Free trade is the only philosophy compatible with international peace and prosperity."
-Dr. Walter Block-
Senior Economist, The Fraser Institute
"I have never seen more senators express discontent with their jobs. ... I think the major cause is that, deep down in our hearts, we have been accomplices to doing something terrible and unforgivable to this wonderful country. Deep down in our hearts, we know that we have bankrupted America and that we have given our children a legacy of bankruptcy. ... We have defrauded our country to get ourselves elected."
-John C. Danforth-
(1936- ) US Senator (MO-R)
Source: in an interview in The Arizona Republic on April 22, 1992
"In U.S. politics, 'compassion' means giving money and privileges to well organized interest groups at everyone else's expense."
-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
"That erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all, it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues, and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else...Their purpose, in brief, is to make docile and patriotic citizens, to pile up majorities, and to make John Doe and Richard Doe as nearly alike, in their everyday reactions and ways of thinking, as possible."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived and dishonest — but the myth — persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic."
-John F. Kennedy-
"The liberty of every individual is only the reflection of his own humanity, or his human right through the conscience of all free men, his brothers and his equals. I can feel free only in the presence of and in relationship with other men. In the presence of an inferior species of animal I am neither free nor a man, because this animal is incapable of conceiving and consequently recognizing my humanity. I am not myself free or human until or unless I recognize the freedom and humanity of all my fellowmen. Only in respecting their human character do I respect my own."
-Mikhail Bakunin-
"To combat socialism Bismarck put through between 1883 and 1889 a program for social security far beyond anything known in other countries. It included compulsory insurance for workers against old age, sickness, accident and incapacity, and though organized by the State it was financed by employers and employees. It cannot be said that it stopped the rise of the Social Democrats or the trade unions, but it did have a profound influence on the working class in that it gradually made them value security over political freedom and caused them to see in the State, however conservative, a benefactor and a protector. Hitler, as we shall see, took full advantage of this state of mind. In this, as in other matters, he learned much from Bismarck. “I studied Bismarck’s socialist legislation,” Hitler remarks in Mein Kampf (p. 155), “in its intention, struggle and success.” "
-William L. Shirer-
(1904-1993) American journalist, war correspondent, historian, author
Source: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960, 96.)
"Jobs really come in the productive sector of the economy. The real jobs are where people are producing goods or services which other people will buy. Now, dependent on those people producing those goods, are a lot of others in the public sector. Now if you run up the public sector, you can only do it by draining money out of industry and commerce. But that's where the jobs are. And one of the reasons why you have to cut public expenditure is to get the money back out of the public sector, into industry and commerce, so that they, in fact, can invest, and improve, and expand; because that's where the secure jobs are."
-Margaret Thatcher-
(1925-2013) British Prime Minister (1979–1990)
Source: 1976 Feb 5, TV Interview for Thames TV 'This Week'
"It is curious that people tend to regard government as a quasi-divine, selfless, Santa Claus organization. Government was constructed neither for ability nor for the exercise of loving care; government was built for the use of force and for necessarily demagogic appeals for votes. If individuals do not know their own interests in many cases, they are free to turn to private experts for guidance. It is absurd to say that they will be served better by a coercive, demagogic apparatus."
-Murray N. Rothbard-
(1926-1995) Dean of the Austrian School of Economics
Source: Power and Market: Government and the Economy
"Let anyone who believes that a high standard of living is the achievement of labor unions and government controls ask himself the following question: If one had a “time machine” and transported the united labor chieftains of America, plus three million government bureaucrats, back to the tenth century—would they be able to provide the medieval serf with electric light, refrigerators, automobiles, and television sets?"
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
Source: Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
"State intervention in economic production arises only when private initiative
is lacking or insufficient, or when the political interests of the State are
involved. This intervention may take the form of control, assistance or direct
management."
-Benito Mussolini-
(1883-1945), Italian dictator during WW2
Source: The Corporate State and its Organization, from the The Labour Charter (Promulgated by the Grand Council of Fascism on April 21, 1927), Ref: Fascism: Doctrine and Institutions, Rome: 'Ardita' Publishers, (1935) p.136
"Socialism itself can hope to exist only for brief periods here and there, and then only through the exercise of the extremest terrorism. For this reason it is secretly preparing itself for rule through fear and is driving the word “justice” into the heads of the half-educated masses like a nail so as to rob them of their reason... and to create in them a good conscience for the evil game they are to play."
-Friedrich Nietzsche-
(1844-1900)
SSource: Human, All Too Human
"I also made it quite clear that Socialism means equality of income or nothing,
and that under socialism you would not be allowed to be poor. You would be
forcibly fed, clothed, lodged, taught, and employed whether you like it or not.
If it were discovered that you had not character enough to be worth all this
trouble, you might possibly be executed in a kindly manner; but whilst you were
permitted to live you would have to live well."
-George Bernard Shaw-
(1856-1950) Irish comic dramatist, member of the socialist Fabian Society
Source: The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, by George Bernard Shaw, pg 470, 1928
1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc.
-Karl Marx-
(1818- 1883) Father of Communism, Author of the 'Communist Manifesto'
Source: Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848, Marx/Engels
"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. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain."
-Frédéric 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
"If something is wrong for you or me, it is also wrong for the cop, the soldier, the mayor, the governor, the general, the Fed chairman, the president. Theft does not become acceptable when they call it taxation, counterfeiting when they call it monetary policy, kidnapping when they call it the draft, mass murder when they call it foreign policy. We understand that it is never acceptable to wield violence nor the threat of violence against the innocent, whether by the mugger or the politician."
-Lew Rockwell-
[Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.] (1944- ) Chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute
"...only those who have the will and the power to shoot down their fellow men, are the real rulers in this, as in all other (so-called) civilized countries; for by no others will civilized men be robbed, or enslaved."
-Lysander Spooner-
(1808-1887) Political theorist, activist, abolitionist
Source: No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority
"By virtue of exchange, one man's prosperity is beneficial to all others."
-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: his book, Economic Harmonies
"The experience that was had in ... the taking away of private property, and the possession of it in community, by a commonwealth ... was found to breed much confusion and discontent; and retard much employment which would have been to the general benefit.... For the young men that were most able and fit for labor and service objected that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men's wives and children, without any recompense.... The strong man or the resourceful man had no more share of food, clothes, etc., than the weak man who was not able to do a quarter the other could; this was thought injustice. The aged and graver men, who were ranked and equalized in labor, food, clothes, etc., with the meaner and younger ones, thought it some indignity and disrespect to them."
-William Bradford-
(c.1590-1657) American colonist, helped found the Plymouth Colony, signatory to the Mayflower Compact, served as Plymouth Colony Governor
1623
Source: Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation, 1606-1646.
"In our country, the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State."
-Alexander Solzhenitsyn-
(1918-2008) Russian novelist, Soviet dissident, imprisoned for 8 years for critizing Stalin in a personal letter, Nobel Prize for Literature, 1970
"These men - ..., the politicians, ... - use their position, their knowledge, and their power of disseminating misinformation to arouse and stimulate the latent instinct for bloodshed. When they have succeeded, they say they are reluctantly forced to war by the pressure of public opinion."
-Bertrand Russell-
[Bertrand Arthur William Russell] (1872-1970) Philosopher, educator
Source: "War and Non-Resistance," Atlantic Monthly, August 1915, p. 274.
"Who lies for you will lie against you."
-Bosnian Proverb-
"He who inflicts a vile and unjust harm by using the power and the force with which he is invested, does not conquer; the true victory is to have on one's side Right naked and entire."
-Luís de Camões-
"If man chooses oblivion, he can go right on leaving his fate to his political leaders. If he chooses Utopia, he must initiate an enormous education program -- immediately, if not sooner."
-R. Buckminster Fuller-
"Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future."
-Niels Bohr-
"As the Founding Fathers knew well, a government that does not trust its honest, law-abiding, taxpaying citizens with the means of self-defense is not itself worthy of trust. Laws disarming honest citizens proclaim that the government is the master, not the servant, of the people."
-Jeffrey R. Snyder-
American attorney, author
Source: A Nation of Cowards, 113 Public Interest (Fall 1993)
"A freedom fighter learns the hard way that it is the oppressor who defines the nature of the struggle,and the oppressed is often left no recourse but to use methods that mirror those of the oppressor. At a point, one can only fight fire with fire."
-Nelson Mandela-
(1918-2013) South African anti-apartheid revolutionary, imprisoned for 27 years, President of South Africa (1994-1999)
Source: Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela
"The right of the people to keep and bear arms has been recognized by the General Government; but the best security of that right after all is, the military spirit, that taste for martial exercises, which has always distinguished the free citizens of these States... Such men form the best barrier to the liberties of America."
-Gazette of the United States-
Source: October 14, 1789, p.211, col.2
"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-
(1948- ) U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Adarand v. Federico Pena
"A truly free society is based on a vision of respect for people and what they value. In a truly free society, any business that disrespects its customers will fail, and deserves to do so. The same should be true of any government that disrespects its citizens. The central belief and fatal conceit of the current administration is that you are incapable of running your own life, but those in power are capable of running it for you. This is the essence of big government and collectivism."
-Charles Koch-
(1935-) American businessman and philanthropist
Source: Koch, Charles (April 3, 2014). 'Instead of welcoming free debate, collectivists engage in character assassination.' "Charles Koch: I'm Fighting to Restore a Free Society". The Wall Street Journal.
"Try this thought experiment. Pretend you're a tyrant. Among your many liberty-destroying objectives are extermination of blacks, Jews and Catholics. Which would you prefer, a United States with political power centralized in Washington, powerful government agencies with detailed information on Americans and compliant states or power widely dispersed over 50 states, thousands of local jurisdictions and a limited federal government?"
-Walter E. Williams-
(1936- ) Columnist, Professor of Economics at George Mason University
"The unhappy legacies of authoritarianism can be removed only if the concept of absolute power as the basis of government is replaced by the concept of confidence as the mainspring of political authority: the confidence of the people in their right and ability to decide the destiny of their nation, mutual confidence between the people and their leaders and, most important of all, confidence in the principles of justice, liberty and human rights."
-Aung San Suu Kyi-
"Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place."
-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
June 1850
Source: "The Law" by Frederic Bastiat (1848)
"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)
"Can we truly expect those who aim to exploit us to be trusted to educate us?"
-Eric Schaub-
Individualist, writer, activist, speaker
Source: The Common Man
"The devil’s best trick is to persuade you that he doesn’t exist!"
-Charles Baudelaire-
(1821-1867) French poet, critic and translator
Source: in his 1864 short story, “The Generous Gambler”
"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society."
-Edward Bernays-
(1891-1995) "Father" of modern public relations (PR) and director of the U.S. Committee on Public Information during World War I, on government propaganda
Source: Bernays, Propaganda (1928), chapter 1.
"I wouldn't call it fascism exactly, but a political system nominally controlled by an irresponsible, dumbed down electorate who are manipulated by dishonest, cynical, controlled mass media that dispense the propaganda of a corrupt political establishment can hardly be described as democracy either."
-Edward Zehr-
(1936-2001) Columnist
"All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia."
-George Orwell-
"Politicians deserve two terms: one in office, one in prison."
-Anon-
"This government is acknowledged by all, to be one of enumerated powers. The principle, that it can exercise only the powers granted to it, would seem too apparent, to have required to be enforced by all those arguments, which its enlightened friends, while it was depending before the people, found it necessary to urge; that principle is now universally admitted."
-Chief Justice Marshall-
(1755-1835) US Supreme Court Chief Justice
Source: McCulloch v. Maryland
"The trouble with most folks isn't so much their ignorance, as knowing so many things that ain't so."
-Josh Billings-
[Henry Wheeler Shaw] (1818-1885) American humorist and lecturer
"The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any."
-Alice Walker-
Author
"The power of authority is never more subtle and effective than when it produces a psychological "atmosphere" or "climate" favorable to the life of certain modes of belief, unfavorable, and even fatal, to the life of others."
-Arthur Balfour-
(1848-1930)
Source: The Foundations of Belief, 1895
"Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage."
-H.L. Mencken-
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
-Mahatma Gandhi-
"The people made the Constitution, and the people can unmake it. It is the creature of their own will, and lives only by their will."
-Supreme Court Justice John Marshall-
Cohens v. Virginia (1821)
"No one understood better than Stalin that the true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade, but to produce a uniform pattern of public utterance in which the first trace of unorthodox thought immediately reveals itself as a jarring dissonance."
-Alan Bullock-
[Alan Louis Charles Bullock, Baron Bullock] (1914-2004) British historian
Source: in Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (1991)
"The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
Source: Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution
"The fatal attraction of government is that it allows busybodies to impose decisions on others without paying any price themselves. That enables them to act as if there were no price, even when there are ruinous prices -- paid by others."
-Thomas Sowell
(1930- ) Writer and economist
"Censorship reflects a society’s lack of confidence in itself.It is the landmark of an authoritarian regime..."
-Justice Potter Stewart-
(1915-1985), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Ginsberg v. United States, 1966
"Chief among the spoils of victory is the privilege of writing the history."
-Mark Alexander-
Editor/Publisher of Patriot Post
Source: Patriot Post, No. 06-07; Published 17 February 2006
"The enormous gap between what U.S. leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology."
-Michael Parenti-
political scientist and author
"If you take all the machinery in the world and dump it in the ocean, within months more than half of all humanity will die and within another six months they’d almost all be gone; if you took all the politicians in the world, put them in a rocket, and sent them to the moon, everyone would get along fine."
-Buckminster Fuller-
"School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is."
-Ivan Illich
(1926-2002) Austrian philosopher, author, social critic
"I begin by taking. I shall find scholars later to demonstrate my perfect right."
-Frederick the Great-
(1712-1786) King of Prussia, Frederick II
"To die for an idea: it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"The most absolute authority is that which penetrates into a man’s innermost being and concerns itself no less with his will than with his actions."
-Jean-Jacques Rousseau-
(1712-1778) Political philosopher, educationist and essayist
Source: The Social Contract, 1762
"Fame is proof that the people are gullible."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-
(1803-1882)
"History is fables agreed upon."
-Voltaire-
[François Marie Arouet] (1694-1778)
"That's not a lie, it's a terminological inexactitude."
-Alexander Haig-
(1924-2010) Secretary of State for President Ronald Reagan
Source: During a TV interview, defending himself against accusations of lying in 1983. Quoted by Rutledge, Leigh W., "Would I Lie To You?", Plume, 1998, ISBN 0-452-27931-3, p. 81.
"History is an account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools."
-Ambrose Bierce-
(1842-1914) Humorist
"There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics."
-Benjamin Disraeli-
(1804-1881) Prime Minister of England, British statesman, novelist
1844
Source: attributed to Disraeli in Mark Twain's Autobiography, 1924
"Democracy consists of choosing your dictators, after they've told you what you think it is you want to hear."
-Alan Corenk-
"Our constitutions purport to be established by 'the people,' and, in theory, 'all the people' consent to such government as the constitutions authorize. But this consent of 'the people' exists only in theory. It has no existence in fact. Government is in reality established by the few; and these few assume the consent of all the rest, without any such consent being actually given."
-Lysander Spooner-
(1808-1887) Political theorist, activist, abolitionist
And for generations in perpetuity...
"The real damage from terrorist attacks doesn't come from the explosion. The real damage is done after the explosion, by the victims, who repeatedly and determinedly attack themselves, giving over reason in favor of terror. Every London cop who stops someone from taking a picture of a public building, every TSA agent who takes away your kid's toothpaste, every NSA spook who wiretaps your email, does the terrorist's job for him. Terrorism is about magnifying one mediagenic act of violence into one hundred billion acts of terrorized authoritarian idiocy."
-Cory Doctorow-
"The laws of this nature are those which forbid to wear arms, disarming those only who are not disposed to commit the crime which the laws mean to prevent. Can it be supposed, that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity, and the most important of the code, will respect the less considerable and arbitrary injunctions, the violation of which is so easy, and of so little comparative importance? Does not the execution of this law deprive the subject of that personal liberty, so dear to mankind and to the wise legislator? and does it not subject the innocent to all the disagreeable circumstances that should only fall on the guilty? It certainly makes the situation of the assaulted worse, and of the assailants better, and rather encourages than prevents murder, as it requires less courage to attack unarmed than armed persons."
-Cesare Beccaria-
(1735-1794) [Bonesana, Marchese di] Italian nobleman, criminologist, and penal reformer
Source: Dei delitti e delle pene, [On Crimes and Punishments] ch.38 (1764)
Translation is as quoted by Thomas Jefferson in his _Commonplace Book_, 1809 Edition, which was "the source book and repertory of Jefferson's ideas on government."
"A principal source of errors and injustice are false ideas of utility. For example: that legislator has false ideas of utility who considers particular more than general conveniencies, who had rather command the sentiments of mankind than excite them, who dares say to reason, 'Be thou a slave;' who would sacrifice a thousand real advantages to the fear of an imaginary or trifling inconvenience; who would deprive men of the use of fire for fear of their being burnt, and of water for fear of their being drowned; and who knows of no means of preventing evil but by destroying it."
-Cesare Beccaria-
(1735-1794) [Bonesana, Marchese di] Italian nobleman, criminologist, and penal reformer
Source: Dei delitti e delle pene, [On Crimes and Punishments] ch.38 (1764)
Translation is as quoted by Thomas Jefferson in his _Commonplace Book_, 1809 Edition, which was "the source book and repertory of Jefferson's ideas on government."
"Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric."
-Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
"Popular revolt against a ruthless, experienced modern dictatorship, which enjoys a monopoly over weapons and communications, ... is simply not a possibility in the modern age."
-George F. Kennan-
(1904-2005) US advisor, diplomat, political analyst, and Pulitzer-prize winning historian
1964
"What luck for the rulers that men do not think."
-Adolf Hitler-
(1889-1945) German Nazi Dictator
"We must never lose sight of the fact that the law has a moral foundation, and we must never fail to ask ourselves not only what the law is, but what the law should be."
-Anthony Kennedy-
No, what the law is allowed to be. Much immorality arised when your "law" presumes above its delegated authority.
"Seems to be a deep instinct in human beings for making everything compulsory that isn't forbidden."
-Manuel Garcia O'Kelly Davis-
Manuel Garcia O'Kelly Davis
Source: "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress"
"Where once a tyrant had to wish that his subjects had but one common neck that he might strangle them all at once, all he has to do now is to 'educate the people' so that they will have but one common mind to delude."
-Richard Mitchell-
(1929-2002) Professor at Glassboro State College, NJ, author, founder and publisher of The Underground Grammarian
Source: The Underground Grammarian
"How strangely will the Tools of a Tyrant pervert the plain Meaning of Words!"
-Samuel Adams-
(1722-1803), was known as the "Father of the American Revolution."
Source: letter to John Pitts, January 21, 1776
"The restriction of knowledge to an elite group destroys the spirit of the society and leads to its intellectual impoverishment."
-Albert Einstein-
(1879-1955) Physicist and Professor, Nobel Prize 1921
"Censorship is the commonest social blasphemy because it is mostly concealed, built into us by indolence, self-interest and cowardice."
-John Osborne-
(1929-1994) British playwright
"No nation, ancient or modern, ever lost the liberty of speaking freely, writing, or publishing their sentiments, but forthwith lost their liberty in general and became slaves."
-John Peter Zenger-
(1697-1746)
"It has been discovered that the best way to insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery."
-Benjamin Disraeli-
(1804-1881) Prime Minister of England, British statesman, novelist
"Teachers are directed to instruct their pupils... and to awaken in them a sense of their responsibility toward the community of the nation."
-Bernhard Rust-
(1883-1945) Minister of Science, Education and National Culture (Reichserziehungsminister) in Nazi Germany
Source: from "Racial Instruction and the National Community," 1935
"Purveyors of political correctness will, in the final analysis, not even allow others their judgments... They celebrate "difference," but they will not allow people truly to be different -- to think differently, and to say what they think."
-Mark Berley-
Source: Argos, Spring 1998
"Alliance: In international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other's pockets that they cannot separately plunder a third."
-Ambrose Bierce-
(1842-1914) Humorist
"It is very comforting to believe that leaders who do terrible things are, in fact, mad. That way, all we have to do is make sure we don't put psychotics in high places and we've got the problem solved."
-Thomas Wolfe-
Author
"When all think alike, no one is thinking very much."
-Walter Lippmann-
(1889-1974) American writer, journalist, and political commentator
"It is futile to fight against, if one does not know what one is fighting for."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
Source: Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 1966
"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-
(1907-1995) Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1969-1986)
"Fascism, communism and national socialism all share in common the explicit premise that the individual must subordinate himself to society's needs, or as Hitler would phrase it: 'Society's needs come before the individual needs.'"
-A. E. Samaan-
Christian-Palestinian and Central American Hispanic author, artist, photographer
Source: 'From a Race of Masters to a Master Race'
"What we have to remember is that not everything is under our control. If people are free in any meaningful sense of the word, that means they are at liberty to foul up their lives as much as make something grand of them. That's a gamble we all take. That's the risk of liberty. Nobody wants others to screw up their lives, but each must be free to do so for themselves."
-Joel Miller-
Source: his book, Bad Trip: How the War against Drugs Is Destroying America, 2005
"I want gay married people to be able to protect their marijuana plants with guns."
-Tim Moen-
Canadian Libertarian candidate, Fort McMurray, Alberta
Source: First Libertarian candidate to run in McMurray, March 4, 2014
"Debate, it seems to me, is one of the most useful of human inventions. It is the mother and father of all free inquiry and honest thought. It tests ideas, detects errors and promotes clear thinking. A man cannot stand up before it without exposing his whole intellectual stock of goods."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910)
Source: Autobiography
"The wizards represent all that the true 'muggle' most fears: They are plainly outcasts and comfortable with being so. Nothing is more unnerving to the truly conventional than the unashamed misfit!"
-J. K. Rowling-
Applies to libertarians, too...
"I would to God Shakspeare had lived later, & promenaded in Broadway … that the muzzle which all men wore on their soul in the Elizebethan day, might not have intercepted Shakspers full articulations. For I hold it a verity, that even Shakspeare, was not a frank man to the uttermost. And, indeed, who in this intolerant universe is, or can be? But the Declaration of Independence makes a difference."
-Herman Melville-
Less and less, sadly, every day...
"I want to die a slave to principles. Not to men."
-Emiliano Zapata-
"Vices are those acts by which a man harms himself or his property. Crimes are those acts by which one man harms the person or property of another. Vices are simply the errors which a man makes in his search after his own happiness. Unlike crimes, they imply no malice toward others, and no interference with their persons or property. In vices, the very essence of crime -- that is, the design to injure the person or property of another -- is wanting. It is a maxim of the law that there can be no crime without criminal intent; that is, without the intent to invade the person or property of another. But no one ever practices a vice with any such criminal intent. He practices his vice for his own happiness solely, and not from any malice toward others. Unless this clear distinction between vices and crimes be made and recognized by the laws, there can be on earth no such thing as individual right, liberty, or property, and the corresponding coequal rights of another man to the control of his own person and property."
-Lysander Spooner-
(1808-1887) Political theorist, activist, abolitionist
Source: Vices are Not Crimes, A Vindication of Moral Liberty (1875)
"We need true tax reform that will at least make a start toward restoring for our children the American Dream that wealth is denied to no one, that each individual has the right to fly as high as his strength and ability will take him.... But we cannot have such reform while our tax policy is engineered by people who view the tax as a means of achieving changes in our social structure."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
"Anyone who says that economic security is a human right, has been too much babied. While he babbles, other men are risking and losing their lives to protect him. They are fighting the sea, fighting the land, fighting disease and insects and weather and space and time, for him, while he chatters that all men have a right to security and that some pagan god -- Society, The State, The Government, The Commune -- must give it to them. Let the fighting men stop fighting this inhuman earth for one hour, and he will learn how much security there is."
-Rose Wilder Lane-
"People are tired of liberty. They have had a surfeit of it. Liberty is no longer a chaste and austere virgin... Today’s youth are moved by other slogans... Order, Hierarchy, Discipline."
-Benito Mussolini-
(1883-1945), Italian dictator during WW2
Source: Speech, March 1923
"Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
"All the martyrs in the history of the world are not sufficient to establish the correctness of an opinion. Martyrdom, as a rule, establishes the sincerity of the martyr, — never the correctness of his thought. Things are true or false in themselves. Truth cannot be affected by opinions; it cannot be changed, established, or affected by martyrdom. An error cannot be believed sincerely enough to make it a truth."
-Robert G. Ingersoll-
"The very purpose of the Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials, and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts....[F]undamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections."
-Justice Robert Jackson-
1943
"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)
"Those who formally rule take their signals and commands not from the electorate as a body, but from a small group of men. This group will be called the Establishment. It exists even though that existence is stoutly denied. It is one of the secrets of the American social order... A second secret is the fact that the existence of the Establishment - the ruling class - is not supposed to be discussed."
-Arthur S. Miller-
George Washington University Professor of Law
"When the political columnists say 'Every thinking man' they mean themselves, and when candidates appeal to 'Every intelligent voter' they mean everybody who is going to vote for them."
-Franklin P. Adams-
(1881-1960)
Source: Nods and Becks (1944)
"It is a matter of record that in the German Election of 1933, the Communist Party was ordered by its leaders to vote for the Nazis - with the explanation that they could later fight the Nazis for power, but first they had to help destroy their common enemy: capitalism and its parliamentary form of government."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
Source: " 'Extremism' or The Art of Smearing", Chapter 17 of Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
"Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future."
-John F. Kennedy-
(1917-1963) 35th US President
"O liberty! O liberty! What crimes are committed in thy name!"
-Madame Jeanne-Marie Roland-
(1754-1793)
Source: November 8, 1793, her last words before being executed on the guillotine, quoted in Alphonse de Lamartine's Histoire des Girondins
"I've never had a problem with drugs. I've had problems with the police."
-Keith Richards-
(1943-) British musician, songwriter and founding member of The Rolling Stones
"Freedom is the right to question and change the established way of doing things. It is the continuous revolution of the marketplace. It is the understanding that allows us to recognize shortcomings and seek solutions."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
Source: Address to students at Moscow State University, 05/31/88
"A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a great society."
-Walter Lippmann-
(1889-1974) American writer, journalist, and political commentator
"There is no such thing, at this date of the world's history, in America as an independent press. You know it and I know it.
There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone.
The business of the journalists is to destroy the truth;
to lie outright;
to pervert;
to vilify;
to fawn at the feet of mammon, and
to sell his country and his race for his daily bread.
You know it and I know it and what folly is this toasting an independent press? We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."
-John Swinton-
(1829-1901) Former Head of Editorial Staff for the New York Times was one of America's best loved newspapermen.
Called by his peers "The Dean of his Profession"
1880, At a banquet in his honor
Source: Labor's Untold Story, by Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais, published by United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America, NY, 1955/1979
"To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries."
-Virginia Woolf-
(1882-1941)
Source: The Moment and Other Essays, 1948
"Whatever the individual motives of the censors may be, censorship is a form of social control. It is a means of holding a society together, of arresting the flux which censors fear. And since the fear cannot be appeased, the demands for censorship mount in volume and intensity. And one form of censorship can easily lead to other forms."
-Carey McWilliams-
(1905-1980) American author, editor, and lawyer
Source: Censorship: For And Against, 1971
"If the political-correctness fascists get their way, we can safely assume it will be correct-thinking, "political cleansing" squads deciding what we can or cannot say on the Intenet. These people fear public debate and demand homogenization of "acceptable" attitudes compatible with their emotional, utopian idealism."
-Charles W. Moore-
Source: Barquentine Ventures Online Journal, 8 July 1999
"The oppression of any people for opinion’s sake has rarely had any other effect than to fix those opinions deeper, and render them more important."
-Hosea Ballou-
(1771-1852)
"Persecution produced its natural effect on them.
It found them a sect; it made them a faction."
-Thomas Babington Macaulay-
(1800-1859) [Lord Macaulay] 1st Baron Macaulay, British historian
Source: History of England, 1849
"Suppression of expression conceals the real problems confronting a society and diverts public attention from the critical issues. It is likely to result in neglect of the grievances which are the actual basis of the unrest, and this prevent their correction."
-Thomas I. Emerson-
(1907-1991) Lines Professor of Law, Yale University, author
Source: Yale Law Journal, 1963
"And let us remind readers regularly, in editorials, in our promotional advertising, in speeches to civic groups and others, that advertising helps people to live better and saves them money. This fact needs constant selling."
-Paul Miller-
(1906-1991) President and CEO of Gannett Newspaper Chain (1957-78), President and Chairman of Associated Press (1963-77)
Source: quoted in Editor & Publisher, September 16, 1961
"It is the advertiser who provides the paper for the subscriber. It is not to be disputed, that the publisher of a newspaper in this country, without a very exhaustive advertising support, would receive less reward for his labor than the humblest mechanic."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804)
"Men willingly believe what they wish."
-Gaius Julius Caesar-
(100-44 B.C.) Dictator of the Roman Republic
"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
"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."
-Oscar Wilde-
(1854-1900)
Source: De Profundis, 1905
"During a war, news should be given out for instruction rather than information."
-Joseph Paul Goebbels
(1897-1945) Nazi Propaganda Minister
"According to Gestapo records... they had little need to engage in direct spying on the citizens since the citizens themselves were more than willing to do their spying for them."
-Kort E. Patterson-
Source: Port of Call, August/September 1999
And remember, if you see something, say something...
"Fascist intellectuals, such as Ugo Spirito, made the round of conferences preaching the virtues of postcapitalism fascism and in fact tried to nudge the structure in a 'leftist' direction by calling for more collective control and even corporative ownership of the economy. Mussolini looked abroad to find that Franklin Roosevelt was merely seeking to emulate Italy's innovations."
-Charles S. Maier-
Historian, professor, Director of the Center for European Studies
Source: In Search of Stability: Explorations in Historical Political Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 81.
"Since National Socialism came to power, I have striven to make its consequences milder for its victims and to prepare the way for a change. In that, my conscience drove me -- and in the end, that is a man's duty."
-Helmuth James-
[Helmuth James Graf von Moltke] (1907-1945) Count of Moltke, German jurist, executed by Nazi government for 'treason'
Source: January 1945, in a letter written while in custody before being executed, he revealed his motivation for resistance to his two sons.
"This manual of the Communist Party should be in the hands of every loyal American, that they may be alerted to the fact that it is not always by armies and guns that a nation is conquered."
-Kenneth Goff-
Author and a one time dues-paying member of the Communist Party
Source: in his book, "THE SOVIET ART OF BRAINWASHING - A Synthesis of the Russian Textbook on Psycho-politics"
"Institutions purely democratic must, sooner, or later, destroy liberty or civilization or both."
-Thomas Babington Macaulay-
(1800-1859) [Lord Macaulay] 1st Baron Macaulay, British historian
Source: Letter to H.S. Randall, May 23, 1857
"A democracy is a government in the hands of men
of low birth, no property, and vulgar employments."
-Aristotle-
(384-322 BC) Greek philosopher
"Liberty has never lasted long in a democracy,
nor has it ever ended in anything better than despotism."
-Fisher Ames-
(1758-1808), American statesman, orator and political writer
"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."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Federalist No. 10, November 23, 1787
"Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve."
-George Bernard Shaw-
(1856-1950) Irish comic dramatist
"The tendency of democracies is, in all things, to mediocrity."
-James Fenimore Cooper-
(1789-1851) American Novelist
Source: The American Democrat, XIV, 1838
"Democracy, with its promise of international peace, has been no better guarantee against war than the old dynastic rule of kings."
-Jan C. Smuts-
(1870-1950) South African and British Commonwealth politician and military leader, Prime Minister of South Africa (1939-48), helped found both the League of Nations and the United Nations (he wrote the preamble of the UN Charter)
Source: Address at St. Andrews University, 1934
"Repeal that [welfare] law, and you will soon see a change in their manners. ... Six days shalt thou labor, though one of the old commandments long treated as out of date, will again be looked upon as a respectable precept; industry will increase, and with it plenty among the lower people; their circumstances will mend, and more will be done for their happiness by inuring them to provide for themselves, than could be done by dividing all your estates among them."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
Source: On the Price of Corn, and Management of the Poor, London Chronicle, November 29, 1766
"The evil of democracy is not the triumph of quantity,
but the triumph of bad quality."
-Guido De Ruggiero-
(1888-1948) Italian philosopher, professor of Italian politics
Source: The History of European Liberalism, II, 1927
"Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor."
-James Russell Lowell-
(1819-1891) American author and diplomatist
Source: The Biglow Papers, II, 1862
"Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people."
-Oscar Wilde-
(1854-1900)
Source: The Soul of Man Under Socialism, 1891
"People often say that, in a democracy, decisions are made by a majority of the people. Of course, that is not true. Decisions are made by a majority of those who make themselves heard and who vote -- a very different thing."
-Walter H. Judd-
(1898-1994) Minnesota legislator, physician, missionary, and orator
I think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country... Only the emergency that makes it immediately dangerous to leave the correction of evil counsels to time warrants making any exception to the sweeping command, 'Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech.'
-Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.-
(1841-1935) US Supreme Court Justice, also known as "The Great Dissenter"
Source: Abrams et al v. United States, 1919
"The bourgeoisie is many times stronger than we. To give it the weapon of freedom of the press is to ease the enemy’s cause, to help the class enemy. We do not desire to end in suicide, so we will not do this."
-Vladimir Ilyich Lenin-
[Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov] (1870 - 1924), First Leader of the Soviet Union
Source: Pravda, 1912
"The intellectually stifling results of censorship -- while deplorable in any setting -- would be all the more abominable if allowed to exist within the college environment."
-William M. Anderson, Jr.-
President of Mary Washington College
Source: Letter, 7 December 1983
"Liberty means, not the mere voting at elections, but the free and fearless exercise of the mental faculties, and that self-possession which springs out of well-reasoned opinions and consistent practice."
-Frances Wright-
"When a nation threatens another nation the people of the latter forget their factionalism, their local antagonisms, their political differences, their suspicions of each other, their religious hostilities, and band together as one unit. Leaders know that, and that is why so many of them whip up wars during periods of national crisis, or when the people become discontented and angry. The leaders stigmatize the enemy with every vice they can think of, every evil and human depravity. They stimulate their people’s natural fear of all other men by channeling it into a defined fear of just certain men, or nations. Attacking another nation, then, acts as a sort of catharsis, temporarily, on men’s fear of their immediate neighbors. This is the explanation of all wars, all racial and religious hatreds, all massacres, and all attempts at genocide."
-Taylor Caldwell-
"The late multiplication of banking companies in both parts of the United Kingdom, an event by which many people have been much alarmed, instead of diminishing, increases the security of the public. ... By dividing the whole circulation into a greater number of parts, the failure of any one company, an accident which, in the course of things, must sometimes happen, becomes of less consequence to the public. This free competition, too, obliges all bankers to be more liberal in their dealings with their customers, lest their rivals should carry them away. In general, if any branch of trade, or any division of labour, be advantageous to the public, the freer and more general the competition, it will always be the more so."
-Adam Smith-
'Wealth of Nations'
"There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader. ... This ... is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil."
-John Adams-
"The attempt to silence a man is the greatest honour you can bestow on him. It means that you recognise his superiority to yourself."
-Joseph Sobran-
(1946-2010) Columnist
Source: Universal Press Syndicate
"Let me make the superstitions of a nation and I care not who makes its laws or its songs either."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910)
"Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them."
-George Orwell-
[Eric Arthur Blair] (1903-1950) British author
Source: his book, '1984'
"Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim."
-George Santayana-
[Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás] (1863-1952) Spanish-born philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist
"In 1883, a small group of Socialists met in London, announcing their intentions of converting the British economic system from capitalism to socialism. This group chose the name 'Fabian Society.' One of the leading members of the Fabian Society, author George Bernard Shaw, perhaps summed it up best when he said, quote: '... Socialism means equality of income or nothing... under socialism you would not be allowed to be poor. You would be forcibly fed, clothed, lodged, taught, and employed whether you like it or not. If it were discovered that you had not character enough to be worth all this trouble, you might possibly be executed in a kindly manner; but whilst you were permitted to live you would have to live well.' "
-Edgar Wallace Robinson-
Source: in his 1980 booklet titled "Rolling Thunder"
"In questions of power, then, let no more be said of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"The real rulers in Washington are invisible and exercise power from behind the scenes."
-Justice Felix Frankfurter-
(1882-1965) U.S. Supreme Court Justice
"The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom."
-Justice William O. Douglas-
(1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Public Utilities Commission v Pollack, 1952
"The aim of socialism is not only to abolish the present division of mankind into small states and all-national isolation, not only to bring the nations closer to each other, but also to merge them."
-Vladimir Ilyich Lenin-
[Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov] (1870 - 1924), First Leader of the Soviet Union
"I'm never quite sure what you mean by consensus politics. I believe that what most people want in their lives, is what the Conservative Party wants to have for them. I believe that our policies are fundamentally common sense policies. Just let's take taxation for an example. Wherever I go I hear enormous resentment about the amount which people are paying out of their own pay packet in tax. And, this goes right across the income ranges. Socialism started by saying it was going to tax the rich, very rapidly it was taxing the middle income groups. Now, it's taxing people quite highly with incomes way below average and pensioners with incomes way below average. You look at the figure on the beginning of a pay slip, sometimes it can look quite high, look along the slip to the other end, and see how many deductions you've had off, those deductions have increased enormously under Socialism ...
Public expenditure, which they always boast about, is financed out of the pay packet in our pockets. People are saying that they really think too much is being taken out of the pay packet for someone to spend on their behalf, and they'd rather be left with more, and it's now well-known that Socialist Governments put up taxes and Conservative Governments take them down. It's part of our fundamental belief giving the people more choice to spend their own money in their own way."
-Margaret Thatcher-
(1925-2013) British Prime Minister (1979–1990)
Source: 1976 Feb 5, TV Interview for Thames TV 'This Week'
"Like it or not, we have placed our destiny in the hands of the experts. A politician is, after all, a kind of expert, if self-styled. Even the fact that competent experts must serve under politicians of mediocre intelligence and little foresight is a problem that we are stuck with, because the experts themselves cannot agree on any major world issue. A logocracy of quarreling experts might be no better than the rule of the mediocrities to which we are subject. The declining intellectual quality of political leadership is the result of the growing complexity of the world. Since no one, be he endowed with the highest wisdom, can grasp it in its entirety, it is those who are least bothered by this who strive for power."
-Stanisław Lem-
"The demagogue is usually sly, a detractor of others, a professor of humility and disinterestedness, a great stickler for equality as respects all above him, a man who acts in corners, and avoids open and manly expositions of his course, calls blackguards gentlemen, and gentlemen folks, appeals to passions and prejudices rather than to reason, and is in all respects, a man of intrigue and deception, of sly cunning and management, instead of manifesting the frank, fearless qualities of the democracy he so prodigally professes. The man who maintains the rights of the people on pure grounds, may be distinguished from the demagogue by the reverse of all these qualities. He does not flatter the people, even while he defends them, for he knows that flattery is a corrupting and dangerous poison. Having nothing to conceal, he is frank and fearless, as are all men with the consciousness of right motives. He oftener chides than commends, for power needs reproof and can dispense with praise. He who would be a courtier under a king, is almost certain to be a demagogue in a democracy."
-The American Democrat-
"How do you tell a Communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
Source: Remarks in Arlington, Virginia, September 25, 1987
"No good government but what is republican... the very definition of a republic is 'an empire of laws, and not of men.'"
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: "Thoughts on Government" January, 1776
"Always stand on principle, even if you stand alone."
-John Quincy Adams-
(1767-1848) 6th US President
"We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and
discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into
physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights
of meeting physical force with soul force."
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-
(1929-1968), US civil rights leader
Source: Speech delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. on August 28, 1963.
"There are two freedoms -- the false, where a man is free to do what he likes; the true, where a man is free to do what he ought."
-Charles Kingsley-
(1819-1875) English clergyman, university professor, historian, and novelist
"All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward."
-Ellen Glasgow-
(1873-1945) Pulitzer Prize winning American novelist
"There is no greater fallacy than the belief that aims and purposes are one thing, while methods and tactics are another... All human experience teaches that methods and means cannot be separated from the ultimate aim."
-Emma Goldman-
(1869-1940)
Source: My Disillusionment in Russia, 1923
"Is there a greater tragedy imaginable than that, in our endeavour consciously to shape our future in accordance with high ideals, we should in fact unwittingly produce the very opposite of what we have been striving for?"
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
"It is a governing principle of nature, that the agency which can produce most good, when perverted from its proper aim, is most productive of evil. It behooves the well-intentioned, therefore, vigorously to watch the tendency of even their most highly-prized institutions, since that which was established in the interests of the right, may so easily become the agent of the wrong."
-James Fenimore Cooper-
(1789-1851) American Novelist
"If a passion for freedom is not in vogue, patriots may sound the alarm till they are weary. The Act of Habeas Corpus, by which prisoners may insist on being brought to trial within a limited time, is the corner-stone of our liberty."
-Horace Walpole-
"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-
"The executive branch of this government never has, nor will suffer, while I preside, any improper conduct of its officers to escape with impunity."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: letter to Gouverneur Morris, 1795
"[There can be no] rational administration of government when good men are held in the same esteem as bad ones."
-Polybius-
(ca. 203-120 BC,) Greek historian
"It is a great importance to set a resolution, not to be shaken, never to tell an untruth. There is no vice so mean, so pitiful, so contemptible and he who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual, he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world's believing him. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all it's good dispositions."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"Fraud may consist as well in the suppression of what is true as in the representation of what is false. If a man professing to answer a question, select those facts only which are likely to give a credit to the person of whom he speaks, and keep back the rest, he is a more artful knave than he who tells a direct falsehood."
-Justice Heath-
English Jurist
Source: Tapp v. Lee (1803), 3 Bos. & Pull, 371; Park, J., Foster v. Charles (1830), 4 M. & P. 70.
"An honest answer is the sign of true friendship."
-Proverb-
Source: The Holy Bible, Proverbs 24:26
"Congress is continually appointing fact-finding committees, when what we really need are some fact-facing committees."
-Roger Allen-
"A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both."
-Dwight D. Eisenhower-
(1890-1969), 34th US President, WWII General
Source: first inaugural address, 20 January 1953
"Over the 20th century, the federal government has assumed a vast and unprecedented set of powers. Not only has the exercise of those powers upset the balance between federal and state governments; run roughshod over individuals, families, and firms; and reduced economic opportunity for all; but most of what the federal government does today -- to put the point as plainly and candidly as possible -- is illegitimate because done without explicit constitutional authority. The time has come to start returning power to the states and the people, to relimit federal power in our fundamental law, to restore constitutional government."
-Roger Pilon-
Vice President for Legal Affairs for the Cato Institute
Source: Restoring Constitutional Government, Cato's Letter #9, p. 1, published by the Cato Institute (1995).
"That frequent recurrence to fundamental principles, and a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, industry and frugality, are absolutely necessary to preserve the blessings of liberty, and keep government free. The people ought, therefore, to pay particular attention to these points, in the choice of officers and representatives, and have a right to exact a due and constant regard to them, from their legislators and magistrates, in the making and executing such laws as are necessary for the good government of the State."
-Vermont Declaration of Rights-
Source: Article 16
"Not to be, but to seem, virtuous -- it is a formula whose utility we all discovered in the nursery."
-C. S. Lewis-
(1898-1963), British novelist
"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-
(1950- ) Author
"If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem. It is true that you may fool all the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all of the time; but you can't fool all of the people all the time."
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
"Of all the properties which belong to honorable men, not one is so highly prized as that of character."
-Henry Clay-
(1777-1852) U. S. Senator, Speaker of the House of Representatives
"Integrity is doing the right thing, even if nobody is watching."
-Jim Stovall-
(1958-) American writer, blind
"No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which one is true."
-Nathaniel Hawthorne-
(1804-1864) American writer
"It is not the fact of liberty but the way in which liberty is exercised that ultimately determines whether liberty itself survives."
-Dorothy Thompson-
(1894-1961)
Source: Ladies Home Journal, May 1958
"Fidelity to the public requires that the laws be as plain and explicit as possible, that the less knowing may understand, and not be ensnared by them, while the artful evade their force."
-Samuel Cooke-
(1709-1783) Pastor of the Second Church in Cambridge
Source: May 30, 1770, Sermon before the Massachusets Bay provincial House of Representatives
"You ask yourself not if this or that is expedient, but if it is right."
-Alan Paton-
(1903-1988) South African author, anti-apartheid activist.
"Once we start to worry too often and too deeply about what certain individuals and what certain groups think about us, then we might start selling our souls for the sake of expediency."
-Otis Chandler-
(1927-2006) Publisher of the Los Angeles Times (1960-1980)
Source: 1969
"The contention that an injury can amount to a crime only when inflicted by intention is no provincial or transient notion. It is as universal and persistent in mature systems of law as belief in freedom of the human will and a consequent ability and duty of the normal individual to choose between good and evil."
-US Supreme Court-
1952
"Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
"Farce, gross incompetence, and tragedy is the hallmark of big centralized government, wherever it develops. Big centralized government has developed in the United States year after year since the 1930s, and it has both solidified and metastasized since 9-11. Today, we live at the will and by the grace of a dystopian and grasping government. There is not an exceptional amount of time left before this government collapses, but before it does, we the people will suffer far more than we have suffered to date. Banking collapses, mortgage fraud at the highest levels, government bailouts, currency printing, and inflation in food and energy are just a foretaste of the future, led by the same Washington public-private cartel we have suffered for decades. . . .
I believe our government -- outdated, unrestrained by the Constitution and soon to default on every debt it has taken on in our name -- cannot long endure. But unlike those who run and benefit from our modern American nationalism, corporatism and socialism, I do not fear average Americans seeking self-government, rule of law and liberty.
That's why on Sept. 11, I will not be celebrating America's undeclared wars on countries that had nothing to do with the Sept. 11 attacks 10 years ago. I will not be attending remembrances of victims of that day, because those remembrances refuse to count American liberty, rule of law and freedom of trade and movement uppermost on that list of the sacrificed. I will not attend any program offered by a religious or political organization that seeks to ride a federal government bandwagon to confirm some imperative of war against Islam halfway around the world, or that seeks to promote the false concept of a culture war as somehow God's intent for America.
On this 10-year anniversary, I intend to go about my business as usual, and say a prayer of gratitude for the small freedoms I have left. In the afternoon, I'll be in Charlottesville, Va., learning about local apprenticeship and crafts demonstrations. In the evening, I'll check the livestock and gather the eggs. I won't allow what I personally experienced that day in the Pentagon, nor the subsequent government drumbeats for war, waving the Sept. 11 banner, to diminish my awareness of the meaning of liberty. . . .
The real battle for Americans today is a battle to reassert our independence from an overbearing and unsustainable state. Today, we can all celebrate that there are fundamental cracks in the federal state's veneer, and we can be grateful for the options we still have in our own lives to live free, to practice charity and faith, creativity and productivity and to rediscover our own power as individuals and communities."
-Karen Kwiatkowski-
(1960-) retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel, included duties as Pentagon desk officer and a variety of roles for the National Security Agency, author, columnist
9 Sep 2011
"From the utopian viewpoint, the United States constitution is a singularly hard-bitten and cautious document, for it breathes the spirit of skepticism about human altruism and incorporates a complex system of checks, balances and restrictions, so that everybody is holding the reins on everybody else."
-Chad Walsh-
Source: From Utopia to Nightmare, 1962
"If you want to be free, there is but one way; it is to guarantee an equally full measure of liberty to all your neighbors. There is no other."
-Carl Schurz-
(1829-1906) German revolutionary, author, newspaper editor, journalist, Union Army general during US Civil War, first German-born U.S. Senator (MO-R)
"The civilized man has a moral obligation to be skeptical, to demand the credentials of all statements that claim to be facts."
-Bergan Evans
(1904-1978)
Source: The Natural History of Nonsense, 1946
"It is a mindless philosophy that assumes that one's private beliefs have nothing to do with public office. Does it make sense to entrust those who are immoral in private with the power to determine the nation's moral issues and, indeed, its destiny? .... The duplicitous soul of a leader can only make a nation more sophisticated in evil."
-Dr. Ravi Zacharias-
"It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money as long as you have it."
-Edwin Way Teale-
(1889-1980)
Source: Circle of the Seasons, 1953
"I have found some of the best reasons I ever had for remaining at the bottom simply by looking at the men at the top."
-Frank Moore Colby-
(1865–1925) American educator, writer
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what's right."
-Isaac Asimov-
(1920-1992) American author and professor of biochemistry at Boston University
"Conformities are called for much more eagerly today than yesterday... skeptics, liberals, individuals with a taste for private life and their own inner standards of behavior, are objects of fear and derision and targets of persecution for either side... in the great ideological wars of our time."
-Isaiah Berlin-
(1909-1997)
Source: Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century, 1950
"There can be no public or private virtue unless the foundation of action is the practice of truth."
-George Jacob Holyoake-
(1817-1906) English secularist
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public."
-Theodore Roosevelt-
(1858-1919) 26th US President
"Without an unfettered press, without liberty of speech, all of the outward forms and structures of free institutions are a sham, a pretense -- the sheerest mockery. If the press is not free; if speech is not independent and untrammeled; if the mind is shackled or made impotent through fear, it makes no difference under what form of government you live, you are a subject and not a citizen."
-William E. Borah-
(1865-1940) U. S. Senator
Source: Remarks to the Senate, 19 April 1917
"Every man who says frankly and fully what he thinks is so far doing a public service. We should be grateful to him for attacking most unsparingly our most cherished opinions."
-Sir Leslie Stephen-
(1832-1904), literary essayist, author
Source: The Suppression of Poisonous Opinions, 1883
"There is no inherent misdirection in holding unorthodox views. Indeed, the autonomous individual, free from compulsive conformance and unquestioned assumptions, is likely to be unorthodox... They stimulate the climate of controversy without which political democracy becomes an empty formalism."
-Snell Putney-
Source: The Adjusted American, 1964
"By academic freedom I understand the right to search for truth and to publish and teach what one holds to be true. This right implies also a duty; one must not conceal any part of what one has recognized to be true."
-Albert Einstein-
(1879-1955) Physicist and Professor, Nobel Prize 1921
Source: Letter on his seventy-fifth birthday, 1954
"He who sees the truth, let him proclaim it, without asking who is for it or who is against it."
-Henry George-
(1839-1897) American political economist
Source: The Land Question, 1881
"You must study to be frank with the world: frankness is the child of honesty and courage. Say just what you mean to do on every occasion, and take it for granted that you mean to do right."
-Robert E. Lee-
(1807-1870) General-in-Chief of the Confederate States army
"In 1956, I shall not go to the polls. I have not registered. I believe that democracy has so far disappeared in the United States that no two evils exist. There is but one evil party with two names, and it will be elected despite all I can do or say."
-W.e.b. DuBois-
"War is merely the continuation of policy by other means."
-Carl von Clausewitz-
"Character in many ways is everything in leadership. It is made up of many things, but I would say character is really integrity. When you delegate something to a subordinate, for example, it is absolutely your responsibility, and he must understand this. You as a leader must take complete responsibility for what the subordinate does. I once said, as a sort of wisecrack, that leadership consists of nothing but taking responsibility for everything that goes wrong and giving your subordinates credit for everything that goes well. "
-Dwight D. Eisenhower-
... this as we rapidly approach a character-free 2016 presidential election...
"Wise politicians will be cautious about fettering the government with restrictions that cannot be observed, because they know that every break of the fundamental laws, though dictated by necessity, impairs that sacred reverence which ought to be maintained in the breast of rulers towards the constitution of a country."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804)
Source: Federalist No. 25, 21 December 1787. Reference: Hamilton, Federalist No. 25 (167)
"When a man assumes a public trust, he should consider himself as public property."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"Not every item of news should be published. Rather must those who control news policies endeavor
to make every item of news serve a certain purpose."
-Joseph Paul Goebbels-
(1897-1945) Nazi Propaganda Minister
Source: Diary, 14 March 1943
"For those who stubbornly seek freedom, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination. These are easy to perceive in the totalitarian societies, much less so in the system of 'brainwashing under freedom' to which we are subjected and which all too often we serve as willing or unwitting instruments."
-Noam Chomsky-
(1928- ) American linguist and political writer
"The battle for the world is the battle for definitions."
-Thomas Szasz-
(1920-2012) Hungarian-American Professor of Psychiatry, Author, Libertarian
"The party ... must not become a servant of the masses, but their master. ... 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
1935
Source: writing about his Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers' Party, or NAZI) in Mein Kampf (1935)
"Academies that are founded at public expense are instituted not so much to cultivate men's natural abilities as to restrain them."
-Baruch Spinoza-
(1632-1677)
"I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is Mass Psychology. ...It's importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda ...Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated."
-Bertrand Russell-
[Bertrand Arthur William Russell] (1872-1970) Philosopher, educator
"It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is."
-Bill Clinton-
[William Jefferson Blythe III] (1946- ), 42nd US President
Source: Excerpt from Grand Jury testimony, Sep 21, 1998
"The road to tyranny, we must remember, begins with the destruction of the truth."
-Bill Clinton-
[William Jefferson Blythe III] (1946- ), 42nd US President
Source: speech at the University of Connecticut, Oct 15, 1997
"The other thing we have to do is to take seriously the role in this problem of... older men who prey on underage women... There are consequences to decisions and... one way or the other, people always wind up being held accountable."
-Bill Clinton-
[William Jefferson Blythe III] (1946- ), 42nd US President
Source: June 13, 1996, in a speech endorsing a national effort against teen pregnancy
"You can't get rich in politics unless you're a crook."
-Harry S. Truman-
(1884-1972), 33rd US President
Source: Attributed
"The measure of a man's character is what he would do if he knew he never would be found out."
-Thomas Babington Macaulay-
(1800-1859) [Lord Macaulay] 1st Baron Macaulay, British historian
"No legacy is so rich as honesty."
-William Shakespeare-
(1564-1616) Playwright
Source: All's Well That Ends Well, Act 3, Scene 5 (c. 1604)
"Integrity is what we do, what we say, and what we say we do."
-Don Galer-
"The reality is, if we tell the truth, we only have to tell the truth once. If you lie, you have to keep lying forever."
-Rabbi Wayne Dosick-
"The man who fears no truths has nothing to fear from lies."
-Sir Francis Bacon-
(1561-1626) English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, orator, and author
"Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: "You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society."
-Doris Lessing-
"The highest proof of virtue is to possess boundless power without abusing it."
-Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay-
"An attitude of moderation is apt to be misunderstood when passions are greatly excited and when victory is apt to rest with the extremists on one side or the other; yet I think it is in the long run the only wise attitude..."
-Theodore Roosevelt-
"If liberty is worth keeping and free representative government worth saving, we must stand for all American fundamentals—not some, but all. All are woven into the great fabric of our national well-being. We cannot hold fast to some only, and abandon others that, for the moment, we find inconvenient. If one American fundamental is prostrated, others in the end will surely fall."
-Albert J. Beveridge-
(1862-1927) American historian, US Senator (R-IN)
1920
"The peak of tolerance is most readily achieved by those who are not burdened by convictions."
-Alexander Chase-
Source: Perspectives, 1966
"There can be no compromise on basic principles.
There can be no compromise on moral issues.
There can be no compromise on matters of knowledge,
of truth, of rational conviction."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
"Integrity is its own reward."
-Dr. Laura Schlessinger-
"He does not believe, that does not live according to his belief."
-Dr. Thomas Fuller-
(1608-1661) English clergyman, writer
Source: "The Church History of Britain"
"The quixotic desire to do good, be universally fair and make everybody happy is understandable [...] There is only one problem with this approach. We are a court."
-Justice Janice Brown-
(1949-) federal judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Associate Justice of the California Supreme Court (1996-2005)
Source: Justice Janice Brown California Supreme Court, quoted in Gathering Mob: Part II by Thomas Sowell
"The fate of the country does not depend on how you vote at the polls -- the worst man is as strong as the best at that game; it does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot-box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning."
-Henry David Thoreau-
(1817-1862) American author, poet, philosopher, polymath, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and transcendentalist
Source: Slavery in Massachusetts (1854)
"We must pity the poor wretched, timid soul who is too faint-hearted to resist his oppressors. He sings the song of the dammed: “I can’t fight back; I have too much to lose; I own too much property; I have worked too hard to get what I have; They will put me out of business if I resist; I might go to jail; I have my family to think about.” Such poor miserable creatures have misplaced values and are hiding their cowardice behind pretended family responsibility -- blindly refusing to see that the most glorious legacy that one can bequeath to posterity is liberty; and that the only true security is liberty."
-Marvin Cooley-
"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
"When even one American -- who has done nothing wrong -- is forced by fear to shut his mind and close his mouth, then all Americans are in peril."
-Harry S. Truman-
(1884-1972), 33rd US President
August 14, 1951
Source: Address at the Dedication of the New Washington Headquarters of the American Legion
"To make your children capable of honesty is the beginning of education."
-John Ruskin-
(1819-1900) British author, artist, social critic
"As part of the conversation with student leaders, we talked about the concept of Zero Tolerance. While I appreciate the desire for such a policy, it is unachievable under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The challenge we all face is to find the balance between wanting to eliminate expressions of racism and bigotry and supporting the free speech guaranteed by the First Amendment. If we value freedom of speech, we must acknowledge that some may find the expressions of others unwelcome, painful, or even, offensive. We can, however, speak out and condemn such expressions, and we can work to create a more welcoming and inclusive environment."
-Mark Kennedy-
President of University of North Dakota
Source: October 05, 2016, Statement from the University of North Dakota
"Apply just the right amount of force — never too much, never too little. All of us know of people who have failed to accomplish what they set out to do because of not properly gauging the amount of effort required. At one extreme, they fall short of the mark; at the other, they do not know when to stop."
-Jigoro Kano-
"You become a libertarian when you realize that it's wrong to hurt people and take their stuff. You become an anarchist when you realize that there are no exceptions."
-Parrish Miller-
"Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right, from the frame of their nature, to knowledge, as their great Creator, who does nothing in vain, has given them understandings, and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean, of the characters and conduct of their rulers."
-John Adams-
A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law (1765)
"If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible."
-Henry David Thoreau-
(1817-1862) American author, poet, philosopher, polymath, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and transcendentalist
"The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those who speak it."
-George Orwell-
[Eric Arthur Blair] (1903-1950) British author
"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
"If by the liberty of the press were understood merely the liberty of discussing the propriety of public measures and political opinions, let us have as much of it as you please: But if it means the liberty of affronting, calumniating and defaming one another, I, for my part, own myself willing to part with my share of it, whenever our legislators shall please so to alter the law and shall chearfully consent to exchange my liberty of abusing others for the privilege of not being abused myself."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
Source: An Account of the Supremest Court of Judicature in Pennsylvania, viz. The Court of the Press, 12 September 1789, Reference: Franklin Collected Works, Lemay, ed., 1152.
"The press is hostile to the idea of liberty. Most people in the press are for big government. Most people think that the solution to anything, whether it's health care problems, education, whatever it is -- it's got to be more government."
-Harry Browne-
(1933-2006) American libertarian writer, politician, and free-market investment analyst. Libertarian candidate for US President 1996 & 2000
July 4, 2002
"Whoever controls the media, controls the mind."
-Jim Morrison-
(1943-1971) Musician
"I could think of no worse example for nations abroad, who for the first time were trying to put free electoral procedures into effect, than that of the United States wrangling over the results of our presidential election, and even suggesting that the presidency itself could be stolen by thievery at the ballot box."
-Thomas Jefferson
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"We are reluctant to admit that we owe our liberties to men of a type that today we hate and fear -- unruly men, disturbers of the peace, men who resent and denounce what Whitman called 'the insolence of elected persons' -- in a word, free men."
-Gerald W. Johnson-
(1890-1980)
Source: American Freedom and the Press, 1958
"We should be unfaithful to ourselves if we should ever lose sight of the danger to our liberties if anything partial or extraneous should infect the purity of our free, fair, virtuous, and independent elections."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: Inaugural Address, March 4, 1797
"I guess truth can hurt you worse in an election than about anything that can happen to you."
-Will Rogers-
(1879-1935) American humorist
"Those who, by the essence of their belief, are committed to Direct Action only are — just who? Why, the non-resistants; precisely those who do not believe in violence at all! Now do not make the mistake of inferring that I say direct action means non-resistance; not by any means. Direct action may be the extreme of violence, or it may be as peaceful as the waters of the Brook of Siloa that go softly. 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-
"The fabric of democracy is always fragile everywhere because it depends on the will of citizens to protect it, and when they become scared, when it becomes dangerous for them to defend it, it can go very quickly."
-Margaret Atwood-
"I have always said that my whole public life was an experiment to determine whether an intelligent people would sustain a man in acting sensibly on each proposition that arose, and in doing nothing for mere show or demagogical effect."
-James A. Garfield-
"A government resting on the minority is an aristocracy, not a republic, and could not be safe with a numerical and physical force against it, without a standing army, an enslaved press and a disarmed populace."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: The Federalist No. 46.
"Ballots are the rightful, and peaceful, successors of bullets; and that when ballots have fairly, and constitutionally, decided, there can be no successful appeal, back to bullets; that there can be no successful appeal, except to ballots themselves, at succeeding elections."
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
Hypocrite.
"The possession of unlimited power will make a despot of almost any man. There is a possible Nero in the gentlest human creature that walks."
-Thomas Bailey Aldrich-
(1836-1907)
Source: Ponkapog Papers, 1903
"The only shape in which equality is really connected with justice is this -- justice presupposes general rules. If these general rules are to be maintained at all, it is obvious that they must be applied equally to every case which satisfies their terms."
-James Fitzjames Stephens-
(1829-1894)
Source: Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, 1873
"At the foundation of our civil liberties lies the principle that denies to government officials an exceptional position before the law and which subjects them to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen."
-Justice Louis D. Brandeis-
(1856-1941) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: Burdeau v. McDowell, 1921
"If the legislature clearly misinterprets a Constitutional provision, the frequent repetition of the wrong will not create a right."
-Amos v. Mosley-
Source: 77 SO 619. Also see Kingsley v. Metril, 99 NW 1044
"Complaints are every where heard from our most considerate and virtuous citizens, equally the friends of public and private faith, and of public and personal liberty, that our governments are too unstable; that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties; and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice, and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Federalist no. 10
"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
"Money is always to be found when men are to be sent to the frontiers to be destroyed: when the object is to preserve them, it is no longer so."
-Voltaire-
"Without general elections, without unrestrained freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution... in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element."
-Rosa Luxemburg-
(1880-1919)
Source: in The Russian Revolution
"The short memories of the American voters is what keeps our politicians in office."
-Will Rogers-
(1879-1935) American humorist
"[A] function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve it's high purpose when it indices a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with things 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 presses for understanding."
-Justice Potter Stewart-
(1915-1985), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: in Free Speech and Political Protest [Marvin Summers], 1967
"It is the growing custom to narrow control, concentrate power, disregard and disfranchise the public; and assuming that certain powers by divine right of money-raising or by sheer assumption, have the power to do as they think best without consulting the wisdom of mankind."
-W. E. B. Du Bois-
(1868-1963) Professor, Civil Rights Activist, NAACP Founding Member
Source: The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois
"The people’s right to obtain information does not, of course, depend on any assured ability to understand its significance or use it wisely. Facts belong to the people simply because they relate to interests that are theirs, government that is theirs, and votes that they may desire to cast, for they are entitled to an active role in shaping every fundamental decision of state."
-Edmond Cahn-
Source: The Predicament of Democratic Man, 1961
"They only care about frivolous things. When I was a boy, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly ... impatient of restraint."
-Hesiod-
Greek poet, ~700BC
“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
-Douglas Adams-
"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."
-George Orwell-
[Eric Arthur Blair] (1903-1950) British author
Source: Animal Farm, 1945
"Without deviation, without exception, without any ifs, buts, or whereases, freedom of speech means that you shall not do something to people either for the views they express, or the words they speak or write."
-Justice Hugo L. Black-
(1886-1971) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: One Man's Stand For Freedom, 1963
"Truth and news are not the same thing."
-Katharine Graham-
(1917-2001) American publisher, owner of Washington Post and Newsweek magazine.
"To argue against any breach of liberty from the ill use that may be made of it, is to argue against liberty itself, since all is capable of being abused."
-Lord George Lyttleton-
(1709-1773)
"The trade of governing has always been monopolized by the most ignorant and the most rascally individuals of mankind."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
"Together we have come to realize that for most men the right to learn is curtailed by the obligation to attend school."
-Ivan Illich-
(1926-2002) Austrian philosopher, author, social critic
Source: Deschooling Society, 1971
"The first goal and primary function of the U.S. public school is not to educate good people, but good citizens. It is the function which we call - in enemy nations - 'state indoctrination.'"
-Jonathan Kozol-
(1936- ) American writer, educator, activist, best known for his books on public education in the US
"Honor is like an island, rugged and without a beach; once we have left it, we can never return."
-Nicolas Boileau-Despraux-
"It is hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head."
-Sally Kempton-
Writer
Source: "Cutting Loose," by Sally Kempton. Esquire, July 1970
"Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up."
-C. S. Lewis-
"Gold is the money of kings; silver is the money of gentlemen; barter is the money of peasants; but debt is the money of slaves."
-Franz-
"Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest."
-Denis Diderot-
"When goods don’t cross borders, Soldiers will."
-Frederic Bastiat-
Did Bastiat say “when goods don’t cross borders, soldiers will”?
"They have gun control in Cuba. They have universal health care in Cuba. So why do they want to come here?"
-Paul Harvey-
[Paul Harvey Aurandt] (1918-2009) American radio broadcaster
Source: August 31, 1994
"Schools have not necessarily much to do with education... they are mainly institutions of control, where basic habits must be inculcated in the young. Education is quite different and has little place in school."
-Sir Winston Churchill-
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
"Government will not fail to employ education
to strengthen its hands and perpetuate its institutions."
-William Godwin-
(1756-1836)
"I don't want my children fed or clothed by the state, but if I had to choose, I would prefer that to their being educated by the state."
-Max Victor Belz-
Iowa grain dealer
"Government schools can't teach reading, writing, and arithmetic -- why should we trust them to teach morality, respect, and character? If public education does for ethics what it's done for learning, we'll end up with a generation of immoral, disrespectful, and characterless students."
-Steve Dasbach-
Chair of the Libertarian National Committee (1993-1998) and its National Executive Director (1998-2002)
"Men had better be without education than be educated by their rulers; for their education is but the mere breaking in of the steer to the yoke; the mere discipline of the hunting dog, which, by dint of severity, is made to forego the strongest impulse of his nature, and instead of devouring his prey, to hasten with it to the feet of his master."
-Thomas Hodgskin-
Source: Mechanics' Magazine , 11 October 1823, Ref: Class and Conflict in Nineteenth-century England, 1815-1850, by Patricia Hollis
"Just as there is a very short distance between the U.S. and Cuba, there is a very short distance between a democracy and a dictatorship where the government gets to decide what to do, how to think, and how to live. And sometimes your freedom is not taken away at gunpoint, but instead it is done one piece of paper at a time, one seemingly meaningless rule at a time, one small silencing at a time. Never allow the government -- or anyone else -- to tell you what you can or cannot believe or what you can and cannot say or what your conscience tells you to have to do or not do."
-Armando Valladares-
(1937-) Cuban poet, diplomat, and human rights activist
Source: Armando Valladares speech receiving the 2016 Canterbury Medal
"Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
"It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong."
-Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
"The dominant purpose of the First Amendment was to prohibit the widespread practice of government suppression of embarrassing information."
-Justice William O. Douglas-
(1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: New York Times v. Unites States (Pentagon Papers)
"Avoid any specific discussion of public policy at public meetings."
-Quintus Tullius Cicero-
(c.102-43 B.C.), Roman general; brother of Cicero the orator
"The idea that political speech had to be protected at any cost dates to Colonial days, during which the press and the public were not allowed to express themselves freely on matters of public concern. The King and his government often used restrictive measures, such as licensing of printing presses and the doctrine of seditious libel, to silence unfavorable public comment."
-Craig R. Smith-
Source: All Speech Is Created Equal, 1986, Washington, D.C., Freedom of Expression Foundation
"If there is a bedrock principle of the First Amendment, it is that the 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: Texas vs. Johnson, 1989
"The First Amendment was designed to protect offensive speech, because nobody ever tries to ban the other kind."
-Mike Godwin-
staff counsel, Electronic Freedom Foundation
"Everybody is in favor of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people's idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone says anything back, that is an outrage."
-Sir Winston Churchill-
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
Source: Speech, House of Commons, 1943
"Perhaps this is why so many intellectuals despise the market. It reveals truths they cannot access, no matter how brilliant, credentialled, studied they might be. The market cuts through every conceit, every preconceived notion of what should be, and presents reality as it is. You can resent it and decry it. Or you can see within it the marvelous revelation of the human personality as it looks when people behave as if they have rights and freedom."
-Jeffrey A. Tucker-
"Top Selling Christmas Gifts Since 1983"
“Where powers are assumed which have not been delegated a nullification of the act is the rightful remedy: that every state has a natural right, in cases not within the compact to nullify of their own authority all assumptions of power by others within their limits.”
-Thomas Jefferson-
"The limit where freedom begins and ends, where its rights and duties come together, is called law, and the State itself must bow to the law."
-Albert Camus-
"I have not come here with reference to any flag but that of freedom. If your Union does not symbolize universal emancipation, it brings no Union for me. If your Constitution does not guarantee freedom for all, it is not a Constitution I can ascribe to. If your flag is stained by the blood of a brother held in bondage, I repudiate it in the name of God. I came here to witness the unfurling of a flag under which every human being is to be recognized as entitled to his freedom. Therefore, with a clear conscience, without any compromise of principles, I accepted the invitation of the Government of the United States to be present and witness the ceremonies that have taken place today. And now let me give the sentiment which has been, and ever will be, the governing passion of my soul: 'Liberty for each, for all, and forever!'"
-William Lloyd Garrison-
"Printers are educated in the Belief, that when Men differ in Opinion, both sides ought equally to have the Advantage of being heard by the Public; and that when Truth and Error have fair Play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter: Hence [printers] cheerfully serve all contending Writers that pay them well, without regarding on which side they are of the Question in Dispute."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
Source: “An Apology for Printers,” Pennsylvania Gazette, 10 June 1731
"A forbidden writing is thought to be a certain spark of truth, that flies up in the face of them who seek to tread it out."
-Sir Francis Bacon-
(1561-1626) Philosopher, British Lord Chancellor
Source: The Advancement of Learning, 1605
"Search for the truth is the noblest occupation of man; its publication is a duty."
-Anne Louise Germaine de Stael-
(1766-1817) French author
"Progressives understand that their program for a government-centered society becomes more plausible the more people believe that work -- individual striving -- is unavailing. Government grows as fatalism grows, and fatalism grows as progressivism inculcates in people the demoralizing -- make that de-moralizing -- belief that they are victims of circumstances."
-George Will-
Journalist
Source: Purdue Has the President America Needs, Jun. 15, 2016
"THE most widespread form of child abuse in the United States is parents' sending children to the government to be educated."
-Neal Boortz-
(1945- ) Radio talk show host, columnist
"The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level."
-Norman Mailer-
(1923-2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and film director
"All animals are created equal but some animals are more equal than others."
-George Orwell-
[Eric Arthur Blair] (1903-1950) British author
Source: in "Animal Farm"
"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
"A tyrant... is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader."
-Plato-
(429-347 BC)
Source: The Republic
"The road to tyranny, we must never forget, begins with the destruction of the truth."
-Bill Clinton-
[William Jefferson Blythe III] (1946- ), 42nd US President
Source: 10/15/95, University of Connecticut
"I used to be employed as a field engineer servicing [a major broadcast network's] distribution equipment, specifically their affiliates' satellite dishes. I've had many talks with TV newsmen. The most telling was one who confessed that he didn't think he could continue his job and live with himself because he daily saw 'the difference between what I am forced to report and what's really happening.' He told me that, at the first meeting with 'corporate's' news director [from the corporate holding company that owned the station, not the network], the ND told them that 'our job as reporters was to shape public opinion.' When someone protested that their job was to discover and report the truth, the ND responded, 'Whatever the public's perception is is the truth and it's your job to make sure that they have the proper perceptions.' That man's statement is always in the back of my mind whenever I see or read anything in the 'news,' that the job of reporters today is not to report hard, verifiable facts but rather to shape public opinion using selected facts presented in carefully arranged fashion."
-Chris Meissen-
"The Right of all members of society to form their own beliefs and communicate them freely to others must be regarded as an essential principle of a democratically organized society."
-Thomas I. Emerson-
(1907-1991) Lines Professor of Law, Yale University, author
Source: Toward A General Theory of the First Amendment, 1966
"It has been well said that really up-to-date liberals do not care what people do, as long as it is compulsory."
-George Will-
(1941-) American newspaper columnist, journalist, and author
"The Radical Centre seem to have the same obsession with control that the fascists and communists had, but unlike them, it is control for control's sake rather than in the service of some clear ideology ... They do not seek the triumph of Volk or the dictatorship of the proletariat, they just seek to replace all social interactions with politically mediated interactions. They seek to regulate everything via a total state that ... just wants a world in which nothing whatsoever is private, everything is political. Their symbol is not the Hammer and Sickle or the Swastika, it is the CCTV camera."
-Perry de Havilland-
British founder of Samizdata
"The Information Age offers much to mankind, and I would like to think that we will rise to the challenges it presents. But it is vital to remember that information — in the sense of raw data — is not knowledge, that knowledge is not wisdom, and that wisdom is not foresight. But information is the first essential step to all of these."
-Arthur C. Clarke-
"Give them a corrupt House of Lords,
give them a venal House of Commons,
give them a tyrannical Prince,
give them a truckling court,
and let me have but an unfettered press.
I will defy them to encroach a hair’s breadth
upon the liberties of England."
-Richard Brinsley Sheridan-
(1751-1816) Irish playwright and Whig statesman
Source: Speech in the House of Commons, 6 February 1810
"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,
"Where men cannot freely convey their thoughts to one another, no other liberty is secure."
-William E. Hocking-
(1873-1966)
Source: Freedom of the Press, 1947
"The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected."
-Gilbert Keith Chesterton-
(1874-1936) British essayist, critic, poet, and novelist
"Being a politician means never having to say you're sorry. You don't have to say, 'I never should have voted to subsidize that ridiculous Enron project in India.' ... After all, they're greedy businessmen and you're a selfless public servant."
-Harry Browne-
(1933-2006) American libertarian writer, politician, and free-market investment analyst. Libertarian candidate for US President 1996 & 2000
"In a free market, consumer sovereignty and competition tend to create instability when sellers learn to game the system too well... In a technocratic system, it is more difficult for consumers to exercise countervailing power. Innovative competitors are often precluded by regulation. Suppliers tend to apply concentrated lobbying power to protect their interests, while the diffuse interests of the consumer are poorly represented in the political process. ... Centralized, regulated systems look good on paper, and they may be effective as they start. However, market systems learn faster, because competitive innovation prevents a market from getting captured by the incumbents who have learned how to game the system."
-Arnold Kling-
(1954-) American economist, scholar
"[Socialism] is a creed even more denigrating than Catholicism, but it offers more tangible bribes for its acceptance."
-Auberon Herbert-
(1838-1906) English author
"... 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. For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do? 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?"
-Alexander Hamilton-
Federalist No. 84
A blind squirrel, a stopped clock, etc. ...
"The plan of the convention declares that the power of Congress ... shall extend to certain enumerated cases. This specification of particulars evidently excludes all pretension to a general legislative authority, because an affirmative grant of special powers would be absurd, as well as useless, if a general authority was intended."
-Alexander Hamilton-
Federalist No. 83
"The superficial distinctions of Fascism, Bolshevism, Hitlerism, are the concern of journalists and publicists; the serious student sees in them only one root-idea of a complete conversion of social power into State power."
-Albert Jay Nock-
(1870-1945)
"The State governments possess inherent advantages, which will ever give them an influence and ascendancy over the National Government, and will for ever preclude the possibility of federal encroachments. That their liberties, indeed, can be subverted by the federal head, is repugnant to every rule of political calculation."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: speech to the New York Ratifying Convention, June 17, 1788
"Big business in America today and for some years has been openly at war with competition and, thus, at war with laissez-faire capitalism. ... The left's attack on corporate capitalism is, when examined, an attack on economic forms possible only in collusion between authoritarian government and bureaucratized, nonentrepreneurial business. It is unfortunate that many New Leftists are so uncritical as to accept this premise as indicating that all forms of capitalism are bad ..."
-Karl Hess-
(1923-1994) American speechwriter, author.
"Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the ease with which the many are governed by the few."
-David Hume-
(1711-1766)
Source: First Principles of Government, 1742
"The history books say that during the Progressive era, government trustbusters reined in business. Nonsense. Progressive 'reforms' -- railroad regulation, meat inspection, drug certification and the rest -- were done at the behest of big companies that wanted competition managed. They knew regulation would burden smaller companies more than themselves. The strategy works."
-John Stossel-
(1947-) American consumer reporter, investigative journalist, author and columnist
"Freedom from something is not enough. It should also be freedom for something. Freedom is not safety but opportunity. Freedom ought to be a means to enable the press to serve the proper functions of communication in a free society."
-Zechariah Chaffee, Jr.-
(1865-1957)
Source: Nieman Reports, April 1948
"The right of freely examining public characters and measures, and of free communication among the people thereon … has ever been justly deemed the only effectual guardian of every other right."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Virginia Resolutions, December 21, 1798
"You say that freedom of utterance is not for time of stress, and I reply with the sad truth that only in time of stress is freedom of utterance in danger... Only when free utterance is suppressed is it needed, and when it is needed it is most vital to justice."
-William Allen White-
(1868-1944)
Source: The Editor and his People, 1924
"The right to discuss freely and openly, by speech, by the pen, by the press, all political questions, and to examine the animadvert upon all political institutions is a right so clear and certain, so interwoven with our other liberties, so necessary, in fact, to their existence, that without it we must fall into despotism and anarchy."
-William Cullen Bryant-
(1794-1878)
Source: New York Evening Post, 18 November 1837
"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)
"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 may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst and provide for it."
-Patrick Henry-
(1736-1799) US Founding Father
Source: Patrick Henry, Speech at the Second Virginia Convention at St. John's Church in Richmond, Virginia (23 March 1775); first published in Life and Character of Patrick Henry (1817) by William Wirt
"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
"There are no hopeless situations; There are only men who have grown hopeless about them."
-Clare Boothe Luce-
(1903-1987) American author, playwright, journalist, ambassador, wife of Henry Luce, publisher/founder of Time, Life and Fortune
"In education markets, like the Asian tutoring industry, top teachers are superstars who get to design curricula for thousands or even millions of students and train scores or hundreds of other teachers to use their effective methods. Quality providers expand and are emulated by competitors, and there is a powerful incentive for meaningful innovation. ... One teacher in Korea’s private tutoring sector made $2 million last year because his web-based employer has profit sharing and he’s brilliant at what he does, so he gets tons of students. That’s what should have happened to [Jaime] Escalante. That’s the sort of success that should greet excellence in education at all levels. It doesn’t because we don’t have a market."
-Andrew J. Coulson-
"Why is it that millions of children who are pushouts or dropouts amount to business as usual in the public schools, while one family educating a child at home becomes a major threat to universal public education and the survival of democracy?"
-Stephen Arons-
Source: Compelling Belief: The Culture of American Schooling
"In a republican nation whose citizens are to be led by reason and persuasion and not by force, the art of reasoning becomes of first importance."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
1824
"Character is the accumulated confidence that individual men and women acquire from years of doing the right thing, over and over again, even when they don't feel like it. People with character understand that their lives are filled with events and choices that are significant, above all, not because of the short term success or failure of the search for money or position, but because the choices we make are actually making us into one kind of person, or another. Our life of choices is a life-long labor to make ourselves into a person who has begun to respond adequately to the awesome gift we received from God when He made us in His image."
-Alan Keyes-
(1950- ) US Politician
"The central task of education is to implant a will and facility for learning; it should produce not learned but learning people. The truly human society is a learning society, where grandparents, parents, and children are students together."
-Eric Hoffer-
(1902-1983) American author, philosopher, awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
"Nannyism is fascism on training wheels."
-R. L. Root-
“If an American is to amount to anything he must rely upon himself, and not upon the State; he must take pride in his own work, instead of sitting idle to envy the luck of others. He must face life with resolute courage, win victory if he can, and accept defeat if he must, without seeking to place on his fellow man a responsibility which is not theirs.”
-Theodore Roosevelt-
(1858-1919) 26th US President
"Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. "
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Notes on Virginia,1782
"Instead of giving money to found colleges to promote learning, why don't they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as good as the Prohibition one did, why, in five years we would have the smartest race of people on earth!"
-Will Rogers-
(1879-1935) American humorist
"My aim is not the establishment of an anarchist society or the total destruction of the state. Here I differ from anarchists. I do not believe that it is possible to destroy the modern state. It is pure imagination to think that some day this power will be overthrown. From a pragmatic standpoint there is no chance of success. Furthermore, I do not believe that anarchist doctrine is the solution to the problem of organization in society and government. I do not think that if anarchism were to succeed we should have a better or more livable society. Hence I am not fighting for the triumph of this doctrine. On the other hand, it seems to me that an anarchist attitude is the only one that is sufficiently radical in the face of a general statist system."
-Jacques Ellul-
"There are only two means by which men can deal with one another: guns or logic. Force or persuasion. Those who know that they cannot win by means of logic, have always resorted to guns."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
"It is unwise to be too sure of one's own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err."
-Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi-
(1869-1948)
"Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody is looking."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections."
-John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton-
"Sometimes people use 'respect' to mean 'treating someone like a person' and sometimes they use 'respect' to mean 'treating someone like an authority'.
And sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say 'if you won’t respect me I won’t respect you' and they mean 'if you won’t treat me like an authority I won’t treat you like a person'.
And they think they’re being fair but they aren’t, and it’s not okay."
-stimmyabby-
"When the truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie."
-Yevtushenko-
Soviet dissident poet
"If you charge too much, you're accused of price gauging. If you charge too little, you're accused of predatory pricing. If you charge the same as the market, you're accused of collusion."
-Walter Block-
"Let the laws be clear, uniform and precise; to interpret laws is almost always to corrupt them."
-Voltaire-
[François Marie Arouet] (1694-1778)
"Whenever we take away the liberties of those whom we hate, we are opening the way to loss of liberty for those we love."
-Wendell L. Willkie-
(1892-1944) Republican presidential candidate, 1940
"A people who extend civil liberties only to preferred groups start down the path either to dictatorship of the right or the left."
-William O. Douglas-
(1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: New York Times, 20 January 1980
"If I give you a forty five percent chance at lethal injection, a fifty percent chance at the electric chair, and a five percent chance for escape which are you going to vote for? The electric chair, because you're likely to win?"
-Michael Badnarik-
(1954- ) American software engineer, political figure, and former radio talk show host
"Not being able to govern events, I govern myself."
-Michel de Montaigne-
[Michel Eyquem De Montaigne] (1532-1592) French Renaissance scholar, philosopher, writer
"It was not the tycoons of big business, it was not the working classes, it was the intellectuals who reversed the trend toward political freedom and revived the doctrines of the absolute State, of totalitarian government rule, of the government's right to control the lives of the citizens in any manner it pleases. This time, it was not in the name of the "divine right of kings," but in the name of the divine right of the masses. The basic principle was the same: the right to enforce at the point of a gun the moral doctrines of whoever happens to seize control of the machinery of government."
-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
"The eyes of the world being thus on our Country, it is put the more on its good behavior, and under the greater obligation also, to do justice to the Tree of Liberty by an exhibition of the fine fruits we gather from it."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: letter to James Monroe, December 16, 1824
"If justice be a natural principle, then it is necessarily an immutable one; and can no more be changed — by any power inferior to that which established it — than can the law of gravitation, the laws of light, the principles of mathematics, or any other natural law or principle whatever; and all attempts or assumptions, on the part of any man or body of men — whether calling themselves governments, or by any other name — to set up their own commands, wills, pleasure, or discretion, in the place of justice, as a rule of conduct for any human being, are as much an absurdity, an usurpation, and a tyranny, as would be their attempts to set up their own commands, wills, pleasure, or discretion in the place of any and all the physical, mental, and moral laws of the universe. If there be any such principle as justice, it is, of necessity, a natural principle; and, as such, it is a matter of science, to be learned and applied like any other science. And to talk of either adding to, or taking from, it, by legislation, is just as false, absurd, and ridiculous as it would be to talk of adding to, or taking from, mathematics, chemistry, or any other science, by legislation."
-Lysander Spooner-
"You think following the rules will buy you a nice life, even if the rulse make you a slave."
-Malcom Reynolds-
Firefly
"Ignorance is king. Many would not profit by his abdication. Many enrich themselves by means of his dark monarchy. They are his Court, and in his name they defraud and govern, enrich themselves and perpetuate their power. Even literacy they fear, for the written word is another channel of communication that might cause their enemies to become united. Their weapons are keen-honed, and they use them with skill. They will press the battle upon the world when their interests are threatened, and the violence which follows will last until the structure of society as it now exists is leveled to rubble, and a new society emerges. I am sorry: But that is how I see it. "
-Walter M. Miller, Jr.-
"The less government interferes with private pursuits, the better for general prosperity."
-Martin Van Buren-
kakistocracy: Government under the control of a nation's worst or least-qualified citizens.
"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: in "Neither Left Nor Right"
"The Left/Right scale is a misleading way of comparing political systems. It
doesn't measure anything."
-Marshall Fritz-
(1943 -2008) American libertarian activist, founded the Advocates for Self-Government, and The Alliance for the Separation of School & State
"If you depart from moral absolutes, you go into a bottomless pit. Communism
and Naziism were catastrophic evils which both derived from moral relativism.
Their differences were minor compared to their similarities."
-Paul Johnson-
American historian
"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 [our] 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 squandered on unworthy men; and the rights of the citizen will be violated or disregarded. If [our] 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-
(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.
"Destroy the family, you destroy the country."
-Vladimir Ilyich Lenin-
[Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov] (1870 - 1924), First Leader of the Soviet Union
"The abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power."
-William Shakespeare-
(1564-1616) Playwright
"A feeble executive implies a feeble execution of the government. A feeble execution is but another phrase for a bad execution; and a government ill executed, whatever may be its theory, must be, in practice, a bad government."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: Federalist No. 70, 1788
"Communism is not a creation of the masses to overthrow the Banking establishment, but rather a creation of the Banking establishment to overthrow and enslave the people."
-Anthony J. Hilder-
American activist, author, film maker, talk show host, broadcaster and former actor
"When government will expropriate any wealth that people create, the present value of future output can actually be less than the value of the country's tangible resources. The power of predatory government to destroy wealth is truly awesome."
-Arnold Kling-
(1954-) American economist, scholar, and blogger
"(i) A person is justified in using reasonable force against a public servant if the person reasonably believes the force is necessary to:
(1) protect the person or a third person from what the person reasonably believes to be the imminent use of unlawful force;
(2) prevent or terminate the public servant’s unlawful entry of or attack on the person’s dwelling, curtilage, or occupied motor vehicle; or
(3) prevent or terminate the public servant’s unlawful trespass on or criminal interference with property lawfully in the person’s possession, lawfully in possession of a member of the person’s immediate family, or belonging to a person whose property the person has authority to protect."
-Indiana Code-
Source: Indiana Code, § 1. IC 35-41-3-2
"Government is instituted to protect property of every sort; as well that which lies in the various rights of individuals, as that which the term particularly expresses. 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 on Property, March 29, 1792
"As the federal government has progressively become larger over the decades, every significant introduction of government regulation, taxation and spending has been to the benefit of some big business."
-Timothy P. Carney-
"The ['Hillary Care'] plan prescribed some eye popping maximum fines: $5,000 for refusing to join the government mandated health plan; $5,000 for failing to pay premiums on time; 15 years in prison for doctors who received ‘anything of value’ in exchange for helping patients short circuit bureaucracy; $10,000 a day for faulty physician paperwork; and $50,000 for unauthorized patient treatment. When told the plan could bankrupt small businesses, Mrs. Clinton said, 'I can’t be responsible for every under-capitalized small business in America.'"
-Tony Snow-
(1955-2008) White House Press Secretary for the George W. Bush administration
Source: reporting on Hillary's health care plan, to which Zoh Hieronimus added, "Perhaps Hillary’s legacy will be that she made fascism seem lady-like."
"Socialism, failing to work as it always does. This time in Venezuela. You talk about giving everybody something free and all of a sudden, there’s no food to eat. And who do you think is the richest person in Venezuela? The daughter of Hugo Chavez. Hello!"
-Vin Scully-
[Vincent Edward Scully] (1927-) legendary American sportscaster
Source: June 17, 2016, during Los Angeles Dodgers game against the Milwaukee Brewers
"If voting changed anything, they would make it illegal."
-Emma Goldman-
(1869-1940) anarchist political activist, lionized as a free-thinking "rebel woman"
"Enron, of course, is exactly the kind of corporation which could not exist in pure capitalism. As a creature, in effect, of politicians, it was deliberately converted from a small pipeline company into an international conglomerate by conniving scoundrels who designed it from the beginning to use the power of their politician-friends to give it government contracts, subsidies, monopoly powers, and favorable regulations to force prospective customers to do business with them, essentially at gunpoint. Obviously, this is fascism, not capitalism, and what you get more and more of when you work to transform what was once the rule of clear-cut law into the rule of men (especially agenda-driving, nuance-inventing judges and lawyers)."
-Rick Gaber-
Libertarian writer
"Clinton realized that America could not economically afford the Protocol Gore negotiated. The Clinton-Gore's Energy Department found Kyoto would lead to $400 billion a year in lost output. ... Gore tries to throw Enron on the back of the current administration. But it was Enron Board Chairman Kenneth Lay who sold Clinton-Gore on Kyoto's cap and trade system. Gore, Clinton, and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin met with Lay on Aug. 7, 1997 to go over goals and procedures for the Kyoto session. ... The corporate smoking memo here was not that from an ExxonMobil adviser to oppose Dr. Watson, but the Enron internal memo saying Kyoto 'would do more to promote Enron's business than almost any other regulatory initiative'."
-Ken Adelman-
(1946-) American diplomat, political writer, policy analyst
"Whereas it has been proposed that the United States of America
become a part of a world federal government; and ...
this program...would entail the surrender of our national sovereignty
and...bring into being a form of government whose authority would
supercede that of the Constitution of The United States Government; and
...institute a system of laws where-by American citizens
could be tried by aliens in controversion of the provisions
of the Constitution of the United States; and
...the Veterans of Foreign Wars is composed solely of men who have worn
the uniform of the United States on foreign shores and in hostile waters
in time of war and from their personal experiences
are familiar with the traditions and operations of other countries; and
...many of our comrades rest forever in foreign soil and
their sacrifices were made to retain the dignity
and sovereignty of the United States of America:
Now therefore, be it Resolved by the Fiftieth Annual Convention
of the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States,
That we hereby declare that we are unalterably opposed
to any program which would entail the surrender of any part
of the sovereignty of the United States of America
in favor of a world government..."
-Veterans of Foreign Wars-
Source: "VFW Resolution No. 27", 1949, House Committee on Foreign Affairs Hearing, 81st Cong., 1st Sess. 10/12-13/1949 - Congressional Record
"No nation which refuses to exercise forbearance and to respect the freedom and rights of others can long remain strong and retain the confidence and respect of other nations. No nation ever loses its dignity or good standing by conciliating its differences and by exercising great patience with, and consideration for, the rights of other nations."
-Franklin D. Roosevelt-
"Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one's thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down. They know its power. Thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers, founded in injustice and wrong, are sure to tremble, if men are allowed to reason of righteousness, temperance, and of a judgment to come in their presence. Slavery cannot tolerate free speech. Five years of its exercise would banish the auction block and break every chain in the South."
-Frederick Douglass-
A Plea for Free Speech
"Some young men seem to labor under the misapprehension that since the draft is a violation of their rights, compliance with the draft law would constitute a moral sanction of that violation. This is a serious error. A forced compliance is not a sanction. All of us are forced to comply with many laws that violate our rights, but so long as we advocate the repeal of such laws, our compliance does not constitute a sanction. Unjust laws have to be fought ideologically; they cannot be fought or corrected by means of mere disobedience and futile martyrdom. To quote from an editorial on this subject in the April 1967 issue of Persuasion: 'One does not stop the juggernaut by throwing oneself in front of it. . . .'"
-Ayn Rand-
"While boasting of our noble deeds we're careful to conceal the ugly fact that by an iniquitous money system we have nationalized a system of oppression which, though more refined, is not 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
Source: 1872, in reference to the National Bank Act of 1863
"The colonies would gladly have borne the little tax on tea and other matters, had it not been that England took away from the colonies their money, which created great unemployment and dissatisfaction. Within a year, the poor houses were filled. The hungry and homeless walked the streets everywhere. The inability of the colonists to get power to issue their own money permanently out of the hands of George III and the International Bankers was probably the Prime reason for the Revolutionary War."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
Source: as quoted from his autobiography
"Thus, our national circulating medium is now at the mercy of loan transactions of banks, which lend, not money, but promises to supply money they do not possess."
-Irving Fisher-
(1867-1947) American economist
Source: 100% Money, 1935
"The Fed was largely responsible for converting what might have been a garden-variety recession, although perhaps a fairly severe one, into a major catastrophe. Instead of using its powers to offset the depression, it presided over a decline in the quantity of money by one-third from 1929 to 1933 ... Far from the depression being a failure of the free-enterprise system, it was a
tragic failure of government."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
Source: Two Lucky People, 233
"I am myself persuaded, on the basis of extensive study of the historical evidence, that... the severity of each of the contractions - 1920-21, 1929-33, and 1937-38 - is directly attributable to acts of commission and omission by the Reserve authorities and would not have occurred under earlier monetary and banking arrangements.''
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
Source: 'Capitalism and Freedom'
"The power to determine the quantity of money... is too important, too pervasive, to be exercised by a few people, however public-spirited, if there is any feasible alternative. There is no need for such arbitrary power... Any system which gives so much power and so much discretion to a few men, [so] that mistakes - excusable or not - can have such far reaching effects, is a bad system. It is a bad system to believers in freedom just because it gives a few men such power without any effective check by the body politic - this is the key political argument against an independent central bank."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
"The drive of the Rockefellers and their allies is to create a one-world government combining supercapitalism and communism under the same tent, all under their control... Do I mean conspiracy? Yes I do. I am convinced there is such a plot, international in scope, generations old in planning, and incredibly evil in intent."
-Larry P. McDonald-
(1935-1983) U.S. Congressman (GA-D), killed in the Korean Airlines flight 007 that was shot down by the Soviets
1976
"In fact, the big corporations who understand the regulatory game can actually benefit from it. They can lobby for expensive regulations only the largest corporations can afford, effectively keeping upstarts and competitors at bay."
-Radley Balko-
"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 Graber-
"Give me control over a man's economic actions, and hence over his means of survival, and except for a few occasional heroes, I'll promise to deliver to you men who think and write and behave as I want them to."
-Benjamine A. Rooge-
"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
"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
"The Great Depression was not caused by laissez faire but by the actions of well-intended politicians and bureaucrats. The Federal Reserve System, after all, was not created in response to the Great Depression, but in 1913. Soon thereafter it began experimenting with its awesome powers, expanding the money supply during the roaring ‘20s, propping up the pound sterling in London, extending credit so Europeans could buy American agricultural products. All the while, Congress was becoming more and more protectionist. When the Fed reversed policies in 1929 and actually shrunk the money supply by a third over the next three years and Congress culminated its protectionist tendencies with the Smoot-Hawley tariff, the collapse was underway. The fact that Hoover then raised taxes and Roosevelt kept wages artificially high guaranteed the massive unemployment that marked the 1930s. Government caused and exacerbated the Great Depression."
-Edward H. Crane-
Founder and president of the Cato Institute
Source: April 6, 1995, at a meeting of the Philanthropy Roundtable
"Society cannot leap into Communism from capitalism without going through a socialist stage of development."
-Nikita Khrushchev-
(1894-1971) Premier of the Soviet Union
Source: Time magazine, May 23, 1960
"[The task is to] covertly lower the standard of living, the whole social structure, of America so that we can be merged with all other nations."
-Rowan Gaither-
[Horace Rowan Gaither, Jr.] (1909-1961) Attorney, investment banker, President of the Ford Foundation (1953-1956)
1954
Source: stated to Congressional Reese Commission investigator Norman Dodd
"Look, I think you're tackling public expenditure from the wrong end, if I might say so. Why don't you look at it as any housewife has to look at it? She has to look at her expenditure every week or every month, according to what she can afford to spend, and if she overspends one week or month, she's got to economise the next. Now governments really ought to look at it from the viewpoint of 'What can we afford to spend?' They've already put up taxes, and yet the taxes they collect are not enough for the tremendous amount they're spending. They're having to borrow to a greater extent than ever before, and future generations will have to repay. Now, if anyone tells me that a Chancellor of the [Denis Healey] Exchequer can put up public expenditure in two years by -- and it's a tremendous figure -- twenty thousand million pounds, and he doesn't know where to get it down by about three thousand million pounds, then he ought never to have been in charge of the nation's finances ... never!"
-Margaret Thatcher
(1925-2013) British Prime Minister (1979–1990)
Source: 1976 Feb 5, TV Interview for Thames TV 'This Week'
"Government does not tax to get the money it needs; government always finds a need for the money it gets."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
"You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer."
-Sir Winston Churchill-
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
"The great trouble with you Americans is that you are still under the influence of that second-rate -- shall I say third-rate? -- mind, Karl Marx."
-H. G. Wells-
(1866-1946) Author
"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.
"Thus corporations finally claimed the full rights enjoyed by individual citizens while being exempted from many of the responsibilities and liabilities of citizenship. Furthermore, in being guaranteed the same right to free speech as individual citizens, they achieved, in the words of Paul Hawken, 'precisely what the Bill of Rights was intended to prevent: domination of public thought and discourse.' The subsequent claim by corporations that they have the same right as any individual to influence the government in their own interest pits the individual citizen against the vast financial and communications resources of the corporation and mocks the constitutional intent that all citizens have an equal voice in the political debates surrounding important issues."
-David C. Korten-
Source: in his book, When Corporations Rule the World, 2001
"The public is hedged about by so many goddam bookkeepers that no time is left in which to produce. More time is spent in carrying out garbage than in carrying in food."
-Martin H. Fischer-
"Ruff's Third Law of Economic Dynamics: "An economy in motion tends to stay in motion, and an economy at rest tends to stay at rest. A free market is constantly in motion. A centrally planned market slows until it eventually dies completely."
-Mike Ruff-
"Free enterprise capitalism exists only when people in the private sector are free to pursue their own interests without direction from government. When politicians start passing laws to tell them what to do, or bureaucrats start issuing edicts to tell them what to do, it is no longer capitalism; it's fascism."
-Rick Gaber-
American writer
"The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity -- much less dissent."
-Gore Vidal-
(1925- )novelist, essayist, playwright, and provocateur
"What's right with America is a willingness to discuss what's wrong with America."
-Harry C. Bauer-
Professor Emeritus of Librarianship, University of Washington, Seattle
"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
"There is not a syllable in the plan under consideration which directly empowers the national courts to construe the laws according to the spirit of the Constitution."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: Federalist No. 81, 1788
"It is emphatically the province and duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is. Those who apply the rule to particular cases must, of necessity, expound and interpret that rule. If two laws conflict with each other, the Courts must decide on the operation of each. So, if a law be in opposition to the Constitution, if both the law and the Constitution apply to a particular case, so that the Court must either decide that case conformably to the law, disregarding the Constitution, or conformably to the Constitution, disregarding the law, the Court must determine which of these conflicting rules governs the case. This is of the very essence of judicial duty. If, then, the Courts are to regard the Constitution, and the Constitution is superior to any ordinary act of the Legislature, the Constitution, and not such ordinary act, must govern the case to which they both apply."
-John Marshall-
(1755-1835) US Supreme Court Chief Justice
Source: Marbury v. Madison, February 23, 1803
"The province of the Court is solely to decide on the rights of individuals... Questions, in their nature political or which are, by the Constitution and laws, submitted to the Executive, can never be made in this court."
-John Marshall-
(1755-1835) US Supreme Court Chief Justice
Source: Marbury v. Madison, February 23, 1803
"We all know nations that can be identified by the flight of writers from their shores. These are regimes whose fear of unmonitored writing is justified because truth is trouble. It is trouble for the warmonger, the torturer, the corporate thief, the political hack, the corrupt justice system, and for a comatose public. Unpersecuted, unjailed, unharrassed writers are trouble for the ignorant bully, the sly racist, and the predators feeding off the world’s resources. The alarm, the disquiet, writers raise is instructive because it is open and vulnerable, because if unpoliced it is threatening. Therefore the historical suppression of writers is the earliest harbinger of the steady peeling away of additional rights and liberties that will follow.
-Toni Morrison-
"If Men are to be precluded from offering their sentiments on a matter, which may involve the most serious and alarming consequences, that can invite the consideration of Mankind; reason is of no use to us — the freedom of Speech may be taken away — and, dumb & silent we may be led, like sheep, to the Slaughter."
-George Washington-
"I acknowledge, in the ordinary course of government, that the exposition of the laws and Constitution devolves upon the judicial. But I beg to know upon what principle it can be contended that any one department draws from the Constitution greater powers than another in marking out the limits of the powers of the several departments."
-James Madison
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: speech in the Congress of the United States, June 17, 1789
"To follow foolish precedents, and wink with both our eyes, is easier than to think."
-William Cowper-
(1731-1800) English poet, hymnodist
"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."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: Thoughts on Government, 1776
"You want to know what fascism is like? It is like your New Deal!"
-Benito Mussolini-
(1883-1945), Italian dictator during WW2
Source: to Grover Whalen, 1939
"The single most exciting thing you encounter in government is competence, because it's so rare."
-Daniel Patrick Moynihan-
(1927-2003) American politician, U.S. Senator (NY-D)
"What is a Constitution? It is the form of government, delineated by the mighty hand of the people, in which certain first principles of fundamental law are established. The Constitution is certain and fixed; it contains the permanent will of the people, and is the supreme law of the land; it is paramount to the power of the Legislature, and can be revoked or altered only by the authority that made it."
-William Paterson-
(1745-1806) New Jersey statesman, a signer of the U.S. Constitution, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, 2nd governor of New Jersey (1790-1793)
Source: VanHorne's Lessee v. Dorrance, 1795
"The great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachment of the others."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Federalist No. 10, November 23, 1787
"So long as [men] hold the tribal notion that the individual is sacrificial fodder for the collective, that some men have the right to rule others by force, and that some (any) alleged 'good' can justify it -- there can be no peace within a nation and no peace among nations."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
Source: in The Roots of War
"Union bosses will continue to use workers’ dues money as a slush fund to support controversial causes and organizations as long as union officials are empowered to order a worker fired simply for refusing to pay money to the union,"
-Patrick Semmons-
Vice president at the National Right to Work Foundation
Source: Washington Free Beacon, AUgust 3, 2015
"From the fact that people are very different it follows that, if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position, and that the only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently. Equality before the law and material equality are therefore not only different but are in conflict with each other; and we can achieve either one or the other, but not both at the same time."
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
Source: The Constitution Of Liberty
"At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to state this or that or the other, but it is "not done"... Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals."
-George Orwell-
[Eric Arthur Blair] (1903-1950) British author
"Democracy is essentially coercive. The winner gets to use public authority to impose their policies on the losers."
-John Chubb-
Source: John Chubb and Terry Moe
"What seems fair enough against a squalid huckster of bad liquor may take on a different face, if used by a government determined to suppress political opposition under the guise of sedition."
-Judge Learned Hand-
(1872-1961), Judge, U. S. Court of Appeals
Source: United States v. Kirschenblatt, 1926
"I think they've [Labour Government] made the biggest financial mess that any government's ever made in this country for a very long time, and Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people's money. It's quite a characteristic of them. They then start to nationalise everything, and people just do not like more and more nationalisation, and they're now trying to control everything by other means. They're progressively reducing the choice available to ordinary people. "
-Margaret Thatcher-
(1925-2013) British Prime Minister (1979–1990)
Source: 1976 Feb 5, TV Interview for Thames TV 'This Week'
"Great abuses in the world are begotten, or, to speak more boldly, all the abuses of the world are begotten, by our being taught to be afraid of professing our ignorance, and that we are bound to accept all things we are not able to refute: we speak of all things by precepts and decisions. The style at Rome was that even that which a witness deposed to having seen with his own eyes, and what a judge determined with his most certain knowledge, was couched in this form of speaking: 'it seems to me.' They make me hate things that are likely, when they would impose them upon me as infallible."
-Michel de Montaigne-
"I did not hate the author of my misfortunes — truth and justice acquit me of that; I rather pitied the hard destiny to which he seemed condemned. But I thought with unspeakable loathing of those errors, in consequence of which every man is fated to be, more or less, the tyrant or the slave. I was astonished at the folly of my species, that they did not rise up as one man, and shake off chains so ignominious, and misery so insupportable. So far as related to myself, I resolved — and this resolution has never been entirety forgotten by me — to hold myself disengaged from this odious scene, and never fill the part either of the oppressor or the sufferer."
-William Godwin-
"Man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all."
-Aristotle-
"I honestly believe that sound commercialism is the best test of true value in art. People work hard for their money and if they won’t part with it for your product the chances are that your product hasn’t sufficient value. An artist or writer hasn’t any monopoly .... If the public response to his artistry is lacking, he’d do well to spend more time analyzing what’s the matter with his work, and less time figuring what’s the matter with the public."
-Berton Braley-
(1882-1966) Poet, philosopher, reporter
Source: Pegasus Pulls A Hack: Memoirs Of A Modern Minstrel
"Historically, it has been Big Business, not consumers or progressives, who have been primarily responsible for creating most government regulatory agencies. ... Indeed, virtually all regulatory agencies have had the effect of limiting entry and competition in the industries they oversee."
-Bruce Bartlett-
(1951-) American historian, area of expertise is supply-side economics, served as a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and as a Treasury official under George H. W. Bush
"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
"Communists have always played an active role in the fight by colonial countries for their freedom, because the short-term objects of communism would always correspond with the long-term objects of freedom movements."
-Nelson Mandela-
(1918-2013) South African anti-apartheid revolutionary, imprisoned for 27 years, President of South Africa (1994-1999)
"The years ahead will be great ones for our country, for the cause of freedom and the spread of civilization. The West will not contain Communism, it will transcend Communism. We will not bother to denounce it, we'll dismiss it as a sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
"You can't make socialists out of individualists. Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming where everyone is interdependent."
-Rosalie M. Gordon-
American author
Source: 'What Happened to Our Schools?' (1956) writing about John Dewey's attitude towards progressive education.
The quote is popularly attributed to John Dewey himself
"I spent 33 years in the Marines. Most of my time being a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the rape of half-a-dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street..."
-Major General Smedley Darlington Butler-
(1881-1940) Major General USMC, "Old Gimlet Eye'' and "Hell Devil Darling", most highly decorated military man from the pre-World War II era.
"Give a good man great powers and crooks grab his job."
-Rick Gaber-
Libertarian writer
"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."
-Financial Times-
Source: London, Nov 22, 2001
"The virtue of a democratic system with a [constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech] is that it readily enables the people, over time, to be persuaded that what they took for granted is not so, and to change their laws accordingly."
-Justice Antonin Scalia-
(1936-2016) American jurist, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
Source: United States v. Virginia, 26 June 1996
"Any man who tries to incite class hatred, sectional hate, hate of creeds, any kind of hatred in our community, though he may affect to do so in the interest of the class he is addressing, is in the long run with absolute certainty that class’s own worst enemy."
-Theodore Roosevelt-
(1858-1919) 26th US President
"If we would be free, if we mean to hold inviolate those inestimable privileges for which we have so long contended, if we mean not basely to abandon the noble cause for which we have so long endured, and to which we have pledged ourselves never to abandon, until the glorious object of our contest should be obtained, then we must fight! I repeat Sir, we must fight! A call to arms and an appeal to the God of hosts is all that we have left."
-Patrick Henry-
(1736-1799) US Founding Father
Source: "The War Inevitable" speech to the Virginia Convention, March 23, 1775
"Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it."
-Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
"If you don't know where you're going, when you get there you'll be lost."
-Yogi Berra-
[Lawrence Peter "Yogi" Berra] (1925-) American Major League Baseball catcher, outfielder, and manager
"Now all acts of legislature apparently contrary to natural right and justice, are, in our laws, and must be in the nature of things, considered as void. The laws of nature are the laws of God: A legislature must not obstruct our obedience to him from whose punishments they cannot protect us. All human constitutions which contradict His laws, we are in conscience bound to disobey. Such have been the adjudications of our courts of justice."
-George Mason-
(1725-1792), drafted the Virgina Declaration of Rights, ally of James Madison and George Washington
"Many of the deliberate con artists are the "true believers" of fanatical religious or political sects who actually accept the dogma that it is a mortal sin for you to take care of yourself and your family first and in any way exercise your right to the pursuit of happiness while their precious cause is in any way neglected, underfunded or even unaccepted."
-Rick Graber-
Source: Selfishness vs."Selfishness"
"To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labor tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution."
-Samuel Johnson-
(1709-1784)
"Liberals seem to assume that, if you don't believe in their particular political solutions, then you don't really care about the people that they claim to want to help."
-Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
"A Galileo could no more be elected president of the United States than he could be elected Pope of Rome. Both high posts are reserved for men favored by God with an extraordinary genius for swathing the bitter facts of life in bandages of self-illusion."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right, from the frame of their nature, to knowledge, as their great Creator, who does nothing in vain, has given them understandings, and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge; I mean, of the characters and conduct of their rulers."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: Dissertation on Canon and Feudal Law, 1765
"Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good."
-Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
"Many people consider the things government does for them to be social progress but they regard the things government does for others as socialism."
-Earl Warren-
"Fascist rebelliousness always occurs where fear of the truth turns a revolutionary emotion into illusions. In its pure form, fascism is the sum total of all irrational reactions of the average human character. To the narrow-minded sociologist who lacks the courage to recognize the enormous role played by the irrational in human history, the fascist race theory appears as nothing but an imperialistic interest or even a mere "prejudice." The violence and the ubiquity of these 'race prejudices' show their origin from the irrational part of the human character. The race theory is not a creation of fascism. No: fascism is a creation of race hatred and its politically organized expression."
-Wilhelm Reich-
“Then I realized that it really is a philosophy that we’re talking about, you know — the nonaggression axiom, that the government should be bound by the same moral laws that the rest of us are. Once you realize that, you’re like, ‘Oh!’ Your entire world opens up, and then your entire paradigm changes.”
-Glenn "Kane" Jacobs-
"Democracy says that the popular vote can take right away and once taken away the act is sanctioned and upheld by all laws, human and divine. I deny it. I say it is a wrong, however it is perpetuated. Why, mothers. What do you care how you are robbed of your babe? The question is not how it is done, the outrage is that it is done at all. No matter whether it is done by an individual or a conspiracy of many individuals in a community agreeing and concerting according to the forms of law. If the poor babe is torn from your heart, that is the unspeakable wrong. Not the manner in which it is perpetrated."
-Owen Lovejoy-
"It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, 1756
"Those in society who are in charge of schools must never forget that the parents have been appointed by God himself as the first and principal educators of their children and that their right is completely inalienable."
-Pope John Paul II-
[Karol Józef Wojtyła] (1920-2005) Polish-born Roman Catholic Pope (1978-2005)
"History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid."
-Dwight D. Eisenhower-
(1890-1969), 34th US President, WWII General
"The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously."
-Hubert H. Humphrey-
(1911-1978) US Vice-President, US Senator (D-MN)
Source: Speech, Madison, WI, 23 August 1965
"When I have a difficult subject before me — when I find the road narrow, and can see no other way of teaching a well established truth except by pleasing one intelligent man and displeasing ten thousand fools — I prefer to address myself to the one man, and to take no notice whatever of the condemnation of the multitude; I prefer to extricate that intelligent man from his embarrassment and show him the cause of his perplexity, so that he may attain perfection and be at
peace."
-Maimonides-
"Government by agreement is only possible provided that we do not require the government to act in fields other than those in which we can obtain true agreement."
-F.A. Hayek-
... provided we don't allow the government to act ...
"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
"It is time to admit that public education operates like a planned economy. It's a bureaucratic system where everybody's role is spelled out in advance, and there are few incentives for innovation and productivity. It's not a surprise when a school system doesn't improve. It more resembles a Communist economy than our own market economy."
-Albert Shanker-
(1928-1997) former president of the American Federation of Teachers
Source: Wall Street Journal, October 2, 1989
"The notion that journalism can regularly produce a product that violates the fundamental interests of media owners and advertisers … is absurd."
-Robert McChesney-
Research Professor in the Institute of Communications Research and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
"Society attacks early when the individual is helpless."
-B. F. Skinner-
(1904-1990) American psychologist, author, inventor, advocate for social reform and poet
"If Americans wish to preserve a country they will recognize, then the first step is to recognize the enemy. Public education is the enemy. The entertainment industry is the enemy. The corporate culture is the enemy. The advertising industry is the enemy. And most of the politicians in both parties are the enemy. An enemy is defined as anybody, or any organization, which is attacking the traditional beliefs of Americans."
-Charley Reese-
(1937-2013) American syndicated columnist
"Our tightly controlled educational system mocks the promise of democracy. With a closed educational system we simply cannot have an open political system. The current situation allows the government and big business to manufacture and maintain our culture for us, and in turn, control remains in the hands of the experts and institutions. The ability to change this situation is in the hands of the individuals and families who understand why change is necessary."
-Helen Hegener-
author, co-publisher of Home Education Magazine
Source: Alternatives in Education
"A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: letter to W. T. Barry, August 4, 1822, Ref: Letters and other Writings of James Madison, vol. 3
(276)
"Only the educated are free."
-Epictetus-
(ca 55-135 A.D.) Greek philospher
Source: Discourses
"I have indeed two great measures at heart, without which no republic can maintain itself in strength:
1. That of general education, to enable every man to judge for himself what will secure or endanger his freedom.
2. To divide every county into hundreds, of such size that all the children of each will be within reach of a central school in it."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: in a letter to John Tyler, 1810.
The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Memorial Edition 12:393 (Lipscomb and Bergh, editors), 1903-04
"To educate a man is to unfit him to be a slave."
-Frederick Douglass-
[Frederick Baily] (1818-1895), escaped slave, Abolitionist, author, editor of the North Star and later the New National Era
"If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare, and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare, they may take the care of religion into their own hands; they may appoint teachers in every State, county and parish and pay them out of their public treasury; they may take into their own hands the education of children, establishing in like manner schools throughout the Union; they may assume the provision of the poor; they may undertake the regulation of all roads other than post-roads; in short, every thing, from the highest object of state legislation down to the most minute object of police, would be thrown under the power of Congress.... Were the power of Congress to be established in the latitude contended for, it would subvert the very foundations, and transmute the very nature of the limited Government established by the people of America."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836) Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: On the Cod Fishery Bill, granting Bounties. February 7, 1792, referring to a bill to subsidize cod fisherman
Or to subsidize dairy farmers. We'd best watch out for that...
"Wherever is found what is called a paternal government, there is found state education. It has been discovered that the best way to insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery."
-Benjamin Disraeli-
(1804-1881) Prime Minister of England, British statesman, novelist
Source: (1874)
"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
"Education rears disciples, imitators, and routinists, not pioneers of new ideas and creative geniuses. The schools are not nurseries of progress and improvement, but conservatories of tradition and unvarying modes of thought."
-Ludwig von Mises-
(1881-1973) Economist and social philosopher
"Often, the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it."
-Mark Twain
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910)
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.
"Our schools are, in a sense, factories, in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life. The specifications for manufacturing come from the demands of twentieth-century civilization, and it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down."
-Ellwood P. Cubberley-
(1868-1941) American educator, author, Dean of the Stanford University School of Education
"To be nobody but yourself -- in a world which is doing it's best,
night and day, to make you like everybody else -- means to fight the
hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting."
-e. e. cummings-
(1894-1962) American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright
"In all countries, in all centuries, the primary reason for government to set up schools is to undermine the politically weak by convincing their children that the leaders are good and their policies are wise. The core is religious intolerance. The sides simply change between the Atheists, Catholics, Protestants, Unitarians, etc., depending whether you are talking about the Soviet Union, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, America, etc. A common second reason is to prepare the boys to go to war and the girls to cheer them on."
-Marshall Fritz-
(1943 -2008) American libertarian activist, founded the Advocates for Self-Government, and The Alliance for the Separation of School & State
"Liberty without learning is always in peril and learning without liberty is always in vain."
-John F. Kennedy-
(1917-1963) 35th US President
"Growth and mastery come only to those who vigorously self-direct. Initiating, creating, doing, reflecting, freely associating, enjoying privacy -- these are precisely what the structures of schooling are set up to prevent, on one pretext or another."
-John Taylor Gatto-
(1937-) American school teacher of 29 years, author, New York State Teacher of the Year, 1991
Source: The Underground History of American Education, 2001
"Education is unique among consumer products -- when it fails to work as advertised, it's the customer that gets labelled as defective."
-Kevin Killion-
"History is written by the victor."
-Latin Proverb-
"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
"I care not what puppet is placed on the throne of England to rule the Empire, ... The man that controls Britain's money supply controls the British Empire. And I control the money supply."
-Baron Nathan Mayer Rothschild-
(1777-1836) London financier, one of the founders of the international Rothschild banking dynasty
Source: Attributed - no source
"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
"The population of the world is gradually dividing into two classes, Anarchists and criminals."
-Benjamin Tucker-
"The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do."
-Samuel P. Huntington-
"Truth persuades by teaching, but does not teach by persuading."
-Tertullian-
"I have not come into this world to make men better, but to make use of their weaknesses."
-Adolf Hitler-
"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)
"Beware the greedy hand of government, thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
"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 federal government has taken too much tax money from the people, too much authority from the states, and too much liberty with the Constitution."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th 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
"Government is the people's business and every man, woman and child
becomes a shareholder with the first penny of tax paid."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
"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
"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
"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
"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 smallest of which minorities is one, the individual...
"... every tax or rate, forcibly taken from an unwilling person, is immoral and oppressive."
-Auberon Herbert-
(1838-1906) English author
Source: "The Principles of Voluntaryism" [1897], reproduced in The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State, and Other Essays by Auberon Herbert (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1978), p. 393
"Any politician who starts shouting election-year demagoguery about the rich and the poor should be asked, 'What about the other 90 percent of the people?' "
-Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
"By establishing reading societies, and subscription libraries, and taking these under our direction, and supplying them through our labors, we may turn the public mind which way we will."
-Adam Weishaupt-
(1748-1830?) [Spartacus] Professor of Natural and Canon Law at Germany's Ingolstadt University,
founded The Order of the Illuminati on May 1, 1776.
He designed the very plan of world domination that is still in use today to enslave the world's masses.
"It is thus necessary that the individual should finally come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of the nation, that the position of the individual is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole."
-Adolf Hitler-
(1889-1945) German Nazi Dictator
Source: speaking in Buckeburg on Oct. 7, 1933
"Believe nothing merely because you have been told it. Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect for the teacher. But whatsoever, after due examination and analysis, you find to be kind, conducive to the good, the benefit, the welfare of all beings -- that doctrine believe and cling to, and take it as your guide."
-Buddha-
[Gautama Siddharta] (563 - 483 BC), Hindu Prince, founder of Buddhism
"The highest result of education is tolerance."
-Helen Keller-
(1880-1968) Blind-Deaf Author
"The philosophy of the classroom today will be the philosophy of government tomorrow."
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
"It seems now that the place where you see the most obvious censorship is on college campuses -- the precise place where you would expect to see the least."
-Alan Charles Kors-
Source: The Shadow University, 1998
"The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men's fatal striving to control society — a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals."
-Friedrich Hayek-
"It's no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."
-Jiddu Krishnamurti-
"It's often been observed that the first casualty of war is the truth. But that's a lie, too, in its way. The reality is that, for most wars to begin, the truth has to have been sacrificed a long time in advance."
-L. Neil Smith-
"[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, 655 F.3d 78, 85 (1st Cir. 2011
"You, sir, are only lingering out the period that shall bring with it your defeat. You have yet scarce began upon the war, and the further you enter, the faster will your troubles thicken. What you now enjoy is only a respite from ruin; an invitation to destruction; something that will lead on to our deliverance at your expense. We know the cause which we are engaged in, and though a passionate fondness for it may make us grieve at every injury which threatens it, yet, when the moment of concern is over, the determination to duty returns. We are not moved by the gloomy smile of a worthless king, but by the ardent glow of generous patriotism. We fight not to enslave, but to set a country free, and to make room upon the earth for honest men to live in. In such a case we are sure that we are right; and we leave to you the despairing reflection of being the tool of a miserable tyrant."
-Thomas Paine-
The American Crisis 4, 1777
"Many false opinions may be exchanged for true ones, without in the least altering the habits of mind of which false opinions are made. … I am now convinced, that no great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible, until a great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought."
-John Stuart Mill-
"Let it [the Constitution] be taught in schools, seminaries and in colleges; let it be written in primers, in spelling books and in almanacs; let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, enforced in courts of justice. In short, let it become the political religion of the nation."
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
"We must abandon the prevalent belief in the superior wisdom of the ignorant."
-Daniel Boorstin-
(1914-2004) American historian, professor, attorney, writer, Librarian of the United States Congress (1975-1987)
"Suffering is but another name for the teaching of experience, which is the parent of instruction and the schoolmaster of life."
-Horace-
[Quintus Horatius Flaccus] (65-8BC) Roman poet
"I believe much trouble and blood would be saved if we opened our hearts more. I will tell you in my way how the Indian sees things. The white man has more words to tell you how they look to him, but it does not require many words to speak the truth. If the white man wants to live in peace with the Indian... we can live in peace. There need be no trouble. Treat all men alike.... give them all the same law. Give them all an even chance to live and grow. You might as well expect the rivers to run backward as that any man who is born a free man should be contented when penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases. We only ask an even chance to live as other men live. We ask to be recognized as men. Let me be a free man...free to travel... free to stop... free to work... free to choose my own teachers... free to follow the religion of my Fathers... free to think and talk and act for myself."
-Chief Joseph-
(1840-1904) Chief of the Wal-lam-wat-kain (Wallowa) band of Nez Perce Indians
"I believe that we learn best when we, not others are deciding what we are going to learn, and when we are choosing the people, materials, and experiences from which we will be learning."
-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 conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking."
-John Kenneth Galbraith-
(1908-2006) Canadian-born economist, Harvard professor
"The road to hell is paved with good intentions."
-Late 16th Century Proverb-
"God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910)
"In the United States of America, satire is protected speech, even if the object of the satire doesn’t get it."
-Al Franken-
And even if the object is a "minority"...
"War is the health of the state."
-Randolph Bourne-
"The only real criterion for a 'true' libertarian is that disagreements about best options ought not be resolved with violence."
-Bill McGonigle-
"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. Even today, there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions. Even today, there is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment. That I do not intend to permit to the extent that it is in my control. And no official of my Administration, whether his rank is high or low, civilian or military, should interpret my words here tonight as an excuse to censor the news, to stifle dissent, to cover up our mistakes or to withhold from the press and the public the facts they deserve to know."
-John F. Kennedy-
"Unity is the great goal toward which humanity moves irresistibly. But it becomes fatal, destructive of the intelligence, the dignity, the well-being of individuals and peoples whenever it is formed without regard to liberty, either by violent means or under the authority of any theological, metaphysical, political, or even economic idea. That patriotism which tends toward unity without regard to liberty is an evil patriotism, always disastrous to the popular and real interests of the country it claims to exalt and serve."
-Mikhail Bakunin-
More significantly, involuntary unity, which is by definition without regard to liberty.
"So, you listen to me. Listen to me! Television is not the truth. Television's a god-damned amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers, and football players. We're in the boredom-killing business... We deal in illusions, man. None of it is true! But you people sit there day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds. We're all you know. You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you. You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube. You even think like the tube. This is mass madness. You maniacs. In God's name, you people are the real thing. We are the illusion."
-Howard Beale-
Source: on-camera television newsman Howard Beale in Network (1976) by Paddy Chayefsky
"There is no such crime as a crime of thought; there are only crimes of action."
-Clarence S. Darrow-
(1857-1938)
"Human nature itself is evermore an advocate for liberty. There is also in human nature a resentment of injury, and indignation against wrong. A love of truth and a veneration of virtue. These amiable passions, are the "latent spark"… If the people are capable of understanding, seeing and feeling the differences between true and false, right and wrong, virtue and vice, to what better principle can the friends of mankind apply than to the sense of this difference?"
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: the Novanglus, 1775
"In all criminal cases whatever, the jury shall have the right to determine the law, and the facts under the direction of the Court as to the law, and the right of new trials as in civil cases."
-Oregon Constitution-
Source: Article I, Section 16
"I want to make one thing clear. This war against our constitution is not being fought way off in Madagascar or in Mandalay. It is being fought here—in our schools, our colleges, our churches, our women’s clubs. It is being fought with our money, channeled through the State Department. It is being fought twenty-four hours a day—while we remain asleep. How many of you Senators know what the UN is doing to change the teaching of the children in your own home town? The UN is at work there, every day and night, changing the teachers, changing the teaching materials, changing the very words and tones—changing all the essential ideas which we imagine our schools are teaching to our young folks. How in the name of Heaven are we to sit here, approve these programs, appropriate our own people’s money—for such outrageous “orientation” of our own children, and of the men and women who teach our children, in this Nation’s schools?"
-William Jenner-
(1908-1985) U.S. Senator (IN-R)
Source: Congressional Record (1952)
"Vote Labor, and you build castles in the air. Vote Conservative, and you can live in them."
-David Frost-
(1939-2013) English journalist, comedian, writer, media personality, television host
"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-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: John Adams, Letter to Jonathan Jackson, October 1780
"All government, in its essence, is organized exploitation, and in virtually all of its existing forms it is the implacable enemy of every industrious and well-disposed man."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"The more profound problem, however, is the degree to which many academic intellectuals, especially in the humanities, have lost their ability to distinguish the 'state' from 'society'."
-Stephen Cox-
(1948-) American professor of literature, editor of Liberty magazine
Source: "Assumptions of Power" Reason magazine, March, 1993
"The three branches of government number considerably more than three and are not, in any sense, 'branches' since that would imply that there is something they are all attached to besides self-aggrandizement and our pocketbooks. ... Government is not a machine with parts; it's an organism. When does an intestine quit being an intestine and start becoming an asshole?"
-P. J. O'Rourke-
(1947- ) US humorist, journalist, & political commentator
"No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny."
-Hannah Arendt-
(1906-1975)
Source: The New Yorker, 12 September 1970
"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 received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors: they purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense 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 to be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men."
-Samuel Adams-
(1722-1803), was known as the "Father of the American Revolution."
"Anyone who tells you that 'It Can't Happen Here' is whistling past the graveyard of history. There is no 'house rule' that bars tyranny coming to America. History is replete with republics whose people grew complacent and descended into imperial butchery and chaos."
-Mike Vanderboegh-
(1953- ) Alabama Minuteman
"Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear."
-Albert Camus-
(1913-1960) French Algerian author
"And I cannot see, why arms should be denied to any man who is not a slave, since they are the only true badges of liberty."
-Andrew Fletcher-
[Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun] (1655-1716) Scottish writer, politician
Source: A Discourse of Government with Relation to Militias, 1737
"False is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand real advantages for one imaginary or trifling inconvenience; that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it; that has no remedy for evils except destruction."
-Cesare Beccaria-
(1735-1794) [Bonesana, Marchese di] Italian nobleman, criminologist, and penal reformer
Source: Dei delitti e delle pene, [On Crimes and Punishments] ch.38 (1764)
Translation is as quoted by Thomas Jefferson in his _Commonplace Book_, 314 (G. Chinard ed. 1926), which was "the source book and repertory of Jefferson's ideas on government." Id. at 4.
"Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been and ever will be pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Federalist No. 51, February 8, 1788
"...and in all cases of libels, the jury shall have the right to determine the law and the facts, under the direction of the court, as in other cases."
-Texas Constitution-
Source: Article I, Section 8
"[T]o consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions ... would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy.
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Letter to William C. Jarvis, September 28, 1820
"As I have stood in the crosshairs of those who target Second Amendment freedoms, I've realized that firearms are not the only issue. No, it's much, much bigger than that. I've come to understand that a cultural war is raging across our land, in which, with Orwellian fervor, certain acceptable thoughts and speech are mandated."
-Charlton Heston-
(1923-2008) American actor, former president of National Rifle Association
"When you disarm peaceful citizens, crime and violence explode.."
-Jarret Wollstein-
Source: The Tyranny of Gun Control, 11 (Future of Freedom Foundation 1997)
"It was during the eighteenth century -- a period of boastful satisfaction with the nice balances within the English constitution -- that Englishmen came to accept the Whig view of the utility of an armed citizenry. The armed citizen was not only affirmed to be protecting himself but, together with his fellows, provided the ultimate check on tyranny."
-Joyce Lee Malcolm-
Professor of law, historian, and Constitutional scholar
Source: To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 128
"I am convinced that we can do to guns what we've done to drugs: create a multi-billion dollar underground market over which we have absolutely no control."
-George L. Roman-
1992
"If the Fed had a war on abortion like its war on poverty or war on drugs, within 5 years men would be having abortions!"
-Harry Browne-
(1933-2006) American libertarian writer, politician, and free-market investment analyst. Libertarian candidate for US President 1996 & 2000
"The growth of drug-related crime is a far greater evil to society as a whole than drug taking. Even so, because we have been seduced by the idea that governments should legislate for our own good, very few people can see how dangerously absurd the present policy is."
-John Casey-
"Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be; and this national weakness finds its nemesis in the stock market."
-The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money-
"O Lord, give us faith. Give us faith in Thee; faith in our sons; faith in each other; faith in our united crusade. Let not the keenness of our spirit ever be dulled. Let not the impacts of temporary events, of temporal matters of but fleeting moment — let not these deter us in our unconquerable purpose. With Thy blessing, we shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy. Help us to conquer the apostles of greed and racial arrogances. Lead us to the saving of our country, and with our sister nations into a world unity that will spell a sure peace — a peace invulnerable to the schemings of unworthy men. And a peace that will let all of men live in freedom, reaping the just rewards of their honest toil. Thy will be done, Almighty God. Amen."
-Franklin D. Roosevelt-
What an incredible hypocrite.
"A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep."
-Saul Bellow-
"Of all wild beasts preserve me from a tyrant; and of all tame, a flatterer."
-Ben Jonson-
"Libertarianism is not a version of legal positivism. We have no central plan summed up in three letters. We do not know, as intellectuals, more than society knows through experience. We have no intention of overriding evolved cultural outcomes that reflect the organic desires of people in their lives. We seek no power at all but rather the increase of the maximum possible liberty for all. Libertarianism is humble toward how society should work or it is not libertarianism at all. "
-Jeffrey Tucker-
"So this is how liberty dies: to thunderous applause."
-Padmé Amidala-
Star Wars: The Phantom Menace
"Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions."
-Joyce Carol Oates-
"All I ask is equal freedom. When it is denied, as it always is, I take it anyhow."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"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 Viriginia, Query XVII (1781-1785)
"Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way to the common feelings of mankind."
-Edward Gibbon-
(1737-1794) English historian and Member of Parliament
"Drug offenses ... may be regarded as the prototypes of non-victim crimes today. The private nature of the sale and use of these drugs has led the police to resort to methods of detection and surveillance that intrude upon our privacy, including illegal search, eavesdropping, and entrapment.
Indeed, the successful prosecution of such cases often requires police infringement of the constitutional protections that safeguard the privacy of individuals."
-John Kaplan-
Jackson Eli Reynolds professor of law at Stanford University, Special Attorney US Dept of Justice, author
Source: "Crime and Justice" from the series 'Courses by Newspaper' appearing in numerous American newspapers in October 1977
[T]he drug prohibition laws have led to wholesale destruction of civil liberties. The War on Drugs has now become a War on the Constitution, and the American people have become, in the eyes of their government, a society of suspects.
-David B. Kopel-
American author, attorney, political science researcher. contributing editor to several publications
Source: Crime and Punishment Symposium: A System in Collapse: Peril or Protection? The Risks and Benefits of Handgun Prohibition, 12 ST. LOUIS U. PUB. L. REV. 285, 319 (1993).
"The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking; he can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn fool, and he might possibly be a damned soul; but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog."
-Gilbert Keith Chesterton-
(1874-1936) British essayist, critic, poet, and novelist
Source: Broadcast talk, June 11, 1935
"[A]fter 20 years on the bench, I have concluded that Federal drug laws are a disaster. It is time to get the Government out of drug enforcement. ... If the possession or distribution of drugs were no longer a Federal crime, other levels of government would face the choice of enforcement or ... decriminalizing. ... The variety, complexity and importance of these questions make it exceedingly clear that the Federal Government has no business being involved in any of them. What might be a hopeful solution in New York, could be a disaster in Idaho, and only State legislatures and city governments, not Congress, can pass laws tailored to local needs. ... It [Congress] should repeal all Federal laws that prohibit or regulate their distribution ..."
-Judge Whitman Knapp-
(1909-2004) US Federal Judge (U.S. Dist. Ct., South. Dist. of N.Y.)
Source: May 9, 1993, letter to editor, New York Times.
Or, government could just, y'know, obey its charter, which delegates to it no 'prohibition' authority...
"Zealotry of either kind -- the puritan's need to regiment others or the victim's passion for blaming everyone except himself -- tends to produce a depressing civic stupidity. Each trait has about it the immobility of addiction. Victims become addicted to being victims: they derive identity, innocence and a kind of devious power from sheer, defaulting helplessness. On the other side, the candlesnuffers of behavioral and political correctness enact their paradox, accomplishing intolerance in the name of tolerance, regimentation in the name of betterment."
-Lance Morrow-
(1939- ) Essayist, professor
"If the words 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' don't include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn't worth the hemp it was written on."
-Terence McKenna-
(1946-2000) Writer, philosopher, and ethnobotanist
"Totalitarianism begins in contempt for what you have. The second step is the notion: 'Things must change—no matter how, Anything is better than what we have.' Totalitarian rulers organize this kind of mass sentiment, and by organizing it articulate it, and by articulating it make the people somehow love it. They were told before, thou shalt not kill; and they didn’t kill. Now they are told, thou shalt kill; and although they think it’s very difficult to kill, they do it because it's now part of the code of behavior. They learn whom to kill and how to kill and how to do it together. This is the much talked about Gleichschaltung—the coordination process. You are coordinated not with the powers that be, but with your neighbor — coordinated with the majority. But instead of communicating with the other you are now glued to him. And you feel of course marvelous. Totalitarianism appeals to the very dangerous emotional needs of people who live in complete isolation and in fear of one another."
-Hannah Arendt-
(1906-1975) German-American political theorist, escaped Nazi Germany
Source: 'Hannah Arendt: From an Interview' Comments made in 1974 during an interview with the French writer Roger Errera and published in October 26, 1978 issue of The NewYork Review of Books Interview
"Conscience is the most sacred of all property."
-James Madison
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Essay on Property, March 29, 1792
"A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded."
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
"I think that prohibition of drugs is the most immoral program that the United States has ever engaged in. It's destroyed civil rights at home and it is responsible for thousands of deaths abroad."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
" 'Extremism' is a word deliberately chosen for its vagueness and used by intellectual slobs who are too desperate, sneaky or lazy to say exactly what they mean. Its only purpose is to deliberately try to confuse the difference between people who are extremely good (usually because of devotion to their principles) with people who are extremely bad. The sleazeballs who use this supposedly scary, yet undefined word are not only trying to smear people of conviction and integrity, but they're also trying to divert attention away from the fact that they are obviously not people of principle themselves."
-Rick Gaber-
Libertarian writer
"The sooner we all learn to make a decision between disapproval and censorship, the better off society will be... Censorship cannot get at the real evil, and it is an evil in itself."
-Granville Hicks-
(1901-1982)
"The right to freedom of expression is justified first of all as the right of an individual purely in his capacity as an individual. It derives from the widely accepted premise of Western thought that the proper end of man is the realization of his character and potentialities as a human being."
-Thomas I. Emerson-
(1907-1991) Lines Professor of Law, Yale University, author
Source: Yale Law Journal, 1963
"Far from failing in its intended task, our educational system is in fact succeeding magnificently, because its aim is to keep the American people thoughtless enough to go on supporting the system."
-Richard Mitchell-
(1929-2002) Professor at Glassboro State College, NJ, author, founder and publisher of The Underground Grammarian
Source: The Underground Grammarian
"Most people are willing to pay more to be amused than to be educated."
-Robert C. Savage-
Source: Life Lessons
"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
"Weak logic, inconsistencies and alienation from the people are common features of authoritarianism. The relentless attempts of totalitarian regimes to prevent free thought and new ideas and the persistent assertion of their own lightness bring on them an intellectual stasis which they project on to the nation at large. Intimidation and propaganda work in a duet of oppression, while the people, lapped in fear and distrust, learn to dissemble and to keep silent. And all the time the desire grows for a system which will lift them from the position of 'rice-eating robots' to the status of human beings who can think and speak freely and hold their heads high in the security of their rights."
-Aung San Suu Kyi-
"Lives were being ruined and few hands were raised in help. Since when do you have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?"
-Lillian Hellman-
"All that time is lost which might be better employed."
-Jean-Jacques Rousseau-
Like oh, say, the time doing your taxes...
"The law of progress holds that everything now must be better than what was there before. Don’t you see if you want something better, and better, and better, you lose the good. The good is no longer even being measured."
-Hannah Arendt-
(1906-1975) German-American political theorist, escaped Nazi Germany
Source: 'Hannah Arendt: From an Interview' Comments made in 1974 during an interview with the French writer Roger Errera and published in October 26, 1978 issue of The NewYork Review of Books Interview.
"We should never define libertarian positions in terms coined by liberals and conservatives, nor as some variant of their positions. We are not fiscally conservative and socially liberal. We are libertarians, who believe in individual liberty and personal responsibility on all issues at all times."
-Harry Browne-
(1933-2006) American libertarian writer, politician, and free-market investment analyst. Libertarian candidate for US President 1996 & 2000
"The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"The fabric of American empire ought to rest on the solid basis of THE CONSENT OF THE PEOPLE. The streams of national power ought to flow from that pure, original fountain of all legitimate authority."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: Federalist No. 22, December 14, 1787
"The creation of the world -- said Plato -- is the victory of persuasion over force... Civilization is the maintenance of social order, by its own inherent persuasiveness as embodying the nobler alternative. The recourse to force, however unavoidable, is a disclosure of the failure of civilization, either in the general society or in a remnant of individuals... Now the intercourse between individuals and between social groups takes one of these two forms: force or persuasion. Commerce is the great example of intercourse by way of persuasion. War, slavery, and governmental compulsion exemplify the reign of force."
-Alfred North Whitehead-
(1861-1947)
Source: in Adventures of Ideas
"Any person or any so-called 'political spectrum' that equates live-and-let-livers with control freaks is even more evil than the worst control freaks themselves."
-Bert Rand-
"You can't give the government the power to do good without also giving it the power to do bad - in fact, to do anything it wants."
-Harry Browne-
(1933-2006) American libertarian writer, politician, and free-market investment analyst. Libertarian candidate for US President 1996 & 2000
"Using governmental force to impose a vision on others is intellectual sloth."
-Ken Schoolland-
Former U.S. International Trade Commission economist, Former Special Advisor to the White House, executive of International Society for Individual Liberty
"A moderate is either someone who has no moral code of his own, or if he does, then he's someone who doesn't have the guts to take sides between good and evil."
-Rick Gaber-
Libertarian writer
"Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: letter to Thomas Jefferson, October 17, 1788
"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
"Liberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker. But if we had not, our fathers have earned and bought it for us, at the expense of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, 1765
"An honorable Peace is and always was my first wish! I can take no delight in the effusion of human Blood; but, if this War should continue, I wish to have the most active part in it."
-John Paul Jones-
(1747-1792) Scottish sailor, US naval fighter in the American Revolutionary War
Source: letter to Gouverneur Morris, Sept 2, 1782
"There is no such thing as an achieved liberty: like electricity, there can be no substantial storage and it must be generated as it is enjoyed, or the lights go out."
-Justice Robert H. Jackson-
(1892-1954), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: American Bar Association Journal, 1953
"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
"The people of the various provinces are strictly forbidden to have in their possession any swords, bows, spears, firearms, or other types of arms. The possession of these elements makes difficult the collection of taxes and dues, and tends to permit uprising. Therefore, the heads of provinces, official agents, and deputies are ordered to collect all the weapons mentioned above and turn them over to the government."
-Toyotomi Hideyoshi-
(1536-1598) Japanese Chancellor of the Realm, preeminent daimyo, warrior, general and politician of the Sengoku period
Source: as Shogun of Japan, August 29, 1558
"We are told there is no cause to fear. When we consider the great powers of Congress, there is great cause of alarm. They can disarm the militia. If they were armed, they would be a resource against great oppressions. The laws of a great empire are difficult to be executed. If the laws of the union were oppressive, they could not carry them into effect, if the people were possessed of the proper means of defence."
-William Lenoir-
Source: advocating for the addition of a Bill of Rights to the Federal Constitution in the North Carolina 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.4 p.203 (Philadelphia, 1836)
"The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie -- a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days -- but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please."
-Hannah Arendt-
(1906-1975) German-American political theorist, escaped Nazi Germany
Source: 'Hannah Arendt: From an Interview' Comments made in 1974 during an interview with the French writer Roger Errera and published in October 26, 1978 issue of The NewYork Review of Books Interview.
"What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core."
-Hannah Arendt-
(1906-1975) German-American political theorist, escaped Nazi Germany
Source: On Revolution (1963), ch. 2.
"It becomes all therefore who are friends of a Government based on free principles to reflect, that by denying the possibility of a system partly federal and partly consolidated, and who would convert ours into one either wholly federal or wholly consolidated, in neither of which forms have individual rights, public order, and external safety, been all duly maintained, they aim a deadly blow at the last hope of true liberty on the face of the Earth."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Notes on Nullification
"Happily for America, happily, we trust, for the whole human race, they pursued a new and more noble course. They accomplished a revolution which has no parallel in the annals of human society."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Federalist No. 14, November 20, 1787
"The diversity in the faculties of men from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Federalist No. 10, November 23, 1787
"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
That's how a FREE society would work, anyway...
"Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"Politicians are always realistically maneuvering for the next election. They are obsolete as fundamental problem-solvers."
-Buckminster Fuller-
Was it ever otherwise...?
"The duties of man consist in alternate action and meditation, mutually aiding and relieving each other; and both, directed with undeviating aim, to the progressive improvement of himself and his fellow creatures. Heaven has given him in charge, to promote the happiness and well-being of himself, his wife, his children, his kindred, his neighbors, his fellow citizens, his country, and his kind; and the great problem of legislation is, so to organize the civil government of a community, that this gradation of duties, may be made to harmonize in all its parts — that in the operation of human institutions upon social action, self-love and social may be made the same."
-John Quincy Adams-
"America was founded on the principle of inalienable rights, not dictated duties. The Declaration of Independence states that every human being has a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It does not state that he is born a slave to the needs of others."
-Alex Epstein-
American writer
Source: John McCain’s Deadly Moral Code (2000.08.12 ) Capitalism Magazine
"There is a place for government in the affairs of men, and our Declaration of Independence tells us precisely what that place is. The role of government is to protect individuals in their God-given individual rights. Freedom is the natural birthright of man, but all that government can do in behalf of freedom is to let the individual alone, and it should secure him in his rights by making others let him alone."
-Rev. Edmund A. Opitz-
(1914-2006) American minister, author
"If the American Revolution had produced nothing but the Declaration of Independence, it would have been worthwhile."
-Samuel Eliot Morison-
(1887-1976) Rear Admiral USNR, Naval historian
1965
"On the distinctive principles of the Government ... of the U. States, the best guides are to be found in ... The Declaration of Independence, as the fundamental Act of Union of these States."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, 1825
Stated differently, you wanna know the original intent of the Constitution? Look to the original grievances of the Declaration.
"Because we fear the responsibility for our actions, we have allowed ourselves to develop the mentality of slaves. Contrary to the stirring sentiments of the Declaration of Independence, we now pledge "our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor" not to one another for our mutual protection, but to the state, whose actions continue to exploit, despoil, and destroy us."
-Butler D. Shaffer-
Professor, Southwestern University School of Law
June 9, 2003
"The War between the States... produced the foundation for the kind of government we have today: consolidated and absolute, based on the unrestrained will of the majority, with force, threats, and intimidation being the order of the day. Today's federal government is considerably at odds with that envisioned by the framers of the Constitution. ... [The War] also laid to rest the great principle enunciated in the Declaration of Independence that 'Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed'."
-Walter E. Williams-
(1936- ) Columnist, Professor of Economics at George Mason University
"Why then sir, why do we longer delay? Why still deliberate? Let this happy day give birth to an American Republic. Let her arise not to devastate and to conquer but to reestablish the reign of peace and law. The eyes of Europe are fixed upon us. She demands of us a living example of freedom that may exhibit a contrast in the felicity of the citizen to the ever-increasing tyranny which desolates her polluted shores. She invites us to prepare an asylum where the unhappy may find solace, and the persecuted repose. If we are not this day wanting in our duty, the names of the American legislators of 1776 will be placed by posterity at the side of all of those whose memory has been and ever will be dear to virtuous men and good citizens."
-Richard Henry Lee-
(1732-1794) Founding Father
Source: introduced the resolution to adopt the Declaration of Independence in June of 1776.
"The law isn’t justice. It’s a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be."
-Raymond Chandler-
"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
"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)
"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
"The essential characteristic of Western civilization that distinguishes it from the arrested and petrified civilizations of the East was and is its concern for freedom from the state."
-Ludwig Von Mises-
(1881-1973) Economist and social philosopher
"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
"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
"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-
(1865-1936)
"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they have resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they suppress."
-Frederick Douglass-
[Frederick Baily] (1818-1895), escaped slave, Abolitionist, author, editor of the North Star and later the New National Era
"I have never had a feeling, politically, that did not spring from ... the Declaration of Independence ... that all should have an equal chance. This is the sentiment embodied in the Declaration of Independence ... I would rather be assassinated on this spot than surrender it."
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
"The secret dread of modern intellectuals, liberals and conservatives alike, the unadmitted terror at the root of their anxiety, which all of their current irrationalities are intended to stave off and to disguise, is the unstated knowledge that Soviet Russia is the full, actual, literal, consistent embodiment of the morality of altruism, that Stalin did not corrupt a noble ideal, that this is the only way altruism has to be or can ever be practiced. If service and self-sacrifice are a moral ideal, and if the "selfishness" of human nature prevents men from leaping into sacrificial furnaces, there is no reason -- no reason that a mystic moralist could name -- why a dictator should not push them in at the point of bayonets -- for their own good, or the good of humanity, or the good of posterity, or the good of the latest bureaucrat's five-year plan. There is no reason that they can name to oppose any atrocity. The value of a man's life? His right to exist? His right to pursue his own happiness? These are concepts that belong to individualism and capitalism -- to the antithesis of the altruist morality."
-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
"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
"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
"True, it is evil that a single man should crush the herd, but see not there the worse form of slavery, which is when the herd crushes out the man."
-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry-
(1900-1944) French writer, poet, aristocrat, journalist, aviator
Source: Citadelle, 1948 (posthumously)
"The last stage but one of every civilisation, is characterised by the forced political unification of its constituent parts, into a single greater whole."
-Arnold J. Toynbee-
(1889-1975) British historian
Source: 'The Study of History'
"The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Rusian-born American author
"It is not the fact of liberty but the way in which liberty is exercised that ultimately determines whether liberty itself survives."
-Dorothy Thompson-
(1894-1961)
"The state is the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies, too; and this lie creeps from its mouth: `I, the state, am the people.'... Everything about it is false; it bites with stolen teeth. "
-Friedrich Nietzsche-
(1844-1900)
Source: from "Thus Spake Zarathustra"
"History suggests that the cause of national decline is, as a rule, that the state in the nation concerned has sought to do too much rather than too little. This applies as much to the Roman Empire as to the Spanish. "
-Hugh Thomas-
(1931- ) Baron Thomas of Swynnerton, British historian
Source: "An Unfinished History of the World" by Hamish Hamilton (1979)
"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 state remains, as it was in the beginning, the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"Integrity is not a conditional word. It doesn't blow in the wind or change with the weather. It is your inner image of yourself, and if you look in there and see a man who won't cheat, then you know he never will. Integrity is not a search for the rewards of integrity. Maybe all you ever get for it is the largest kick in the ass the world can provide. It is not supposed to be a productive asset. Crime pays a lot better. I can bend my own rules way, way over, but there is a place where I finally stop bending them."
-John D. MacDonald-
“Narcotics police (Prohibitionists) are an enormous, corrupt international bureaucracy … and now fund a coterie of researchers who provide them with ‘scientific support’ … fanatics who distort the legitimate research of others. … The anti-marijuana campaign is a cancerous tissue of lies, undermining law enforcement, aggravating the drug problem, depriving the sick of needed help, and suckering well-intentioned conservatives and countless frightened parents.”
-William F. Buckley-
Commentary in The National Review, April 29, 1988
"The only index by which to judge a government or a way of life is by the quality of the people it acts upon. No matter how noble the objectives of a government, if it blurs decency and kindness, cheapens human life, and breeds ill will and suspicion — it is an evil government."
-Eric Hoffer-
"In debates between anarchists and statists, the burden of proof clearly should rest on those who place their trust in the state. Anarchy's mayhem is wholly conjectural; the state's mayhem is undeniably, factually horrendous."
-Robert Higgs-
"It is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits."
-Aristotle-
"A young man is not a proper hearer of lectures on political science; for he is inexperienced in the actions that occur in life, but its discussions start from these and are about these; and, further, since he tends to follow his passions, his study will be vain and unprofitable, because the end aimed at is not knowledge but action."
-Aristotle-
"Decent people, virtually by definition, do not seek to exercise political power over their fellows. ... Honorable people, taking a wrong turn and blundering into positions of political leadership, would last no longer than a nun in a brothel. If ruthless rivals did not displace them at the earliest opportunity, the scrupulous people would soon remove themselves in disgust. People who lack pugnacity do not succeed as prize fighters; people who lack a talent for lying, stealing and, if need be, abetting homicide do not succeed in modern politics."
-Robert Higgs-
"The work of the individual still remains the spark that moves mankind forward."
-Igor Sikorsky-
(1889-1972) Aviation pioneer
"The only part of the conduct of anyone for which he is amenable to society is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign."
-John Stuart Mill-
(1806-1873) English philosopher and economist
"The mania for giving the Government power to meddle with the private affairs of cities or citizens is likely to cause endless trouble, through the rivaly of schools and creeds that are anxious to obtain official recognition, and there is great danger that our people will lose our 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, to prescribe when his child may be born and when he may die, 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-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910)
"Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist
"To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying 'Amen' to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive."
-Robert Louis Stevenson-
(1850-1895)
"By pursuing his own interest [every individual] frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good."
-Adam Smith-
(1723-1790) Scottish philosopher and economist
Source: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), Book IV, Chap. 2 (New York: Random House, 1937, p. 423)
"There is no happiness, there is no liberty, there is no enjoyment of life, unless a man can say, when he rises in the morning, I shall be subject to the decision of no unwise judge today."
-Daniel Webster-
(1782-1852), US Senator
Source: Speech, 10 March 1931
"The idea that men are created free and equal is both true and misleading: men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other."
-David Reisman-
American Sociologist
"The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to prevailing superstition or taboo."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
Source: Minority Report
"True education makes for inequality;
the inequality of individuality,
the inequality of success,
the glorious inequality of talent, of genius;
for inequality, not mediocrity,
individual superiority, not standardization,
is the measure of the progress of the world."
-Felix E. Schelling-
(1858-1945) American educator
"Our dependency makes slaves out of us, especially if this dependency is a dependency of our self esteem. If you need encouragement, pats on the back from everybody, then you make everybody your judge."
-Fritz Perls-
"To change masters is not to be free."
-Jose Marti y Perez-
(1853-1895)
"A declaration is not a government; a creed is not enough. The Founders recognized that there were seeds of anarchy in the idea of individual freedom, an intoxicating danger in the idea of equality, for if everybody is truly free, without the constraints of birth or rank or an inherited social order — if my notion of faith is no better or worse than yours, and my notions of truth and goodness and beauty are as true and good and beautiful as yours — then how can we ever hope to form a society that coheres? Enlightenment thinkers like Hobbes and Locke suggested that free men would form governments as a bargain to ensure that one man's freedom did not become another man's tyranny; that they would sacrifice individual license to better preserve their liberty."
-The Audacity of Hope-
Yeah, and...? This is so hopelessly confused...
"Freedom of thought is the only guarantee against an infection of people by mass myths, which, in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demagogues, can be transformed into bloody dictatorships."
-Andrei Sakharov-
(1921-1989)
Source: Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom, 1968
"We fought the Revolutionary War for no taxation without representation, it seems to me that we are much worse off today, because we are heavily taxed, and only the king's corporations control this Country, together with mob rule, of the special interests."
-James Montgomery-
(1771-1854) Scottish-born hymnodist, poet and editor
"Government does not cause affluence. Citizens of totalitarian countries have plenty of government and nothing of anything else."
-P. J. O'Rourke-
(1947- ) US humorist, journalist, & political commentator
Source: "Eat the Rich"
"Love your country but fear its government."
-Daniel Webster-
(1782-1852), US Senator
"I believe that if the people of this nation fully understood what Congress has done to them over the last 49 years, they would move on Washington; they would not wait for an election... It adds up to a preconceived plan to destroy the economic and social independence of the United States!"
-George W. Malone-
(1890-1961) U.S. Senator (Nevada)
1957
Source: speaking before Congress
"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
"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)
"Individual liberty is individual power, and as the power of a community is a mass compounded of individual powers, the nation which enjoys the most freedom must necessarily be in proportion to its numbers the most powerful nation."
-John Quincy Adams-
(1767-1848) 6th US President
Source: Letter to James Lloyd, 1 October 1822
"Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence."
-Albert Einstein-
(1879-1955) Physicist and Professor, Nobel Prize 1921
"No one can be free unless he is independent... In reality, he who is served is limited in his independence..."
-Maria Montessori-
(1870-1952)
"Utopians...consider individual freedom as the stumbling block on which the grandiose idea of mankind's totalization may flounder."
-Thomas Molnar-
Source: Utopia: The Perennial Heresy, 1967
"And that the said Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press, or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms; or to raise standing armies, unless necessary for the defense of the United States, or of some one or more of them; or to prevent the people from petitioning, in a peaceable and orderly manner, the federal legislature, for a redress of grievances; or to subject the people to unreasonable searches and seizures of their persons, papers or possessions."
-Samuel Adams-
(1722-1803), was known as the "Father of the American Revolution."
Source: Debates and Proceedings in the Convention of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 1788 (Pierce & Hale, eds., Boston, 1850)
"Dost thou not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?"
-Count Axel Oxenstierna-
[Axel Gustafsson Oxenstierna af Södermöre] (1583-1654) Count of Södermöre, Swedish statesman
Source: Count Axel Oxenstierna of Sweden (letter to his son, 1648)
"Order is not pressure which is imposed on society from without but an equilibrium which is set up from within."
-José Ortega y Gasset-
(1883-1955)
1927
"I do esteem individual liberty above everything. What is a nation for, but to secure the maximum liberty to every individual?"
-D. H. Lawrence-
(1885-1938)
Source: Letter, 12 July 1916
"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
"Liberty is quite as much a moral as a political growth, -- the result of free individual action, energy, and independence."
-Samuel Smiles-
(1812-1904) Scottish author and reformer
"The whole of the Bill [of Rights] is a declaration of the right of the people at large or considered as individuals... It establishes some rights of the individual as unalienable and which consequently, no majority has a right to deprive them of."
-Albert Gallatin-
of the NY Historical Society
October 7, 1789
"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
"Freedom is not a fixed and possessed thing. It is a quality of life. And like action itself, it is something experienced only by individuals."
-Neil A. McDonald-
Source: Politics: A Study of Control Behavior, 1965
"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"
"Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
Source: "Common Sense"
"Reactionism is not the same thing as conservatism. It’s far more potent a brew. Reactionary thought begins, usually, with acute despair at the present moment and a memory of a previous golden age. It then posits a moment in the past when everything went to hell and proposes to turn things back to what they once were. It is not simply a conservative preference for things as they are, with a few nudges back, but a passionate loathing of the status quo and a desire to return to the past in one emotionally cathartic revolt. If conservatives are pessimistic, reactionaries are apocalyptic. If conservatives value elites, reactionaries seethe with contempt for them. If conservatives believe in institutions, reactionaries want to blow them up. If conservatives tend to resist too radical a change, reactionaries want a revolution. Though it took some time to reveal itself, today’s Republican Party — from Newt Gingrich’s Republican Revolution to today’s Age of Trump — is not a conservative party. It is a reactionary party that is now at the peak of its political power."
-Andrew Sullivan-
"The rights of all are equal: justice, poised and balanced in eternal calm, will shake from the golden scales in which are weighed the acts of men, the very dust of prejudice and caste: No race, no color, no previous condition, can change the rights of men."
-Robert G. Ingersoll-
"America was born of revolt, flourished on dissent, became great through experimentation."
-Henry Steele Commager-
(1902-1998) Historian and author
"Freedom for supporters of the government only, for members of one party only -- no matter how big its membership may be -- is no freedom at all. Freedom is always freedom for the man who thinks differently."
-Rosa Luxemburg-
(1880-1919)
"If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless
and ineffectual. "
-Frank Herbert-
(1920-1986)
Source: "The Dosadi Experiment"
"A shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases."
-Carl Gustav Jung-
(1875-1961)
Source: Modern Man in Search of a Soul, 1933
"A society committed to the search for truth must give protection to, and set a high value upon, the independent and original mind, however angular, however rasping, however, socially unpleasant it may be; for it is upon such minds in large measure, that the effective search for truth depends."
-Caryl Parker Haskins-
(1908-2001) Scientist, author, inventor, philanthropist, governmental advisor and pioneering entomologist in the study of ant biology
Source: New York Times, 9 December 1963
"The individual is the true reality of life. A cosmos in himself, he does not exist for the State, nor for that abstraction called 'society,' or the 'nation,' which is only a collection of individuals."
-Emma Goldman-
(1869-1940)
Source: The Place of the Individual in Society
"I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races. There is physical difference between the two which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together."
-Abraham Lincoln-
"Government has within it a tendency to abuse its powers."
-John C. Calhoun-
(1782-1850) American statesman
"By far the most numerous and most flagrant violations of personal liberty and individual rights are performed by governments. The major crimes throughout history, the ones executed on the largest scale, have been committed not by individuals or bands of individuals but by governments, as a deliberate policy of those governments, that is, by the official representatives of governments, acting in their official capacity."
-John Hospers-
(1918-2011) Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Southern California, author
"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
"China, Cuba, countries where the only freedoms are those bestowed on a whim by the state -- these countries jail their kids for burning the flag. We do not. America was created around dissent. Our freedom is founded upon the right to make known our opinion without threat of government interdiction -- Old Glory is the ultimate, tangible expression of this national belief."
-Marvin Johnson-
a Legislative Counsel for the ACLU
Source: circa 2001
"Government power must be dispersed. If government is to exercise power, better in the county than in the state, better in the state than in Washington. If I do not like what my local community does, be it in sewage disposal, or zoning, or schools, I can move to another local community, and though few may take this step, the mere possibility acts as a check. If I do not like what Washington imposes, I have few alternatives in this world of jealous nations."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
Source: "Capitalism and Freedom"
"While I was at the hotel to-day, an elderly gentleman called upon me to know whether I was really in favor of producing a perfect equality between the negroes and white people. [Great Laughter.] While I had not proposed to myself on this occasion to say much on that subject, yet as the question was asked me I thought I would occupy perhaps five minutes in saying something in regard to it. I will say then 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, [applause]-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 there 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 other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. I say upon this occasion I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the negro should be denied every thing. I do not understand that because I do not want a negro woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. [Cheers and laughter.] My understanding is that I can just let her alone. I am now in my fiftieth year, and I certainly never have had a black woman for either a slave or a wife. So it seems to me quite possible for us to get along without making either slaves or wives of negroes. I will add to this that I have never seen, to my knowledge, a man, woman or child who was in favor of producing a perfect equality, social and political, between negroes and white men. … I will also add to the remarks I have made (for I am not going to enter at large upon this subject,) that I have never had the least apprehension that I or my friends would marry negroes if there was no law to keep them from it, [laughter] but as Judge Douglas and his friends seem to be in great apprehension that they might, if there were no law to keep them from it, [roars of laughter] I give him the most solemn pledge that I will to the very last stand by the law of this State, which forbids the marrying of white people with negroes. [Continued laughter and applause.]"
-Abraham Lincoln-
fourth Lincoln-Douglas debate, held in Charleston, South Carolina
"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."
-H.L. Mencken-
1880-1956
"The only freedom which counts is the freedom to do what some other people think to be wrong. There is no point in demanding freedom to do that which all will applaud. All the so-called liberties or rights are things which have to be asserted against others; who claim that if such things are to be allowed, their own rights are infringed or their own liberties threatened. This is always true, even when we speak of the freedom to worship, of the right of free speech or association, or of public assembly. If we are to allow freedoms at all there will constantly be complaints that either the liberty itself or the way in which it is exercised is being abused, and, if it is a genuine freedom, these complaints will often be justified. There is no way of having a free society in which there is not abuse. Abuse is the very hallmark of liberty."
-Lord Chief Justice Baron Hailsham-
"The Dilemma of Democracy" --66.231.221.224 01:17, 16 August 2015 (UTC)
"I am certain, however, that nothing has done so much to destroy the judicial safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice."
-Friedrich A. Hayek-
"We need not adopt the values of the people whose rights we defend."
-Jeffery Tucker-
"For my friends, anything. For my enemies, the law."
-Oscar Benavides-
"While I have considered the preservation of the constitutional power of the General Government to be the foundation of our peace and safety at home and abroad, I yet believe that the maintenance of the rights and authority reserved to the states and to the people, not only are essential to the adjustment and balance of the general system, but the safeguard to the continuance of a free government. I consider it as the chief source of stability to our political system, whereas the consolidation of the states into one vast republic, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of that ruin which has overwhelmed all those that have preceded it."
-Robert E. Lee-
letter to Lord Acton
"The majority is never right. Never, I tell you! That's one of these lies in society that no free and intelligent man can ever help rebelling against. Who are the people that make up the biggest proportion of the population -- the intelligent ones or the fools? I think we can agree it's the fools, no matter where you go in this world, it's the fools that form the overwhelming majority."
-Henrik Ibsen-
(1828-1906) Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet
"Those who have ever valued liberty for its own sake believed that to be free to choose, and not to be chosen for, is an unalienable ingredient in what makes human beings human."
-Isaiah Berlin-
(1909-1997)
Source: Five Essays on Liberty, 1969
"When we lose the right to be different, we lose the privilege to be free."
-Justice Charles Evans Hughes-
(1862-1948) Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court
"Whatever power you give to the good cops, goes to the bad ones, too. Never forget that."
-Phillip J. Birmingham-
"No man has ever ruled other men for their own good."
-George Herron
(1862-1925) American clergyman, lecturer, writer, and Christian socialist activist
"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
"....it is always easier to tell people what to do than to find out what is happening..."
-Martin Pawley-
"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: May 3, 1854, President vetoed a bill
"The principle that the end justifies the means is in individualist ethics regarded as the denial of all morals. In collectivist ethics it becomes necessarily the supreme rule."
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
Source: The Road to Serfdom (1944)
"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
"If Congress can determine what constitutes the general welfare and can appropriate money for its advancement, where is the limitation to carrying into execution whatever can be effected by money?"
-William Drayton-
(1776-1846) US Congressman for South Carolina (1825-1833), banker, and author
1828
"The law, unfortunately, has always been retained on the side of power; laws have uniformly been enacted for the protection and perpetuation of power."
-Thomas Cooper-
(1759-1839)
Source: Liberty of the Press, 1830
"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)
"The tendency of all strong governments has always been to suppress liberty, partly in order to ease the processes of rule, partly from sheer disbelief in innovation."
-John A. Hobson-
(1858-1940)
Source: Free Thought in the Social Sciences, 1926
"Freedom is the emancipation from the arbitrary rule of other men."
-Mortimer Adler-
(1902-2001)
"The plea of necessity, that eternal argument of all conspirators."
-William Henry Harrison-
(1773-1841), 9th U. S. President
Source: Letter to Simon Bolivar, 27 September 1829
"Emergency does not create power. Emergency does not increase granted power or remove or diminish the restrictions imposed upon power granted or reserved. The Constitution was adopted in a period of grave emergency. Its grants of power to the federal government and its limitations of the power of the States were determined in the light of emergency, and they are not altered by emergency."
-Justice Charles Evans Hughes-
(1862-1948) Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court
Source: Home Building & Loan Assn v. Blairsdell, 1934
"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
"It will be found an unjust and unwise jealousy to deprive a man of his natural liberty upon the supposition he may abuse it."
-Oliver Cromwell-
(1599-1658) British Lord General of the Army, Lord Protector of the Realm
Source: Address, First Protectorate Parliament, 1654
"The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its 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 man than that any of its provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government. Such a doctrine leads directly to anarchy or despotism, but the theory of necessity on which it is based is false; for the government, within the Constitution, has all the powers granted to it, which are necessary to preserve its existence; as has been happily proved by the result of the great effort to throw off its just authority."
-Justice David Davis-
(1815-1886) U.S. Supreme Court Justice 1862-1877
Source: Ex parte Milligan 71 U.S. 2 (1866) DAVIS, J., Opinion of the Court
"It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones. "
-Calvin Coolidge-
(1873-1933), 30th US President
"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)
"Ponder the capriciousness of human nature, which allows momentary appetites and fleeting attitudes to set the courses for entire lives and future responsibilities."
-Ann Gray-
Author
Source: "BRIARS: The House of Heirs", 2002
"Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution, of course, lays out the delegated, enumerated, and therefore limited powers of Congress. Only through a deliberate misreading of the general welfare and commerce clauses of the Constitution has the federal government been allowed to overreach its authority and extend its tendrils into every corner of civil society."
-Edward H. Crane-
Founder and president of the Cato Institute
Source: A Constitution of Liberty, Cato Institute 1995 Annual Report
"The dangers of a concentration of all power in the general government of a confederacy so vast as ours are too obvious to be disregarded."
-Franklin Pierce-
(1804-1869) U.S. President
Source: Inaugural Address, 4 March 1853
"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
"But our society -- unlike most in the world -- presupposes that freedom and liberty are in a frame of reference that makes the individual, not government, the keeper of his tastes, beliefs, and ideas; that is the philosophy of the First Amendment; and it is this article of faith that sets us apart from most nations in the world."
-William O. Douglas-
(1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: dissenting, Paris Adult Theatre I v. Slaton
"The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"Indeed, the ABA [American Bar Association] is truly a creature of these post-modern times. Its governing members view the political sphere and judicial sphere as one in the same, and worship raw power as the ultimate and only currency in social transactions. The modern ABA thus has embraced an ideology that views the rule of law as a mere extension of politics, and in a self-fulfilling confirmation of that view, conflates law and politics with unashamedly liberal policy prescriptions."
-Ray Gifford-
(attorney with law firm of Baker & Hostetler in Denver, Co)
Source: The ABA Strait-jacket, THE DEFENDER, October/November 1995.
"How should it happen that the individual should be without rights, but the combination of individuals should possess unlimited rights?"
-Auberon Herbert-
(1838-1906) English author
"The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interest."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
"Laws are maintained in credit, not because they are essentially just, but because they are laws. It is the mystical foundation of their authority; they have none other."
-Michel de Montaigne-
[Michel Eyquem De Montaigne] (1532-1592) French Renaissance scholar, philosopher, writer
Source: Essays, 1575
"The end cannot justify the means for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced."
-Aldous Huxley-
(1894-1963) Author
Source: Ends and Means, 1937
"If the federal government should overpass the just bounds of its authority and make a tyrannical use of its powers, the people, whose creature it is, must appeal to the standard they have formed, and take such measures to redress the injury done to the Constitution as the exigency may suggest and prudence justify."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: Federalist No. 33, 3 January 1788
"But constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it, and to carry his authority as far as it will go."
-Charles-Louis de Secondat-
(1689-1755) Baron de Montesquieu
"There is as far as I know, no example in history, of any state voluntarily ceding power from the centre to its constituent parts."
-Charles Handy-
Source: 'The Age of Unreason'
"Madness is rare in individuals, but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule."
-Friedrich Nietzsche-
(1844-1900)
"Responsibility, in order to be reasonable, must be limited to objects within the power of the responsible party, and in order to be effectual, must relate to operations of that power, of which a ready and proper judgment can be formed by the constituents."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: Federalist No. 63, 1788
"The IRS is an extraordinary example of the end justifying the means. The means of this agency is growth. It is interesting that the revenue officers within the IRS refer to taxpayers as 'inventory'. The IRS embodies the political realities of the selfish human desire to dominate others. Thus the end of this gigantic pretense of officialdom is power, pure and simple. The meek may inherit the earth, but they will never receive a promotion in an agency where efficiency is measured by the number of seizures of taxpayers' property and by the number of citizens and businesses driven into bankruptcy."
-George Hansen-
Congressman and author of "To Harass Our People"
"Socialism is after all, the Viagra of politics..."
-Michael Pierce-
"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
Senators, I beseech you. Oops, 17th Amendment. Too late...
"The greatest danger to liberty today comes from the men who are most needed and most powerful in modern government, namely, the efficient expert administrators exclusively concerned with what they regard as the public good."
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
"Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose."
-Friedrich Nietzsche-
(1844-1900)
Source: The Anti-Christ
"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
"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
Statists/authoritarians and libertarians, by any other name...
"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
"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
"The struggle is always between the individual and his sacred right to express himself and... the power structure that seeks conformity, suppression and obedience."
-Justice William O. Douglas-
(1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
"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
"The way to have good and safe government is not to trust it all to one, but to divide it among the many, distributing to everyone exactly the functions in which he is competent ...
- To let the National Government be entrusted with the defense of the nation, and its foreign and federal relations ...
- The State Governments with the Civil Rights, Laws, Police and administration of what concerns the State generally.
- The Counties with the local concerns, and each ward direct the interests within itself.
It is by dividing and subdividing these Republics from the great national one down through all its subordinations until it ends in the administration of everyman's farm by himself, by placing under everyone what his own eye may superintend, that all will be done for the best."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Jefferson letter to Joseph Cabell, Febrary 2, 1816, Writings W., 6:544
"Any power must be an enemy of mankind which enslaves the individual by power and by force, whether it arises under the Fascist or the Communist flag. All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development accorded to the individual."
-Albert Einstein-
(1879-1955) Physicist and Professor, Nobel Prize 1921
Source: 15 September 1933
"There have existed, in every age and every country, two distinct orders of men -- the lovers of freedom and the devoted advocates of power."
-Robert Y. Hayne-
(1791-1839 ) U.S. Senator for S.C.
Source: Speech, 21 January 1830
"A free man is he that, in those things which by his strength and wit he is able to do, is not hindered to do what he has a will to."
-Thomas Hobbes-
(1588-1679) English philosopher, political theorist
Source: Leviathan, 1651
"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use."
-Galileo Galilei-
Astronomer (1564 - 1642)
"It is within the police power of the state to prohibit public use of fighting words that create a danger of breach of the peace, but simply to prohibit public use of fighting words is too broad. Those words may sometimes be used in situations where there is no danger."
-Ithiel De Sola Pool-
Source: Technologies Of Freedom: On Free Speech in an Electronic Age, 1983
"Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them."
-Laurence J. Peter-
"The growth of federal power and programs over this century -- involving the regulation of business, the expansion of "civil rights," the production of environmental goods, and much else -- has taken place in large measure through the power of Congress to regulate "commerce among the states." That power has been read so broadly by the modern Court that Congress today can regulate anything that even "affects" commerce, which in principle is everything. As a result, save for the restraints imposed by the Bill of Rights, the commerce power is now essentially plenary, which is hardly what the Framers intended when they enumerated Congress’s powers. Indeed, if they had meant for Congress to be able to do anything it wanted under the commerce power, the enumeration of Congress’s other powers -- to say nothing of the defense of the doctrine of enumerated powers throughout the Federalist Papers -- would have been pointless. The purpose of the commerce clause quite simply, was to enable Congress to ensure the free flow of commerce among the states. Under the Articles of Confederation, state legislatures had enacted tariffs and other protectionist measures that impeded interstate commerce. To break the logjam, Congress was empowered to make commerce among the states "regular." In fact, the need to do so was one of the principal reasons behind the call for a new constitution."
-Roger Pilon-
Vice President for Legal Affairs for the Cato Institute
Source: Restoring Constitutional Government, Cato's Letter #9, p. 6, published by the Cato Institute (1995)
"Do not expect justice where might is right."
-Plato-
(429-347 BC)
Source: Phaedrus, 360 B.C.
"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 A. Heinlein-
(1907-1988) American writer
"Freedom... refer[s] to a social relationship among people -- namely, the absence of force as a prospective instrument of decision making. Freedom is reduced whenever a decision is made under threat of force, whether or not force actually materializes or is evident in retrospect."
-Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
"An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: letter to John Melish, January 13, 1813
"The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves."
-William Hazlitt-
(1778-1830)
Source: Political Essays (1819). 'The Times' Newspaper
"True liberty cannot exist apart from the full rights of property, for property is the only crystallized form of free faculties... The whole meaning of socialism is a systematic glorification of force... No literary phrases about social organisms are potent enough to evaporate the individual, who is the prime, indispensable, irreducible element."
-Auberon Herbert-
(1838-1906) English author
"Governments do not govern, but merely control the machinery of government, being themselves controlled by the hidden hand."
-Benjamin Disraeli-
(1804-1881) Prime Minister of England, British statesman, novelist
"It's never more important to move slowly and carefully before granting the state new powers than in the wake of tragedies."
-Brian Doherty-
(1968-) American journalist, author, Senior Editor at Reason magazine
Source: Tragic Government, Reason, May, 1997, p 9
"Great nations are simply the operating fronts of behind-the-scenes, vastly ambitious individuals who had become so effectively powerful because of their ability to remain invisible while operating behind the national scenery."
-Buckminster Fuller-
[Richard Buckminster Fuller] (1895-1983) American visionary, designer, architect, poet, author, and inventor
Source: 'Critical Path'
"Watch out for the fellow who talks about putting things in order! Putting things in order always means getting other people under your control."
-Denis Diderot-
(1713-1784)
"The man who craves disciples and wants followers is always more or less of a charlatan. The man of genuine worth and insight wants to be himself; and he wants others to be themselves, also."
-Elbert Hubbard-
(1856-1915)
"Absolute power turns its possessors not into a God but an anti-God. For God turned clay into men, while the absolute despot turns men into clay."
-Eric Hoffer-
(1902-1983) American author, philosopher, awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
"If ever the Time should come, when vain & aspiring Men shall possess the highest Seats in Government, our Country will stand in Need of its experienced Patriots to prevent its Ruin."
-Samuel Adams-
"Presidents don't have power. Their job is to draw attention away from it."
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Best deep state summary...?
"The greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence. In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one could argue, to whom one could present grievances, on whom the pressures of power could be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant."
-Hannah Arendt-
(1906-1975)
German-American political theorist who wrote extensively on totalitarianism
"[It is a basic principle of a tyrant] to unarm his people of weapons, money, and all means whereby they resist his power."
-Sir Walter Raleigh-
(1554-1618)
Source: 3 The Works of Sir Walter Raleigh 22 (T. Birch ed. 1829)
"If an individual is born with the obligation to obey, who is born with the right to command?"
-Tom G. Palmer-
(1956-) Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute
Source: Myths of Individualism, Volume XVIII Number 5 Cato Policy Report p. 12 (September/October 1996).
"Unlimited Power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it."
-William Pitt, Sr.-
(1708-1778) 1st Earl of Chatham, English Statesman, Orator
January 9, 1770
"[T]he State's criminality is nothing new and nothing to be wondered at. It began when the first predatory group of men clustered together and formed the State, and it will continue as long as the State exists in the world, because the State is fundamentally an anti-social institution, fundamentally criminal. The idea that the State originated to serve any kind of social purpose is completely unhistorical. It originated in conquest and confiscation -- that is to say, in crime. It originated for the purpose of maintaining the division of society into an owning-and-exploiting class and a propertyless dependent class -- that is, for a criminal purpose. No State known to history originated in any other manner, or for any other purpose. Like all predatory or parasitic institutions, its first instinct is that of self-preservation. All its enterprises are directed first towards preserving its own life, and, second, towards increasing its own power and enlarging the scope of its own activity. For the sake of this it will, and regularly does, commit any crime which circumstances make expedient."
-Albert Jay Nock-
(1870-1945)
Source: The Criminality of the State, America Mercury Magazine, March, 1939
"Nothing is less productive than to make more efficient what should not be done at all."
-Peter Drucker-
(1909-2005) American writer, management consultant, and self-described “social ecologist.” Widely considered to be the father of “modern management."
"One of the central assumptions of the concept of democracy, perhaps its most central assumption, is that by and large human beings are better judges of their own interests…. The operating maxim of the democratic ideology is, “Whoever wears the shoe knows best where it pinches.”"
-Sidney Hook-
(1902-1989) American Marxist philosopher
Source: Political Power and Personal Freedom, 1959
"Force (is) the vital principle and immediate parent of despotism."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"Is freedom anything else than the right to live as we wish?
Nothing else."
-Epictetus-
(ca 55-135 A.D.) Greek philospher
"Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows."
-George Orwell-
[Eric Arthur Blair] (1903-1950) British author
Source: his book, '1984', 1949
"To freemen, threats are impotent.
[Lat., Nulla enim minantis auctoritas apud liberos est.]"
-Marcus Tullius Cicero-
(106-43 B.C.) Roman Statesman, Philosopher and Orator
"All lawful authority comes from God to the people."
-Constitution of the Irish Free State-
Source: Constitution of the Irish Free State, Preamble, 1922
"Distrust everyone in whom the impulse to punish is powerful."
-Friedrich Nietzsche-
(1844-1900)
Source: Thus Spoke Zarathustra
"My faith is that the only soul a man must save is his own."
-Justice William O. Douglas-
(1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
"It is maintained that a society is free only when dissenting minorities have room to throw their weight around. As a matter of fact, a dissenting minority feels free only when it can impose its will on the majority: what it abominates most is the dissent of the majority."
-Eric Hoffer-
(1902-1983) American author, philosopher, awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
"History has taught us time and again that political power always raises its angry fist when timeless principles are lost. We know that without the scale of 'self-evident truths' grounded in the 'laws of nature and nature's God,' every culture eventually finds itself subject to the rule of the gang or the tyranny of the individual. Recognizing this, scholars of all ages have confidently given their hearts and minds to the words, 'You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.'"
-Everett Piper-
President of Oklahoma Wesleyan University
Source: 'Bethlehem, Not Berkeley, Is the Birthplace of Free Speech,' The Christian Post, Apr 27, 2017
"The Greeks... labored under the delusion that their democracy was a guarantee of peace and plenty, not realizing that unrestrained majority rule always destroys freedom, puts the minority at the mercy of the mob, and works at cross-purposes to the effective use of human energy and individual initiative."
-Henry Grady Weaver-
(1889-1949)
Source: "The Mainspring of Human Progress," 1947
"People demand freedom only when they have no power."
-Friedrich Nietzsche-
(1844-1900)
"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) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: Federalist Paper 79 (regarding payment of Judges)
"Forcing people to be more 'unselfish' creates animosity instead of good will. Trying to control selfish others is a cure worse than the disease. ... In trying to control others, we find ourselves controlled. We point fingers at the dictators, the Communists, the politicians, and the international cartels. We are blithely unaware that our desire to control selfish others creates and sustains them. Like a stone thrown in a quiet pond, our desire to control our neighbors ripples outward, affecting the political course of our community, state, nation, and world. Yet we know not what we do. We attempt to bend our neighbors to our will, sincere in our belief that we are benevolently protecting the world from their folly and short-sightedness. We seek control to create peace and prosperity, not realizing that this is the very means by which war and poverty are propagated. In fighting for our dream without awareness, we become the instruments of its destruction. If we could only see the pattern!"
-Dr. Mary J. Ruwart-
(1949- )
Source: Healing Our World, Introduction.
"Throughout the history of the United States, war has been the primary impetus behind the growth and development of the central state. It has been the lever by which presidents and other national officials have bolstered the power of the state in the face of tenacious popular resistance."
-Bruce D. Porter-
(1952- ) Professor of political science at Brigham Young University
Source: "War and the Rise of the State", 1994
"We recognize the force of the argument that the effects of war under modern conditions may be felt in the economy for years and years, and that if the war power can be used in days of peace to treat all the wounds which war inflicts on our society, it may not only swallow up all other powers of Congress but largely obliterate the Ninth and the Tenth Amendments as well."
-Justice William O. Douglas-
(1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: delivering the opinion of the Supreme Court, Woods v. Cloyd W. Miller Co., 333 U.S. 138, 143-144 (1948)
"Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms [of government] those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"[I]t is a truth which the experience of all ages has attested, that the people are always most in danger, when the means of injuring their rights are in the possession of those of whom they entertain the least suspicion."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: writing as "Publius" in _Federalist No. 25,_ December 21, 1787
"Freedom means freedom from forces and circumstances which would turn man into a thing, which would impose on man the passivity and predictability of matter. By this test, absolute power is the manifestation most inimical to human uniqueness. Absolute power wants to turn people into malleable clay."
-Eric Hoffer-
(1902-1983) American author, philosopher, awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
"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
"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
"Goodness without wisdom always accomplished evil."
-Robert A. Heinlein-
(1907-1988) American writer
Source: "Stranger in a Strange Land"
"Courage without conscience is a wild beast."
-Robert G. Ingersoll-
(1833-1899) American political leader, orator
"In order to rally people, governments need enemies. They want us to be afraid, to hate, so we will rally behind them. And if they do not have a real enemy, they will invent one in order to mobilize us."
-Thích Nhất Hạnh-
"WHY PEOPLE ESPOUSE ANARCHY: Because they believe that kindness is better than cruelty, cooperation is better than conflict, truth is better than lies, reason is better than force, honesty is better than deception, peace is better than war, beauty is better than ugliness, love is better than hatred, wealth is better than poverty, generosity is better than selfishness, progress is better than decline, health is better than sickness, gentleness is better than violence, innocence is better than guilt, wisdom is better than folly, respect is better than contempt, intelligence is better than stupidity, freedom is better than slavery, sanity is better than lunacy, honor is better than treachery, and justice is better than injustice.
WHY PEOPLE ESPOUSE THE STATE: Because they believe that anarchy won’t work or because they are evil."
-Robert Higgs-
"Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable."
-John Kenneth Galbraith-
"The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit."
-Milton Friedman-
"Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor Liberty to purchase power."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
Source: Benjamin Franklin, in the Poor Richard's Almanack of 1738
"Those in power need checks and restraints lest they come to identify the common good for their own tastes and desires, and their continuation in office as essential to the preservation of the nation."
-Justice William O. Douglas-
(1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: We, The Judges, 1956
"Political liberty is nothing else but the diffusion of power."
-Lord Hailsham-
[Quintin McGarel Hogg] (1872-1950) British lawyer and politician
Source: The Case for Conservatism, 1947
"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)
"Vitality springs from diversity -- which makes for real progress so long as there is mutual toleration, based on the recognition that worse may come from an attempt to suppress differences than from acceptance of them. For this reason, the kind of peace that makes progress possible is best assured by the mutual checks created by a balance of forces-alike in the sphere of internal politics and of international relations."
-B. H. Liddell Hart-
(1895-1970) British military historian and strategist
"Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and a house divided against a house falleth."
-Jesus of Nazareth-
Source: The Holy Bible, Luke 11:17
"You know your country is dying when you have to make a distinction between what is moral and ethical, and what is legal."
-John De Armond-
"We must daily decide whether the threats we face are real, whether the solutions we are offered will do any good, whether the problems we're told exist are in fact real problems, or non-problems. Every one of us has a sense of the world, and we all know that this sense is in part given to us by what other people and society tell us; in part generated by our emotional state, which we project outward; and in part by our genuine perceptions of reality. In short, our struggle to determine what is true is the struggle to decide which of our perceptions are genuine, and which are false because they are handed down, or sold to us, or generated by our own hopes and fears."
-Michael Crichton-
"The Bill of Rights was not written to protect governments from trouble. It was written precisely to give the people the constitutional means to cause trouble for governments they no longer trusted."
-Henry Steele Commager-
"Liberty is the luxury of self-discipline, that those nations historically who have failed to discipline themselves have had discipline imposed by others."
-Alistair Cooke-
Source: America
"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
"By giving the government unlimited powers, the most arbitrary rule can be made legal; and in this way a democracy may set up the most complete despotism imaginable."
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
Source: The Road to Serfdom
"The liberty of the individual is the greatest thing of all, it is on this and this alone that the true will of the people can develop."
-Alexander Ivanovich Herzen-
(1812- 1870)
Source: From the Other Shore, 1849
"In questions of science the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual."
-Galileo Galilei-
Astronomer (1564 - 1642)
"The strongest man in the world is he who stands alone."
-Henrik Ibsen-
(1828-1906) Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet
"Constitutions are made of paper; Bayonets are made of steel."
-French Aphorism-
"One sword keeps another in the sheath."
-George Herbert-
(1593-1633) Welsh born English poet, orator and Anglican priest.
Source: Jacula Prudentum, 1651
"For those looking for security, be forewarned that there's nothing more insecure than a political promise."
-Harry Browne-
(1933-2006) American libertarian writer, politician, and free-market investment analyst. Libertarian candidate for US President 1996 & 2000
"You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. Yet in their hearts there is unspoken – unspeakable! – fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts! Words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home, all the more powerful because they are forbidden. These terrify them. A little mouse – a little tiny mouse! – of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic."
-Sir Winston Churchill-
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
"[R]estricting arms to the military and police eviscerates the principle that power should flow from the people to government, and turns the government into a master rather than a servant."
-Robert Dowlut-
General Counsel for the National Rifle Association
Source: Arms: A Right to Self-Defense Against Criminals and Despots, 8 Stanford L. & Policy Rev. 25 (1997).
"Anyone who confuses liberty lovers with nazis or other fascists is waaaayy too stupid (or evil) to deserve respect."
-Bert Rand-
"Power may be at the end of a gun, but sometimes it's also at the end of the shadow or the image of a gun."
-Jean Genet-
"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."
"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 world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth -- that the error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it is cured on one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"'Balanced' is a code for 'denied': a right to free speech that must be 'balanced' against so exhaustive a list of other supposed values means a right that can be exercised only when those in power judge that the speech in question is innocuous to them."
-Ronald Dworkin-
Source: Index on Censorship, March 1997
"Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an excess, that itself will need reforming."
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge-
(1772-1834) English poet, critic, philosopher, and a leader of the British Romantic movement
"Force always attracts men of low morality. "
-Albert Einstein-
(1879-1955) Physicist and Professor, Nobel Prize 1921
"They said it couldn't be done but sometimes it doesn't work out that way."
-Casey Stengel-
[Charles Dillon Stengel] (1890-1975) Legendary baseball manager
"The preservation of freedom is the protective reason for limiting and decentralizing governmental power. But there is also a constructive reason. The great advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science or in literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
Source: "Capitalism and Freedom"
"Collectivism holds that the individual has no rights, that his life and work belong to the group (to 'society,' to the tribe, the state, the nation) and that the group may sacrifice him at its own whim to its own interests. The only way to implement a doctrine of that kind is by means of brute force -- and statism has always been the political corollary of collectivism."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
"Those who believe themselves to be masters of all they survey are mistaken. There is no such thing as absolute power and the delusion that one is in possession of such power constitutes absolute corruption. This delusion leads, resolutely, to the downfall of its adherents."
-Daniel Pouzzner-
"People unfit for freedom -- who cannot do much with it -- are hungry for power. The desire for freedom is an attribute of a 'have' type of self. It says: leave me alone and I shall grow, learn, and realize my capacities. The desire for power is basically an attribute of a 'have not' type of self."
-Eric Hoffer-
(1902-1983) American author, philosopher, awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
"Nothing can be more readily disproved than the old saw, 'You can't keep a good man down.' Most human societies have been beautifully organized to keep good men down."
-John W. Gardner-
(1912-2002) US Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare under President Lyndon Johnson, President of the Carnegie Corporation, founder Common Cause and Independent Sector
"It is not the function of the government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error."
-Justice Robert H. Jackson-
(1892-1954), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: US Supreme Court, American Communications Association v. Douds, 339 U.S. 382, 442 (1950)
"The American public highly overrates its sense of humor. We're great belly laughers and prat fallers, but we never really did have a real sense of humor. Not satire anyway. … When we realize finally that we aren't God's given children, we'll understand satire. Humor is really laughing off a hurt, grinning at misery."
-Bill Mauldin-
I'm offended...!
"Aggression is simply another name for government. Aggression, invasion, government are interchangeable terms. The essence of government is control, or the attempt to control. He who attempts to control another is a governor, an aggressor, an invader; and the nature of such invasion is not changed, whether it be made of the ordinary criminal, or by one man upon all other men, after the manner of an absolute monarch, or by all other men upon one man, after the manner of a modern democracy."
-Benjamin Tucker-
"But remember, Fascism is a right-wing ideology, and capitalist and individualist etc. Because the Left says so. You can't believe those lying fascists who claimed they were socialists!"
-Benito Mussolini-
"Fascism... believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace. War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon peoples who have the courage to meet it... It may be expected that this is will be the century of authority, a century of the Left, a century of Fascism. For the nineteenth century was a century of individualism... It may be expected that this will be a century of collectivism and hence the century of the State."
-Benito Mussolini-
"If the average man had had his way there would probably never have been any state. Even today he resents it, classes death with taxes, and yearns for that government which governs least. If he asks for many laws it is only because he is sure that his neighbor needs them; privately he is an unphilosophical anarchist, and thinks laws in his own case superfluous. In the simplest societies there is hardly any government."
-Will Durant-
"It [the State] has taken on a vast mass of new duties and responsibilities; it has spread out its powers until they penetrate to every act of the citizen, however secret; it has begun to throw around its operations the high dignity and impeccability of a State religion; its agents become a separate and superior caste, with authority to bind and loose, and their thumbs in every pot. But it still remains, as it was in the beginning, the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men. "
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
1926
"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
"Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us?"
-Justice William O. Douglas-
(1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
"Each individual of the society has a right to be protected by it in the enjoyment of his life, liberty, and property, according to standing laws. He is obliged, consequently, to contribute his share to the expense of this protection; and to give his personal service, or an equivalent, when necessary. But no part of the property of any individual can, with justice, be taken from him, or applied to public uses, without his own consent, or that of the representative body of the people. In fine, the people of this commonwealth are not controllable by any other laws than those to which their constitutional representative body have given their consent."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: Thoughts on Government, 1776
"Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are ruined.... O sir, we should have fine times, indeed, if to punish tyrants, it were only sufficient to assemble the people!"
-Patrick Henry-
(1736-1799) US Founding Father
"The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false."
-Paul Johnson-
"I have never met a more dedicated bunch of people than I did working in the union, at every level. The work is difficult and demanding, and very few people would do it if they didn’t believe in its righteousness. However, the conviction that you know what’s best insulates you against reflecting morally on your own actions and it teaches you to begin assessing morality in terms of either the ends justifying the means, or even worse, of mere good intention justifying those means."
-Ben Johnson-
Former president of AFT Vermont and Vermont AFL-CIO
Source: Time for organized labor to end forced dues, August 22, 2017, The Washington Times
"It is a general popular error to suppose the loudest complainers for the public to be the most anxious for its welfare."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
"All of us necessarily hold many casual opinions that are ludicrously wrong simply because life is far too short for us to think through even a small fraction of the topics that we come across."
-Julian Simon-
[Julian Lincoln Simon] (1932-1998) Professor of economics, author, Senior Fellow at the Cato
"One evening, when I was yet in my nurse’s arms, I wanted to touch the tea urn, which was boiling merrily... My nurse would have taken me away from the urn, but my mother said 'Let him touch it.' So I touched it -- and that was my first lesson in the meaning of liberty."
-John Ruskin-
(1819-1900) British author, artist, social critic
Source: The Story of Arachne, 1870
"Of all the inanimate objects, of all men’s creations, books are the nearest to us, for they contain our very thoughts, our ambitions, our indignations, our illusions, our fidelity to truth, and our persistent leaning toward error."
-Joseph Conrad-
(1857-1924)
Source: Notes on Life and Letters
"This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice."
-Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.-
(1841-1935) US Supreme Court Justice, also known as "The Great Dissenter"
Source: Martin Yant, Presumed Guilty: When Innocent People Are Wrongly Convicted 11 (1991) (quoting Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.)
"I am prepared to die, but there is no cause for which I am prepared to kill."
-Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi-
(1869-1948)
"From a comparative perspective, the United States is unusual if not unique in the lack of restraints on freedom of expression. It is also unusual in the range and effectiveness of methods employed to restrain freedom of thought... Where the voice of the people is heard, elite groups must insure their voice says the right things."
-Noam Chomsky-
(1928- ) American linguist and political writer
Source: Index On Censorship, July/August 1986
... and the web hadn't even kicked into gear yet...
"There is no real wealth but the labor of man."
-Percy Bysshe Shelley-
(1792-1822) British poet
"The United States was supposed to have a limited government because the founders knew government power attracts demagogues and despots as surely as horse manure attracts horseflies."
-Rick Gaber-
Libertarian writer
"There are…certain freedoms that are like circuses. Their very existence, so long as they are individual and enjoyed chiefly individually as by spectators, diverts men’s mind from the loss of other, more fundamental, social and economic and political rights."
-Robert Nisbet-
(1913-1996) American sociologist, author
Source: Twilight of Authority, 1975
"The main vice of capitalism is the uneven distribution of prosperity. The main vice of socialism is the even distribution of misery."
-Sir Winston Churchill-
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
"When we have begun to take charge of our lives, to own ourselves, there is no longer any need to ask permission of someone."
-George O'Neil-
(1896-1940) American poet, playwright, novelist and film writer
"Neither current events nor history show that the majority rule, or ever did rule."
-Jefferson Davis-
(1808-1889) President of the Confederate States of America (1861-1865)
"[When] Men are not allowed to think freely
about chemistry and biology,
why should they be allowed to think freely
about political philosophy?"
-Auguste Comte-
[Isidore Marie Auguste François Xavier Comte] (1798-1857) French philosopher, was the founder of Positivism and Sociology
Source: The Positive Philosophy, 1830-40
"From that point on, the extraordinary system of spies and informers which has played an important part in the political work of the French state into our own time took shape. (Sartine, who became lieutenant general de police in 1759, is supposed to have said to Louis XV, 'Sire, when three people are chatting in the street one of them is surely my man.') Eighteenth-century police manuals like those of Colquhoun in England or Lemaire in France are no less than general treatises on the government's full repertoire of domestic regulation, coercion, and surveillance."
-Charles Tilly-
Source: The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), p.60.
"Some informants spied on their neighbors because they actually believed the propaganda… Some denounced their enemies in order to settle personal grudges. Some were driven by their own fears to attempt to deflect attention away from themselves…Some were motivated by the sense of power turning in their neighbors gave them."
-Kort E. Patterson
Source: Port of Call, August/September 1999
"The liberty of the press is most generally approved when it takes liberties with the other fellow, and leaves us alone."
-Edgar Watson Howe-
(1853-1937)
Source: Country Town Sayings, 1911
"The majority of us are for free speech when it deals with subjects concerning which we have no intense feelings."
-Edmund B. Chaffee-
(1887-1936)
"If you believe everything you read, you better not read."
-Japanese Proverb-
"Our job is to give people not what they want, but what we decide they ought to have."
-Richard Salant-
(1914-1993) former President of CBS News
"News reporters are certainly liberal and left of center."
-Walter Cronkite-
former CBS News anchor
"The news is like a ship. If you take hands off the wheel, it pulls hard to the left."
-Roger Ailes-
(1940-2017) American television executive. Chairman and CEO of Fox News
Source: Fox News Is Dropping Its ‘Fair & Balanced’ Slogan, by Gabriel Sherman, New York Magazine, June 14, 2017
"There's nothing so absurd that if you repeat it often enough, people will believe it."
-William James-
(1842-1910) The father of modern Psychology
"Terrorism is the best political weapon for nothing drives people harder than a fear of sudden death."
-Adolf Hitler-
(1889-1945) German Nazi Dictator
"Note the difference between a right and a privilege. A right, in the abstract, is a fact; it is not a thing to be given, established, or conferred; it is. Of the exercise of a right power may deprive me; of the right itself, never. Privilege, in the abstract, does not exist; there is no such thing. Rights recognized, privilege is destroyed. But, in the practical, the moment you admit a supreme authority, you have denied rights. Practically the supremacy has all the rights, and no matter what the human race possesses, it does so merely at the caprice of that authority."
-Voltairine de Cleyre-
"While birds can fly, only humans can argue.
Argument is the affirmation of our being.
It is the principal instrument of human intercourse.
Without argument the species would perish.
As a subtle suggestion, it is the means by which we aid another.
As a warning, it steers us from danger.
As exposition, it teaches.
As an expression of creativity, it is the gift of ourselves.
As a protest, it struggles for justice.
As a reasoned dialogue, it resolves disputes.
As an assertion of self, it engenders respect.
As an entreaty of love, it expresses our devotion.
As a plea, it generates mercy.
As charismatic oration it moves multitudes and changes history.
We must argue -- to help, to warn, to lead, to love, to create,
to learn, to enjoy justice, to be."
-Gerry Spence-
Lawyer and author
Source: from his book, How To Argue And Win Every Time
"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
"Truth has always been found to promote the best interests of mankind."
-Percy Bysshe Shelley-
(1792-1822) British poet
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-
(1803-1882) English writer and lexicographer
Source: Essays. First Series. "Self-Reliance," 1841
"Freedom of speech means that you shall not do something to people either for the views they have, or the views they express, or the words they speak or write."
-Hugo L. Black-
(1886-1971) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: 1963
"The people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, or to publish their sentiments; and the freedom of the press, as one of the great bulwarks of liberty, shall be inviolable."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: First draft of what became the First Amendment, 8 June 1789
"I am for the First Amendment from the first word to the last. I believe it means what it says."
-Justice Hugo L. Black-
(1886-1971) US Supreme Court Justice
"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 … 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."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: Farewall Address
"Our republic and its press will rise and fall together."
-Joseph Pulitzer-
(1847-1911) Hungarian-born American newspaper publisher after whom the Pulitzer Prize was named.
"Ego trips by coteries of self-exalting people are treated in the media as idealism, rather than the petty tyranny it is."
-Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
"We are going to impose our agenda on the coverage by dealing with the issues and subjects we choose to deal with."
-Richard M. Cohan-
Senior Producer of CBS political news
"The news media in general are liberals."
-Barbara Walters-
"The New York Times is deliberately pitched to the liberal point of view."
-Herman Dismore-
foreign editor of the N.Y. Times from 1950 to 1960
"The efficiency of the truly national leader consists primarily in preventing the division of the attention of a people, and always in concentrating it on a single enemy."
-Adolf Hitler-
(1889-1945) German Nazi Dictator
Source: Mein Kampf, 1925-27
"Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive."
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
"Republicans campaign like Libertarians and govern like Democrats."
-Harry Browne-
(1933-2006) American libertarian writer, politician, and free-market investment analyst. Libertarian candidate for US President 1996 & 2000
"Totalitarianism spells simplification: an enormous reduction in the variety of aims, motives, interests, human types, and, above all, in the categories and units of power."
-Eric Hoffer-
(1902-1983) American author, philosopher, awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
Source: The Ordeal of Change, 1964
"A little government involvement is just as dangerous as a lot -- because the first leads inevitably to the second."
-Harry Browne-
(1933-2006) American libertarian writer, politician, and free-market investment analyst. Libertarian candidate for US President 1996 & 2000
"The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact."
-Justice Robert H. Jackson-
(1892-1954), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Terminiello v. City of Chicago (1949), dissenting in twenty-four page decision.
"Under the privilege of the First Amendment many, many ridiculous things are said."
-John Kenneth Galbraith-
(1908-2006) Canadian-born economist, Harvard professor
Source: PBS Firing Line, 9 December 1989
"Wherever there’s a disagreement among Republicans, I’m for one of those disagreements. I’m all for it. The president’s with Russia? I’m with John McCain and Lindsey Graham, I’m for NATO! Why? [It’s a] wedge. Wedges have to be schisms, schisms have to be divides."
-Rahm Emanuel-
Source: Speaking to an audience at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business in California, 02/06/2017
"Few things are more irritating than when someone who is wrong is also very effective in making his point.”
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910)
"The more a government strives to curtail freedom of speech, the more obstinately is it resisted; not indeed by the avaricious … but by those whom good education, sound morality, and virtue have rendered more free. Men in general are so constituted that there is nothing they will endure with so little patience as that views which they believe to be true should be counted crimes against the laws. … Under such circumstances they do not think it disgraceful, but most honorable, to hold the laws in abhorrence, and to refrain from no action against the government."
-Tractatus Theologico-Politicus-
"The constitutional right of free speech has been declared to be the same in peace and war. In peace, too, men may differ widely as to what loyalty to our country demands, and an intolerant majority, swayed by passion or by fear, may be prone in the future, as it has been in the past, to stamp as disloyal opinions with which it disagrees."
-Justice Louis D. Brandeis-
(1856-1941) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: Schaefer v. U. S., 1920
"Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation, must begin by subduing Freedom of Speech... Without Freedom of Thought, there can be no such Thing as Wisdom; and no such Thing as publick Liberty, without Freedom of Speech..."
-Cato-
John Trenchard (1662-1723) & Thomas Gordon (169?-1750)
Source: Letters, 1720
"But this is slavery, not to speak one’s thought."
-Euripides-
(480-406 B.C.)
Source: The Phoenician Women, 411-409 B.C.
"A free press stands as one of the great interpreters between the government and the people. To allow it to be fettered is to fetter ourselves."
-George Sutherland-
(1862-1942) U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Grosjean v. American Press Co., 1936
"To speak his thoughts is every freeman's right,
in peace and war, in council and in fight."
-Homer-
(sometime between 1050-850 BC) legendary Greek epic poet
Source: The Iliad
"There is only one remedy for ignorance and thoughtlessness, and that is literacy. Millions and millions of children would today stand in no need of sex education or consumer education or anti-racism education or any of those fake educations, if they had had in the first place 'an' education."
-Richard Mitchell-
(1929-2002) Professor at Glassboro State College, NJ, author, founder and publisher of The Underground Grammarian
Source: The Underground Grammarian
"Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between church and State."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: letter to a Committee of the Danbury Baptist Association, Connecticut, January 1st 1802
"The bill for establishing religious freedom, the principles of which had, to a certain degree, been enacted before, I had drawn in all the latitude of reason & right. It still met with opposition; but, with some mutilations in the preamble, it was finally passed; and a singular proposition proved that it's protection of opinion was meant to be universal. Where the preamble declares that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed, by inserting the word 'Jesus Christ,' so that it should read 'a departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion.' The insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of it's protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Autobiography, 1821
"Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus."
-Michael Crichton-
(1942-2008) American author, producer, director, and screenwriter
"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-
(1933- )
Source: "Inventing Reality" (1986)
"The surest way to ruin a promising career in economics, whether professional or academic, is to venture into the 'cranks and crackpots' world of suggestions for reform of the financial system."
-Michael Rowbotham-
British economist
"It is largely because civilization enables us constantly to profit from knowledge which we individually do not possess and because each individual's use of his particular knowledge may serve to assist others unknown to him in achieving their ends that men as members of civilized society can pursue their individual ends so much more successfully than they could alone."
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
"Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people, being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties, and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in the various parts of the country, and among the different orders of people, it shall be the duty of legislators and magistrates… to cherish the interest of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: Thoughts on Government, 1776
Compare with NH Constitution, [Art.] 83. [Encouragement of Literature, etc.; Control of Corporations, Monopolies, etc.]
Knowledge and learning, generally diffused through a community, being essential to the preservation of a free government; and spreading the opportunities and advantages of education through the various parts of the country, being highly conducive to promote this end; it shall be the duty of the legislators and magistrates, in all future periods of this government, to cherish the interest of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries and public schools, to encourage private and public institutions, rewards, and immunities for the promotion of agriculture, arts, sciences, commerce, trades, manufactures, and natural history of the country ...
June 2, 1784
"Contrary to everything our rulers tell us, and everything that our schoolteachers are teaching the children of this nation, the biggest threat to the lives and well-being of the American people lies not with some foreign government. The biggest threat to the American people today lies with the United States government. And while gun ownership stands as a barrier to potential, Nazi-like behavior, the 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. It entails the repeal of all laws that permit such conduct. And it means the privatization of most of the bureaucrats who work for the U.S. government."
-Jacob G. Hornberger-
Source: The Nazi Mind-Set in America, THE TYRANNY OF GUN CONTROL, p.63 (Future of Freedom Foundation 1997).
"In the hands of the state, compulsory public education becomes a tool for political control and manipulation -- a prime instrument for the thought police of the society. And precisely because every child passes through the same indoctrination process -- learning the same 'official history,' the same 'civic virtues,' the same lessons of obedience and loyalty to the state -- it becomes extremely difficult for the independent soul to free himself from the straightjacket of the ideology and values the political authorities wish to imprint upon the population under its jurisdiction. For the communists, it was the class struggle and obedience to the Party and Comrade Stalin; for the fascists, it was worship of the nation -- state and obedience to the Duce; for the Nazis, it was race purity and obedience to the Fuhrer. The content has varied, but the form has remained the same. Through the institution of compulsory state education, the child is to be molded like wax into the shape desired by the state and its educational elite. We should not believe that because ours is a freer, more democratic society, the same imprinting procedure has not occurred even here, in America. Every generation of school-age children has imprinted upon it a politically correct ideology concerning America's past and the sanctity of the role of the state in society. Practically every child in the public school system learns that the 'robber barons' of the 19th century exploited the common working man; that unregulated capitalism needed to be harnessed by enlightened government regulation beginning in the Progressive era at the turn of the century; that wild Wall Street speculation was a primary cause of the Great Depression; that only Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal saved America from catastrophe; and that American intervention in foreign wars has been necessary and inevitable, with the United States government required to be a global leader and an occasional world policeman."
-Richard M. Ebeling-
(1950- ) Author, Professor of Economics, Hillsdale College
Source: Introduction to 'Separating School & State: How to Liberate America's Families' (Sheldon Richman, 1994)
"The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good."
-Dr. Samuel Johnson-
(1709-1784)
"We must protect the freedoms of even those who hate us, and that we may find objectionable. If we fail in this task, we become victims of the precedents we create."
-Judge Robert Doumar-
(1930-) Senior U.S. District Judge of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia
"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
"I doubt if the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and for power -- power to oppress others. The oppressed want above all to imitate their oppressors; they want to retaliate."
-Eric Hoffer-
(1902-1983) American author, philosopher, awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
Source: quoted in Eric Hoffer: An American Odyssey (Calvin Tompkins), 1968
"We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."
-Viktor Frankl-
(1905-1997) former prisoner of a Nazi concentration camp
"Many academicians and self-styled intellectuals, with a habitually arrogant and condescending attitude, treat the rest of the world with contempt. These so-called 'intelligentsia' congratulate themselves for, not only having high IQs and lots of education in their particular fields, but for having achieved the allegedly momentous insight that free-market capitalism and pure altruism are ultimately incompatible (duh). Yet they're still too damned stupid to realize, and too damned ignorant to acknowledge, that altruism is NOT the only moral code available to mankind. (It is, in fact, the bloodiest and most regressive one of all). This stunted thinking has resulted in their committing the intellectual atrocity of rejecting the capitalism and freedom instead of the altruism and coercion."
-Rick Gaber-
Libertarian writer
"It is sometimes said that toleration should be refused to the intolerant. In practice this would destroy it... The only remedy for dogmatism and lies is toleration and the greatest possible liberty of expression."
-Joyce Cary-
(1888-1957)
Source: Power in Men, 1939
"The power of the Right is principle, and the principle of the Left is power. Understand this and you will understand the basis of modern politics."
-J.T. Young-
"The village atheist has the right to be heard; he has no right to be heeded. While he has a right not to have his own children indoctrinated in what he believes are false and foolish teachings, he has no right to dictate what other children may be taught."
-Patrick J. Buchanan-
(1938- ) American politician, author, syndicated columnist and broadcaster
"In necessariis unitas, in dubiis libertas, in omnibus caritas."
(Unity in things Necessary, Liberty in things Unnecessary, and Charity in all.)
-Rupertus Meldenius-
Peter Meiderlin
Source: Paraenesis votiva pro Pace Ecclesiae ad Theologos Augustanae Confessionis, Auctore Ruperto Meldenio Theologo (c. 1627)
"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
"Welfare rights are pseudo-rights: They rely on the force of law to take private property for the use of others without compensation and without consent. Public charity is forced charity; it is not a virtue but a vice."
-James A. Dorn-
V.P. for academic affairs at the Cato Institute, director of Cato’s project on Civil Society
Source: Wrapped in the pretense of morality, The Washington Times, August 29, 1995
"Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being."
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe-
(1749-1832)
"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.
"[It is not the purpose nor right of Congress]
to attend to what generosity and humanity require,
but to what the Constitution and their duty require."
-William Branch Giles-
(1762-1830) American statesman, US Senator and Congressman from Virginia, 24th Governor of Virginia
Source: 1796, spoken on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives concerning a proposed relief measure for fire victims
"Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
"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
"Peace if possible, but truth at any rate."
-Martin Luther-
(1483-1546) Christian reformer
"Blessed are the peacemakers:
for they shall be called the children of God."
-Jesus of Nazareth-
Source: The Holy Bible, Matthew 5:9
"Practical religion consists in doing good: and the only way of serving God is that of endeavoring to make His creation happy. All preaching that has not this for its object is nonsense and hypocrisy."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
"To love truth for truth's sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues."
-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.
"Honesty demands that we boldly pursue ideas tested by time, defended by reason, validated by experience, and confirmed by revelation. We will only find truth when we place our confidence in it and not in ourselves. We will only learn when we love truth enough to measure all ideas with a measuring rod outside of those things being measured and are willing to discard those ideas we find to be "intolerable," inferior, and useless."
-Everett Piper-
President of Oklahoma Wesleyan University
Source: 'Bethlehem, Not Berkeley, Is the Birthplace of Free Speech,' The Christian Post, Apr 27, 2017
"Tolerance is a better guarantee of freedom than brotherly love; for a man may love his brother so much that he feels himself thereby appointed his brother’s keeper."
-Everett Dean Martin-
(1880-1941)
Source: Liberty, 1930
"Once one assumes an attitude of intolerance, there is no knowing where it will take one. Intolerance, someone has said, is violence to the intellect and hatred is violence to the heart."
-Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi-
(1869-1948)
1942
"There are different forms of anarchy and different currents in it. I must, first say very simply what anarchy I have in view. By anarchy I mean first an absolute rejection of violence. Hence I cannot accept either nihilists or anarchists who choose violence as a means of action."
-Jacques Ellul-
"To bargain freedom for security is the devil's bargain. Having made the bargain, one enjoys neither freedom nor security."
-Gerry Spence-
"I know that it can be very easy, under the intensive pressures of a campaign, for even well-intentioned people to fall into shady tactics — to rationalize this on the grounds that what is at stake is of such importance to the Nation that the end justifies the means. And both of our great parties have been guilty of such tactics in the past. In recent years, however, the campaign excesses that have occurred on all sides have provided a sobering demonstration of how far this false doctrine can take us. The lesson is clear: America, in its political campaigns, must not again fall into the trap of letting the end, however great that end is, justify the means. I urge the leaders of both political parties, I urge citizens, all of you, everywhere, to join in working toward a new set of standards, new rules and procedures to ensure that future elections will be as nearly free of such abuses as they possibly can be made. This is my goal. I ask you to join in making it America's goal."
-Richard Nixon-
"There are two things which cannot be attacked in front: ignorance and narrow-mindedness. They can only be shaken by the simple development of the contrary qualities. They will not bear discussion."
-John Dalberg-Acton-
1st Baron Acton
"Free inquiry entails recognition of civil liberties as integral to its pursuit, that is, a free press, freedom of communication, the right to organize opposition parties and to join voluntary associations, and freedom to cultivate and publish the fruits of scientific, philosophical, artistic, literary, moral and religious freedom."
-Paul Kurtz-
Source: “A Secular Humanist Declaration,” in On The Barricades, 1989
"Public Choice theory, if nothing else, has taught economists to consider the state as it is, not as it should be in a dream world: the state is a potential tyrant, not a benevolent God."
-Pierre Lemieux-
"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
"I have accepted a seat in the House of Representatives, and thereby have consented to my own ruin, to your ruin, and to the ruin of our children. I give you this warning that you may prepare your mind for your fate."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: Letter to Benjamin Rush, 4 April 1809
Oh, just wait until he's President...
"The general [federal] government will tend to monarchy, which will fortify itself from day to day, instead of working its own cures."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Letter to George Washington, Philadelphia, May 23, 1792
"All over the Union, people are coming to feel that they have no control over the course of affairs... ‘We vote; we are offered the platform we want; we elect the men who stand on that platform; and we get absolutely nothing.’ So they begin to ask: ‘What is the use of voting? We know that the machines of both parties are subsidized by the same persons, and therefore it is useless to turn in either direction.’ "
-Woodrow Wilson-
And he was sublimely good with that.
"We Americans have no commission from God to police the world."
-Benjamin Harrison-
(1833-1901) 23rd US President
"[S]ince the substitution of an industrial for the agricultural order of society and the conquest of the industrial by the financial, the government of the Western nations, whether monarchical or republican, had passed into the invisible hands of a plutocracy, international in power and grasp. It was, I venture to suggest, this semioccult power which, automatically, rather than calculatedly, pushed the mass of the American people into the cauldron [of World War I]."
-Major General J.F.C. Fuller-
[John Frederick Charles Fuller] (1878-1966) British Army officer, military historian, strategist
Source: Decisive Battles of the U.S.A., 1776-1918, (1942) p.396
"Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb."
-Nadine Gordimer-
(1923-) South African writer, political activist, Nobel Prize in Literature (1991)
"Foreign influence is truly the Grecian horse to a republic. We cannot be too careful to exclude its influence."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: Pacificus, No. 6, July 17, 1793
"Force without wisdom falls of its own weight."
-Horace-
[Quintus Horatius Flaccus] (65-8BC) Roman poet
Source: Odes
"Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves, therefore, are its only safe depositories."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"Righteousness is easy in retrospect."
-Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.-
(1917-2007) Author, historian
"“The power of morality is the greatest of all intellectual powers -– and mankind’s tragedy lies in the fact that the vicious moral code men have accepted destroys them by means of the best within them.”"
-Ayn Rand-
(1905-1982) Author
"How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within oneself? There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light."
-Barry Lopez-
(1945-) American author, essayist, writer
Source: Arctic Dreams
"He who says there is no such thing as an honest man, you may be sure is himself a knave."
-George Berkeley-
(1685-1753) Irish philosopher, known as Bishop Berkeley (Bishop of Cloyne)
"The liar’s punishment is not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else."
-George Bernard Shaw-
(1856-1950) Irish comic dramatist
"The purest treasure mortal times afford Is spotless reputation."
-William Shakespeare-
(1564-1616) Playwright
"Goodness is beauty in the best estate."
-Christopher Marlowe-
(c.1564-1593) English playwright, poet and translator of the Elizabethan era, known as Kit Marlowe
"Conscience is, in most, an anticipation of the opinion of others."
-Henry Taylor-
"Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910)
"Dogma demand authority, rather than intelligent thought, as the source of opinion; it requires persecution of heretics and hostility to unbelievers; it asks of its disciples that they should inhibit natural kindness in favor of systematic hatred."
-Bertrand Russell-
(1872-1970) Philosopher, educator
"[T]hough of all poses a moral pose is the most offensive, still to have a pose at all is something."
-Oscar Wilde-
(1854-1900) Irish poet and playwright
Source: The Critic as Artist, 1890
"It is incredible that only idiots are absolutely sure of salvation. It is incredible that the more brain you have the less your chance is. There can be no danger in honest thought, and if the world ever advances beyond what it is to-day, it must be led by men who express their real opinions."
-Robert G. Ingersoll-
(1833-1899) American political leader, orator
Source: The Great Infidels (1881)
"Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are."
-George Santayana-
[Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás] (1863-1952) Spanish-born philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist
Source: The Life of Reason, 1905
"If we are ever in doubt about what to do, it is a good rule to ask ourselves what we shall wish on the morrow that we had done."
-John Lubbock-
(1834-1913) English naturalist, banker, statesman
"There is no limit to what you can accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
Source: Sign on his desk
"I have a dream that one day
this nation will rise up and
live out the true meaning of its creed:
'We hold these truths to be self-evident:
that all men are created equal.' ...
I have a dream that my four little children
will one day live in a nation where
they will not be judged by the color of their skin
but by the content of their character.
I have a dream today."
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-
(1929-1968), US civil rights leader
Source: Speech delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. on August 28, 1963.
"The limitation of riots, moral questions aside, is that they cannot win and their participants know it. Hence, rioting is not revolutionary but reactionary because it invites defeat. It involves an emotional catharsis, but it must be followed by a sense of futility."
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-
(1929-1968), US civil rights leader
Source: The Trumpet of Conscience
"The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges. But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred."
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-
(1929-1968), US civil rights leader
Source: Speech delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. on August 28, 1963.
"Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens — and real diseases are useful material. Epidemic diseases usually elicit a call to ban the entry of foreigners, immigrants. And xenophobic propaganda has always depicted immigrants as bearers of disease… Such is the extraordinary potency and efficacy of the plague metaphor: it allows a disease to be regarded both as something incurred by vulnerable "others" and as (potentially) everyone's disease."
-Susan Sontag-
"Between a balanced republic and a democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos."
-Chief Justice John Marshall-
"Men since the beginning of time have sought peace. Various methods through the ages have been attempted to devise an international process to prevent or settle disputes between nations. From the very start workable methods were found in so far as individual citizens were concerned, but the mechanics of an instrumentality of larger international scope have never been successful. Military alliances, balances of power, Leagues of Nations, all in turn failed, leaving the only path to be by way of the crucible of war. The utter destructiveness of war now blocks out this alternative. We have had our last chance. If we will not devise some greater and more equitable system, Armageddon will be at our door."
-Douglas MacArthur-
"It is the aim of public life to arrange that all forms of power are entrusted, so far as possible, to men who effectively consent to be bound by the obligation towards all human beings which lies upon everyone, and who understand the obligation. Law is the quality of the permanent provisions for making this aim effective."
-Simone Weil-
"Many of those who attack capitalism know very well that their situation under any other economic system will be less favorable. Nevertheless, with full knowledge of this fact, they advocate a reform, e.g., socialism, because they hope that the rich, whom they envy, will also suffer under it."
-Ludwig von Mises-
(1881-1973) Economist and social philosopher
"In an ironic sense, Karl Marx was right. We are witnessing today a great revolutionary crisis -- a crisis where the demands of the economic order are colliding directly with those of the political order. But the crisis is happening not in the free, non-Marxist West, but in the home of Marxism-Leninism, the Soviet Union.... [Communism will be] left on the ash heap of history."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
"President Vladimir Putin could never have imagined anyone so ignorant or so willing to destroy their people like Obama much less seeing millions vote for someone like Obama. They read history in America don't they? Alas, the schools in the U.S. were conquered by the Communists long ago and history was revised thus paving the way for their Communist presidents."
-Xavier Lerma-
Russian columnist for Pravda
Source: Obama's Soviet Mistake, Pravda, 19.11.2012
"The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under the name of 'liberalism' they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without knowing how it happened."
-Norman Thomas-
(1884-1968) six-time U.S. Presidential candidate for the Socialist Party of America
Source: 1948 - from an interview during the presidential campaign,
[Ed. note: Norman Thomas and Gus Hall, the U.S. Communist Party Candidate, both quit American politics, agreeing that the Republican and Democratic parties had adopted every plank on the Communist/Socialist and they no longer had an alternate party platform on which to run.]
"Basically National Socialism and Marxism are the same."
-Adolf Hitler-
(1889-1945) German Nazi Dictator
Source: Speech, 1941
"Professionalism implies knowledge based in evidence, not in authority. Such lines are blurred in the era of identity politics and the normalization of pseudo-disciplines such as Gender Studies, Black Studies, Queer Studies, Fat Studies, Disability Studies, Chicano Studies and White Studies and Indigenous Studies, all of which are taught based on the “authority” of Marxism, and all of whose primary purpose is to demonize “oppressors” – the “patriarchy,” white “colonialists” and the U.S. in general – and to recruit activists for organized perpetuation of the identity grievance industry."
-Barabara Kay
Source: The Left’s Siege of Our Universities (2017)
"There had been many things I had not really understood. I had regarded the Communist Party as a poor man’s party, and thought the presence of certain men of wealth within it accidental. I now saw this was no accident. I regarded the Party as a monolithic organization with the leadership in the National Committee and the National Board. Now I saw this was only a facade placed there by the movement to create the illusion of the poor man’s party; it was in reality a device to control the “common man” they so raucously championed."
-Dr. Bella Dodd-
(1904-1969) head of the New York State Teachers Union , member of the Communist Party of America (CPUSA) in the 1930s and 1940s, later a vocal anti-communist
Source: School of Darkness, Chapter 16 (1954)
"Capitalism and communism stand at opposite poles. Their essential difference is this:
The communist seeing the rich man and his fine home says, “No man should have so much.”
The capitalist seeing the same thing says, “All men should have as much.” "
-Phelps Adams-
(1903-1991) Chief Washington correspondent for The New York Sun (1928-50), adminstrative vice president for United States Steel (1950-67)
"Man exists for his own sake and not to add a laborer to the State."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-
(1803-1882)
Source: Journal, 1839
"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
"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
"If you depart from moral absolutes, you go into a bottomless pit.
Communism and Naziism were catastrophic evils which both derived from moral relativism.
Their differences were minor compared to their similarities."
-Paul Johnson-
Historian
"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."
-Sir Winston Churchill-
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
November 21, 1943
"The path we’re embarked upon, in the name of good, is a familiar one. The unspeakable horrors of Nazism, Stalinism, and Maoism did not begin in the ‘30s and ‘40s with the men usually associated with those names. Those horrors were simply the end result of a long evolution of ideas leading to the consolidation of power in central government in the name of 'social justice.' It was decent but misguided Germans, who would have cringed at the thought of extermination and genocide, who built the Trojan Horse for Hitler to take over. We Americans promote disrespect for our Constitution, rule of law and private property in our pursuit of 'social justice.' But the scum that rises to the top has an agenda of command and control that’s leading toward totalitarianism. And, incidentally, it’s no coincidence that most of those at the top are lawyers -- people with a special, seemingly tutored, contempt for our Constitution and rule of law."
-Walter E. Williams-
(1936- ) Columnist, Professor of Economics at George Mason University
Source: Conservative Chronicle, September 20, 1995
"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
"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
"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")
"The maxim, that governments ought to train the people in the way in which they should go, sounds well. But is there any reason for believing that a government is more likely to lead the people in the right way than the people to fall into the right way of themselves?"
-Thomas Babington Macaulay-
(1800-1859) [Lord Macaulay] 1st Baron Macaulay, British historian
Source: "Southey's Colloquies on Society" par. SC.60
"When you run in debt; you give to another power over your liberty."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
"With the exception only of the period of the gold standard, practically all governments of history have used their exclusive power to issue money to defraud and plunder the people."
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
"A power has risen up in the government greater than the people themselves, consisting of many and various powerful interests, combined in one mass, and held together by the cohesive power of the vast surplus in banks."
-John C. Calhoun-
(1782-1850) American statesman
June 27, 1836
Source: http://www.devvy.com/9612.html
"If thou lend money to any of my people that is poor by thee, thou shalt not be to him an usurer, neither shalt thou lay upon him usury."
-The Bible-
Source: Exodus 22:25
"Take no usury of him, or increase... thou shalt not give him thy money upon usury."
-The Bible-
Source: Leviticus 25:36-37
"Unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon usury: That the Lord thy God bless thee."
-The Bible-
Source: Deuteronomy 23:20
"A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves."
-Bertrand de Jouvenel-
(1903-1987)
"Only a debt-backed system of paper money could finance the great wars, the social improvements and the fevered dreams of the 20th century."
-Brian Maher-
Managing Editor, The Daily Reckoning
Source: June 10, 2017, "Debt-Based Money Corrodes Society"
"Those who swallow down usury cannot arise except as one whom Satan has prostrated by his touch does rise. That is because they say, trading is only like usury; and Allah has allowed trading and forbidden usury. To whomsoever then the admonition has come from his Lord, then he desists, he shall have what is already passed, and his affairs are in the hands of Allah; and whoever returns to it - these are the inmates of the fire; they shall abide in it..."
-Qur'an-
Source: From the Qur'an, Surah Al-Baqarah
"If the legislature clearly misinterprets a constitutional provision, the frequent repitition of the wrong will not create a right."
-Amos v. Mosley-
Source: Amos v. Mosley, 74 Fla. 555; 77 So. 619.
"Economic necessity cannot justify a disregard of cardinal constitutional guarantee."
-Riley v. Carter-
Source: Riley v. Carter, 165 Okal. 262; 25 P. 2d 666; 79 ALR 1018.
"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 whole secret of existence is to have no fear.
Never fear what will become of you, depend on no one.
Only the moment you reject all help are you freed."
-Buddha-
[Gautama Siddharta] (563 - 483 BC), Hindu Prince, founder of Buddhism
"The average man does not want to be free.
He simply wants to be safe."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"Those who created this country chose freedom. With all of its dangers. And do you know the riskiest part of that choice they made? They actually believed that we could be trusted to make up our own minds in the whirl of differing ideas. That we could be trusted to remain free, even when there were very, very seductive voices – taking advantage of our freedom of speech – who were trying to turn this country into the kind of place where the government could tell you what you can and cannot do."
-Nat Hentoff
(1925-2017)American historian, novelist, jazz and country music critic, and syndicated columnist
Source: The Day They Came To Arrest The Book, 1982
"Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first."
-Ronald Reagan-
"Suppose Germany had developed two bombs before we had any bombs. And suppose Germany had dropped one bomb, say, on Rochester and the other on Buffalo, and then having run out of bombs she would have lost the war. Can anyone doubt that we would then have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and that we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them? But, again, don't misunderstand me. The only conclusion we can draw is that governments acting in a crisis are guided by questions of expediency, and moral considerations are given very little weight, and that America is no different from any other nation in this respect."
-Leó Szilárd-
"Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."
-Abraham Lincoln-
All ya had to do was stop violating your oath and prosecuting it, Abe. That's on you...
"If we can cultivate in the world the idea that aggressive war-making is the way to the prisoner's dock rather than the way to honors, we will have accomplished something toward making the peace more secure."
-Robert H. Jackson-
"It is sufficiently obvious, that persons and property are the two great subjects on which Governments are to act; and that the rights of persons, and the rights of property, are the objects, for the protection of which Government was instituted. These rights cannot well be separated."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Speech at the Virginia Convention, December 2, 1829
"When people put their ballots in the boxes, they are, by that act, inoculated against the feeling that the government is not theirs. They then accept, in some measure, that its errors are their errors, its aberrations their aberrations, that any revolt will be against them. It's a remarkably shrewd and rather conservative arrangement when one thinks of it."
-John Kenneth Galbraith-
Source: The Age Of Uncertainty (1977), Chapter 12, p. 330.
Every individual has the right to use force for lawful self-defense. It is for this reason that the collective force -- which is only the organized combination of the individual forces -- may lawfully be used for the same purpose; and it cannot be used legitimately for any other purpose."
-Frédéric Bastiat-
The Law
"It is not true that the function of law is to regulate our consciences, our ideas, our wills, our education, our opinions, our work, our trade, our talents, or our pleasures. The function of law is to protect the free exercise of these rights, and to prevent any person from interfering with the free exercise of these same rights by any other person."
-Frédéric Bastiat-
The Law
"You jus' may be great at hangin' paper around the big cities, but us country boys is not entirely brainless. When it comes to the law, nothin' is understood."
-Dragline-
Cool Hand Luke
"Freedom of the press is perhaps the freedom that has suffered the most from the gradual degradation of the idea of liberty."
-Albert Camus-
(1913-1960) French Algerian author
Source: Resistance, Rebellion and Death, 1961
"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalistic System was to debauch the currency... Lenin was certainly right. 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 can diagnose."
-John Maynard Keynes-
(1883-1946) British economist
Source: The Economic Consequences of the Peace, 1920, page 235
"Politics is war without bloodshed
while war is politics with bloodshed."
-Mao Tse-Tung-
Premier of China (1893 - 1976)
"If it's a despot you would dethrone, see first that his throne erected within you is destroyed."
-Khalil Gibran-
(1883-1931) Lebanese-American philosophical essayist, novelist, mystical poet, and artist
Source: 1923
"Liberty will not descend to a people, a people must raise themselves to liberty; it is a blessing that must be earned before it can be enjoyed."
-Charles Caleb Colton-
(1780-1832) English cleric, writer and collector
"Truth: the most deadly weapon ever discovered by humanity.
Capable of destroying entire perceptual sets, cultures, and realities.
Outlawed by all governments everywhere.
Possession is normally punishable by death."
-John Gilmore-
(1935-2016) American true crime writer, author of Hollywood memoirs, and novelist
"Of all the tyrannies on human kind the worst is that which persecutes the mind."
-John Dryden-
(1631-1700) English Poet
Source: The Hind and the Panther, 1687
"... political reporters love to write about politics as if they are merely disinterested observers of political events and the public's perceptions of them, when in fact they play a very key role in shaping those events and perceptions."
-Greg Sargent-
Columnist for the Los Angeles Times
"Every man – in the development of his own personality – has the right to form his own beliefs and opinions. Hence, suppression of belief, opinion and expression is an affront to the dignity of man, a negation of man’s essential nature."
-Thomas I. Emerson-
(1907-1991) Lines Professor of Law, Yale University, author
Source: Toward A General Theory of the First Amendment, 1966
"While the right to talk may be the beginning of freedom, the necessity of listening is what makes the right important."
-Walter Lippmann-
(1889-1974) American writer, journalist, and political commentator
"Sitting here, we are not at liberty to add one jot of power to the national government beyond what the people have granted by the constitution; and, on the other hand, we are bound to support that constitution as it stands, and to give a fair and rational scope to all the powers which it clearly contains."
-Houston v. Moore-
Source: Houston v. Moore, 18 U.S. 1 (1820)
"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
"When your response to everything that is wrong with the world is to say, 'there ought to be a law,' you are saying that you hold freedom very cheap."
-Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
"A functioning police state needs no police."
-William S. Borroughs-
(1914-1997) American writer, artist
Source: The Naked Lunch, 1959
"Aside from the most committed libertarians, few Americans would list a lack of freedom in their lives as their most pressing concern. That is not to deny that militant leftism, the administrative state, and the imperial judiciary threaten liberty—they most emphatically do. Nor is it to argue that conservatives should not care for liberty. Rather it is to recognize that the average American, including the average Republican voter, is not a libertarian, has come to expect quite a lot from the federal government, and cares as much, if not more, about security than liberty (or opportunity for that matter, unless he is young and on the make). "
-David Azerrad-
Director of the B. Kenneth Simon Center for Principles and Politics, AWC Family Foundation Fellow at The Heritage Foundation
Source: A fusionist ‘conservatarian’ GOP must now also accommodate Trumpism. Part II in a series., The Amercan Spectator, 10/16/2017
"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)
"I support people having a gun in public full stop, not just in your home. We don't have the right to bear arms because of burglars; we have the right to bear arms to resist the supreme power of a corrupt and abusive government. It's not about duck hunting; it's about the ability of the individual. It's the same reason we have freedom of speech."
-Vince Vaughn-
(1970-) American actor, producer, screenwriter, and comedian
Source: British GQ
"History is clear that the first ten amendments to the Constitution were adopted to secure certain common law rights of the people, against invasion by the Federal Government."
-Bell v. Hood-
Source: Bell v. Hood, 71 F. Supp., 813, 816 (1947) U.S.D.C., So. Dist. CA
"Constitutional provisions for the security of person and property should be liberally construed. It is the duty of the courts to be watchful of constitutional rights against any stealthy encroachments thereon."
-Boyd v. U.S.-
Source: Boyd v. U.S., 116 U.S. 635
"It is the theory of all modern civilized governments that they protect and foster the liberty of the citizen; it is the practice of all of them to limit its exercise, and sometimes very narrowly."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"In the midst of these pleasing ideas we should be unfaithful to ourselves if we should ever lose sight of the danger to our liberties if anything partial or extraneous should infect the purity of our free, fair, virtuous, and independent elections."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: Inaugural Address, March 4, 1797
"Let us reform our schools, and we shall find little reform needed in our prisons."
-John Ruskin-
(1819-1900) British author, artist, social critic
"I have no fear that the result of our experiment will be that men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Letter to David Hartley; 1787
"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
"I always counsel my first-year students never to support a law they are not willing to kill to enforce. Officials who fail to take into account the obvious fact that the laws they're so eager to pass will be enforced at the point of a gun cannot fairly be described as public servants. ... Don't ever fight to make something illegal unless you're willing to risk the lives of your fellow citizens to get your way."
-Stephen L. Carter-"
Yale Law School
"Risk", hell. "Threaten" is more appropriate...
"The world is in greater peril from those who tolerate or encourage evil than from those who actually commit it."
-Albert Einstein-
"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. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."
-James Madison--
"'The greatest good for the greatest number' is a high-sounding phrase but contrary to the very basis of our nation, unless it is accompanied by recognition that we have certain rights which cannot be infringed upon, even if the individual stands outvoted by all of his fellow citizens. Without this recognition, majority rule is nothing more than mob rule."
- Ronald Wilson Reagan-
1964
"No legal plunder: This is the principle of justice, peace, order, stability, harmony, and logic. Until the day of my death, I shall proclaim this principle with all the force of my lungs (which alas! is all too inadequate)."
-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
"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
"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
"No person was ever honored for what he received. Honor has been the reward for what he gave."
-Calvin Coolidge-
(1873-1933), 30th US President
"It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, 1756
"No people will tamely surrender their Liberties, nor can any be easily subdued, when knowledge is diffused and Virtue is preserved. On the Contrary, when People are universally ignorant, and debauched in their Manners, they will sink under their own weight without the Aid of foreign Invaders."
-Samuel Adams-
(1722-1803), was known as the "Father of the American Revolution."
Source: letter to James Warren, 4 November 1775. Reference: Our Sacred Honor, Bennett (261)
"Liberty is one of the choicest gifts that heaven hath bestowed upon man, and exceeds in value all the treasures which the earth contains within its bosom, or the sea covers. Liberty, as well as honor, man ought to preserve at the hazard of his life, for without it life is insupportable."
-Cervantes-
[Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra] (1547-1616) Spanish writer
"He that is good, will infallibly become better, and he that is bad, will as certainly become worse; for vice, virtue and time are three things that never stand still."
-Charles Caleb Colton-
(1780-1832) English cleric, writer and collector
"I shall not counsel or maintain any suit or proceeding which shall appear to me to be unjust, nor any defense except such as I believe to be honestly debatable under the law of the land."
-American Bar Association-
Source: Oath for Candidates Seeking Admission to the Bar, 1925
"The spirit of liberty is not merely, as multitudes imagine, a jealousy of our own particular rights, but a respect for the rights of others, and an unwillingness that any man, whether high or low, should be wronged and trampled under foot."
-William Ellery Channing-
(1780-1842)
"Every process which arises from our physical being and is related to it, is an event which lies outside of our volition. Every social process, however, arises from human intentions and human goal setting and occurs within the limits of our volition. Consequently, it is not subject to the concept of natural necessity. … We are here stating no prejudiced opinion, but merely an established fact. Every result of human purposiveness is of indisputable importance for man's social existence, but we should stop regarding social processes as deterministic manifestations of a necessary course of events. Such a view can only lead to the most erroneous conclusions and contribute to a fatal confusion in our understanding of historical events."
-Rudolf Rocker-
"The attributes of sovereignty are now enjoyed by every state in the Union."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: Commentaries on the Constitution, Vol. III, p 287
"In the United States, Sovereignty resides in the people, who act through the organs established by the Constitution."
-Chisholm v. Georgia-
Source: Chisholm v. Georgia, 2 Dall 419, 471
"Not only, therefore, can there be no loss of separate and independent autonomy to the states, through their union under the Constitution, but it may be not unreasonably said that the preservation of the states, and the maintenance of their governments, are as much within the design and care of the Constitution as the preservation of the Union and the maintenance of the national government. The Constitution, in all its provisions, looks to an indestructible Union, composed of indestructible states."
-Texas v. White-
Source: Texas v. White, 7 Wall 700, 725; 19 L. ed. 227, 237
"But as the plan of the [Constitutional] convention aims only at a partial union or consolidation, the State governments would clearly retain all the rights of sovereignty which they before had, and which were not, by that act, EXCLUSIVELY delegated to the United States."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: The Federalist Papers, No. 32. The Same Subject Continued Concerning the General Power of Taxation From the Daily Advertiser. Thursday, January 3, 1788.
"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
"[We should be] determined... to sever ourselves from the union we so much value rather than give up the rights of self-government... in which alone we see liberty, safety and happiness."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: letter to Madison in August 1799
"[T]he people as ultimate sovereigns, retain the ultimate power -- and even the duty -- to overthrow any government that fails to respect their authority."
-Glenn Harlan Reynolds-
(1960- ) Beauchamp Brogan Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee
Source: The Right to Keep and Bear Arms Under the Tennessee Constitution, A Case Study in Civic Republican Thought, 61 TENN. L. R. 647, 652 (1994)
"It is only when the people become ignorant and corrupt, when they degenerate into a populace, that they are incapable of exercising their sovereignty. Usurpation is then an easy attainment, and an usurper soon found. The people themselves become the willing instruments of their own debasement and ruin."
-James Monroe-
(1758-1831), 5th US President
Source: First Inaugural Address, 1817
"It is federal, because it is the government of States united in a political union, in contradistinction to a government of individuals, that is, by what is usually called, a social compact. To express it more concisely, it is federal and not national because it is the government of a community of States, and not the government of a single State or Nation."
-John C. Calhoun-
(1782-1850) American statesman
Source: 1850, John C. Calhoun's essay entitled A Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States
"The sovereignty fetish is still so strong in the public mind, that there would appear to be little chance of winning popular assent to American membership in anything approaching a super-state organization. Much will depend on the kind of approach which is used in further popular education."
-Council on Foreign Relations-
Source: "American Public Opinion and Postwar Security Commitments", 1944
"We deplore the division of humankind on nationalistic grounds. We have reached a turning point in human history where the best option is to transcend the limits of national sovereignty and to move towards the building of a world community. We look toward the development of a system of world law, world order, based upon transnational government."
-Humanist Manifesto, Article 12-
Humanists propose that the United Nations care for and control all peoples of the earth.
"The United Nations is the greatest fraud in all History. Its purpose is to destroy the United States."
-John E. Rankin-
Served 16 terms as Mississippi’s First District Representative in the U.S. House of Representatives
1945
"The main purpose of the Council on Foreign Relations is promoting the disarmament of U.S. sovereignty and national independence and submergence into an all powerful, one world government."
-Rear Admiral Chester Ward-
Rear Admiral US Navy (retired), CFR member for 16 years, Judge Advocate General of the Navy 1956-60
"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
"But if we are to be told by a foreign Power ... what we shall do, and what we shall not do, we have Independence yet to seek, and have contended hitherto for very little."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: letter to Alexander Hamilton, 8 May 1796, Reference: The Writings of George Washington, Fitzpatrick, ed., vol. 35 (40)
"Once a matter has become, in one way or another, the subject of regulation by the United Nations, be it by resolution or the General Assembly or by convention between member States [Nations] at the insistence of the United Nations, that subject ceases to be a matter being 'essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of the member States...'"
-Moses Moskowitz-
UN Staff Member
Source: "American Bar Association Journal", April, 1949
"I solemnly affirm to exercise in all loyalty, discretion and conscience the functions entrusted to me as a member of the international service of the United Nations, to discharge those functions and regulate my conduct with the interest of the United Nations only in view, and not to seek or accept instructions in respect to the performance of my duties from any government or other authority external to the organization."
-United Nations' Loyalty Oath-
"...there is no provision in the Charter itself that contemplates ending war. It is true the Charter provides for force to bring peace, but such use of force is itself war... The Charter is a war document not a peace document... Not only does the Charter Organization not prevent future wars, but it makes it practically certain that we shall have future wars, and as to such wars it takes from us the power to declare them, to choose the side on which we shall fight, to determine what forces and military equipment we shall use in the war, and to control and command our sons who do the fighting."
-J. Reuben Clark, Jr.-
One-time U.S. Under-secretary of State, and Ambassador to Mexico
Source: Regarding the U.N. Charter, September 20th , 1945
"Human rights are not a privilege conferred by government. They are every human being's entitlement by virtue of his humanity. The right to life does not depend, and must not be contingent, on the pleasure of anyone else, not even a parent or sovereign. ... You must weep that your own government, at present, seems blind to this truth."
-Mother Teresa-
[Agnes Gonxha Beiaxhiu] (1910-1997) Humanitarian, Nobel Peace Prize 1979
"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)
"The Union was formed by the voluntary agreement of the states; and these, in uniting together, have not forfeited their nationality, nor have they been reduced to the condition of one and the same people. If one of the states chooses to withdraw from the compact, it would be difficult to disapprove its right of doing so, and the Federal Government would have no means of maintaining its claims directly either by force or right."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
(1805-1859) French historian
Source: Democracy in America, 1835
"The Thirteen States are Thirteen Sovereign bodies."
-Oliver Ellsworth-
(1745-1807) USA Founding father, third Chief Justice of the United States
Source: Commentaries on the Constitution, Vol. III, p 287
"The Government made by a number of Sovereign States."
-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.
Source: Commentaries on the Constitution, Vol. III, p 287
"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
"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)
"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
"Of the laws of nature on which the condition of man depends, that which is attended with the greatest number of consequences is the necessity of labor for obtaining the means of subsistence, as well as the means of the greatest part of our pleasures. This is no doubt the primary cause of government; for if nature had produced spontaneously all the objects which we desire, and in sufficient abundance for the desires of all, there would have been no source of dispute or of injury among men, nor would any man have possessed the means of ever acquiring authority over another. The results are exceedingly different when nature produces the objects of desire not in sufficient abundance for all. The source of dispute is then exhaustless, and every man has the means of acquiring authority over others in proportion to the quantity of those objects which he is able to possess. In this case the end to be obtained through government as the means, is to make that distribution of the scanty materials of happiness which would insure the greatest sum of it in the members of the community taken altogether, preventing every individual or combination of individuals from interfering with that distribution or making any man to have less than his share."
-James Mill-
"The drafters of the Constitution had made one simple but far-reaching error. They'd assumed that the people selected by The People to manage the nation would be as honest and honorable as they'd been. One could almost hear the 'Oops!' emanating from all those old graves."
-Tom Clancy-
"It would be a dangerous delusion were a confidence in the men of our choice to silence our fears for the safety of our rights; that confidence is every where the parent of despotism; free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence; it is jealousy, and not confidence, which prescribes limited constitutions to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power; that our Constitution has accordingly fixed the limits to which, and no farther, our confidence may go; and let the honest advocate of confidence read the Alien and Sedition Acts, and say if the Constitution has not been wise in fixing limits to the government it created, and whether we should be wise in destroying those limits; let him say what the government is, if it be not a tyranny, which the men of our choice have conferred on the President, and the President of our choice has assented to and accepted, over the friendly strangers, to whom the mild spirit of our country and its laws had pledged hospitality and protection; that the men of our choice have more respected the bare suspicions of the President than the solid rights of innocence, the claims of justification, the sacred force of truth, and the forms and substance of law and justice. In questions of power, then, let no more be said of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"Foolish liberals who are trying to read the Second Amendment out of the constitution by claiming it’s not an individual right or that it’s too much of a safety hazard don’t see the danger of the big picture. They’re courting disaster by encouraging others to use this same means to eliminate portions of the Constitution they don’t like."
-Alan Dershowitz-
(1938- ) Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School
Source: The Conceptual Foundations of Anglo-American Jurisprudence in Religion and Reason, 82 Mich L. Rev., 204 (Dan Gifford), 1995
"The Framers of the First Amendment were not concerned with preventing government from abridging their freedom to speak about crops and cockfighting, or with protecting the expressive activity of topless dancers, which of late has found some shelter under the First Amendment. Rather, the Framers cherished unabridged freedom of political communication."
-George Will-
(1941-) American newspaper columnist, journalist, and author
"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."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: Thoughts on Government, 1776
"Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
"If you own your life, then you have the right to defend yourself against anyone who would deprive you of it. ... And, if you have the right of self-defense, it follows that you have the right to act ... to obtain means appropriate to that defense. That brings us to firearms, particularly the handgun, which so many people would outlaw. The handgun has been called the equalizer ..., and for good reason. It affords smaller, weaker people the chance to defend themselves against bigger, stronger people who threaten them. Handguns offer the otherwise defenseless a convenient, practical, inexpensive method of safeguarding themselves and their families. Banishing handguns -- even if the big and strong were also denied them -- would leave the small and the weak defenseless."
-Sheldon Richman-
V.P. of Future of Freedom Foundation, author
Source: The Right to Life Equals the Right to Possess Firearms, The Tyranny of Gun Control, 40 (Future of Freedom Foundation 1997).
"A just fear of an imminent danger, though there be no blow given, is a lawful cause of war."
-Sir Francis Bacon-
(1561-1626) Philosopher, British Lord Chancellor
"The first step in saving our liberty is to realize how much we have already lost, how we lost it, and how we will continue to lose it unless fundamental political changes occur."
-James Bovard-
(1956- ) American author, lecturer
Source: Lost Rights, 1994
"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."
-Judge Alex Kozinski-
(1950-) US Circuit Judge of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (1985-2017)
Source: Silveira v. Lockyer, 328 F. 3d 567 - Court of Appeals, 9th Circuit 2003, Dissent by Judge KOZINSKI
"If men, through fear, fraud, or mistake, should in terms renounce or give up any natural right, the eternal law of reason and the grand end of society would absolutely vacate such renunciation. The right to freedom being the gift of Almighty God, it is not in the power of man to alienate this gift and voluntarily become a slave."
-Samuel Adams-
(1722-1803), was known as the "Father of the American Revolution."
Samuel Adams instigated the Boston Tea Party, was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, called for the first Continental Congress, and served as a member of Congress until 1781.
Samuel Adams formed the Committees of Correspondence, which were largely responsible for the unity and cohesion of the Colonists preceding the Revolution.
The original committee, formed in Boston, had three goals:
(1) To delineate the rights of Colonists as men;
(2) To detail how these rights had been violated;
(3) To publicize these rights and the violations thereof throughout the Colonies.
"It is unreasonable ... to oblige a man not to attempt the defense of his own life."
-Charles de Montesquieu-
[Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat] (1689-1755) Baron de Montesquieu
Source: The Spirit of Laws 64.
"The great object is that every man be armed. Everyone who is able may have a gun."
-Patrick Henry-
(1736-1799) US Founding Father
Source: in the Virginia Convention on the ratification of the Constitution, June 14, 1788,
in_Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution,_
Jonathan Elliot, ed., v.3 p.386 (Philadelphia, 1836)
"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."
-Jeffrey R. 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
"I have no reason to suppose, that he, who would take away my liberty, would not, when he had me in his power, take away every thing else."
-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, 202 §. 18 (1690)
"Whosoever uses force without Right ... puts himself into a state of War with those, against whom he uses it, and in that state all former Ties are canceled, all other Rights cease, and every one has a Right to defend himself, and to resist the Aggressor."
-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 153-54 (Chicago 1955).
"Self-defence is a part of the law of nature; nor can it be denied the community, even against the king himself..."
-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, 390 §. 233 (1690)
"The enemies of freedom do not argue; they shout and they shoot."
-William Ralph Inge-
(1860-1954) English author, Anglican prelate
Source: The End of an Age
"[It is] a natural Right which the people have reserved to themselves, confirmed by the [English] Bill of rights, to keep arms for their own defense; and as Mr. Blackstone observes, it is to be made use of when the sanctions of Society and law are found insufficient to restrain the violence of oppression."
-Boston Evening Post-
Source: A Journal of the Times, March 27, 1769, printed May 25, 1769.
"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)
"[Self-defense is] justly called the primary law of nature, so it is not, neither can it be in fact, taken away by the laws of society."
-Sir William Blackstone-
(1723-1780)
Source: 3 William Blackstone, Commentaries 139
"The purpose of the right to bear arms is twofold; to allow individuals to protect themselves and their families, and to ensure a body of armed citizenry from which a militia could be drawn, whether that militia’s role was to protect the nation, or to protect the people from a tyrannical government."
-Glenn Harlan Reynolds-
Assoc. Prof. of Law, Univ. of Tennessee
Source: A Critical Guide to the Second Amendment, 62 TENN. L. R. 461, 475 (1995).
"A people armed and free forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition and is a bulwark for the nation against foreign invasion and domestic oppression."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
"In March, 1982, Kennesaw, Georgia, passed a mandatory gun ownership ordinance which requires all heads of households to own a firearm -- handgun, rifle or shotgun. In 1982, our crime against persons, which include murder, rape, armed robbery, aggravated assault and residential burglary, decreased 74%. In 1983 these same crimes decreased [an additional] 46%. ... I would also like you to be aware that our population has increased in excess of 20% since 1982. We have had no accidents nor incidents involving our citizens with regards to firearms. ... It is a pleasure to see our senior citizens strolling the streets at night without fear of becoming a victim of violent crime."
-Robert L. Ruble-
Chief of Police, Kennesaw, Georgia
Source: November 5, 1984, unpublished letter to Ann Landers
"It is an ancient truth that freedom cannot be legislated into existence, so it is no less obvious that freedom cannot be censored into existence. And any who act as if freedom's defenses are found in suppression and suspicion and fear confess a doctrine that is alien to America."
-Dwight D. Eisenhower-
(1890-1969), 34th US President, WWII General
Source: Letter, 24 June 1953
"It is unclear how disarming law-abiding citizens would better protect them from the dangers and threats posed by those who would flout the law. It is at just such times that the constitutional right to self-defense is most precious and must be protected from government overreach."
-Rick Scott-
(1959-) Governor of Florida
Source: in rejecting Tampa Bay politicians request seeking suspension of the concealed-carry laws outside the Republican and Democratic national conventions
"Today, the people who would use guns to violate rights have little trouble getting them, while those who would use them to defend their rights have increasing trouble getting them. ... Gun control is in effect a subsidy for criminals."
-Sheldon Richman-
V.P. of Future of Freedom Foundation, author
Source: The Right to Life Equals the Right to Possess Firearms, The Tyranny of Gun Control, 41 (Future of Freedom Foundation 1997).
"Despite the vision and farseeing wisdom of our wartime heads of state, the physicists have felt the peculiarly intimate responsibility for suggesting, for supporting, and in the end, in large measure, for achieving the realization of atomic weapons. Nor can we forget that these weapons, as they were in fact used, dramatized so mercilessly the inhumanity and evil of modern war. In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose."
-Robert Oppenheimer-
"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
"From the east to the west blow the trumpet to arms!
Through the land let the sound of it flee;
Let the far and the near all unite, with a cheer,
In defense of our Liberty Tree."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
"Sovereignty inheres in the right to issue money. And the American sovereignty belongs by right to the people, and their representatives in Congress have the right to issue money and to determine the value thereof. And 120 million, 120 million suckers have lamentably failed to insist on the observation of this quite decided law. ... Now the point at which embezzlement of the nation's funds on the part of her officers becomes treason can probably be decided only by jurists, and not by hand-picked judges who support illegality."
-Ezra Pound-
(1885-1972) American poet
April 9, 1942
"I remember that a wise friend of mine did usually say, 'That which is everybody's business is nobody's business'."
-Izaak Walton-
(c. 1593-1683) English writer
"The several states composing the United States of America are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government; but by a compact under the style and title of a Constitution for the United States, and of amendments thereto, they constituted a general government for special purposes [and] delegated to that government certain definite powers and whensoever the general government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force. To this compact each state acceded as a state, and is an integral party, its co-states forming, as to itself, the other party. The government created by this compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself, since that would have made its discretion, and not the Constitution the measure of its powers."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: in his draft of the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 which were written in response to an attempt by Congress to expand the criminal jurisdiction of the federal government through a set of laws entitled the "Alien and Sedition Laws."
"[T]his Assembly doth explicitly and peremptorily declare, that it views the powers of the Federal Government, as resulting from the compact, to which the States are parties, as limited by the plain sense and intention of the instrument constituting the compact as no further valid than they are authorized by the grants enumerated in that compact; and that in case of a deliberate, palpable and 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, and for maintaining within their respective limits, the authorities, rights and liberties appertaining to them."
-Virginia Resolution of 1798-
Source: in response to the federal government's "Alien and Sedition Laws."
"The judiciary of the United States is the subtle corps of sappers and miners constantly working under ground to undermine the foundations of our confederated fabric. They are construing our constitution from a coordination of a general and special government to a general and supreme one alone. This will lay all things at their feet... We shall see if they are bold enough to take the daring stride their five lawyers have lately taken. If they do, then... I will say, that 'against this every man should raise his voice,' and more, should uplift his arm."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: (Letter to T. Ritchie, 1820). THE POLITICAL WRITINGS OF THOMAS JEFFERSON 152-153 (Dumbauld Ed. 1955)
"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: The Federalist Papers at 184-188
"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-
(1909-1998) US Senator (R-Arizona)
Source: Acceptance speech, Republican presidential nomination, 16 July 1964
"Crime is rampant because the law-abiding, each of us, condone it, excuse it, permit it, submit to it. We permit and encourage it because we do not fight back, immediately, then and there, where it happens. Crime is not rampant because we do not have enough prisons, because judges and prosecutors are too soft, because the police are hamstrung with absurd technicalities. The defect is there, in our character. We are a nation of cowards and shirkers."
-Jeffrey R. Snyder-
American attorney, author
Source: A Nation of Cowards, 113 Public Interest (Fall 1993)
"[Individuals] have a right to defend themselves and recover by force what by unlawful force is taken from them."
-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 174 (Chicago 1955)
"And they are ignorant that the purpose of the sword is to save every man from slavery."
-Lucanus-
[Marcus Annaeus Lucan] (A.D. 39-65)
Source: De Bello Civili (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Loeb Classical Library, 1988), IV, 579, p. 216
"The difference between a politician and a pickpocket is that the pickpocket doesn't get indignant when you tell him to keep his hands to himself."
-Joseph Sobran-
(1946-2010) Columnist
"The first ten amendments were proposed and adopted largely because of fear that Government might unduly interfere with prized individual liberties. The people wanted and demanded a Bill of Rights written into their Constitution. The amendments embodying the Bill of Rights were intended to curb all branches of the Federal Government in the fields touched by the amendments—Legislative, Executive, and Judicial."
-Justice Hugo L. Black-
(1886-1971) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: Adamson v. California, 332 U.S. 46, 71 (Dissent) (1947).
"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
"[F]or everybody has a natural right to defend his own person and property against aggressors, but also to go to the assistance and defence of everybody else, whose person or property is invaded. The natural right of each individual to defend his own person and property against an aggressor, and to go to the assistance and defence of every one else whose person or property is invaded, is a right without which men could not exist on earth."
-Lysander Spooner-
(1808-1887) Political theorist, activist, abolitionist
Source: Vices are Not Crimes, A Vindication of Moral Liberty (1875)
"Truth resides in every human heart, and one has to search for it there, and to be guided by truth as one sees it. But no one has a right to coerce others to act according to his own view of truth."
-Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi-
(1869-1948)
"The right to unite freely and to separate freely is the first and most important of all political rights."
-Mikhail A. Bakunin-
(1814-1876)
Source: Proposition Motivee, 1868
"Individualism is at once an ethical-psychological concept and an ethical-political one. As an ethical-psychological concept, individualism holds that a human being should think and judge independently, respecting nothing more than the sovereignty of his or her mind; thus, it is intimately connected with the concept of autonomy. As an ethical-political concept, individualism upholds the supremacy of individual rights ..."
-Nathaniel Branden-
(1930-) Canadian psychotherapist, writer
Source: Capitalism: The Libertarian Vision
"[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
"What is freedom? It means not being a slave to any circumstance, to any restraint, to any chance."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist
Source: Letters to Lucilius, 65 A.D.
"If I want to be free from any other man’s dictation, I must understand that I can have no other man under my control."
-William Graham Sumner-
(1840-1910) American academic and professor at Yale College
Source: The Forgotten Man and Other Essays, 1918
"The only sure bulwark of continuing liberty is a government strong enough to protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and well enough informed to maintain its sovereign control over the government."
-Franklin D. Roosevelt-
(1882-1945), 32nd US President
"What spectacle can be more edifying or more seasonable, than that of Liberty and Learning, each leaning on the other for their mutual & surest support?"
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: letter to W.T. Barry, August 4, 1822
"Conservatism, though a necessary element in any stable society, is not a social program; in its paternalistic, nationalistic and power adoring tendencies it is often closer to socialism than true liberalism; and with its traditionalistic, anti-intellectual, and often mystical propensities it will never, except in short periods of disillusionment, appeal to the young and all those others who believe that some changes are desirable if this world is to become a better place."
-Friedrich Hayek-
"Nationalism is always an effort in a direction opposite to that of the principle which creates nations. The former is exclusive in tendency, the latter inclusive. In periods of consolidation, nationalism has a positive value, and is a lofty standard. But in Europe everything is more than consolidated, and nationalism is nothing but a mania, a pretext to escape from the necessity of inventing something new, some great enterprise."
-José Ortega y Gasset-
"The noblest and most fruitful work of the human intelligence is to make a clean sweep of every enforced idea — of advantages or meanings — and to go right through appearances in search of the eternal bases. Thus you will clearly see the moral law at the beginning of all things, and the conception of justice and equality will appear to you beautiful as daylight."
-Henri Barbusse-
"We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still. First: the opinion which it is attempted to suppress by authority may possibly be true. Those who desire to suppress it, of course deny its truth; but they are not infallible. They have no authority to decide the question for all mankind, and exclude every other person from the means of judging. To refuse a hearing to an opinion, because they are sure that it is false, is to assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty. All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility. Its condemnation may be allowed to rest on this common argument, not the worse for being common. Unfortunately for the good sense of mankind, the fact of their fallibility is far from carrying the weight in their practical judgment, which is always allowed to it in theory; for while every one well knows himself to be fallible, few think it necessary to take any precautions against their own fallibility, or admit the supposition that any opinion, of which they feel very certain, may be one of the examples of the error to which they acknowledge themselves to be liable."
-On Liberty-
"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)
"A juror who is forced by the judge’s instructions to convict a defendant whose conduct he applauds or at the least feels is justifiable, will lose respect for the legal system. . . . A juror compelled to decide against his own judgment will rebel at the system that made him a traitor to himself."
-Alan W. Scheflin-
Professor of Law at Santa Clara University School of Law in California
Source: Jury Nullification: The Right to Say No, 45 S. CAL. L. REV. 168, 183 (1972)
"What is the fairest fruit of the English Tree of Liberty? The security of our rights and of the law, and that no man shall be brought to trial where there is a prejudice against him."
-Thomas Erskine-
(1750-1823)
Source: Defense of Thomas Paine, 20 December 1792
"Jurors have found, again and again, and at critical moments, according to what is their sense of the rational and just. If their sense of justice has gone one way, and the case another, they have found “against the evidence,” ... the English common law rests upon a bargain between the Law and the people: The jury box is where the people come into the court: The judge watches them and the people watch back. A jury is the place where the bargain is struck. The jury attends in judgment, not only upon the accused, but also upon the justice and the humanity of the Law."
-E. P. Thompson-
1978
"The jury in all criminal cases, shall be the judges of the law and the facts."
-Georgia, Declaration of Rights, Art.I, Sec.II, Para. I-
"In all criminal cases whatsoever, the jury shall have the right to determine the law and the facts."
-Indiana Constitution-
Source: Indiana Constitution Article I, Section 19
"[N]o American should retreat an inch on the right of jurors to acquit if they perceive the law or its administration to be unjust.
-Charley Reese-
(1937-2013) American syndicated columnist
Source: Don’t sacrifice justice to law, CONSERVATIVE CHRONICLE, May 1, 1996
"Ours is an accusatorial and not an inquisitorial system -- a system in which the state must establish guilt by evidence independently and freely secured and may not by coercion prove its charge against an accused out of his own mouth."
-Felix Frankfurter-
(1882-1965) U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: 1961
"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
"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 not what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
Source: Second Speech on Conciliation, 1775
"Society's demands for moral authority and character increase as the importance of the position increases."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
"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. I have no fear of constitutional amendments properly adopted, but I do fear the rewriting of the Constitution by judges under the guise of interpretation."
-Justice Hugo L. Black-
(1886-1971) US Supreme Court Justice
"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
"Stripped of all its covering, the naked question is, whether ours is a federal or consolidated government; a constitutional or absolute one; a government resting solidly on the basis of the sovereignty of the States, or on the unrestrained will of a majority; a form of government, as in all other unlimited ones, in which injustice, violence, and force must ultimately prevail."
-John C. Calhoun-
(1782-1850) American statesman
1831
"The fault lies not with our technologies but with our systems."
-Roger Levian-
"Censorship of anything, at any time, in any place, on whatever pretense, has always been and will always be the last resort of the boob and the bigot."
-Eugene O'Neill-
(1888-1953)
"Freedom, morality, and the human dignity of the individual consists precisely in this; that he does good not because he is forced to do so, but because he freely conceives it, wants it, and loves it."
-Mikhail A. Bakunin-
(1814-1876)
Source: God and The State, 1871
"Don't try to be different. Just be good. To be good is different enough."
-Arthur Freed-
[Arthur Grossman] (1894-1973) American lyricist, film producer
"A 'No' uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a 'Yes' merely uttered to please, or worse, to avoid trouble."
-Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi-
(1869-1948)
"To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men."
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
"How did it happen? How did our national government grow from a servant with sharply limited powers into a master with virtually unlimited power? In part, we were swindled. There are occasions when we have elevated men and political parties to power that promised to restore limited government and then proceeded, after their election, to expand the activities of government. But let us be honest with ourselves. Broken promises are not the major causes of our trouble. Kept promises are. All too often we have put men in office who have suggested spending a little more on this, a little more on that, who have proposed a new welfare program, who have thought of another variety of 'security.' We have taken the bait, preferring to put off to another day the recapture of freedom and the restoration of our constitutional system. We have gone the way of many a democratic society that has lost its freedom by persuading itself that if 'the people' rule, all is well."
-Barry Goldwater-
(1909-1998) US Senator (R-Arizona)
"Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one."
-Charles Mackay-
(1814-1889) Scottish poet, journalist, author, anthologist, novelist, and songwriter
Source: 1841, "Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds"
"The objector and the rebel
who raises his voice against
what he believes to be
the injustice of the present
and the wrongs of the past
is the one who hunches the world along."
-Clarence S. Darrow-
(1857-1938)
Source: Address to the Court, The Communist Trial, People v. Lloyd, 1920
"As long as people will accept crap, it will be financially profitable to dispense it."
-Dick Cavett-
(1936-) American television personality, former talk show host
"No more duty can be urged upon those who are entering the great theater of life than simple loyalty to their best convictions."
-Edwin Hubbel Chapin-
(1814-1880) US clergyman, author, speaker
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit."
-Aristotle-
(384-322 BC) Greek philosopher
"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) English author, poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer
"We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing,
while others judge us by what we have already done."
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow-
(1807-1882) American poet
Source: Kavanagh, 1849
"Ill habits gather by unseen degrees --
As brooks make rivers, rivers run to seas."
-John Dryden-
(1631-1700) English Poet
"Every wrong seems possible today, and is accepted. I don't accept it."
-Pablo Casals-
[Pau Casals i Defilló] (1876-1973) Catalan cellist and conductor
"[F]alsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd 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
"Lying can never save us from another lie."
-Vaclav Havel-
(1936-2011) Czech writer, philosopher, dissident, statesman, last President of Czechoslovakia
"To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves."
-Will Durant-
(1885-1981) American psychologist, philosopher
"Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself."
-William Faulkner-
(1897-1962)
"Pity the poor, wretched, timid soul, too faint hearted to resist his oppressors. He sings the songs of the damned, 'I cannot resist, I have too much to lose, they might take my property or confiscate my earnings, what would my family do, how would they survive?' He hides behind pretended family responsibility, failing to see that the most glorious legacy that we can bequeath to our posterity is liberty!"
-W. Vaughn Ellsworth-
American author, defended himself against IRS in 1977
"He who sees the truth, let him proclaim it, without asking who is for it or who is against it."
-Henry George-
(1839-1897) American political economist
Source: The Land Question, 1881
"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, p.291 (1991)
"Human reason can neither predict nor deliberately shape its own future. Its advances consist in finding out where it has been wrong."
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
"I protect my right to be a Catholic by preserving your right to believe as a Jew, a Protestant, or non-believer, or as anything else you choose. We know that the price of seeking to force our beliefs on others is that they might some day force theirs on us. This freedom is the fundamental strength of our unique experiment in government. In the complex interplay of forces and considerations that go into the making of our laws and policies, its preservation must be a pervasive and dominant concern."
-Mario Cuomo-
"Labor was the first price, the original purchase - money that was paid for all things
-Adam Smith-
(1723-1790) Scottish philosopher and economist
"We are more especially called upon to maintain the principles of free discussion in case of unpopular sentiments or persons, as in no other case will any effort to maintain them be needed."
-Edward Beecher-
(1803-1895)
"The beginning of philosophy is the recognition of the conflict between opinions."
-Epictetus-
(ca 55-135 A.D.) Greek philospher
Source: Discourses, ca. 110 A.D.
"The [classical] liberal, of course, does not deny that there are some superior people -- he is not an egalitarian -- but he denies that anyone has authority to decide who these superior people are."
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
Source: "Why I Am Not a Conservative," postcript to The Constitution of Liberty [1960] (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1972), p. 402
"Liberty, equality -- bad principles! The only true principle for humanity is justice; and justice to the feeble is protection and kindness."
-Henri-Frédéric Amiel-
(1821-1881) Swiss philosopher, poet
"Your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart to give yourself to it."
-Buddha-
[Gautama Siddharta] (563 - 483 BC), Hindu Prince, founder of Buddhism
"Everything in the world is purchased by labor."
-David Hume-
(1711-1776) Scottish philosopher, historian and economist
"The non-producers now receive the larger share of what those who labor produce. The result is natural. Discontent culminates in exactly the same ratio that intelligence sustains aspiration."
-Frederick Douglass-
[Frederick Baily] (1818-1895), escaped slave, Abolitionist, author, editor of the North Star and later the New National Era
"The poor despise labor when performed by slaves."
-George Mason-
(1725-1792), drafted the Virgina Declaration of Rights, ally of James Madison and George Washington
"Large fortunes are all founded either on the occupation of land, or lending or the taxation of labor."
-John Ruskin-
(1819-1900) British author, artist, social critic
"Governors have no Right to seek and take what they please; by this, instead of being content with the Station assigned them, that of honorable Servants of the Society, they would soon become Absolute Masters, Despots,and Tyrants. Hence, as a private Man has a Right to say what Wages he will give in his private Affairs, so has a Community to determine what they will give and grant of their Substance for the Administration of public Affairs."
-Samuel Adams-
(1722-1803), was known as the "Father of the American Revolution."
Source: The Votes and Proceedings of the Freeholders and Other Inhabitants of the Town of Boston in Town Meeting Assembled, According to Law. Published by Order of the Town. Nov 20 1772
"In short, it is the greatest Absurdity to suppose it in the Power of one or any Number of Men, at the entering into Society, to renounce their essential natural Rights or the Means of preserving those Rights, when the grand End of civil Government, from the very Nature of its Institution, is for the Support, Protection and Defense of those very Rights: The principal of which, as is before observed, are Life, Liberty, and Property."
-Samuel Adams-
(1722-1803), was known as the "Father of the American Revolution."
Source: The Votes and Proceedings of the Freeholders and Other Inhabitants of the Town of Boston in Town Meeting Assembled, According to Law. Published by Order of the Town. Nov 20 1772
"The Legislative has no Right to absolute arbitrary Power over the Lives and Fortunes of the People: Nor can Mortals assume a Prerogative not only too high for Men but for Angels, and therefore reserv’d for the Exercise of the Deity alone."
-Samuel Adams-
(1722-1803), was known as the "Father of the American Revolution."
Source: The Votes and Proceedings of the Freeholders and Other Inhabitants of the Town of Boston in Town Meeting Assembled, According to Law. Published by Order of the Town. Nov 20 1772
"Tis a Mistake to think this Fault [tyranny] is proper only to Monarchies; other Forms of Government are liable to it, as well as that. For where-ever the Power that is put in any hands for the Government of the People, and the Preservation of their Properties, is applied to other ends, and made use of to impoverish, harass, or subdue them to the Arbitrary and Irregular Commands of those that have it: There it presently becomes Tyranny, whether those that thus use it are one or many."
-John Locke-
(1632-1704) English philosopher and political theorist
"[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
1690
"The Natural Liberty of Man is to be free from any Superior Power on Earth, and not to be under the Will or Legislative Authority of Man, but to have only the Law of Nature for his Rule."
-John Locke-
(1632-1704) English philosopher and political theorist
Source: Two Treatises on Government, 1690
"It is a principle incorporated into the settled policy of America, that as peace is better than war, war is better than tribute."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: letter to the Dey of Algiers, August, 1816
"Objects of the most stupendous magnitude, and measure in which the lives and liberties of millions yet unborn are intimately interested, are now before us. We are in the very midst of a revolution the most complete, unexpected and remarkable of any in the history of nations."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: letter to William Cushing, June 9, 1776
"Knavery seems to be so much the striking feature of its [America's] inhabitants that it may not in the end be an evil that they will become aliens to the kingdom."
-King George III-
(1738-1820) King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (1760-1820)
"In time of war all countries behave equally badly, because the power of action is handed over to stupid and obstinate men."
-Kenneth Clark-
"[T]he flames kindled on the Fourth of July 1776, have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism; on the contrary, they will consume these engines and all who work them."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
1821
"Convinced that the republican is the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind, my prayers & efforts shall be cordially distributed to the support of that we have so happily established. It is indeed an animating thought that, while we are securing the rights of ourselves & our posterity, we are pointing out the way to struggling nations who wish, like us, to emerge from their tyrannies also. Heaven help their struggles, and lead them, as it has done us, triumphantly thro' them."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Letter to William Hunter, 11 March 1790
"If every person has the right to defend -- even by force -- his person, his liberty, and his property, then it follows that a group of men have the right to organize and support a common force to protect these rights constantly. Thus the principle of collective right -- its reason for existing, its lawfulness -- is based on individual right. And the common force that protects this collective right cannot logically have any other purpose or any other mission than that for which it acts as a substitute. Thus, 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 individuals or groups."
-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 (1848)
"Life, faculties, production -- in other words, individuality, liberty, property -- this is man. And in spite of the cunning of artful political leaders, these three gifts from God precede all human legislation and are superior to it."
-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 (1848)
"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
"Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom. But the tumult soon subsides."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
January 1776
Source: Common Sense, February 14, 1776, Introduction
"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)
"If the American Revolution had produced nothing but the Declaration of Independence, it would have been worthwhile.... The beauty and cogency of the preamble, reaching back to remotest antiquity and forward to an infinite future, having lifted the hearts of millions of men and will continue to do.... These words are more revolutionary than anything written by Robespierre, Marx, or Lenin, more explosive than the atom, a continual challenge to ourselves as well as an inspiration to the oppressed of all the world."
-Samuel Eliot Morison-
(1887-1976) Rear Admiral USNR, Naval historian
"Men being by nature all free, equal and independent, no one can be put out of his estate and subjected to the political power of another without his own consent which is done by agreeing with other men, to join and unite into a community for their comfortable, safe, and peaceable living in a secure enjoyment of their properties."
-John Locke-
(1632-1704) English philosopher and political theorist
Source: Second Treatise on Government (Chapter 95) 1698
"Among the natural Rights of the Colonists are these: First, a Right to Life; secondly, to Liberty; thirdly, to Property; together with the Right to support and defend them in the best Manner they can. Those are evident Branches of, rather than Deductions from, the Duty of Self-Preservation, commonly called the first Law of Nature."
-Samuel Adams-
(1722-1803), was known as the "Father of the American Revolution."
Source: The Votes and Proceedings of the Freeholders and Other Inhabitants of the Town of Boston in Town Meeting Assembled, According to Law. Published by Order of the Town. Oct 1772
"Government cannot make us equal; it can only recognize, respect, and protect us as equal before the law. That [affirmative action] programs may have been motivated, in part, by good intentions cannot provide refuge from the principle that under our Constitution, the government may not make distinctions on the basis of race."
-Justice Clarence Thomas-
(1948- ) U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Adarand v. Federico Pena
"You can't say you love your country and hate your government."
-Bill Clinton-
[William Jefferson Blythe III] (1946- ), 42nd US President
Source: 1995 (After the OKC bombing)
Spoken like a self-serving government...
"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
Source: "The Law" by Frederic Bastiat (1850)
In the immortal words of "superior" Nancy Pelosi, "Are you serious...?!"
"Politics, as a practise, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds."
-Henry Brooks Adams-
(1838-1918) Pulitzer prize-winning historian (1919), great-grandson of John Adams, grandson of John Quincy Adams, and son of US Secretary of State, Charles Adams
Source: The Education of Henry Adams, ch. 1 (1907)
"In our country, the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State."
-Alexander Solzhenitsyn-
(1918-2008) Russian novelist, Soviet dissident, imprisoned for 8 years for critizing Stalin in a personal letter, Nobel Prize for Literature, 1970
"It is indeed probable that more harm and misery have been caused by men determined to use coercion to stamp out a moral evil than by men intent on doing evil."
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
Source: The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), p. 146
"The laws of man may bind him in chains or may put him to death, but they never can make him wise, virtuous, or happy."
-John Quincy Adams-
(1767-1848) 6th US President
"Every crime is born of necessity. If you want less crime, you must change the conditions. Poverty makes crime. Want, rags, crusts, misfortune - all these awake the wild beast in man, and finally he takes, and takes contrary to law, and becomes a criminal. And what do you do with him? You punish him. Why not punish a man for having consumption? The time will come when you will see that that is just as logical. What do you do with the criminal? You send him to the penitentiary. Is he made better? Worse. The first thing you do is to try to trample out his manhood, by putting an indignity upon him. You mark him. You put him in stripes. At night you put him in darkness. His feeling for revenge grows. You make a wild beast of him, and he comes out of that place branded in body and soul, and then you won't let him reform if he wants to."
-Robert G. Ingersoll-
(1833-1899) American lawyer, Civil War veteran, political leader, orator of United States during the Golden Age of Free Thought, nicknamed "The Great Agnostic"
Source: A Lay Sermon, 1886
"People unfit for freedom — who cannot do much with it — are hungry for power. The desire for freedom is an attribute of a 'have' type of self. It says: leave me alone and I shall grow, learn, and realize my capacities. The desire for power is basically an attribute of a 'have-not' type of self. If Hitler had had the talents and the temperament of a genuine artist, if Stalin had had the capacity to become a first-rate theoretician, if Napoleon had had the makings of a great poet or philosopher they would hardly have developed the all-consuming lust for absolute power. Freedom gives us a chance to realize our human and individual uniqueness. Absolute power can also bestow uniqueness: to have absolute power is to have the power to reduce all the people around us to puppets, robots, toys, or animals, and be the only man in sight. Absolute power achieves uniqueness by dehumanizing others."
-Eric Hoffer-
"How strangely will the Tools of a Tyrant pervert the plain Meaning of Words!"
-Samuel Adams-
(1722-1803), was known as the "Father of the American Revolution."
Source: letter to John Pitts, January 21, 1776
"It is not only vain, but wicked, in a legislature to frame laws in opposition to the laws of nature, and to arm them with the terrors of death. This is truly creating crimes in order to punish them."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Note on the Crimes Bill, 1779
"To disregard such a deliberate choice of words and their natural meaning, would be a departure from the first principle of constitutional interpretation. "In expounding the Constitution of the United States," said Chief Justice Taney in Holmes v. Jennison, 14 U.S. 540, 570-1, "every word must have its due force and appropriate meaning; for it is evident from the whole instrument, that, no word was unnecessarily used, or needlessly added. The many discussions which have taken place upon the construction of the Constitution, have proved the correctness of this proposition; and shown the high talent, the caution and the foresight of the illustrious men who framed it. Every word appears to have been weighed with the utmost deliberation and its force and effect to have been fully understood."
-Wright v. United States-
Source: in Wright v. United States, 302 U.S. 583 (1938), quoting Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney (1777-1864)
"The worst tyrants are those which establish themselves in our own breasts."
-William Ellery Channing-
(1780-1842) American Unitarian preacher
Source: Spiritual Freedom, 1830
"Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all."
-Hypatia of Alexandria-
(355? - 415 CE), Female Mathematician, Astronomer, and Philosopher
"From the moment the first leader of the first clan in human history took charge, he busied himself with this question: 'What can I say and do that will make my people react the way I want them to.' He was the first Pavlov. He was the first psychologist, the first propagandist, the first mind-control boss. His was the first little empire. Since then, only the means and methods have changed."
-Jon Rappoport-
American author, investigative reporter, writer
Source: The Underground
"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
"...Virtue, morality, and religion. This is the armor, my friend, and this alone that renders us invincible. These are the tactics we should study. If we lose these, we are conquered, fallen indeed...so long as our manners and principles remain sound, there is no danger."
-Patrick Henry-
(1736-1799) US Founding Father
"All Men have a Right to remain in a State of Nature as long as they please: And in case of intolerable Oppression, civil or religious, to leave the Society they belong to and enter into another. When Men enter into Society, it is by voluntary Consent, and they have a Right to demand and insist upon the performance of such Conditions and previous Limitations as form an equitable original Compact."
-Samuel Adams-
(1722-1803), was known as the "Father of the American Revolution."
Source: The Votes and Proceedings of the Freeholders and Other Inhabitants of the Town of Boston in Town Meeting Assembled, According to Law. Published by Order of the Town. Nov 20 1772
"If for no other reason, personal pride should prompt every governor and state legislator to take a secessionist attitude they were not elected to be lackeys of the federal bureaucracy."
-Frank Chodorov-
(1887-1966) American author, publisher
1952
"No country upon earth ever had it more in its power to attain these blessings than United America. Wondrously strange, then, and much to be regretted indeed would it be, were we to neglect the means and to depart from the road which Providence has pointed us to so plainly; I cannot believe it will ever come to pass."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: 1788, in a letter to Benjamin Lincoln, Ref: George Washington: A Collection, W.B. Allen, ed. (521)
"The right of ordinary citizens to possess weapons is the most extraordinary, most controversial, and least understood of those liberties secured by Englishmen and bequeathed to their American colonists. It lies at the very heart of the relationship between the individual and his fellows, and between the individual and his government."
-Joyce Lee Malcolm-
(1941-) American professor of law, historian, and Constitutional scholar
Source: To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. IX
"An appeal is when you ask one court to show its contempt for another court."
-Finley Peter Dunne-
(1867-1936) American humorist, writer
"The only kind of freedom that the mob can imagine is freedom to annoy and oppress its betters, and that is precisely the kind that we mainly have."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"The strongest of all warriors are these two -- Time and Patience."
-Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi-
(1828-1910) Russian writer
Source: War and Peace (1865–1867; 1869), Bk. X, ch. 16
"The loyalists in the beginning of the late war objected to associating, arming and fighting, in defense of our liberties, because these measures were not constitutional. A free people should always be left... with every possible power to promote their own happiness."
-Pennsylvania Gazette-
April 23, 1788
"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)
"I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"One byproduct of individualism is benevolence -- a general attitude of good will towards one's neighbors and fellow human beings. Benevolence is impossible in a society where people violate each others' rights."
-Glenn Woiceshyn-
Canadian writer
Source: Capitalism Magazine, 1998.03.07
"Count it the greatest sin to prefer life to honor, and for the sake of living to lose what makes life worth having."
-Juvenal-
[Decimus Junius Juvenalis] (c.55-c.128 AD) Roman satirical poet
"If moral behavior were simply following rules, we could program a computer to be moral."
-Samuel P. Ginder-
Rear Admiral of the US Navy, WW2
"Be fit for more than the thing you are now doing. Let every one know that you have a reserve in yourself; that you have more power than you are now using. If you are not too large for the place you occupy, you are too small for it."
-James A. Garfield-
(1831-1881) 20th President of the United States (1881), assassinated
"Perfect Freedom is reserved for the man who lives by his own work, and in that work does what he wants to do."
-R. G. Collingwood-
(1889-1943) English philosopher and historian
"Then liberty, like day,
Breaks on the soul, and by a flash from Heaven
Fires all the faculties with glorious joy."
-William Cowper-
(1731-1800) English poet, hymnodist
Source: Task (bk. V, l. 882)
"Virtue is harder to be got than a knowledge of the world; and, if lost in a young man, is seldom recovered."
-John Locke-
(1632-1704) English philosopher and political theorist
"Morality may consist solely in the courage of making a choice."
-Léon Blum-
(1872-1950) Prime Minister of France
"When you choose the lesser of two evils, always remember that it is still an evil."
-Max Lerner
(1902-1992) Russian-born American journalist and educator
Source: Actions and Passions, 1949
"It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind."
-George Bernard Shaw-
(1856-1950) Irish comic dramatist
Source: quoted in Amnesty Update, January/February 1990
"Totalitarianism begins in contempt for what you have. The second step is the notion: 'Things must change — no matter how, Anything is better than what we have.' Totalitarian rulers organize this kind of mass sentiment, and by organizing it articulate it, and by articulating it make the people somehow love it. They were told before, thou shalt not kill; and they didn’t kill. Now they are told, thou shalt kill; and although they think it’s very difficult to kill, they do it because it's now part of the code of behavior. They learn whom to kill and how to kill and how to do it together. This is the much talked about Gleichschaltung — the coordination process. You are coordinated not with the powers that be, but with your neighbor — coordinated with the majority. But instead of communicating with the other you are now glued to him. And you feel of course marvelous. Totalitarianism appeals to the very dangerous emotional needs of people who live in complete isolation and in fear of one another."
-Hannah Arendt-
(1906-1975) German-American political theorist, escaped Nazi Germany
Source: 'Hannah Arendt: From an Interview' Comments made in 1974 during an interview with the French writer Roger Errera and published in October 26, 1978 issue of The NewYork Review of Books Interview.
"If you cannot convince them, confuse them."
-Harry S. Truman-
(1884-1972), 33rd US President
"Based on the idea of natural rights, government secures those rights to the individual by strictly negative intervention, making justice costless and easy of access; and beyond that it does not go. The State, on the other hand, 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.
So far from encouraging a wholesome development of social power, it has invariably, as Madison said, turned every contingency into a resource for depleting social power and enhancing State power. As Dr. Sigmund Freud has observed, it can not even be said that the State has ever shown any disposition to suppress crime, but only to safeguard its own monopoly of crime."
-Albert Jay Nock-
Our Enemy, the State
"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
"It is precisely this clinging to victimhood as a means of demonstrating one’s virtue and advancing one’s well-being that has led us into a society in which welfare and quotas are “civil rights,” government handouts are “entitlements,” and payment to girls having babies out of wedlock are “compassionate,” while hard-working, ambitious people are “greedy,” punishment of crime is “oppression,” and an independent thinker who stands for courage and self-reliance is dismissed as an “Uncle Tom.”"
-J. Tucker Alford-
Source: Heroics, Letter to The American Spectator, P. 72, February, 1996.
"Government schools will teach children that government is wonderful."
-Neal Boortz-
(1945- ) Radio talk show host, columnist
"Tyranny, like fog in the well known poem, often creeps in silently 'on little cat feet.'"
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
"Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to."
-Theodore Dalrymple-
[Anthony Malcolm Daniels] (1949-) English writer (generally using the pen name Theodore Dalrymple), retired prison doctor and psychiatrist
Source: Our Culture, What’s Left Of It, by Jamie Glazov, Interview with Theodore Dalrymple, FrontPageMagazine.com, August 31, 2005
"The minute you read something that you can't understand, you can almost be sure it was drawn up by a lawyer."
-Will Rogers-
(1879-1935) American humorist
"The history of civilized man is the history of the incessant conflict between liberty and authority. Each victory for liberty marked a new step in the world's progress; so we can measure the advance of civilization by the amount of freedom acquired by human institutions."
-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)
"And here is the difference between the Libertarians and the Authoritarians: the latter have no confidence in liberty; they believe in compelling people to be good, assuming that people are totally depraved; the former believe in letting people be good, and maintain that humanity grows better and better as it gains more and more liberty. If Libertarians were merely to ask that liberty be tried in any one of the other fields of human expression they would meet the same opposition as their pioneer predecessors; but such is their confidence in the advantages of liberty that they demand, not that it be tried in one more instance only, but that it be universally adopted."
-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 first great struggle for liberty was in the realm of thought. The libertarians reasoned that freedom of thought would be good for mankind; it would promote knowledge, and increased knowledge would advance civilization. But the authoritarians protested that freedom of thought would be dangerous, that people would think wrong, that a few were divinely appointed to think for the people."
-Charles T. Sprading-
(1871-1959) Libertarian activist, writer
Source: Liberty and The Great Libertarians, 1913
"Freedom degenerates unless it has to struggle in its own defence."
-Lord Acton-
[John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton] (1834-1902), First Baron Acton of Aldenham
"Freedom is a new religion, the religion of our time."
-Heinrich Heine-
(1797-1856) German poet, journalist, essayist, literary critic
"I wish men to be free, as much from mobs as kings,—from you as me."
-Lord Byron-
[George Gordon Noel Byron] (1788-1824), The 6th Baron Byron of Rochdale
"The persecuting spirit has its origin morally in the disposition of man to domineer over his fellow creatures; intellectually, in the assumption that one's own opinions are infallibly correct."
-John Fiske-
(1842-1901) American philosopher, historian
"It is not the disease, but the physician; it is the pernicious hand of government alone which can reduce a whole people to despair."
-Junius-
the pseudonym of a writer who contributed a series of letters to the London Public Advertiser, from January 21, 1769 to January 21, 1772
"All truth is safe, and nothing else is safe; and he who keeps back the truth or withholds it from men, from motives of expediency, is either a coward, or a criminal, or both."
-Max Muller-
(1823-1900) German-born philologist, Orientalist
"People take different roads seeking fulfillment & happiness. Just because they're not on your road doesn't mean they've gotten lost."
-H. Jackson Brown, Jr.-
(1940-) American author
"Everyone may seek his own happiness in the way that seems good to himself, provided that he infringe not such freedom of others to strive after a similar end as is consistent with the freedom of all according to a possible general law."
-Immanuel Kant-
(1724-1804) German philosopher
"There is one thing in the world more wicked than the desire to command, and that is the will to obey."
-William Kingdon Clifford-
(1845-1879) English mathematician, philosopher
"When you stretch the truth, watch out for the snapback."
-Bill Copeland-
(1946-2010) American poet, writer and historian
"It is always the best policy to tell the truth, unless, of course, you are an exceptionally good liar."
-Jerome K. Jerome-
(1859-1927) English writer, humorist
"Respect for the truth is an acquired taste."
-Mark Van Doren-
(1894-1972) Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, professor, and critic
Source: Liberal Education, 1943
"Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions that differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions."
-Albert Einstein-
(1879-1955) Physicist and Professor, Nobel Prize 1921
"If we were all given by magic the power to read each other's thoughts, I suppose the first effect would be to dissolve all friendships."
-Bertrand Russell-
[Bertrand Arthur William Russell] (1872-1970) Philosopher, educator
"There's one way to find out if a man is honest - ask him. If he says, 'Yes,' you know he is a crook."
-Groucho Marx-
(1890-1977) American comedian and film and television star
"He who is not sure of his memory, should not undertake the trade of lying."
-Michel de Montaigne-
[Michel Eyquem De Montaigne] (1532-1592) French Renaissance scholar, philosopher, writer
"People who are brutally honest get more satisfaction out of the brutality than out of the honesty."
-Richard J. Needham-
(1912-1996) Canadian humour columnist
"Today I bent the truth to be kind, and I have no regret, for I am far surer of what is kind than I am of what is true."
-Robert Brault-
"The truth needs so little rehearsal."
-Barbara Kingsolver-
(1955-) American novelist, essayist and poet
Source: Animal Dreams
"It takes two to lie. One to lie and one to listen."
-Homer Simpson-
Source: from the television show The Simpsons
"I don't mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy."
-Samuel Butler-
(1835-1902) Victorian-era English author
Source: Note-Books, 1912
"The truth brings with it a great measure of absolution, always."
-R. D. Laing-
[Ronald David Laing] (1927 -1989) Scottish psychiatrist
"Honesty is the first chapter of the book of wisdom."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"He is the freeman whom the truth makes free,
And all are slaves besides."
-William Cowper-
(1731-1800) English poet, hymnodist
"No man has a good enough memory to make a successful liar."
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
"The truth is more important than the facts."
-Frank Lloyd Wright-
(1867-1959) American architect, designer, writer, and educator
"Honesty is never seen sitting astride the fence."
-Lemuel K. Washburn-
(1846-1927) American Freethought writer
Source: Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911
"The Constitution is a delusion and a snare if the weakest and humblest man in the land cannot be defended in his right to speak and his right to think as much as the strongest in the land."
-Clarence S. Darrow-
(1857-1938)
Source: The Communist Trial, People v. Lloyd, 1920
"The Bill of Rights is a born rebel. It reeks with sedition. In every clause it shakes its fist in the face of constituted authority... It is the one guarantee of human freedom to the American people."
-Frank I. Cobb-
(1869-1923) American Journalist
Source: LaFollette’s Magazine, January 1920
"Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people, being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties, and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in the various parts of the country, and among the different orders of people, it shall be the duty of legislators and magistrates... to cherish the interest of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: John Adams, Thoughts on Government, 1776
"Free trade consists simply in letting people buy and sell as they want to buy and sell. It is protection that requires force, for it consists in preventing people from doing what they want to do. Protective tariffs are as much applications of force as are blockading squadrons, and their object is the same — to prevent trade. The difference between the two is that blockading squadrons are a means whereby nations seek to prevent their enemies from trading; protective tariffs are a means whereby nations attempt to prevent their own people from trading. What protection teaches us, is to do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war."
-Henry George-
"I have never been hurt by anything I didn't say."
-Calvin Coolidge-
(1872-1933) 30th US President
"Without free speech no search for truth is possible... no discovery of truth is useful. Better a thousand fold abuse of free speech than denial of free speech. The abuse dies in a day, but the denial slays the life of the people."
-Charles Bradlaugh-
(1833-1891) English political activist and atheist, founded the National Secular Society in 1866
Source: Speech, 1890
"The liberty of the press would be an empty sound, and no man would venture to write on any subject, however pure his purpose, without an attorney at one elbow and a counsel at the other. From minds thus subdued by the fear of punishment, there could issue no works of genius to expand the empire of human reason."
-Thomas Erskine-
(1750-1823) Lord Chancellor of England
Source: Trial of John Stockdale, 9 December 1789
"If you admit that to silence your opponent by force is to win an intellectual argument, then you admit the right to silence people by force."
-Hans Eysenck-
(1916-1997) German-born psychologist, spent professional career in Great Britain
"You thus have no rights at all over our freedom of thought, you princes; no jurisdiction over that which is true or false; no right to determine the objects of our inquiry or to set limits to it; no right to hinder us from communicating the results, whether they be true or false, to whomever or however we wish."
-Johann Gottlieb Fichte-
(1762-1814) German philosopher, psychologist, considered the father of German nationalism
"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)
"Freedom of speech and freedom of action [is meaningless] without freedom to think. And there is no freedom of thought without doubt."
-Bergan Evans-
(1904-1978)
Source: The Natural History of Nonsense, 1946
"Censorship is advertising paid by the government."
-Federico Fellini-
(1920-1993) Italian film director and screenwriter
"Complete and accurate surveillance as a means of control is probably a practical impossibility. What is much more likely is a loss of privacy and constant inconvenience as the wrong people gain access to information, as one wastes time convincing the inquisitors that one is in fact innocent, or as one struggles to untangle the errors of the errant machine."
-Victor Ferkiss-
Source: Technological Man: The Myth and the Reality, 1969
"Society can exist only on the basis that there is some amount of polished lying and that no one says exactly what he thinks."
-Lin Yutang-
(1895-1976) Chinese writer, translator, linguist, philosopher and inventor
"Truth is the most valuable thing we have, so I try to conserve it."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910) American author and humorist
"I am different from Washington; I have a higher, grander standard of principle. Washington could not lie. I can lie, but I won't."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910) American author and humorist
"Truth always originates in a minority of one, and every custom begins as a broken precedent."
-Nancy Astor-
(1879-1964) Member of Parliament, United Kingdom
"Such being the happiness of the times, that you may think as you wish, and speak as you think.
[Lat., Rara temporum felicitate, ubi sentire quae velis, et quae sentias dicere licet.]"
-Cornelius Tacitus-
(55-117 A.D.) Senator and historian of the Roman Empire
"Under the surface of this global civilization, a great and secret war is taking place. The two opponents hold different conceptions of Reality. On one side, those who claim that humans operate purely on the basis of stimulus-response, like machines; on the other side, those who believe there is a gigantic thing called freedom. Phase One of the war is already over. The stimulus-response people have won. In Phase Two, people are waking up to the far-reaching and devastating consequences of the Pavlovian program."
-Jon Rappoport-
American author, investigative reporter, writer
Source: The Underground
"Does it not seem a vast waste of valuable human material that the pioneers of thought, those who by their genius dare to clear unknown paths in the arts and sciences and in government, should have to conform to the dictates of that non-creative, slow-moving mass, the majority? An appeal to the majority is a resort to force and not an appeal to intelligence; the majority is always ignorant, and by increasing the majority we multiply ignorance. The majority is incapable of initiative, its attitude being one of opposition toward everything that is new. If it had been left to the majority, the world would never have had the steamboat, the railroad, the telegraph, or any of the conveniences of modern life."
-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)
"Collective judgment of new ideas is so often wrong that it is arguable that progress depends on individuals being free to back their own judgment despite collective disapproval."
-Sir William Arthur Lewis-
(1915-1991) Saint Lucian economist, Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics (1979)
"The question about progress has become the question whether we can discover any way of submitting to the worldwide paternalism of a technocracy without losing all personal privacy and independence. Is there any possibility of getting the super Welfare State's honey and avoiding the sting?"
-C. S. Lewis-
(1898-1963), British novelist
Source: Willing Slaves of the Welfare State, first published in The Observer on July 20, 1958
"Depressed? Of course we're all depressed. We've been so quickly, violently, and irreconcilably plucked from nature, from physical labor, from kinship and village mentality, from every natural and primordial anti-depressant. The further society 'progresses,' the grander the scale of imbalance. Just as fluoride is put in water to prevent dental caries, we'll soon find government mandating Prozac in our water to prevent mental caries."
-M. Robin D'Antan-
"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."
-Henry Grady Weaver-
(1889-1949) American author, General Motors marketing executive who made the cover of Time in 1938
"You're obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That's the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world."
-Octave Mirbeau-
(1848-1917) French journalist, art critic, pamphleteer, novelist, and playwright
Source: Torture Garden, "The Mission," Chapter 8 (1899 - Le Jardin des supplices)
"Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things."
-Russell Baker-
(1925- ) American Pulitzer Prize-winning writer
"The illusion of freedom [in America] will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater."
-Frank Zappa-
(1940-1993) American Musician
"The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain."
-Colin Wilson-
(1931-2013) English writer, philosopher and novelist
"It may be safety received as an axiom in our political system, that the State government…afford security…against the national authority."
-Alexander Hamilton-
"The State governments, by their original constitutions, are invested with complete sovereignty."
-Alexander Hamilton-
"Do they [the anti-Federalists] require that, in the establishment of the Constitution, the States should be regarded as distinct and independent sovereigns? They are so regarded by the Constitution proposed."
-James Madison-
"But it will not follow from this doctrine that acts of the larger society [Federal] which are not pursuant to its constitutional powers, but which are invasions of the residuary authorities of the smaller societies [States], will become the supreme law of the land. These will be merely acts of usurpation and will deserve to be treated as such.
It will not, I presume, have escaped observation, that it expressly confines this supremacy to laws made pursuant to the Constitution.
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."
-Alexander Hamilton-
"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 writer, theorist, philosopher, 19th century individualist, member of the Parliament of the U.K.
"The test for whether one is living in a police state is that those who are charged with enforcing the law are allowed to break the laws with impunity."
-Jon Roland-
(1944-) founder of the Constitution Society
"The scapegoat has always had the mysterious power of unleashing man's ferocious pleasure in torturing, corrupting, and befouling."
-Francois Mauriac-
(1885-1970) French novelist, dramatist, critic, poet, journalist, member of the Académie française, Nobel Prize in Literature (1952)
Source: Second Thoughts, 1961
"To the frustrated, freedom from responsibility is more attractive than freedom from restraint. They are eager to barter their independence for relief from the burdens of willing, deciding and being responsible for inevitable failure. They willingly abdicate the directing of their lives to those who want to plan, command and shoulder all responsibility."
-Eric Hoffer-
(1902-1983) American author, philosopher, awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
"Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it."
-Germaine Greer-
(1939- ) Australian feminist
"The skeptic does not mean him who doubts, but him who investigates or researches, as opposed to him who asserts and thinks he has found."
-Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo-
(1864-1936) Spanish Basque essayist, novelist, poet, playwright, philosopher, professor
Source: Essays and Soliloquies, 1924
"Hypocrisy is a fashionable vice, and all fashionable vices pass for virtue."
-Molière-
[Jean-Baptiste Poquelin] (1622-1673) French playwright
"A true party-man hates and despises candour."
-Adam Smith-
(1723-1790) Scottish philosopher and economist
Source: The Theory of Moral Sentiments par. III.I.85
"I detest that man, who hides one thing in the depths of his heart, and speaks forth another."
-Homer-
(sometime between 1050-850 BC) legendary Greek epic poet
"Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself."
-Justice Potter Stewart-
(1915-1985), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
"Those wearing Tolerance for a label
Call other views intolerable."
-Phyllis McGinley-
(1905-1978)
Source: 1954
"What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man! Who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment & death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment ... inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: letter to Jean Nicholas Demeunier, January 24, 1786
"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) American abolitionist, advocate for Native Americans, orator, lawyer
Source: Liberty and the Great Libertarians (C. Spradling)
Like, say, flags. Or anthems. Or governments ostensibly instituted expressly to protect liberties...
"What you do speaks so loud I cannot hear what you say."
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
Physician, heal thyself...
"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) American libertarian author, editor, educational theorist, Georgist, social critic
"The house of delusions is cheap to build but drafty to live in, and ready at any instant to fall."
-A. E. Housman-
[Alfred Edward Housman] (1859-1936) British writer
Source: October 3, 1892 at University College, London
"Laws: We know what they are, and what they are worth! They are spider webs for the rich and mighty, steel chains for the poor and weak, fishing nets in the hands of the government."
-Pierre-Joseph Proudhon-
(1809-1865) French mutualist political philosopher
"What are the moral convictions most fondly held by barbarous and semi-barbarous people? They are the convictions that authority is the soundest basis of belief; that merit attaches to readiness to believe; that the doubting disposition is a bad one, and skepticism is a sin."
-Thomas Henry Huxley-
(1825-1895) English biologist
Source: On The Advisableness of Improving Natural Knowledge,1866
"Party is known to encourage prejudice, and to lead men astray in the judgment of character. Thus it is we see one half the nation extolling those that the other half condemns, and condemning those that the other half extols. Both cannot be right, and as passions, interests and prejudices are all enlisted on such occasions, it would be nearer the truth to say that both are wrong. Party is an instrument of error, by pledging men to support its policy, instead of supporting the policy of the state. Thus we see party measures almost always in extremes, the resistance of opponents inducing the leaders to ask for more than is necessary. Party leads to vicious, corrupt and unprofitable legislation, for the sole purpose of defeating party. Thus have we seen those territorial divisions and regulations which ought to be permanent, as well as other useful laws, altered, for no other end than to influence an election. Party, has been a means of entirely destroying that local independence, which elsewhere has given rise to a representation that acts solely for the nation, and which, under other systems is called the country party, every legislator being virtually pledged to support one of two opinions; or, if a shade of opinion between them, a shade that is equally fettered, though the truth be with neither."
-The American Democrat-
"All powers not given are retained."
-George Nicholas-
"Any law not warranted by the Constitution is a bare-faced usurpation."
-James Iredell-
"The State retains all the Rights of Sovereignty which it has not expressly parted with to the Congress of the United States."
-Samuel Adams-
"Every extension of the administrative authority beyond its just constitutional limits, is absolutely an act of usurpation."
-St. George Tucker-
"In the general Constitution, its powers are enumerated"
-Edmund Randolph-
"There is always more goodness in the world than there appears to be, because goodness is of its very nature modest and retiring."
-Evelyn Beatrice Hall-
On the other hand, the most effective evil pulls off the impression...
"Although the legal and ethical definitions of right are the antithesis of each other, most writers use them as synonyms. They confuse power with goodness, and mistake law for justice."
-Charles T. Sprading-
(1871-1959) Libertarian activist, writer
Source: Freedom and its Fundamentals
"Alas, how many have been persecuted for the wrong of having been right?"
-Jean-Baptiste Say-
(1767-1832) French economist, businessman
Source: A Treatise on Political Economy, 1803
"Video meliora, proboque;
Deteriora sequor."
(I see the better way, and approve it;
I follow the worse.)
-Ovid-
[Publius Ovidius Naso ] (43 BC- AD 18) Roman poet during the reign of Augustus
"The worst of all deceptions is self-deception."
-Plato-
(429-347 BC) Greek philosopher
"We have met the enemy and he is us."
-Walt Kelly-
(1913- 1973) Comic strip artist for 'Pogo'
Source: Pogo: We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us, 1972
"Every nation gets the government it deserves."
-Joseph de Maistre-
(1753-1821) Savoyard lawyer, diplomat, writer, and philosopher
Source: Correspondance diplomatique, tome 2. Paris : Michel Lévy frères libraires éditeurs, 1860, p.196.
"To pretend to know when you do not know is a disease."
-Lao-Tzu-
[Li Erh] (570-490 BC) 'Old Sage', Father of Taoism
"[T]here seems to have been an actual decline in rational thinking. The United States had become a place where entertainers and professional athletes were mistaken for people of importance. They were idolized and treated as leaders; their opinions were sought on everything and they took themselves just as seriously—after all, if an athlete is paid a million or more a year, he knows he is important ... so his opinions of foreign affairs and domestic policies must be important, too, even though he proves himself to be ignorant and subliterate every time he opens his mouth."
-Robert A. Heinlein-
(1907-1988) American writer
Source: To Sail Beyond the Sunset, 1987
"All the public business in Congress now connects itself with intrigues, and there is great danger that the whole government will degenerate into a struggle of cabals."
-John Quincy Adams-
(1767-1848) 6th US President
Source: Journal entry (January 1819)
Oh, John. If you only knew...
"Can any of you seriously say the Bill of Rights could get through Congress today? It wouldn't even get out of committee."
-F. Lee Bailey-
famous trial attorney
Source: Newsweek, 17 April 1967
"Among those who dislike oppression are many who like to oppress."
-Napoleon Bonaparte-
(1769-1821) French emperor
Source: Political Aphorisms (1848)
"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
"Big Brother in the form of an increasingly powerful government and in an increasingly powerful private sector will pile the records high with reasons why privacy should give way to national security, to law and order, to efficiency of operation, to scientific advancement and the like."
-Justice William O. Douglas-
(1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Points of Rebellion, 1969
"Judges ... rule on the basis of law, not public opinion, and they should be totally indifferent to pressures of the times."
-Justice Warren E. Burger-
(1907-1995) Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1969-1986)
Source: Christian Science Monitor, 11 February 1987
"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
"Be not intimidated... nor suffer yourselves to be wheedled out of your liberties by any pretense of politeness, delicacy, or decency. These, as they are often used, are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery and cowardice."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, 1765
"Government of the self was the original basis for republican government, reflecting the view that civil society was much more than politics. Society was made up of men and women who gave order to their lives by entering into associations on a voluntary basis, quite apart from government, for all the various reasons of fellowship, philanthrophy,
faith and commerce."
-Hans L. Eicholz-
Senior Fellow at the Liberty Fund
"The Democrats and Republicans stand at two extremes, characterized by which parts of our lives they emphasize their desire to control. Libertarians reject both extremes in favor of the government leaving control of your life to you."
-Michael Badnarik-
(1954- ) American software engineer, political figure, and former radio talk show host
"What occurs to me in reading their book is that the new American approach to social control is so much more sophisticated and pervasive that it really deserves a new name. It isn't just propaganda any more, it's 'prop-agenda'. It's not so much the control of what we think, but the control of what we think about. When our governments want to sell us a course of action, they do it by making sure it's the only thing on the agenda, the only thing everyone's talking about. And they pre-load the ensuing discussion with highly selected images, devious and prejudicial language, dubious linkages, weak or false 'intelligence' and selected 'leaks'. "
-Brian Eno-
(1948- ) English musician, composer, record producer, singer, and visual artist
Source: on Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber's "Weapons of Mass Deception"
"The word 'politics' is derived from the word 'poly', meaning 'many', and the word 'ticks', meaning 'blood sucking parasites.'"
-Larry Hardiman-
"If a million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing."
-Anatole France-
[Jacques Anatole Thibault] (1844-1924)
"You have all the characteristics of a popular politician: a horrible voice, bad breeding, and a vulgar manner."
-Aristophanes-
(450-385 BC) Greek comedy writer
Source: Knights, 424 B.C.
"What orators lack in depth they make up for in length."
-Charles-Louis de Secondat-
(1689-1755) Baron de Montesquieu
"Politics is made up largely of irrelevancies."
-Dalton Camp-
"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-
"A free society cannot be the substitution of a ‘new order’ for the old order; it is the extension of spheres of free action until they make up most of social life."
-Paul Goodman-
"Do not seek to find hope among your leaders. They are the repositories of poison. Their interest in you extends only so far as their ability to control you. For you, they seek duty and obedience, and they will ply you with the language of stirring faith. They seek followers, and woe to those who question, or voice challenge. Civilization after civilization, it is the same. The world falls to tyranny with a whisper. The frightened are ever keen to bow to a perceived necessity, in the belief that necessity forces conformity, and conformity a certain stability. In a world shaped into conformity, dissidents stand out, are easily branded and dealt with. There is no multitude of perspectives, no dialogue. The victim assumes the face of the tyrant, self-righteous and intransigent, and wars breed like vermin. And people die."
-Steven Erikson-
"Socialism is rape, Capitalism is consensual sex."
-Ben Shapiro-
"I have been one of those who have carried the fight for complete freedom of information in the United Nations. And while accepting the fact that some of our press, our radio commentators, our prominent citizens and our movies may at times be blamed legitimately for things they have said and done, still I feel that the fundamental right of freedom of thought and expression is essential. If you curtail what the other fellow says and does, you curtail what you yourself may say and do. In our country we must trust the people to hear and see both the good and the bad and to choose the good."
-Eleanor Roosevelt-
"As long as the law may be diverted from its true purpose -- that it may violate property instead of protecting it -- then everyone will want to participate in making the law, either to protect himself against plunder or to use it for plunder. Political questions will always be prejudicial, dominant, and all-absorbing. There will be fighting to gain access to the legislature as well as fighting within it."
-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)
"Any one of the strange laws we suffer is a compromise between a fad and a vested interest."
-Gilbert Keith Chesterton-
(1874-1936) British essayist, critic, poet, and novelist
Source: Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox, 1933
"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) American science fiction writer
Source: Dune, 1965
"Causes that live by politics, die by politics."
-Steven F. Hayward-
American author, political commentator, and policy scholar
Source: Climate Change Has Run Its Course, Wall Street Journal, June 4, 2018
"While it would be silly and ungracious to insist that intelligent deliberation on public issues is nowhere found in modern communities, it would be naive to imagine that wise deliberation can survive the constant pounding from self-interested political behavior. Benevolence in public institutions has a short half-life no matter how noble its original intentions.'
'Once [a] program is in place, its day-to-day administration falls into the hands of a professional cadre besieged by powerful interest groups whose influence grows as public interest wanes. . . . A slow process of disintegration and reconfiguration sets in, transforming and expanding a program from within."
-Richard A. Epstein'
(1943-) Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law at the New York University School of Law
Source: Principles for a Free Society
"I refuse to apologize for my ability --
I refuse to apologize for my success --
I refuse to apologize for my money.
If this is evil, make the most of it."
-Ayn Rand-
[Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum] (1905-1982) Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter
Source: Atlas Shrugged
"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
"Coercion by government, the main fear of our founding fathers, is now its most common attribute."
-Philip K. Howard-
New York attorney
Source: The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America (New York: Random House 1994)
"To do evil that good may come of it is for bunglers in politics as well as morals."
-William Penn-
(1644-1718)
"From the saintly and single-minded idealist to the fanatic is often but a step."
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
"I know that most men -- not only those considered clever, but even those who are very clever and capable of understanding most difficult scientific, mathematical, or philosophic, problems -- can seldom discern even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as obliges them to admit the falsity of conclusions they have formed, perhaps with much difficulty -- conclusions of which they are proud, which they have taught to others, and on which they have built their lives."
-Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi-
(1828-1910) Russian writer
Source: What is Art? (1896)
"In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying."
-Adolf Hitler-
(1889-1945) German Nazi Dictator
1935
Source: Mein Kampf, p. 197(?) 14th Edition
"If the author of the Declaration of Independence were to utter such a sentiment today, the Post Office Department could exclude him from the mail, grand juries could indict him for sedition and criminal syndicalism, legislative committees could seize his private papers ... and United States Senators would be clamoring for his deportation that he ... should be sent back to live with the rest of the terrorists."
-Frank I. Cobb-
(1869-1923) American Journalist
Source: New York World
"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)
"If politicians don't respect the law, why should citizens respect politicians?"
-Debra Saunders-
American newspaper columnist
"There are two methods, or means, and only two, whereby man's needs and desires can be satisfied. One is the production and exchange of wealth; this is the economic means. The other is the uncompensated appropriation of wealth produced by others; this is the political means."
-Albert Jay Nock-
(1870-1945) American libertarian author, editor, educational theorist, Georgist, social critic
"Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance."
-Hannah Arendt-
"Money is a singular thing. It ranks with love as man's greatest source of joy. And with death as his greatest source of anxiety. Over all history it has oppressed nearly all people in one of two ways: either it has been abundant and very unreliable, or reliable and very scarce."
-John Kenneth Galbraith-
"Protection of political speech advanced two important democratic goals: 1) an informed citizenry that would be capable of making educated decisions on matters of public concern, and 2) a free and open marketplace of ideas wherein the truth would ultimately prevail… Only through a vigorous and spirited public debate could citizens be educated about the actions of their government and react responsibly."
-Craig R. Smith-
Source: All Speech Is Created Equal, 1986
"Error of opinion may be tolerated when reason is left free to combat it."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: First Inaugural Address, 4 March 1801
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."
-George Orwell-
[Eric Arthur Blair] (1903-1950) British author
"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'
"If somebody smokes a joint, we're gonna go in and bust them? We're gonna raid houses in case somebody has a banned substance? Confiscate their houses? My God, if people don't see that as an abuse of force, of too much government, then we're just not communicating."
-Charles Koch-
(1935-) American businessman and philanthropist
Source: USA TODAY April 24, 2015
"Marijuana in its natural form is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man. By any measure of rational analysis marijuana can be safely used within a supervised routine of medical care. ... It would be unreasonable, arbitrary and capricious for DEA to continue to stand between those sufferers and the benefits of this substance in light of the evidence in this record."
-Judge Francis L. Young-
DEA Chief Administrative Law
Source: Ruling in the matter of Marijuana Rescheduling Petition, September 6, 1988
"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
"Censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion... In the long run it will create a generation incapable of appreciating the difference between independence of thought and subservience."
-Henry Steele Commager-
(1902-1998) Historian and author
Source: Freedom, Loyalty and Dissent, 1954
"To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind for it."
-Michel De Montaigne-
[Michel Eyquem De Montaigne] (1532-1592) French Renaissance scholar, philosopher, writer
Source: Essays
"If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it? The recent practice of propaganda has proved that it is possible, at least up to a certain point and within certain limits."
-Edward L. Bernays-
(1891-1995) Austrian-American pioneer in the field of public relations and propaganda, "the father of public relations," nephew of Sigmund Freud
Source: in his book “Propaganda” (1928)
"I shall have liberty to think for myself without molesting others or being molested myself."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: letter to his brother-in-law, Richard Cranch, August 29, 1756, explaining how his independent opinions would create much difficulty in the ministry, in Edwin S Gaustad, Faith of Our Fathers: Religion and the New Nation (1987) p. 88, quoted from Ed and Michael Buckner, "Quotations that Support the Separation of State and Church"
"The political spirit is the great force in throwing the love of truth and accurate reasoning into a secondary place."
-John Viscount Morley-
(1838-1923), of Blackburn
Source: On Compromise, 1874
"If a law to donate aid to any farmer or cattleman who has had poor crops or lost his cattle comes within the meaning of the phrase “to provide for the General Welfare of the United States,” why should not similar gifts be made to grocers, shopkeepers, miners, and other businessmen who have made losses through financial depression, or to wage earners out of employment? Why is not their property equally within the purview of the General Welfare?"
-Charles Warren-
(1868-1954) American lawyer, legal scholar, awarded Pulitzer Prize in 1923
Source: Congress As Santa Clause, 1932
"A liberal's like to be lax
When recommending a tax.
With a glut in his heart
And his brain low a quart,
He will give you the shirts off our backs."
-F. R. Duplantier-
American writer, editor
Source: Politickles: Limericks Lampooning the Lunatic Left, January 1, 2010
"If one understands that Socialism is not a 'share the wealth' program but is in reality a method to consolidate and control the wealth, then the seeming paradox of super rich men promoting Socialism becomes no paradox at all. Instead it becomes logical, even the perfect tool of power-seeking megalomaniacs. Communism, or more accurately Socialism, is not a movement of the down-trodden masses but of the economic elite."
-Gary Allen-
(1936-86) American journalist
"Free speech is about as good a cause as the world has ever known. But it…gets shoved aside in favor of things which at a given moment more vital…everybody favors free speech in the slack moments when no axes are being ground."
-Heywood Broun-
(1888-1939) American journalist, founded the American Newspaper Guild
Source: New York World, 23 October 1926
"All these people talk so eloquently about getting back to good old-fashioned values…and I say let’s get back to the good old-fashioned First Amendment of the good old-fashioned Constitution of the United States – and to hell with the censors! Give me knowledge or give me death!"
-Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.-
(1922-2007) American author
"As so often before, liberty has been wounded in the house of its friends. Liberty in the wild and freakish hands of fanatics has once more, as frequently in the past, proved the effective helpmate of autocracy and the twin-brother of tyranny."
-Otto Hermann Kahn-
(1867-1934) German-born American investment banker, collector, philanthropist
"In the US, voters cast ballots for individual candidates who are not bound to any party program except rhetorically, and not always then. Some Republicans are more liberal than some Democrats, some libertarians are more radical than some socialists, and many local candidates run without any party identification. No American citizen can vote intelligently without knowledge of the ideas, political background, and commitments of each individual candidate."
-Ben H. Bagdikian-
(1920- ) Armenian-born author, dean emeritus of the University of California at Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, former editor at the Washington Post
Source: 1982
"I do not subscribe to the doctrine that the people are the slaves and property of their government. I believe that government is for the use of the people, and not the people for the use of the government."
-Gerrit Smith-
(1797-1874)
Source: Speech, House of Representatives, 27 June 1854
"I am an adherent of the ideal of democracy, although I know well the weaknesses of the democratic form of government. Social equality and economic protection of the individual have always seemed to me the important communal aims of the state. Although I am a typical loner in daily life, my consciousness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice keeps me from feeling isolated."
-Albert Einstein-
"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)
"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
"Were I to define the British constitution, therefore, I should say, it is a limited monarchy, or a mixture of the three forms of government commonly known in the schools, reserving as much of the monarchical splendor, the aristocratical independency, and the democratical freedom, as are necessary that each of these powers may have a control, both in legislation and execution, over the other two, for the preservation of the subject's liberty."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: Boston Gazette, 27 Jan 1766, Adams Papers, V I, pp 167-168
"If a majority are capable of preferring their own private interest, or that of their families, counties, and party, to that of the nation collectively, some provision must be made in the constitution, in favor of justice, to compel all to respect the common right, the public good, the universal law, in preference to all private and partial considerations... And that the desires of the majority of the people are often for injustice and inhumanity against the minority, is demonstrated by every page of history... To remedy the dangers attendant upon the arbitrary use of power, checks, however multiplied, will scarcely avail without an explicit admission some limitation of the right of the majority to exercise sovereign authority over the individual citizen... In popular governments [democracies], minorities [individuals] constantly run much greater risk of suffering from arbitrary power than in absolute monarchies..."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: "On Government", (1778)
"It is the greatest inequality to try to make unequal things equal."
-Aristotle-
(384-322 BC) Greek philosopher
"The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."
-Marcus Aurelius-
[Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus] (121-180) Roman emperor (161-180)
"I can’t think of anything that would do more toward putting us back on the road to liberty and personal responsibility than for the average American, and for the news media, to come to the understanding that we are not a democracy, nor were we supposed to be."
-Neal Boortz-
(1945- ) Radio talk show host, columnist
"In a free society, standards of public morality can be measured only by whether physical coercion -- violence against persons or property -- occurs. There is no right not to be offended by words, actions or symbols."
-Richard E. Sincere, Jr.-
"Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
(1805-1859) French historian
Equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome.
"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-
(1937-2013) American syndicated columnist
Source: The Orlando Sentinel, 11/03/98
"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 death."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
"Democracy...is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike."
-Plato-
(429-347 BC) Greek philosopher
Source: The Republic, ca. 390 B.C.
"American democracy must be a failure because it places the supreme authority in the hands of the poorest and most ignorant part of the society."
-Thomas Babington Macaulay-
(1800-1859) [Lord Macaulay] 1st Baron Macaulay, British historian
"I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty, or civilization, or both."
-Thomas Babington Macaulay-
(1800-1859) [Lord Macaulay] 1st Baron Macaulay, British historian
"Did I say 'republic?' By God, yes, I said 'republic!' Long live the glorious republic of the United States of America. Damn democracy. It is a fraudulent term used, often by ignorant persons but no less often by intellectual fakers, to describe an infamous mixture of socialism, graft, confiscation of property and denial of personal rights to individuals whose virtuous principles make them offensive."
-Westbrook Pegler-
(1894-1969) American journalist, writer
Source: New York Journal American of January 25th and 26th, 1951, under the titles "Upholds Republic of U.S. Against Phony Democracy" and "Democracy in the U.S. Branded Meaningless."
"Socialism is but Catholicism addressing itself not to the soul but to the sense of men... [Both implore you to] accept authority, accept the force which it employs, resign yourself to all-powerful managers, give up the free choice and the free act... They both seek to sacrifice man."
-Auberon Herbert-
(1838-1906) English writer, theorist, philosopher, 19th century individualist, member of the Parliament of the U.K.
"If you establish a democracy, you must in due time reap the fruits of a democracy. You will in due season have great impatience of the public burdens, combined in due season with great increase of the public expenditure. You will in due season have wars entered into from passion and not from reason; and you will in due season submit to peace ignominiously sought and ignominiously obtained, which will diminish your authority and perhaps endanger your independence. You will in due season find your property is less valueable, and your freedom less complete."
-Benjamin Disraeli-
(1804-1881) Prime Minister of England, British statesman, novelist
Source: Speech in the House of Commons, March 31, 1850
"The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is non-interference with their own particular ways of being happy, provided those ways do not assume to interfere by violence with ours."
-William James-
(1842-1910) American psychologist, philosopher, medical doctor, author, 'The father of modern Psychology'
Source: William James. Talks to Students. 1899 "What Makes a Life Significant?"
"Liberty is the most jealous and exacting mistress that can beguile the brain and soul of man. From him who will not give her all, she will have nothing. She knows that his pretended love serves but to betray. But when once the fierce heat of her quenchless, lustrous eyes have burned into the victim's heart, he will know no other smile but hers."
-Clarence S. Darrow-
(1857-1938)
1920
"Liberty exists in proportion to wholesome restraint; the more restraint on others to keep off from us, the more liberty we have."
-Daniel Webster-
(1782-1852) US Senator
1847
"The resolution [the famous Virginia Resolutions of 1798] supposes that dangerous powers, not delegated, may not only be usurped and executed by the other departments, but that the judicial department also may exercise or sanction dangerous powers beyond the grant of the Constitution; and, consequently, that the ultimate right of the parties to the Constitution [i.e., the states], to judge whether the compact has been dangerously violated, must extend to violations by one delegated authority, as well as by another; by the judiciary, as well as by the executive, or the legislature.
However true, therefore, it may be, that the judicial department, is, in all questions submitted to it by the forms of the Constitution, to decide in the last resort, this resort must necessarily be deemed the last in relation to the authorities of the other departments of the government; not in relation to the rights of the parties to the constitutional compact, from which the judicial as well as the other departments hold their delegated trusts."
-James Madison-
"I believe that all other political states are in fact variations or outgrowths of a basic state of anarchy; after all, when you mention the idea of anarchy to most people they will tell you what a bad idea it is because the biggest gang would just take over. Which is pretty much how I see contemporary society. We live in a badly developed anarchist situation in which the biggest gang has taken over and have declared that it is not an anarchist situation -- that it is a capitalist or a communist situation. But I tend to think that anarchy is the most natural form of politics for a human being to actually practice."
-Alan Moore-
"We do not now differ in our judgment concerning the controversies of past generations, and fifty years hence our children will not be divided in their opinions concerning our controversies. They will surely bless their fathers and their fathers' God that the Union was preserved, that slavery was overthrown, and that both races were made equal before the law. We may hasten or we may retard, but we can not prevent, the final reconciliation. Is it not possible for us now to make a truce with time by anticipating and accepting its inevitable verdict? Enterprises of the highest importance to our moral and material well-being unite us and offer ample employment of our best powers. Let all our people, leaving behind them the battlefields of dead issues, move forward and in their strength of liberty and the restored Union win the grander victories of peace."
-James A. Garfield-
"Envy is the basis of Democracy."
-Bertrand Russell-
[Bertrand Arthur William Russell] (1872-1970) Philosopher, educator
Source: The Conquest of Happiness, VI, 1930
"There are all kinds of devices invented for the protection and preservation of countries: defensive barriers, forts, trenches, and the like... But prudent minds have as a natural gift one safeguard which is the common possession of all, and this applies especially to the dealings of democracies. What is this safeguard? Skepticism. This you must preserve. This you must retain. If you can keep this, you need fear no harm."
-Demosthenes-
(384 B.C.-322 B.C.)
Source: Oration
"When it becomes dominated by a collectivist creed, democracy will inevitably destroy itself."
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
Source: The Road to Serfdom, pg 73 (1944)
"[T]he main evil of the present democratic institutions of the united states does not raise, as is often asserted in Europe, 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
"Democracy does not guarantee equality of conditions -- it only guarantees equality of opportunity."
-Irving Kristol-
(1920-2009) American columnist, journalist, and writer
"Participation is an instrument of conquest because it encourages people to give their consent to being governed. ... Deeply embedded in people's sense of fair play is the principle that those who play the game must accept the outcome. Those who participate in politics are similarly committed, even if they are consistently on the losing side. Why do politicians plead with everyone to get out and vote? Because voting is the simplest and easiest form of participation by masses of people. Even though it is minimal participation, it is sufficient to commit all voters to being governed, regardless of who wins."
-Theodore Lowi-
Source: INCOMPLETE CONQUEST, (1981), pp. 25-26
"If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
-John Stuart Mill-
(1806-1873) English philosopher and economist
Source: On Liberty, 1859
"Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power. Consequently those who live under the dominion of Puritanism become exceedingly desirous of power. Now love of power does far more harm than love of drink or any of the other vices against which Puritans protest. Of course, in virtuous people love of power camouflages itself as love of doing good, but this makes very little difference to its social effects. It merely means that we punish our victims for being wicked, instead of for being our enemies. In either case, tyranny and war result. Moral indignation is one of the most harmful forces in the modem world, the more so as it can always be diverted to sinister uses by those who control propaganda."
-Bertrand Russell-
[Bertrand Arthur William Russell] (1872-1970) Philosopher, educator
Source: The Recrudescence of Puritanism, in Sceptical Essays, 1928
"If by the mere force of numbers a majority should deprive a minority of any clearly written constitutional right, it might, in a moral point of view, justify revolution."
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
Source: First Inaugural Address, 4 March 1861
"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-
[Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum] (1905-1982) Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter
"From this view of the subject, it may be concluded, that a pure Democracy, by which I mean a society, consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the Government in person, can admit no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will in almost every case, be felt by the majority of the whole; a communication and concert results from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party, or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is, that such 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. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed, that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions. "
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: The Federalist X, 1787
"Those who have been intoxicated with power... can never willingly abandon it."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
"A lawyer with a briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns."
-Mario Puzo-
(1920-1999) Novelist
Source: The Godfather
"No people is wholly civilized where a distinction is drawn between stealing an office and stealing a purse."
-Theodore Roosevelt-
(1858-1919) 26th US President
"The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold."
-Aristotle-
(384-322 BC) Greek philosopher
"Power corrupts. But it does more than that. Power attracts the corrupt, then corrupts them further."
-Don Matthews-
(1939-2017 ) a.k.a. "The Don", former head coach of several teams in the Canadian Football League, known as the winningest coach in the CFL
"The first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means."
-Georges Bernanos-
(1888-1949) French author
Source: The Last Essays of Georges Bernanos, 1955
"The deterioration of every government begins with the decay of the principles on which it was founded."
-Charles de Montesquieu-
[Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat] (1689-1755) Baron de Montesquieu
Source: The Spirit of the Laws, VIII, 1752
"All bad precedents began as justifiable measures."
-Gaius Julius Caesar-
(100-44 B.C.) Dictator of the Roman Republic
"Never could an increase of comfort or security be a sufficient good to be bought at the price of liberty."
-Hilaire Belloc-
(1870-1953) French-born British writer
"Let us rise up and be thankful, for if we didn't learn a lot today, at least we learned a little, and if we didn't learn a little, at least we didn't get sick, and if we got sick, at least we didn't die; so, let us all be thankful."
-Buddha-
[Gautama Siddharta] (563 - 483 BC), Hindu Prince, founder of Buddhism
"When I'm not thanked at all, I'm thanked enough; I've done my duty, and I've done no more."
-Henry Fielding-
(1707-1754) English novelist and dramatist
"I thank Thee first because I was never robbed before; second, because although they took my purse they did not take my life; third, because although they took my all, it was not much; and fourth because it was I who was robbed, and not I who robbed."
-Matthew Henry-
(1662-1714) Welsh-English nonconformist minister, author
Source: Arnold Gingrich, Coronet, Volume 17 (1944), which characterizes the quote as a diary entry.
"There is no act, however virtuous, for which ingenuity may not find some bad motive."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: letter to Edward Dowse, April 19, 1803
"Toward no crimes have men shown themselves so cold-bloodedly cruel as in punishing differences of opinion."
-James Russell Lowell-
(1819-1891) American author and diplomatist
Source: Literary Essays
"The experience that was had in ... the taking away of private property, and the possession of it in community, by a commonwealth ... was found to breed much confusion and discontent; and retard much employment which would have been to the general benefit.... For the young men that were most able and fit for labor and service objected that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men's wives and children, without any recompense.... The strong man or the resourceful man had no more share of food, clothes, etc., than the weak man who was not able to do a quarter the other could; this was thought injustice. The aged and graver men, who were ranked and equalized in labor, food, clothes, etc., with the meaner and younger ones, thought it some indignity and disrespect to them."
-William Bradford-
(c.1590-1657) American colonist, helped found the Plymouth Colony, signatory to the Mayflower Compact, served as Plymouth Colony Governor
1623
Source: Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation, 1606-1646
"What can you ever really know of other people's souls -- of their temptations, their opportunities, their struggles? One soul in the whole creation you do know: and it is the only one whose fate is placed in your hands. If there is a God, you are, in a sense, alone with Him. You cannot put Him off with speculations about your next door neighbours or memories of what you have read in books."
-C. S. Lewis-
"The citizen who thinks he sees that the commonwealth's political clothes are worn out, and yet holds his peace and does not agitate for a new suit, is disloyal; he is a traitor. That he may be the only one who thinks he sees this decay, does not excuse him; it is his duty to agitate anyway, and it is the duty of the others to vote him down if they do not see the matter as he does."
-Mark Twain-
"Remind students that one of the central missions of the university, which justifies its existence, is to get at the truth. That requires honest debate, patience, intellectual honesty, investigation, and a lot of hard work. But it also is not for the faint of heart. And that is a lesson that is almost never transmitted today. That offense, bruising thoughts, and unpleasant facts simply go with the territory. They are an intrinsic feature of an open society, and they never can be entirely avoided."
-Amy Wax-
University of Pennsylvania law professor
Source: Nov. 8 2018 speech at The Heritage Foundation
"Our lack of constant awareness has also permitted us to accept definitions of freedom that are not necessarily consistent with the actuality of being free. Because we have learned to confuse the word with the reality the word seeks to describe, our vocabulary has become riddled with distorted and contradictory meanings smuggled into the language."
-Butler D. Shaffer-
Professor, Southwestern University School of Law
Source: Calculated Chaos, 1985
"Freedom can exist only in the society of knowledge. Without learning, men are incapable of knowing their rights."
-Dr. Benjamin Rush-
(1745-1813) signed the Declaration of Independence, physician, politician, social reformer, humanitarian, educator, founder of Dickinson College
1786
"Rousseau had it backwards. We are NOT born free. We are born in the chains of the random and the reflexive, and are ignorant and unreasonable by simple nature. We must learn to be free, to organize the random and detect the reflexive, to acquire the knowledge of particulars and the powers of reason. The examined life is impossible if we cannot examine, order, classify, define, distinguish, always in minute particulars."
-Richard Mitchell-
(1929-2002) Professor at Glassboro State College, NJ, author, founder and publisher of The Underground Grammarian
"Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence."
-Abigail Adams-
(1744-1818) wife of John Adams
1780
"But how shall we educate men to goodness, to a sense of one another, to a love of truth? And more urgently, how shall we do this in a bad time?"
-Daniel Joseph Berrigan-
(1921-2016)American Jesuit priest, anti-war activist, Christian pacifist, playwright, poet, author
"You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him to find it within himself."
-Galileo Galilei-
(1564-1642) Italian astronomer, physicist, engineer, philosopher, and mathematician
"My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself."
-George Bernard Shaw-
(1856-1950) Irish comic dramatist
"What is education? Properly speaking, there is no such thing as education. Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another. Whatever the soul is like, it will have to be passed on somehow, consciously or unconsciously, and that transition may be called education. ... What we need is to have a culture before we hand it down. In other words, it is a truth, however sad and strange, that we cannot give what we have not got, and cannot teach to other people what we do not know ourselves."
-Gilbert Keith Chesterton-
(1874-1936) British essayist, critic, poet, and novelist
Source: Illustrated London News, July 5, 1924
"For what is meant by saying that a government ought to educate the people? Why should they be educated? What is the education for? Clearly, to fit the people for social life -- to make them good citizens. And who is to say what are good citizens? The government: there is no other judge. And who is to say how these good citizens may be made? The government: there is no other judge. Hence the proposition is convertible into this -- a government ought to mold children into good citizens, using its own discretion in settling what a good citizen is and how the child may be molded into one."
-Herbert Spencer-
(1820-1903) British author, economist, philosopher
Source: 1850
"A general State education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mold 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
"The purpose of education is to make the choices clear to people, not to make the choices for people."
-Peter McWilliams-
(1949-2000) Poet, author
Source: Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do, 1996
"[A]ny provider that commands 90 percent of the market -- whether we're talking about software, phone service, or heating oil -- is, by definition, a monopoly. Our government employs thousands of bureaucrats to track down and break up monopolies on the grounds that monopolies stifle competition and thereby produce bad products at high prices. Doesn't it strike anyone as strange that the same government protects its own monopoly in education? And stranger still, that nearly everyone accepts this state of affairs as normal -- as something that has always been and must always be? ... [C]ompetition forces public schools into making long-overdue repairs. And it offers poor parents the choices they desperately desire."
-Jennifer A. Grossman-
Source: How Philanthropy Is Revolutionizing Education, IMPRIMIS, Feb. 1999, Vol. 28, Number 2., p. 3.
"Who besides a degraded rabble would voluntarily present itself to be graded and classified like meat? No wonder school is compulsory."
-John Taylor Gatto-
(1937-2018) American school teacher of 29 years, author, New York State Teacher of the Year, 1991
Source: The Underground History of American Education, 2001
"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
"Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts."
-Henry Brooks Adams-
(1838-1918) Pulitzer prize-winning historian (1919), great-grandson of John Adams, grandson of John Quincy Adams, and son of US Secretary of State, Charles Adams
Source: The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography, 1918
"I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays and have things arranged for them that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas."
-Agatha Christie-
[Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller, Lady Mallowan] (1890-1976) English crime writer of novels, short stories and plays. Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. She also wrote romances under the name Mary Westmacott
"...[A] fool cannot be protected from his folly. If you attempt to do so, you will not only arouse his animosity but also you will be attempting to deprive him of whatever benefit he is capable of deriving from experience. Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig."
-Robert A. Heinlein-
(1907-1988) American writer
Source: Time Enough for Love (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons) 51: (1973)
"When school children start paying union dues, that's when I'll start representing the interests of school children."
-Albert Shanker-
(1928-1997) president of the United Federation of Teachers (1964-1985), president of the American Federation of Teachers (1974-1997)
"At every hour of every day, I can tell you on which page of which book each school child in Italy is studying."
-Benito Mussolini-
(1883-1945) Italian dictator during WW2, founder of Italian Fascism, 'Il Duce'
"The public expects too much from teachers because educationists have led it to believe teachers could be substitute parents, psychotherapists, cops, social workers, dieticians, nursemaids, babysitters, and nose wipers and still do a decent job teaching kids to read, write, and do math. Instead of saying no, educationists have added courses in environmental education, death education, personal hygiene, self-esteem, driver's ed, job readiness, sexual harassment, radon studies, yoga, yogurt awareness, and god-knows-what-else."
-Charlie Sykes-
(1954-) American political commentator, author
Source: Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good About Themselves But Can't Read, Write, or Add (1996)
"[T]he child should be taught to consider his instructor... superior to the parent in point of authority.... The vulgar impression that parents have a legal right to dictate to teachers is entirely erroneous.... Parents have no remedy as against the teacher."
-John Swett-
(1830-1913) Superintendent of California Public School System, "Father of the California public school" system, "Horace Mann of the Pacific"
John, you're fired.
"We who are engaged in the sacred cause of education are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause."
-Horace Mann-
(1796-1859) American education reformer, abolitionist, first secretary of education in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Massachusetts House of Representatives (1827-1833), Massachusetts Senate (1833-1837)
"If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare, and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare, they may take the care of religion into their own hands; they may appoint teachers in every State, county and parish and pay them out of their public treasury; they may take into their own hands the education of children, establishing in like manner schools throughout the Union; they may assume the provision of the poor; they may undertake the regulation of all roads other than post-roads; in short, every thing, from the highest object of state legislation down to the most minute object of police, would be thrown under the power of Congress. ... Were the power of Congress to be established in the latitude contended for, it would subvert the very foundations, and transmute the very nature of the limited Government established by the people of America."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
"The test of every religious, political,
or educational system, is the man which it forms.
If a system injures the intelligence it is bad.
If it injures the character it is vicious.
If it injures the conscience it is criminal."
-Henri Frederic Amiel-
(1821-1881) Swiss philosopher, poet
Source: Journal, 17 June 1852
"To educate a man in mind, and not in morals, is to educate a menace to society."
-Theodore Roosevelt-
(1858-1919) 26th US President
"A nation of well informed men who have been taught to know and prize the rights which God has given them cannot be enslaved. It is in the region of ignorance that tyranny begins."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
"Intellectual freedom is the right of every individual to both seek and receive information from all points of view without restriction. It provides for free access of all expressions of ideas through which any and all sides of a question, cause or movement may be explored."
-American Library Association-
Source: Office of Intellectual Freedom, 2002
"What's the difference between a bright, inquisitive five-year-old, and a dull, stupid nineteen-year-old? Fourteen years of the British educational system."
-Bertrand Russell-
[Bertrand Arthur William Russell] (1872-1970) Philosopher, educator
"Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
"The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority.
The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority.
The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking."
-A. A. Milne-
[Alan Alexander Milne] (1882-1956) English author
"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt."
-Bertrand Russell-
[Bertrand Arthur William Russell] (1872-1970) Philosopher, educator
"A teacher is never a giver of truth -- he is a guide, a pointer to the truth that each student must find for himself. A good teacher is merely a catalyst."
-Bruce Lee-
[Lee Jun-fan] (1940-1973) Hong Kong American martial artist, actor, martial arts instructor, filmmaker, and the founder of Jeet Kune Do
"Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,
Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,
Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law,
Whereas it is essential to promote the development of friendly relations between nations,
Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,
Whereas Member States have pledged themselves to achieve, in co-operation with the United Nations, the promotion of universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms,
Whereas a common understanding of these rights and freedoms is of the greatest importance for the full realization of this pledge,
Now, Therefore THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY proclaims THIS UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction.
Article 1.
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
Article 2.
Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.
Article 3.
Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.
Article 4.
No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.
Article 5.
No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
Article 6.
Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.
Article 7.
All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.
Article 8.
Everyone has the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law.
Article 9.
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.
Article 10.
Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.
Article 11.
(1) Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence.
(2) No one shall be held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offence was committed.
Article 12.
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
Article 13.
(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.
(2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.
Article 14.
(1) Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.
(2) This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.
Article 15.
(1) Everyone has the right to a nationality.
(2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.
Article 16.
(1) Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.
(2) Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses.
(3) The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.
Article 17.
(1) Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.
(2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.
Article 18.
Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.
Article 19.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Article 20.
(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.
(2) No one may be compelled to belong to an association.
Article 21.
(1) Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.
(2) Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.
(3) The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.
Article 22.
Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.
Article 23.
(1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
(2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.
(3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.
(4) Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.
Article 24.
Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.
Article 25.
(1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
(2) Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.
Article 26.
(1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.
(2) Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.
(3) Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.
Article 27.
(1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
(2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.
Article 28.
Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.
Article 29.
(1) Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.
(2) In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.
(3) These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.
Article 30.
Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein."
-Universal Declaration of Human Rights-
"In different places over the years I have had to prove that socialism, which to many western thinkers is a sort of kingdom of justice, was in fact full of coercion, of bureaucratic greed and corruption and avarice, and consistent within itself that socialism cannot be implemented without the aid of coercion. Communist propaganda would sometimes include statements such as "we include almost all the commandments of the Gospel in our ideology". The difference is that the Gospel asks all this to be achieved through love, through self-limitation, but socialism only uses coercion. This is one point. Untouched by the breath of God, unrestricted by human conscience, both capitalism and socialism are repulsive."
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn-
"The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types -- the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution."
-G.K. Chesterton-
"No use to shout at them to pay attention. If the situations, the materials, the problems before the child do not interest him, his attention will slip off to what does interest him, and no amount of exhortation of threats will bring it back."
-John Holt-
(1923-1985) American author and educator, proponent of homeschooling, and pioneer in youth rights theory
"The desire to know is natural to good men."
-Leonardo da Vinci-
(1452-1519) Italian inventor, artist, polymath, the "Universal Genius" or "Renaissance Man"
"Liberty is the prevention of control by others. This requires self-control and, therefore, religious and spiritual influences; education, knowledge, well-being."
-Lord Acton-
[John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton] (1834-1902), First Baron Acton of Aldenham
1887
Source: Lord Acton, Selected Writings of Lord Acton: Essays in Religion, Politics, and Morality, ed. J. Rufus Fears, 3 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1988), 3:490
"To live his life in his own way, to call his house his castle, to enjoy the fruits of his own labour, to educate his children as his conscience directs, to save for their prosperity after his death --- these are wishes deeply ingrained in civilised man. Their realization is almost as necessary to our virtues as to our happiness. From their total frustration disastrous results both moral and psychological might follow."
-C. S. Lewis-
(1898-1963), British novelist
Source: Willing Slaves of the Welfare State, first published in The Observer on July 20, 1958
"Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents...."
-John Taylor Gatto-
(1937-2018) American school teacher of 29 years, author, New York State Teacher of the Year, 1991
Source: The Underground History of American Education, 2001
"One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself."
-Leonardo da Vinci-
(1452-1519) Italian inventor, artist, polymath, the "Universal Genius" or "Renaissance Man"
"Nothing enrages me more than when people criticize my criticism of school by telling me that schools are not just places to learn math and spelling, they are places where children learn a vaguely defined thing called socialization. I know. I think schools generally do an effective and terribly damaging job of teaching children to be infantile, dependent, intellectually dishonest, passive and disrespectful to their own developmental capacities."
-Seymour Papert-
(1928-2016) South African-born MIT mathematician, computer scientist, educator, pioneer in artificial intelligence, inventor of the Logo programming language
"The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed."
-Steve Biko-
(1946-1977) Anti-apartheid activist in South Africa, fatally beaten while in police custody
"Above all things I hope the education of the common people will be attended to, convinced that on their good sense we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"There are three schoolmasters for everybody that will employ them - the senses, intelligent companions, and books."
-Rev. Henry Ward Beecher-
(1813-1887) American abolitionist, clergyman
"Knowledge and human power are synonymous."
-Sir Francis Bacon-
(1561-1626) Philosopher, British Lord Chancellor
"The greatest Glory of a free-born People,
Is to transmit that Freedom to their Children."
-William Havard-
(1889-1956) Welsh military chaplain (WWI), bishop of Church in Wales, and rugby union international player
"If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run -- and often in the short one -- the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative."
-Arthur C. Clarke-
"Banning weapons is the most white privilege idea ever. Rich liberals scoffing at the idea that a person might need to defend their own life is a tower so ivory you can't look at it in direct sunlight. It's the personal safety equivalent of 'just have the maid do it'."
-Caleb Howe-
"Who then is free? The wise who can command his passions, who fears not want, nor death, nor chains, firmly resisting his appetites and despising the honors of the world, who relies wholly on himself, whose angular points of character have all been rounded off and polished."
-Horace-
[Quintus Horatius Flaccus] (65-8BC) Roman poet
25 B.C.
"To most of us nothing is so invisible as an unpleasant truth. Though it is held before our eyes, pushed under our noses, rammed down our throats -- we know it not."
-Eric Hoffer-
(1902-1983) American author, philosopher, awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
"I freed thousands of slaves. I could have freed thousands more if they had known they were slaves."
-Harriet Tubman-
[Araminta Ross] (c.1820-1913) African-American abolitionist, humanitarian, and Union spy during the U.S. Civil War. After escaping from captivity, she made thirteen missions to rescue over seventy slaves using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad
"We can ignore reality, but we cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality."
-Ayn Rand-
"I am myself persuaded, on the basis of extensive study of the historical evidence, that... the severity of each of the contractions - 1920-21, 1929-33, and 1937-38 - is directly attributable to acts of commission and omission by the Reserve authorities and would not have occurred under earlier monetary and banking arrangements."
-Milton Friedman-
"That alien friends are under the jurisdiction and protection of the laws of the States wherein they are; tha no power over them has been delegated to the United States ... An Act concerning aliens, which assumes powers over alien friends, not delegated by the Constitution, is not law, but is altogether void, and of no force."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"I choose free libraries as the best agencies for improving the masses of the people, because they give nothing for nothing. They only help those who help themselves. They never pauperize. They reach the aspiring and open to these chief treasures of the world -- those stored up in books. A taste for reading drives out lower tastes."
-Andrew Carnegie-
(1835-1919) Scottish-American industrialist, philanthropist
Source: Andrew Carnegie in New York Herald, June 1900
"Let us by wise and constitutional measures promote intelligence among the people as the best means of preserving our liberties."
-James Monroe-
(1758-1831), 5th US President
Source: First Inaugural Address, 4 March 1817
"A native American who cannot read or write is as rare an appearance... as a comet or an earthquake."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: 1765
"Hitherto the plans of the educationalists have achieved very little of what they attempted, and indeed we may well thank the beneficent obstinacy of real mothers, real nurses, and (above all) real children for preserving the human race in such sanity as it still possesses."
-C. S. Lewis-
(1898-1963), British novelist
"It's not that I feel that school is a good idea gone wrong, but a wrong idea from the word go. It's a nutty notion that we can have a place where nothing but learning happens, cut off from the rest of life."
-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
"School is the first impression children get of organized society. Like most first impressions it is the lasting one. Life is dull and stupid, only Coke provides relief. And other products, too, of course."
-John Taylor Gatto-
(1937-2018) American school teacher of 29 years, author, New York State Teacher of the Year, 1991
Source: The Underground History of American Education, 2001
"Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910) American author and humorist
"The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled."
-Plutarch-
(c.45-125 A.D.) Greek Priest of the Delphic Oracle
"Think! It ain't illegal 'yet.'"
-George Clinton-
(1941-) American singer, songwriter, bandleader, record producer
Source: Lunchmeataphobia ('Think, It Ain't Illegal Yet!), 1978
"But it was in making education not only common to all, but in some sense compulsory on all, that the destiny of the free republics of America was practically settled."
-James Russell Lowell-
(1819-1891) American author and diplomatist
If welfare isn't guaranteed, then education is "in some sense compulsory on all".
"If the aborigine drafted an IQ test, all of Western civilization would presumably flunk it."
-Stanley Garn-
(1922-2007) American human biologist, professor of anthropology
"It is precisely because education is the road to equality and citizenship, that it has been made more elusive for Negroes than many other rights. The walling off of Negroes from equal education is part of the historical design to submerge him in second class status. Therefore, as Negroes have struggled to be free they have had to fight for the opportunity for a decent education."
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-
(1929-1968) US civil rights leader
14 March 1964
"Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone."
-Jesus of Nazareth-
Source: Holy Bible, Matthew 23:23
"It comes as news to most people to learn that practically all important ethical teachers -- Moses, Aristotle, Jesus, Mohammed, and Saint Thomas Aquinas, for instance -- have denounced lending at interest as usury and as morally wrong."
-Lawrence Dennis-
Source: Saturday Review of Literature #661, June 24, 1933
"Nothing can be more exactly and seriously true than what is there [the very words only of Jesus] stated; that but a short time elapsed after the death of the great reformer of the Jewish religion, before his principles were departed from by those who professed to be his special servants, and perverted into an engine for enslaving mankind, and aggrandising their oppressors in Church and State; that the purest system of morals ever before preached to man, has been adulterated and sophisticated by artificial constructions, into a mere contrivance to filch wealth and power to themselves; that rational men not being able to swallow their impious heresies, in order to force them down their throats, they raise the hue and cry of infidelity, while themselves are the greatest obstacles to the advancement of the real doctrines of Jesus, and do in fact constitute the real Anti-Christ."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: letter to Samuel Kerchreview, January 19, 1810
"In every declining civilization there is a small 'remnant' of people who adhere to the right against the wrong; who recognize the difference between good and evil and who will take an active stand for the former and against the latter; who can still think and discern and who will courageously take a stand against the political, social, moral, and spiritual rot or decay of their day."
-Donald S. McAlvaney-
Source: Toward a New World Order, 360 (2nd ed. 1992)
"But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts us absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many lifeless bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas."
-Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.-
(1922-2007) American author
"Christmas is a time when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay for it. Deficits are when adults tell the government what they want and their kids pay for it."
-Richard Lamm-
[Richard Douglas "Dick" Lamm] (1935- ) American politician, lawyer, governor of Colorado (D) (1975-1987), 1996 US presidential candidate for the Reform Party
"The whole freedom of man consists either in spiritual or civil liberty."
-John Milton-
(1608-1674) English Poet
"And this I must fight against: any idea, 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 this is the one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system."
-John Steinbeck-
(1902-1968) Author, Nobel laureate
Source: East of Eden, 1952
"Truth never damages a cause that is just."
-Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi-
(1869-1948)
"The idea that anarchism must fail because under anarchy no one can make others obey the rules is stunningly stupid. On any given day, even in a world pervaded by states and their dictates, nearly everything that people do or refrain from doing is so not because the state threatens them with violence for acting otherwise, but because they find conformity with rules — honesty, promise keeping, careful handling of goods, avoidance of opportunism, and so forth — to be in their interest. The world does not run on the state’s threats of violence; it runs in spite of those threats.
Many sanctions besides violence and threats of violence may be — and are even in the world in which we now live — effective sanctions for adherence to law and order. Ostracization of dishonest dealers, for example, works wonders, and in the world of modern communications it can be more effective than ever."
-Robert Higgs-
"It is better to go to defeat with free will than to live in a meaningless security as a cog in a machine."
-Isaac Asimov-
"Appetitus rationi pareat."
Let your desires be ruled by reason.
-Cicero-
"You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid monotonous work, chances are you'll end up boring, stupid and monotonous. Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such significant moronizing mechanisms as television and education. People who are regimented all their lives, handed off to work from school and bracketed by the family in the beginning and the nursing home at the end, are habituated to hierarchy and psychologically enslaved. Their aptitude for autonomy is so atrophied that their fear of freedom is among their few rationally grounded phobias."
-Bob Black-
"Through the myth it creates, propaganda imposes a complete range of intuitive knowledge, susceptible of only one interpretation, unique and one-sided, and precluding any divergence. This myth becomes so powerful that it invades every arena of consciousness, leaving no faculty or motivation intact. It stimulates in the individual a feeling of exclusiveness, and produces a biased attitude."
-Jacques Ellul-
"All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take root in our personal experience."
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe-
(1749-1832) German writer, statesman
"There are only two forces in the world, the sword and the spirit. In the long run the sword will always be conquered by the spirit."
-Napoleon Bonaparte-
(1769-1821) French emperor
"No citizen enjoys genuine freedom of religious conviction until the state is indifferent to every form of religious outlook from Atheism to Zoroastrianism."
-Harold J. Laski-
(1893-1950) British political theorist, economist, author, and lecturer
Source: Grammar of Politics, 1925
"I know of but one freedom and that is the freedom of the mind."
-Antoine De Saint-Exupery-
(1900-1944) French writer, poet, aristocrat, journalist, and pioneering aviator
Source: The Wisdom of the Sands, 1950
"Each progressive spirit is opposed by a thousand mediocre minds appointed to guard the past."
-Maurice Maeterlinck-
(1862-1949) Belgian playwright, poet, and essayist
"Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good."
-Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi-
(1869-1948)
"It is not my intention to do away with government. It is, rather, to make it work -- work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back. Government can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity, not stifle it. It is no coincidence that our present troubles parallel and are proportionate to the intervention and intrusion in our lives that result from unnecessary and excessive growth of government. ... We shall reflect the compassion that is so much a part of your makeup. How can we love our country and not love our countrymen, and loving them, not reach out a hand when they fall, heal them when they are sick, and provide opportunities to make them self-sufficient so they will be equal in fact and not just in theory? ... We are a nation under God, and I believe God intended for us to be free. It would be fitting and good, I think, if on each Inauguration Day in future years it should be declared a day of prayer."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
Source: First Inaugural Address, 1981
"Talent develops in tranquillity, character in the full current of human life."
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe-
(1749-1832) German writer, statesman
"A human being is a part of the whole, called by us, "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security."
-Albert Einstein-
(1879-1955) Physicist and Professor, Nobel Prize 1921
And every time we appeal to force-monopoly government to restrict some peaceful other's liberty, we reject that compassion. Essentially by definition. Every... single... time.
"This is the sum of all true righteousness:
deal with others as thou wouldst thyself be dealt by.
Do nothing to thy neighbor which thou
wouldst not have him do to thee hereafter."
-The Mahabharata-
Hindu epic poem, circa 800 BCE
"In ancient times the State absorbed authorities not its own, and intruded on the domain of personal freedom. In the Middle Ages it possessed too little authority, and suffered others to intrude. Modern States fall habitually into both excesses. The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities. Liberty, by this definition, is the essential condition and guardian of religion..."
-John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton-
"Liberty, if I understand it at all, is a general principle, and the clear right of all the subjects within the realm, or of none. Partial freedom seems to me a most invidious mode of slavery. But, unfortunately, it is the kind of slavery the most easily admitted in times of civil discord; for parties are but too apt to forget their own future safety in their desire of sacrificing their enemies. People without much difficulty admit the entrance of that injustice of which they are not to be the immediate victims … great determined measures are not commonly so dangerous to freedom. They are marked with too strong lines to slide into use. … But the true danger is, when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and by parts."
-Edmund Burke-
"All parties without exception, when they seek for power, are varieties of absolutism.
-Pierre-Joseph Proudhon-
"Dr. Reich vastly offended many people by his sociological theory, which holds that fascism is just an exaggerated form of the basic structure of sex-negative societies and has existed under other names in every civilization based on sexual repression. In this theory, the character and muscular armor of the average citizen — a submissive and frightened attitude anchored in body reflexes — causes the average person to want a strong authority figure above them. Tyranny, in this model, is not created by tyrants alone but by neurotic masses who want tyrants."
-Robert Anton Wilson-
"Through all time, so far as history informs us, wherever mankind have attempted to live in peace with each other, both the natural instincts, and the collective wisdom of the human race, have acknowledged and prescribed, as an indispensable condition, obedience to this one only universal obligation: viz., that each should live honestly towards every other. The ancient maxim makes the sum of a man’s legal duty to his fellow men to be simply this: " To live honestly, to hurt no one, to give to every one his due." This entire maxim is really expressed in the single words, to live honestly; since to live honestly is to hurt no one, and give to every one his due."
-Lysander Spooner-
"Nothing doth more hurt in a state than that cunning men pass for wise."
-Francis Bacon
"The only time my education was interrupted was when I was in school."
-George Bernard Shaw-
(1856-1950) Irish comic dramatist
"College isn't the place to go for ideas."
-Helen Keller-
(1880-1968) Blind-Deaf Author
“Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.”
-Vladimir Ilyich Lenin-
[Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov] (1870-1924) First Leader of the Soviet Union
"Compassion is the use of public funds to buy votes."
-Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
"Confronted with such a tight regulation, can man pretend to be free because the tyranny he is subjected to derives from the law? Of course, the legal power is not called 'tyranny' since it appears to be established by the general will in the common interest, and since, in any event, occurrences of arbitrary power are infrequent. But a master's equity does not mean that his subjects are not slaves. ... And when their servitude lasts and their thoughts follow their behavior, the state becomes totalitarian and subjection is complete. Since it is legal servitude, the regime is still said to be democratic. Such is the hypocrisy of political language."
-Georges Ripert-
(1880-1958) French lawyer, Secretary of State for Public Instruction and Youth in the Vichy Regime
Source: Le Déclin du Droit. Etude sur la législation contemporaine (Paris: Librairie Générale de Droit et de Jurisprudence, 1949), p. 69
"To curtail free expression strikes twice at intellectual freedom, for whoever deprives another of the right to state unpopular views necessarily deprives others of the right to listen to those views."
-C. Van Woodward-
(1908-1999) American historian
Source: “Report On Free Speech,” New York Times, 28 January 1975
"To open his lips is crime in a plain citizen."
-Quintus Ennius-
(c.239 BC - c.169 BC) Considered the father of Roman poetry
"God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide."
-Rebecca West-
(1892-1983) British author, journalist, literary critic and travel writer
Source: Censorship: For And Against, 1971
"Freedom of speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself. What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist."
-Salman Rushdie-
(1947-) British-Indian novelist and essayist
Source: "The right to be downright offensive" by Jonathan Duffy in BBC News Magazine (21 December 2004)
"What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don't like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don't expect freedom to survive very long."
-Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
"No matter whose lips that would speak, they must be free and ungagged. The community which dares not protect its humblest and most hated member in the free utterance of his opinions, no matter how false or hateful, is only a gang of slaves. If there is anything in the universe that can’t stand discussion, let it crack."
-Wendell Phillips-
(1811-1884) American abolitionist, advocate for Native Americans, orator, lawyer
Source: Speech, 1863
"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it... Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate.... Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-
(1929-1968) US civil rights leader
"I firmly believe that the Gandhian philosophy of nonviolent resistance is the only logical and moral approach to the solution of the race problem in the United States."
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-
(1929-1968) US civil rights leader
1957
"The nation relies upon public discussion as one of the indispensable means to attain correct solutions to problems of social welfare. Curtailment of free speech limits this open discussion. Our whole history teaches that adjustment of social relations through reason is possible when free speech is maintained."
-Stanley Forman Reed-
(1884-1980) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
"When men can freely communicate their thoughts and their sufferings, real or imagined, their passions spend themselves in air, like gunpowder scattered upon the surface – but pent up by terrors, they work unseen, burst forth in a moment, and destroy everything in its course. Let reason be opposed to reason, and argument to argument, and every good government will be safe."
-Thomas Erskine-
(1750-1823) Lord Chancellor of England
"Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictory word, preserves contact – it is silence which isolates."
-Thomas Mann-
(1875-1955) German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, Nobel Prize in Literature (1929)
Source: The Magic Mountain
"It is not uncommon for ignorant and corrupt men to falsely charge others with doing what they imagine they themselves, in their narrow minds and experience, would have done under the circumstances."
-John Hessin Clarke-
(1857-1995) Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court
Source: Valdez v. United States, 1917
"I have seen gross intolerance show in support of tolerance."
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge-
(1772-1834) English poet, critic, philosopher, and a leader of the British Romantic movement
Source: Biographia Literaria, 1817
"Where the principle of difference [between political parties] is as substantial and as strongly pronounced as between the republicans and the monocrats of our country, I hold it as honorable to take a firm and decided part and as immoral to pursue a middle line, as between the parties of honest men and rogues, into which every country is divided."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Thomas Jefferson to William Branch Giles, 1795. ME 9:317
"Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself."
-Carl Gustav Jung-
(1875-1961)
"Democracy and liberty are not the same. Democracy is little more than mob rule, while liberty refers to the sovereignty of the individual."
-Walter E. Williams-
(1936- ) Columnist, Professor of Economics at George Mason University
"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
"Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens,) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake; since history and experience prove, that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of Republican Government. But that jealousy, to be useful, must be impartial; else it becomes the instrument of the very influence to be avoided, instead of a defence against it. Excessive partiality for one foreign nation, and excessive dislike of another, cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one side, and serve to veil and even second the arts of influence on the other. Real patriots, who may resist the intrigues of the favorite, are liable to become suspected and odious; while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people, to surrender their interests."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: Farewell Address, September 17, 1796, Ref: George Washington: A Collection, W.B. Allen, ed. (521)
"Good government is the most dangerous government, because it deprives people of the need to look after themselves."
-Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi-
(1869-1948)
"Self-reliance is the only road to true freedom, and being one's own person is its ultimate reward."
-Patricia Sampson-
(1921-1998)
"When men hire themselves out to shoot other men to order, asking nothing about the justice of their cause, I don't care if they are shot themselves."
-Herbert Spencer-
"I am concerned about the attitude of a candidate or his sponsors with respect to the rights of American citizens to assemble peaceably and to express publicly their views and opinions on important social and economic issues. There can be no constitutional democracy in any community which denies to the individual his freedom to speak and worship as he wishes. The American people will not be deceived by anyone who attempts to suppress individual liberty under the pretense of patriotism."
-Franklin D. Roosevelt-
"Liberty sets the mind free, fosters independence and unorthodox thinking and ideas. But it does not offer instant prosperity or happiness and wealth to everyone. This is something that politicians in particular must keep in mind."
-Boris Yeltsin-
Especially since politicians can't offer prosperity or happiness EVER -- instant or otherwise...
"That the power to tax involves the power to destroy; that the power to destroy may defeat and render useless the power to create."
-Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall-
1819
"I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it and see it still."
-Ronald Reagan-
"All lawful authority, legislative, and executive, originates from the people."
-James Burgh-
(1714-1775) was an English Whig politician
Source: "Political Disquisitions: Or, an Enquiry into Public Errors, Defects, and Abuses" (London, 1774-1775)
"The essential characteristic of Western civilization that distinguishes it from the arrested and petrified civilizations of the East was and is its concern for freedom from the state. The history of the West, from the age of the Greek polis down to the present-day resistance to socialism, is essentially the history of the fight for liberty against the encroachments of the officeholders."
-Ludwig Von Mises-
(1881-1973) Economist and social philosopher
"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 affairs. Let the General Government be reduced to foreign concerns only, and let our affairs be disentangled from those of all other nations, except as to commerce, which the merchants will manage the better, the more they are left free to manage for themselves, and our General Government may be reduced to a very simple organization, and a very inexpensive one; a few plain duties to be performed by a few servants."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: March 1800
"The 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 and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. 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."
-Justice Robert H. Jackson-
(1892-1954), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: West Virginia Board of Education vs. Barnette, 1943
"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
"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
"Apologists for activist government never tire of telling us that the benevolent state is our protector and that without it we'd be at the mercy of monsters. It is about time that we understood that the U.S. government does more to endanger the American people than any imagined monsters around the world…by pursuing its Grand Foreign Policy of meddling anywhere and everywhere."
-Sheldon Richman-
V.P. of Future of Freedom Foundation, author
Source: Liberty, Security, and the War on Terrorism (2010)
"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) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: The Federalist Papers Federalist No. 85
Right up until passage of the 17th Amendment...
"The worth of a state, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it."
-John Stuart Mill-
(1806-1873) English philosopher and economist
"The True Gentleman is the man whose conduct proceeds from good will and an acute sense of propriety, and whose self-control is equal to all emergencies; who does not make the poor man conscious of his poverty, the obscure man of his obscurity, or any man of his inferiority or deformity; who is himself humbled if necessity compels him to humble another; who does not flatter wealth, cringe before power, or boast of his own possessions or achievements; who speaks with frankness but always with sincerity and sympathy; whose deed follows his word; who thinks of the rights and feelings of others, rather than his own; and who appears well in any company, a man with whom honor is sacred and virtue safe."
-John Walter Wayland-
1899
"Tis the upright mind that holds true sovereignty."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: Tragedies, Thyestes, line 380; (Chorus)
"They can only set free men free ...
And there is no need of that:
Free men set themselves free."
-James Oppenheim-
(1882-1932), was an American poet, novelist, and editor
Source: The Slave
"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
"The 4th Amendment and the personal rights it secures have a long history. At the very core stands the right of a man to retreat into his own home and there be free from unreasonable governmental intrusion."
-Justice Potter Stewart-
(1915-1985) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
Source: Bartkus v. Illinois, 5 March 1961
"While rationalism at the individual level is a plea for more personal autonomy from cultural norms, at the social level it is often a claim -- or arrogation -- of power to stifle the autonomy of others."
-Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
"If I want to be free from any other man’s dictation, I must understand that I can have no other man under my control."
-William Graham Sumner-
(1840-1910) American academic and professor at Yale College
"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]
c. 1300
"English character and English freedom depend comparatively little on the form which the Constitution assumes at Westminster. A centralised democracy may be as tyrannical as an absolute monarch; and if the vigour of the nation is to continue unimpaired, each individual, each family, each district, must preserve as far as possible its independence, its self-completeness, its powers and its privilege to manage its own affairs and think its own thoughts."
-- James Anthony Froude
(1818-1894) British author and historian
Source: Short Studies on Great Subjects, 1872
http://libertytree.ca/quotes/James.Froude.Quote.0C30
"Thoughts are free and are subject to no rule. On them rests the freedom of man, and they tower above the light of nature."
-Philippus Aureolus Paracelsus-
[Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim] (1493-1541)
"You are not what you think you are; What you think – you are."
-Red Pritchard-
"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) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: The Federalist No. 79
"Learned institutions ought to be favorite objects with every free people. They throw that light over the public mind which is the best security against crafty and dangerous encroachments on public liberty."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
"The State... has had a vested interest in promoting attitudes that would tend to make us skeptical of our own abilities, fearful of the motives of others, and emotionally dependent upon external authorities for purpose and direction in our lives."
-Butler D. Shaffer-
Professor, Southwestern University School of Law
Source: Calculated Chaos, 1985
"There is only one success: to be able to spend your life in your own way, and not to give others absurd maddening claims upon it."
-Christopher Darlington Morley-
(1890-1957)
"A man may have to die for our country: but no man must, in any exclusive sense, live for his country. He who surrenders himself without reservation to the temporal claims of a nation, or a party, or a class is rendering to Caesar that which, of all things, most emphatically belongs to God: himself."
-C. S. Lewis-
(1898-1963), British novelist
"Here in America we are descended in spirit from revolutionaries and rebels -- men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine."
-Dwight D. Eisenhower-
(1890-1969), 34th US President, WWII General
Source: Speech, Columbia University, 1954
"The Republic was not established by cowards; and cowards will not preserve it ... This will remain the land of the free only so long as it is the home of the brave."
-Elmer Davis-
(1890-1958), American writer, commentator
