"Why is self-control -- autonomy -- such a threat to authority? Because the person who controls himself, who is his own master, has no need for an authority to be his master. This, then, renders authority unemployed. What is he to do if he cannot control others? To be sure, he could mind his own business. But this is a fatuous answer, for those who are satisfied to mind their own business do not aspire to become authorities."
-Dr. Thomas Szasz-
"Tongue-suicide is not only the choice of children. It is common among the infantile heads of state and power merchants whose evacuated language leaves them with no access to what is left of their human instincts for they speak only to those who obey, or in order to force obedience. The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek — it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language — all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas."
-Toni Morrison-
"Liberty means that a man is recognized as free and treated as free by those who surround him."
-Mikhail A. Bakunin-
(1814-1876) Russian revolutionary anarchist, founder of collectivist anarchism
Source: God and the State, 1871
"Individualism regards man -- every man -- as an independent, sovereign entity who possesses an inalienable right to his own life, a right derived from his nature as a rational being. Individualism holds that a civilized society, or any form of association, cooperation or peaceful co-existence among men, can be achieved only on the basis of the recognition of individual rights -- and that a group, as such, has no rights other than the individual rights of its members."
-Ayn Rand-
[Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum] (1905-1982) Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter
"Every effort to confine Americanism to a single pattern, to constrain it to a single formula, is disloyalty to everything that is valid in Americanism."
-Henry Steele Commager-
(1902-1998) Historian and author
"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
"If the States were not left to leave the Union when their rights were interfered with, the government would have been National, but the Convention refused to baptize it by that name."
-Daniel Webster-
(1782-1852) US Senator
Source: June 1, 1837; Works 1:403
"Each state enjoys sovereign power."
-Gouverneur Morris-
(1752-1816) represented Pennsylvania in the Constitutional Convention of 1787, author of large sections of the Constitution for the United States, credited as the author of its Preamble
Source: Commentaries on the Constitution, Vol. III, p 287
"[T]he only thing wrong with Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was that it was the South, not the North, that was fighting for a government of the people, by the people and for the people."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"First ask yourselves, Gentlemen, what an Englishman, a Frenchman, and a citizen of the United States of America understand today by the word 'liberty'. For each of them it is the right to be subjected only to the laws, and to be neither arrested, detained, put to death nor maltreated in any way by the arbitrary will of one or more individuals. It is the right of everyone to express their opinion, choose a profession and practice it, to dispose of property, and even to abuse it; to come and go without permission, and without having to account for their motives or undertakings. It is everyone's right to associate with other individuals, either to discuss their interests, or to profess the religion which they or their associates prefer, or even simply to occupy their days or hours in a way which is more compatible with their inclinations or whims. Finally, it is everyone's right to exercise some influence on the administration of the government, either by electing all or particular officials, or through representations, petitions, demands to which the authorities are more or less compelled to pay heed. Now compare this liberty with that of the ancients. The latter consisted in exercising collectively, but directly, several parts of the complete sovereignty; in deliberating, in the public square, over war and peace; in forming alliances with foreign governments; in voting laws, in pronouncing judgments; in examining the accounts, the acts, the stewardship of the magistrates; in calling them to appear in front of the assembled people, in accusing, condemning or absolving them. But if this was what the ancients called liberty, they admitted as compatible with this collective freedom the complete subjection of the individual to the authority of the community."
-Benjamin Constant-
[Henri-Benjamin Constant de Rebecque] (1767-1830) Swiss-born thinker, writer and French politician.
Source: "De la liberté des anciens comparée à celle des modernes" (1819), in De la liberté chez les Modernes (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1980), pp. 494-495; English translation: "The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns" (1819), in Benjamin Constant, Political Writings, Edited by Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 310-311.
"Absolute power corrupts even when exercised for humane purposes. The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still demands from others the submissiveness of sheep. The taint inherent in absolute power is not its inhumanity but its anti-humanity."
-Eric Hoffer-
(1902-1983) American author, philosopher, awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
Source: The Ordeal of Change (1963), Chapter 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.
Stated differently, might doesn't make right.
"The most powerful clique in these (CFR) groups have one objective in common they want to bring about the surrender of the sovereignty and the national independence of the U.S. They want to end national boundaries and racial and ethnic loyalties supposedly to increase business and ensure world peace. What they strive for would inevitably lead to dictatorship and loss of freedoms by the people. The CFR was founded for 'the purpose of promoting disarmament and submergence of U.S. sovereignty and national independence into an all powerful one world government.'"
-Harpers magazine-
Source: Harpers magazine, 1958
"No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore our belief in our own guidance."
-Henry Miller-
(1891-1980) American writer
Source: The Wisdom of the Heart, 1941
"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."
-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)
"For in a Republic, who is 'the country?' Is it the Government which is for the moment in the saddle? Why, the Government is merely a servant -- merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910) American author and humorist
"Today we may say aloud before an awe-struck world: 'We are still masters of our fate. We are still captain of our souls.'"
-Sir Winston Churchill-
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1940-1945, 1951-1955)
Q. What is meant by the term “constitution”?
A. A constitution embodies the fundamental principles of a government. Our constitution, adopted by the sovereign power, is amendable by that power only. To the constitution all laws, executive actions, and judicial decisions must conform, as it is the creator of the powers exercised by the departments of government.
Q. Why has our Constitution been classed as “rigid”?
A. The term “rigid” is used in opposition to “flexible” because the provisions are in a written document which cannot be legally changed with the same ease and in the same manner as ordinary laws. The British constitution, which is unwritten, can, on the other hand be changed overnight by an act of Parliament. ...
Q. Where, in the Constitution, is there mention of education?
A. There is none; education is a matter reserved for the States. ...
Q. Does the Constitution give us our rights and liberties?
A. No, it does not, it only guarantees them. The people had all their rights and liberties before they made the Constitution. The Constitution was formed, among other purposes, to make the people’s liberties secure -- secure not only as against foreign attack but against oppression by their own government. They set specific limits upon their national government and upon the States, and reserved to themselves all powers that they did not grant. The Ninth Amendment declares: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”
-Sol Bloom-
Director General of the United States Constitution Sesquicentennial Commission
Source: The Story Of The Constitution 1787 - We The People - 1937, copyrighted to The United States Constitutional Sesquicentennial Commission, July 28, 1937, Pg. 168, 169, 177.
"These things I believe:
That government should butt out.
That freedom is our most precious commodity and if we are not eternally vigilant, government will take it all away.
That individual freedom demands individual responsibility.
That government is not a necessary good but an unavoidable evil.
That the executive branch has grown too strong, the judicial branch too arrogant and the legislative branch too stupid.
That political parties have become close to meaningless.
That government should work to insure the rights of the individual, not plot to take them away.
That government should provide for the national defense and work to insure domestic tranquillity.
That foreign trade should be fair rather than free.
That America should be wary of foreign entanglements.
That the tree of liberty needs to be watered from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
That guns do more than protect us from criminals; more importantly, they protect us from the ongoing threat of government.
That states are the bulwark of our freedom.
That states should have the right to secede from the Union.
That once a year we should hang someone in government as an example to his fellows."
-Lyn Nofziger-
[Franklyn C. Nofziger] (1924-2006) American journalist, political consultant, author, Press Secretary for President Reagan
Source: 11/9/99 issue of the Federalist Digest
Some of the fuctions that government performs may be unavoidable. The institution itself, however...
And "fair trade" by whose definition...?
And individuals are the bulwark of our freedom.
And governments don't have rights, but only delegated authority. State governments have the authority to secede -- or to support the people's secession, really -- because the federal government hasn't been delegated the authority to stop them.
"Any single man must judge for himself whether circumstances warrant obedience or resistance to the commands of the civil magistrate; we are all qualified, entitled, and morally obliged to evaluate the conduct of our rulers. This political judgment, moreover, is not simply or primarily a right, but like self-preservation, a duty to God. As such it is a judgment that men cannot part with according to the God of Nature. It is the first and foremost of our inalienable rights without which we can preserve no other."
-John Locke
(1632-1704) English philosopher and political theorist
"The wish, which ages have not yet subdued
In man, to have no master save his mood."
-Lord Byron-
[George Gordon Noel Byron] (1788-1824), The 6th Baron Byron of Rochdale
"The liberal insists that the individual must remain so supreme as to make the State his servant."
-Wayne Morse-
(1900-1974) U.S. Senator
Source: New Republic, 22 July 1946
That's the "classical liberal", of course...
"The 'strength' of the People becomes weak when we don't 'exercise' our rights."
-Eric Schaub-
Editor/Publisher of Liberty Quotes
"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."
-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)
"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 nation which signs this [UN] Charter can justly maintain that any of its acts are its own business, or within its own domestic jurisdiction, if the security council says that these acts are a threat to the peace."
-William Carr-
National Education Association, Associate Secretary
Source: One World In The Making,1946
"The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of people."
-Justice William O. Douglas-
(1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: The Court Years, 1939-1975, 1980
"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
"Taxes should be continued by annual or biennial reenactments, because a constant hold, by the nation, of the strings of the public purse is a salutary restraint from which an honest government ought not wish, nor a corrupt one to be permitted, to be free."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"The NRA believes America's laws were made to be obeyed and that our Constitutional liberties are just as important today as 200 years ago. And by the way, the Constitution does not say Government shall decree the right to keep and bear arms. The Constitution says 'The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.' "
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
Source: NRA HQ
"People sometimes rationalize their greed by saying that it is all for the good of their children but this is nothing but an excuse they use to make their despicable actions appear respectable and praiseworthy."
-Democritus-
(460-370 BC) Greek philosopher
"In almost every act of our lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business or in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind."
-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)
"Provided I do not write about the government, or about religion, or politics, or morals, or those in power, or public bodies, or the Opera, or the other state theatres, or about anybody who is active in anything, I can print whatever I want."
-Pierre-Augustin Beaumarchais-
(1732-1799) French playwright, watchmaker, inventor, musician, diplomat, fugitive, spy, publisher, arms dealer, satirist, financier, and revolutionary
"There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice."
-Charles-Louis De Secondat-
(1689-1755) Baron de Montesquieu
Source: The Spirit of the Laws, 1748
"There is one, and only one, thing in modern society more hideous than crime -- namely, repressive justice."
-Simone Weil-
(1909-1943)
Source: Human Personality
"Wise men are instructed by reason;
men of less understanding, by experience;
the most ignorant, by necessity;
the beasts, by nature."
-Marcus Tullius Cicero-
(106-43 B.C.) Roman Statesman, Philosopher and Orator
"I heartily accept the motto, that government is best which governs least ... Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which I also believe, that government is best which governs not at all; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have."
-Henry David Thoreau-
(1817-1862) American author, poet, philosopher, polymath, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and transcendentalist
Source: his book, On The Duty of Civil Disobedience, 1849
"[You have Rights] antecedent to all earthly governments: Rights, that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws; Rights, derived from the Great Legislator of the universe."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, 1765
"If you believe it reprehensible to possess the means and will to use lethal force to repel a criminal assault, how can you call upon another to do so for you?"
-Jeffrey R. Snyder-
American attorney, author
Source: A Nation of Cowards, 113 Public Interest 40, 52 (Fall 1993)
"Governments need armies to protect them against their enslaved and oppressed subjects."
-Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi-
(1828-1910) Russian writer
1893
"No free man shall ever be de-barred the use of arms. The strongest reason for the people to retain their right to keep and bear arms is as a last resort to protect themselves against tyranny in government."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: [Falesly attributed] While the first sentence is found in the proposed Virginia Constitution, the second sentence is not found. The quote is not found in any of his speeches, personal correspondence, or diaries. Nor has the quote ever been cited in law journals by Second Amendment legal scholars.
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
Source: Common Sense, February 14, 1776
"If the opposition (citizen) disarms, well and good. If it refuses to disarm, we shall disarm it ourselves."
-Josef Stalin-
(1879-1953) Communist leader of the USSR
"We hold it for a fundamental and undeniable truth, that religion, or the duty we owe our Creator and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence. The religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate. This right is in its nature an unalienable right."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
"...So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men."
-Voltaire-
[François Marie Arouet] (1694-1778) French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher
Source: Philosophical Dictionary, 1764
"Odious ideas are not entitled to hide from criticism behind the human shield of their believers' feelings."
-Richard Stallman-
"Thus the criminal ceases to be a person, a subject of rights and duties, and becomes merely an object on which society can work. And this is, in principle, how Hitler treated the Jews. They were objects; killed not for ill desert but because, on his theories, they were a disease in society. If society can mend, remake, and unmake men at its pleasure, its pleasure may, of course, be humane or homicidal. The difference is important. But, either way, rulers have become owners."
-C. S. Lewis-
(1898-1963), British novelist
Source: Willing Slaves of the Welfare State, first published in The Observer on July 20, 1958
"Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
"Whenever they burn books, they will also, in the end, burn human beings."
-Heinrich Heine-
(1797-1856) German poet, journalist, essayist, literary critic
Source: Almansor: A Tragedy, 1823
"Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have... a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean the characters and conduct of their rulers."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
"Large and permanent military establishments ... are forbidden by the principles of free government, and against the necessity of which the militia were meant to be a constitutional bulwark."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Fourth Annual Message, November 4, 1812
"Freedom of thought and freedom of speech in our great institutions are absolutely necessary for the preservation of our country. The moment either is restricted, liberty begins to wither and die..."
-John Peter Altgeld-
(1847-1902)
Source: 1897
"Another not unimportant consideration is, that the powers of the general government will be, and indeed must be, principally employed upon external objects, such as war, peace, negotiations with foreign powers, and foreign commerce. In its internal operations it can touch but few objects, except to introduce regulations beneficial to the commerce, intercourse, and other relations, between the states, and to lay taxes for the common good. The powers of the states, on the other hand, extend to all objects, which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, and liberties, and property of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the state."
-Joseph Story-
(1779-1845) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: Commentaries on the Constitution, 1833
"Heretics have been hated from the beginning of recorded time; they have been ostracized, exiled, tortured, maimed and butchered; but it has generally proved impossible to smother them; and when it has not, the society that has succeeded has always declined."
-Judge Learned Hand-
(1872-1961), Judge, U. S. Court of Appeals
Source: Speech, 1955
"The history of the welfare state is the history of public enterprise pushing out private organization. The impact was largely unintentional, but natural and inevitable. Higher taxes left individuals with less money to give; government’s assumption of responsibility for providing welfare shriveled the perceived duty of individuals to respond to their neighbors’ needs; and the availability of public programs gave recipients an alternative to private assistance, one which did not challenge recipients to reform their destructive behavior."
-Doug Bandow-
(1954- ) American columnist, author, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute
Source: National Service -- or Government Service?, Policy Review, P. 34, September-October, 1996
"Many of you are well enough off that ... the tax cuts may have helped you. We're saying that for America to get back on track, we're probably going to cut that short and not give it to you. We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good."
-Hillary Clinton-
(1947- ) Wife of President Bill Clinton, US Senator (NY-D)
Source: speaking at a Democratic party fundraiser in San Francisco, June 28, 2004.
"The tendency of taxation is to create a class of persons who do not labor, to take from those who do labor the produce of that labor, and to give it to those who do not labor."
-William Cobbett-
(1763-1835) English pamphleteer, farmer, journalist
"The cult of the omnipotent state has millions of followers in the United States. Americans of today view their government in the same way as Christians view their God; they worship and adore the state and they render their lives and fortunes to it. Statists believe that their lives -- their very being -- are a privilege that the state has given to them. They believe that everything they do is -- and should be -- dependent on the consent of the government. Thus, statists support such devices as income taxation, licensing laws, regulations, passports, trade restrictions, and the like."
-Jacob G. Hornberger-
American author, journalist, politician, founder and president of the Future of Freedom Foundation
Source: Waco And The Cult Of The Omnipotent State, The Tyranny Of Gun Control, 69 (Future Of Freedom Foundation 1997).
"The politicians don’t just want your money. They want your soul. They want you to be worn down by taxes until you are dependent and helpless."
-James Dale Davidson-
National Taxpayers Union
"Government is saying to the average citizen every January 1: 'For the next five months you’ll be working for us, for goals we shall determine. Is that clear? After May 5 you may look after your own needs and ambitions, but report back to us next January. Now move along.' ... If nearly half of what you make is spent by someone else, that means that half your work time is spent working for someone else. Call me a radical, but I think that comes dangerously close to being a form of indentured servitude."
-Richard Armey-
(1940- ) U.S. Congressman (R-TX) (1985–2003), House Majority Leader (1995–2003).
Source: THE FREEDOM REVOLUTION
"Subsidies entail politicians’ taking the citizen’s paycheck and then using it to buy his submission."
-James Bovard-
(1956- ) American author, lecturer
Source: Harebrained Pot and Wheat Decisions, January 18, 2006
"Thus, if there exists a law which sanctions slavery or monopoly, oppression or robbery, in any form whatever, it must not even be mentioned. For how can it be mentioned without damaging the respect which it inspires? Still further, morality and political economy must be taught from the point of view of this law; from the supposition that it must be a just law merely because it is a law.
Another effect of this tragic perversion of the law is that it gives an exaggerated importance to political passions and conflicts, and to politics in general."
-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)
"The root of the evil... lay not in corruption but in the system which bred it, the alliance between industrialists and politicians which produced benefits in the form of tariffs, public lands, and federal subsidies."
-Samuel P. Hays-
Source: The Response to Industrialism 1885-1914, p. 26, describing the view of E.L. Godkin, who founded the weekly Nation
"The best way to put more money in people's wallets is to leave it there in the first place."
-Edwin Feulner-
(1941- ) Founder and President of the Heritage Foundation
"At first it was the incomes of corporations, then of rich citizens, then of well-provided widows and opulent workers, and finally the wealth of housemaids and the tips of waitresses. This is all in line with the ability to pay doctrine. The poor, simply because there are more of them, have more ability to pay than the rich."
-Frank Chodorov-
(1887-1966) American author, publisher
Source: The Income Tax: Root pf All Evil
"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. [It] has made the individual vastly more dependent on the State."
-W. H. Chamberlin-
(1897-1969) American historian, journalist, author
"If I have worked harder and built myself a good house while you have been content to live in a hovel, the tax gatherer now comes annually to make me pay a penalty for my energy and industry by taxing me more than you. If I have saved while you wasted, I am [taxed] while you are exempt. If a man built a ship, we make him pay for his temerity as though he had done injury to the state; if a railroad be opened, down comes the tax collector upon it as though were a public nuisance.... We punish with a tax the man who covers barren fields with ripening grain; we fine him who puts up machinery and him who drains a swamp. To abolish these taxes would be to lift the whole enormous weight of taxation from productive industry.... The state would say to the producer, 'Be as industrious, as thrifty, as enterprising as you choose. You shall have your full reward!' "
-Henry George-
(1839-1897) American political economist
Source: Progress And Poverty (1879)
"We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
"It is wrong to take half or more of what people earn; wrong to force some people to pay for the support of others, threatening them with jail if they refuse (are in “noncompliance”)."
-Tom Bethel-
Source: A Flat Tax Is Gonna Come, The American Spectator, P. 19, April, 1996.
"The income tax is the biggest single intrusion suffered by the American people. It forces every worker to be a bookkeeper, to open his records to the government, to explain his expenses, to fear conviction for a harmless accounting error. Compliance wastes billions of dollars. It penalizes savings and creates an enormous drag on the U.S. economy. It is incompatible with a free society, and we aren’t libertarians if we tolerate it."
-Harry Browne-
(1933-2006) American libertarian writer, politician, and free-market investment analyst. Libertarian candidate for US President 1996 & 2000
Source: Pamphlet: Harry Browne, Why I’m Running for President. 1995.
"We used to be a free people. Now we are hedged in by millions of laws. Harassed by a plague of opportunistic lawyers. Harmed by regulations meant for our protection. Unnecessarily taxed to pay for a suffocating bureaucracy. Drowning in petty paperwork. Stifled by “rights” that rarely benefit anyone."
-Joan Beck-
Columnist
Source: Houston Chronicle, February 6, 1995
"The men who administer public affairs must first of all see that everyone holds onto what is his, and that private men are never deprived of their goods by public men."
-Marcus Tullius Cicero-
(106-43 B.C.) Roman Statesman, Philosopher and Orator
"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 inquisitorial features, it will provide penalties. It will create a complicated machinery. Under it businessmen 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. They will compel men of business to show their books and disclose the secrets of their affairs. They will dictate forms of bookkeeping. They will require statements and affidavits. On the one hand the inspector can blackmail the taxpayer and on the other, he can profit by selling his secret to his competitor."
-Richard Evelyn Byrd, Sr.-
(1860–1925) Lawyer, politician and newspaperman, Virginia Speaker of the House of Delegates (1908-1914)
Source: Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates, 1910, predicting the consequences of a federal income tax
"The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax."
-Albert Einstein-
(1879-1955) Physicist and Professor, Nobel Prize 1921
"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
"Who could impose such socialistic confiscatory rates?"
-William E. Borah-
(1865-1940) United States Senator (R-Idaho)
Source: denying the possibility that income tax could ever exceed 9%
"The median family of four ... paid $4,722 in federal taxes last year. That’s enough to pay for a new curtain for the secretary of commerce’s office, to bribe a farmer not to plant 38 acres with corn ... seven weeks of salary for a Customs man assigned to save us from the terror of high-quality, low priced foreign TV sets, or the subsidy on 6,000 bushels of wheat to prop up the Soviet regime. Surely civilization would collapse without such essential services."
-Alan Bock-
(1944-2011) Senior editorial writer and former editorial page editor for the Orange County Register, columnist, contributing editor at Liberty magazine
Source: Orange County Register
"The people themselves, not their government, should be trusted with spending their own money and making their own decisions."
-Richard Armey-
(1940- ) U.S. Congressman (R-TX) (1985–2003), House Majority Leader (1995–2003).
Source: THE FREEDOM REVOLUTION
"War, what is it good for? With the same 'socialist' elites backing both sides, it's good for business. It's good for creating chaos and destruction. It's good for launching new global organizations, in the aftermath; organizations that exert a level of control and reach that didn't exist before. It's good for launching organizations like the United Nations and the European Union and the World Trade Organization -- dedicated to Globalism, which in turn is dedicated to planned civilization, in which the individual is demeaned and the group is All. Freedom is demeaned; and dominance by the few over the many is hailed as peace in our time."
-Jon Rappoport-
American author, investigative reporter, writer
Source: Socialism exposed: thick lipstick on a global pig, 19 June 2018
"Men desire to have some share in the management of public affairs chiefly on account of the importance which it gives them."
-Adam Smith-
(1723-1790) Scottish philosopher and economist
Source: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations par. IV.7.160
"By the time the (16th) Amendment had been approved by the states, the Rockefeller Foundation was in full operation...about the same time that Judge Kenesaw Landis was ordering the breakup of the Standard Oil monopoly...John D...not only avoided taxes by creating four great tax-exempt foundations; he used them as repositories for his 'divested' interests...made his assets non-taxable so that they might be passed down through generations without...estate and gift taxes...Each year the Rockefellers can dump up to half their incomes into their pet foundations and deduct the "donations" from their income tax."
-Gary Allen-
(1936-86) American journalist
Source: in his 1976 book "The Rockefeller File"
"The Internal Revenue Service is everything the so-called tax protesters said it was; nonresponsive, unable to withstand scrutiny, tyrannical, and oblivious to the rule of law and the U.S. Constitution."
-Joseph Banister-
CPA, former IRS Criminal Investigator
Source: quoted by Sarah Foster, The Power to Destroy, IRS Special Agent Challenges System, WORLDNETDAILY, March 26, 1999
"The apportionment of taxes on the various descriptions of property is an act which seems to require the most exact impartiality; yet there is, perhaps, no legislative act in which greater opportunity and temptation are given to a predominant party to trample on the rules of justice. Every shilling which they overburden the inferior number is a shilling saved to their own pockets."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
"Social Security is an unfunded pay-as-you-go system, fundamentally flawed and analogous in design to illegal pyramid schemes. Government accounting creates the illusion of a trust fund, but in fact, excess receipts are spent immediately. The government’s own actuaries predict the system will be bankrupt by 2030, but Social Security could face financial crisis as early as 2014. Moreover, Social Security’s relatively poor rate of return makes the program an increasingly worse investment for today’s young worker. ... The system design itself is fundamentally flawed and cannot be repaired. It must instead be replaced by one derived from free markets and operated by free citizenry making individual economic decisions in their own self-interest. ... Reform is long overdue. If we fail to act soon, our children will either inherit a bankrupt system or be forced to pay an impossibly high level of taxes. Only private pensions with individual property rights to accumulate fund balances can create a secure pension system. Chile, which privatized its system in 1981, provides evidence of such a system’s effectiveness."
-Karl Borden-
Professor of financial economics at University of Nebraska
Source: The CATO Project on Social Security, DISMANTLING THE PYRAMID: THE WHY AND HOW OF PRIVATIZING SOCIAL SECURITY, August 14, 1995
"Our tax system is based on individual self-assessment and voluntary compliance."
-Mortimer Caplin-
Source: Internal Revenue Audit Manual (1975)
"We also need to encourage Americans to become more fiscally responsible themselves. We can do this by redesigning our tax system into an expenditure tax with a single flat rate. ... We have to substantially reduce the size and scope of the federal government, fundamentally increase the role of the states in choosing their own practices, and bring decision-making closer to the people, not to unelected administrators. These steps are crucial to getting our nation on a path of fiscal, political and constitutional responsibility."
-Edwin Feulner-
(1941- ) Founder and President of the Heritage Foundation
"[R]evenues drive expenditures, not the inverse. ... tax evasion represents a net benefit to everybody ... A statue should be erected to the unknown tax evader."
-Pierre Lemieux-
Source: In Praise of the Unknown Tax Evader, NATIONAL POST, February 27, 2002
"If you mind your own business, you won't be minding mine."
-Hank Williams-
(1923-1953) Legendary country music singer
"I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging the future but by the past."
-Patrick Henry-
(1736-1799) US Founding Father
March 23, 1775
Source: Speech on the Stamp Act, Virginia Convention
"The Act of Congress which we are impugning before you is communistic in its purposes and tendencies, and is defended here upon principles as communistic, socialistic - what shall I call them - populistic as ever have been addressed to any political assembly in the world."
-Joseph H. Choate-
(1832-1917) attorney who successfully challenged the Income Tax Act of 1894
Source: United States Supreme Court, Pollock v. Farmers Loan & Trust Co. (1898)
"I believe there is a limit beyond which free speech cannot go, but it's a limit that's very seldom mentioned. It's the point where free speech begins to collide with the right to privacy. I don't think there are any other conditions to free speech. I've got a right to say and believe anything I please, but I haven't got a right to press it on anybody else. .... Nobody's got a right to be a nuisance to his neighbors."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"Character is not the enemy of self-expression and personal freedom, it is their necessary precondition."
-James Q. Wilson-
Source: On Character, 1995
"The most efficacious method of dealing with deviancy is to ignore, to the furthest point of our tolerance, those items which we find offensive."
-Ilbert Geis-
"An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself."
-Joseph Pulitzer-
(1847-1911) Hungarian-born American newspaper publisher after whom the Pulitzer Prize was named.
"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 Darrow-
"What censorship accomplishes, creating an unreal and hypocritical mythology, fomenting an attraction for forbidden fruit, inhibiting the creative minds among us and fostering an illicit trade. Above all, it curtails the right of the individual, be he creator or consumer, to satisfy his intellect and his interest without harm. In our law-rooted society, we are not the keeper of our brother's morals -- only of his rights."
-Judith Crist-
(1922- ) US Film Critic
Source: Censorship: For And Against, 1971
"In our country are evangelists and zealots of many different political, economic and religious persuasions whose fanatical conviction is that all thought is divinely classified into two kinds -- that which is their own and that which is false and dangerous."
-Justice Robert H. Jackson-
(1892-1954), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
"Everything secret degenerates, even the administration of justice;
nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity."
-Lord Acton-
[John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton] (1834-1902), First Baron Acton of Aldenham
Source: Letter, 23 January 1861
"Government has no other end than the preservation of property."
-John Locke-
(1632-1704) English philosopher and political theorist
"Travel is lethal to prejudice."
-Mark Twain
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910) American author and humorist
"Without criticism and reliable and intelligent reporting, the government cannot govern."
-Walter Lippmann-
(1889-1974) American writer, journalist, and political commentator
Source: Speech, International Press Institute Association, London, 27 May 1965
"What a state of society is this
in which freethinker is a term of abuse,
and in which doubt is regarded as sin?"
-William Winwood Reade-
(1838-1875) English philosopher, historian, anthropologist and explorer
Source: The Martyrdom of Man, 1872
"I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive."
-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
"Socialism of any type leads to a total destruction of the human spirit."
-Alexander Solzhenitsyn-
(1918-2008) Russian novelist, Soviet dissident, imprisoned for 8 years for critizing Stalin in a personal letter, Nobel Prize for Literature, 1970
"Liberty is never out of bounds or off limits; it spreads wherever it can capture the imagination of men."
-E. B. White-
(1899-1985) American writer, contributor to "The New Yorker" magazine
Source: The Points of My Compass, 1960
-Michael Ellner-
"Enlightened by a benign religion, professed, indeed, and practiced in various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man, acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter -- with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people? Still one thing more... a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US Presidentbr>SSource: First Inaugural Address, 1801
"The right to defy an unconstitutional statute is basic in our scheme. Even when an ordinance requires a permit to make a speech, to deliver a sermon, to picket, to parade, or to assemble, it need not be honored when it’s invalid on its face."
-Justice Potter Stewart-
(1915-1985) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
Source: Walker v. Birmingham, 1967
"Revolution is not something fixed in ideology, nor is it something fashioned to a particular decade. It is a perpetual process embedded in the human spirit."
-Abbie Hoffman-
(1936-1989) American political and social activist, anarchist, and revolutionary who co-founded the Youth International Party ("Yippies")
"We've got to teach history based not on what's in fashion but what's important. If we forget what we did, we won't know who we are. I'm warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
Source: Ronald Reagan in his farewell address in January 1989
"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)
To say nothing of the man who desires to rule...
"The secret of liberty is to enlighten men, as that of tyranny is to keep them in ignorance."
-Maximilien Robespierre
"It is not the business of the law to make anyone good or reverent or moral or clean or upright."
-Murray N. Rothbard-
(1926-1995) Dean of the Austrian School of Economics
"In the recommendation to admit indiscriminately foreign emigrants of every description to the privileges of American citizens on their first entrance into our country, there is an attempt to break down every pale which has been erected for the preservation of a national spirit and a national character; and to let in the most powerful means of perverting and corrupting both the one and the other."
-Alexander Hamilton-
Source: Alexander Hamilton, The Examination, No. 9 (January 18, 1802).
"To admit foreigners indiscriminately to the rights of citizens the moment they put foot in our country would be nothing less than to admit the Grecian horse into the citadel of our liberty and sovereignty."
-Alexander Hamilton-
Source: Alexander Hamilton, The Examination, No. 9 (January 18, 1802)
Al Hamilton, wrong again. Who could have predicted? We hold self-evidently that rights -- universal and unalienable -- belong to "all men", and that this government was expressly instituted to secure those rights FOR "all men". Why the hell else would we keep the dangerous thing around, ferchrissake?!? 'Course, if he'd been referring to, say, central banks or forced-wealth-redistributive entitlements, he'd have been spot on. But then he wouldn't have been Al Hamilton...
"The safety of a republic depends essentially on the energy of a common national sentiment; on a uniformity of principles and habits; on the exemption of the citizens from foreign bias and prejudice, and on the love of country which will almost invariably be found to be closely connected with birth, education, and family. The opinion advanced in Notes on Virginia [by Thomas Jefferson] is undoubtedly correct, that foreigners will generally be apt to bring with them attachments to the persons they have left behind; to the country of their nativity, and to its particular customs and manners. They will also entertain opinions on government congenial with those under which they have lived; or, if they should be led hither from a preference to ours, how extremely unlikely is it that they will bring with them that temperate love of liberty, so essential to real republicanism?"
-Alexander Hamilton-
Source: Alexander Hamilton, The Examination, No. 8 (January 12, 1802).
"What can be more reasonable than that when crowds of them [immigrants] come here, they should be forced to renounce everything contrary to the spirit of the Constitution[?]"
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: James Madison, House of Representatives, Naturalization Bills (January 1, 1795); Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner, eds., The Founders’ Constitution, Volume Two: Preamble through Article I, Section 8, Clause 4 (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000), 577
"When we are considering the advantages that may result from an easy mode of naturalization, we ought also to consider the cautions necessary to guard against abuses. It is no doubt very desirable that we should hold out as many inducements as possible for the worthy part of mankind to come and settle amongst us, and throw their fortunes into a common lot with ours. But why is this desirable? Not merely to swell the catalogue of people. No, sir, it is to increase the wealth and strength of the community; and those who acquire the rights of citizenship without adding to the strength or wealth of the community are not the people we are in want of … I should be exceedingly sorry, sir, that our rule of naturalization excluded a single person of good fame that really meant to incorporate himself into our society; on the other hand, I do not wish that any man should acquire the privilege, but such as would be a real addition to the wealth or strength of the United States."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: James Madison, House of Representatives, Rule of Naturalization (February 3-4, 1790); Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner, eds., The Founders’ Constitution, Volume Two: Preamble through Article I, Section 8, Clause 4 (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000), 562
"[T]he policy or advantage of [immigration] taking place in a body (I mean the settling of them in a body) may be much questioned; for, by so doing, they retain the language, habits, and principles (good or bad) which they bring with them. Whereas by an intermixture with our people, they, or their descendants, get assimilated to our customs, measures, and laws: in a word, soon become one people."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: George Washington, Letter to John Adams (November 15, 1794)
"If aliens might be admitted indiscriminately to enjoy all the rights of citizens at the will of a single state, the Union might itself be endangered by an influx of foreigners, hostile to its institutions, ignorant of its powers, and incapable of a due estimate of its privileges."
-Justice Joseph Story-
(1779-1845) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution, Book 3, §1098 (1833); Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner, eds., The Founders’ Constitution, Volume Two: Preamble through Article I, Section 8, Clause 4 (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000), 619.
"[N]othing can be more opposed [to American principles] than the maxims of absolute monarchies. Yet, from such, we are to expect the greater number of emigrants. They will bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth; or, if able to throw them off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness, passing, as is usual, from one extreme to another. It would be a miracle were they to stop precisely at the point of temperate liberty. These principles, with their language, they will transmit to their children. In proportion to their numbers, they will share with us the legislation. They will infuse into it their spirit, warp and bias its direction, and render it a heterogenous, incoherent, distracted mass."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query 8 (1783)
"[T]here is a wide difference between closing the door altogether and throwing it entirely open; between a postponement of fourteen years and an immediate admission to all the rights of citizenship. Some reasonable term ought to be allowed to enable aliens to get rid of foreign and acquire American attachments; to learn the principles and imbibe the spirit of our government; and to admit of at least a probability of their feeling a real interest in our affairs."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: Alexander Hamilton, The Examination, No. 8 (January 1802).
"All the property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages. He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
Source: letter to Robert Morris, 25 December 1783, Ref: Franklin Collected Works, Lemay, ed., 1082
"Every species of government has its specific principles. Ours perhaps are more peculiar than those of any other in the universe. It is a composition of the freest principles of the English constitution, with others derived from natural right and natural reason."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query 8 (1783)
"The freemen of America will remember, that it is very easy to change a free government into an arbitrary, despotic, or military one: but it is very difficult, almost impossible to reverse the matter -- very difficult to regain freedom once lost."
-Freeman’s Journal-
Source: Freeman’s Journal (Philadelphia), March 5, 1788
"Before the creation of the welfare state, immigrants who came to this country were for the most part attracted by America’s reputation as a land of freedom and opportunity. Laws and customs that then prevailed required immigrants to carve out their individual destinies by their own labor, perseverance, intelligence, and determination."
-James Thornton-
Source: Six Great Immigrants, The New American, February 19, 1996, p. 47
"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-
(1870-1945) American libertarian author, editor, educational theorist, Georgist, social critic
"If you look at Washington, you see permanently camped on the banks of the Potomac spread around in concentric circles an army representing thousands of selfish interests. The sole purpose of their presence is to plunder, by hook or crook, the public treasury for the benefit of their particular people or corporations."
-Charley Reese-
(1937-2013) American syndicated columnist
Source: The “Me” Method Of Government., Conservative Chronicle, P. 17, July 31, 1996
"The Radical creed, as I understand it, is this: We have not abandoned our old belief in liberty, justice, and Self-help, but we say that under certain conditions the people cannot help themselves, and that then they should be helped by the State representing directly the whole people. In giving this State help, we make three conditions: first, the matter must be one of primary social importance; next, it must be proved to be practicable; thirdly, the State interference must not diminish self-reliance. Even if the chance should arise of removing a great social evil, nothing must be done to weaken those habits of individual self-reliance and voluntary association which have built up the greatness of the English people."
-Arnold J. Toynbee-
(1889-1975) British historian
Source: Lectures on The Industrial Revolution in England (1884), p. 219. "Are Radicals Socialists?"
"[D]ecade after decade, through taxes and regulations, governments at all levels took ever-increasing control over people’s lives, wealth, and property. The control grew exponentially, decade after decade. The rationale was that the control was necessary -- for society, for the poor, for the nation, even for freedom itself. Americans continued living their life of the lie: they continued believing that the more control government exercised over their lives and property, the freer they became."
-Jacob G. Hornberger-
American author, journalist, politician, founder and president of the Future of Freedom Foundation
Source: Terrorism—Public And Private, The Tyranny Of Gun Control, 74 (Future Of Freedom Foundation 1997).
"Politicians need human misery. ... Government’s a disease masquerading as its own cure."
-L. Neil Smith-
American writer
Source: The Probability Broach, 129 (Tor 1980).
"Here in America, government began as a tool to assure freedom. It gradually turned into a hideously expensive political toy designed to redistribute your wealth and control most aspects of your business and private life."
-Mark Skousen-
(1947-) American economist, investment analyst, newsletter editor, college professor and author
"The world is governed more by appearance than realities so that it is fully as necessary to seem to know something as to know it."
-Daniel Webster-
(1782-1852) US Senator
"The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history."
-Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel-
(1770-1831) German philosopher
"[T]he power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbor and perhaps my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest fonctionaire possesses who wields the coercive power of the state and on whose discretion it depends whether and how I am to be allowed to live or to work? And who will deny that a world in which the wealthy are powerful is still a better world than one in which only the already powerful can acquire wealth?"
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
Source: The Road To Serfdom, P. 115
"Libertarianism is not and does not pretend to be a complete moral, or aesthetic theory; it is only a political theory, that is, the important subset of moral theory that deals with the proper role of violence in social life. Political theory deals with what is proper or improper for government to do, and government is distinguished from every other group in society as being the institution of organized violence. Libertarianism holds that the only proper role of violence is to defend person and property against violence, that any use of violence that goes beyond such just defense is itself aggressive, unjust, and criminal. Libertarianism, therefore, is a theory which states that everyone should be free of violent invasion, should be free to do as he sees fit except invade the person or property of another. What a person does with his or her life is vital and important, but is simply irrelevant to libertarianism."
-Murray N. Rothbard-
"If every one of those good words — liberty, equality, fraternity, democracy, human rights — has been called "bourgeois", what on earth does that leave for us?
-Fang Lizhi-
"The individual is not accountable to society for his actions, insofar as these concern the interests of no person but himself."
-John Stuart Mill-
(1806-1873) English philosopher and economist
"Unlike ordinary legislation, a constitution is enacted by the people themselves in their sovereign capacity and is therefore the paramount law."
-Justice Frank Cruise Haymond-
(1887-1972) West Virginia Court of Appeals (1946-1972)
Source: Lance v. Board of Education, 170 S.E.2d 783, 793 (1969) (dissent)
"There is no difference in principle, ... between the economic philosophy of Nazism, socialism, communism, and fascism and that of the American welfare state and regulated economy."
-Jacob G. Hornberger-
American author, journalist, politician, founder and president of the Future of Freedom Foundation
Source: paraphrasing F. A. Hayek, Terrorism—Public and Private, THE TYRANNY OF GUN CONTROL, 74 (Future of Freedom Foundation 1997).
"That no government, so called, can reasonably be trusted, or reasonably be supposed to have honest purposes in view, any longer than it depends wholly upon voluntary support."
-Lysander Spooner-
(1808-1887) Political theorist, activist, abolitionist
"Today, of course, the redistributive powers of Congress are everywhere -- except in the Constitution. The result is the feeding frenzy that is modern Washington, the Hobbesian war of all against all as each tries to get his share and more of the common pot the tax system fills. ... It is unseemly and wrong. More than that, it is unconstitutional, whatever the slim and cowed majority on the New Deal Court may have said."
-Roger Pilon-
Vice President for Legal Affairs for the Cato Institute
Source: Restoring Constitutional Government, Cato’s Letter #9, P. 10, Published By The Cato Institute (1995)
"Suum cuique"
[To each his own, to each according to his merits.]
-Latin Proverb-
"The more that is given, the less people will work for themselves, and the less they work, the more their poverty will increase."
-Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi-
(1828-1910) Russian writer
"While the legislature has power, in the most comprehensive manner, to regulate the carrying and use of firearms, it has no power to constitute it a crime for a person, alien or citizen, to possess a revolver for the legitimate defense of himself and his property, said right being expressly granted by section 5, art. 2, of the State Constitution, to every person."
-Michigan Supreme Court-
Source: People v. Zerillo, 219 Mich. 635, 189 N.W. 927, 24 A.L.R. 1115 at headnote 1 (1922).
"There's no valid evidence whatsoever to indicate that depriving law-abiding American citizens of the right to own firearms would in any way lesson crime or criminal activity. ... The National Sheriffs Association unequivocally opposes any legislation that has as its intent the confiscation of firearms ... or the taking away from law-abiding American citizens their right to purchase, own, and keep arms."
-National Sheriffs Association-
"[N]one are so emboldened as thugs who, in spite of the law are armed, in confrontations with law-abiding citizens who, because of the law, are disarmed."
-The New American-
Source: THE NEW AMERICAN, p. 42, February 5, 1996
"[Legislation] cannot constitutionally result in the prohibition of the possession of those arms which, by the common opinion and usage of law-abiding people, are proper and legitimate to be kept upon private premises for the protection of person and property."
-Michigan Supreme Court-
Source: People v. Brown, 235 N.W. 245, 246 -- 47 (1931)
"No law shall abridge the right of the citizen to keep and bear arms for security and defense of themselves, their families, their property and the state."
-New Mexico Constitution-
Source: New Mexico Constitution, Article II, Section 6
"It is our opinion that an ordinance may not deny the people the constitutionally guaranteed right to bear arms, and to that extent the ordinance under consideration is void."
-New Mexico Court of Appeals-
Source: City of Las Vegas v. Moberg, 82 N.M. 626, 627, 485 P.2d 737, 738 (1971)
"A sword by itself does not slay; it is merely the weapon used by the slayer."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter LXXXVII: Some arguments in favor of the simple life, line 30
"The right of every citizen to keep and bear arms for the defense of his home, person, or property, or in aid of the civil power when thereto legally summoned, shall not be called in question, but the legislature may regulate or forbid carrying concealed weapons."
-Mississippi Constitution-
Source: Mississippi Constitution, Article III, Section 12
"That the right of every citizen to keep and bear arms in defense of his home, person and property, or when lawfully summoned in aid of the civil power, shall not be questioned; but this shall not justify the wearing of concealed weapons."
-Missouri Constitution-
Source: Missouri Constitution, Article I, Section 23
"All persons are by nature free and independent, and have certain inherent and unalienable rights; among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and the right to keep and bear arms for security or defense of self, family, home and others, and for lawful common defense, hunting, recreational use, and all other lawful purposes, and such rights shall not be denied or infringed by the state or any subdivision thereof."
-Nebraska Constitution-
Source: Nebraska Constitution, Article I, Section 1
"Every citizen has the right to keep and bear arms for security and defense, for lawful hunting and recreational use and for other lawful purposes."
-Nevada Constitution-
Source: Nevada Constitution, Article I, Section 11(1)
"The end move in politics is always to pick up a gun."
-R. Buckminster Fuller-
[Richard Buckminster Fuller] (1895-1983) American visionary, designer, architect, poet, author, and inventor
Source: Attributed
"The framers gave us the Second Amendment not so we could go deer or duck hunting but to give us a modicum of protection against congressional tyranny."
-Walter E. Williams-
(1936- ) Columnist, Professor of Economics at George Mason University
"It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favor of vegetarianism while the wolf remains of a different opinion."
-William Ralph Inge-
(1860-1954) English author, Anglican prelate
"[G]overnment theft of private money and redistribution by a government elite is communism not democracy. ... Communism has already been tried for over 70 years, and it doesn't work because people work to support themselves, not their neighbors. When the rewards are confiscated and redistributed to others, people produce less or stop producing altogether. The quantity of 'goods in common' declines until the system finally collapses and everybody is hungry, not just 'the poor.' Then totalitarianism steps in to force people to produce (ask the Russians, the Poles, the Estonians)."
-Don Hull-
Source: The UnReported News, August 27, 1995
"These are the rules of big business...Get a monopoly; let society work for you; and remember that the best of all business is politics..."
-Frederick C. Howe-
Source: revealed the strategy of using government in a 1906 book, "Confessions of a Monopolist"
It's the only one with a FORCE monopoly.
"It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it."
-Upton Sinclair-
Source: 1935, "I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked"
"Since time immemorial, governments have claimed moral superiority. Yet they use laws to loot the productive wealth of working people and build palaces, pyramids, religious monuments, military forces, and other symbols of their power."
-Marisa Manley-
Source: Why Laws Backfire, THE FREEMAN, p.546, August 1996
"The Liberal Democrat remain steadfast in their belief that liberty must not be sacrificed on the altar of security and regrets the climate of fear that has been fostered by the approach of both Labour and the Conservatives to issues of domestic and international security. We believe that liberty, justice and the separation of powers are essential to achieving lasting security and that abandoning liberties, particularly in the face of unconventional threats from criminals and terrorists, will only serve to make Britain both less free and less secure."
-Robin Lawrence-
UK Liberal Democrat Park Ward Councillor
Source: Liberal Democrat Conference, Sep. 13, 2008
"I can never join with my voice in the toast which I see in the papers attributed to one of our gallant naval heroes. I cannot ask of heaven success, even for my country, in a cause where she should be in the wrong. Fiat justitia, pereat coelum. My toast would be, may our country be always successful, but whether successful or otherwise, always right."
-John Quincy Adams-
“History shows that governments sometimes seek to regulate our lives finely, acutely, thoroughly, and exhaustively. In our own time and place, criminal laws have grown so exuberantly and come to cover so much previously innocent conduct that almost anyone can be arrested for something. If the state could use these laws not for their intended purposes but to silence those who voice unpopular ideas, little would be left of our First Amendment liberties, and little would separate us from the tyrannies of the past or the malignant fiefdoms of our own age. The freedom to speak without risking arrest is ‘one of the principal characteristics by which we distinguish a free nation.’”
-Justice Neil Gorsuch-
dissenting, Nieves v. Bartlett (2019)
"Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us? The constitutional theory is that we the people are the sovereigns, the state and federal officials only our agents. We who have the final word can speak softly or angrily. We can seek to challenge and annoy, as we need not stay docile and quiet. The situation might have indicated that Colten's techniques were ill-suited to the mission he was on, that diplomacy would have been more effective. But at the constitutional level speech need not be a sedative; it can be disruptive."
-Justice William O. Douglas-
dissenting, Colten v. Kentucky
[S]tatism is a system of institutionalized violence and perpetual civil war. It leaves men no choice but to fight to seize political power -- to rob or be robbed, to kill or be killed. ... Statism survives by looting; a free country survives by production.
-Ayn Rand-
[Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum] (1905-1982) Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter
Source: The Roots Of War
"Taxes are not levied for the benefit of the taxed."
-Robert A. Heinlein-
(1907-1988) American writer
"There are two distinct classes of men in the nation, those who pay taxes, and those who receive and live upon the taxes."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
"Trade is profitable. Conflict is costly."
-DownsizeDC-
"The people suffer from famine because of the multitude of taxes consumed by their superiors. It is through this that they suffer famine."
-Lao-Tzu-
[Li Erh] (570-490 BC) 'Old Sage', Father of Taoism
Source: Tao Te Ching
"To see what is in front of one's nose requires a constant struggle."
-George Orwell-
[Eric Arthur Blair] (1903-1950) British author
"Outwardly we have a Constitutional government. We have operating within our government and political system, another body representing another form of government, a bureaucratic elite which believes our Constitution is outmoded."
-Senator William Jenner-
(1908-1985) U.S. Senator (IN-R)
"The practical objection to Puritanism, as to every form of fanaticism, is that it singles out certain evils as so much worse than others that they must be suppressed at all costs. The fanatic fails to recognise that the suppression of a real evil, if carried out too drastically, produces other evils which are even greater."
-Bertrand Russell-
[Bertrand Arthur William Russell] (1872-1970) Philosopher, educator
Source: The Recrudescence of Puritanism, in Sceptical Essays, 1928
"The majority, oppressing an individual, is guilty of a crime, abuses its strength, and by acting on the law of the strongest breaks up the foundations of society."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Thomas Jefferson to Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours, 1816
"Force is the antithesis of freedom, but force must be used, if only to defend against other force."
-Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
"It takes a very long time to learn that a courtroom is the last place in the world for learning the truth."
-Alice Koller-
Source: The Stations of Solitute (1990)
"Psychologically, it is important to understand that the simple fact of being interviewed and investigated has a coercive influence. As soon as a man is under cross-examination, he may become paralyzed by the procedure and find himself confessing to deeds he never did. In a country where the urge to investigate spreads, suspicion and insecurity grow."
-Joost A. Merloo-
Source: The Rape of the Mind, 1956
"May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the Signal of arousing men to burst the chains, under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings & security of self-government.
That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man . . . The palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of god. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them."
-Thomas Jefferson-
July 4, 1826, marking the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence -- then he died
"The freemen of America did not wait till usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise, and entangled the question in precedents. They saw all the consequences in the principle, and they avoided the consequences by denying the principle."
-James Madison-
1785
"Precedents do not stop where they begin, but, however, narrow the path upon which they enter, they create for themselves a highway whereon they may wander with the utmost latitude."
-Velleius Paterculus-
Roman historian, (19 BC-31 AD)
"Our dreams of bringing the whole of human history under the control of the human will are ironically refuted by the fact that no group of idealists can easily move the pattern of history toward the desired goal of peace and justice. The recalcitrant forces in the historical drama have a power and persistence beyond our reckoning."
-Reinhold Niebuhr-
"The basic problem is simply that the Congress has become professionalized. It has interest much higher than ever existed before in remaining in office. It has a bureaucracy that is serving it. It is much more subject to the power of individualized pressure groups as opposed to the unorganized feelings of the majority of the citizens."
-Justice Antonin Scalia-
(1936-2016) American jurist, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
Source: American Enterprise Institute forum, “A Constitutional Convention: How Well Would It Work?” May 23, 1979
"The vices of the rich and great are mistaken for error; and those of the poor and lowly, for crimes."
-Lady Marguerite Blessington-
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!"
-Patrick Henry-
(1736-1799) US Founding Father
1775
"The first duty of government is to protect the citizen from assault. Unless it does this, all the civil rights and civil liberties in the world aren't worth a dime."
-Richard A. Viguerie-
(1933- ) American writer
"I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample under foot."
-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"
"To those who feel that their values are THE values, the less controlled systems necessarily present a spectacle of "chaos," simply because such systems respond to a diversity of values. The more successfully such systems respond to diversity, the more "chaos" there will be, by definition, according to the standards of ANY specific set of values -- other than diversity or freedom as values. Looked at another way, the more self-righteous observers there are, the more chaos (and 'waste') will be seen."
-Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
"Men love liberty because it protects them from control and humiliation by others, thus affording them the possibility of dignity; they loathe liberty because it throws them back on their own abilities and resources, thus confronting them with the possibility of insignificance."
-Thomas Szasz-
(1920-2012) Hungarian-American Professor of Psychiatry, Author, Libertarian
Source: The Untamed Tongue, 1990
"This new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe. Hither have they fled, not from the tender embraces of the mother, but from the cruelty of the monster; and it is so far true of England, that the same tyranny which drove the first emigrants from home, pursues their descendants still."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
Source: Common Sense, 1776
"People with real power never fear of losing it. People with control think of little else."
-Joss Whedon-
"Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it."
-Thomas Sowell-
"One of the grand fallacies of our time is that something beneficial should be subsidized."
-Thomas Sowell-
"When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear."
-Thomas Sowell-
"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. Know-it-alls in the school system do not lose one dime or one hour's sleep if their bright ideas turn out to be all wrong, or even disastrous, for the child."
-Thomas Sowell-
"Some of the most vocal critics of the way things are being done are people who have done nothing themselves, and whose only contributions to society are their complaints and moral exhibitionism."
-Thomas Sowell-
'Moral exhibitionism', AKA 'virtue signaling'
"People who think that they are being 'exploited' should ask themselves whether they would be missed if they left, or whether people would say: 'Good riddance.'"
-Thomas Sowell-
"It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication and a government bureaucracy to administer 'universal health care.'"
-Thomas Sowell-
"Idiot, n. A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling. The Idiot's activity is not confined to any special field of thought or action, but "pervades and regulates the whole." He has the last word in everything; his decision is unappealable. He sets the fashions and opinion of taste, dictates the limitations of speech and circumscribes conduct with a dead-line."
-Ambrose Bierce-
"In a Society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behaviour is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law. When human beings are governed by 'thou shalt not', the individual can practise a certain amount of eccentricity: when they are supposedly governed by 'love' or 'reason', he is under continuous pressure to make him behave and think in exactly the same way as everyone else."
-George Orwell-
"Anything other than free enterprise always means a society of compulsion and lower living standards, and any form of socialism strictly enforced means dictatorship and the total state. That this statement is still widely disputed only illustrates the degree to which malignant fantasy can capture the imagination of intellectuals."
-Lew Rockwell-
[Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.] (1944- ) Chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute
Source: September 11 and the Anti-Capitalistic Mentality: An Interview with Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr
By: Myles Kantor, FrontPageMagazine.com | Tuesday, March 12, 2002
"Communism, avowedly secularistic and materialistic, has no place for God. This I could never accept,... I strongly disagreed with Communism’s ethical relativism… there are no fixed, immutable principles; consequently, almost anything — force, violence, murder, lying — is a justifiable means to the ‘millennial’ end."
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-
(1929-1968) US civil rights leader
Source: Stride Toward Freedom
"We may define a Puritan as a man who holds that certain kinds of acts, even if they have no visible bad effects upon others than the agent, are inherently sinful, and, being sinful, ought to be prevented by whatever means is most effectual - the criminal law if possible, and, if not that, then public opinion backed by economic pressure."
-Bertrand Russell-
[Bertrand Arthur William Russell] (1872-1970) Philosopher, educator
Source: The Recrudescence of Puritanism, in Sceptical Essays, 1928
"The Democratic constituency is just like a herd of cows. All you have to do is lay out enough silage and they come running. That’s why I became an operative working with Democrats. With Democrats all you have to do is make a lot of noise, lay out the hay, and be ready to use the ole cattle prod in case a few want to bolt the herd."
-James Carville-
[Chester James Carville Jr.] (1944-) American political commentator, Democrat political consultant, campaign manager for Bill Clinton
Source: A Chalice of Miracles, by John W. Casperson (2008)
"Public business, my son, must always be done by somebody. It will be done by somebody or other. If wise men decline it, others will not; if honest men refuse it, others will not."
-John Adams-
"One tells as few lies as possible only by telling as few lies as possible, and not by having the least possible opportunity to do so."
-Franz Kafka-
"It is natural that citizens of great and powerful nations see themselves, collectively speaking, as immortal and immune to the processes that have brought down other illustrious nations and peoples."
-James Thornton-
Source: On The Edge Of Anarchy, The New American, October 16, 1995 At 33.
"The wealthy, not only by private fraud but also by common laws, do every day pluck and snatch away from the people some part of their daily living. Therefore, when I consider and weigh in my mind these commonwealths which nowadays do flourish, I perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men in procuring their own commodities under the name and authority of the commonwealth. They invent and devise all means and crafts, first how to keep safely without fear of losing that which they have unjustly gathered together, and next how to hire and abuse the work and labor of the people for as little money and effort as possible."
-Thomas More-
(1478-1535) English lawyer, social philosopher, author, statesman, Renaissance humanist. Executed by King Henry VIII. Canonized in 1935.
Source: Utopia
And yet as long as they haven't the power to suppress competition...
"You only have power over people as long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything he's no longer in your power -- he's FREE again."
-Alexander Solzhenitsyn-
(1918-2008) Russian novelist, Soviet dissident, imprisoned for 8 years for critizing Stalin in a personal letter, Nobel Prize for Literature, 1970
"Beggars should be abolished. It annoys one to give to them, and it annoys one not to give to them."
-Friedrich Nietzsche-
(1844-1900) German philosopher, cultural critic, poet, philologist
Source: "On the Pitying," Thus Spake Zarathustra
"Laws directed against opinions affect the generous-minded rather than the wicked, and are adapted less for coercing criminals than for irritating the upright."
-Baruch Spinoza-
(1632-1677) Dutch philosopher of Sephardi Portuguese origin
Source: cited in Atlantic Monthly, January 1955
"We feel that an American citizen of voting age and good character should have the right to purchase without restriction a handgun, pistol, revolver, rifle, shotgun, or like item without interference by a government body."
-National Police Officers' Association of America-
"All warfare is based on deception. There is no place where espionage is not used. Offer the enemy bait to lure him."
-Sun Tzu-
(c.500-320 B.C.) name used by the unknown Chinese authors of the sophisticated treatise on philosophy, logistics, espionage, strategy and tactics known as 'The Art of War'
"These, and other grievances, were patiently borne by the people of Texas, untill they reached that point at which forbearance ceases to be a virtue. We then took up arms in defence of the national constitution."
-Texas Declaration of Independence-
March 2, 1836
"Any group or 'collective,' large or small, is only a number of individuals. A group can have no rights other than the rights of its individual members. In a free society, the 'rights' of any group are derived from the rights of its members through their voluntary individual choice and contractual agreement, and are merely the application of these individual rights to a specific undertaking... A group, as such, has no rights."
-Ayn Rand-
[Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum] (1905-1982) Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter
Source: Collectivized Rights
"If the Constitution is adopted the Union will be in fact and in theory an association of States of a Confederacy."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: "The Federalist Papers", vol LX
"Don't forget that pure democracy is a form of collectivism -- it readily sacrifices individual rights to majority wishes. Since it involves no constitutional bill of rights, or at least, no working and effective one, the majority-of-the-moment can and does vote away the rights of the minority-of-the-moment, even of a single individual. This has been called 'mob rule,' the 'tyranny of the majority' and many other pejorative names. It is one of the greatest threats to liberty, the reason why America's founding fathers wrote so much so disparagingly of pure democracy."
-Bert Rand-
"It's a sad and stupid thing to have to proclaim yourself a revolutionary just to be a decent man."
-David Harris-
(1946-) American journalist, author
Source: documentary 'Carry It On' (1970)
"You have to love a nation that celebrates its independence every July 4, not with a parade of guns, tanks, and soldiers who file by the White House in a show of strength and muscle, but with family picnics where kids throw Frisbees, the potato salad gets "iffy", and the flies die from happiness. You may think you have overeaten, but it is patriotism."
-Erma Bombeck-
"No other theory is adequate to explain or comprehend the Declaration of Independence. It is the product of the spiritual insight of the people. We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first. Unless we cling to that, all our material prosperity, overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren sceptre in our grasp. If we are to maintain the great heritage which has been bequeathed to us, we must be like-minded as the fathers who created it. We must not sink into a pagan materialism. We must cultivate the reverence which they had for the things that are holy. We must follow the spiritual and moral leadership which they showed. We must keep replenished, that they may glow with a more compelling flame, the altar fires before which they worshiped."
-Calvin Coolidge-
(1872-1933) 30th US President
"Let the Fourth of July always be a reminder that here in this land, for the first time, it was decided that man is born with certain God-given rights; that government is only a convenience created and managed by the people, with no powers of its own except those voluntarily granted to it by the people. We sometimes forget that great truth, and we never should. Happy Fourth of July."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
Source: Independence Day, 1981
"Every culture and every religion of what we call the civilized world carries, in one form or another, a mythos or story about a time in the past or future when humans lived or will live in peace and harmony. Whether it's referred to as Valhalla or Eden, Shambala or 'A Thousand Years of Peace,' the Satya Yuga or Jannat, stories of past or coming times of paradise go hand-in-hand with hierarchical cultures. Such prophecies were clearly in the minds of America's Founders when they first discussed integrating Greek ideas of democracy, Roman notions of a republic, Masonic utopian ideals, and the Iroquois Federation's constitutionally organized egalitarian society, which was known to Jefferson, Washington, Adams, and Franklin. The creation of the United States of America brought into the world a dramatic new experiment in how people could live together in a modern state."
-Thom Hartmann-
Source: Unequal Protection: The rise of corporate dominance and theft of human rights, by Thom Hartmann
"United teams win. Divided teams lose. Play to our multicultural strengths. Stop preaching the messages of hate and division in your campaign themes. And now, a message to both parties. Please remember that those who have participated in the United We Stand America movement are intelligent, thinking, responsible people. They are not unprogrammed robots who can be emotionally swayed by your negative ads or messages of fear and divisiveness. Bluntly, you will have to face the issues to get their votes. Mud wrestling and messages aimed at destroying your opponent and his loved ones won't work. I love the American people and I am sure that you do, too. I owe them a debt I can never repay and so do you. Today, their Government is a mess, and they want it fixed. By joining together as the owners of this great country, they can solve these problems. As I've said before, it is time to clean out the barn — join us — pick up a shovel. Get to work!"
-Ross Perot-
"Unfortunately, over the course of this century Congress has largely ignored the constitutional limits on its power. And the courts, especially after Franklin Roosevelt threatened to pack the Supreme Court with six additional members, have only abetted the resulting growth of government by fashioning constitutional doctrines that have no basis whatever in the Constitution. As a consequence, many of the programs Congress oversees today are without constitutional foundation, having resulted from acts that Congress had no authority."
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)
"There can be no greater error than to expect, or calculate upon real favours from Nation to Nation. 'Tis an illusion which experience must cure, which a just pride ought to discard."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: Farewell Address, 1796. Reference: Maxims of George Washington, Schroeder, ed. (71)
"[T]he enshrinement of constitutional rights necessarily takes certain policy choices off the table.... Undoubtedly some think that the Second Amendment is outmoded in a society where our standing army is the pride of our Nation, where well-trained police forces provide personal security, and where gun violence is a serious problem. That is perhaps debatable, but what is not debatable is that it is not the role of this Court to pronounce the Second Amendment extinct."
-Justice Antonin Scalia-
(1936-2016) American jurist, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
Source: District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008)
"Hypocrisy in anything whatever may deceive the cleverest and most penetrating man, but the least wide-awake of children recognizes it, and is revolted by it, however ingeniously it may be disguised."
-Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi-
(1828-1910) Russian writer
"... judicial verbicide is calculated to convert the Constitution into a worthless scrap of paper and to replace our government of laws with a judicial oligarchy."
-Senator Sam Ervin-
(1896-1985) United States Senator NC-D (1954-1974)
"Those who cannot afford to sue currently have no protection of their property rights if they come in conflict with a regulation."
-Steve Symms-
US Senator (R-ID)
1991
"Let therefore every man, that, appealing to his own heart, feels the least spark of virtue or freedom there, think that it is an honor which he owes himself, and a duty which he owes his country, to bear arms."
-Thomas Pownhall-
"That is why we give to children a proverb, or that which the Greeks call Chreia, to be learned by heart; that sort of thing can be comprehended by the young mind, which cannot as yet hold more. For a man, however, whose progress is definite, to chase after choice extracts and to prop his weakness by the best known and the briefest sayings and to depend upon his memory, is disgraceful; it is time for him to lean on himself. He should make such maxims and not memorize them. For it is disgraceful even for an old man, or one who has sighted old age, to have a note-book knowledge. "This is what Zeno said." But what have you yourself said? "This is the opinion of Cleanthes." But what is your own opinion? How long shall you march under another man's orders? Take command, and utter some word which posterity will remember. Put forth something from your own stock."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter XXXIII
"Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
Source: Prejudices: Third Series, 1922
"Honest differences are a healthy sign of progress."
-Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi-
(1869-1948)
"The Swiss are well armed and enjoy great freedom."
-Niccolo Machiavelli-
(1469-1527) Italian Statesman and Political Philosopher
Source: The Prince (1513)
"The sentiment that modern day ordinary Canadians do not need firearms for protection is pleasant but unrealistic. To discourage responsible deserving Canadians from possessing firearms for lawful self-defence and other legitimate purposes is to risk sacrificing them at the altar of political correctness."
-Don Demetrick-
Alberta Provincial Court Judge
"Whereas civil rulers, not having their duty to the people duly before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as military forces, which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow citizens, the people are confirmed by the article in their right to keep and bear their private arms."
-Tench Coxe-
(1755-1824) American political economist
Source: Writing as "A Pennsylvanian," in "Remarks On The First Part Of The Amendments To The Federal Constitution,"
in the _Philadelphia Federal Gazette,_ June 18, 1789, p.2 col.1
"Is your life worth protecting? If so, whose responsibility is it to protect it? ... How can you rightfully ask another human being to risk his life to protect yours, when you will assume no responsibility yourself?"
-Jeffrey R. Snyder-
American attorney, author
Source: A Nation of Cowards, 113 Public Interest (Fall 1993).
"The single most frightening thing you encounter is confidence-in-government because it's so common."
-Rick Gaber-
Libertarian writer
"The essential characteristic of all government, whatever its form, is authority. There must, in every instance, be, on the one hand, governors, and on the other hand, those who are governed. And the authority of governors, directly or indirectly, rest in all cases ultimately on FORCE. Government, in its last analysis, is organized force. Not necessarily or invariably organized, armed force, but the will of a few men, of many men, or of a community prepared by organization to realize its own purposes with reference to the common affairs of the community. Organized, that is, to rule, to dominate."
-Woodrow Wilson-
(1856-1924) 28th US President
Source: The State, by Woodrow Wilson (1918), p.572
"The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world."
-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 was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself — anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face ... was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime ..."
-George Orwell-
[Eric Arthur Blair] (1903-1950) British author
Source: his book, '1984'
"Imagine the traditionalist as living in synopticon — a suspect that is the target of 24/7 viewing, indoctrination, and conditioning by progressive auditors. In other words, a 40-45 percent minority of Americans is relentlessly lectured, sermonized, demonized, and neutered by a 360-degree ring of prying institutional overseers. There is no escape. There is no respite. There is no quarter given."
-Victor Davis Hanson-
(1953-) American classicist, military historian, columnist, farmer
Source: The Progressive Synopticon, November 18th, 2018
"Public virtue cannot exist in a nation without private, and public virtue is the only foundation of republics. There must be a positive passion for the public good, the public interest, honor, power and glory, established in the minds of the people, or there can be no republican government, nor any real liberty: and this public passion must be superior to all private passions."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: letter to Mercy Warren, 1776
"The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy. The people do not want virtue, but are the dupes of pretended patriots."
-Elbridge Gerry-
(1744-1814) of Massachusetts, Signer of the Declaration of Independence and Member of the Constitutional Convention
Source: Speech in the Constitutional Convention, 1787
"Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat."
-John Lehman-
Secretary of the Navy, 1981-1987
"Sentimentality is a superstructure covering brutality."
-Carl Gustav Jung-
(1875-1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology
"It is doubtful if the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and 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
"It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness."
-Sigmund Freud-
Source: Civilization and Its Discontents
"Hold on, my friends, to the Constitution and to the Republic for which it stands. Miracles do not cluster and what has happened once in 6,000 years, may not happen again. Hold on to the Constitution, for if the American Constitution should fail, there will be anarchy throughout the world."
-Daniel Webster-
(1782-1852) US Senator
1851
"Progressives did not like the antiquated thinking that saw the Constitution as a barrier to government expansion. The 'living Constitution' was born. That benign-sounding phrase (coined later) was conjured up to justify changing the Constitution, without formal amendment, from a limit on power to a blank check. What was impermissible to the federal government by an earlier interpretation became permissible once the Constitution was construed as a evolving document. But by that philosophy, the Constitution is no limit on government power at all. A constitutional government that defines its own powers is a contradiction in terms."
-Sheldon Richman-
"The superior man acquaints himself with many sayings of antiquity And many deeds of the past, In order to strengthen his character thereby."
-I Ching-
"Since a politician never believes what he says, he is quite surprised to be taken at his word."
-Charles De Gaulle-
(1890-1970) French president and military leader
"A nation, therefore, has no right to say to a province: You belong to me, I want to take you. A province consists of its inhabitants. If anybody has a right to be heard in this case it is these inhabitants. Boundary disputes should be settled by plebiscite."
-Ludwig von Mises-
Omnipotent Government, p. 90
"No people and no part of a people shall be held against its will in a political association that it does not want."
-Ludwig von Mises-
Nation, State, and Economy, p. 34
"Liberalism knows no conquests, no annexations; just as it is indifferent towards the state itself, so the problem of the size of the state is unimportant to it. It forces no one against his will into the structure of the state. Whoever wants to emigrate is not held back. When a part of the people of the state wants to drop out of the union, liberalism does not hinder it from doing so. Colonies that want to become independent need only do so. The nation as an organic entity can be neither increased nor reduced by changes in states; the world as a whole can neither win nor lose from them."
-Ludwig von Mises-
Nation, State, and Economy, pp. 39–40
"The size of a states territory therefore does not matter."
-Ludwig von Mises-
Nation, State, and Economy, p. 82
"The right of self-determination in regard to the question of membership in a state thus means: whenever the inhabitants of a particular territory, whether it be a single village, a whole district, or a series of adjacent districts, make it known, by a freely conducted plebiscite, that they no longer wish to remain united to the state to which they belong at the time, but wish either to form an independent state or to attach themselves to some other state, their wishes are to be respected and complied with. This is the only feasible and effective way of preventing revolutions and civil and international wars."
-Ludwig von Mises-
Liberalism, p. 109
"If it were in any way possible to grant this right of self-determination to every individual person, it would have to be done."
-Ludwig von Mises-
Liberalism, pp. 109–10
"The situation of having to belong to a state to which one does not wish to belong is no less onerous if it is the result of an election than if one must endure it as the consequence of a military conquest."
-Ludwig von Mises-
Liberalism, p. 119
"It makes no difference where the frontiers of a country are drawn. Nobody has a special material interest in enlarging the territory of the state in which he lives; nobody suffers loss if a part of this area is separated from the state. It is also immaterial whether all parts of the states territory are in direct geographical connection, or whether they are separated by a piece of land belonging to another state. It is of no economic importance whether the country has a frontage on the ocean or not. In such a world the people of every village or district could decide by plebiscite to which state they wanted to belong."
-Ludwig von Mises-
Omnipotent Government, p. 92
"The prohibition law, written for weaklings and derelicts, has divided the nation, like Gaul, into three parts -- wets, drys, and hypocrites."
-Florence Sabin-
(1871-1953) American scientist
Source: Speech, February 9, 1931
"It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state."
-Bruce Schneier-
Source: Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World, 2000
"So long as there are earnest believers in the world, they will always wish to punish opinions, even if their judgment tells them it is unwise and their conscience tells them it is wrong."
-Walter Bagehot-
(1826-1877)
Source: Literary Studies
"When Michelle and I decided that I would run for President, it was because of a shared belief in the power of community and connection, a commitment to the idea that we are our brothers' keepers."
-Barack Hussein Obama-
(1961-) 44th President of the United States
Source: Campaign email sent by [email protected], Sep. 13, 2010
That's not community. That's animal husbrandry.
"The only vice that can not be forgiven is hypocrisy."
-William Hazlitt-
(1778 - 1830)
"I will have nought to do with a man who can blow hot and cold with the same breath."
-Aesop-
(c. 550 B.C.) legendary Greek fabulist
Source: The Man and the Satyr
"Hypocrisy is anything whatever may deceive the cleverest and most penetrating man, but the least wide-awake of children recognizes it, and is revolted by it, however ingeniously it may be disguised."
-Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi-
(1828-1910) Russian writer
"Once again prosperous and successful crime goes by the name of virtue; good men obey the bad, might is right and fear oppresses law."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: Tragedies, Hercules Furens (The Madness of Hercules), lines 251-253; (Amphitryon)
"Democracy is a form of religion, it is the worship of jackals by jack asses."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even where there is no river."
-Nikita Khrushchev-
(1894-1971) Premier of the Soviet Union
So what does that say about voters...?
"I once said cynically of a politician, 'He'll doublecross that bridge when he comes to it.'"
-Oscar Levant-
(1906-1972)
"Asked random questions about the First Amendment and how they would like to have it applied, if you believe in polls at all, the average American wants no part of it. But if you ask, 'What if we threw the Constitution away tomorrow?' the answer is 'No, that would be bad!' But living under the Constitution is another story altogether."
-Frank Zappa-
(1940-1993) American Musician
"I'm not here to say that the government is always right, but when the government tells you to do something, I'm sure you would all agree that I think you all recognize that is something you need to do."
-Kit Bond-
[Christopher Samuel "Kit" Bond] (1939-) US Senator (R-MO)
"... [T]he 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-
States Have Powers: The Powers of the People -- Hon. Dan Itse
"A society that puts equality... ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
"'Racism’ has been redefined to mean anyone opposing big government dependency welfare programs."
-Bill Federer-
(1957-) American writer, author
Source: 'The politics of race: It’s not black and white,' July 27, 2019
"There is a certain class of race-problem solvers who do not want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public."
-Booker T. Washington-
(1856-1915) Author
"My mother worked as a domestic, two, sometimes three jobs at a time because she didn’t want to be on welfare. She felt very strongly that if she gave up and went on welfare, that she would give up control of her life and of our lives, and I think she was probably correct about that. … But, one thing that she provided us was a tremendous example of what hard work is like."
-Dr. Ben Carson-
(1951-) American neurosurgeon, former presidential candidate, 17th United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development
"Too often when we talk about racial healing, we make the old assumption that government can heal the racial divide. … Republicans and Democrats – red, yellow, black and white – have to understand that we must individually, all of us, accept our share of responsibility. … It does not happen by dividing us into racial groups. It does not happen by trying to turn rich against poor or by using the politics of fear. It does not happen by reducing our values to the lowest common denominator. And friends, it does not happen by asking Americans to accept what’s immoral and wrong in the name of tolerance. "
-J. C. Watts, Jr.-
(1957- ) US Congressman from Oklahoma (R), former quarterback in the Canadian Football League
Source: Feb. 5, 1997
"It is a sad reminder that many in the media are not interested in journalism but progressive advocacy."
-Mollie Hemingway-
American columnist, political commentator, author
Source: Daily Caller, 18 July 2019
"Understanding of men can be warped and their affections changed by operations upon their passions and prejudices."
-William Henry Harrison-
(1773-1841), 9th U. S. President
Source: Inaugural Address, 1841
"[T]he greatest problem facing the United States today is not racism; it is the disappearance of the can-do attitude that built the country, ... We’ve lost the sense of individual responsibility for our problems, and that’s bad enough. But what’s worse, we’re losing faith in our ability to solve our problems. This acquired sense of helplessness is catastrophic, and it has paralyzed large swaths of the American public – rural, urban and suburban. … Encouraging dependence upon government not only creates generations of helpless people; it inures them to government’s ineffectiveness."
-Laura Hollis-
Source: OUR TRAGIC 'GOVERNMENT AS SAVIOR' MENTALITY, Aug 1, 2019
"Who vaunts his race, lauds what belongs to others."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: Tragedies, Hercules Furens (The Madness of Hercules), lines 340-341; (Lycus)
"The freedom to fail is vital if you’re going to succeed. Most successful people fail from time to time, and it is a measure of their strength that failure merely propels them into some new attempt at success."
-Michael Korda-
(1919-1973)
"Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it."
-George Orwell-
Source: George Orwell's '1984', 1949
"Your children’s children will live under communism. You Americans are so gullible. No, you won’t accept Communism outright, but we’ll keep feeding you small doses of Socialism until you will finally wake up and find that you already have Communism. We won’t have to fight you; We’ll so weaken your economy, until you fall like overripe fruit into our hands."
-Nikita Khrushschev-
Source: reportedly told to Ezra Taft Benson, Eisenhower’s Secretary of Agriculture, in 1959
"Kings … will … take possession of the children, who will be unaffected by the habits of their parents; these they will train in their own habits and laws."
-Plato-
(429-347 BC) Greek philosopher
Source: “Republic” (380 B.C.)
"For the past 30 years our nation’s spent $5 trillion trying to erase poverty, and the result, as you know, is that we didn’t get rid of it at all. In fact, we spread it. We destroyed the self-esteem of millions of people, grinding them down in a welfare system that penalizes moms for wanting to marry the father of their children, and penalizes moms for wanting to save money. Friends, that’s not right."
-J. C. Watts, Jr.-
(1957- ) US Congressman from Oklahoma (R), former quarterback in the Canadian Football League
Source: Feb. 5, 1997
"The classical Liberal, during the Revolutionary time, was a man who wanted less power for the king and more power for the people. He wanted people to have more say in the running of their lives and he wanted protection for the God-given rights of the people. He did not believe those rights were dispensations granted by the king to the people, he believed that he was born with them. Well, that today is the Conservative."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
Source: 1973
"My Son, Freedom is best, I tell thee true, of all things to be won. Then never live within the Bond of Slavery."
-William Wallace-
"At any particular moment in a man's life, he can say that everything he has done and not done, that has been done and not been done to him, has brought him to that moment. If he's being installed as Chieftain or receiving a Nobel Prize, that's a fulfilling notion. But if he's in a sleeping bag at ten thousand feet in a snowstorm, parked in the middle of a highway and waiting to freeze to death, the idea can make him feel calamitously stupid."
-William Least Heat-Moon-
"The fact is that libertarianism is not and does not pretend to be a complete moral or aesthetic theory; it is only a political theory, that is, the important subset of moral theory that deals with the proper role of violence in social life.
Political theory deals with what is proper or improper for government to do, and government is distinguished from every other group in society as being the institution of organized violence. Libertarianism holds that the only proper role of violence is to defend person and property against violence, that any use of violence that goes beyond such just defense is itself aggressive, unjust, and criminal. Libertarianism, therefore, is a theory which states that everyone should be free of violent invasion, should be free to do as he sees fit, except invade the person or property of another. What a person does with his or her life is vital and important, but is simply irrelevant to libertarianism.
It should not be surprising, therefore, that there are libertarians who are indeed hedonists and devotees of alternative lifestyles, and that there are also libertarians who are firm adherents of "bourgeois" conventional or religious morality. There are libertarian libertines and there are libertarians who cleave firmly to the disciplines of natural or religious law. There are other libertarians who have no moral theory at all apart from the imperative of non-violation of rights. That is because libertarianism per se has no general or personal moral theory.
Libertarianism does not offer a way of life; it offers liberty, so that each person is free to adopt and act upon his own values and moral principles. Libertarians agree with Lord Acton that 'liberty is the highest political end' — not necessarily the highest end on everyone's personal scale of values."
-Murray N. Rothbard-
"[H]e that thinks absolute power purifies men's blood, and corrects the baseness of human nature, need read the history of this, or any other age, to be convinced to the contrary."
-John Locke-
(1632-1704) English philosopher and political theorist
"[I]f society acknowledges that handguns have significant defensive value and can help save the lives of police officers and security guards, how can society deny that handguns can also help save the lives of other people?"
-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, 287 (1993)
"Thus perhaps the most dangerous of all socialist attacks on America in the 1990s is the onslaught to register and confiscate America's firearms. America cannot be subjugated to communism or a socialist dictatorship until Americans are first disarmed. Poland has strict gun control; so does Cambodia, Russia, and Red China. Over 100 million people were brutally slaughtered in those countries, but first they were disarmed. The danger to people when they can't own guns is far greater than any danger gun ownership can ever create."
-Donald S. McAlvaney-
Source: Toward a New World Order, 57 (2nd Ed. 1992)
"God requireth not a uniformity of religion."
-Roger Williams-
(1603-1684) Anglo-American clergyman, advocate for the separation of church and state, founder of the Rhode Island colony
Source: "A Plea for Religious Liberty" in The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, for Cause of Conscience (1644)
"Former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart noted (in his dissent of Abington Township, 1963) ‘if religious exercises are held to be impermissible activity in schools, religion is placed at an artificial and state-created disadvantage. Permission for such exercises for those who want them is necessary if the schools are truly to be neutral in the matter of religion. And a refusal to permit them is seen not as the realization of state neutrality, but rather as the establishment of a religion of secularism.'"
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
Source: Ronald Reagan radio address, Feb. 25, 1984
"If a State refused to let religious groups use facilities open to others, then it would demonstrate not neutrality but hostility toward religion. The Establishment Clause does not license government to treat religion and those who teach or practice it … as subversive of American ideals."
-US Supreme Court-
Source: The Supreme Court upheld the Equal Access Act by a vote of 8-1 in Westside Community Schools v. Mergens, June 4, 1990
"The believer is happy, the doubter is wise."
-Hungarian Proverb-
"Mistrust the people and they become untrustworthy."
-I Ching-
"License they mean when they cry, Liberty!
For who loves that, must first be wise and good."
-John Milton-
(1608-1674) English Poet
"Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance."
-C. S. Lewis-
(1898-1963), British novelist
"[T]he Swiss people are the best practitioners of the ideals of non-aggression. The Swiss national government posts are parttime positions. Most decisions are made at the canton (state) level. Swiss per capita income is the highest in the world, showing that non-aggression pays. How did the Swiss come to adopt a relatively non-aggressive constitution in an aggressive world? In the mid-1800s, they imitated our constitution and stuck with it!"
-Dr. Mary J. Ruwart-
(1949- )
Source: Healing Our World, Ch 22
"The same fact that Boccaccio offers in support of religion might be adduced in behalf of a republic: 'It exists in spite of its ministers.'"
-Heinrich Heine-
(1797-1856) German poet, journalist, essayist, literary critic
"It would indeed be ironic if, in the name of national defense, we would sanction the subversion of one of the liberties ... which makes the defense of the Nation worthwhile."
-United States v. Robel-
Source: United States v. Robel, 389 US 258, 264 (1967)
"We are sure living in a peculiar time. You get more for not working than you will for working, and more for not raising a hog than for raising it."
-Will Rogers-
(1879-1935) American humorist
"If I could have entertained the slightest apprehension that the Constitution framed by the Convention, where I had the honor to preside, might possibly endanger the religious rights of any ecclesiastical Society, certainly I would never have placed my signature to it."
-George Washington-
Source: United Baptist Churches of Virginia, May 10, 1789
"Well-meaning Americans in the name of freedom have taken freedom away. For the sake of religious tolerance, they’ve forbidden religious practice."
-Ronald Reagan-
Source: National Day of Prayer, May 6, 1982
"The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."
-W.B. Yeats-
"The decidedly Christian nature of these prayers must not be dismissed as the relic of a time when our Nation was less pluralistic than it is today. Congress continues to permit its appointed and visiting chaplains to express themselves in a religious idiom. … To hold that invocations must be nonsectarian would force the legislatures … and the courts … to act as … censors of religious speech. … Government may not mandate a civic religion that stifles any but the most generic reference to the sacred any more than it may prescribe a religious orthodoxy …"
-Justice Anthony Kennedy-
(1936-) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (1988-2018)
Source: Town of Greece, NY, v. Galloway et al, Justice Kennedy wrote in the decision, May 5, 2014
"In Torcaso v. Watkins, (1961), we did indeed refer to ‘secular humanism’ as a ‘religion.'"
-Justice Antonin Scalia-
(1936-2016) American jurist, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
Source: in Edwards v. Aguillard (1987)
"Among the religions in this country which do not teach what would generally be considered a belief in the existence of God are Buddhism, Taoism, ethical culture, secular humanism and others."
-Justice Hugo L. Black-
(1886-1971) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: Torcaso v Watkins (1961)
"The prosperity of commerce is now perceived and acknowledged by all enlightened statesmen to be the most useful as well as the most productive source of national wealth, and has accordingly become a primary object of its political cares."
-Alexander Hamilton-
Source: 1787
"Google, Amazon (AWS), Apple and other elitist 'alphabets' are controlled by global entities working in collusion through major stakeholders and executives for the benefit of foreign and domestic globalist agendas and not for the protection of their clients or user base. Their neo-Nazi ideology proliferates one world governance through technology. It’s a kind of tech socialism mixed with big brother in the cloud along with other mentally unstable ideas. Thus, independence from these ideologies, individuals and companies are required to maintain security and loyalty to our clients."
-Rich Granville-
CEO of Yippy.com
Source: Interview April 4, 2019
"I constantly long for a Left that doesn't reflexively abandon values simply because the Right adopts some bastardized version of them."
-Christopher Hudson-
And vice versa...
"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby."
-H.L. Mencken-
"[Any] act, a habit, an institution, a law, gives birth not only to an effect, but to a series of effects. Of these effects, the first only is immediate; it manifests itself simultaneously with its cause — it is seen. The others unfold in succession — they are not seen: it is well for us, if they are foreseen. Between a good and a bad economist this constitutes the whole difference — the one takes account of the visible effect; the other takes account both of the effects which are seen, and also of those which it is necessary to foresee."
-Frédéric Bastiat-
"The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you've got it made."
-Jean Giraudoux-
maybe...
"A government which lays taxes on the people not required by urgent public necessity and sound public policy is not a protector of liberty, but an instrument of tyranny. It condemns the citizen to servitude."
-Calvin Coolidge-
"Whosoever wishes to know about the world
must learn about it in its particular details.
Knowledge is not intelligence.
In searching for the truth be ready for the unexpected.
Change alone is unchanging.
The same road goes both up and down.
The beginning of a circle is also its end.
Not I, but the world says it: all is one.
And yet everything comes in season."
-Heraclitus-
(c.540-480 BC) Greek philosopher
"The First Amendment does not require students to leave their religion at the schoolhouse door. … If students can wear T-shirts advertising sports teams, rock groups or politicians, they can also wear T-shirts that promote religion. … Religion is too important to our history and our heritage for us to keep it out of our schools."
-Bill Clinton-
[William Jefferson Blythe III] (1946- ), 42nd US President
Source: James Madison High School, July 12, 1995
"Everyone has the right…to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media regardless of frontiers."
-United Nations-
Source: Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19, 1948
"A man should be upright, not be kept upright."
-Marcus Aurelius Antoninus-
(121 AD -180 AD) Roman Emperor, 161-180 AD
Source: Meditations, Book III, 5 (c.161-180 AD)
"You can’t, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty."
-Joseph Conrad-
(1857-1924)
"In the 1950’s [America was] the richest nation, the richest city on earth was Detroit. They voted for change and so now it is the poorest city in America. At the same time, the nation of South Korea, of all the nations on earth, was third from the bottom. Virtually the poorest nation on earth. It is now tenth from the top. If you understand the principle, the greater freedom, the greater the wealth, you can then put any nation [on this chart]. Now you can go to Tagusagopos, you can go to Buenos Aires, you can go to Cairo, you can go to Philadelphia and all you need to know is what percentage of the Gross Domestic Product is controlled by government, and the greater the government, the greater the poverty, and that’s all politics is about. Every day politicians say, 'I can make a better decision for you than you can for yourself, and let me take your money away from you and make it on your behalf' and thus make the nation poorer."
-Bob McEwen-
(1950-) US Congressman (OH-R) (1981-1993)
Source: http://www.conservative.org/cpac/archives/cpacarchivescpac-2010-bob-mcewen
"Freedom can't be kept for nothing. If you set a high value on liberty, you must set a low value on everything else."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: Letters to Lucilius, 65 A.D.
"Populism is rising because liberals have become unbearable, Okay? And I speak as a liberal… Liberals have become utterly, pathetically illiberal and it’s a massive problem. What’s the point of calling yourself a liberal if you don’t allow anyone else to have a different view? You know, this snowflake culture we operate in, this victimhood culture that everyone, has to think in a certain way, behave a certain way. Everyone has to have a bleeding heart… You say a joke 10 years ago that offended somebody you can never host the Oscars… So what’s happening around the world? Populism is rising because people are fed up with the PC culture. They’re fed up with the snowflake culture. They’re fed up with everyone being offended by everything… They just want to tell people, not just how to lead their life but if you don’t lead it the way I tell you to, It’s a kind of version of fascism. "
-Piers Morgan
(1965-) British journalist, television personality
Source: Daily Wire interview, Aug 17, 2019
"You will ruin no more lives as you ruined mine.
You will wring no more hearts as you wrung mine.
I will free the world of a poisonous thing.
Take that, you hound, and that! -- and that! -- and that! -- and that!"
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle-
(1859-1930) Scottish author, most noted for his stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes
Source: The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton, 1904
"An unexamined idea, to paraphrase Socrates, is not worth having, and a society whose ideas are never explored for possible error may eventually find its foundations insecure."
-Mark Van Doren-
(1894-1972) Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, professor, and critic
Source: Man’s Right to Knowledge, 1954
"The newspaper is of necessity something of a monopoly, and its first duty is to shun the temptations of monopoly. Its primary office is the gathering of news. At the peril of its soul it must see that the supply is not tainted. Neither in what it gives, nor in what it does not give, nor in the mode of presentation, must the unclouded face of truth suffer wrong. Comment is free but facts are sacred."
-C. P. Scott-
(1846-1932)
Source: Manchester Guardian, 6 May 1926
"A half truth is the worst of all lies, because it can be defended in partiality."
-Solon-
(c.638 BC-558 BC) Athenian statesman, lawmaker, Lyric poet, renowned as a founding father of the Athenian polis, one of the Seven Sages of Greece
550 B.C.
Source: Attributed
"No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expediency."
-Theodore Roosevelt-
(1858-1919) 26th US President
"A radical is one who speaks the truth."
-Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr.-
(1859-1924) Congressman (R-MN), father of famous aviator
June 15, 1957
"He who does not bellow out the truth when he knows the truth makes himself the accomplice of liars and forgers."
-Charles Peguy-
(1873-1914) French poet, essayist and editor
"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 person than he, if he had the power, would be in silencing mankind… 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-
(1806-1873) English philosopher and economist
Source: On Liberty, 1859
"The trouble with most of us is that we would rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism."
-Norman Vincent Peale-
(1898-1993) American minister, author
"I never did, or countenanced, in public life, a single act inconsistent with the strictest good faith; having never believed there was one code of morality for a public, and another for a private man."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
1809
"The superior man thinks of virtue; the small man thinks of comfort. The superior man thinks of the sanctions of law; the small man thinks of favors which he may receive."
-Confucius- (孔子 · Kongzi)
"When complaints are freely heard, deeply considered, and speedily reformed, then is the utmost bound of civil liberty obtained that wise men look for."
-John Milton
(1608-1674) English Poet
Source: Areopagitica, 1644
"Where the words of a constitution are unambiguous and in their commonly received sense lead to a reasonable conclusion, it should be read according to the natural and most obvious import of the framers, without resorting to subtle and forced construction for the purpose of limiting or extending its operation."
-A State Ex Rel. Torryson v. Grey-
Source: A State Ex Rel. Torryson v. Grey, 21 Nev. 378, 32 P. 190.
"Gun control advocates need to realize that passing laws that honest gun owners will not obey is a self-defeating strategy. Gun owners are not about to surrender their rights, and only the most foolish of politicians would risk the stability of the government by trying to use the force of the state to disarm the people."
-J. Neil Schulman-
Source: Los Angeles Times, June 8, 1992
"To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good."
-Alexander Solzhenitsyn-
(1918-2008) Russian novelist, Soviet dissident, imprisoned for 8 years for critizing Stalin in a personal letter, Nobel Prize for Literature, 1970
"[A] deep-rooted culture of incompetence and corruption has made it virtually impossible for government to function fairly and efficiently. And because most government employees are shielded by layers of protection, they couldn't care less. Never before in the history of this nation has there been a greater divide between a self-serving federal leviathan and millions of Americans... 'Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,' Ronald Reagan reminded us during his inaugural address in 1981. Nothing's changed since then, with one exception: It's gotten far worse."
-Arnold Ahlert-
American columnist
Aug. 4, 2015
"You taught me to be nice, so nice that now I am so full of niceness, I have no sense of right and wrong, no outrage, no passion."
-Garrison Keillor-
(1942- ) American author, humorist, musician, and radio personality
"Every State is known by the rights it maintains."
-Harold J. Laski-
(1893-1950) British political theorist, economist, author, and lecturer
Source: A Grammar of Politics, 1925
"...[T]here is no more dangerous experiment than that of undertaking to be one thing before a man's face and another behind his back."
-Robert E. Lee-
(1807-1870) General-in-Chief of the Confederate States army
"This is the fundamental fact on which the whole philosophy of individualism is based. It does not assume, as is often asserted, that man is egoistic or selfish or ought to be. It merely starts from the indisputable fact that the limits of our powers of imagination make it impossible to include in our scale of values more than a sector of the needs of the whole society, and that, since strictly speaking, scales of value can exist only in individuals minds, nothing but partial scales of values exist – scales which are inevitably different and often inconsistent with each other. From this the individualist concludes that the individuals should be allowed, within defined limits, to follow their own values and preferences rather than somebody else’s; that within these spheres the individual’s system of ends should be supreme and not subject to dictation by others. It is this recognition of the individual as the ultimate judge of his ends, the belief that as far as possible his own views ought to govern his actions, that forms the essence of the individualist position."
-F.A. Hayek-
The Road to Serfdom
"Happily for the busy lunatics who rule over us, we are permanently the United States of Amnesia. We learn nothing because we remember nothing."
-Gore Vidal-
"The argument for liberty is not an argument against organization, which is one of the most powerful tools human reason can employ, but an argument against all exclusive, privileged, monopolistic organization, against the use of coercion to prevent others from doing better."
-Friedrich Hayek-
"When people talk about traveling to the past, they worry about radically changing the present by doing something small, but barely anyone in the present really thinks that they can change the future by doing something small."
-From the Book of Face-
"The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart."
-Alexander Solzhenitsyn-
(1918-2008) Russian novelist, Soviet dissident, imprisoned for 8 years for critizing Stalin in a personal letter, Nobel Prize for Literature, 1970
"O, what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practice to deceive!"
-Sir Walter Scott-
(1771-1832) Scottish historical novelist, playwright, poet
Source: "Marmion", Canto VI, Stanza 17
"It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
"[T]he delegation of the government, in [a republic], to a small number of citizens elected by the rest ... [is] to refine and enlarge the public views by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
"It's a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it."
-W. Somerset Maugham-
(1874-1965)
"Men must have the right of choice, even to choose wrong, if he shall ever learn to choose right."
-Josiah C. Wedgwood-
(1872-1943) British Member of Parliament
"It is the eternal struggle between these two principles -- right and wrong -- throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time..."
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
"No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause, because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Federalist No. 10, November 23, 1787
"Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself."
-Ludwig Wittgenstein-
(1889-1951) Austrian-British philosopher
"The problem of power is how to achieve its responsible use rather than its irresponsible and indulgent use -- of how to get men of power to live for the public rather than off the public."
-Robert F. Kennedy-
(1925-1968), US Senator, Attorney General
Source: 'I Remember, I Believe,' The Pursuit of Justice, 1964
"Slavery is not wrong because it was badly run.
It's not wrong because the wrong people were in charge.
It's not wrong because it was inefficient.
It's not wrong because it was unequal.
It's not wrong because it was racist.
It's not wrong because many slaves were mistreated.
It's wrong because Other People Are Not Your Property."
-Mike Ruff-
"[T]he ignorance of the people is the footstool of despotism."
-St. George Tucker-
"A man must first govern himself ere he is fit to govern a family; and his family ere he be fit to bear the government of the commonwealth."
-Sir Walter Raleigh-
(1552-1618) British Poet, Courtier and Explorer, executed by King James I
"When the leader is morally weak and his discipline not strict, when his instructions and guidance are not enlightened, when there are no consistent rules, neighboring rulers will take advantage of this."
-Sun Tzu-
(c.500-320 B.C.) name used by the unknown Chinese authors of the sophisticated treatise on philosophy, logistics, espionage, strategy and tactics known as 'The Art of War'
"Liberty, like chastity, once lost, can never be regained in its original purity."
-Henry Wheeler Shaw-
(1818-1885) American humorist and lecturer
"Man's character is his fate."
-Heraclitus-
(c.540-480 BC) Greek philosopher
"Can you imagine working at the following Company? It has a little over 500 employees with the following statistics: 29 have been accused of spousal abuse. 7 have been arrested for fraud. 19 have been accused of writing bad checks. 117 have bankrupted at least two businesses. 3 have been arrested for assault. 71 cannot get a credit card due to bad credit. 14 have been arrested on drug-related charges. 8 have been arrested for shoplifting. 21 are current defendants in law suits. 84 were stopped for drunk driving in 1998 alone. Can you guess which organization this is? Give up? It's the 535 members of your United States Congress. The same group that perpetually cranks out hundreds upon hundreds of new laws designed to keep the rest of us in line."
-Jack Sharp-
Capitol Hill Blue editor
Source: Capitol Hill Blue editor Jack Sharp, researcher Marilyn Crosslyn, and private Investigator James Hargill.
"Arms observe no bounds; nor can the wrath of the sword, once drawn, be easily checked or stayed; war delights in blood."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: Tragedies, Hercules Furens (The Madness of Hercules), lines 403-405; (Lycus).
"Some conservatives are surprised to find people on the Left supporting the war in Afghanistan. It's not surprising at all…It is hard for the government to prosecute a war and not expand…Conservatives may think they can support war and oppose the expansion of the state, but that is like trying to square the circle. What makes them think they can contain the expansion?"
-Sheldon Richman-
Editor of The Freeman, published by The Foundation for Economic Education
Source: Liberty, Security, and the War on Terrorism (2010)
"War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking into the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent."
-George Orwell-
"In every war zone that I've been in, there has been a reality and then there has been the public perception of why the war was being fought. In every crisis, in every confrontation that has come my way, the issues have been far more complex than the public has been allowed to know."
-John le Carré-
Meh. It's simply about consolidating more power to those who have already managed to steal a considerable amount already...
"[Communist Goals for America:]
- Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of “separation of church and state.”
- Control schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda.
- Soften curriculum. Get control of teachers’ associations. Put party line in textbooks.
Control student newspapers.
- Infiltrate churches and replace revealed religion with “social” religion (i.e. “social justice,” “liberation theology”).
- Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a “religious crutch.”
- Discredit American culture.
- Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and divorce.
- Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as “normal, natural, healthy."
-Albert S. Herlong, Jr.-
(1909-1995) US Congressman (D-FL) (1949-1969)
Source: Democrat Congressman Albert S. Herlong, Jr., warned of the socialist-communist agenda infiltrating schools. He read into the Congressional Record, Jan. 10, 1963, the list of Communist goals for America (Vol 109, 88th Congress, 1st Session, Appendix, pp. A34-A35)
"God grant me the courage not to give up what I think is right even though I think it is hopeless."
-Chester W. Nimitz-
(1885-1966) Five-star Admiral of the United States Navy
"The bigger the information media, the less courage and information they allow. Bigness means weakness."
-Eric Sevareid-
(1912-1992) American newsman, journalist, author
Source: 1959
"Let's see socialism for what it is. Not in the abstract, but in reality. Socialism is:
The taking of money (taxes) from some people who work for it and giving it to others who don't work for it. On a grand scale.
The vast expansion of freebies doled out by central government. In order to create and sustain dependence.
The government protection of favored persons and corporations, permitting them and aiding them to expand their fortunes without limit, regardless of what crimes they commit in the process. (Monsanto would be a fine example.)
The squeezing out of those who would compete with the favored persons and corporations.
The dictatorship by and for the very wealthy, pretending to be the servant of the masses.
The lie that the dictatorship is being run by the masses.
The gradual lowering of the standard of living for the overwhelming number of people.
The propaganda claiming socialism is the path to a better world for all.
In other words, socialism is a protection racket and a long con and a heartless system of elite control, posing as the greatest good.
It is just another form of top-down tyranny -- as old as the hills."
-Jon Rappoport-
American author, investigative reporter, writer
Source: Socialism exposed: thick lipstick on a global pig, 19 June 2018
"Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply."
-Stephen Covey-
"One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain."
-Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
"The task of weaning various people and groups from the national nipple will not be easy. The sound of whines, bawls, screams and invective will fill the air as the agony of withdrawal pangs finds voice."
-Linda Bowles-
(1952-2003) Columnist
"What is a left-wing socialist but a Marxist without a gun?"
-Don Feder-
(1950- ) American columnist
"The greatest danger that threatens us is neither heterodox thought nor orthodox thought, but the absence of thought."
-Henry Steele Commager-
"As the history majors among you here today know all too well, when people in power invent their own facts and attack those who question them, it can mark the beginning of the end of a free society. That is not hyperbole. It is what authoritarian regimes throughout history have done. They attempt to control reality. Not just our laws and our rights and our budgets, but our thoughts and beliefs."
-Hillary Clinton-
Well, she'd certainly know...
"When you elevate victimhood as virtue, you will create a culture in which people are tripping over themselves to be oppressed."
-Allie Beth Stuckey-
(1992-) American journalist, commentator
"The whole point of the liberal revolution that gave rise to the 1960’s was to free us from somebody else’s dogma, but now the same people…are striving to impose on others a secularized religion…disguising it behind innocuous labels like ‘diversity training’ and ‘respect for difference.’"
-Richard Bernstein-
(1944-) American journalist, columnist, author
Source: Dictatorship of Virtue, 1994
"One of the ironies, as some have observed, is that the secular project has itself become a religion, pursued with religious fervor. It is taking on all the trappings of a religion – including inquisitions and excommunication. Those who defy the creed risk a figurative burning at the stake – social, educational, and professional ostracism and exclusion waged through lawsuits and savage social media campaigns."
-William Barr-
(1950-) US Attorney General
Source: During a speech at Notre Dame law school on October 11, 2019
"There is no better way of exercising the imagination than the study of law. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth."
-Jean Giraudoux-
"As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty — to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy."
-Abraham Lincoln-
1855
"Let every declamation turn upon the beauty of liberty and virtue, and the deformity, turpitude, and malignity, of slavery and vice. Let the public disputations become researches into the grounds and nature and ends of government, and the means of preserving the good and demolishing the evil. Let the dialogues, and all the exercises, become the instruments of impressing on the tender mind, and of spreading and distributing far and wide, the ideas of right and the sensations of freedom. In a word, let every sluice of knowledge be opened and set a-flowing."
-John Adams-
"I never saw a bipartisan bill that reduced the size of government."
-Jim DeMint-
Echoing Ayn Rand's quote about only evil CAN win in any compromise...
"It would be the greatest mistake, certainly, to think that concessions mean peace. Nothing of the kind. Concessions are nothing but a new form of war."
-Vladimir Ilyich Lenin-
[Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov] (1870-1924) First Leader of the Soviet Union
"Socialism in America will come through the ballot box."
-Gus Hall-
[Arvo Gustav Halberg ] (1910-2000) leader of the Communist Party USA and its four-time U.S. presidential candidate
Source: in an interview with the Cleveland Plain-Dealer (1996)
"The government of the world was [Cecil] Rhodes' simple desire."
-Sarah Gertrude Millin-
(1889-1968) South African writer
"The only path to the final defeat of imperialism and the building of socialism is revolutionary war."
-Bill Ayers-
(1944- ) founder of the self-described communist revolutionary group, the Weather Underground, professor of education at University of Illinois at Chicago, personal friend and financial supporter of Barrack Hussein Obama
"As socialists, we are opponents of the Jews, because we see, in the Hebrews, the incarnation of capitalism, of the misuse of the nation’s goods."
-Joseph Paul Goebbels-
(1897-1945) German politician and Reich Minister of Propaganda of Nazi Germany
Source: Goebbels, Joseph; Mjölnir (1932). Die verfluchten Hakenkreuzler. Etwas zum Nachdenken. Munich: Franz Eher Nachfolger. English translation: Those Damned Nazis
"Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces."
-Étienne de La Boétie-
"The really unforgivable acts are committed by calm men in beautiful green silk rooms, who deal death wholesale, by the shipload, without lust, or anger, or desire, or any redeeming emotion to excuse them but cold fear of some pretended future. But the crimes they hope to prevent in that future are imaginary. The ones they commit in the present — they are real."
-Lois McMaster Bujold-
"In part by their apathy, in part by their passivity, and in part actively, these masses of people make possible the catastrophes under which they themselves suffer more than anybody else. To stress this guilt on the part of masses of people, to hold them solely responsible, means to take them seriously. On the other hand, to commiserate masses of people as victims, means to treat them as small, helpless children. The former is the attitude held by genuine freedom-fighters; the latter the attitude held by the power-thirsty politicians."
-Wilhelm Reich-
"Look at America now; older middle-income Americans are encouraged to divest themselves of their assets in order to qualify for Medicaid so that taxpayers at large must subsidize the costs of warehousing the artificially impoverished nursing homes -- in the name of 'independent living' and 'not being a burden to the children.'"
-Daniel F. Walker-
Attorney
Source: Thielicke on the Modern Welfare State, The Freeman, p. 557, August, 1996
"American [public] schools are failing because they are organized according to a bureaucratic, monopolistic model; their organizing principle is basically the same as that of a socialist economy."
-David Boaz-
[David Boaz and Morris Barrett]
Source: What Would A School Voucher Buy? The Real Cost Of Private Schools, Cato Institute Briefing Paper No. 25, March, 1996.
"I'm an American, and always will be. I happen to love that big, awkward, sprawling country very much — and its big, awkward, sprawling people. Anyway, I don't like politics; and I don't make 'political gestures' … I don't even believe in politics. To me, politics is like one of those annoying, and potentially dangerous (but generally just painful) chronic diseases that you just have to put up with in your life if you happen to have contracted it. Politics is like having diabetes. It's a science, a catch-as-catch-can science, which has grown up out of simple animal necessity more than anything else. If I were twice as big as I am, and twice as physically strong, I think I'd be a total anarchist."
-James Jones-
"When the whole world is running towards a cliff, he who is running in the opposite direction appears to have lost his mind."
-C.S. Lewis-
"The modern State exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good – anyway, to do something to us or to make us something. Hence the new name ‘leaders’ for those who were once ‘rulers’. We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, ‘Mind your own business.’ Our whole lives are their business."
-C.S. Lewis-
Is Progress Possible, God in the Dock
"The struggle for freedom ... is not the struggle of the many against the few, but of minorities -- sometimes of a minority of but one man -- against the majority."
-Ludwig von Mises-
(1881-1973) Economist and social philosopher
Source: Theory and History: An Interpretation of Social and Economic Evolution (Auburn, Ala.: The Ludwig Von Mises Institute, 1985) Pp. 66-67
"No one is free who is not master of himself."
-Pythagoras-
(c. 570-c. 495 BC) Ionian Greek philosopher, mathematician, mystic and scientist
"It is the tragic story of the cultural crusader in a mass society that he cannot win, but that we would be lost without him."
-Paul F. Lazarsfeld-
(1901-1976)
Source: The Mass Media and the Intellectual Community, 1961
"True individualists tend to be quite unobservant; it is the snob, the... sophisticate, the frightened conformist, who keeps a fascinated or worried eye on what is in the wind."
-Louis Kronenberger-
(1904-1980)
Source: Company Manners, 1954
"Society honors its living conformists and its dead troublemakers."
-Mignon McLaughlin-
(1913-1983) American journalist and author
"The most fatal blow to progress is slavery of the intellect. The most sacred right of humanity is the right to think, and next to the right to think is the right to express that thought without fear."
-Helen H. Gardner-
Source: Men, Women and Gods, 1885
"A people are free in proportion as they form their own opinions."
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge-
(1772-1834) English poet, critic, philosopher, and a leader of the British Romantic movement
Source: The Watchman, 1796
"What is common to many is least taken care of, for all men have greater regard for what is their own than what they possess in common with others."
-Aristotle-
(384-322 BC) Greek philosopher
AKA, "tragedy of the commons"
"Consciences keep silence more often than they should, that's why laws were created."
-José Saramago-
"I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail."
-Abraham Maslow-
'the law of the instrument', 1966
"Any attempt to replace a personal conscience by a collective conscience does violence to the individual and is the first step toward totalitarianism."
-Herman Hesse-
(1877-1962)
Source: Reflections, 1974
"And it is not difficult to show, by abundant instances, that to extend the bounds of what may be called moral police, until it encroaches on the most unquestionably legitimate liberty of the individual, is one of the most universal of all human propensities."
-John Stuart Mill-
(1806-1873) English philosopher and economist
Source: On Liberty, by John Stuart Mill, 1859
"Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defense."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910) American author and humorist
Source: Notebooks
"The heart of the liberal philosophy is a belief in the dignity of the individual, in his freedom to make the most of his capacities and opportunities according to his own lights... This implies a belief in the equality of man in one sense; in their inequality in another."
-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, 1962
"Freedom is the recognition that no single person, no single authority or government has a monopoly on the truth, but that every individual life is infinitely precious, that every one of us put in this world has been put there for a reason and has something to offer. It's so hard for government planners, no matter how sophisticated, to ever substitute for millions of individuals working night and day to make their dreams come true. The fact is, bureaucracies are a problem around the world."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
Source: Speech at Moscow State University, 05/31/88
"As Madison expressed it: 'The local or municipal authorities form distinct and independent portions of the supremacy, no more subject, within their respective spheres, to the general authority than the general authority is subject to them, within its own sphere.' The Federalist No. 39, at 245. [n.11]
This separation of the two spheres is one of the Constitution’s structural protections of liberty.
'Just as the separation and independence of the coordinate branches of the Federal Government serve to prevent the accumulation of excessive power in any one branch, a healthy balance of power between the States and the Federal Government will reduce the risk of tyranny and abuse from either front.'"
-Justice Antonin Scalia-
Mack and Printz v. United States (1997)
"I maintain that the word supreme imports no more than this — that the Constitution, and laws made in pursuance thereof, cannot be controlled or defeated by any other law. The acts of the United States, therefore, will be absolutely obligatory as to all the proper objects and powers of the general government … but the laws of Congress are restricted to a certain sphere, and when they depart from this sphere, they are no longer supreme or binding."
-Alexander Hamilton-
"On the other hand, should an unwarrantable measure of the federal government be unpopular in particular States, which would seldom fail to be the case, or even a warrantable measure be so, which may sometimes be the case, the means of opposition to it are powerful and at hand. The disquietude of the people; their repugnance and, perhaps, refusal to co-operate with the officers of the Union; the frowns of the executive magistracy of the State; the embarrassments created by legislative devices, which would often be added on such occasions, would oppose, in any State, difficulties not to be despised; would form, in a large State, very serious impediments; and where the sentiments of several adjoining States happened to be in unison, would present obstructions which the federal government would hardly be willing to encounter."
-James Madison-
Federalist, No. 46
How's that been workin' out...?
"Those who knowingly allow the King to err deserve the same punishment as traitors."
-Alfonso X of Castile-
"He whose honor is rooted in popular approval must, day by day, anxiously strive, act, and scheme in order to retain his reputation. For the populace is variable and inconstant, so that, if a reputation be not kept up, it quickly withers away. Everyone wishes to catch popular applause for himself, and readily represses the fame of others. The object of the strife being estimated as the greatest of all goods, each combatant is seized with a fierce desire to put down his rivals in every possible way, till he who at last comes out victorious is more proud of having done harm to others than of having done good to himself. This sort of honor, then, is really empty, being nothing."
-Ethics-
"They [the founders] proclaimed to all the world the revolutionary doctrine of the divine rights of the common man. That doctrine has ever since been the heart of the American faith."
-Dwight D. Eisenhower-
(1890-1969), 34th US President, WWII General
"All discussion, all debate, all dissidence tends to question and in consequence, to upset existing convictions; that is precisely its purpose and its justification."
-Judge Learned Hand-
(1872-1961), Judge, U. S. Court of Appeals
"There is an almost universal tendency, perhaps an inborn tendency, to suspect the good faith of a man who holds opinions that differ from our own opinions... It obviously endangers the freedom and the objectivity of our discussion if we attack a person instead of attacking an opinion or, more precisely, a theory."
-Sir Karl Popper-
(1902-1993)
Source: “The Importance of Critical Discussion,” in On The Barricades, 1989
"And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in all the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual."
-John Steinbeck-
(1902-1968) Author, Nobel laureate
Source: East of Eden, 1952
"Toleration is good for all, or it is good for none."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
Source: Speech, House of Commons, 1773
"Profound insights arise only in debate, with a possibility of counterargument, only when there is a possibility of expressing not only correct ideas but also dubious ideas."
-Andrei Sakharov-
(1921-1989)
Source: Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom, 1968
"When individuals and nations have once got in their heads the abstract concept of full-blown liberty, there is nothing like it in its uncontrollable strength."
-Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel-
(1770-1831) German philosopher
Source: Philosophy of Mind
"Injustice, poverty, slavery, ignorance -- these may be cured by reform or revolution. But men do not live only by fighting evils. They live by positive goals, individual and collective, a vast variety of them, seldom predictable, at times incompatible."
-Isaiah Berlin-
(1909-1997)
Source: 1909, Four Essays on Liberty, Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century
"There can be no freedom without freedom to fail."
-Eric Hoffer-
(1902-1983) American author, philosopher, awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
Source: The Ordeal of Change, 1964
"A liberal society stands on the proposition that we should all take seriously the idea that we might be wrong. This means we must place no one, including ourselves, beyond the reach of criticism (no final say); it means that we must allow people to err, even where the error offends and upsets, as it often will."
-Jonathan Rauch-
(1960-) American author, journalist, activist
Source: Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought, 1993
"I have always strenuously supported the right of every man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies another this right makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
Source: The Age of Reason, 1783
"Individuality is freedom lived."
-John Dos Passos-
(1896-1970) American novelist, historian, critic, artist
"Prosperity or egalitarianism -- you have to choose. I favor freedom -- you never achieve real equality anyway, you simply sacrifice prosperity for an illusion."
-Marios Vargas Llosa-
(1936- ) Peruvian writer
Source: Independent on Sunday, 5 May 1991
"Only when the human spirit is allowed to invent and create, only when individuals are given a personal stake in deciding economic policies and benefiting from their success -- only then can societies remain economically alive, dynamic, prosperous, progressive and free."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
September 29, 1981
Source: Remarks at the Annual Meeting of the Boards of Governors of the World Bank Group and International Monetary Fund
"The freedom of each individual can only be the freedom of all."
-Friedrich Durrenmatt-
(1921-1990)
Source: About Tolerance, 1977
"Ideas are indeed the most dangerous weapons in the world. Our ideas of freedom are the most powerful political weapons man has ever forged."
-William O. Douglas-
(1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: An Almanac of Liberty, 1954
"Fact of the matter is, there is no hip world, there is no straight world. There's a world, you see, which has people in it who believe in a variety of different things. Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, use that something to support their own existence."
-Frank Zappa-
(1940-1993) American Musician
"A society that does not recognize that each individual has values of his own which he is entitled to follow can have no respect for the dignity of the individual and cannot really know freedom."
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
"I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed."
-Jonathan Swift-
"It behooves every American to encourage home manufactures, that our oppressors may feel through their pockets the effects of their blind folly."
-Samuel Adams-
"The object and practice of liberty lies in the limitation of government power."
-General Douglas MacArthur-
(1880-1964) WWII Supreme Allied Commander of the Southwest Pacific, Supreme United Nations Commander
"Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men."
-John Stuart Mill-
(1806-1873) English philosopher and economist
Source: On Liberty
"A society that robs an individual of the product of his effort, or enslaves him, or attempts to limit the freedom of his mind, or compels him to act against his own rational judgment ... is not, strictly speaking, a society, but a mob held together by institutionalized gang-rule."
-Ayn Rand-
[Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum] (1905-1982) Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter
Source: The Nature Of Government, The Virtues Of Selfishness, 126 (Signet Book 1964)
"The antipode of individualism is collectivism, which subordinates the individual to the group -- be it the 'community,' the tribe, the race, the proletariat, etc. A person's moral worth is judged by how much he sacrifices himself to the group. [Under collectivism] the more emergencies (and victims) the better, because they provide more opportunity for 'virtue'."
-Glenn Woiceshyn-
Canadian writer
Source: Lessons from the Great Ice Storm: Individualism vs Collectivism, (1998.03.07)
"Comrades! We must abolish the cult of the individual decisively, once and for all."
-Nikita Khrushchev-
(1894-1971) Premier of the Soviet Union
Source: addressing the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, 2-25-56
"Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself."
-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
"I am persuaded to believe that God had left nations to the liberty of setting up such governments as best pleased themselves, and that magistrates were set up for the good of nations, not nations for the honor and glory of magistrates."
-Algernon Sydney-
"Fortune does not change men; it unmasks them."
-Suzanne Necker-
"The chief purpose in the establishment of states and constitutional orders was that individual property rights might be secured . . . It is the peculiar function of state and city to guarantee to every man the free and undisturbed control of his own property."
-Marcus Tullius Cicero-
"I have been derisively called a "Woman's Rights Man". I know no such distinction. I claim to the a Human Rights Man, and wherever there is a human being, I see God-given rights inherent in that being, whatever may be the sex or complexion."
-William Lloyd Garrison-
.... or location or citizenship or...
"The strength of a man's virtue should not be measured by his special exertions, but by his habitual acts."
-Blaise Pascal-
(1623- 1662) French mathematician and philosopher
Source: Pensées, 1670
"To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man."
-William Shakespeare-
(1564-1616) Playwright
Source: Hamlet
"One does evil enough when one does nothing good."
-German Proverb-
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
-James D. Miles-
"It has been objected also against a bill of rights, that, by enumerating particular exceptions to the grant of power, it would disparage those rights which were not placed in that enumeration; and it might follow by implication, that those rights which were not singled out, were intended to be assigned into the hands of the General Government, and were consequently insecure. This is one of the most plausible arguments I have ever heard urged against the admission of a bill of rights into this system; but, I conceive, that it may be guarded against. I have attempted it, as gentlemen may see by turning to the last clause of the fourth resolution [the Ninth Amendment]."
-James Madison-
And so how'd that work out...?
"It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives."
-Dr. Samuel Johnson-
(1709-1784) English author, poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer
"[O]ur greatest contributions to the cause of freedom and development overseas is not what we do over there, but what we do right here at home."
-Frances Moore Lappé-
(1944-) Ameican author, activist
Source: Betraying the National Interest, published in 1982 by The Institute for Food and Development Policy (Food First)
"I believe more follies are committed out of complaisance to the world, than in following our own inclinations."
-Mary Wortley Montagu-
(1689-1762) English author
"You shall not, for the sake of one individual, change the meaning of principle and integrity, nor endeavour to persuade yourself or me, that selfishness is prudence, and insensibility of danger security for happiness."
-Pride and Prejudice-
"A man does what he must -- in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers -- and this is the basis of all human morality."
-John F. Kennedy-
(1917-1963) 35th US President
"A lie will easily get you out of a scrape, and yet, strangely and beautifully, rapture possesses you when you have taken the scrape and left out the lie."
-Charles Edward Montague-
(1867-1928) English journalist, writer
Source: Disenchantment, 1922
"If one doesn't know his mistakes, he won't want to correct them."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter XXVIII: On travel as a cure for discontent, line 9
"Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing."
-Thomas Henry Huxley-
(1825-1895) English biologist, known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his advocacy of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution
"Our enemy really isn't capitalism, it's cynicism. That's one the things I learned from Woody … Not to be cynical … That cynicism … It destroys you, it rots you away from the inside. So that sense of optimism and humanity … which 20 years ago I would have called socialism but now I'll call compassion … You know, that idea is still out there and alive and if you can plug into that and encourage that it makes it all worth while."
-Billy Bragg-
Socialism and compassion are not synonymous. Compassion is a fairly straightforward concept, defined for and by each individual for himself -- which can include voluntary socialism. But socialism at the governmental level is the coerced ILLUSION of compassion, to the benefit of that government. One simply cannot be truly compassionate with stolen resources.
"Laws, wisely administered, will secure men in the enjoyment of the fruits of their labour, whether of mind or body, at a comparatively small personal sacrifice; but no laws, however stringent, can make the idle industrious, the thriftless provident, or the drunken sober. Such reforms can only be effected by means of individual action, economy, and self-denial; by better habits, rather than by greater rights. The Government of a nation itself is usually found to be but the reflex of the individuals composing it. The Government that is ahead of the people will inevitably be dragged down to their level, as the Government that is behind them will in the long run be dragged up. In the order of nature, the collective character of a nation will as surely find its befitting results in its law and government, as water finds its own level. The noble people will be nobly ruled, and the ignorant and corrupt ignobly. Indeed all experience serves to prove that the worth and strength of a State depend far less upon the form of its institutions than upon the character of its men. For the nation is only an aggregate of individual conditions, and civilization itself is but a question of the personal improvement of the men, women, and children of whom society is composed."
-Samuel Smiles-
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts."
-Richard Feynman-
"Liberalism regards all absolutes with profound skepticism, including both moral imperatives and final solutions... Insistence upon any particular solution is the mark of an ideologue..."
-Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.-
(1917-2007) Author, historian
Source: The Crisis of Confidence, 1969
"No duty, however, binds us to these so-called laws, whose corrupting influence menaces what is noblest in our being..."
-Benjamin Constant-
[Henri-Benjamin Constant de Rebecque] (1767-1830) Swiss-born thinker, writer and French politician.
Source: Principles of Politics Applicable to All Governments (1810) (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2003), p. 401-402
"It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910) American author and humorist
"We even had to pass a special law in the Congress just a few weeks ago to allow student prayer groups the same access to school rooms after classes that a Young Marxist Society … would already enjoy."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
Source: Aug. 23, 1984 at Reunion Arena, Dallas, Texas
"Freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of person under the protection of habeas corpus; and trial by juries impartially selected – these principles form the bright constellation which has gone before us."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: First Inaugural Address, 4 March 1801
"Doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith."
-Paul Tillich-
German theologian and historian
"What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality."
-Plutarch-
(c.45-125 A.D.) Greek Priest of the Delphic Oracle
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."
-Margaret Mead-
(1901-1978) American cultural anthropologist and author
"Every child, at birth, is the Universal Man. But, as it grows, we turn it into 'a petty man.' It should be the function of education to turn it again into the original 'Universal Man.' The child which by birth was the universal man is fettered by us with such constraints as country, language, religion, caste, race and colour. To free it from all these limitations and transform it into 'the enlightened soul', that is to say, the universal man, — this should become the first and foremost function of our education, culture, civilization, and what not."
-Kuvempu-
"The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for, among old parchments, or musty records. They are written, as with a sun beam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: The Farmer Refuted, February 23, 1775
"The laws in question can, therefore, only be justified by the theory of vindictive punishment, which holds that certain sins, though they may not injure anyone except the sinner, are so heinous as to make it our duty to inflict pain upon the delinquent. This point of view, under the influence of Benthamism, lost its hold during the nineteenth century. But in recent years, with the general decay of Liberalism, it has regained lost ground, and has begun to threaten a new tyranny as oppressive as any in the Middle Ages."
-Bertrand Russell-
[Bertrand Arthur William Russell] (1872-1970) Philosopher, educator
Source: The Recrudescence of Puritanism, in Sceptical Essays, 1928
"Lose this day loitering
'Twill be the same old story,
Tomorrow and the next,
Even more dilatory.
Whatever you would do,
Or dream of doing, begin it!
Boldness has power, genius, and magic in it.
Begin it now."
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe-
(1749-1832) German writer, statesman
Source: "Faust"
"The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can 'throw the rascals out' at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy....Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party which will be none of these things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same basic policies."
-Carroll Quigley-
globalist insider, mentor to Bill Clinton, aauthor 'Tragedy And Hope'
"I begin to think, that a calm is not desirable in any situation in life.... Man was made for action and for bustle too, I believe."
-Abigail Adams-
(1744-1818) wife of John Adams
Source: letter to her sister, Mary Smith Cranch, 1784
"There is an irreducible thing. It's called freedom. It is native to every individual. Sometimes it rears its head in the middle of the night, and the dreamer awakes. And he asks himself: what is my freedom for? And then he begins a voyage that no device can record, measure, or analyze. If he pursues it long enough, it takes him out of the labyrinth."
-Jon Rappoport-
American author, investigative reporter, writer
Source: Bill Gates' stimulus-response empire vs. freedom, Mar 6, 2018
"None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating power of the hope of freedom to those who are not free."
-Pearl S. Buck-
(1892-1973)
Source: What America Means To Me, 1943
Anarchism can teach Christian thinkers to see the realities of our societies from a different standpoint than the dominant one of the state. What seems to be one of the disasters of our time is that we all appear to agree that the nation-state is the norm."
-Jacques Ellul-
"The right to think is the beginning of freedom, and speech must be protected from the government because speech is the beginning of thought."
-Justice Anthony Kennedy-
(1936-) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (1988-2018)
Source: U.S. Supreme Court, 16 Apr 2002, Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition
I'd say, rather more accurately, that thought, hopefully, is the beginning of speech...
"Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard."
-Justice Robert H. Jackson-
(1892-1954), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?navby=CASE&court=US&vol=319&page=624
"The three aims of the tyrant are, one, the humiliation of his subjects; he knows that a mean-spirited man will not conspire against anybody; two, the creation of mistrust among them; for a tyrant is not to be overthrown until men begin to have confidence in one another -- and this is the reason why tyrants are at war with the good; they are under the idea that their power is endangered by them, not only because they will not be ruled despotically, but also because they are too loyal to one another and to other men, and do not inform against one another or against other men -- three, the tyrant desires that all his subjects shall be incapable of action, for no one attempts what is impossible and they will not attempt to overthrow a tyranny if they are powerless."
-Aristotle-
(384-322 BC) Greek philosopher
Source: Politics, Book V Chapter 11
"The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.-
(1841-1935) US Supreme Court Justice, also known as "The Great Dissenter"
Source: Falsely attributed. Various permutations of this quote have been incorrectly attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Original version written by Zechariah Chafee, "Freedom of Speech in Wartime", 32 Harvard Law Review 932, 957 (1919).
"The right to do something does not mean that doing it is right."
-William Safire-
(1929-2009) American author, columnist, journalist, Pulitzer Prize (1978), Presidential Medal of Freedom (2006)
"Machiavelli's teaching would hardly have stood the test of parliamentary government, for public discussion demands at least the profession of good faith. But it gave an immense impulse to absolutism by silencing the consciences of very religious kings, and made the good and the bad very much alike. … The way was paved for absolute monarchy to triumph over the spirit and institutions of a better age, not by isolated acts of wickedness, but by a studied philosophy of crime, and so thorough a perversion of the moral sense that the like of it had not been since the Stoics reformed the morality of paganism."
-John Dalberg-Acton-
1st Baron Acton
"Elections are a good deal like marriages, there's no accounting for anyone's taste. Every time we see a bridegroom we wonder why she ever picked him, and it's the same with Public Officials."
-Will Rogers-
(1879-1935) American humorist
"An avaricious man might be tempted to betray the interests of the State to the acquisition of wealth. An ambitious man might make his own aggrandizement, by the aid of a foreign power, the price of his treachery to his constituents. The history of human conduct does not warrant that exalted opinion of human virtue, which would make it wise in a Nation to commit interests of so delicate and momentous a kind, as those which concern its intercourse with the rest of the world, to the sole disposal of a Magistrate created and circumstanced as would be a President of the United States."
-Alexander Hamilton-
Because HE, having actively sought and won such awesome power, certainly would be no longer susceptible to such base human foibles. Great plan, Al...
"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle. It is not enough in a situation of trust in the commonwealth, that a man means well to his country; it is not enough that in his single person he never did an evil act, but always voted according to his conscience, and even harangued against every design which he apprehended to be prejudicial to the interests of his country. This innoxious and ineffectual character, that seems formed upon a plan of apology and disculpation, falls miserably short of the mark of publick duty. That duty demands and requires, that what is right should not only be made known, but made prevalent; that what is evil should not only be detected, but defeated."
-Edmund Burke-
"We cannot abdicate our conscience to an organization, nor to a government. "Am I my brother's keeper?" Most certainly I am! I cannot escape my responsibility by saying the State will do all that is necessary. It is a tragedy that nowadays so many think and feel otherwise."
-Albert Schweitzer-
"The primary delusion of politics is the notion that someone out there is more qualified to run your life, or at least your neighbor’s life, than you or your neighbor. In the advanced stages of the psychosis, the victim becomes convinced that he or she IS that someone and decides to seek political office."
-Thomas L. Knapp-
"The deterioration of a government begins almost always by the decay of its principles."
-The Spirit of the Laws-
Which, in turn, begins almost always with the first swearing-in...
“For we are presented with a clear and simple statute to be judged against a pure command of the Constitution. The outcome can be laid at no door but ours. The hard fact is that sometimes we must make decisions we do not like. We make them because they are right, right in the sense that the law and the Constitution, as we see them, compel the result. And so great is our commitment to the process that, except in the rare case, we do not pause to express distaste for the result, perhaps for fear of undermining a valued principle that dictates the decision. This is one of those rare cases.
Though symbols often are what we ourselves make of them, the flag is constant in expressing beliefs Americans share, beliefs in law and peace and that freedom which sustains the human spirit. The case here today forces recognition of the costs to which those beliefs commit us. It is poignant but fundamental that the flag protects those who hold it in contempt."
-Justice Anthony Kennedy-
Texas v. Johnson, 491 U.S. 397 (1989)
When this rogue government stops wrapping itself in the flag, I'll have less contempt for the flag.
"It will not be amiss to distinguish the three kinds and, as it were, grades of ambition in mankind. The first is of those who desire to extend their own power in their native country, a vulgar and degenerate kind. The second is of those who labor to extend the power and dominion of their country among men. This certainly has more dignity, though not less covetousness. But if a man endeavor to establish and extend the power and dominion of the human race itself over the universe, his ambition (if ambition it can be called) is without doubt both a more wholesome and a more noble thing than the other two. Now the empire of man over things depends wholly on the arts and sciences. For we cannot command nature except by obeying her."
-Francis Bacon-
"Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law."
-Ayn Rand-
[Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum] (1905-1982) Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket."
-Eric Hoffer-
(1902-1983) American author, philosopher, awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
"In any age, the so-called progressives treat politics as their religion. Their holy mission is to use the coercive power of the State to remake man and society in their own image, according to an abstract ideal of perfection. Whatever means they use are therefore justified because, by definition, they are a virtuous people pursing a deific end. They are willing to use any means necessary to gain momentary advantage in achieving their end, regardless of collateral consequences and the systemic implications. They never ask whether the actions they take could be justified as a general rule of conduct, equally applicable to all sides."
-William Barr-
Source: Federalist Society’s 2019 National Lawyers Convention, November 15, 2019
That applies to statists of all stripes, there, Bill...
"We are socialists, we are enemies, mortal enemies of the present capitalistic economic system with its exploitation of the economically weak, with its unjust wages, with its immoral evaluation of individuals according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and achievement, and we are determined under all circumstances to abolish this system!"
-Gregor Strasser-
(1892-1934) early prominent German Nazi official and politician who was murdered during the Night of the Long Knives in 1934
Source: “Thoughts about the Tasks of the Future", 1926 pamphlet by Gregor Strasser,
Falsely attributed to a Hitler speech on May 1, 1927. Cited in: Toland, John (1992). Adolf Hitler. Anchor Books. pp. 224–225. ISBN 0385037244
"Society's needs come before the individual's needs."
-Adolf Hitler-
(1889-1945) German Nazi Dictator
Source: Attributed by A. E. Samaan in 'From a Race of Masters to a Master Race'
"In our struggle against racial segregation in Montgomery, Alabama, I came to see at a very early stage that a synthesis of Gandhi's method of nonviolence and the Christian ethic of love is the best weapon available to Negroes for this struggle for freedom and human dignity. It may well be that the Gandhian approach will bring about a solution to the race problem in America. His spirit is a continual reminder to oppressed people that it is possible to resist evil and yet not resort to violence."
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-
(1929-1968) US civil rights leader
1958
"To ignore evil is to become an accomplice to it."
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-
(1929-1968) US civil rights leader
"And it proves, in the last place, that liberty can have nothing to fear from the judiciary alone, but would have everything to fear from its union with either of the other departments."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: Federalist No. 78, 1788
"If vice and corruption prevail, liberty cannot subsist; but if virtue have the advantage, arbitrary power cannot be established."
-Algernon Sidney-
(1622-1683) English statesman, writer, Whig leader
"The punishment of death is the war of a nation against a citizen whose destruction it judges to be necessary or useful."
-Cesare Beccaria-
(1735-1794) [Bonesana, Marchese di] Italian nobleman, criminologist, and penal reformer
Source: On Crimes and Punishments, 1764
"Government is, and always has been, the greatest criminal threat to the peaceful members of society."
-Richard M. Ebeling-
(1950- ) Author, Professor of Economics, Hillsdale College
Source: The Tyranny Of Gun Control, xii (Future Of Freedom Foundation 1997)
"I am for socialism, disarmament, and ultimately, for abolishing the state itself. … Communism is the goal."
-Roger Baldwin-
(1884-1981) one of the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
Source: 1935
"The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike at him as hard as you can and as often as you can, and keep moving on."
-Ulysses S. Grant-
(1822-1885) 18th US President
"And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned around on you—where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast—man's laws, not God's—and if you cut them down…d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake."
-Thomas More-
A Man For All Seasons
"Whatever power you give politicians and bureaucrats to use against other people will eventually be used by future politicians and bureaucrats against you."
-Michael Boldin-
Founder of Tenth Amendment Center
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sXWK2909co
"I do not believe there are more than a very limited number of persons, perhaps a hundred who really know what is in the Constitution of the United States."
-Dr. John J. Tigert-
U. S. Commissioner of Education, October, 1924
"Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of liberty."
-Henry Martyn Robert-
(183-1923) American soldier, engineer, and author of "Robert's Rules of Order", which became the most widely used manual of parliamentary procedure and remains today the most common parliamentary authority in the United States
"There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: letter to Edmund Randolph, 1795
"The first duty of a newspaper is to be accurate. If it is accurate, it follows that it is fair."
-Herbert B. Swope-
(1882-1958)
Source: Letter, New York Herald Tribune, 16 March 1958
"We hold that no person or set of persons can properly establish a standard of expression for others."
-William Randolph Hearst-
(1863-1951) American newspaper publisher
Source: Independence League Platform, New York Journal, 1 February 1924
"The task of government in this enlightened time does not extend to actually dealing with problems. Solving problems might put bureaucrats out of work. No, the task of government is to make it look as though problems have been solved, while continuing to keep the maximum number of consultants and bureaucrats employed dealing with them."
-Bob Emmers-
Source: Orange County Register
"Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"`
"The human soul has need of consented obedience and of liberty. Consented obedience is what one concedes to an authority because one judges it to be legitimate. It is not possible in relation to a political power established by conquest or coup d'etat nor to an economic power based upon money. Liberty is the power of choice within the latitude left between the direct constraint of natural forces and the authority accepted as legitimate. The latitude should be sufficiently wide for liberty to be more than a fiction, but it should include only what is innocent and should never be wide enough to permit certain kinds of crime."
-Simone Weil-
"Great cases, like hard cases, make bad law."
-Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.-
Northern Securities Co. v. United States, 193 U.S. 197 (1904)
"That 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-
Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776)
"As during the time of kings it would have been naive to think that the king’s firstborn son would be the fittest to rule, so in our time it is naive to think that the democratically elected ruler will be the fittest. The rule of succession is not a formula for identifying the best ruler, it is a formula for conferring legitimacy on someone or other and thus forestalling civil conflict."
-J. M. Coetzee
"The greatest danger is that the decision will be regulated more by the comparative strength of parties than by the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: Federalist No. 65, regarding impeachment of the President
"There can be no crime, there can be no misdemeanor without a law written or unwritten, express or implied."
-Benjamin Curtis-
(1809-1874) Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court
Source: Dissenting in Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857)
Da fuq? There are no "implied" laws.
"Impeachment is about whatever the Congress says it is. There is no law that dictates impeachment. What the Constitution says is “high crimes and misdemeanors,” and we define that."
-Maxine Waters-
(1938-) US Congresswoman D-CA
Source: September 21, 2017, Congressional Black Caucus Town Hall on Civil Rights
"Powers once assumed are never relinquished, just as bureaucracies, once created, never die."
-Charley Reese-
(1937-2013) American syndicated columnist
"Ultimately, however, as the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter pointed out, a powerful bureaucratic class is in the same relation to commerce as was the scorpion in Aesop to the dog on whose back he crossed the river. They will destroy commerce and establish socialism, even if it kills them, because that is their nature."
-John Derbyshire-
(1945-) British-born American writer, journalist and commentator
"Every bureaucrat has a constitutional right to fuzzify, profundify and drivelate. It's a part of our freedom of speech... If people can understand what is being said in Washington, they might want to take over their own government again."
-Dr. Jim Boren-
Humorist and Author
Source: Wall Street Journal, June 2, 1998
"Government machinery has been described as a marvelous labor saving device which enables ten men to do the work of one."
-John Maynard Keynes-
(1883-1946) British economist
"Where the meaning of the Constitution is clear and unambiguous, there can be no resort to construction to attribute to the founders a purpose or intent not manifest in its letter."
-Norris v. Baltimore-
Source: 192 A 531
"Those who wish to appear wise among fools, among the wise seem foolish."
-Marcus Fabius Quintilianus-
(c.35-c.100) Roman Rhetorician
Source: Institutio Oratoria, c.95 AD
"When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer 'present' or 'not guilty.'"
-Theodore Roosevelt-
(1858-1919) 26th US President
"For most Americans the Constitution had become a hazy document, cited like the Bible on ceremonial occasions but forgotten in the daily transactions of life."
-Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.-
(1917-2007) Author, historian
"Sir, I have found you an argument; but I am not obliged to find you an understanding."
-Dr. Samuel Johnson-
(1709-1784) English author, poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer
"There are four boxes to be used in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
"Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so, whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose, and you allow him to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after having given him so much as you propose. If, to-day, he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada, to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, "I see no probability of the British invading us" but he will say to you, "Be silent; I see it, if you don't." The provision of the Constitution giving the war making power to Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons. Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us."
-Abraham Lincoln-
"Lying has always been a highly approved Nazi technique. Hitler, in Mein Kampf, advocated mendacity as a policy. … Nor is the lie direct the only means of falsehood. They all speak with a Nazi double meaning with which to deceive the unwary. … Before we accept their word at what seems to be its face value, we must always look for hidden meanings. … Besides outright false statements and those with double meanings, there are also other circumventions of truth in the nature of fantastic explanations and absurd professions. … Even Schacht showed that he, too, had adopted the Nazi attitude that truth is any story which succeeds. Confronted on cross-examination with a long record of broken vows and false words, he declared in justification — and I quote from the record: 'I think you can score many more successes when you want to lead someone if you don't tell them the truth than if you tell them the truth.' This was the philosophy of the National Socialists. When for years they have deceived the world, and masked falsehood with plausibilities, can anyone be surprised that they continue that habit of a lifetime in this dock? Credibility is one of the main issues of this trial. Only those who have failed to learn the bitter lessons of the last decade can doubt that men who have always played on the unsuspecting credulity of generous opponents would not hesitate to do the same now."
-Robert H. Jackson-
"A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious."
-Aristotle-
(384-322 BC) Greek philosopher
Source: Politics, 343 B.C.
"A lot of people mistake a short memory for a clear conscience."
-Doug Larson-
(1926-) Syndicated columnist
"You can stand tall without standing on someone. You can be a victor without having victims."
-Harriet Woods-
(1927-2007) Lieutenant Governor of Missouri
"The welfare state that is built upon this conception seems to prove precisely away from the conservative conception of authoritative and personal government, towards a labyrinthine privilege sodden structure of anonymous power, structuring a citizenship that is increasingly reluctant to answer for itself, increasingly parasitic on the dispensations of a bureaucracy towards which it can feel no gratitude."
-Roger Scruton-
(1944- ) English philosopher, professor, writer, and composer
"All socialism involves slavery.... That which fundamentally distinguishes the slave is that he labors under coercion to satisfy another's desires. The relation admits of many gradations. Oppressive taxation is a form of slavery of the individual to the community as a whole. The essential question is -- How much is he compelled to labor for other benefit than his own, and how much can he labor for his own benefit?
-Herbert Spencer-
(1820-1903) British author, economist, philosopher
Source: The Man Versus the State -1884
"The real danger is the gradual erosion of individual liberties through automation, integration, and interconnection of many small, separate record-keeping systems, each of which alone may seem innocuous, even benevolent, and wholly justifiable."
-U. S. Privacy Study Commission-
Source: 1977
"I hear much of people's calling out to punish the guilty, but very few are concerned to clear the innocent."
-Daniel Defoe-
[Daniel Foe] (1660-1731) English writer, famous pamphleteer, journalist and novelist, wrote the novel Robinson Crusoe
Source: An Appeal to Honor and Justice, 1715
"If we were all to be judged by our thoughts, the hills would be swarming with outlaws."
-Johann Sigurjonsson-
(1880-1919) Icelandic playwright and poet
"Reputation is character minus what you've been caught doing."
-Michael Iapoce-
Source: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Boardroom
"The universe seems bankrupt as soon as we begin to discuss the characters of individuals."
-Henry David Thoreau-
(1817-1862) American author, poet, philosopher, polymath, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and transcendentalist
"In all men is evil sleeping; the good man is he who will not awaken it, in himself or in other men."
-Mary Renault-
[Eileen Mary Challans] (1905-1983) English novelist
"Therefore, rid yourselves of all malice and all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander of every kind."
-St. Peter-
Source: Holy Bible, 1 Peter 2:1
"No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself."
-Henry Adams-
"Political realism is aware of the moral significance of political action. It is also aware of the ineluctable tension between the moral command and the requirements of successful political action. And it is unwilling to gloss over and obliterate that tension and thus to obfuscate both the moral and the political issue by making it appear as though the stark facts of politics were morally more satisfying than they actually are, and the moral law less exacting than it actually is."
-Hans Morgenthau-
"Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics.' When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty -- to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy hypocrisy."
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
"We live in a world that has popularized Black people showing the same hate towards white people that people like Martin Luther King Jr. died fighting to overcome. It’s sad. Sad as hell."
-CJ Pearson-
[Coreco Ja'Quan Pearson] (2002-) American political activist and commentator
Source: Twitter, 12/30/2019
"Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of Liberty abused to licentiousness."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
1796
"Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generations which preceded it. Man has no property in man, neither has any generation a property in the generations which are to follow."
-Tom Paine-
"Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow."
-Aesop-
(c. 620–564 BCE) legendary Greek fabulist
Source: The Dog and the Shadow
"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague."
-Marcus Tullius Cicero-
(106-43 B.C.) Roman Statesman, Philosopher and Orator
Source: Attributed to a speech in the Roman Senate in 58 BC as "Recorded by Sallust" in the fictional novel 'A Pillar of Iron,' by Taylor Caldwell (1983), ch. 5.
The quotation bears resemblance to Cicero's Second Oration against Cataline. [2.11]
"I believe Socialism is the grandest theory ever presented, and I am sure it will someday rule the world. Then we will have attained the Millennium... Then men will be content to work for the general welfare and share their riches with their neighbors."
-Andrew Carnegie-
(1835-1919) Scottish-American industrialist, philanthropist
Source: The New York Times, 1 January 1885, "A Millionaire Socialist"
"I was at last beginning to see how ignorant I had become, how long since I had read anything except Party literature. I thought of our bookshelves stripped of books questioned by the Party, how when a writer was expelled from the Party his books went, too. I thought of the systematic rewriting of Soviet history, the revaluation, and in some cases the blotting out of any mention of such persons as Trotsky. I thought of the successive purges. Suddenly I too wanted the answers to the questions Senator Hickenlooper was asking and I wanted the truth. I found myself hitting at the duplicity of the Communist Party."
-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)
"In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king."
-Desiderius Erasmus-
(1466-1536) Dutch author
Source: Adagia (III, IV, 96)
"Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind."
-Henry Miller-
(1891-1980) American writer
"Virtue runs no risk of becoming contemptible by being exposed to view, and it is better to be despised for simplicity than to be tormented by continual hypocrisy."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: On Tranquility of the Mind, A letter to Serenus as translated in Tranquillity of Mind and Providence (1900) by William Bell Langsdorf
"We create an environment where it is alright to hate, to steal, to cheat, and to lie if we dress it up with symbols of respectability, dignity and love."
-Whitney Moore, Jr.-
"Liberty has no horizontal relationship to authoritarianism. Libertarianism’s relationship to authoritarianism is vertical; it is up from the muck of men enslaving man…"
-Leonard Read-
1956
"I saw in States’ rights the only availing check upon the absolutism of he sovereign will, and secession filled me with hope, not as the destruction but as the redemption of Democracy . . . . I deemed that you were fighting for the battles of our liberty, our progress, and our civilization; and I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo."
-Lord Acton-
November 4, 1866 letter to General Robert E. Lee
"A man is usually more careful of his money than of his principles."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.-
(1841-1935) US Supreme Court Justice, also known as "The Great Dissenter"
Source: speech, Boston, 8 January 1897
"Men do not care how nobly they live, but only how long, although it is within the reach of every man to live nobly, but within no man's power to live long."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter XXII: On the futility of half-way measures, line 17.
"For often evil men are rich, and good men poor;
But we will not exchange with them
Our virtue for their wealth since one abides always,
While riches change their owners every day."
-Solon-
(c.638 BC-558 BC) Athenian statesman, lawmaker, Lyric poet, renowned as a founding father of the Athenian polis, one of the Seven Sages of Greece
550 B.C.
Source: Plutarch Solon, ch. 3; translation by Bernadotte Perrin
"Collectivism, unlike individualism, holds the group as the primary, and the standard of moral value."
-Mark Da Cunha-
Publisher of Capitalism magazine
Source: http://capitalism.org/tag/statism/
"The core of racism is the notion that the individual is meaningless and that membership in the collective -- the race -- is the source of his identity and value. ... The notion of 'diversity' entails exactly the same premises as racism -- that one's ideas are determined by one's race and that the source of an individual's identity is his ethnic heritage."
-Peter Schwartz-
Source: The Racism of “Diversity, (2003.12.15 )
"In strategy the longest way round is often the shortest way there; a direct approach to the object exhausts the attacker and hardens the resistance by compression, whereas an indirect approach loosens the defender's hold by upsetting his balance."
-B. H. Liddell Hart-
(1895-1970) British military historian and strategist
"The Communists could succeed if we ever let ourselves be lulled into thinking that they are no longer dangerous to us externally and internally. They would be victorious if we were ever duped by their own nationals or by foolish Americans -- if we were ever duped into believing that they are not aggressive, atheist socialist imperialists. They have proved they never sleep. They have never permanently retreated, and what seems at a particular time to be a cessation of their forward movement or a change in their designs is nothing more than a tactical maneuver on another front."
-Kenneth D. Wells-
President of Valley Forge Freedoms Foundation
Source: BYU Speech, 30 Apr. 1962, in Speeches, 1962, p. 5
"Free speech is my right to say what you don't want to hear."
-George Orwell-
"Left has come to represent increasing government control. The extreme leftist typically seeks total government. Working their way toward total government power are the Communists, socialists, fascists, and modern liberals who advocate government solutions for every real or imagined problem."
-John F. McManus-
Source: Defining "Right" And "Left," The New American, P. 44, December 11, 1995
"Assault weapons laws resemble hate speech laws. Hate speech laws usually begin by targeting a few words that almost no one approves. Once the system for controlling and punishing “hate speech” is put into place, there is little or nothing to stop it from expanding to punish more and more types of everyday speech. Similarly, once an assault weapons law is on the books, there is little to prevent politicians from vastly increasing the number of weapons banned under the law. The main effect of banning assault weapons is to give government an excuse to arrest and imprison millions of Americans while doing little or nothing to reduce crime. America has a limited number of police, and politicians must decide who the real public enemies are. If Mr. Clinton signs an assault weapons ban, it could signal the start of an attack on gun owners’ constitutional rights that could far surpass all previous gun bans."
-James Bovard-
(1956- ) American author, lecturer
"I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy -- I don't disparage envy, but I don't accept it as legitimately my master."
-Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.-
(1841-1935) US Supreme Court Justice, also known as "The Great Dissenter"
Source: Holmes-Laski Letters : The Correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Harold J. Laski, 1916 - 1935 (1953), Vol. 2, p. 942
"A politician will always tip off his true belief by stating the opposite at the beginning of the sentence. For maximum comprehension, do not start listening until the first clause is concluded. Begin instead at the word 'BUT' which begins the second, or active, clause. This is the way to tell a liberal from a conservative - before they tell you. Thus: 'I have always believed in a strong national defense, second to none, but...(a liberal, about to propose a $20 billion defense cut)."
-Frank Mankiewicz-
(1924-) American journalist
"The reputation of a thousand years may be determined by the conduct of one hour."
-Japanese Proverb
"Characters do not change. Opinions alter, but characters are only developed."
-Benjamin Disraeli-
(1804-1881) Prime Minister of England, British statesman, novelist
"If it was necessary to tolerate in other people everything that one permits oneself, life would be unbearable."
-Georges Courteline-
[Georges Victor Marcel Moinaux] (1858-1929) French dramatist, novelist, satiristst
"We now live in a nation where doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the press destroys information, religion destroys morals, and our banks destroy the economy."
-Chris Hedges-
(1956- ) American journalist, author, and war correspondent
"The people of the U.S. owe their Independence & their liberty, to the wisdom of descrying in the minute tax of 3 pence on tea, the magnitude of the evil comprised in the precedent. Let them exert the same wisdom, in watching against every evil lurking under plausible disguises, and growing up from small beginnings."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: James Madison's 'Detached Memoranda,' ca. 1817 W. & M. Q., 3d ser., 3:554--60 1946
"The essential characteristic of socialism is the denial of individual property rights..."
-Ayn Rand-
[Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum] (1905-1982) Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter
Source: _The Virtue of Selfishness_ 1964
"Good government generally begins in the family, and if the moral character of a people once degenerate, their political character must soon follow."
-Elias Boudinot-
(1740-1821) President of the Continental Congress, later a congressman from NJ, and president of the American Bible Society
"The only insecurity which is altogether paralyzing to the active energies of producers is that arising from the government, or from persons vested with its authority. Against all other depredators there is a hope of defending oneself."
-John Stuart Mill-
Principles of Political Economy
"We have seen the mere distinction of colour made in the most enlightened period of time, a ground of the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man. What has been the source of those unjust laws complained of among ourselves? Has it not been the real or supposed interest of the major number? Debtors have defrauded their creditors. The landed interest has borne hard on the mercantile interest. The Holders of one species of property have thrown a disproportion of taxes on the holders of another species. The lesson we are to draw from the whole is that where a majority are united by a common sentiment, and have an opportunity, the rights of the minor party become insecure."
-James Madison-
"The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man."
-B. F. Skinner-
"It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable."
-Eric Hoffer-
(1902-1983) American author, philosopher, awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
Source: The Passionate State of Mind, 1954
"Safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national conduct."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: The Federalist
"Worse than war is the very fear of war."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: Tragedies, Thyestes, line 572 (Chorus)
"No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
"Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all others."
-Sir Winston Churchill-
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1940-1945, 1951-1955)
"The greatest of all infidelities is the fear that the truth will be bad."
-Herbert Spencer-
(1820-1903) British author, economist, philosopher
"Times of tragedy and war naturally bring out strong emotions... Sometimes people are only too anxious to sacrifice their constitutional liberties during a crisis, hoping to gain some measure of security. Yet nothing would please terrorists more than if we willingly gave up our cherished liberties because of their actions."
-Dr. Ron Paul-
(1935-) American physician, US Congressman (R-TX), US Presidential candidate
"The great masses of the people ... will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one."
-Adolf Hitler-
(1889-1945) German Nazi Dictator
Source: Mein Kampf, 1933
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel."
-Ambrose Bierce-
(1842-1914) Humorist
"I practice journalism in accordance with the following guidelines:
• Do nothing I cannot defend.
• Do not distort, lie, slant or hype.
• Do not falsify facts or make up quotes.
• Cover, write and present every story with the care I would want if the story were about me.
• Assume there is at least one other side or version to every story.
• Assume the viewer is as smart and caring and good a person as I am.
• Assume the same about all people on whom I report.
• Assume everyone is innocent until proven guilty.
• Assume personal lives are a private matter until a legitimate turn in the story mandates otherwise.
• Carefully separate opinion and analysis from straight news stories and clearly label it as such.
• Do not use anonymous sources or blind quotes except on rare and monumental occasions. No one should ever be allowed to attack another anonymously.
• Do not broadcast profanity or the end result of violence unless it is an integral and necessary part of the story and/or crucial to its understanding.
• Acknowledge that objectivity may be impossible but fairness never is.
• Journalists who are reckless with facts and reputations should be disciplined by their employers.
• My viewers have a right to know what principles guide my work and the process I use in their practice.
• I am not in the entertainment business. "
-Jim Lehrer-
(1934-2020) American journalist, novelist, screenwriter, playwright
Source: THE 1997 CATTO REPORT ON JOURNALISM AND SOCIETY, Jim Lehrer’s Rules of Journalism
"What a government of limited powers needs, at the beginning and forever, is some means of satisfying the people that it has taken all steps humanly possible to stay within its powers. That is the condition of its legitimacy, and its legitimacy, in the long run, is the condition of its life."
-Charles L. Black, Jr.-
Source: The People And The Court, 52 (1960).
"When a government takes over a people’s economic life it becomes absolute, and when it has become absolute it destroys the arts, the minds, the liberties and the meaning of the people it governs."
-Maxwell Anderson-
(1888-1959)
Source: The Guaranteed Life
"I do encourage you to question authority, apply logic, and think for yourself. Look at the forest, not the trees. And the centuries, not the months. Or you might risk being lead willingly, as a sheep, to the slaughter."
-Rick Gaber-
Libertarian writer
Source: Selfishness vs. “Selfishness”
"True, a socialistic society could see that 1000 litres of wine were better than 800 litres. It could decide whether or not 1000 litres of wine were to be preferred to 500 litres of oil. Such a decision would involve no calculation. The will of some man would decide. But the real business of economic administration, the adaptation of means to ends only begins when such a decision is taken. And only economic calculation makes this adaptation possible. Without such assistance, in the bewildering chaos of alternative materials and processes the human mind would be at a complete loss. Whenever we had to decide between different processes or different centres of production, we would be entirely at sea."
-Ludwig von Mises-
(1881-1973) Economist and social philosopher
Source: Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis
"Although totalitarian democracy is democratic in form, it requires an all-knowing elite to guide the masses toward their determined end, and that elite relies on whipping up mass enthusiasm to preserve its power and achieve its goals. Totalitarian democracy is almost always secular and materialistic, and its adherents tend to treat politics as a substitute for religion. Their sacred mission is to use the coercive power of the state to remake man and society according to an abstract ideal of perfection."
-William Barr-
(1950-) US Attorney General
Source: 2020 National Religious Broadcasters Convention, 2/26/2020
"Self-imposed limits on sovereign power can disarm mistrust, but provide no guarantee of liberty and property beyond those afforded by the balance between state and private force."
-Anthony de Jasay-
(1925- ) Hungarian writer
Source: The State [1985] (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1998), p. 205
"Young man, the secret of my success is that at an early age I discovered that I was not God."
-Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.-
(1841-1935) US Supreme Court Justice, also known as "The Great Dissenter"
Source: On his 90th birthday to a journalist (8 March 1931), as quoted in Information 2000: Library and Information Services for the 21st Century, Vol. 1991, Part 2 (1992) by the U.S. National Commission on Libraries and Information Science, p. 272.
"We shall be judged by what we do, not by how we felt while we were doing it."
-Kenneth Tynan-
Or, actions speak louder than motives...
"Every time you call for the government to do something, you are saying: I've run out of good ideas, creative ideas, peaceful ideas, cooperative ideas. Let's just turn to force and violence."
-Robert Higgs-
"One's first step in wisdom is to question everything -- and one's last is to come to terms with everything."
-Georg Christoph Lichtenberg-
(1742-1799) German scientist, professor, satirist and Anglophile
"It must never be forgotten... that the liberties of the people are not so safe under the gracious manner of government as by the limitation of power."
-Richard Henry Lee-
(1732-1794) Founding Father
"We hold that each man is the best judge of his own interest."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: Constitutions of Government of yhe United States of America, at 475, (Philadelphia 1788)
"Think about the agendas behind universal vaccination, climate change, universal psychiatric treatment, GMO food, and other 'science-based' frauds. They all imply a false collectivist model, in which individuals give up their power in exchange for 'doing good' and becoming members of the largest group in the world: 'disabled' people with needs that must be addressed and satisfied. Instead of supporting the liberation of the individual, the controllers want to squash it. Why? Because they fear individual power. It is forever the unpredictable wild card. They want a society in which every thought an individual thinks connects him to a greater whole---and if that sounds attractive, understand that this Whole is a fiction, intentionally faked to resemble a genuine oceanic feeling."
-Jon Rappoport-
American author, investigative reporter, writer
Source: introduction to 'The Matrix Revealed,' by Jon Rappoport
"When it is a duty to worship the sun it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat."
-John Viscount Morley-
(1838-1923), of Blackburn
Source: Voltaire, 1872
"It is our nature to conform; it is a force which not many people can successfully resist. What is its seat? The inborn requirement of self-approval."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910) American author and humorist
Source: Corn Pone Opinions
"To dragoon man into the adoption of what we think right, is an intolerable tyranny."
-William Godwin-
(1756-1836) English journalist, political philosopher, novelist
Source: William Godwin, ENQUIRY CONCERNING POLITICAL JUSTICE (1798), Book IV, Chapter i, Paragraph 10
"A people who mean to be free must be prepared to meet danger in person, and not rely upon the fallacious protection of armies."
-Edmund Randolph-
(1753-1813) Virginia delegate at the US Constitutional Convention, 1787
Source: January 9, 1800, Annals of the Congress of the United States, p297
"I have made all the calculations; fate will do the rest."
-Napoleon Bonaparte-
(1769-1821) French emperor
"This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But, it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."
-Sir Winston Churchill-
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1940-1945, 1951-1955)
"Besides, he who follows another not only discovers nothing but is not even investigating."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter XXXIII
"Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910) American author and humorist
"... absolutely we see this as an opportunity to reshape the way we do business and how we govern."
-Gavin Newsom-
(1967-) Governor of California
Source: 4/1/2020 asked whether the Corono virus crisis provided an opportunity for taking addional steps towards a new progressive era.
"This is a tremendous opportunity to restructure things to fit our vision."
-James Clyburn-
(1940 -) House Majority Whip (D-SC)
Source: 3/19/2020
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/488543-house-democrats-eyeing-much-broader-phase-3-stimulus
"'Useful,' and 'necessity' was always 'the tyrant's plea'."
-C. S. Lewis-
(1898-1963), British novelist
"The tyranny of a multitude is a multiplied tyranny."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
"The origin of all science is in the desire to know causes; and the origin of all false science and imposture is in the desire to accept false causes rather than none; or, which is the same thing, in the unwillingness to acknowledge our own ignorance."
-William Hazlitt-
"A false conclusion once arrived at and widely accepted is not easily dislodged and the less it is understood the more tenaciously it is held."
-Georg Cantor-
"The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself."
-Hilaire Belloc-
(1870-1953) French-born British writer
Source: THE SERVILE STATE
"The measure of my ambition will be full if when my wife and children shall repair to my grave to drop the tear of affection to my memory they may read on my tombstone He who lies beneath surrendered office, place and power rather than bow down and worship slavery."
-John P. Hale-
First Anti-slavery U. S. Senator, He secured the abolition of flogging and the spirit ration in the Navy
Born at Rochester 1806, Died at Dover 1873
"As long as the world shall last there will be wrongs, and if no man objected and no man rebelled, those wrongs would last forever. 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 Darrow-
"Whenever a single definite object is made the supreme end of the State, be it the advantage of a class, the safety of the power of the country, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, or the support of any speculative idea, the State becomes for the time inevitably absolute."
-Lord Acton-
[John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton] (1834-1902), First Baron Acton of Aldenham
"Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge, fitter to bruise than polish."
-Anne Bradstreet-
"The mortalist enemy unto knowledge, and that which hath done the greatest execution unto truth, has been a preemptory adhesion unto authority."
-Sir Thomas Browne-
(1605-1682)
Source: Religio Medici, 1642
"Historians and economists are very good at creating and perpetuating myths that justify increasing the power placed in the hands of government."
-Reuven Brenner-
(1947- ) Romanian-born Economist, Chair of Economics at McGill University's Desautels Faculty of Management
"An anarchist is anyone who doesn't need a cop to tell him what to do."
-Ammon Hennacy-
(1893-1970) Catholic anarchist, pacifist, vegetarian, draft refuser in two world wars, tax resister, "one-person revolution in America."
Source: Whenever Ammon was arrested for any number of reasons, mostly for "illegal" picketing, instead of pleading guilty or innocent he would plead 'anarchy'. This was his reply to the judge's question 'What is an anarchist?'
"Power gradually extirpates for the mind every humane and gentle virtue."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
"The greater the power the more dangerous the abuse."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
"The great inlet by which a colour for oppression has entered into the world is by one man's pretending to determine concerning the happiness of another."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
Source: quoted by Lord Acton in Lectures on the French Revolution (London: 1910), in J. Rufus Fears (Ed.), Selected Writings of Lord Acton, Vol. 1: Essays in the History of Liberty (Indianapolis: LibertyClassics, 1985), p. 206
"There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: Journal, 1772
"From all evil against which the law bars you, you should be barred, at an infinite distance, by honour, by conscience, and nobility. Does the law require patriotism, philanthropy, self-abnegation, public service, purity of purpose, devotion to the needs of others who have been placed in the world below you? The law is a great thing, — because men are poor and weak, and bad. And it is great, because where it exists in its strength, no tyrant can be above it. But between you and me there should be no mention of law as the guide of conduct. Speak to me of honour, of duty, and of nobility; and tell me what they require of you."
-Anthony Trollope-
"The necessity of every one paying in his own labor for what he consumes, affords the only legitimate and effectual check to excessive luxury, which has so often ruined individuals, states and empires; and which has now brought almost universal bankruptcy upon us."
-Josiah Warren-
(1798-1874)
"We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office."
-Aesop-
(c. 550 B.C.) legendary Greek fabulist
"Dogma is the convictions of one man
imposed authoritatively upon others."
-Felix Adler-
(1851-1933) Professor of political and social ethics
"Liberty, whether natural, civil, or political, is the lawful power in the individual to exercise his corresponding rights. It is greatly favored in law."
-Henry Campbell Black-
(1860-1927) Founder of Black's Law Dictionary, the definitive legal dictionary first published in 1891, editor of The Constitutional Review (1917-1927)
"Freedom is not something that can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be."
-James Baldwin-
(1924-1987) Novelist, Essayist, and Playwright
"A golden bit does not make a better horse."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter XLI: On the god within us
"Tyranny in democratic republics does not proceed in the same way, however. It ignores the body and goes straight for the soul. The master no longer says: You will think as I do or die. He says: You are free not to think as I do. You may keep your life, your property, and everything else. But from this day forth you shall be as a stranger among us. You will retain your civic privileges, but they will be of no use to you. For if you seek the votes of your fellow citizens, they will withhold them, and if you seek only their esteem, they will feign to refuse even that. You will remain among men, but you will forfeit your rights to humanity. When you approach your fellow creatures, they will shun you as one who is impure. And even those who believe in your innocence will abandon you, lest they, too, be shunned in turn. Go in peace, I will not take your life, but the life I leave you with is worse than death."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
"Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language."
-Ludwig Wittgenstein-
"It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character."
-Catch-22-
"Last, but by no means least, courage -- moral courage, the courage of one’s convictions, the courage to see things through. The world is in a constant conspiracy against the brave. It’s the age-old struggle -- the roar of the crowd on one side and the voice of your conscience on the other."
-General Douglas MacArthur-
(1880-1964) WWII Supreme Allied Commander of the Southwest Pacific, Supreme United Nations Commander
"There is no Freedom without Courage."
-Eric Schaub-
American Individualist, activist, speaker, writer
"Every actual state is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-
(1803-1882) American essayist, lecturer, and poet
"To say 'I have to' is to speak the language of compulsion, duty, authority -- the language of injunctions imposed on us from without. Objectivism is not a duty ethic, but an ethic of values, the ultimate value being one's own life and happiness. The language of values is 'I want' and 'I will': I want this, and I will do what it takes to get it."
-David Kelley-
Executive Director Institute for Objectivist Studies, Ph.D.
Source: I Don't Have To, IOS Journal, Volume 6, Number 1, April 1996.
"Rules are written for those who lack the ability to truly reason. But for those who can, rules become nothing more than guidelines, and live their lives governed not by rules but by reason."
-James McGuigan-
(1894-1974) Canadian Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church
"The unity of freedom has never relied on uniformity of opinion."
-John F. Kennedy-
(1917-1963) 35th US President
"You have to ask yourself, 'Who owns me? Do I own myself or am I just another piece of government property?' "
-Neal Boortz-
(1945- ) Radio talk show host, columnist
"The highest manifestation of life consists in this: that a being governs its own actions. A thing which is always subject to the direction of another is somewhat of a dead thing."
-Saint Thomas Aquinas-
(1225-1274) Italian philosopher and theologian
"A standing army, however necessary it may be at some times, is always dangerous to the liberties of the people. Such power should be watched with a jealous eye."
-Samuel Adams-
(1722-1803), was known as the "Father of the American Revolution."
"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity."
-Martin Luthor King-
"To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or knaves."
-Claude-Adrien Helvetius-
(1715-1771)
Source: On The Mind
"The most formidable weapons against errors of every kind is reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
"The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names."
-Chinese Proverb-
"The patriot, like the Christian, must learn to bear revilings and persecutions as a part of his duty; and in proportion as the trial is severe, firmness under it becomes more requisite and praiseworthy. It requires, indeed, self-command. But that will be fortified in proportion as the calls for its exercise are repeated."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"Mind Your Business"
-U. S. Treasury-
Source: The very first motto on a U.S. Minted Coin, the Continental Dollar, in 1776
"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 cannot enter — all his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement!"
-William Pitt-
1st Earl of Chatham
Speech on the Excise Bill, House of Commons (March 1763), quoted in Lord Brougham, Historical Sketches of Statesmen Who Flourished in the Time of George III (1855), I, p. 42
"Men are generally more honest in their private than in their public capacity, and will go greater lengths to serve a party, than when their own private interest is alone concerned. Honour is a great check upon mankind: But where a considerable body of men act together, this check is, in a great measure, removed; since a man is sure to be approved of by his own party, for what promotes the common interest; and he soon learns to despise the clamours of adversaries."
-David Hume-
"A man’s natural rights are his own, against the whole world; and any infringement of them is equally a crime, whether committed by one man, or by millions; whether committed by one man, calling himself a robber, … or by millions, calling themselves a government."
-Lysander Spooner-
"Freedom is risky. Nature makes no promises."
-Eric Schaub-
Individualist, activist, speaker, author
Source: The Liberty Ideal, 2005
"They: The makers of the Constitution: conferred, as against the government, the right to be let alone -- the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men."
-Justice Louis D. Brandeis-
(1856-1941) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: 1928
"A committee is a group of individuals who all put in a perfectly good color, and it comes out gray."
-Alan Sherman-
"[I]t is not the source but the limitation of power which prevents it from being arbitrary."
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
Source: The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944), p. 71
"My grandmother wanted me to have an education, so she kept me out of school."
-Margaret Mead-
(1901-1978) American cultural anthropologist and author
"Reaching consensus in a group is often confused with finding the right answer."
-Norman Mailer-
(1923-2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and film director
"Dignify and glorify common labor. It is at the bottom of life that we must begin, not at the top."
-Booker T. Washington-
(1856-1915) Author
"The strength and power of despotism consists wholly in the fear of resistance."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
"Those great and good men [the Framers] foresaw that troublous times would arise, when rulers and people would become restive under restraint, and seek by sharp and decisive measures to accomplish ends deemed just and proper; and that the principles of constitutional liberty would be in peril, unless established by irrepealable law. The history of the world had taught them that what was done in the past might be attempted in the future. 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."
-Ex parte Milligan-
1866 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court held that civilians could not be tried by military tribunals during the Civil War
"Everybody's a minarchist, you know, who's not an anarchist. Joseph Stalin was a minarchist. Bernie Sanders is a minarchist. If you're just gonna say, well, the State should just do x, y, z, why not x, y, z and a, b, c? And while we're at it, e, f, g, and a whole bunch of other things? Y'know, anarchists get accused of being utopian. But there is nothing more utopian than a minarchist. The idea that a State will stay restrained because it just decides it doesn't want more power. We're gonna create a monopoly on the initiation of violence, and they'll probably decide we'll only stay, you know, a reasonable size. Well, I mean, how much empirical evidence do you need to disprove the idea that that's even possible?
-Dave Smith-
The Monopoly On Violence
"The brave man inattentive to his duty, is worth little more to his country than the coward who deserts her in the hour of danger."
-Andrew Jackson-
(1767-1845) 7th US President
"We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can make for us or spare us."
-Marcel Proust-
(1871-1922) French novelist, critic, essayist
Source: In Search of Lost Time / Remembrance of Things Past, Vol II: Within a Budding Grove (1919)
"Are you willing to spend time studying the issues, making yourself aware, and then conveying that information to family and friends? Will you resist the temptation to get a government handout for your community?"
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
Source: from the speech "A Time For Choosing"
"The seven blunders that human society commits and cause all the violence: wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice, and politics without principles."
-Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi-
(1869-1948)
Source: A written list given to his departing grandson Arun Gandhi (October 1947), as quoted in Marriot (Spring 1998)
"The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor."
-George Orwell-
[Eric Arthur Blair] (1903-1950) British author
"I believe in the dignity of labor, whether with head or hand; that the world owes no man a living but that it owes every man an opportunity to make a living."
-John D. Rockefeller, Jr.-
"All wealth is the product of labor."
-John Locke-
(1632-1704) English philosopher and political theorist
"Fairness does not require the redistribution of wealth; it requires the creation of wealth, geared to an economy that can provide employment for everyone able and willing to work."
-Felix Rohatyn-
(1928- ) American investment banker known for his role in preventing the bankruptcy of New York City in the 1970s, United States Ambassador to France, long term advisor to the U.S. Democratic Party
Source: Wall Street Journal, April 11, 1996.
"The production of wealth is the result of agreement between labor and capital, between employer and employed. Its distribution, therefore, will follow the law of its creation, or great injustice will be done."
-Leland Stanford-
[Amasa Leland Stanford] (1824-1893) American tycoon, industrialist, politician and founder of Stanford University
"Without labor nothing prospers."
-Sophocles-
(c 497/6 BC - 406/5 BC) Greek playwright
"Absence of occupation is not rest,
A mind quite vacant is a mind distress'd."
-William Cowper-
(1731-1800) English poet, hymnodist
"Freedom of exchange and production within a regime of private property rights and freedom of contract harnesses self-interest to the public good. Admiration and endorsement of free markets is not – contrary to much uninformed commentary – admiration and endorsement of greed or materialism. It is, instead, the reflection of an acceptance of the reality that each person’s capacity to care for others is not unlimited.
Yet free markets work wonders in part because each person’s capacity to do no harm to other people’s persons and property is unlimited. And so when strangers meet to exchange, the law of property and contract (and tort) prompts each person to help the others, for only by helping these strangers can each person help himself or herself.
-Dr. Don Boudreaux-
"There are certain injustices in this life you’ve got to do something about. You can’t just say that you can’t fight it, or it’s too much trouble, or that you don’t have the time or the effort, or that you can’t win. Forget all that. Fight them all!
-Harlan Ellison-
"America's abundance was created not by public sacrifices to 'the common good,' but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America's industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance -- and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way."
-Ayn Rand-
[Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum] (1905-1982) Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter
"Let us not forget that the cultivation of the earth is the most important labor of man. When tillage begins, other arts will follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of civilization."
-Daniel Webster-
(1782-1852) US Senator
"In the late 1980s, Soviets were allowed to keep the wealth they created by raising vegetables on their garden plots. Although these plots composed only about 2% of the agricultural lands in the Soviet Union, they produced 25% of the food! When Soviets kept the wealth they created, they produced almost 16 times more than when it was taken from them at gunpoint, if necessary!"
-Dr. Mary J. Ruwart-
(1949- )
Source: Healing Our World, Ch 19.
"You don't have a right to the fruits of somebody else's labor. You don't have a right to a house, you don't have a right to a job, you don't have a right to medical care. You have a right to your life, you have your right to your liberty, you have a right to keep what your earn. And that's what produces prosperity. So you want equal justice. And this is not hard for me to argue, because if you really are compassionate and you care about people, the freer the society the more prosperous it is, and more likely that you are going to have medical care... When you turn it over to central economic planning, they're bound to make mistakes. The bureaucrats and the special interests and the Halliburtons are going to make the money. Whether it's war, or Katrina, these noncompetitive contracts, the bureaucrats make a lot of money and you end up with inefficiency."
-Dr. Ron Paul-
(1935-) American physician, US Congressman (R-TX), US Presidential candidate
Source: All Things Considered, NPR, July 25, 2007
"The Rules for Liberty
1) Don’t hurt people: Free people just want to be left alone, not hassled or harmed by someone else with an agenda or designs over their life and property.
2) Don’t take people’s stuff: America’s founders fought to ensure property rights and our individual right to the fruits of our labors.
3) Take responsibility: Liberty takes responsibility. Don’t sit around waiting for someone else to solve your problems.
4) Work for it: For every action there is an equal reaction. Work hard and you’ll be rewarded.
5) Mind your own business: Free people live and let live.
6) Fight the power: Thanks to the Internet and the decentralization of knowledge, there are more opportunities than ever to take a stand against corrupt authority."
-Matt Kibbe-
American economist, author, FreedomWorks President and CEO
Source: excerpted from 'Don’t Hurt People and Don’t Take Their Stuff: A Libertarian Manifesto,' 2014
"We may explain success mainly by one word and that word is WORK! WORK!! WORK!!! WORK!!!! Not transient and fitful effort, but patient, enduring, honest, unremitting, and indefatigable work, into which the whole heart is put."
-Frederick Douglass-
[Frederick Baily] (1818-1895), escaped slave, Abolitionist, author, editor of the North Star and later the New National Era
"There is no substitute under the heavens for productive labor. It is the process by which dreams become realities. It is the process by which idle visions become dynamic achievements."
-Gordon B. Hinckley-
(1910-2008) 15th President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
"A man who is without capital, and who, by prohibitions upon banking, is practically forbidden to hire any, is in a condition elevated but one degree above that of a chattel slave. He may live; but he can live only as the servant of others; compelled to perform such labor, and to perform it at such prices, as they may see fit to dictate."
-Lysander Spooner-
(1808-1887) Political theorist, activist, abolitionist
"The Democratic Party is made up of trial lawyers, labor unions, government employees, big city political machines, the coercive utopians, the radical environmentalists, feminists, and others who want to restructure society with tax dollars and government fiat."
-Grover Norquist-
(1956-) American political advocate, founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform
"The monarchy is a labor intensive industry."
-Harold Wilson-
(1916-1995) UK Prime Minister (1964-70, 1974-76)
"If a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who’s been arrested."
-Tom Wolf-
"It is unfortunate, that the efforts of mankind to recover the freedom of which they have been so long deprived, will be accompanied with violence, with errors, & even with crimes. But while we weep over the means, we must pray for the end."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Thomas Jefferson to F. D. Ivernois, February 6, 1795
"Modern society, based as it is on the division of labor, can be preserved only under conditions of lasting peace."
-Ludwig von Mises-
(1881-1973) Economist and social philosopher
"Democracy leads to anarchy, which is mob rule."
-Plato-
(429-347 BC) Greek philosopher
Source: The Republic, ca. 390 B.C.
"Democracy is morose, and runs to anarchy."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-
(1803-1882) American essayist, lecturer, and poet
Source: Nominalist and Realist, 1841
"The religious quality of Marxism also explains a characteristic attitude of the orthodox Marxist toward opponents. To him, as to any believer in a faith, the opponent is not merely in error but in sin. Dissent is unapproved of not only intellectually but also morally."
-Joseph A. Schumpeter-
(1883-1950)
Source: Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 1942
"Communism and socialism is [sic] seductive. It promises us that people will contribute according to ability and receive according to needs. Everybody is equal. Everybody has a right to decent housing, decent food and affordable medical care. History should have taught us that when we hear people talk this stuff -- watch out!"
-Walter E. Williams-
(1936- ) Columnist, Professor of Economics at George Mason University
"This is why political correctness, or Cultural Marxism,... lends itself so fashionably to easy labels. Transphobic, homophobic, xenophobic, racist, bigoted, Uncle Tom, white privilege, mainsplaining. All of these are slapped on people with "politically incorrect" opinions in an attempt to silence you. ...
Hate speech is inextricably tied to political correctness, or Cultural Marxism, and that creates intellectual conformity -- or intellectual authoritarianism. And that’s where you start to see things like 'safe spaces' or 'trigger warnings' or speakers banned from campus, or people with unpopular opinions banned from social media."
-Steven Crowder-
Source: Why 'Hate Speech' Doesn't Exist, 12/10/2016
"The ideal type of the Communist is a man in whom all individual, emotional, and unconscious elements have been reduced to a minimum and subjected to the control of an iron will, informed by a supple intellect. That intellect is totally at the service of a single and compelling idea, made incarnate in the Communist Party: the concept of History as an inexorable god whose ways are revealed ‘scientifically’ through the doctrine and method of Marxism-Leninism."
-Frank Straus Meyer-
(1909-1972) American philosopher, political activist, best known for his theory of "fusionism" – a political philosophy that unites elements of libertarianism and traditionalism into a philosophical synthesis which is posited as the definition of modern American conservatism.
Source: The Moulding of Communists: The Training of the Communist Cadre, 1961, p.16
"Open discussion of many major public questions has for some time now been taboo. We can’t open our mouths without being denounced as racists, misogynists, supremacists, imperialists or fascists. As for the media, they stand ready to trash anyone so designated."
-Saul Bellow-
(1915-2005) Canadian author, Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976
"The Framers would have seen a one-size-fits-all government for hundreds of millions of diverse citizens as being utterly unworkable and a straight road to tyranny. That is because they recognized that not every community is exactly the same. What works in Brooklyn might not be a good fit for Birmingham. The federal system allows for this diversity. It also enables people who do not like a certain system to move to a different one."
-William Barr-
(1950-) US Attorney General
Source: 2020 National Religious Broadcasters Convention, 2/26/2020
"Every time I criticize what I consider to be excesses or faults in the news business, I am accused of repression, and the leaders of various media professional groups wave the First Amendment as they denounce me. That happens to be my amendment, too. It guarantees my free speech as it does their freedom of the press... There is room for all of us -- and for our divergent views -- under the First Amendment."
-Spiro Agnew-
U. S. Vice-President
Source: 1972
"Perhaps the most obvious political effect of controlled news is the advantage it gives powerful people in getting their issues on the political agenda and defining those issues in ways likely to influence their resolution."
-W. Lance Bennett-
Author, professor at University of Washington
Source: News: The Politics of Illusion, 1983
"Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth -- more than ruin -- more even than death.... Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man."
-Bertrand Russell-
(1872 - 1970)
"Half the work that is done in this world is to make things appear what they are not."
-Elias Root Beadle-
(1812-1879) American (Afghanistan-born) Clergyman
"The politicians' stirring phrases are meant to keep our eyes averted from the reality of war — to make us imagine heroic young men marching in parades, winning glorious battles, and bringing peace and democracy to the world. But war is something quite different from that. It is your children or your grandchildren dying before they're even fully adults, or being maimed or mentally scarred for life. It is your brothers and sisters being taught to kill other people — and to hate people who are just like themselves and who don't want to kill anyone either. It is your children seeing their buddies' limbs blown off their bodies. It is hundreds of thousands of human beings dying years before their time. It is millions of people separated forever from the ones they love. It is the destruction of homes for which people worked for decades. It is the end of careers that meant as much to others as your career means to you. It is the imposition of heavy taxes on you and on other Americans and on people in other countries — taxes that remain long after the war is over. It is the suppression of free speech and the jailing of people who criticize the government. It is the imposition of slavery by forcing young men to serve in the military. It is goading the public to hate foreign people and races — whether Arabs or Japanese or Cubans or Serbs. It is numbing our sensibilities to cruelties inflicted on foreigners. It is cheering at the news of enemy pilots killed in their planes, of young men blown to bits while trapped inside tanks, of sailors drowned at sea. Other tragedies inevitably trail in the wake of war. Politicians lie even more than usual. Secrecy and cover-ups become the rule rather than the exception. The press becomes even less reliable. War is genocide, torture, cruelty, propaganda, and slavery. War is the worst cruelty government can inflict upon its subjects. It makes every other political crime — corruption, bribery, favoritism, vote-buying, graft, dishonesty — seem petty."
-Harry Browne-
"If police answered to customers just as grocers and hairdressers do, they wouldn’t be wasting time doing things that customers wouldn’t pay for, like pursuing the failed War on Drugs or petty rule infractions that generate revenue for governments."
-Nick Hankoff-
"To be able to think freely, a man must be certain that no consequence will follow whatever he writes."
-Ernest Renan-
(1823-1892)
Source: 1879
"Some who are too scrupulous to steal your possessions nevertheless see no wrong in tampering with your thoughts."
-Khalil Gibran-
(1883-1931) Lebanese-American philosophical essayist, novelist, mystical poet, and artist
Source: Spiritual Sayings of Kahlil Gibran (Anthony R. Ferris) 1962
"The most exhausting thing in life is being insincere."
-Anne Morrow Lindbergh-
(1906-2001) pioneering American aviator, author, and the spouse of fellow aviator Charles Lindbergh
"It takes less time to do a thing right, than it does to explain why you did it wrong."
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow-
(1807-1882) American poet
"It's an old political trick: 'If you can't convince 'em, confuse 'em.' But this time it won't work."
-Harry S. Truman-
(1884-1972), 33rd US President
Source: Address at the National Plowing Match (18 September 1948); as quoted in Miracle of '48: Harry Truman's Major Campaign Speeches and Selected Whistle-stops (2003)
"Are you not ashamed of heaping up the greatest amount of money and honour and reputation, and caring so little about wisdom and truth and the greatest improvement of the soul?"
-Socrates-
(469-399 B.C.) Greek philosopher
"Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth."
-Henry David Thoreau-
(1817-1862) American author, poet, philosopher, polymath, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and transcendentalist
"For an individual, or a society, the difference between moving forward, and moving in circles, is largely one of remaining aware of where you’ve been — of keeping your mistakes squarely in your view so you can be mindful of the direction you’re trying to move in. Hiding your mistakes, or denying that they ever occurred, may feel good in the short run; but in the long run, it’s a recipe for guaranteeing that you’ll make them again in the future."
-Ian Underwood-
"Small minds discuss people, average minds discuss events, but great minds discuss ideas."
-Admiral Hyman Rickover-
... but based on...
"Men and women range themselves into three classes or orders of intelligence; you can tell the lowest class by their habit of always talking about persons; the next by the fact that their habit is always to converse about things; the highest by their preference for the discussion of ideas."
-Henry Thomas Buckle-
"Between 'just desserts' and 'tragic irony' we are given quite a large scope for our particular talent. Generally speaking, things have gone about as far as they can possibly go when things have gotten about as bad as they can reasonably get.
-Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead-
"When government accepts responsibility for people, then people no longer take responsibility for themselves."
-George Pataki-
(1945- ) 53rd Governor of New York State
"The real 'haves' are they who can acquire freedom, self-confidence, and even riches without depriving others of them. They acquire all of these by developing and applying their potentialities. On the other hand, the real 'have nots' are they who cannot have aught except by depriving others of it. They can feel free only by diminishing the freedom of others, self-confident by spreading fear and dependence among others, and rich by making others poor."
-Eric Hoffer-
(1902-1983) American author, philosopher, awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
Source: The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms (1955)
"What is possible for me is possible for you."
-Frederick Douglass-
[Frederick Baily] (1818-1895), escaped slave, Abolitionist, author, editor of the North Star and later the New National Era
"Freedom of conscience is a natural right, both antecedent and superior to all human laws and institutions whatever; a right which laws never gave and a right which laws can never take away."
-John Goodwin-
(1594-1664)
Source: Might and Right Well Met, 1648
"Our forefathers found the evils of free thinking more to be endured than the evils of inquest or suppression. This is because thoughtful, bold and independent minds are essential to the wise and considered self-government."
-Justice Robert H. Jackson-
(1892-1954), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Atlantic Monthly, January 1955
"By a Declaration, Liberty is born. With Courage she is nourished, and with unceasing Commitment she is guarded."
-- Eric Schaub
Editor of Liberty Quotes
Source: The Common Man, 2003
"The Declaration of Independence is the all-time masterpiece of ideological simplification. There in a single sentence of self-evident truth, the founding Fathers put into clear, easily understandable focus, the broad basis of man's relationship to God, to government, and to his fellow man."
-Clarence Manion-
(1896-1979) American conservative radio talk show host, dean of the Notre Dame Law School
1956
"The 1st Amendment embraces the individual's right to purchase and read whatever books she wishes to, without fear the government will take steps to discover which books she buys, reads, and intends to read."
-Colorado Supreme Court-
Source: in a unanimous decision for Tattered Cover
"Two hundred ten years ago, the people who drafted our Bill of Rights decided that banning books wasn't the way to handle disagreements. They thought the best thing was more speech. It is a pity that county commissioners in 2002 don't agree."
-Matt Coles-
director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Lesbian and Gay Rights Projects
Source: on the occasion of a censorship challenge to It's Perfectly Normal
"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."
-Henry David Thoreau-
(1817-1862) American author, poet, philosopher, polymath, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and transcendentalist
"The class of citizens who provide at once their own food and their own raiment, may be viewed as the most truly independent and happy. They are more: they are the best basis of public liberty, and the strongest bulwark of public safety. It follows, that the greater the proportion of this class to the whole society, the more free, the more independent, and the more happy must be the society itself."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: National Gazette, 3 March 1792
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."
-Buckminster Fuller-
"A sure sign of a genius is that all of the dunces are in a confederacy against him."
-Frank Lloyd Wright-
(1867-1959) American architect, designer, writer, and educator
"This, then, is freedom in the external life of man -- that he is independent of the arbitrary power of his fellows."
-Ludwig von Mises-
(1881-1973) Economist and social philosopher
Source: his book, Socialism, par. II.9.26
"[I]f we can but prevent the government from wasting the labours of the people, under the pretence of taking care of them,
they must become happy."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Cooper, November 29, 1802
"My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government. That government is best which governs least."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"What assurance have we that our masters will or can keep the promise which induced us to sell ourselves? Let us not be deceived by phrases about 'Man taking charge of his own destiny'. All that can really happen is that some men will take charge of the destiny of the others. They will be simply men; none perfect; some greedy, cruel and dishonest. The more completely we are planned the more powerful they will be. Have we discovered some new reason why, this time, power should not corrupt as it has done before?"
-C. S. Lewis-
(1898-1963), British novelist
Source: Willing Slaves of the Welfare State, first published in The Observer on July 20, 1958
"Ultimately, the only power to which man should aspire is that which he exercises over himself."
-Elie Wiesel-
(1928-) Author, Nobel Peace Prize 1986
"A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away."
-Barry Goldwater-
(1909-1998) US Senator (R-Arizona)
"Already a couple of the faithful have sent in checks for a foundation memorial to the innocents who perished at the hands of the ninja at Waco ... I have been criticized by referring to our federal masked men as 'ninja' ... Let us reflect upon the fact that a man who covers his face shows reason to be ashamed of what he is doing. A man who takes it upon himself to shed blood while concealing his identity is a revolting perversion of the warrior ethic. It has long been my conviction that a masked man with a gun is a target. I see no reason to change that view."
-Jeff Cooper-
LTC USMC, 1920-2006
"My father taught that the only helping hand you're ever going to be able to rely on is the one at the end of your sleeve."
-J. C. Watts, Jr.-
(1957- ) US Congressman from Oklahoma (R), former quarterback in the Canadian Football League
"Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year, it is the struggle of a lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble."
-John Lewis-
"No man can suffer too much, and no man can fall too soon, if he suffer or if he fall in defense of the liberties and Constitution of his country."
-Daniel Webster-
(1782-1852) US Senator
"The worst evils which mankind has ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments. The state can be and has often been in the course of history the main source of mischief and disaster."
-Ludwig von Mises-
(1881-1973) Economist and social philosopher
"Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we should soon want bread."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured." Aristotle observed, "Anybody can become angry — that is easy — but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose and in the right way — that is not within everybody's power and is not easy."
-Mark Twain-
"I swear by my life, and love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."
-Ayn Rand-
[Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum] (1905-1982) Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter
Source: Atlas Shrugged
"People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them."
-George Bernard Shaw-
(1856-1950) Irish comic dramatistst
Source: "Mrs. Warren's Profession" (1893) Act II
"The man who does not do his own thinking is a slave, and is a traitor to himself and his fellow men."
-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"t;
"No man can climb out beyond the limitations of his own character."
-John Viscount Morley-
(1838-1923), of Blackburn
"Reporters today are far removed from America's founding values and are alarmed and contemptuous of gun owners as dangerous lower classes."
-Henry Allen-
American journalist, poet, musician, and critic
Source: Washington Post
&q"As long as I don't write about the government, religion, politics, and other institutions, I am free to print anything."
-Pierre-Augustin Beaumarchais-
(1732-1799) French playwright, watchmaker, inventor, musician, diplomat, fugitive, spy, publisher, arms dealer, satirist, financier, and revolutionary
"The American people should be made aware of the trend toward monopolization of the great public information vehicles and the concentration of more and more power over public opinion in fewer and fewer hands."
-Spiro Agnew-
U. S. Vice-President
"Today in the United States, the corporate – or ‘mainstream’ – press is massively consolidated. And it has become remarkably monolithic in viewpoint, at the same time that an increasing number of journalists see themselves less as objective reporters of the facts, and more as agents of change."
-William Barr-
(1950-) US Attorney Generalal
Source: 2020 National Religious Broadcasters Convention, 2/26/2020
"A platform is something a candidate stands for and the voters fall for. ... I'm having my platform run up by a movie set designer, so it will be very impressive from the front, but not too permanent. After all, there's no sense putting a lot of time and thought into something you'll have no use for after you're elected."
-Gracie Allen-
"You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline; it helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer."
-Frank Zappa-
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you."
-Don Marquis-
"Every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered...History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right."
-George Orwell-
[Eric Arthur Blair] (1903-1950) British author
Source: "1984" by George Orwell, 1950
"A statesman who keeps his ear permanently glued to the ground will have neither elegance of posture nor flexibility of movement."
-Abba Eban-
[Aubrey Solomon Meir Eban] (1915-2002) Israeli diplomat, politician
"Governing a large country is like frying a small fish. You spoil it with too much poking."
-Lao-Tzu-
[Li Erh] (570-490 BC) 'Old Sage', Father of Taoism
"It is the beginning of all true criticism of our time to realize that it has really nothing to say, at the very moment when it has invented so tremendous a trumpet for saying it."
-Gilbert Keith Chesterton-
(1874-1936) British essayist, critic, poet, and novelist
Source: Illustrated London News, 1923
"It is discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit."
-Noel Coward-
(1899-1973) British playwright
"Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-
(1803-1882) American essayist, lecturer, and poet
Source: Essays, 1841
"There is no man so good that if he placed all his actions and thought under the scrutiny of the laws, he would not deserve hanging ten times in his life."
-Michel de Montaigne-
[Michel Eyquem De Montaigne] (1532-1592) French Renaissance scholar, philosopher, writer
Source: Essays, 1595
"Take care that no one hates you justly."
-Publilius Syrus-
Latin writer of maxims, in the 1st century BCE
"We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable, that all men are created equal and independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: First draft of the Declaration of Independence
"We must not allow ourselves to become like the system we oppose. We cannot afford to use methods of which we will be ashamed when we look back, when we say, '...we shouldn't have done that.' We must remember, my friends, that we have been given a wonderful cause. The cause of freedom! And you and I must be those who will walk with heads held high. We will say, 'We used methods that can stand the harsh scrutiny of history.'"
-Bishop Desmond Tutu-
(1931- ) Nobel Prize for Peace 1984
"Even today a crude sort of persecution is all that is required to create an honorable name for any sect, no matter how indifferent in itself."
-Friedrich Nietzsche-
(1844-1900) German philosopher, cultural critic, poet, philologist
Source: The Anti-Christ, 1889
"One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them."
-Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
"It is possible that the distinction between moral relativism and moral absolutism has sometimes been blurred because an excessively consistent practice of either leads to the same practical result -- ruthlessness in political life."
-Richard Hofstadter-
"All things in moderation, including moderation."
"When I contemplate the natural dignity of man; when I feel ... for the honor and happiness of its character, I become irritated at the attempt to govern mankind by force and fraud, as if they were all knaves and fools, and can scarcely avoid disgust at those who are thus imposed upon."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
"There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences."
-P. J. O'Rourke-
(1947- ) US humorist, journalist, & political commentator
1993
"Tolerance implies a respect for another person, not because he is wrong or even because he is right, but because he is human."
-John Cogley-
Source: Commonwealth, 24 April 1959
"[A]fter unleashing the Red Guards … to serve his political purposes, Mao Zedong was no longer able to control them."
-Nien Cheng-
[Yao Nien-Yuan 姚念媛] (1915 - 2009) Chinese author who recounted her harrowing experiences during the Cultural Revolution in her memoir 'Life and Death in Shanghai'
Source: Life and Death in Shanghai, 1987
"Day and night the city resounded with the loud noise of drums and gongs … looting and the ransacking of private homes … The violence of the Red Guards seemed to have escalated. … Articles in the newspapers … encouraged the Red Guards and congratulated them on their vandalism. They were … exhorted to be fearless in their work of toppling the old world and building a new one based on Mao’s teachings."
-Nien Cheng-
[Yao Nien-Yuan 姚念媛] (1915 - 2009) Chinese author who recounted her harrowing experiences during the Cultural Revolution in her memoir 'Life and Death in Shanghai'
Source: Life and Death in Shanghai, 1987
"The newspaper announced that the mission of the Red Guards was to rid the country of the ‘Four Olds’: old culture, old customs, old habits, and old ways of thinking. There was no clear definition of ‘old’; it was left to the Red Guards to decide. First of all, they changed street names."
-Nien Cheng-
[Yao Nien-Yuan 姚念媛] (1915 - 2009) Chinese author who recounted her harrowing experiences during the Cultural Revolution in her memoir 'Life and Death in Shanghai'
Source: Life and Death in Shanghai, 1987
"A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday."
-Alexander Pope-
(1688-1744) English poet
Source: Thoughts on Various Subjects; published in Swift's Miscellanies (1727)
"A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing."
-George Bernard Shaw-
(1856-1950) Irish comic dramatist
"The opposition is indispensable. A good statesmen, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opponents than from his fervent supporters."
-Walter Lippmann-
(1889-1974) American writer, journalist, and political commentator
Source: Atlantic Monthly, August 1939
"Hypocrisy is an homage that vice pays to virtue."
-François Duc de La Rochefoucauld-
(1613-1680) French author
Source: Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678), Maxim 218
"A wise man neither suffers himself to be governed, nor attempts to govern others."
-Jean de la Bruyere-
(1645-1696) French essayist and moralist
"No one has ever succeeded in keeping nations at war except by lies."
-Salvador de Madariaga-
(1886-1978 ), Spanish writer, diplomat, and historian, noted for his service at the League of Nations
"The highest reward for man’s toil is not what he gets for it, but what he becomes by it."
-John Ruskin-
(1819-1900) British author, artist, social critic
"Mastering others is strength. Mastering yourself is true power."
-Lao-Tzu-
[Li Erh] (570-490 BC) 'Old Sage', Father of Taoism
"The things that will destroy us are:
politics without principle;
pleasure without conscience;
wealth without work;
knowledge without character;
business without morality;
science without humanity;
and worship without sacrifice."
-Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi-
(1869-1948)
"The whole art of government consists in the art of being honest."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"We, today, stand on the shoulders of our predecessors who have gone before us. We, as their successors, must catch the torch of freedom and liberty passed on to us by our ancestors. We cannot lose this battle."
-Benjamin E. Mays-
(1895-1984)
"Freedom may come quickly in robes of peace, or after ages of conflict and war; but come it will, and abide it will, so long as the principles by which it was acquired are held sacred."
-Edward Everett-
(1794-1865) American politician and educator from Massachusetts. US Representative, US Senator, 15th Governor of Massachusetts, Minister to Great Britain, US Secretary of State, professor and president of Harvard
Source: Orations and Speeches. Address, Aug. 25, 1835. Before the Literary Societies of Amherst College
"It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not."
-Andre Gide-
(1869-1951) French writer
"The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous."
-Frederick Douglass-
[Frederick Baily] (1818-1895), escaped slave, Abolitionist, author, editor of the North Star and later the New National Era
"Dare to be true. Nothing can need a lie:
A fault, which needs it most, grows two thereby."
-George Herbert-
[1593-1633] Welsh-born English poet, orator and Anglican priest
Source: The Temple (1633), The Church Porch, Lines 77-78
"I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution, or that have failed their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is "needed" before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents' 'interests,' I shall reply that I was informed that their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can."
-Barry Goldwater-
"Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"War is an ugly thing but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feelings which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."
-John Stuart Mill-
(1806-1873) English philosopher and economist
"Do all the good you can.
By all the means you can.
In all the ways you can.
In all the places you can.
At all the times you can.
To all the people you can.
As long as ever you can."
-John Wesley-
(1703-1791) Church of England cleric, Christian theologian, a founder of the Methodist movement
"I am a Tory Anarchist. I should like every one to go about doing just as he pleased — short of altering any of the things to which I have grown accustomed."
-Max Beerbohm-
"Bad men cannot make good citizens. It is impossible that a nation of infidels or idolaters should be a nation of freemen. It is when a people forget God that tyrants forge their chains. A vitiated state of morals, a corrupted public conscience, is incompatible with freedom. No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue; and by a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles."
-Patrick Henry-
(1736-1799) US Founding Father
Source: Attributed - no source found.
"No man who is corrupt, no man who condones corruption in others, can possibly do his duty by the community."
-Theodore Roosevelt-
(1858-1919) 26th US President
"When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.
When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.
When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.
When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out."
-Reverend Martin Niemoeller-
(1892-1984) German Lutheran pastor, was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Dachau in 1938. He was freed by the allied forces in 1945.
Source: Poem in 1976 translated from German
"Volumes can be and have been written about the issue of freedom versus dictatorship, but, in essence, it comes down to a single question: do you consider it moral to treat men as sacrificial animals and to rule them by physical force?"
-Ayn Rand-
[Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum] (1905-1982) Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter
"During the last dozen years the tales of suppression of free assemblage, free press, and free speech, by local authorities or the State operating under martial law have been so numerous as to have become an old story. They are attacked at the instigation of an economically and socially powerful class, itself enjoying to the full the advantages of free communications, but bent on denying them to the class it holds within its power..."
-Edward Alsworth Ross-
(1866-1951) Professor
Source: Speech, American Sociological Society, 1914
"The public must be put in its place, so that it may exercise its own powers, but no less and perhaps even more, so that each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd."
-Walter Lippmann-
(1889-1974) American writer, journalist, and political commentator
"Politics is the entertainment division of the military-industrial complex."
-Frank Zappa-
"One of these days they are going to remove so much of the 'hooey' and the thousands of things the schools have become clogged up with, and we will find that we can educate our broods for about one-tenth of the price and learn 'em something that they might accidentally use after they escape."
-Will Rogers-
(1879-1935) American humorist
"The most worthwhile form of education is the kind that puts the educator inside you, as it were, so that the appetite for learning persists long after the external pressure for grades and degrees has vanished. Otherwise you are not educated; you are merely trained."
-Sydney J. Harris-
"Libertarianism is a political philosophy that holds that a person should be free to do whatever he wants in life, as long as his conduct is peaceful. Thus, as long a person doesn’t murder, rape, burglarize, defraud, trespass, steal, or inflict any other act of violence against another person’s life, liberty, or property, libertarians hold that the government should leave him alone. In fact, libertarians believe that a primary purpose of government is to prosecute and punish anti-social individuals who initiate force against others."
-Jacob Hornberger-
Future of Freedom Foundation president
"Libertarianism is the philosophy that says that people should be free from individual, societal, or government interference to live their lives any way they desire, pursue their own happiness, accumulate wealth, assess their own risks, make their own choices, participate in any economic activity for their profit, engage in commerce with anyone who is willing to reciprocate, and spend the fruits of their labor as they see fit. As long as people don’t violate the personal or property rights of others, and as long as their actions are peaceful, their associations are voluntary, and their interactions are consensual, they should be free to live their lives without license, regulation, interference, or molestation by the government."
-Laurence M. Vance-
"Ours was the first revolution in the history of mankind that truly reversed the course of government, and with three little words: 'We the people.' 'We the people' tell the government what to do, it doesn't tell us. 'We the people' are the driver, the government is the car. And we decide where it should go, and by what route, and how fast. Almost all the world's constitutions are documents in which governments tell the people what their privileges are. Our Constitution is a document in which 'We the people' tell the government what it is allowed to do. 'We the people' are free. This belief has been the underlying basis for everything I've tried to do these past eight years."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
"The issues can be stated very briefly:
Who will be controlled?
Who will exercise control?
What type of control will be exercised?
Most important of all, toward what end or purpose,
or in the pursuit of what value, will control be exercised?"
-Carl Rogers-
(1902-1987) American psychologist
"There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc., that are common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience."
-Karl Marx-
(1818-1883) Prussian-born philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist, father of Communism, co-author of the 'Communist Manifesto'
Source: The Communist Manifesto, 1848
"You don't have to scratch liberalism very deeply to find socialism underneath, nor socialism to find authoritarianism underneath."
-Don Luskin-
(1954 -) American columnist
"People constantly speak of 'the government' doing this or that, as they might speak of God doing it. But the government is really nothing but a group of men, and usually they are very inferior men."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"Discipline must come through liberty... We do not consider an individual disciplined when he has been rendered as artificially silent as a mute and as immovable as a paralytic. He is an individual annihilated, not disciplined."
-Maria Montessori-
(1870-1952) Italian physician and educator best known for the philosophy of education that bears her name, the Montessori method
Source: The Montessori Method, 1912
"One of the serious results of propaganda is that it has caused the public to think that education and propaganda are the same thing, and thus to make an ignorant multitude believe it is being educated when it is only being manipulated. Education aims at independence of judgement. Propaganda offers ready-made opinions for the unthinking herd."
-Everett Dean Martin-
(1880-1941) American minister, writer, journalist, instructor, lecturer, social psychologist, social philosopher, advocate of adult education
Source: Are We Victims of Propaganda, Our Invisible Masters: A Debate with Edward Bernays (1929)
"It is the trivial, the irrelevant, the sensational, the appeal to obsolete bigotry which naturally give it greatest publicity. In such publicity it becomes a mere vulgar caricature of itself."
-Everett Dean Martin-
(1880-1941) American minister, writer, journalist, instructor, lecturer, social psychologist, social philosopher, advocate of adult education
Source: Are We Victims of Propaganda, Our Invisible Masters: A Debate with Edward Bernays (1929)
"The educator aims at a slow process of development; the propagandist, at quick results. The educator tries to tell people how to think; the propagandist, what to think. The educator strives to develop individual responsibility; the propagandist, mass effects. The educator wants thinking; the propagandist, action. The educator fails unless he achieves an open mind; the propagandist, unless he achieves a closed mind."
-Everett Dean Martin-
(1880-1941) American minister, writer, journalist, instructor, lecturer, social psychologist, social philosopher, advocate of adult education
Source: Are We Victims of Propaganda, Our Invisible Masters: A Debate with Edward Bernays (1929)
"I regret to say it, but we are gradually turning over the business of Congress, turning over all our constitutional rights, turning over our powers delegated by the people to a lot of editors, theorists, and college professors who are not capable of conducting our affairs and to whom we should not abdicate."
-Oscar Callaway-
(1872-1947) U.S. Congressman, TX-D (1911-1917)
Source: Congressional Record of February 9, 1917, page 2947, as entered by Representative Oscar Callaway of Texas
"Political scientists almost everywhere have promoted the expansion of government power. They have functioned as the clergy of oppression."
-Rudolph J. Rummel-
(1932-2014) Professor of political science, University of Hawaii
Source: Death by Government, 1995
"Politics doesn't work. Look at the parts of America where government has had the most power, where government has spent the most money. Look at the housing projects we've got the poor people in."
-P. J. O'Rourke-
(1947- ) US humorist, journalist, & political commentator
Source: "Age And Guile"
"But what is Freedom? Rightly understood,
A universal licence to be good."
-Hartley Coleridge-
(1796-1849) Poet
"Duties are not performed for duty's sake, but because their neglect would make the man uncomfortable. A man performs but one duty -- the duty of contenting his spirit, the duty of making himself agreeable to himself."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910) American author and humorist
"Activate yourself to duty by remembering your position, who you are, and what you have obliged yourself to be."
-Thomas Kempis-
[Thomas à Kempis] (c.1380-1471) Catholic author
"It is a very great mistake to imagine that the object of loyalty is the authority and interest of one individual man, however dignified by the applause or enriched by the success of popular actions."
-Samuel Adams-
"It is not who governs but what government is entitled to do that seems to me the essential problem."
-Friedrich Hayek-
"Why I am not a conservative"
"Before you heal someone, as him if he's willing to give up the things that made him sick."
-Hippocrates-
"If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910) American author and humorist
"Rather fail with honor than succeed by fraud."
-Sophocles-
(c 497/6 BC - 406/5 BC) Greek playwright
"Persons with weight of character carry, like planets, their atmospheres along with them in their orbits."
-Thomas Hardy-
(1840-1928) English novelist, poet
"Leadership is a potent combination of strategy and character. But if you must be without one, be without the strategy."
-General H. Norman Schwarzkopf-
(1934-2012) United States Army general
"Honor, justice, and humanity, forbid us tamely to surrender that freedom which we received from our gallant ancestors, and which our innocent posterity have a right to receive from us."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"My father had a deep and lifelong contempt for politicians in general ('They tell lies,' he used to say with wonder, 'even when they don't have to')."
-Gore Vidal-
"False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil."
-Socrates-
(469-399 B.C.) Greek philosopher
"The creed of our democracy is that liberty is acquired and kept by men and women who are strong and self-reliant, and possessed of such wisdom as God gives mankind -- men and women who are just, and understanding, and generous to others -- men and women who are capable of disciplining themselves. For they are the rulers and they must rule themselves."
-Franklin D. Roosevelt-
(1882-1945), 32nd US President
10/28/44
"Whenever government assumes to deliver us from the trouble of thinking for ourselves, the only consequences it produces are those of torpor and imbecility."
-William Godwin-
(1756-1836) English journalist, political philosopher and novelist
Source: An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 1793
"Those who love peace must learn to organize as effectively as those who love war."
-Martin Luthor King, Jr.-
"The only foundation of a free Constitution, is pure Virtue, and if this cannot be inspired into our People, in a great Measure, than they have it now. They may change their Rulers, and the forms of Government, but they will not obtain a lasting Liberty."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: John Adams, letter to Zabdiel Adams, June 21, 1776
"All free constitutions are formed with two views -- to deter the governed from crime, and the governors from tyranny."
-John Lansing, Jr.-
(1754-1829) American lawyer, politician
Source: Debate, Constitutional Convention, 1787
"In selecting men for office, let principle be your guide. Regard not the particular sect or denomination of the candidate -- look at his character. It is alleged by men of loose principles, or defective views of the subject, that religion and morality are not necessary or important qualifications for political stations. But the scriptures teach a different doctrine. They direct that rulers should be men who rule in the fear of God, men of truth, hating covetousness. It is to the neglect of this rule that we must ascribe the multiplied frauds, breaches of trust, speculations and embezzlements of public property which astonish even ourselves; which tarnish the character of our country and which disgrace our government. When a citizen gives his vote to a man of known immorality, he abuses his civic responsibility; he not only sacrifices his own responsibility; he sacrifices not only his own interest, but that of his neighbor; he betrays the interest of his country."
-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
"Remember to vote early -- and often."
-Al Capone-
(1899-1947) American gangster, nicknamed "Scarface"
Source: Attributed accordog to "Capone," by John Kobler
"I think I have served the purpose that I came here for, which was to provide a credible election product for our members."
-Brenda Snipes-
(1943-) Supervisor of Elections for Broward County, Florida
November 13, 2018, priot to her removal from office
Source: https://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/politics/fl-ne-election-snipes-replacement-20181113-story.html
"I listen to people talking about this universal breakdown we are in and I marvel at their stupid cowardice. It is so obvious that they deliberately cheat themselves because their fear of change won't let them face the truth. They don't want to understand what has happened to them. All they want is to start the merry-go-round of blind greed all over again. They no longer know what they want this country to be, what they want it to become, where they want it to go. It has lost all meaning for them except as pig-wallow. And so their lives as citizens have no beginnings, no ends. They have lost the ideal of the Land of the Free. Freedom demands initiative, courage, the need to decide what life must mean to oneself. To them, that is terror. They explain away their spiritual cowardice by whining that the time for individualism is past, when it is their courage to possess their own souls which is dead — and stinking! No, they don't want to be free. Slavery means security — of a kind, the only kind they have courage for. It means they need not to think. They have only to obey orders from owners who are, in turn, their slaves!"
-Eugene O'Neill-
"It's not the hand that signs the laws that holds the destiny of America. It's the hand that casts the ballot."
-Harry S. Truman-
(1884-1972), 33rd US President
"The lesson that Americans today have forgotten or never learned -- the lesson which our ancestors tried so hard to teach -- is that the greatest threat to our lives, liberty, property, and security is not some foreign government, as our rulers so often tell us. The greatest threat to our freedom and well-being lies with our own government!."
-Jacob G. Hornberger-
(1950- ) American author, journalist, politician, founder and president of the Future of Freedom Foundation
Source: Gun Control, Patriotism and Civil Disobedience, Pamphlet published by International Society for Individual Liberty
"Vote: The instrument and symbol of a free man's power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country."
-Ambrose Bierce-
(1842-1914) American Civil War soldier, humorist, writer
"An election is nothing more than the advanced auction of stolen goods."
-Ambrose Bierce-
(1842-1914) American Civil War soldier, humorist, writer
"Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
Source: to the voters of Bristol, 1774
"Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half the time."
-E. B. White-
(1899-1985) American writer, contributor to "The New Yorker" magazine
More than -- but only just more than -- half. FTFY...
"Our experience has shown us that in the excitement of great popular elections, deciding the policy of the country, and its vast patronage, frauds will be committed, if a chance is given for them. If these frauds are allowed, the result is not only that the popular will may be defeated, and the result falsified, but that the worst side will prevail. The side which has the greater number of dishonest men will poll the most votes. The war cry, "Vote early and vote often!" and the familiar problem, "how to cast the greatest number of votes with the smallest number of voters", indicate the direction in which the dangers lie."
-Richard Henry Dana, Jr.-
(1815-1882) American lawyer, politician from Massachusetts
Source: The British newspaper The Times of 27 August 1859 printed a letter about the use of the ballot for voting in the United States, written by Richard Henry Dana, Jr. to his friend Lord Radstock
"According to the Taranto Principle, the press's failure to hold left-wingers accountable for bad behavior merely encourages the left's bad behavior to the point that its candidates are repellent to ordinary Americans."
-R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.-
(1943-) American magazine editor, book author, columnist
Source: 'The Taranto Principle', The New York Sun, September 25, 2008
"He alone deserves liberty and life who daily must win them anew."
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe-
(1749-1832) German writer, statesman
"There is danger in the concentration of control in the television and radio networks, especially in the large television and radio stations; danger in the concentration of ownership in the press… and danger in the increasing concentration of selection by book publishers and reviewers and by the producers of radio and television programs."
-Eugene McCarthy-
(1916-2005) US Congressman (D-Minnesota) & US Senator (D-Minnesota)
Source: Censorship: For And Against, 1971
"Make men wise, and by that very operation you make them free. Civil liberty follows as a consequence of this; no usurped power can stand against the artillery of opinion."
-William Godwin-
(1756-1836) English journalist, political philosopher and novelist
"A wise man ought not to desire to inhabit that country where men have more authority than laws."
-Walter Raleigh-
"I will not willingly cede more power to anyone, not to the state, not to General Motors, not to the CIO. I will hoard my power like a miser, resisting every effort to drain it away from me. I will then use my power, as I see fit. I mean to live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never to the authority of political truths arrived at yesterday at the voting booth."
-William F. Buckley Jr.-
"Socialists desire to practice legal plunder, not illegal plunder. Socialists, like all other monopolists, desire to make the law their own weapon. And when once the law is on the side of socialism, how can it be used against socialism? For when plunder is abetted by the law, it does not fear your courts, your gendarmes, and your prisons. Rather, it may call upon them for help."
-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
"What does anti-Semitism have to do with socialism? I would put the question this way: What does the Jew have to do with socialism? Socialism has to do with labor. When did one ever see him working instead of plundering, stealing and living from the sweat of others? As socialists we are opponents of the Jews because we see in the Hebrews the incarnation of capitalism."
-Joseph Paul Goebbels-
(1897-1945) German politician and Reich Minister of Propaganda of Nazi Germany
Source: Joseph Goebbels and Mjölnir, Die verfluchten Hakenkreuzler. Etwas zum Nachdenken (Munich: Verlag Frz. Eher, 1932)
"Those who can make you believe in absurdities can make you commit atrocities!"
-Voltaire-
[François Marie Arouet] (1694-1778) French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher
"Metaphysicians and politicians may dispute forever, but they will never find any other moral principle or foundation of rule or obedience, than the consent of governors and governed."
-John Adams-
"The act of voting is one opportunity for us to remember that our whole way of life is predicated on the capacity of ordinary people to judge carefully and well."
-Alan Keyes-
(1950- ) US Politician
"But I go on this great republican principle, that the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom. Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks -- no form of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea. If there be sufficient virtue and intelligence in the community, it will be exercised in the selection of these men. So that we do not depend on their virtue, or put confidence in our rulers, but in the people who are to choose them."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Virginia Ratifying Convention, 1788
“We the willing, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much, with so little, for so long, we are now qualified to do anything, with nothing.”
-anonymous-
"Questions are a burden to others.
Answers are a prison for oneself."
-The Prisoner-
"Rooted in freedom, bonded in the fellowship of danger, sharing everywhere a common human blood, we declare again that all men are brothers, and that mutual tolerance is the price of liberty."
-Will Durant-
"Not to be a republican at twenty is proof of want of heart; to be one at thirty is proof of want of head."
-Francois Guisot-
(1787-1874)
"He who is not a républicain at twenty compels one to doubt the generosity of his heart; but he who, after thirty, persists, compels one to doubt the soundness of his mind."
-Anselme Polycarpe Batbie-
French jurist and academic, 1828-1887
"Give the American people a good cause, and there's nothing they can't lick."
-John Wayne-
[Marion Morrison] (1907-1979) American film actor
"The electors see their representative not only as a legislator for the state but also as the natural protector of local interests in the legislature; indeed, they almost seem to think that he has a power of attorney to represent each constituent, and they trust him to be as eager in their private interests as in those of the country."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
[Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clerel, le Comte de Tocqueville] (1805-1859) French historian
Source: Democracy in America, 1835
"An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for blood; a mud bath for every soul concerned in it."
-George Bernard Shaw-
(1856-1950) Irish comic dramatist
"The true patriot scrutinizes the actions of his own government with unceasing vigilance. And when his government violates the morality and rightness associated with principles of individual freedom and private property, he immediately rises in opposition to his government."
-Jacob G. Hornberger-
(1950- ) American author, journalist, politician, founder and president of the Future of Freedom Foundation
Source: The Tyranny Of Gun Control, 28 (Future Of Freedom Foundation 1997)
"Politicians thrill their supporters with promises to misuse the vast and dangerous power of the state to crush despised opponents. And then we're supposed to wonder why our political seasons turn into societal pressure cookers with election outcomes treated as existential threats. Well, our political class and their rabid partisans are doing their best to make sure that losing a vote really is an existential threat. ...
Traditional philosophical arguments over the proper role of government and the balance of majority wishes with individual autonomy have been replaced by one important observation: the government we have now is so large, powerful, and dangerous that nobody can afford to lose control to their enemies. Politics is now an escalating struggle between death cults whose partisans realistically fear doom if vote totals don't go their way. ...
But one way or another we have to make elections less consequential so that people can afford to lose them without fearing their treatment by the winners. Given that power is inevitably abused by those who wield it, that means reducing government's authority over our lives so that ballot-box victors can't so easily punish their enemies."
-J.D. Tuccille-
"Experts and the educated elite have replaced what worked with what sounded good. Society was far more civilized before they took over our schools, prisons, welfare programs, police departments and courts. It's high time we ran these people out of our lives and went back to common sense."
-Walter E. Williams-
(1936- ) Columnist, Professor of Economics at George Mason University
"Let the people think they govern and they will be governed."
-William Penn-
(1644-1718) English real estate entrepreneur, philosopher, early Quaker, founder of the Province of Pennsylvania
Source: Some Fruits of Solitude, 1693
"If you are afraid to speak against tyranny, then you are already a slave."
-John "Birdman" Bryant-
(1943-2009) self labeled as “The World’s Most Controversial Author”
"[The People] are the ultimate, guardians of their own liberty."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Queries 14 and 19, 1784
"Yield not to evils, but attack all the more boldly."
-Virgil-
[Publius Vergilius Maro] (70-19 BCE) Classical Roman poet
"Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny."
-Robert A. Heinlein-
(1907-1988) American writer
"Anarchy means 'without leaders', not 'without order'. With anarchy comes an age of ordnung, of true order, which is to say voluntary order... this age of ordung will begin when the mad and incoherent cycle of verwirrung that these bulletins reveal has run its course... This is not anarchy, Eve. This is chaos."
-V for Vendetta-
"Where law ends, tyranny begins."
-Margaret Thatcher-
(1925-2013) British Prime Minister (1979–1990)
"There is a class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs. There is a certain class of race-problem solvers who don't want the patient to get well."
-Booker T. Washington-
(1856-1915) Author
"Who profits by a sin has done the sin."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: Tragedies, Medea, lines 500-501; (Medea)
"'Liar' is just as ugly a word as 'thief,' because it implies the presence of just as ugly a sin in one case as in the other. If a man lies under oath or procures the lie of another under oath, if he perjures himself or suborns perjury, he is guilty under the statute law."
-Theodore Roosevelt-
(1858-1919) 26th US President
"If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"The government created by this compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"As long as people will accept crap, it will be financially profitable to dispense it. It becomes an ever-descending spiral."
-Dick Cavett-
Works for politics and governance, too...
"The most difficult struggle of all is the one within ourselves. Let us not get accustomed and adjusted to these conditions. The one who adjusts ceases to discriminate between good and evil. He becomes a slave in body and soul. Whatever may happen to you, remember always: Don’t adjust! Revolt against the reality!"
-Mordechai Anielewicz-
(1919-1943) Jewish resistance leader against Nazi oppression in Warsaw, Poland, 1943
1943
"He that complies against his will,
Is of his own opinion still."
-Samuel Butler-
(1835-1902) Victorian-era English author
"What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly — that is the first law of nature."
-Voltaire-
"A greater principle is at stake than the fate of any particular president."
-Benjamin Curtis-
(1809-1874) Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court
Source: Dissenting in Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857)
"... and Whereas both Houses of Congress have by their joint committee requested me to recommend to the people of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God, especially a form of government for their safety and happiness. Now, therefore, I do recommend and assign Thursday, the 26th day of November, next to be devoted by the people of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being Who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, or will be ...that we may then all unite in rendering unto Him our sincere and humble thanks for His kind care and protection of the people of this country previous to there becoming a nation... And also that we then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations, and beseech Him to pardon our national and other transgressions... to render our National Government a blessing to all the people by constantly being a governmment of wise, just and Constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed...(and) to promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the increase of science among us...given under my hand at the City of New York, the 3rd day of October in the Year of Our Lord 1789."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: in his First Thanksgiving Proclamation before the Congress on October 3, 1789
"The Perfect Way is only difficult for those who pick and choose; Do not like, do not dislike; all will then be clear. Make a hairbreadth difference, and Heaven and Earth are set apart; If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between 'for' and 'against' is the mind's worst disease; While the deep meaning is misunderstood, it is useless to meditate on Rest."
-Sengcan-
"If Canada and the United States can be separate nations without being denounced as being in a state of impermissible 'anarchy,' why may not the South secede from the United States? New York State from the Union? New York City from the state? Why may not Manhattan secede? Each neighborhood? Each block? Each house? Each person?"
-Murray N. Rothbard-
"Don’t ever give a politician any power you wouldn’t want your ex-spouse to have."
-Mike Maharrey-
"Liberty, according to my metaphysics, is an intellectual quality, an attribute that belongs not to fate nor chance. Neither possesses it, neither is capable of it. There is nothing moral or immoral in the idea of it. The definition of it is a self-determining power in an intellectual agent. It implies thought and choice and power; it can elect between objects, indifferent in point of morality, neither morally good nor morally evil."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: John Adams, in a letter to John Taylor (15 April 1814)
"If all men are created equal, that is final.
If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final.
If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final.
No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: In a speech commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence
"Capitalism is relatively new in human history. Prior to capitalism, the way people amassed great wealth was by looting, plundering, and enslaving their fellow man. Capitalism made it possible to become wealthy by serving your fellow man."
-Walter E. Williams-
RIP, Dr. Williams...
"From whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some trans-Atlantic military giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe and Asia…could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide."
-Abraham Lincoln-
"Our government has found that the most effective way to control a person is not by the ballot or the bullet, but rather by the 'bucket'. Today, in a country that fought a revolution to rid itself of a repressive government and excessive taxes, government takes 40 percent of everything we earn in the form of taxes."
-Byron C. Radaker-
Chairman and C.E.O., Congoleum Corp.
"Liberty and happiness have a powerful enemy on each hand; on the one hand tyranny, on the other licentiousness [anarchy]. To guard against the latter, it is necessary to give the proper powers to government; and to guard against the former, it is necessary that those powers should be properly distributed."
-James Wilson-
(1742-1798) Member of Continental Congress, signed Declaration of Independence; U.S. Supreme Court Justice and delegate from Pennsylvania
Source: The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, 15 vols, Pub By, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1984, 2:403
"What’s 'just' has been debated for centuries, but let me offer you my definition of social justice: I keep what I earn and you keep what you earn. Do you disagree? Well then, tell me how much of what I earn 'belongs' to you -- and why?"
-Walter E. Williams-
(1936-2020) Columnist, Professor of Economics at George Mason University
"In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted."
-Bertrand Russell-
[Bertrand Arthur William Russell] (1872-1970) Philosopher, educator
Source: The Recrudescence of Puritanism, in Sceptical Essays, 1928
"There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting."
-Buddha-
[Gautama Siddharta] (563 - 483 BC), Hindu Prince, founder of Buddhism
"How far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without?"
-Dwight D. Eisenhower-
(1890-1969), 34th US President, WWII General
"A nation, which can prefer appeasement over danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
"My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute."
-Ayn Rand-
[Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum] (1905-1982) Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter
"I answered that the die was now cast; I had passed the Rubicon. Swim or sink, live or die, survive or perish with my country was my unalterable determination."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: Mr. Adams, describing a conversation with Jonathan Sewall in 1774, Ref: Webster's Works, vol. iv. p. 8
"The history of liberty has largely been the history of the observance of procedural safeguards."
-Felix Frankfurter-
(1882-1965) U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: McNabb v. United States, 1943
"You can't run a society or cope with its problems if people are not held accountable for what they do."
-John Leo-
Columnist
"Where there is no law there is no freedom."
-John Locke-
(1632-1704) English philosopher and political theorist
"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality."
-Bishop Desmond Tutu-
(1931- ) Nobel Prize for Peace 1984
"We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people."
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-
(1929-1968) US civil rights leader
"True liberty can exist only when justice is equally administered to all."
-Katherine Mansfield-
(1888-1923) New Zealand author
"The guarantee of equal protection cannot mean one thing when applied to one individual and something else when applied to a person of another color. If both are not accorded the same protection, then it is not equal."
-Lewis F. Powell-
(1907-1998) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (1971-1987)
Source: Regents of the University of California v Bakke, 1978
"Somehow strangely the vice of men gets well represented and protected but their virtue has none to plead its cause -- nor any charter of immunities and rights."
-Henry David Thoreau-
(1817-1862) American author, poet, philosopher, polymath, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and transcendentalist
"If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties."
-Francis Bacon-
(1561-1626) Philosopher, British Lord Chancellor
"He hath freedom whoso beareth a clean and constant heart within."
-Quintus Ennius-
(c.239 BC - c.169 BC) Considered the father of Roman poetry
"For man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but, when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all; since armed injustice is the more dangerous, and he is equipped at birth with the arms of intelligence and with moral qualities which he may use for the worst ends."
-Aristotle-
(384-322 BC) Greek philosopher
Source: Politics, 300 B.C.
"No government is respectable which is not just. Without unspotted purity of public faith, without sacred public principle, fidelity, and honor, no machinery of laws, can give dignity to political society."
-Daniel Webster-
(1782-1852) US Senator
"Crime does not pay...as well as politics."
-Alfred E. Newman-
Source: MAD Magazine
"A frequent recurrence to the fundamental principles of the constitution, and a constant adherence to those of piety, justice, moderation, temperance, industry and frugality, are absolutely necessary to preserve the advantages of liberty, and to maintain a free government."
-Massachusetts Bill of Rights-
1780
"If all that Americans want is security, they can go to prison. They'll have enough to eat, a bed and a roof over their heads. But if an American wants to preserve his dignity and his equality as a human being, he must not bow his neck to any dictatorial government."
-Dwight D. Eisenhower-
(1890-1969), 34th US President, WWII General
Source: speech to luncheon clubs, Galveston, Texas, December 8, 1949. The New York Times, December 9, 1949, p. 23
"It [freedom] is a thing of the spirit. Men must be free to worship, to think, to hold opinions, to speak without fear. They must be free to challenge wrong and oppression with the surety of justice."
-Herbert Hoover-
(1874-1964), 31st US President
Source: Addresses on the American Road
"Never give in. Never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy."
-Sir Winston Churchill-
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1940-1945, 1951-1955)
Source: speech given at Harrow, October 29, 1944.
"National injustice is the surest road to national downfall."
-William E. Gladstone-
(1809-1898) English statesman
"We can have justice whenever those who have not been injured by injustice are as outraged by it as those who have been."
-Solon-
(c.638 BC-558 BC) Athenian statesman, lawmaker, Lyric poet, renowned as a founding father of the Athenian polis, one of the Seven Sages of Greece
594 B.C.
Source: when asked how social justice could be achieved in Athens
"Since they have dared, I too shall dare. I shall tell the truth because I pledged myself to tell it if justice regularly empowered did not do so fully, unmitigated. My duty is to speak; I have no wish to be an accomplice."
-Emile Zola-
(1840-1902 French writer
"Every human being has, like Socrates, an attendant spirit; and wise are they who obey its signals. If it does not always tell us what to do, it always cautions us what not to do."
-Lydia M. Child-
(1802-1880) American abolitionist, women's rights activist, opponent of American expansionism, Indian rights activist, novelist, and journalist
"Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime."
"Build a man a fire, and you keep him warm for a night; set a man on fire, and you keep him warm for the rest of his life."
"The worst government is the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and human. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression."
-H.L. Mencken-
"Government is now commonly understood to be, not a mechanism for protecting rights, but a tool by which the majority can force its preferences on the minority. That is, it is a tool for replacing government by consent with government by majority rule. Which means that the very concept of 'representative government' has become an oxymoron.
Frankly, we’d all be better off if we found another term that we can use to discuss what’s actually going on. As Confucius said, the first step towards wisdom is to call things by their right names."
-Ian Underwood-
"I have come to the conclusion that politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians."
-Charles De Gaulle-
(1890-1970) French president and military leader
"Find out just what the 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 until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."
-Frederick Douglass-
[Frederick Baily] (1818-1895), escaped slave, Abolitionist, author, editor of the North Star and later the New National Era
Source: August 4, 1857
"Government can only interfere with personal freedom not by demonstrating the evidentiary basis for its commands but by proving wrongness on the part of the people whose freedom it wants to curtail.
The exercise of a natural right — so long as it does not nullify another's natural right — simply can never be wrong.
When government interferes with natural rights outside of due process, it fails its obligation to uphold the Constitution. And when governors and mayors use the power of the state to interfere with rights that are guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, they explicitly violate federal law and expose themselves to federal prosecution."
-Judge Andrew P. Napolitano-
"The forum [is] an established place for men to cheat one another, and behave covetously."
-Anacharsis-
(c.580 BC) Greek Scythian philosopher
Source: As quoted in The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laërtius, as translated by C. D. Yonge (1853), "Anacharsis" sect. 5, p. 48
"No man's life, liberty or fortune is safe while our legislature is in session."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
"The political means ... is ... communalization by force, or legal thievery. It is simply the political device by which citizens pool their votes to extort the fruits of the labor of others."
-Leonard Read-
Students of Liberty, 1950
Politics -- force -- is the tool you use when you can't get what you want voluntarily.
"Precisely in proportion to our own intellectual weakness will be our credulity as to those mysterious powers assumed by others."
-Charles Caleb Colton-
(1780-1832) English cleric, writer and collector
Source: Lacon, 1825
"Free speech is too dangerous to a democracy to be permitted."
-H.L. Mencken-
"The ultimate decision about what is accepted as right and wrong will be made not by individual human wisdom but by the disappearance of the groups that have adhered to the 'wrong' beliefs."
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
"No matter how noble the original intentions, the seductions of power can turn any movement from one seeking equal rights to one that would deny them to others."
-Tammy Bruce-
(1962-) American radio host, author, and political commentator
Source: The New Thought Police, 2001
"Do not hold the delusion that your advancement is accomplished by crushing others."
-Marcus Tullius Cicero-
(106-43 B.C.) Roman Statesman, Philosopher and Orator
"For the first time in history, the rational and the good are fully armed in the battle against evil. Here we finally find the answer to our paradox; now we can understand the nature of the social power held by evil. Ultimately, the evil, the irrational, truly has no power. The evil men’s control of morality is transient; it lives on borrowed time made possible only by the errors of the good. In time, as more honest men grasp the truth, evil’s stranglehold will be easily broken."
-Andrew Bernstein-
Professor of philosophy, writer
Source: Villainy: An Analysis of the Nature of Evil, (2005.11.05 )
"Perhaps one of the most important accomplishments of my administration has been minding my own business. Government shouldn’t play a part in everyday life. Jefferson said that the people should be left to manage their own affairs. His opposition will bear careful analysis, and the country could stand a good deal more of its application. The trouble with us is we talk about Jefferson, but we do not follow him. In this theory that the people should manage their government, and not be managed by it, he was everlastingly right."
-Calvin Coolidge-
"You demonize...we call it the wrap-up smear, you smear somebody with falsehoods and all the rest, and then you merchandise it and then you write it and say, 'See, it's reported in the press that this, this, and this...' so they have that validation that the press reported the smear and then it's called a wrap-up-smear and the merchandise is the press' report on the smear we made. It's a tactic, and it's self-evident."
-Nancy Pelosi-
(1940-) American politician
Source: June 22, 2017, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi talks about the political tactic called “The Wrap-Up Smear.”
"Propaganda is persuading people to make up their minds while withholding some of the facts from them."
-Harold Evans-
(1928-) British journalist, writer, editor
"As to the evil which results from a censorship, it is impossible to measure it, for it is impossible to tell where it ends."
-Jeremy Bentham-
(1748-1832) English jurist, philosopher, and legal and social reformer
"These decrees of yours are no different from spiders' webs. They'll restrain anyone weak and insignificant who gets caught in them, but they'll be torn to shreds by people with power and wealth."
-Anacharsis-
(c.580 BC) Greek Scythian philosopher
Source: Discussing Solon's laws with him, as quoted by Plutarch, in Solon ch. 5; translation by Robin Waterfield from Plutarch Greek Lives (1998) p. 50
"As the organized Left gained cultural power, it turned into a monster that found perpetual victimhood, combined with thought and speech control, the most efficient way to hold on to that power. Suddenly it was the Left, the protector of liberty, that was setting rules about what could and could not be said or even thought."
-Tammy Bruce-
(1962-) American radio host, author, and political commentator
Source: The New Thought Police, 2001
"Under our form of government, the legislature is not supreme ... like other departments of government, it can only exercise such powers as have been delegated to it, and when it steps beyond that boundary, its acts, like those of the most humble magistrate in the state who transcends his jurisdiction, are utterly void."
-Billings v. Hall-
Source: 7 CA 1
"Leading is showing. Ruling is telling."
-Ian Underwood-
"Freedoms, like privileges, prevail or are imperiled together. You cannot harm or strive to achieve one without harming or furthering all."
-José Martí-
"The 1783 Treaty of Paris ended the war between the colonies and Great Britain. Its first article declared the 13 colonies 'to be free, sovereign and independent states.' These 13 sovereign nations came together in 1787 as principals and created the federal government as their agent. Principals have always held the right to fire agents. In other words, states held a right to withdraw from the pact — secede."
-Walter E. Williams-
"I repeat... that all power is a trust; that we are accountable for its exercise; that, from the people, and for the people, all springs, and all must exist."
-Benjamin Disraeli-
(1804-1881) Prime Minister of England, British statesman, novelist
"Our life is what our thoughts make it. A man will find that as he alters his thoughts toward things and other people, things and others will alter towards him."
-James Allen-
(1864-1912) Author
Source: As a Man Thinketh, 1902
"He who doesn’t know how to be a servant should never be allowed to be a master; the interests of public life are alien to anyone who is unable to enjoy others' successes, and such a person should never be entrusted with public affairs."
-Anton Chekhov-
"Justice in the hands of the powerful is merely a governing system like any other. Why call it justice? Let us rather call it injustice, but of a sly effective order, based entirely on cruel knowledge of the resistance of the weak, their capacity for pain, humiliation and misery."
-Georges Bernanos-
(1888-1948) French author
Source: in Diary of a Country Priest
"The laughter of Mordor will be our only reward, if we quarrel."
-Gandalf-
The Lord of the Rings
"In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant."
-Charles de Gaulle-
(1890-1970) French president and military leader
"Governments have ever been known to hold a high hand over the education of the people. They know, better than anyone else, that their power is based almost entirely on the school. Hence, they monopolize it more and more."
-Francisco Ferrer-
[Francisco Ferrer y Guardia] (1857-1909) founder of 'The Modern School' in Barcelona, Spain, arrested and executed without trial by firing squad following the declaration of martial law in 1909 during the 'Tragic Week'
Source: The Modern School, 1908
"The best rulers are those whom the people hardly know exist.
Next come rulers whom the people love and praise.
After that come rulers whom the people fear.
And the worst rulers are those whom the people despise.
The ruler who does not trust the people will not be trusted by the people.
The best ruler stays in the background, and his voice is rarely heard.
When he accomplishes his tasks, and things go well,
The people declare: It was we who did it by ourselves."
-Dao De Jing-
Ch. 17 (4th Century BCE)
"A race of altruists is necessarily a race of slaves. A race of free men is necessarily a race of egoists."
-Max Stirner-
[Johann Kaspar Schmidt] (1806-1856) German philosopher
"Knowledge is power."
-Sir Francis Bacon-
(1561-1626) Philosopher, British Lord Chancellor
Source: Religious Meditations, Of Heresies, 1597
"Let us consider the effect that coercion produces upon the mind of him against whom it is employed. It cannot begin with convincing; it is no argument. It begins with producing the sensation of pain, and the sentiment of distaste. It begins with violently alienating the mind from the truth with which we wish it to be impressed. It includes in it a tacit confession of imbecility. If he who employs coercion against me could mould me to his purposes by argument, no doubt he would. He pretends to punish me because his argument is important, but he really punishes me because his argument is weak."
-William Godwin-
(1756-1836) English journalist, political philosopher and novelist
Source: William Godwin, ENQUIRY CONCERNING POLITICAL JUSTICE (1798), Book VII, Chapter ii, Paragraph 9
"Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact."
-H.L. Mencken-
"How many crimes are permitted simply because their authors could not endure being wrong."
-Albert Camus-
(1913-1960) French Algerian author
Source: The Fall, 1956
"Collectivism is the political theory that states that the will of the people is omnipotent, an individual must obey; that society as a whole, not the individual, is the unit of moral value. ... Collectivism is the application of the altruist ethics to politics."
-Andrew Bernstein-
Professor of philosophy, writer
Source: Villainy: An Analysis of the Nature of Evil, (2005.11.05 )
"The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim."
-Gustave Le Bon-
(1841-1931) French psychologist and sociologist
"America has furnished to the world the character of Washington! And if our American institutions had done nothing else, that alone would have entitled them to the respect of mankind."
-Daniel Webster-
"Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces. The men become every year more and more creatures of force, massed about central power-houses. The conflict is no longer between the men, but between the motors that drive the men, and the men tend to succumb to their own motive forces."
-Henry Adams-
"Yes! to this thought I hold with firm persistence;
The last result of wisdom stamps it true;
He only earns his freedom and existence
Who daily conquers them anew."
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe-
(1749-1832) German writer, statesman
Source: Faust (act V, sc. 6)
"Freedom is the fundamental character of the will, as weight is of matter... That which is free is the will. Will without freedom is an empty word."
-Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel-
(1770-1831) German philosopher
Source: Philosophy of Right, 1821
"Spiritual movements are revolts of thought against inertia, of the few against the many; of those who because they are strong in spirit are strongest alone against those who can express themselves only in the mass and the mob, and who are significant only because they are numerous."
-Ludwig von Mises-
(1881-1973) Economist and social philosopher
Source: Socialism. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. 1981. p53
"The process of completely freeing oneself emotionally from being a Communist is a thing no outsider can understand. The group thinking and group planning and the group life of the Party had been a part of me for so long that it was desperately difficult for me to be a person again. ... But I had begun the process of 'unbecoming' a Communist. It was a long and painful process, much like that of a polio victim who has to learn to walk all over again. I had to learn to think. I had to learn to love. I had to drain the hate and frenzy from my system. I had to dislodge the self and the pride that had made me arrogant, made me feel that I knew all the answers. I had to learn that I knew nothing. There were many stumbling blocks in this process."
-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)
"The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression."
-W. E. B. Du Bois-
"Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing."
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
"One stumble is enough to deface the character of an honorable life."
-Sir Roger L'Estrange-
(1616-1704) English pamphleteer, author and staunch defender of Royalist claims
Source: Fables of Aesop And Other Eminent Mythologists with Moral Reflections, 5th Edition, 1708
"Character is much easier kept than recovered."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
Source: The American Crisis, no. 13; 1783
"We have set before ourselves the task of inoculating our youth … at a very early age. … This new Reich will give its youth to no one, but will itself take youth and give to youth its own education and its own upbringing."
-Adolf Hitler-
(1889-1945) German Nazi Dictator
Source: May 1, 1937
"The goal of the 'liberals' -- as it emerges from the record of the past decades -- was to smuggle the country into welfare statism by means of single, concrete, specific measures, enlarging the power of the government a step at a time. Never permitting their direction to be summed up into principles, never permitting their direction to be identified or the basic issue to be named. Thus, statism was to come, not by vote or by violence, but by slow rot -- by a long process of evasion and epistemological corruption, leading to a fait accompli. (The goal of the 'conservative' was only to retard that process.)"
-Ayn Rand-
[Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum] (1905-1982) Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter
Source: “‘Extremism,’ or the Art of Smearing,” Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 178
"The truth is that, to many people calling themselves Socialists, revolution does not mean a movement of the masses with which they hope to associate themselves; it means a set of reforms which 'we', the clever ones, are going to impose upon 'them', the Lower Orders."
-George Orwell-
[Eric Arthur Blair] (1903-1950) British author
"It is very imprudent to deprive America of any of her privileges. If her commerce and friendship are of any importance to you, they are to be had on no other terms than leaving her in the full enjoyment of her rights."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
Source: Political Observations
"The freedom of speech, and debates or proceedings in Parliament, ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of Parliament."
-The English Bill Of Rights-
Source: December 1689
"Journalists cannot serve two masters. To the extent that they take on the task of suppressing information or biting their tongue for the sake of some political agenda, they are betraying the trust of the public and corrupting their own profession."
-Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
"Ever since I was a child I have had this instinctive urge for expansion and growth. To me, the function and duty of a quality human being is the sincere and honest development of one's potential."
-Bruce Lee-
[Lee Jun-fan] (1940-1973) Hong Kong American martial artist, actor, martial arts instructor, filmmaker, and the founder of Jeet Kune Do
"Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college."
-Lillian Smith-
(1897-1966) American writer and social critic
"Knowledge must start from some foundation, something must be recognized as known; otherwise we shall be obliged always to define one unknown by means of another."
-P. D. Ouspensky-
Kinda like "We hold these truths to be self-evident"...?
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910) American author and humorist
"Historically, much of the motivation for public schooling has been to stifle variety and institute social control."
-Jack Hugh-
Cato Institute
"There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison."
-William Glasser-
(1925- ) Jewish American psychiatrist, developer of Reality Therapy and Choice Theory
"Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance. A mass movement offers them unlimited opportunities for both."
-Eric Hoffer-
(1902-1983) American author, philosopher, awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
"The tyranny of the many would be when one body takes over the rights of others, and then exercises its power to change the laws in its favor."
-Voltaire-
[François Marie Arouet] (1694-1778) French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher
Source: Philosophical Dictionary, 1764
"There are many well-meaning people today who work at placing an economic floor beneath all of us so that no one shall exist below a certain level or standard of living, and certainly we don't quarrel with this. But look more closely and you may find that all too often these well-meaning people are building a ceiling above which no one shall be permitted to climb and between the two are pressing us all into conformity, into a mold of standardized mediocrity."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
"Always eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or bed -- no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters in your skull."
-George Orwell-
[Eric Arthur Blair] (1903-1950) British author
Source: his book '1984'
"Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently."
-Rosa Luxemburg-
(1871-1919) Polish-German Marxist theorist, philosopher, economist and revolutionary socialist
Source: The Russian Revolution
"A machine has value only as it produces more than it consumes -- so check your value to the community. "
-Martin H. Fischer-
(1879-1962) German-born American physician and author
Source: As quoted in Quote Unquote (A Handbook of Quotations) (2005) by M. P. Singh, p. 86
"Honest difference of views and honest debate are not disunity. They are the vital process of policy among free men."
-Herbert Hoover-
(1874-1964), 31st US President
Source: Speech, 1950
"When people talk of the freedom of writing, speaking, or thinking, I cannot choose but laugh. No such thing ever existed. No such thing now exists; but I hope it will exist. But it must be hundreds of years after you and I shall write and speak no more."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: letter to Thomas Jefferson, 15 July 1817, Ref: The Yale Book of Quotations, 2006
"Patterning your life around other's opinions is nothing more than slavery."
-Lawana Blackwell-
Author
Source: The Dowry of Miss Lydia Clark, 1999
"Freedom of the press, freedom of association, the inviolability of domicile, and all the rest of the rights of man are respected so long as no one tries to use them against the privileged class. On the day they are launched against the privileged they are overthrown."
-Prince Peter Kropotkin-
(1842-1921) Russian prince, author, called "The Anarchist Prince"
"To punish a man because we infer from the nature of some doctrine which he holds, or from the conduct of other persons who hold the same doctrines with him, that he will commit a crime, is persecution, and is, in every case, foolish and wicked."
-Thomas Babington Macaulay-
(1800-1859) [Lord Macaulay] 1st Baron Macaulay, British historian
Source: Hallam, 1828
"As for me, my literary theory, like my politics, is based chiefly upon one main idea, to wit, the idea of freedom. I am, in brief, a libertarian of the most extreme variety, and know of no human right that is one-tenth as valuable as the simple right to utter what seems (at the moment) to be the truth"
-H. L. Mencken-
"Of government, at least in democratic states, it may be said briefly that it is an agency engaged wholesale, and as a matter of solemn duty, in the performance of acts which all self-respecting individuals refrain from as a matter of common decency."
-H. L. Mencken-
"It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority."
-Lord Acton-
[John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton] (1834-1902), First Baron Acton of Aldenham
Source: The History of Freedom in Antiquity, 1877
"The said constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms."
-Samuel Adams-
(1722-1803), was known as the "Father of the American Revolution."
"After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military."
-William S. Burroughs-
(1914-1997) American novelist, essayist, social critic
1992
"Force and reason -- which last is the essence of the moral act -- are at the two opposite poles. The one who compels his neighbor... treats him, not as a being with reason, but as an animal in whom reason is not."
-Auberon Herbert-
(1838-1906) English writer, theorist, philosopher, 19th century individualist, member of the Parliament of the U.K.
"The key to wisdom is this -- constant and frequent questioning ... for by doubting we are led to question and by questioning we arrive at the truth."
-Peter Abelard-
(1099-1142) medieval French scholastic philosopher, leading logician, theologian, teacher, musician, composer, poet
Source: Sic et non, c. 1120
"The rights of all persons are wrapped in the same constitutional bundle
as those of the most hated member of the community."
-A. L. Wirin-
ACLU Attorney
Source: Time Magazine, 10 February 1978
"In my opinion we learn nothing from history except the infinite variety of men’s behaviour. We study it, as we listen to music or read poetry, for pleasure, not for instruction."
-A. J. P. Taylor-
"The freedom to share one’s insights and judgments verbally or in writing is, just like the freedom to think, a holy and inalienable right of humanity that, as a universal human right, is above all the rights of princes."
-Carl Friedrich Bahrdt-
(1740-1792)
Source: On Freedom of The Press and Its Limits, 1787
"We have a natural right to make use of our pens as of our tongue, at our peril, risk and hazard."
-Voltaire-
[François Marie Arouet] (1694-1778) French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher
"Let no man think we can deny civil liberty to others and retain it for ourselves. When zealous agents of the Government arrest suspected 'radicals' without warrant, hold them without prompt trial, deny them access to counsel and admission of bail....we have shorn the Bill of Rights of its sanctity..."
-Robert M. Lafollette, Sr.-
(1855-1925) U.S. Senator
Source: The Progressive, March 1920
"No one is fit to be trusted with power. ... No one. ... Any man who has lived at all knows the follies and wickedness he's capable of. ... And if he does know it, he knows also that neither he nor any man ought to be allowed to decide a single human fate."
-C. P. Snow-
[Charles Percy Snow, Baron Snow, CBE] (1905-1980) English novelist, physical chemist
Source: the book, The Light and the Dark, 1947
"I believe the State exists for the development of individual lives, not individuals for the development of the state."
-Julian Huxley-
(1878-1975) English evolutionary biologist, eugenicist, and internationalist
"Pity the poor opponents of the right to keep and bear arms! They must distrust just everybody except criminals and except the tyrant to whom they concede the armed monopoly of their protection."
-Pierre Lemieux-
Canadian journalist
Source: LIBERTY Magazine Nov. '97
"If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: Address to officers of the Army, 15 March 1783
"Men are never so likely to settle a question rightly as when they discuss it freely."
-Thomas Babington Macaulay-
(1800-1859) [Lord Macaulay] 1st Baron Macaulay, British historian
Source: "Southey's Colloquies on Society" par. SC.64
"Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice and the exercise of choice, a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing."
-Archibald MacLeish-
(1892-1982) Poet, playwright, Librarian of Congress, & Assistant Secretary of State under Franklin Roosevelt
Source: 4 December 1937
"Freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order."
-Justice Robert H. Jackson-
(1892-1954), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 1943
"If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all."
-Virginia Woolf-
(1882-1941)
"I may not agree with what you say, but to the death I will defend your right to say it."
-Voltaire-
[François Marie Arouet] (1694-1778) French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher
Source: Paraphrased by Evelyn Beatrice Halll, writing under the pseudonym of Stephen G. Tallentyre in The Friends of Voltaire (1906)
"We must protect the right of our opponents to speak because we must hear what they have to say."
-Walter Lippmann-
(1889-1974) American writer, journalist, and political commentator
"Tolerance is the positive and cordial effort to understand another's beliefs, practices, and habits without necessarily sharing or accepting them."
-Joshua Liebman-
"Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man or order of men."
-Adam Smith-
(1723-1790) Scottish philosopher and economist
1776
Source: Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith, 1776
"Many of the greatest things man has achieved are not the result of consciously directed thought, and still less the product of a deliberately coordinated effort of many individuals, but of a process in which the individual plays a part which he can never fully understand."
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
"The policy of seeking values from human beings by means of force, when practiced by an individual, is called crime. When practiced by a government, it is called statism ..."
-Nathaniel Branden-
[Nathan Blumenthal] (1930-2014) Canadian psychotherapist, writer
"When a government controls both the economic power of individuals and the coercive power of the state ... this violates a fundamental rule of happy living: Never let the people with all the money and the people with all the guns be the same people."
-P. J. O'Rourke-
(1947- ) US humorist, journalist, & political commentator
"I think that every true reformer, every real friend of liberty, will agree with me in saying that if we must erect safeguards, they should be rather for the security of the individual than of the mass, and that our chiefest care must be to train the majority to respect the rights of the minority, to prevent the claims of the few from being trampled under foot by the caprice or passion of the many."
-Sir Richard John Cartwright-
(1835-1912) Canadian Member of Parliament and Senator
Source: in the Legislative Assembly, Canada, March 9, 1865; reproduced in Janet Ajzenstat, Paul Romney, Ian Gentles, and William D. Gairdner (Eds.), Canada’s Founding Debates (Toronto: Stoddart, 1999), p. 19
"When will the world learn that a million men are of no importance compared with one man?"
-Henry David Thoreau-
(1817-1862) American author, poet, philosopher, polymath, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and transcendentalist
"If the world were perfect, it wouldn't be."
-Yogi Berra-
[Lawrence Peter "Yogi" Berra] (1925-2015) American Major League Baseball catcher, outfielder, and manager
Source: When You Come to a Fork in the Road, Take It!: Inspiration and Wisdom from One of Baseball's Greatest Heroes, Hyperion, 2002, ISBN 0786867752, p. 154
"To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men, their individualism, loyalty to family traditions, national patriotism and religious dogmas."
-Dr. G. Brock Chisolm-
(1896-1971) Canadian World War I veteran, medical practitioner, first Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), first head of the World Federation of Mental Health
"Every dollar released from taxation, that is spent or invested, will create a new job and a new salary."
-John Fitzgerald Kennedy-
"Nothing is easier than spending public money.
It does not appear to belong to anybody.
The temptation is overwhelming to bestow it on somebody."
-Calvin Coolidge-
(1872-1933) 30th US President
"The state is the great fiction by which everybody seeks to live at the expense of everybody else."
-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 State", Journal des débats, issue of September 25, 1848
(in Selected Essays on Political Economy) par. 5.20
"We have rights, as individuals, to give as much of our own money as we please to charity; but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of public money."
-Davy Crockett-
(1786-1836) American hunter, frontiersman, soldier and politician
"I have no sympathy for the narrow, selfish notion of economy which assumes that every crumb of bread which goes into the mouth of one class is so much taken from the mouths of another class."
-Frederick Douglass-
[Frederick Baily] (1818-1895), escaped slave, Abolitionist, author, editor of the North Star and later the New National Era
"The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it."
-John Kenneth Galbraith-
(1908-2006) Canadian-born economist, Harvard professor
Source: Money: Whence it came, where it went - 1975, p15
"The legal tender quality [of money] is only valuable for the purposes of dishonesty."
-Justice Salmon Chase-
(1808-1873) U.S. Senator from Ohio and Governor of Ohio, U.S. Treasury Secretary under President Abraham Lincoln (1861-1864), Chief Justice of the United States (1864-73)
Source: in dissent of Knox vs. Lee (The Legal Tender Cases, 1871)
"The era of big government is over ... We know big government does not have all the answers. We know there's not a program for every problem. And we have to give the American people [a government] that lives within its means."
-President Bill Clinton-
State of the Union address, January 23, 1996
"I've abandoned free market principles to save the free market system,"
-President George W. Bush-
defending his Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to CNN, December, 2008
"Don't let your mouth write no check that your tail can't cash."
-Bo Diddley-
(1928-2008) Blues musician
"He who will not economize will have to agonize."
-Confucius-
[Kung Fu-tse] (551-479 B.C.) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher
"Governments, whatever their pretensions otherwise, try to preserve themselves by holding the individual down ... Government itself, indeed, may be reasonably defined as a conspiracy against him. Its one permanent aim, whatever its form, is to hobble him sufficiently to maintain itself."
-H. L. Mencken-
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."
-Hunter S. Thompson-
“Liberty is not for these slaves; I do not advocate inflicting it against their conscience. On the contrary, I am strongly in favor of letting them crawl and grovel all they please before whatever fraud or combination of frauds they choose to venerate…Our whole practical government is grounded in mob psychology and the Boobus Americanus will follow any command that promises to make him safer."
-H. L. Mencken-
“Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it."
-Albert Camus-
"Endless money forms the sinews of war."
-Marcus Tullius Cicero-
(106-43 B.C.) Roman Statesman, Philosopher and Orator
“Government price-fixing once started, has alike no justice and no end. It is an economic folly from which this country has every right to be spared.”
-Calvin Coolidge-
(1872-1933) 30th US President
Source: when vetoing two bills to establish federal controls over agricultural commodities
"Central bankers always try to avoid their last big mistake. So every time there's the threat of a contraction in the economy, they'll over stimulate the economy, by printing too much money. The result will be a rising roller coaster of inflation, with each high and low being higher than the preceding one."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
"A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it ... gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. 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"
Source: Capitalism and Freedom (1962) Ch. 1 "The Relation Between Economic Freedom and Political Freedom", 2002 edition, page 15
"Money power denounces, as public enemies, all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes."
-William Jennings Bryan-
(1860-1925) US Congressman (1891-1895), US Secretary of State (1913-1915) under President Woodrow Wilson, Democratic Party nominee for President 1896, 1900 and 1908
"But while capitalism may be a convenient scapegoat, it did not cause any of these problems. Indeed, whatever one wishes to call the unruly mixture of freedom and government controls that made up our economic and political system during the last three decades, one cannot call it capitalism."
-Yaron Brook-
Source: 'Stop Blaming Capitalism for Government Failures,' Yaron Brook and Don Watkins, Capitalism Magazine (2008.11.15)
"And, lastly, to vindicate these rights, when actually violated and attacked, the subjects of England are entitled, in the first place, to the regular administration and free course of justice in the courts of law; next to the right of petitioning the king and parliament for redress of grievances; and, lastly, to the right of having and using arms for self preservation and defense."
-Sir William Blackstone-
(1723-1780) English jurist, judge, Tory politician
Source: Commentaries on the Laws of England (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 17th edition, 1966, Vol. 1., Chap.1)
"God who gave us life gave us liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure if we have removed their only firm basis: a conviction in the minds of men that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Thomas Jefferson Memorial building, Panel Three.
This quote has been found to be the paraphrasing of several quotes from different sources.
"Students throughout the totalitarian world risk life and limb for freedom of expression, many American college students are demanding that big brother restrict their freedom of speech on campus. This demand for enhanced censorship is not emanating only from the usual corner – the know-nothing fundamentalist right – it is coming from the radical, and increasingly not-so-radical left as well."
-Alan Dershowitz-
(1938- ) Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School
Source: Shouting Fire: Civil Liberties in a Turbulent Age, 2002
"We believe that free communication is essential to the preservation of a free society and a creative culture."
-American Library Association-
Source: The Freedom to Read Association, 2000
"In the most civilized and progressive countries freedom of discussion is recognized as a fundamental principle."
-C. E. M. Joad-
(1891-1953)
Source: The Recovery of Belief, 1952
"The smaller the mind the greater the conceit."
-Aesop-
(c. 550 B.C.) legendary Greek fabulist
"Any excuse will serve a tyrant."
-Aesop-
(c. 550 B.C.) legendary Greek fabulist
Source: The Wolf and the Lamb
"While I see many hoof marks going in, I see none coming out.
It is easier to get into the enemy's toils than out again."
-Aesop-
(c. 550 B.C.) legendary Greek fabulist
Source: The Lion, the Fox, and the Beasts
"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."
-Ex Parte Milligan-
Supreme Court of the United States, 1866
"'Parent choice' proceeds from the belief that the purpose of education is to provide individual students with an education. In fact, educating the individual is but a means to the true end of education, which is to create a viable social order to which individuals contribute and by which they are sustained. 'Family choice' is, therefore, basically selfish and anti-social in that it focuses on the 'wants' of a single family rather than the 'needs' of society."
-Association of California School Administrators-
Source: (ACSA, October 1979) Ref: Policy Issues for the 1990s, By Ray C. Rist, page 738, also see Presbyterian Journal, December 5, 1979
"You have to remember, rights don’t come in groups we shouldn’t have ‘gay rights’; rights come as individuals, and we wouldn’t have this major debate going on. It would be behavior that would count, not what person belongs to what group."
-Dr. Ron Paul-
(1935-) American physician, US Congressman (R-TX), US Presidential candidate
"I don’t believe in quotas. America was founded on a philosophy of individual rights, not group rights."
-Justice Clarence Thomas-
(1948- ) U.S. Supreme Court Justice
"The creation of money exclusively as debt is the critical, destabilizing flaw in the American Economy."
-Theodore R. Thoren-
Author
Source: The Truth In Money Book
"It is usual in democracies that, when enough people earn a livelihood from solving a problem, the problem itself becomes trivial in comparison with the need to keep the solvers employed, so that it becomes crucial not to solve the problem, which has by now become a national resource."
-Fred Reed-
"The government isn’t smart enough to plan the future, they are just people who just go with the flow and don’t innovate, if it means you may get into trouble for a failure. If the government is so smart why doesn’t it get rich betting on wall street instead of just taxing the people."
-Dallas Weaver-
"A man always has two reasons for what he does -- a good one, and the real one."
-J. P. Morgan-
[John Pierpont Morgan] (1837-1913) American financier and banker
"One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole. We redistribute de facto the world's wealth by climate policy."
-Ottmar Edenhofer-
(1961-) Co-chaired the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group on Mitigation of Climate Change
"We can hardly expect the nation-state to make itself superfluous, at least not overnight. Rather what we must aim for is really nothing more than caretakers of a bankrupt international machine which will have to be transformed slowly into a new one. The transition will not be dramatic, but a gradual one. People will still cling to national symbols."
-Henry Morgenthau, Jr.-
(1891-1967) U.S. Secretary of the Treasury for Franklin D. Roosevelt, CFR member
Source: 1945
"An important art of politicians is to find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the public."
-Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord-
(1754-1838) 1st Sovereign Prince of Beneventum, French diplomat, "Prince of Diplomats"
"Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
-George Orwell-
[Eric Arthur Blair] (1903-1950) British author
"We are entitled to our informed opinions. Without research, without background, without understanding, it’s nothing. It’s just bibble-babble. It’s like a fart in a wind tunnel, folks."
-Harlan Ellison-
"The sober people of America are weary of the fluctuating policy which has directed the public councils. They have seen with regret and indignation that sudden changes and legislative interferences, in cases affecting personal rights, become jobs in the hands of enterprising and influential speculators, and snares to the more-industrious and less informed part of the community. They have seen, too, that one legislative interference is but the first link of a long chain of repetitions, every subsequent interference being naturally produced by the effects of the preceding."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: THE FEDERALIST No. 44
"Man is deeply vulnerable when faced with overwhelming evil. Instead of consolidating his energy to fight it, he wastes valuable time and effort puzzling over it, insisting it is not, cannot possibly be, what it seems."
-Konnilyn G. Feig-
Source: Hitler's Death Camps: The Sanity Of Madness P. 444 (1979)
"Many people today don't want honest answers insofar as honest means unpleasant or disturbing. They want a soft answer that turneth away anxiety."
-Louis Kronenberger-
(1904-1980) American literary critic, novelist, biographer
"The most dangerous untruths are truths moderately distorted."
-Georg Christoph Lichtenberg-
(1742-1799) German scientist, professor, satirist and Anglophile
"The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists."
-Joan Robinson-
(1903-1983) Economist, professor at Cambridge University
"The reduction of political discourse to sound bites is one of the worst things that’s happened in American political life."
-John Silber-
(1926- ) Chancellor, Boston University
Source: USA Today, 1 October 1990
"When you have no basis for argument, abuse the plaintiff."
-Marcus Tullius Cicero-
(106-43 B.C.) Roman Statesman, Philosopher and Orator
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum."
-Noam Chomsky-
(1928- ) American linguist and political writer
"Appearances often are deceiving."
-Aesop-
(c. 550 B.C.) legendary Greek fabulist
Source: The Wolf in Sheep's Clothing
"Why is it so hard for most political figures and their tribes to let people make their own decisions and to apply the same standards of liberty for things they personally agree with to things they don't? Everyone being in a rush to use government force to push their preferred agendas is how we get the hyper-partisan, crush-or-be-crushed mentality that drives so much of our political dysfunction today."
-Elizabeth Nolan Brown-
'Political dysfunction' is redundant...
"The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
[Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clerel, le Comte de Tocqueville] (1805-1859) French historian
"You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, and that's good enough."
-Dr. Edwin Vieira-
President of the National Alliance for Constitutional Money, Constitutional lawyer and scholar
"The Party is not interested in the overt act. The thought is all we care about."
-George Orwell-
[Eric Arthur Blair] (1903-1950) British author
Source: Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false-face for the urge to rule it."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesy and make their prophecies come true, but they can also lie and make their lies come true."
-Eric Hoffer-
(1902-1983) American author, philosopher, awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
Source: The Passionate State of Mind
"The history of government management of money has, except for a few short happy periods, been one of incessant fraud and deception."
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
"The enjoyment of power inevitably corrupts the judgment of reason, and perverts its liberty."
-Immanuel Kant-
(1724-1804) German philosopher
Source: Perpetual Peace, 1795
"When you cannot measure, your knowledge is meager and unsatisfactory."
-Lord Kelvin-
"America is great because America is good. If America ever ceases to be good it will cease to be great."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
[Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clerel, le Comte de Tocqueville] (1805-1859) French historian
Supposedly upon visiting America in the early 19th Century
Source: No source for this quote has ever been found. See:
"After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world."
-Calvin Coolidge-
(1872-1933) 30th US President
"It is capitalist America that produced the modern independent woman. Never in history have women had more freedom of choice in regard to dress, behavior, career, and sexual orientation."
-Camille Paglia-
(1947-) American professor, social critic
"That the sole object and only legitimate end of government is to protect the citizen in the enjoyment of life, liberty, and property, and when the government assumes other functions it is usurpation and oppression."
-Alabama, Declaration of Rights Article I Section 35-
"America would be better off as a country and Americans happier and more prosperous as a people if half of our government boards, bureaus, and commissions were Abolished, hundreds of thousands of our government officials, agents and employees were discharged, and two-thirds of our government regulations, restrictions, inhibitions were removed."
-Albert J. Beveridge-
(1862-1927) American historian, US Senator (R-IN)
"America, my friends, is the only country in the world actually founded on liberty -- the only one. People went to America to be free."
-Margaret Thatcher-
(1925-2013) British Prime Minister (1979–1990)
"A general dissolution of the principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy... While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but once they lose their virtue, they will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader... If virtue and knowledge are diffused among the people, they will never be enslaved. This will be their great security."
-Samuel Adams-
(1722-1803), was known as the "Father of the American Revolution."
Source: The Writings of Samuel Adams, ed., Harry Alonzo Cushing (G. P. Putman's Sons, 1908), Vol. 4, p. 124.
"To divide along the lines of section or caste or creed is un-American."
-Theodore Roosevelt-
(1858-1919) 26th US President
"American tyranny has come gradually, like a slowly rising river. Each of us does not realize the danger until the water comes in our door. Until then, it is merely someone else's problem and a problem that we fool ourselves into thinking won't reach us."
-Charley Reese-
(1937-2013) American syndicated columnist
Source: The Orlando Sentinel, Feb. 28, 1999
"But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security."
-Declaration of Independence-
July 4, 1776
"If newsmen do not tell the truth as they see it because it might make waves, or if their bosses decide something should or should not be broadcast because of Washington or Main Street consequences, we have dishonored ourselves and we have lost the First Amendment by default."
-Richard Salant-
(1914-1993) former President of CBS News
"If it be asked, What is the most sacred duty and the greatest source of our security in a Republic? The answer would be, An inviolable respect for the Constitution and Laws."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: Essay in the American Daily Advertiser, August 28, 1794
"The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."
-Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts-
"I prefer liberty with danger to peace with slavery."
-Jean-Jacques Rousseau-
(1712-1778) Political philosopher, educationist and essayist
"...[W]e insist on the principle that no danger or crisis, foreign or domestic, will be solved by Americans surrendering more of their constitutional liberties, in the foolish hope that a bigger government will provide greater security."
-Larry P. Arnn-
(1952- ) President of Hillsdale College, MI
"The greater the importance to safeguarding the community from incitements to the overthrow of our institutions by force and violence, the more imperative is the need to preserve the constitutional rights of free speech, free press and free assembly in order to maintain the opportunity for free political discussion."
-Justice Charles Evans Hughes-
(1862-1948) Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court
Source: DeJonge v. Oregon, 1937
"The interest of the people lies in being able to join organizations, advocate causes, and make political 'mistakes' without being subjected to governmental penalties."
-Justice Hugo L. Black-
(1886-1971) US Supreme Court Justice
"It had become an universal and almost uncontroverted position in the several States, that the purposes of society do not require a surrender of all our rights to our ordinary governors; that there are certain portions of right not necessary to enable them to carry on an effective government, and which experience has nevertheless proved they will be constantly encroaching on, if submitted to them; that there are also certain fences which experience has proved peculiarly efficacious against wrong, and rarely obstructive of right, which yet the governing powers have ever shown a disposition to weaken and remove. Of the first kind, for instance, is freedom of religion; of the second, trial by jury, habeas corpus laws, free presses."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"No man who knows aught, can be so stupid to deny that all men naturally were born free."
-John Milton-
(1608-1674) English Poet
"The right to enjoy property without unlawful deprivation, no less than the right to speak out or the right to travel is, in truth, a 'personal” right'."
-Justice Potter Stewart-
(1915-1985) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
Source: Lynch v. Household Finance Corporation, 1972
... or, speaking of property, the right to keep and bear arms...
"Liberty is not a matter of words, but a positive and important condition of society. Its greatest safeguard after placing its foundations in a popular base, is in the checks and balances imposed on the public servants."
-James Fenimore Cooper-
(1789-1851) American Novelist
Source: The American Democrat, 1838
"The makers of our constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness... They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred, as against the government, the right to be let alone -- the most comprehensive of the rights and the right most valued by civilized men."
-Justice Louis D. Brandeis-
(1856-1941) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: Olmstead v. United States, 1928
"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-
"May have been the losing side. Still not convinced it was the wrong one."
-Malcolm Reynolds-
"Man will ultimately be governed by God or by tyrants."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
"We the People of the united States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, 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."
-Constitution for the USA-
By the Unanimous Order of the States at the Constitutional Convention, September 17, 1787
"The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government."
-Constitution for the United States-
Source: Constitution for the United States, Art. IV, 1789
"Our founding fathers detested the idea of a democracy and labored long to prevent America becoming one. Once again -- the word 'democracy' does not appear in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, or the constitution of any of the fifty states. Not once. Furthermore, take a look at State of the Union speeches. You won't find the 'D' word uttered once until the Wilson years."
-Neal Boortz-
(1945- ) Radio talk show host, columnist
Source: Nov. 7, 2002
"If America is destroyed, it may be by Americans who salute the flag, sing the national anthem, march in patriotic parades, cheer Fourth of July speakers – normally good Americans, but Americans who fail to comprehend what is required to keep our country strong and free, Americans who have been lulled away into a false security."
-Ezra Taft Benson-
(1899-1994) President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
Source: his book, An Enemy Hath Done This, 2002
"I had always hoped that this land might become a safe and agreeable asylum to the virtuous and persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: 1788, letter to Francis Van der Kamp
"But what do we mean by the American Revolution? Do we mean the American war? The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments, of their duties and obligations…This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people was the real American Revolution."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: letter to H. Niles, February 13, 1818
"There are those who will say
that the liberation of humanity,
the freedom of man and mind,
is nothing but a dream.
They are right.
It is the American Dream."
-Archibald MacLeish-
(1892-1982) Poet, playwright, Librarian of Congress, & Assistant Secretary of State under Franklin Roosevelt
"[L]et me point out that libertarians defend a tradition of liberty that is the fruit of thousands of years of human history."
-Tom G. Palmer-
Source: Myths of Individualism, Volume XVIII Number 5 CATO Policy Report p. 12 (September/October 1996).
"[Liberty] is the right to be subjected only to the laws, and to be neither arrested, detained, put to death or maltreated in any way by the arbitrary will of one or more individuals. It is the right of everyone to express their opinion, choose a profession and practice it, to dispose of property, and even to abuse it; to come and go without permission, and without having to account for their motives or undertakings. It is everyone’s right to associate with other individuals, either to discuss their interests, or to profess the religion which they and their associates prefer, or even simply to occupy their days or hours in a way which is most compatible with their inclinations or whims."
-Benjamin Constant-
1816
"We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes which were, for the moment, unpopular."
-Edward R. Murrow-
(1908-1965) American broadcast journalist and war correspondent
"The American’s conviction that he must be able to look any man in the eye and tell him to go to hell is the very essence of the free man's way of life."
-Walter Lippmann
(1889-1974) American writer, journalist, and political commentator
"The spirit of truth and the spirit of freedom -- they are the pillars of society."
-Henrik Ibsen-
(1828-1906) Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet
Source: Pillars of Society, 1877
"[A]ll power is originally vested in, and consequently derived from, the people. That government is instituted and ought to be exercised for the benefit of the people; which consists in the enjoyment of life and liberty and the right of acquiring property, and generally of pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety. That the people have an indubitable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to reform or change their government whenever it be found adverse or inadequate to the purpose of its institution."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
"A truly American sentiment recognizes the dignity of labor and the fact that honor lies in honest toil."
-Grover Cleveland-
(1837-1908) 22nd & 24th US President
"Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day.
Teach him how to fish and he'll eat forever."
-Chinese Proverb-
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a night.
Set a man on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life...
"...for that nothing doth more hurt in a state, than that cunning men pass for wise."
-Francis Bacon-
(1561-1626) Philosopher, British Lord Chancellor
"The high-minded man must care more for the truth than for what people think."
-Aristotle-
(384-322 BC) Greek philosopher
"Honesty is the rarest wealth anyone can possess, and yet all the honesty in the world ain't lawful tender for a loaf of bread."
-Josh Billings-
[Henry Wheeler Shaw] (1818-1885) American humorist and lecturer
"The fundamental principle is this: No matter how worthwhile an end may be, if there is no constitutional authority to pursue it, then the federal government must step aside and leave the matter to the states or to private parties. The president and Congress can proceed only from constitutional authority, not from good intentions alone. If Congress thinks it necessary to expand its powers, the Framers crafted an amendment process for that purpose. But too often, rather than follow that process, Congress has disregarded the limits set by the Constitution and gutted our frontline defense against overweening federal government."
-Robert A. Levy-
(1941- ) Chairman of Cato Institute, author, lawyer
"The claim that anarchism is utopian is bizarre, but nevertheless common. Much anarchist literature deals with private law enforcement and defence; these would not be needed in a utopia.
In fact, the fallibility of humans is one of the basic tenets of anarchism. The belief that a small group of people can be trusted to run defence and law enforcement efficiently as a monopoly without putting their own needs above those of the people, without ever being corrupt and without overstepping their mandate; now that is utopian. To believe that the “losers” in an election will happily support the policies of the winners, and that the policies aren't being forced upon those people, now that is utopian. To believe that the funding of all this via taxation is a foundation of peace, rather than an act of war, now that is utopian.
Anarchists oppose all those things precisely because they are not utopian dreamers.
Anyone who questions anarchism because of human nature, should take a closer look at how human nature impacts their own proposal. One involves giving fallible humans power, one does not."
-Unknown-
"I can find no warrant for such appropriation in the Constitution."
-Grover Cleveland-
(1837-1908) 22nd & 24th US President
Source: written often during his two terms as president when he vetoed Congressional spending
"When a man who is honestly mistaken hears the truth, he will either quit being mistaken or cease to be honest."
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
"When it comes to space, I see it as my job to build infrastructure the hard way — I'm using my resources to put in place heavy-lifting infrastructure so the next generation of people can have a dynamic, entrepreneurial explosion into space. ... I want thousands of entrepreneurs doing amazing things in space, and to do that we need to dramatically lower the cost of access to space."
-Jeff Bezos-
"It is easier to find a score of men wise enough to discover the truth than to find one intrepid enough, in the face of opposition, to stand up for it."
-A. A. Hodge-
[Archibald Alexander Hodge] (1823-1886) American Presbyterian leader, principal of Princeton Seminary
"Our own heart, and not other men's opinions form our true honor."
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge-
(1772-1834) English poet, critic, philosopher, and a leader of the British Romantic movement
"The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do. The hard part is doing it."
-General H. Norman Schwarzkopf-
(1934-2012) United States Army general
"A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest form of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal in satisfying his vices. And it all comes from lying to others and to yourself."
-Fyodor Dostoyevsky-
(1821-1881)
Source: The Brothers Karamazov
"The hardest tumble a man can make is to fall over his own bluff."
-Ambrose Bierce-
(1842-1914) American Civil War soldier, humorist, writer
"What statists of all types fail to understand is that anarchists don’t believe what they do from a utilitarian perspective. Although they realize that free people will do better in the world than ruled ones, anarchy is not adopted for a better ‘society’, or any other such collectivist notion. The belief in freedom is philosophical. It is held by men with the certain knowledge that they have a right to live their own lives, to pursue their own happiness, and no other man, or groups of men, has any moral right to rule them or impede their individual liberty.
So when you say ‘it won’t work’, it’s entirely irrelevant. There *are* answers to all your irrational fears about roads, police and armies. But, they are entirely beside the point. While anarchists understand that voluntary societies will always outperform ones where your options are limited by the arbitrary use of force, that is not why they believe what they do. Anarchists are anarchists because it is the only fully moral and non-contradictory position a man can hold about himself, and other men.
So, the *real* answer to ‘who will build the roads?’ is: 'what does that have to do with my right to be free?'"
-Gary Margetson-
"Neither your life nor my life, nor the future of this country, will be affected in the slightest by whether Linda Tripp is naughty or nice. But if any president is able to commit crimes with impunity by using the vast powers and perquisites of his office to cover up, then we will have a danger of corruption and abuse of power that can only grow with the passing years and generations."
-Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
07/23/98
"Outside show is a poor substitute for inner worth."
-Aesop-
(c. 550 B.C.) legendary Greek fabulist
"Most of our faults are more pardonable than the means we use to conceal them."
-François Duc de La Rochefoucauld-
(1613-1680) French author
"The best way of avenging thyself is not to become like the wrong-doer."
-Marcus Aurelius Antoninus-
(121 AD -180 AD) Roman Emperor, 161-180 AD
"While the people have property, arms in their hands, and only a spark of noble spirit, the most corrupt Congress must be mad to form any project of tyranny."
-Rev. Nicholas Collin-
(1746-1831) Episcopal pastor, friend of Benjamin Franklin
Source: Fayetteville Gazette (N.C.), October 12, 1789
"Stand with anybody that stands right. Stand with him while he is right, and part with him when he goes wrong."
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
"[L]iberty, or the absence of coercion, or the leaving people to think, speak, and act as they please, is in itself a good thing. It is the object of a favourable presumption. The burden of proving it inexpedient always lies, and wholly lies, on those who wish to abridge it by coercion, whether direct or indirect."
-John Morley-
(1838-1923) British Liberal statesman, writer, newspaper editor
Source: John Morley, ON COMPROMISE, London: Macmillan and Co., 1888, pp. 253-254.
"Liberty is not a cruise ship full of pampered passengers. Liberty is a man-of-war, and we are all crew."
-Kenneth W. Royce-
American author who primarily writes under the pen-name of Boston T. Party
Source: Kenneth W. Royce, in Boston's Gun Bible
"Any training school for free citizens must begin by teaching distrust, not trust. It must teach questioning, not acceptance of stock answers."
-CAMMAR PILRU-
Ambassador-in-Exile for Ix "House Corrino"
"Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt."
-Richard P. Feynman-
"There must be no compromise with slavery -- none whatsoever. Nothing is gained, everything is lost, by subordinating principle to expedience."
-William Lloyd Garrison-
"All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed, they must rely exclusively on force."
-George Orwell-
"I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned."
-Richard P. Feynman-
"The fruit derived from labor is the sweetest of pleasures."
-Luc de Clapiers-
(1715-1747) French writer, marquis de Vauvenargues
"Sound money and free banking are not impossible; they are merely illegal. Freedom of money and freedom of banking... are the principles that must guide our steps."
-Hans F. Sennholz-
(1922-2007) German-born economist from the Austrian school of economics who studied under Ludwig von Mises
"Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch."
-James Baldwin-
(1924-1987) Novelist, Essayist, and Playwright
"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-
"Everything that can be invented has been invented."
-Charles H. Duell-
Commissioner of US patent office in 1899
"We must not always judge of the generality of the opinion by the noise of the acclamation."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
"A dog is not considered a good dog because he is a good barker. A man is not considered a good man because he is a good talker."
-Buddha-
[Gautama Siddharta] (563 - 483 BC), Hindu Prince, founder of Buddhism
"How you can win the population for war: At first, the statesman will invent cheap lying, that impute the guilt of the attacked nation, and each person will be happy over this deceit, that calm the conscience. It will study it detailed and refuse to test arguments of the other opinion. So he will convince step for step even therefrom that the war is just and thank God, that he, after this process of grotesque even deceit, can sleep better."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910) American author and humorist
"The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the U.S. since the days of Andrew Jackson. History depicts Andrew Jackson as the last truly honorable and incorruptible American president."
-Franklin D. Roosevelt-
(1882-1945), 32nd US President
November 21, 1933
Source: in a letter written to Colonel E. Mandell House
"Our modern society is engaged in polishing and decorating the cage in which man is kept imprisoned."
-Swami Nirmalananda-
[Tulasi Charan Dutta] (1863 -1938) Indian monk
Source: Enlightened Anarchism
"The major function of secrecy in Washington is to keep the U.S. people ... from knowing what the nation’s leaders are doing."
-John Stockwell-
(1937-) U.S. Marine Corps Major, and Chief of Station and National Security Council coordinator for the CIA
"Censors are infused with the sentiment of moral indignation – a dangerous and misleading sentiment because, by blinding those who voice it to the real reasons for their indignation, it makes them puppets whose fears can be manipulated for ends and purposes they do not foresee or intend."
-Carey McWilliams-
(1905-1980) American author, editor, and lawyer
Source: Censorship: For And Against, 1971
"What ISN'T in the news is often more important than what IS."
-Ed Biersmith-
1942
"Whereas each man claims his freedom as a matter of right, the freedom he accords to other men is a matter of toleration."
-Walter Lippmann-
(1889-1974) American writer, journalist, and political commentator
"The papers say, 'Congress is deadlocked and can't act.' I think that is the greatest blessing that could befall this country."
-Will Rogers-
"Never blame a legislative body for not doing something. When they do nothing, they don’t hurt anybody. It’s when they do something that they get dangerous."
-Will Rogers-
"Be thankful we’re not getting all the government we’re paying for."
-Will Rogers-
"We will never have true civilization until we have learned to recognize the rights of others."
-Will Rogers-
"An intelligent man neither allows himself to be controlled nor attempts to control others; he wishes reason alone to rule, and that always."
-Les Caractères-
"Because of the diverse conditions of humans, it happens that some acts are virtuous to some people, as appropriate and suitable to them, while the same acts are immoral for others, as inappropriate to them."
-Saint Thomas Aquinas-
(1225-74) Italian philosopher and theologian
"Attack another’s rights and you destroy your own."
-John Jay Chapman-
(1862-1933) American Essayist and Poet
Source: letter, 1897
"They defend their errors as if they were defending their inheritance."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
WeWell...?
"Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity."
-Marshall McLuhan-
(1911-1980) Canadian philosopher of communication theory
"In the United States there is no phenomenon more threatening to popular government than the unwillingness of newspapers to give the facts to their readers."
-Nelson Antrim Crawford-
(1888-1963) American writer, editor, author
"Deal with the faults of others as gently as with your own."
-Chinese Proverb-
"The only way to make sure people you agree with can speak is to support the rights of people you don't agree with."
-Eleanor Holmes Norton-
(1937- ) Congressional Delegate from the District of Columbia
Source: The New York Post, 28 March 1970
"We are all full of weakness and errors, let us mutually pardon each other our follies. It is the first law of nature."
-Voltaire-
[François Marie Arouet] (1694-1778) French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher
"Appeasers believe that if you keep on throwing steaks to a tiger, the tiger will turn vegetarian."
-Heywood Hale Broun-
(1918-2001) American sportswriter, commentator, and actor
"Stop throwing the Constitution in my face. It’s just a goddamned piece of paper!"
-George W. Bush-
debunked
"It may be true, as Confucius said, that 'the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name,' but it can also be the end of politics."
-Jonathan Turley-
"Can anybody point me to that one time in history where the side that was demanding censorship, segregation, propaganda, radical education, papers to move freely in society, plus government forces going door to door to demand compliance were the good guys?"
-Candace Owens-
(born April 29, 1989) American conservative author, talk show host, political commentator, and activist
Source: Twitter July 21, 2021
"No, there is a limit to the tyrant's power!
When the oppressed man finds no justice,
When the burden grows unbearable, he appeals
With fearless heart to Heaven,
And thence brings down his everlasting rights,
Which there abide, inalienably his,
And indestructible as stars themselves.
The primal state of nature reappears,
Wherein man confronts his fellow man;
And if all other means shall fail his need,
One last resort remains—his own good sword.
The dearest of our goods we may defend
From violence.
We stand before our country,
We stand before our wives, before our children!"
-Friedrich Schiller-
[Johann Christoph Friedrich (von) Schiller] (1759-1805) German poet, philosopher, physician, historian, and playwright
Source: from the drama Wilhelm Tell, 1804
"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 strength or weakness of a society depends more on the level of its spiritual life than on its level of industrialization. Neither a market economy nor even general abundance constitutes the crowning achievement of human life. If a nation’s spiritual energies have been exhausted, it will not be saved from collapse by the most perfect government structure or by any industrial development. A tree with a rotten core cannot stand."
-Alexander Solzhenitsyn-
(1918-2008) Russian novelist, Soviet dissident, imprisoned for 8 years for critizing Stalin in a personal letter, Nobel Prize for Literature, 1970
Source: National Review article (Sept. 23, 1991, p.24)
"A lie doesn't become truth, wrong doesn't become right and evil doesn't become good just because it's accepted by a majority. "
-Booker T. Washington-
(1856-1915) Author
"Custom may suffice as the basis of law, but is inadequate as the basis of justice. Tyranny, not liberty, has been the custom in the past; and so Libertarians reject custom as a guiding principle, just as they reject power or might. They know that justice is not something that was, or is, but that is to be."
-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)
"There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs."
-Thomas Sowell-
"In the tragic vision, individual sufferings and social evils are inherent in the innate deficiencies of all human beings, whether these deficiencies are in knowledge, wisdom, morality, or courage. Moreover, the available resources are always inadequate to fulfill all the desires of all the people. Thus there are no 'solutions' in the tragic vision, but only trade-offs that still leave many unfulfilled and much unhappiness in the world."
-Thomas Sowell-
'The Vision of the Anointed' p. 113
"The issue of this campaign -- it IS that word socialism. Some people like it. Younger people like it. Those of us like me, who grew up in a cold war and saw some aspects of it while visiting places like Vietnam, like I have, and seeing countries like Cuba, being there. I’m seeing what socialism’s like. I don’t like it. OK? It’s not only not free. It doesn’t freakin’ work!"
-Chris Matthews-
(1945-) is an American political commentator, talk show host and author
Source: Democratic Presidential Debate in New Hampshire, MSNBC Live, Feb 7, 2020
"There is nothing to take a man's freedom away from him, save other men. To be free, a man must be free of his brothers."
-Ayn Rand-
[Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum] (1905-1982) Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter
"If some people had wings and others didn't, and the government wanted to enforce 'fairness,' soon no one would have wings. Because wings cannot be redistributed, they can only be broken. Likewise, a government edict cannot make people smarter or more capable, but it can impede the growth of those with the potential. Wouldn't it be fair if, in the name of equality, we scar the beautiful, cripple the athletes, lobotomize the scientists, blind the artists, and sever the hands of the musicians? Why not?"
-Oleg Atbashian-
(1960-) born in USSR, teacher, artist, journalist immigrated to USA in 1994
Source: Shakedown Socialism by Oleg Atbashian copyright 2009 Greenleaf Press pp 90-91
"As one reads history, not in the expurgated editions written for schoolboys and passmen, but in the original authorities of each time, one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime."
-Oscar Wilde-
(1854-1900)
Source: The Soul of Man Under Socialism
"On account of being a democracy and run by the people, we are the only nation in the world that has to keep a government four years, no matter what it does."
-Will Rogers-
(1879-1935) American humorist
"Blind submission to the Administration of the government is not devotion to the country or the Constitution. The administration is not the government."
-Edward G. Ryan-
(1810-1880) Wisconsin Supreme Court Chief Justice
"Many people never grow up. They stay all their lives with a passionate need for external authority and guidance, pretending not to trust their own judgment."
-Alan Watts-
(1915-1973) British-American philosopher
"Morality is always the product of terror; its chains and strait-waistcoats are fashioned by those who dare not trust others, because they dare not trust themselves, to walk in liberty."
-Aldous Huxley-
(1894-1963) English writer, novelist, philosopher
"You see what power is -- holding someone else's fear in your hand and showing it to them!"
-Amy Tan-
(1952-) American author
Source: The Kitchen God's Wife (1991), New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. p. 387
"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)
"No government ought to exist for the purpose of checking the prosperity of its people or to allow such a principle in its policy."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
"We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people."
-John F. Kennedy-
(1917-1963) 35th US President
"We may feel genuinely concerned about world conditions, though such a concern should drive us into action and not into a depression."
-Karen Horney-
(1885-1952) German psychoanalyst
"When men have come to the edge of a precipice, it is the lover of life who has the spirit to leap backwards, and only the pessimist who continues to believe in progress."
-Gilbert Keith Chesterton-
(1874-1936) British essayist, critic, poet, and novelist
Source: Illustrated London News, Nov 8, 1924
"Never trust governments absolutely and always do what you can to prevent them from doing too much harm."
-John Arthur Passmore-
(1914-2004) Australian philosopher
"We find few historians who have been diligent enough in their search for truth; it is their common method to take on trust what they help distribute to the public; by which means a falsehood once received from a famed writer becomes traditional to posterity."
-John Dryden-
(1631-1700) English Poet
"It seems foolhardy to assume that the armed state will necessarily be benevolent. The American political tradition is, for good or ill, based in large measure on a healthy mistrust of the state."
-Sanford Levinson-
(1941- ) University of Texas law professor
Source: The Embarrassing Second Amendment, 99 YALE L.J. 637, 656 (1989)
"The aim of every political constitution is, or ought to be, first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society; and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous whilst they continue to hold their public trust."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Federalist #57
"Be not too hasty to trust or admire the teachers of morality; they discourse like angels but they live like men."
-Dr. Samuel Johnson-
(1709-1784) English author, poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer
Source: Rasselas, 1759
"I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance."
-Socrates-
Or did he really...?
"The most important service rendered by the press and the magazines is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust."
-Samuel Butler-
(1835-1902) Victorian-era English author
"Whenever people are well-informed they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: letter to Richard Price, January 8, 1789
"The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business."
-Clarence S. Darrow-
(1857-1938)
"Nobody can be trusted with unlimited power. The more power a regime has, the more likely people will be killed. This is a major reason for promoting freedom."
-Rudolph J. Rummel-
(1932-2014) American professor
"It is better to die for an idea that will live, than to live for an idea that will die."
-Steve Biko-
"It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace -- but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"
-Patrick Henry-
(1736-1799) US Founding Father
Source: March 23, 1775
"What chance of survival does a culture have when its own elites actively seek its destruction?"
-William S. Lind-
(1947- ) American expert on military affairs, pundit on cultural conservatism
"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"In such a strait the wisest may well be perplexed and the boldest staggered."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
"Are we at last brought to such an humiliating and debasing degradation that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own defense? Where is the difference between having our arms under our own possession and under our own direction, and having them under the management of Congress? If our defense be the real object of having those arms, in whose hands can they be trusted with more propriety, or equal safety to us, as in our own hands?"
-Patrick Henry-
(1736-1799) US Founding Father
Source: [3 J. Elliot, Debates in the Several State Conventions 45, 2d ed. Philadelphia, 1836]
"I grew up a right-winger ... I got out of the Right-wing not because I ceased believing in liberty, but because being a libertarian above all, I came to see that the Right-wing specialized in cloaking its authoritarian and neo-fascist policies in the honeyed words of libertarian rhetoric."
-Murray Rothbard-
"Make men large and strong and tyranny will bankrupt itself in making shackles for them."
-Rev. Henry Ward Beecher-
(1813-1887) American abolitionist, clergyman
SoSource: Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, 1887
"We should view our government the way we should a friendly, cuddly lion. Just because he’s friendly and cuddly shouldn’t blind us to the fact that he’s still got teeth and claws."
-Walter E. Williams-
(1936-2020) Columnist, Professor of Economics at George Mason Universityr>SoSource: Conservative Chronicle, August 30, 1995
"A man has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so."
-Walter Lippmann-
(1889-1974) American writer, journalist, and political commentator
"One can ignore reality, but one cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality."
-Ayn Rand-
[Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum] (1905-1982) Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter
Source: ref: Teaching of Ayn Rand : Lines from the Mother of Objectivism (2019), pg 28
"The more laws, the less justice."
-Marcus Tullius Cicero-
(106-43 B.C.) Roman Statesman, Philosopher and Orator
"All men having power ought to be mistrusted."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
"If the governments devalue the currency in order to betray all creditors, you politely call this procedure 'inflation'."
-George Bernard Shaw-
(1856-1950) Irish comic dramatist
"I will no longer pay for the destruction of my country, family, and self. Damn tyranny! Damn the Federal Reserve liars and thieves! Damn all pettifogging, oath-breaking US attorneys and judges.… I will see you all in Hell and shed my blood before I will be robbed of one more dollar to finance a national policy of treason, plunder, and corruption"
-Marvin Cooley-
Arizona tax protester, author of the book, The Big Bluff, documenting the struggles of his fellow anti-tax protester, W. Vaughn Ellsworth. Cooley was jailed for tax evasion in 1973 and 1989
Source: in his book The Big Bluff: Tax Tyranny in the Guise of Law : the Constitution Vs. the Tax Collector, 1971
"100% of what is collected is absorbed solely by interest on the Federal Debt ... all individual income tax revenues are gone before one nickel is spent on the services taxpayers expect from government."
-a href="http://libertytree.ca/quotes/Grace.Commission.Quote.C455">Grace Commission-
Source: report submitted to President Ronald Reagan on January 15, 1984
"If, however, a government refrains from regulations and allows matters to take their course, essential commodities soon attain a level of price out of the reach of all but the rich, the worthlessness of the money becomes apparent, and the fraud upon the public can be concealed no longer."
-John Maynard Keynes-
(1883-1946) British economist
SSource: The Economic Consequences of the Peace, 1920, page 240
If there's no government regulation, then what happened to the entrepreneurial competition? The "not rich" sure does seem to me like way too big a market segment for them to simply disdainfully piss away. Would you just piss it away, John? Or would you price so they could become your customers, like a savvy market participant would...?
"There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as a result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final or total catastrophe of the currency system involved."
-Ludwig von Mises-
(1881-1973) Economist and social philosopher
"They will furnish credits which will serve us for the support of the Communist Party in their countries and, by supplying us materials and technical equipment which we lack, will restore our military industry necessary for our future attacks against our suppliers. To put it in other words, they will work on the preparation of their own suicide."
-Vladimir Ilyich Lenin-
[Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov] (1870-1924) First Leader of the Soviet Union
"You can't truly call yourself 'peaceful' unless you are capable of great violence. If you are not capable of violence, you are not peaceful, you are harmless. Important distinction."
-Stef Starkgaryen-
"Money for me has only one sound: liberty."
-Gabrielle Chanel-
[Gabrielle Bonheur "Coco" Chanel] (1883-1971) French fashion designer, founder of the fashion brand Chanel
“I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket."
-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.
Source: from a speech in 1933
"Hamilton's whole monetary policy is based on unconstitutional grounds and unsound reasoning, and fraudulent statements. His policies were fought through the whole public career of Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, Randolph and many another truly great lovers of Republican Government.
His policies have proved to be more destructive of our independent and democratic form of government than the old subjugation of the Colonies by Great Britain. The deliberations in Congress over Hamilton's Bank Bill, and the opinions of members of The Cabinet show the intensity of feeling between the private money interests and those supporting the Constitution. History records that the “money changers” have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling the money and its issuance."
-Olive Cushing Dwinell-
Source: The Story of Our Money, p. 70-71, by Olive Cushing Dwinell, 1946
"Banks lend by creating credit. They create the means of payment out of nothing."
-Ralph M. Hawtrey-
Former Secretary of the British Treasury
"I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample underfoot."
-Horace Greeley-
(1811-1872), Editor of the New York Tribune
"America is another name for opportunity. Our whole history appears like a last effort of divine Providence in behalf of the human race."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-
(1803-1882) American essayist, lecturer, and poet
"Why are we proud [to be American]? We are proud, first of all, because from the beginning of this Nation, a man can walk upright, no matter who he is, or who she is. He can walk upright and meet his friend -- or his enemy; and he does not fear that because that enemy may be in a position of great power that he can be suddenly thrown in jail to rot there without charges and with no recourse to justice. We have the habeas corpus act, and we respect it."
-Dwight D. Eisenhower-
(1890-1969), 34th US President, WWII General
Source: : Remarks Upon Receiving the America's Democratic Legacy Award at a B'nai B'rith Dinner in Honor of the 40th Anniversary of the Anti-Defamation League
"There are incalculable resources in the human spirit, once it has been set free."
-Hubert H. Humphrey-
(1911-1978) US Vice-President, US Senator (D-MN)
Source: Speech, 10 December 1966
"The dissident does not operate in the realm of genuine power at all. He is not seeking power. He has no desire for office and does not gather votes. He does not attempt to charm the public, he offers nothing and promises nothing. He can offer, if anything, only his own skin — and he offers it solely because he has no other way of affirming the truth he stands for. His actions simply articulate his dignity as a citizen, regardless of the cost."
-Václav Havel-
"Nation states are archaic leftovers from when each man feared the tribe over the hill, an attitude we can’t afford anymore."
-David Brin-
But even then, we as individuals can arrange mutual defense pacts between us. "Representatives" I can accept, if really necessary. But we simply don't need "leaders".
"The whole principle is wrong. It's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't eat steak."
-Robert A. Heinlein-
(1907-1988) American writer
Source: on Censorship, in his book, The Man Who Sold The Moon, p186
"Crimes were committed to punish crimes, and crimes were committed to prevent crimes. The world has been filled with prisons and dungeons, with chains and whips, with crosses and gibbets, with thumbscrews and racks, with hangmen and heads-men - and yet these frightful means and instrumentalities have committed far more crimes than they have prevented.... Ignorance, filth, and poverty are the missionaries of crime. As long as dishonorable success outranks honest effort -- as long as society bows and cringes before the great thieves, there will be little ones enough to fill the jails."
-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: Robert Ingersoll, Crimes Against Criminals
"As long as man remains an inquiring animal, there can never be a complete unanimity in our fundamental beliefs. The more diverse our paths, the greater is likely to be the divergence of beliefs."
-Sir Arthur Keith-
(1866-1927)
"Respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality."
-Dune-
"Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you."
-Jean-Paul Sartre-
(1905-1980)
"There is no such thing as a problem without a gift for you in its hands. You seek problems because you need their gifts."
-Richard Bach-
Source: Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah
"Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again."
-William Cullen Bryant-
(1794-1878)
Source: The Battle-Field (1839), st. 9., Poems, by William Cullen Bryant, 1854
"It is a fundamental human right, a privilege of nature, that every man should worship according to his own convictions. One man’s religion neither harms nor helps another man. It is assuredly no part of religion to compel religion, to which free will and not force should lead us."
-Tertullian-
(160?-230? A.D) Carthaginian “Father of Latin theology”
c. 200 A.D.
"Religious liberty is the chief cornerstone of the American system of government, and provisions for its security are embedded in the written charter and interwoven in the moral fabric of its laws. Anything that tends to invade a right so essential and sacred must be carefully guarded against, and I am satisfied that my countrymen, ever mindful of the suffering and sacrifices necessary to obtain it, will never consent to its impairment for any reason or under any pretext whatsoever."
-Thomas F. Bayard-
(1828-1898) U.S. Senator from Delaware, U.S. Secretary of State, and U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom
Source: Foreign Relations of the United States for 1885, pp.48-51
"More! More! is the cry of a mistaken soul."
-William Blake-
(1757-1827) English poet, painter, engraver
"No, Freedom has a thousand charms to show
That slaves, howe'er contented, never know."
-William Cowper-
(1731-1800) English poet, hymnodist
Source: Table Talk (l. 260)
"The greatest discovery of any generation is that a living soul can alter his life by altering his attitude."
-William James-
(1842-1910) American philosopher, psychologist, 'The father of modern Psychology'
"The conservative is a person who considers very closely every chance, even the longest, of 'throwing out the baby with the bath-water,' as the German proverb puts it, and who determines his conduct accordingly. And so we see that the term conservative has little value as a label; in fact, one might say that its label-value varies inversely with one's right to wear it."
-Albert Jay Nock-
"Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it."
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
"Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world."
-Thomas Carlyle-
(1795-1881) Scottish essayist, satirist, and historian
"It is wrong always, everywhere and for everyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence."
-William Kingdon Clifford-
(1845-1879) English mathematician and philosopher
"The cultivation -- even celebration -- of victimhood by intellectuals, tort lawyers, politicians and the media is both cause and effect of today's culture of complaint."
-George Will-
(1941-) American newspaper columnist, journalist, and author
"We are now considering legislation based on statistics that include name-calling at public rallies as crimes. Are we going on to the school yards of this country and when two kids get angry with each other and call each other names -- what are we going to do, cart them over to the reformatory or add them to the list of 'hate crimes' perpetrators? This is ridiculous."
-Jesse Helms-
(1921-2008), US Senator (R-NC), 1973-2003
Source: in opposition to the Hate Crimes Bill which criminalizes name-calling and motives, the Bill passed the Senate and the House and was signed by Pres. George Bush, Congressional Record, February 8, 1990.
"A reminder that school lessons are less about content, as most of them will inherently be forgotten by graduation. They are fundamentally about threats to obey or be labelled by grades to shame, limit, for control:
'The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders.'
-John Taylor Gatto-"
-The Honest Teacher-
"Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations...entangling alliances with none."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"One who deceives will always find those who allow themselves to be deceived."
-Niccolo Machiavelli-
(1469-1527) Italian Statesman and Political Philosopher
"All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"Observe, I do not mean to suggest that the custom of lying has suffered any decay or interruption -- no, for the Lie, as Virtue, as Principle, is eternal; the Lie, as a recreation, a solace, a refuge in time of need, the fourth Grace, the tenth Muse, man's best and surest friend, is immortal, and cannot perish from the earth while this club remains.
My complaint, simply concerns the decay of the art of lying. No high-minded man, no man of right feeling, can contemplate the lumbering and slovenly lying of the present day without grieving to see a noble art so prostituted. ... If this finest of the fine art arts had everywhere received the attention, encouragement, and conscientious practice and development which this club has devoted to it, I should not need to utter this lament, or cry a single tear. I do not say this to flatter. I say it in a spirit of just and appreciative recognition."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910) American author and humorist
Source: address to Historical and Antiquarian Club of Hartford, 1882
"The world wishes to be deceived."
-Sebastian Franck-
(1499-c.1543) German preacher, author, humanist reformer
"[J]ust because you have an individual right does not mean that the state or local government can't constrain the exercise of that right..."
-Barack Hussein Obama-
(1961-) 44th President of the United States
Source: 2008 Philadelphia primary debate
"If the personal freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution inhibit the government's ability to govern the people, we should look to limit those guarantees."
-Bill Clinton-
[William Jefferson Blythe III] (1946- ), 42nd US President
August 12, 1993
"Individual rights must take a back-seat to the collective."
-Harvey Ruvin-
Vice-chair of International Committee for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI) for implementing UN Agenda 21 in American local communities
"To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good... Ideology - that is what gives devildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others' eyes, so that he won't hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors."
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn-
(1918-2008) Russian novelist, Soviet dissident, imprisoned for 8 years for critizing Stalin in a personal letter, Nobel Prize for Literature, 1970
"The grand paradox of our society is this: we magnify man’s right but we minimize his capacities."
-Joseph Wood Krutch-
(1893-1970) American writer, critic, and naturalist
Source: The Measure of Man, 1954
"If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them."
-Isaac Asimov-
(1920-1992) American author and professor of biochemistry at Boston University
"The dichotomy between personal liberties and property rights is a false one. Property does not have rights. People have rights... In fact, a fundamental interdependence exists between the personal right to liberty and the personal right in property."
-Justice Potter Stewart-
(1915-1985) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
Source: Lynch v. Household Finance Corp., 1972
"Values are social norms — they're personal, emotional, subjective, and arguable. All of us have values. Even criminals have values. The question you must ask yourself is, Are your values based upon principles? In the last analysis, principles are natural laws they're impersonal, factual, objective and self-evident. Consequences are governed by principles and behavior is governed by values; therefore, value principles!"
-Stephen Covey-
"You know, by the time you become the leader of a country, someone else makes all the decisions. ... You may find you can get away with virtual presidents, virtual prime ministers, virtual everything."
-Bill Clinton-
[William Jefferson Blythe III] (1946- ), 42nd US President
Source: Sep 5, 1998, Dublin, Ireland
"If the president alone was vested with the power of appointing all officers, and was left to select a council for himself, he would be liable to be deceived by flatterers and pretenders to patriotism."
-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: Roger Sherman to John Adams, 1789
"Everyone can see that politics is a means by which people seek to get what they want for themselves and others about whom they care. But politics is also, in at least equal part, a means by which people seek to hurt those they dislike for whatever reason. Henry Adams hit the bull's eye when he observed long ago that "Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds." Political events during the past century have done nothing to invalidate this observation."
-Robert Higgs-
"Stability in government is essential to national character and to the advantages annexed to it, as well as to that repose and confidence in the minds of the people, which are among the chief blessings of civil society."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Federalist No. 37, 1788
"Do we still recognize [the Constitution of the United States of America] as the basis of our system of government in America, or not? Do we still have a constitution that guarantees our unalienable rights as the sovereign citizens of a great and free nation, or not? Do we have a federal government and state governments that honor and defend the fundamental principles of equal justice, due process or law, the right to life, liberty, and property - the principles that represent the very foundation of our constitutional form of government, or not? We the People have a right to know the truth. We have a right to know if we still have a Constitution."
-Bob Schultz-
Founder of 'We The People Congress'
Source: Citizens' Truth -in-Taxation Hearing, Washington D.C. 2/27-28/02 - 'New York Times' 2/10/02
"When a government is dependent upon bankers for money, they and not the leaders of the government control the situation, since the hand that gives is above the hand that takes. Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole object is gain."
-Napoleon Bonaparte-
(1769-1821) French emperor
"We are not a charitable institution but a Party of revolutionary socialists."
-Joseph Paul Goebbels-
(1897-1945) German politician and Reich Minister of Propaganda of Nazi Germany
Source: “Einbeitsfront,” Der Angriff editorial, May 27, 1929. David Schoenbaum, Hitler's Social Revolution: Class and Status in Nazi Germany, 1933-1939, W.W. Norton & Company (1997) p. 25
"The money pigs of capitalist democracy… Money has made slaves of us… Money is the curse of mankind. It smothers the seed of everything great and good. Every penny is sticky with sweat and blood."
-Joseph Paul Goebbels-
(1897-1945) German politician and Reich Minister of Propaganda of Nazi Germany
Source: Quoted in The Nazi Party 1919-1945: A Complete History, Dietrich Orlow, New York: NY, Enigma Books, 2012, p 61. Goebbels’ article, “Nationalsozialisten aus Berlin und aus dem Reich”, Voelkischer Beobachter, February 4, 1927
"Lenin is the greatest man, second only to Hitler, and that the difference between Communism and the Hitler faith is very slight."
-Joseph Paul Goebbels-
(1897-1945) German politician and Reich Minister of Propaganda of Nazi Germany
Source: Speech (November 27, 1925), quoted in “Hitlerite Riot in Berlin: Beer Glasses Fly When Speaker Compares Hitler to Lenin”, New York Times (November 28, 1925)
Well, at least he realized that socialism requires faith...
"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 of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result 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."
-James Madison-
"I am not discouraged by [a] little difficulty; nor have I any doubt that the result of our experiment will be, that men are capable of governing themselves without a master."
-Thomas Jefferson-
to T. B. Hollis, 1787. ME 6:156
"[General Washington] has often declared to me that he considered our new Constitution as an experiment on the practicability of republican government, and with what dose of liberty man could be trusted for his own good; that he was determined the experiment should have a fair trial, and would lose the last drop of his blood in support of it.”
-Thomas Jefferson-
to Walter Jones, 1814. ME 14:51
"The men who rule the Democratic Party then promised the people that if they were returned to power there would be no central bank established here while they held the reigns of government. Thirteen months later that promise was broken, and the Wilson administration, under the tutelage of those sinister Wall Street figures who stood behind Colonel House, established here in our free Country the worm-eaten monarchical institution of the "King's Bank" to control us from the top downward, and from the cradle to the grave."
-Louis McFadden-
(1876-1936) US Congressman (R-PA) (1915-1935), Chairman of House Banking and Currency Committee. Poisoned in 1936.
Source: May 23, 1933, speech made on the Floor of the House of Representatives Congressman, the Honorable Louis T. McFadden of Pennsylvania, brought formal charges against the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve Bank system, The Comptroller of the Currency and the Secretary of United States Treasury
"It's impossible to be loyal to your family, your friends, your country, and your principles, all at the same time."
-Mignon McLaughlin-
(1913-1983) American journalist, author
Source: The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960
"If ever a time should come, when vain and 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-
(1722-1803), was known as the "Father of the American Revolution."
1780
"It is not enough to do your best; you must know what to do, and THEN do your best."
-W. Edwards Deming-
(1900-1993) American engineer, statistician, professor, author, lecturer
"The Democrats seem to be basically nicer people, but they have demonstrated time and time again that they have the management skills of celery. They're the kind of people who'd stop to help you change a flat, but would somehow manage to set your car on fire. I would be reluctant to entrust them with a Cuisinart, let alone the economy. The Republicans, on the other hand, would know how to fix your tire, but they wouldn't bother to stop because they'd want to be on time for Ugly Pants Night at the country club."
-Dave Barry-
(1947- ) Humorist
"When you disarm your subjects, however, you offend them by showing that either from cowardliness or lack of faith, you distrust them; and either conclusion will induce them to hate you."
-Niccolo Machiavelli-
(1469-1527) Italian Statesman and Political Philosopher
Source: The Prince
"Freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West coast."
-Viktor Frankyl-
"At least one way of measuring the freedom of any society is the amount of comedy that is permitted, and clearly a healthy society permits more satirical comment than a repressive, so that if comedy is to function in some way as a safety release then it must obviously deal with these taboo areas. This is part of the responsibility we accord our licensed jesters, that nothing be excused the searching light of comedy. If anything can survive the probe of humour it is clearly of value, and conversely all groups who claim immunity from laughter are claiming special privileges which should not be granted."
-Eric Idle-
(1943- ) British Comedian
"Character assassination is at once easier and surer than physical assault; and it involves far less risk for the assassin. It leaves him free to commit the same deed over and over again, and may, indeed, win him the honors of a hero in the country of his victims."
-Alan Barth-
(1906-1979) served on the editorial board of The Washington Post for thirty years
Source: The Loyalty of Free Men, 1951
"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-
"The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails."
-William Arthur Ward-
"Unrighteous fortune seldom spares the highest worth; no one with safety can long front so frequent perils. Whom calamity oft passes by she finds at last."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: Tragedies, Hercules Furens (The Madness of Hercules), lines 325-328; (Megara).
"Tell me who your friends are, and I will tell you who you are."
-Proverb-
"Rogues are preferable to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest."
-Alexandre Dumas-
(1802-1870) French writer
"Growth is slow but collapse is rapid."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: Ugo Bardi (2017), "The Seneca Effect: Why growth is slow but collapse is rapid"
"I am really mortified to be told that, in the United States of America, a fact like this can become a subject of inquiry, and of criminal inquiry too, as an offence against religion; that a question about the sale of a book can be carried before the civil magistrate. Is this then our freedom of religion? and are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule for what we are to read, and what we must believe? It is an insult to our citizens to question whether they are rational beings or not, and blasphemy against religion to suppose it cannot stand the test of truth and reason."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Letter, 19 April 1814
"As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost and science can never regress."
-J. Robert Oppenheimer-
(1904-1967)
Source: Life Magazine, 10 October 1949
On the other hand, when The Science is proclaimed settled...
"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."
-Albert Einstein-
(1879-1955) Physicist and Professor, Nobel Prize 1921
Source: in The New Convergence
"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply too painful to acknowledge -- even to ourselves -- that we've been so credulous. (So the old bamboozles tend to persist as the new bamboozles rise.)"
-Carl Sagan-
(1934-1996), Astro-physicist
Source: "The Fine Art of Baloney Detection," Parade, February 1, 1987
"Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intelligence."
-Dr. Samuel Johnson-
(1709-1784) English author, poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer
Source: The Rambler, 1750-52
"The first and simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind, is curiosity."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
"Within seven centuries, [the ancient Greeks] invented for itself, epic, elegy, lyric, tragedy, novel, democratic government, political and economic science, history, geography, philosophy, physics and biology; and made revolutionary advances in architecture, sculpture, painting, music, oratory, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, anatomy, engineering, law and war... a stupendous feat for whose most brilliant state Attica was the size of Hertfordshire, with a free population (including children) of perhaps 160,000."
-F. J. Lucas-
"Freedom is the oxygen without which science cannot breathe."
-David Sarnoff-
(1891-1971) American businessman, pioneer of American radio and television
"Truth, in its struggles for recognition, passes through four distinct stages.
First, we say it is damnable, dangerous, disorderly, and will surely disrupt society.
Second, we declare it is heretical, infidelic and contrary to the Bible.
Third, we say it is really a matter of no importance either one way or the other.
Fourth, we aver that we have always upheld it and believed it."
-Elbert Hubbard-
(1856-1915)
Source: Roycroft Dictionary and Book of Epigrams, 1923
"Philosophy means the complete liberty of the mind, and therefore independence of all social, political or religious prejudice... It loves one thing only... truth."
-Henri Frederic Amiel-
(1821-1881) Swiss philosopher, poet
Source: Journal, 1873-84
"Man comes into the world naked and unarmed, as if nature had destined him for a social creature, and ordained him to live under equitable laws and in peace; as if she had desired that he should be guided by reason rather than be driven by force; therefore did she endow him with understanding, and furnish him with hands, that he might himself contrive what was necessary to his clothing and protection. To those animals to which nature has given vast strength, she has also presented weapons in harmony with their powers; to those that are not thus vigorous, she has given ingenuity, cunning, and singular dexterity in avoiding injury."
-William Harvey-
"This habit of forming opinions, and acting upon them without evidence, is one of the most immoral habits of the mind. ... As our opinions are the fathers of our actions, to be indifferent about the evidence of our opinions is to be indifferent about the consequences of our actions. But the consequences of our actions are the good and evil of our fellow-creatures. The habit of the neglect of evidence, therefore, is the habit of disregarding the good and evil of our fellow-creatures."
-James Mill-
"Democracy, alas, is also a form of theology, and shows all the immemorial stigmata. Confronted by uncomfortable facts, it invariably tries to dispose of them by appeals to the highest sentiments of the human heart. An anti-democrat is not merely mistaken; he is also wicked, and the more plausible he is the more wicked he becomes."
-H.L. Mencken-
"By freethinking I mean the use of the understanding in endeavoring to find out the meaning of any proposition whatsoever, in considering the nature of the evidence for or against, and in judging of it according to the seeming force or weakness of the evidence."
-Anthony Collins-
(1676-1729) English philosopher, proponent of deism
Source: A Discourse of Freethinking, 1713
"If a theory and its proponents stubbornly refuse falsification by an ever increasing body of substantial conflicting evidence, the theory degenerates into a textbook example of dogmatic pseudo-science. The neo-Darwinian theory of macroevolution has failed on all fronts, from mathematical feasibility, to theoretical plausibility and explanatory power, to empirical support."
-Günter Bechly-
Source: Evolution News, "New Fossil Human Species Thwarts Core Darwinian Predictions," April 19, 2019. In reference to "the late great philosopher of science Sir Karl Popper (1963): Conjectures and Refutations!"
"There is no absolute knowledge. And those who claim it, whether they are scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy. All information is imperfect. We have to treat it with humility."
-Jacob Bronowski-
(1908-1974) Polish-born British mathematician
Source: The Ascent of Man, 1973
"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice, there is."
-Jan L.A. van de Snepscheut-
(1953-1994) Dutch computer scientist and educator
"No great advance has ever been made in science, politics, or religion, without controversy."
-Lyman Beecher-
(1775-1863) American Presbyterian minister, and the father of 13 children, many of whom became noted figures, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Ward Beecher, Charles Beecher, Edward Beecher, Isabella Beecher Hooker, Catharine Beecher, and Thomas K. Beecher
Source: Life Thoughts, 1858
"I was never ruined but twice: once when I lost a lawsuit, and once when I won one."
-Voltaire-
"A lawsuit is the suicide of time."
-Thomas Edison-
"Most new insights come only after a superabundant accumulation of facts have removed the blindness which prevented us from seeing what later comes to be regarded as obvious."
-Isidor Issac Rabi-
(1898-1988) Galician-born American physicist, 1944 Nobel laureate for his discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance
"Free speech is essential to education, especially to a liberal education, which encourages the search for truths in art and science. If expression is restricted, the range of inquiry is also curtailed... The beneficiaries of a free society have a duty to pursue the truth and to protect the freedom of expression that makes possible the search for a new enlightenment."
-Norman Dorsen-
Author, Professor of Consitutional Law (NYU), ACLU president (1976-1991), CFR member
Source: Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression
"It is the great parent of science & of virtue: and that a nation will be great in both, always in proportion as it is free."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: letter to Joseph Willard, March 24, 1789
"I will always hold to those principles by which I have been raised … To seek understanding before taking action, yet to trust my instincts when action is called for. Never to avoid danger from fear, never to seek out danger for its own sake. Never to conform to fashion from fear of eccentricity, never to be eccentric from fear of conformity. … To hold myself to higher standards of conduct than I hold another. To never strike without cause, and, when there is cause, to strike for the heart.
-Steven Brust-
"It takes a long time to understand nothing."
-Edward Dahlberg-
(1900-1977) American novelist and essayist
"It is time for our school systems to stop accepting the gospel of that false religion and start doing their due diligence. Our children should be taught about the demonstrable solar cycles; and the whole human-caused Global Warming theory, along with the Hockey Stick Hoax, should be taught only as another example, after Piltdown Man and pre-Copernican theories of planetary movement, of how science can be corrupted when ideology gets ahead of the data."
-Orson Scott Card-
(1951- ) American novelist, critic, public speaker, essayist, columnist
"For the truth of the conclusions of physical science, observation is the supreme Court of Appeal."
-Sir Arthur Eddington-
Mathematician
"And so, my fellow Americans: Ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: Ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man."
-John F. Kennedy-
(1917-1963) 35th US President
Source: Inaugural address, January 20, 1961
"As we celebrate Thanksgiving ... we should ask what we can do as individuals to demonstrate our gratitude to God for all He has done. Such reflection can only add to the significance of this precious day of remembrance. Let us recommit ourselves to that devotion to God and family that has played such an important role in making this a great Nation, and which will be needed as a source of strength if we are to remain a great people."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
Source: President Reagan's Thanksgiving Proclamation, November 26, 1987
"Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few."
-Sir Winston Churchill-
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1940-1945, 1951-1955)
"A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government."
-Edward Abbey-
(1927-1989) American author and essayist
"Surely the day will come when color means nothing more than skin tone, when religion is seen uniquely as a way to speak one’s soul; when birth places have the weight of a throw of the dice and all men are born free, when understanding breeds love and brotherhood."
-Josephine Baker-
"Of course, the proponents of political tyranny are usually well-motivated. Those who enacted the gun-registration law in California point to criminals who have used semiautomatic weapons to commit horrible, murderous acts. But the illusion -- the pipe dream -- is that bad acts can be prevented by the deprivation of liberty. They cannot be! Life is always insecure. The only choice is between liberty and insecurity, on the one hand, and insecurity and enslavement on the other. The true patriot scrutinizes the actions of his own government with unceasing vigilance. And when his government violates the morality and rightness associated with principles of individual freedom and private property, he immediately rises in opposition to his government. This is why the gun owners of California might ultimately go down in history as among the greatest and most courageous patriots of our time."
-Jacob G. Hornberger-
(1950- ) American author, journalist, politician, founder and president of the Future of Freedom Foundation
Source: Gun Control, Patriotism and Civil Disobedience, Pamphlet published by International Society for Individual
Liberty
"My kind of loyalty was to one's country, not to its institutions or its officeholders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease, and death."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910) American author and humorist
"Equal laws protecting equal rights -- the best guarantee of loyalty and love of country."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: letter to Jacob de la Motta, August 1820
"Political ideas that have dominated the public mind for decades cannot be refuted through rational arguments. They must run their course in life and cannot collapse otherwise than in great catastrophe..."
-Ludwig von Mises-
(1881-1973) Economist and social philosopher
"The authoritarian sets up some book, or man, or tradition to establish the truth. The freethinker sets up reason and private judgment to discover the truth... It takes the highest courage to utter unpopular truths."
-Herbert Spencer-
(1820-1903) British author, economist, philosopher
Source: Freedom and Its Fundamentals
"I discharge every person under punishment or prosecution under the Sedition Law, because I considered, and now consider, that law to be a nullity as absolute and palpable as if Congress had ordered us to fall down and worship a golden image."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Letter to Abigail Adams, 22 July 1804
"Yesterday, December 7, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy — the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. … Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory and our interests are in grave danger. With confidence in our armed forces — with the unbounding determination of our people — we will gain the inevitable triumph — so help us God."
-Franklin D. Roosevelt-
"The question was how we should maneuver them [the Japanese] into firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves."
-Sec. of War Henry Stimson-
writing in his diary after a cabinet meeting with FDR, Nov. 25th, 1941
Cause and effect. Stimson took his title seriously...
"As a matter of constitutional tradition, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, we presume that governmental regulation of the content of speech is more likely to interfere with the free exchange of ideas than to encourage it. The interest in encouraging freedom of expression in a democratic society outweighs any theoretical but unproven benefit of censorship."
-Justice John Paul Stevens-
U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Majority Opinion, Communications Decency Act, 26 June 1997
"A family member asked my wife, 'Aren't you concerned about his (our son's) socialization with other kids?'
My wife gave this response: 'Go to your local middle school, junior high, or high school, walk down the hallways, and tell me which behavior you see that you think our son should emulate.'"
-Manfred B. Zysk-
German-American engineer and researcher
"In my judgment the people of no nation can lose their liberty so long as a Bill of Rights like ours survives and its basic purposes are conscientiously interpreted, enforced and respected so as to afford continuous protection against old, as well as new, devices and practices which might thwart those purposes. I fear to see the consequences of the Court's practice of substituting its own concepts of decency and fundamental justice for the language of the Bill of Rights as its point of departure in interpreting and enforcing that Bill of Rights."
-Justice Hugo L. Black-
(1886-1971) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: Adamson v. California, 332 U.S. 46, 89 (Dissent) (1947)
"Woe to that nation whose literature is disturbed by the intervention of power. Because that is not just a violation against 'freedom of print', it is the closing down of the heart of the nation, a slashing to pieces of its memory. The nation ceases to be mindful of itself, it is deprived of its spiritual unity, and despite a supposedly common language, compatriots suddenly cease to understand one another ."
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn-
(1918-2008) Russian novelist, Soviet dissident, imprisoned for 8 years for critizing Stalin in a personal letter, Nobel Prize for Literature, 1970
Source: Nobel lecture (1970), Lecture prepared for the Swedish Academy, not actually delivered as an address
"A Bible and a newspaper in every house, a good school in every district - all studied and appreciated as they merit - are the principal support of virtue, morality, and civil liberty."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
in a letter dated March 1778 to the Ministry of France
"The burning of an author’s books, imprisonment for opinion’s sake, has always been the tribute that an ignorant age pays to the genius of its time."
-Joseph Lewis-
(1889-1968) American freethinker, atheist activist, publisher, litigator
Source: Voltaire: The Incomparable Infidel, 1929
"Any one having a white face, and being so disposed, could stop us, and subject us to examination. ... When I get there [in Pennsylvania], I shall not be required to have a pass; I can travel without being disturbed."
-Frederick Douglass-
[Frederick Baily] (1818-1895), escaped slave, Abolitionist, author, editor of the North Star and later the New National Era
Source: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself [1845] (Toronto: New American Library, 1968), p. 77 and 93-94
"All that we are is the result of what we have thought. If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him. If a man speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves him."
-Buddha-
[Gautama Siddharta] (563 - 483 BC), Hindu Prince, founder of Buddhism
"I have had more trouble with myself than with any other man I have ever met."
-Dwight Lyman Moody-
(1837-1899) American evangelist and publisher
"Sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences."
-Robert Louis Stevenson-
(1850-1895) Scottish novelist, poet, and travel writer
Source: most likely a paraphrase of "that game of consequences to which we all sit down" from 'Old Mortality'
"Civil liberty can be established on no foundation of human reason which will not at the same time demonstrate the right of religious freedom."
-John Quincy Adams-
(1767-1848) 6th US President
Source: Letter, 1823
"There is but one law for all, namely, that law which governs all law, the law of our Creator, the law of humanity, justice, equity -- the law of nature, and of nations."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
"The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time: the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Summary View of the Rights of British America, 1774
"The new law will create inflation whenever the trusts want inflation...they can unload the stocks on the people at high prices during the excitement and then bring on a panic and buy them back at low prices...the day of reckoning is only a few years removed."
-Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr.-
(1859-1924) Congressman (R-MN), father of famous aviator
"It is more noble to give yourself completely to one individual than to labor diligently for the salvation of the masses."
-Dag Hammarskjold-
(1905-1961) Swedish diplomat, the second United Nations Secretary-General, and a Nobel Peace Prize recipient
Source: as quoted in Living in Grace : The Shift to Spiritual Perception (2002) by Beca Lewis, p. 158
"What is earnest is not always true; on the contrary, error is often more earnest than truth."
-Benjamin Disraeli-
To say nothing of outright deception...
"Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true."
-Sir Francis Bacon-
(1561-1626) Philosopher, British Lord Chancellor
Source: Norvum Organum (1620)
And has every right to do so. Thoughts and conscience and whatnot. Imposing them, of course, is an entirely different matter...
"The recovery of freedom is so splendid a thing that we must not shun even death when seeking to recover it."
-Marcus Tullius Cicero-
(106-43 B.C.) Roman Statesman, Philosopher and Orator
"Whether in chains or in laurels, liberty knows nothing but victories."
-Wendell Phillips-
(1811-1884) American abolitionist, advocate for Native Americans, orator, lawyer
"The patriot volunteer, fighting for country and his rights, makes the most reliable soldier on earth."
-Thomas J. Jackson
(1824-1863) "Stonewall Jackson", Confederate General
"But there is another strong objection which I, one of the laziest of all the children of Adam, have against the Leisure State. Those who think it could be done argue that a vast machinery using electricity, water-power, petrol, and so on, might reduce the work imposed on each of us to a minimum. It might, but it would also reduce our control to a minimum. We should ourselves become parts of a machine, even if the machine only used those parts once a week. The machine would be our master, for the machine would produce our food, and most of us could have no notion of how it was really being produced."
-Gilbert Keith Chesterton-
(1874-1936) British essayist, critic, poet, and novelist
Source: Illustrated London News, March 21, 1925
"The common man is the sovereign consumer whose buying or abstention from buying ultimately determines what should be produced and in what quantity and quality."
-Ludwig von Mises-
(1881-1973) Economist and social philosopher
Source: The Anti-Capitalist Mentality, p.1
"If we cannot live so as to be happy, let us at least live so as to deserve it."
-Immanuel Hermann von Fichte-
(1796-1879) German philosopher
"The purpose of life is to live a life of purpose."
-Robert Byrne-
"The authoritarian impulse is reasserting itself, to challenge free people and free societies, everywhere. In our own country, from the trivial to the truly dangerous, it is the range and regularity of the untruths we see that should be cause for profound alarm, and spur to action. Add to that the by-now predictable habit of calling true things false, and false things true, and we have a recipe for disaster. As George Orwell warned, 'The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.' … The question of why the truth is now under such assault may well be for historians to determine. But for those who cherish American constitutional democracy, what matters is the effect on America and her people and her standing in an increasingly unstable world — made all the more unstable by these very fabrications. What matters is the daily disassembling of our democratic institutions. We are a mature democracy — it is well past time that we stop excusing or ignoring — or worse, endorsing — these attacks on the truth. For if we compromise the truth for the sake of our politics, we are lost."
-Jeff Flake-
"To be what no one ever was, to be what everyone has been:
Freedom is the mean of those extremes that fence all effort in."
-Mark Van Doren-
(1894-1972) Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, professor, and critic
"While there are two ways of contending, one by discussion, the other by force, the former belonging properly to man, the latter to beasts, recourse must be had to the latter if there be no opportunity for employing the former."
-Cicero-
"To put it baldly, there are two ways to become wealthy: to create wealth or to take wealth away from others. The former adds to society. The latter typically subtracts from it, for in the process of taking it away, wealth gets destroyed. A monopolist who overcharges for his product takes money from those whom he is overcharging and at the same time destroys value. To get his monopoly price, he has to restrict production."
-Joseph E. Stiglitz-
(1943-) American economist, public policy analyst, professor
Source: The Price of Inequality (2012)
"Men, to act with vigour and effect, must have time to mature measures, and judgment and experience, as to the best method of applying them. They must not be hurried on to their conclusions by the passions, or the fears of the multitude. They must deliberate, as well as resolve."
-Joseph Story-
(1779-1845) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: (1833)
"... we conclude that the [Federal] Reserve Banks are not federal ... but are independent privately owned and locally controlled corporations... without day to day direction from the federal government."
-9th Circuit Court-
Source: Lewis vs United States, June 24, 1982
"I either want less corruption, or more chance to participate in it."
-Ashleigh Brilliant-
(1933- ) British-American author, syndicated cartoonist
"Inflation is taxation without representation."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
"You are a den of vipers and thieves. I intend to rout you out, and by the grace of the Eternal God, will rout you out."
-Andrew Jackson-
(1767-1845) 7th US President
Source: upon evicting from the Oval Office a delegation of international bankers discussing the Bank Renewal Bill, 1832
"Either the application for renewal of the charter (for the First Bank of the United States) is granted, or the United States will find itself involved in a most disastrous war."
-Baron Nathan Mayer Rothschild-
(1777-1836) London financier, one of the founders of the international Rothschild banking dynasty
Source: 1811, ref: A History of Central Banking, Stephen Milford Goodson
"Corruption is no stranger to Washington; it is a famous resident."
-Walter Goodman-
(1927-2002) American author, journalist, television critic
"A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny."
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn-
(1918-2008) Russian novelist, Soviet dissident, imprisoned for 8 years for critizing Stalin in a personal letter, Nobel Prize for Literature, 1970
"A fondness for power is implanted, in most men, and it is natural to abuse it, when acquired."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: The Farmer Refuted, February 23, 1775
"We now have so many regulations that everyone is guilty of some violation."
-Donald Alexander-
(1921-2009) American tax lawyer, Commissioner of Internal Revenue (1973-1977)
1975
Source: before Congress ~1975
"The government was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself."
-Thomas Jefferson-
That way lies madness...
"One of the most dangerous forms of human error is forgetting what one is trying to achieve."
-Paul Nitze-
When you're up to your ass in alligators, it's difficult to remind yourself that your original objective was to drain the swamp...
"In a small Swiss city sits an international organization so obscure and secretive....Control of the institution, the Bank for International Settlements, lies with some of the world's most powerful and least visible men: the heads of 32 central banks, officials able to shift billions of dollars and alter the course of economies at the stroke of a pen."
-Keith Bradsher-
New York Times bureau chief in Detroit (1996-2001) and Hong Kong (2001- )
Source: New York Times, August 5, 1995
"Every national border in Europe marks the place where two gangs of bandits got too exhausted to kill each other anymore and signed a treaty. Patriotism is the delusion that one of these gangs of bandits is better than all the others"
-Robert Anton Wilson-
"It is no wonder that the contemporary libertarian, seeing the world going socialist and Communist, and believing himself virtually isolated and cut off from any prospect of united mass action, tends to be steeped in long-run pessimism. But the scene immediately brightens when we realize that that indispensable requisite of modern civilization: the overthrow of the Old Order, was accomplished by mass libertarian action erupting in such great revolutions of the West as the French and American Revolutions, and bringing about the glories of the Industrial Revolution and the advances of liberty, mobility, and rising living standards that we still retain today. Despite the reactionary swings backward to statism, the modern world stands towering above the world of the past. When we consider also that, in one form or another, the Old Order of despotism, feudalism, theocracy and militarism dominated every human civilization until the West of the 18th century, optimism over what man has and can achieve must mount still higher."
-Murray Rothbard-
"I've concluded that anarchism is an impractical ideal. Nowadays, I regard myself as a libertarian. I suppose an anarchist would say, paraphrasing what Marx said about agnostics being 'frightened atheists,' that libertarians are simply frightened anarchists. Having just stated the case for the opposition, I will go along and agree with them: yes, I am frightened. I'm a libertarian because I don't trust the people as much as anarchists do. I want to see government limited as much as possible; I would like to see it reduced back to where it was in Jefferson's time, or even smaller. But I would not like to see it abolished. I think the average American, if left totally free, would act exactly like Idi Amin. I don't trust the people any more than I trust the government."
-Robert Anton Wilson-
You don't trust people -- unless they're handed the power and guns, the force monopoly, of government? Then you trust them? Then they're easier to limit? "Government limited as much as possible" is anarchism. Sorry...
"Democracy is more cruel than wars or tyrants."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: 'Epistulse morales'
"The most may err as grossly as the few."
-John Dryden-
(1631-1700) English Poet
Source: Absalom and Achitophel, 1681
"This truth is well known among our principal men now engaged in forming an imperialism of Capital to govern the world. By dividing the voters through the political party system, we can get them to expend their energies in fighting over questions of no importance. Thus by discreet action we can secure for ourselves what has been so well planned and so successfully accomplished."
-Sir Denison Miller-
(1860-1923) first governor of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia
"Choice by the people themselves is not generally distinguished for its wisdom."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: 1776, Jefferson’s Literary Commonplace Book, Wilson, ed., 1989, p. 11.
"Nations grow corrupt, love bondage more than liberty; bondage with ease than strenuous liberty."
-John Milton-
(1608-1674) English Poet
"The cruelest lies are often told in silence."
-Robert Louis Stevenson-
(1850-1895) Scottish novelist, poet, and travel writer
"Do the people of this land…desire to preserve those [liberties] protected by the First Amendment… If so, let them withstand all beginnings of encroachment. For the saddest epitaph which can be carved in memory of a vanquished liberty is that it was lost because its possessors failed to stretch for a saving hand while yet there was time."
-George Sutherland-
(1862-1942) U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Associated Press v. National Labor Relations Board, 1937
"Very commonly in ages when civil rights of one kind are in evidence – those pertaining to freedom of speech and thought in, say, theater, press, and forum, with obscenity and libel laws correspondingly loosened – very real constrictions of individual liberty take place in other, more vital areas: political organization, voluntary association, property, and the right to hold jobs, for example."
-Robert Nisbet-
(1913-1996) American sociologist, author
Source: Twilight of Authority, 1975
"Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. If there is too much cash chasing too few goods, prices will rise."
-Megan McArdle-
December 10, 2021
"The modern susceptibility to conformity and obedience to authority indicates that the truth endorsed by authority is likely to be accepted as such by a majority of the people."
-David Edwards-
(1962-) British political writer, columnist
Source: Burning All Illusions, 1996
"To combat depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about; because we are suffering from a misdirection of production, we want to create further misdirection -- a procedure which can only lead to a much more severe crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end."
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
1933
"It is a sobering fact that the prominence of central banks in this century has coincided with a general tendency towards more inflation, not less. [I]f the overriding objective is price stability, we did better with the nineteenth-century gold standard and passive central banks, with currency boards, or even with ‘free banking.’ The truly unique power of a central bank, after all, is the power to create money, and ultimately the power to create is the power to destroy."
-Paul Volcker-
(1927-2019) American economist, Chairman of the Federal Reserve (1979-1987)
Source: in the Foreword of "The Central Banks"
"Truth never envelops itself in mystery, and the mystery in which it is at any time enveloped is the work of its antagonist, and never of itself."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
"If you stand straight, do not fear a crooked shadow."
-Chinese Proverb-
“War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses."
-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.
Source: from a speech in 1933
"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."
-anonymous-
"In practice, socialism didn’t work. But socialism could never have worked because it is based on false premises about human psychology and society, and gross ignorance of human economy. In the vast library of socialist theory (and in all of Marx’s compendious works), there is hardly a chapter devoted to the creation of wealth to what will cause human beings to work and to innovate, or to what will make their efforts efficient. Socialism is a plan of morally sanctioned theft. It is about dividing up what others have created. Consequently, socialist economies don’t work; they create poverty instead of wealth. This is unarguable historical fact now, but that has not prompted the left to have second thoughts."
-David Horowitz-
"It was not by accident or coincidence that the rights to freedom in speech and press were coupled in a single guaranty with the rights of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition for redress of grievances. All these, though not identical, are inseparable. They are cognate rights, and therefore are united in the first Article’s assurance."
-Judge Wiley B. Rutledge-
[Wiley Blount Rutledge] (1894-1949) U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Thomas v. Collins, 1944
"Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress had been made, through disobedience and through rebellion."
-Oscar Wilde-
(1854-1900) Anglo-Irish poet, novelist, writer
"We do not move forward by curtailing people’s liberty because we are afraid of what they may do or say."
-Eleanor Roosevelt-
[Anna Eleanor Roosevelt] (1884-1963) Wife of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt
Source: The Nation, 1940
"With the destructive power of today's weapons, keeping the peace is not just a goal; it's a sacred obligation. But maintaining peace requires more than sincerity and idealism — more than optimism and good will. As you know well, peace is a product of hard, strenuous labor by those dedicated to its preservation. It requires realism, not wishful thinking."
-Ronald Reagan-
Even when defending said peace against your own government.
"It is the glistening and softly spoken lie; the amiable fallacy; the patriotic lie of the historian, the provident lie of the politician, the zealous lie of the partisan, the merciful lie of the friend, and the careless lie of each man to himself, that cast that black mystery over humanity, through which we thank any man who pierces, as we would thank one who dug a well in a desert."
-John Ruskin-
"The right to revolt has sources deep in our history."
-William O. Douglas-
(1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: An Almanac of Liberty, 1954
"Most men today cannot conceive of a freedom that does not involve somebody's slavery."
-W.E.B. Du Bois-
"Political agitation, by the passions it arouses or the convictions it engenders, may in fact stimulate men to the violation of the law. Detestation of existing politics is easily transformed into forcible resistance of the authority which puts them in execution..."
-Judge Learned Hand-
(1872-1961), Judge, U. S. Court of Appeals
Source: Masses Pub Co. v. Patten, 1917
"He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
"Who can protest and does not, is an accomplice in the act."
-The Talmud-
"Hope, in reality, is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man."
-Nietzsche-
Hope is like a spiritual dose of clap.
"Freedom includes the right to say what others may object to and resent... The essence of citizenship is to be tolerant of strong and provocative words."
-John G. Diefenbaker-
(1895-1979) Prime Minister of Canada
Source: Hansard, 9 April 1970
"Propaganda gives force and direction to the successive movements of popular feeling and desire; but it does not do much to create these movements. The propagandist is a man who canalizes an already existing stream. In a land where there is no water, he digs in vain."
-Aldous Huxley-
"Freedom released the energies of the masses not by exhilarating but by unbalancing, irritating, and goading."
-Eric Hoffer-
(1902-1983) American author, philosopher, awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
"Our tradition is one of protest and revolt, and it is stultifying to celebrate the rebels of the past while we silence the rebels of the present."
-Henry Steele Commager-
(1902-1998) Historian and author
Source: Freedom Loyalty and Dissent, 1966
"The right to comment freely and criticize the action, opinions, and judgment of courts is of primary importance to the public generally. Not only is it good for the public; but it has a salutary effect on courts and judges as well."
-James P. Hughes-
(1874-1961) Justice of the Indiana Supreme Court (1933-1939)
Source: 1935
"There’s a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any over-large concentration of like-minded individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause."
-P. J. O'Rourke-
(1947-2022) US humorist, journalist, & political commentator
Source: Parliament of Whores, 1991
"The Tenth Commandment sends a message to socialists, to egalitarians, to people obsessed with fairness, to American presidential candidates in the year 2000 -- to everyone who believes that wealth should be redistributed. And that message is clear and concise: Go to Hell."
-P. J. O'Rourke-
(1947-2022) US humorist, journalist, & political commentator
Source: his book, Eat the Rich
"They who most loudly clamour for liberty do not most liberally grant it."
- Dr. Samuel Johnson-
(1709-1784) English author, poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer
"Let me get this straight. For the past quarter-century or more, the central government has been stealing hundreds of billions of dollars each year from competent, hard-working, successful people and giving it to incompetent, lazy failures. As a result, middle-class America has increasingly been impoverished while the poor are even poorer. Now come calls for reforming the system, and liberals are denouncing reformers in the vilest language. What planet did you say liberals are from?"
-Paul Thiel-
(1964- ) American financial journalist, investment manager
Source: letter to The Cincinnati Enquirer
"Anonymous pamphlets, leaflets, brochures and even books have played an important role in the progress of mankind. Persecuted groups and sects from time to time throughout history have been able to criticize the oppressive practices and laws either anonymously or not at all... It is plain that anonymity has sometimes been assumed for the most constructive purposes."
-Justice Hugo L. Black-
(1886-1971) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: Tally v. California, 1960
"In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies."
-Sir Winston Churchill-
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1940-1945, 1951-1955)
"There is always a certain glamour about the idea of a nation rising up to crush an evil simply because it is wrong. Unfortunately, this can seldom be realized in real life; for the very existence of the evil usually argues a moral weakness in the very place where extraordinary moral strength is called for."
-W. E. B. Du Bois-
"Diplomacy: The patriotic art of lying for one's country."
-Ambrose Bierce-
(1842-1914) American Civil War soldier, humorist, writer
"The danger to which the success of revolutions is most exposed, is that of attempting them before the principles on which they proceed, and the advantages to result from them, are sufficiently seen and understood."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
"No government of the Centre would seek powers to imprison individuals who have committed no crime merely on the say-so of 'experts' who believe they might commit a crime. No libertarian government would want to reduce our right to trial by jury, to curfew children, to place 'anti-social behaviour orders' on citizens, to conduct compulsory DNA and drug tests on all offenders. No government that was concerned with freedom would seek to ban pursuits that harm no one, such as foxhunting, simply because they are unpopular. No government that has respect for its citizens would seek to interfere so intimately with so many of their private activities -- for instance, what right does a government have to tell me under what terms and conditions I may sell my house. The transaction should, quite simply, be none of their business."
-George Thomas-
Source: Letter to Editor, London Times, October 13, 1999.
"It is a part of the function of 'law' to give recognition to ideas representing the exact opposite of established conduct. Most of the complications arise from the necessity of pretending to do one thing, while actually doing another."
-Thurman Arnold-
(1891-1969) former head of the Anti-Trust Division of the U.S. Justice Department (1938-1943)
Source: The Symbols of Government, 1935
"The great illusion of the current paradigm of statism is that governments achieve a worthwhile reduction of violence. Governments are the greatest cause of violence in the world today. They are coercive monopolies with only an illusion of public support. Everything they do is based on a presumed right to point guns at people who are acting peacefully."
-Adam Kokesh-
"This is a world of compensations; and he who would be no slave must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves."
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
Source: Speech, 1856
"All go free when multitudes offend.
[Lat., Quicquid multis peccatur inultum est.]"
-Lucanus-
[Marcus Annaeus Lucanus] (A.D. 39-65) Roman poet
Source: Pharsalia (V, 260)
"The victim to too severe a law is considered as a martyr rather than a criminal."
-Charles Caleb Colton-
(1780-1832) English cleric, writer and collector
Source: Lacon, 1825
"I consider trial by jury as the only anchor yet devised by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: 1789 in correspondence to Thomas Paine
"No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the main enemy forces."
-Helmuth von Moltke the Elder-
Prussian Field Marshal, 1871
"Everybody has plans until they get hit for the first time."
-Mike Tyson-
1987
"People do not make wars; governments do."
-Ronald Reagan-
"The most extravagant idea that can be born in the head of a political thinker is to believe that it suffices for people to enter, weapons in hand, among a foreign people and expect to have its laws and constitution embraced. No one loves armed missionaries; the first lesson of nature and prudence is to repulse them as enemies."
-Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre-
(6 May 1758 - 28 July 1794) French lawyer, statesman, one of the most influential figures of the French Revolution, member of the Constituent Assembly, Jacobin Club
Source: Opposing proposals to spread the French revolution by war, in Sur la guerre (1ère intervention), a speech to the Jacobin Club (2 January 1792)
"Every citizen should be a soldier. This was the case with the Greeks and Romans, and must be that of every free state."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"[A constitution] naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right."
-Thomas Jefferson-
letter to James Madison in 1789
"No matter what political reasons are given for war, the underlying reason is always economic."
-A. J. P. Taylor-
[Alan John Percivale Taylor] (1906-1990) British historian
"Wars are caused by undefended wealth."
-General Douglas MacArthur-
(1880-1964) WWII Supreme Allied Commander of the Southwest Pacific, Supreme United Nations Commander
"History teaches that wars begin when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
"Is there any man, is there any woman, let me say any child here that does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry?"
-Woodrow Wilson-
(1856-1924) 28th US President
1919
"War is the trade of Kings."
-John Dryden-
(1631-1700) English Poet
Source: King Arthur, II, ii (1691)
"The history of war is the history of powerful individuals willing to sacrifice thousands upon thousands of other people’s lives for personal gains."
-Michael Rivero-
"If we ever have a plan, we're screwed."
-Paul Newman-
referencing "Newman's Own"
"When people begin to understand that the State originated for predatory purposes and for conquest, and realize that its underlying aim ever since has been to camouflage what in reality is its essential feature of controlling people so that it can arbitrarily rob some for the benefit of others, they will begin to understand the motives and effects of State activity in every quarter of the globe. They will begin to ponder on other alternatives for solving their problems than resort to the State machine. Such a recourse is today almost completely absent from the minds of reformers and revolutionists. In fact, subtract the idea of the State as an implementor of social policy from the minds of nearly all those bent on reform and their thinking processes would be immediately halted."
-Laurance Labadie-
"There can be no greater error than to expect or calculate upon real favors from nation to nation."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
"It is an approved maxim in war, never to do what the enemy wishes you to do, for this reason alone, that he desires it."
-Napoleon Bonaparte-
(1769-1821) French emperor
"The moral and constitutional obligations of our representatives in Washington are to protect our liberty, not coddle the world, precipitating no-win wars, while bringing bankruptcy and economic turmoil to our people."
-Dr. Ron Paul-
(1935-) American physician, US Congressman (R-TX), US Presidential candidate
"We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home."
-Edward R. Murrow-
(1908-1965) American broadcast journalist and war correspondent
Defend whatever the hell you consider worthy. That is your right. But "freedom abroad" -- however whoever defines it -- is still not the enforceable Constitutional responsibility of the US taxpayer. Period. Hold a bake sale.
"One of the fondest expressions around is that we can't be the world's policeman. But guess who gets called when somebody needs a cop."
-General Colin Powell-
(1937- ) US Army General, Secretary of State (2001-05)
Which is precisely why people who win the lottery so often soon get an unlisted number.
"You may not be interested in war, but war is very interested in you."
-Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi-
(1828-1910) Russian writer
"Beware lest in your anxiety to avoid war you obtain a master."
-Demosthenes-
(384-322 BC) Greek statesman and orator of ancient Athens
"There are two histories : official history, lying, and then secret history, where you find the real causes of events."
-Honoré de Balzac-
(1799-1850) French novelist, playwright
"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle."
-Sun Tzu-
(c.500-320 B.C.) name used by the unknown Chinese authors of the sophisticated treatise on philosophy, logistics, espionage, strategy and tactics known as 'The Art of War'
500 B.C.
Source: http://www.realityzone.com/granddeception.html
"To come to know your enemy, first you must become his friend, and once you become his friend, all his defences come down. Then you can choose the most fitting method for his demise."
-Tokugawa Ieyasu-
(1542-1616) Japanese Shogun
"The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them."
-Vladimir Ilyich Lenin-
[Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov] (1870-1924) First Leader of the Soviet Union
"Republicanism and ignorance are in bitter antagonism."
-Alphonse de Lamartine-
(1790- 1869) - French writer, poet, politician who was instrumental in the foundation of the Second Republic and the continuation of the Tricolore as the flag of France
"Be convinced that to be happy means to be free and that to be free means to be brave. Therefore do not take lightly the perils of war."
-Thucydides-
[Thoukudídês] (c.455-c.400 BC) Greek historian, author of the History of the Peloponnesian War
"The strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venal love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
"History teaches us that men and nations only behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives."
-Abba Eban-
[Aubrey Solomon Meir] (1915-2002) Israeli diplomat and politician
Source: Speech in London, 16 December 1970
"The Shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which the sheep thanks the shephard as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as a destroyer of liberty. Plainly, the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of liberty."
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
"The people have always some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness... This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs, when he first appears he is a protector."
-Plato-
(429-347 BC) Greek philosopher
Source: The Republic
"From a 'pragmatic' point of view, political philosophy is a monster, and whenever it has been taken seriously, the consequence, almost invariably, has been revolution, war, and eventually, the police state."
-Henry David Aiken-
(1912-1982) Author
Source: Commentary, April 1964
"It was Thomas Edison who brought us electricity, not the Sierra Club. It was the Wright brothers who got us off the ground, not the Federal Aviation Administration. It was Henry Ford who ended the isolation of millions of Americans by making the automobile affordable, not Ralph Nader. Those who have helped the poor the most have not been those who have gone around loudly expressing 'compassion' for the poor, but those who found ways to make industry more productive and distribution more efficient, so that the poor of today can afford things that the affluent of yesterday could only dream about."
-Thomas Sowell-
"To judge from the history of mankind, we shall be compelled to conclude, that the fiery and destructive passions of war, reign in the human breast, with much more powerful sway, than the mild and beneficent sentiments of peace; and, that to model our political systems upon speculations of lasting tranquility, is to calculate on the weaker springs of the human character."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: writing as "Publius," in _Federalist No. 34,_ January 5, 1788
"In the twentieth century the number of people killed by their own governments under authoritarian regimes is four times the number killed in all this century’s wars combined."
-John Shattuck-
(1943-) Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights
"Enemies are necessary for the wheels of the U.S. military machine to turn."
-John Stockwell-
(1937-) U.S. Marine Corps Major, and Chief of Station and National Security Council coordinator for the CIA
"No man is entitled to the blessings of freedom unless he be vigilant in its preservation."
-General Douglas MacArthur-
(1880-1964) WWII Supreme Allied Commander of the Southwest Pacific, Supreme United Nations Commander
"Suppose they gave a war, and nobody came? Why then, the war would come to you!"
-Bertolt Brecht-
[Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht] (1898-1956) German socialist dramatist, stage director, and poet
"He who wants peace must prepare for war."
-Claudius-
[Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus] (10 BC-54 AD) fourth Roman Emperor of the Julio-Claudian dynasty
"Having so pledged myself, and having been elected to my senatorship upon such pledge, and not having been elected to create an organization to which we would give a promise, either express or implied, that it would have the authority to send our boys all over the Earth, I cannot support the Charter. I believe it is fraught with danger to the American people and to American institutions."
-William Langer-
(1886-1959), Governor of North Dakota (1933-34, 1937-39), US Senator (R-ND, 1940-59), one of only two Senators who voted against the United Nations Charter in 1945
Source: Statement to the US Senate - Congressional Record August, 1945
"War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it."
-William Tecumseh Sherman-
(1820-1891) General Commander of the United States Army
"I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell."
-William Tecumseh Sherman-
(1820-1891) General Commander of the United States Army
"The essence of war is violence. Moderation in war is imbecility."
-John A. Fisher-
[Lord John Arbutnoth Fisher of Kilverstone] (1841-1920) English first sea Lord of Admiralty and writer
Source: Macaulay "Essay on Lord Nugent's Memorials of Hampden"
"Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Tolerance in the face of tyranny is no virtue."
-Barry Goldwater-
(1909-1998) US Senator (R-Arizona)
Source: Often attributed to Goldwater but no source found. Perhaps paraphrased from this quote.
"Standing up to a tyrant has always been illegal and dangerous. There is no guarantee but one -- to not live like a slave, nor to die like one."
-Eric Schaub-
Individualist, activist, speaker, writer
"Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains and always was."
-D. H. Lawrence-
(1885-1938)
"I don't measure a man's success by how high he climbs but how high he bounces when he hits bottom."
-General George S. Patton, Jr.-
"Restless is discontent and discontent is the first necessity of progress."
-Thomas A. Edison-
(1847-1931) Inventor
"I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone. Someone once said that Thomas Jefferson was a gentleman of 32 who could calculate an eclipse, survey an estate, tie an artery, plan an edifice, try a cause, break a horse, and dance the minuet."
-John F. Kennedy-
Remarks at a Dinner Honoring Nobel Prize Winners of the Western Hemisphere
29 Apr. 1962
"Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output. … A steady rate of monetary growth at a moderate level can provide a framework under which a country can have little inflation and much growth. It will not produce perfect stability; it will not produce heaven on earth; but it can make an important contribution to a stable economic society."
-Milton Friedman-
"The fiercest serpent may be overcome by a swarm of ants."
-Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto-
(1884-1943) Japanese Naval Marshal General and commander-in-chief of the Combined Fleet during World War II, a graduate of the Imperial Japanese Naval Academy and a student of Harvard University (1919–1921)
Source: Statement in opposition of the planned construction of the Yamato class battleships, as quoted in Scraps of paper: the disarmament treaties between the world wars (1989) by Harlow A. Hyde
"Woe unto you, ye blind guides, which say, Whosoever shall swear by the temple, it is nothing; but whosoever shall swear by the gold of the temple, he is a debtor!"
-Jesus of Nazareth-
(c. 4 BC – c. AD 30/33)
Source: Holy Bible, Matthew 23:16
"Banks have done more injury to the religion, morality, tranquility, prosperity, and even wealth of the nation than they can have done or ever will do good."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: John Adams letter to John Taylor, Of Caroline, Quincy, 12 March, 1819
"Everything is backwards; everything is upside down. Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the major media destroy information, and religions destroy spirituality."
-Michael Ellner-
"Therefore, be ye lamps unto yourselves, be a refuge to yourselves. Hold fast to Truth as a lamp; hold fast to the truth as a refuge. Look not for a refuge in anyone beside yourselves. And those, who shall be a lamp unto themselves, shall betake themselves to no external refuge, but holding fast to the Truth as their lamp, and holding fast to the Truth as their refuge, they shall reach the topmost height."
-Buddha-
[Gautama Siddharta] (563 - 483 BC), Hindu Prince, founder of Buddhism
"The test of every religious, political, or educational system is the man that it forms."
-Henri-Frédéric Amiel-
(1821-1881) Swiss philosopher, poet
"By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes his duty against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion."
-Lord Acton-
[John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton] (1834-1902), First Baron Acton of Aldenham
Source: Lord Acton, in The History of Freedom in Antiquity (1877)
"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
"Fantastic doctrines (like Christianity or Islam or Marxism) require unanimity of belief. One dissenter casts doubt on the creed of millions. Thus the fear and the hate; thus the torture chamber, the iron stake, the gallows, the labor camp, the psychiatric ward."
-Edward Abbey-
(1927-1989) American author and essayist
"The quintessential revolution is that of the spirit, born of an intellectual conviction of the need for change in those mental attitudes and values which shape the course of a nation's development. A revolution which aims merely at changing official policies and institutions with a view to an improvement in material conditions has little chance of genuine success. Without a revolution in spirit, the forces which had produced inequities of the old order would continue to be operative, posing a constant threat to the process of reform and regeneration. It is not enough merely to call for freedom, democracy and human rights. There has to be a united determination to persevere in the struggle, to make sacrifices in the name of enduring truths, to resist the corrupting influences of desire, ill will, ignorance, and fear."
-Aung San Suu Kyi-
Burmese Prime Minster-elect, General Secretary of the National League for Democracy (Myanmar)
"There is usually only a limited amount of damage that can be done by dull or stupid people. For creating a truly monumental disaster, you need people with high IQs."
-Thomas Sowell-
"The assumption that spending more of the taxpayer's money will make things better has survived all kinds of evidence that it has made things worse. The black family - which survived slavery, discrimination, poverty, wars and depressions - began to come apart as the federal government moved in with its well-financed programs to 'help.'"
-Thomas Sowell-
"Twenty times in the course of my late reading have I been on the point of breaking out, 'This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!!!' But in this exclamation I would have been as fanatical as Bryant or Cleverly. Without religion this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite company, I mean hell."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: letter to Thomas Jefferson, June 28, 1813, quoted from Charles Francis Adams, ed., Works of John Adams (1856), vol. X, p. 254
"War is the health of the State. It automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate co-operation with the Government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense."
-Randolph Bourne-
1918
"We have no government armed in power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our Constitution was made only for a religious and moral people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: Oct. 11, 1798; Address to the military
"We are sending a complicated system into an unknown environment at very high speed. I feel calm. I feel ready. I can only conclude it's because I don't have a full grasp of the situation."
-Mark Adler-
Deputy Mission Manager, Mars Spirit Rover, NASA, 1/3/04
"The body of People may with Respect resist intolerable Tyranny."
-John Locke-
(1632-1704) English philosopher and political theorist
Source: Second Treatise On Civil Government 288 (Chicago 1955)
Or, I'd contend, without.
"Nobody should be compelled to respect an ideology that doesn’t respect them."
-Pat Condell-
(1949-) British writer
And tyranny, basically by definition, doesn't respect them, so...
"Our major mistakes have not been the result of democracy, but of the erosion of democracy made possible by the mass media’s manipulation of public opinion."
-Robert Cirino-
Source: Don’t Blame The People, 1971
"Free societies... are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom’s existence."
-Salman Rushdie-
Author
And I think what we have here is a dead shark...
"I think that the influence towards suppression of minority views – towards orthodoxy in thinking about public issues – has been more subconscious than unconscious, stemming to a very great extent from the tendency of Americans to conform…not to deviate or depart from an orthodox point of view."
-William O. Douglas-
(1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: 1952
"The censor’s sword pierces deeply into the heart of free expression."
-Earl Warren-
(1891-1974) Chief Justice, U. S. Supreme Court
Source: Times Film Corps. vs. City of Chicago, 23 January 1961
"No loss by flood and lightning, no destruction of cities and temples by hostile forces of nature, has deprived man of so many noble lives and impulses as those which his intolerance has destroyed."
-Helen Keller-
(1880-1968) Blind-Deaf Author
"Protection against government is now not enough to guarantee that a man who has something to say shall have a chance to say it. The owners and managers of the press determine which person, which facts, which version of the facts, and which ideas shall reach the public."
-Commission On Freedom Of The Press-
Source: A Free and Responsible Press, 1947
"No mighty king, no ambitious emperor, no pope, or prophet ever dreamt of such an awesome pulpit, so potent a magic wand [television]."
-Fred W. Friendly-
(1915-1998) former president of CBS News, creator with Edward R. Murrow of the documentary television program 'See It Now.'
Source: Foreword: Presidential Television, 1973
"It is impossible for ideas to compete in the marketplace if no forum for their presentation is provided or available."
-Thomas Mann-
(1875-1955) German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, Nobel Prize in Literature (1929)
"[A] principle is not a principle until it costs you."
-Lefebure v. D'Aquilla-
15 F.4th 650, 663 (5th Cir. 2021)
citing Psalm 15:4, honoring those who "keep[ ] an oath even when it hurts"
"Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one."
-A. J. Liebling-
[Abbott Joseph Liebling] (1904-1963) American journalist, author
Source: The New Yorker, 1960
"It is our attitude toward free thought and free expression that will determine our fate. There must be no limit on the range of temperate discussion, no limits on thought. No subject must be taboo. No censor must preside at our assemblies."
-Justice William O. Douglas-
(1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Address, Author’s Guild, 1952
"To prevent inquiry is among the worst of evils."
-Thomas Holcroft-
(1745-1816) English dramatist, miscellanist, poet and translator
Source: The Adventures of Hugh Trevor, 1794
"Private opinion is weak, but public opinion is almost omnipotent."
-Harriet Beecher Stowe-
(1814-1896) Abolitionist author
"I would not be fooled by the old myth that reporting is about objectivity. Deciding what is news is the most subjective of acts and it is probably the most important thing that we do."
-Carl Bernstein-
(1944-) American investigative journalist, author, Washington Post reporter for Watergate scandal
"[Tyranny is] to compel men not to think as they do, to compel men to express thoughts that are not their own."
-Milovan Djilas-
(1911-1995) Montenegro communist politician, theorist and author
Source: The New Class, 1957
"Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile. In protest, I declined election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters some years ago, and now I must decline the Pulitzer Prize."
-Sinclair Lewis-
(1885-1951) American novelist, short-story writer, playwright, Nobel Prize in Literature (1930)
Source: Letter, 1926
"The media can now wistfully reflect on their glory days of the 1970's when the majority of people actually bought into their bullshit."
-Laura K. Van Onymous-
"As Hitler showed us, a press suppressed does not make a recovery. As Lenin indicated, a press controlled does not revert to a critic’s role. As history reminds us, free speech surrendered is rarely recovered."
-William J. Small-
Source: Political Power and The Press, 1972
"Persecution for opinion is the master vice of society."
-Frances Wright-
(1795-1852) Scottish-born lecturer, writer, freethinker, feminist, abolitionist, and social reformer
Source: Lecture, 1829
"Freedom of the press, or, to be more precise, the benefit of freedom of the press, belongs to everyone - to the citizen as well as the publisher... The crux is not the publisher's 'freedom to print'; it is, rather, the citizen's 'right
to know.'"
-Arthur Hays Sulzberger-
(1891-1969)
Source: Newspaper publisher
"Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910) American author and humorist
"It is in war that the State really comes into its own: swelling in power, in number, in pride, in absolute dominion over the economy and the society."
-Murray Rothbard-
"It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket, nor breaks my leg."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"Low taxes are the result of low spending."
-Meldrim Thompson-
NH Governor, 1973-1979
"Civil libertarians must often remind government officials (and others) that if the First Amendment only protected the expression of popular and agreeable ideas, it would be totally unnecessary since those ideas would never be threatened by our democratic form of government. Our society's commitment to free speech is tested when we encounter the expression of ideas that are disagreeable -- or even offensive."
-Timothy Lynch-
Director of Cato Institute's Project on Criminal Justice
"Every human being has a right to hear what other wise human beings have spoken to him. It is one of the Rights of Men; a very cruel injustice if you deny it to a man."
-Thomas Carlyle-
(1795-1881) Scottish essayist, satirist, and historian
"[I]t’s an unfortunate reality in many of the journalistic environments we exist today. We can’t criticize certain people, or dig into certain stories, or follow our noses on the trail of corruption if it means upsetting our publishers, sponsors, and donors."
-Zaid Jilani-
Former senior blogger for ThinkProgress at the Center for American Progress Action Fund
Source: How Working In Washington Taught Me We’re All A Little Like RT America, Mar 6th, 2014
"The main thing is to have a soul that loves the truth and harbours it where he finds it. And another thing: truth requires constant repetition, because error is being preached about us all the time, and not only by isolated individuals but by the masses. In the newspapers and encyclopedias, in schools and universities, everywhere error rides high and basks in the consciousness of having the majority on its side."
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe-
(1749-1832) German writer, statesman
"Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press."
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn-
(1918-2008) Russian novelist, Soviet dissident, imprisoned for 8 years for critizing Stalin in a personal letter, Nobel Prize for Literature, 1970
"A newspaper has three things to do. One is to amuse, another is to entertain and the rest is to mislead."
-Ernest Bevin-
(1881-1951) British Foreign Minister
Source: at London Conference of Foreign Ministers, 10 Feb. 1946, quoted in The Barnes Review, vol. 5, no. 3 (Washington D.C.: TBR Co., May/June 1999), p. 29
"Every failure is a step to success. Every detection of what is false directs us towards what is true: every trial exhausts some tempting form of error. Not only so; but scarcely any attempt is entirely a failure; scarcely any theory, the result of steady thought, is altogether false; no tempting form of Error is without some latent charm derived from Truth."
-William Whewell-
But everyone involved in said trial should be so without coercion. No fiat "social experiments" for theoretical "Truth", charm or no charm.
"People everywhere confuse,
What they read in newspapers with news."
-A. J. Liebling-
[Abbott Joseph Liebling] (1904-1963) American journalist, author
Source: The New Yorker, 7 April 1956
"The notion of editorial independence from ownership only dates back to the 1930s. Prior to that time the media was openly biased and that includes the Press that the founding fathers dealt with. Some of the founders like Hamilton and Franklin had actually ran media outlets that were very biased. You used to have things like Newspapers that openly proclaimed they were a Democratic or Republican or Whig or a Federalist newspaper right on the banner. The concept of an independent and allegedly neutral press was and still is mainly pushed by people from the left who do NOT want anything remotely neutral, but who instead want to make sure those 'evil' business interests don't have a means of getting their side aired without it being filtered by their idea of what a neutral press consists of."
-John Dobbins-
"But those dealing in the actual manufacture of mind are dealing in a very explosive material. The material is not merely the clay of which man is master, but the truths or semblances of truth which have a certain mastery over man. The material is explosive because it must be taken seriously. The men writing books really are throwing bombs."
-Gilbert Keith Chesterton-
(1874-1936) British essayist, critic, poet, and novelist
Source: Illustrated London News, 1924
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
-Arthur C. Clarke-
"Only an armed people can be the real bulwark of popular liberty."
-Vladimir Ilyich Lenin-
[Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov] (1870-1924) First Leader of the Soviet Union
Source: "The Beginning of the Revolution in Russia", Selected Works, Vol. I, International Publishers, New York, 1967
"The measures adopted to restore public order are: First of all, the elimination of the so-called subversive elements. ... They were elements of disorder and subversion. On the morrow of each conflict I gave the categorical order to confiscate the largest possible number of weapons of every sort and kind. This confiscation, which continues with the utmost energy, has given satisfactory results."
-Benito Mussolini-
(1883-1945) Italian dictator during WW2, founder of Italian Fascism, 'Il Duce'
Source: Speech delivered by Prime Minister Benito Mussolini before the Italian Senate, June 8, 1923. Reproduced in Mussolini as Revealed in His Political Speeches (London & Toronto: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1923), pp. 308-309
"The issue isn't gun control but state control -- obtuse and arbitrary state control, state control run amok. ... Forget guns. If Dr. Hudson, Mr. Turnbull, Dr. Gingrich and others end up in jail it won't be for their guns but our liberties."
-George Jonas-
Source: "The Issue Isn't Gun Control but State Control", National Post, July 23, 2003, p. A-15
"To prohibit a citizen from wearing or carrying a war arm ... is an unwarranted restriction upon the constitutional right to keep and bear arms. If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of constitutional privilege."
-Wilson v. State-
Source: 33 Ark. 557, at 560, 34Am. Rep. 52, at 54 (1878)
"Here's my credo. There are no good guns, There are no bad guns. A gun in the hands of a bad man is a bad thing. Any gun in the hands of a good man is no threat to anyone, except bad people."
-Charlton Heston-
(1923-2008) American actor, former president of National Rifle Association
"A sword never kills anybody; it's a tool in the killer's hand."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: Letters to Lucilius, circa 63-65 A.D.
"Americans need never fear their government because of the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
"How a politician stands on the Second Amendment tells you how he or she views you as an individual… as a trustworthy and productive citizen, or as part of an unruly crowd that needs to be lorded over, controlled, supervised, and taken care of."
-Suzanna Gratia Hupp-
(1959-) Texas State Representative (R), survivor of 'Luby's Massacre' where both her parents were among 23 people fatally shot and 50 others wounded
"Because this right [of self-defense] cannot be effectively exercised with bare hands, the right to keep and bear arms is the only efficient way to secure the fundamental right of self-defense."
-Robert Dowlut-
General Counsel for the National Rifle Association
Source: Arms: A Right to Self-Defense Against Criminals and Despots, 8 Stanford L. & Pol'y Rev. 25 (1997).
"The prohibition is general. No clause in the Constitution could by any rule of construction be conceived to give congress a power to disarm the people. Such a flagitious attempt could only be made under some general pretense by a state legislature. But if in any blind pursuit of inordinate power, either should attempt it, this amendment may be appealed to as a restraint on both."
-William Rawle-
(1759-1836) Lawyer, had been asked several times by George Washington to serve as Attorney General
Source: commenting on the Second Amendment, A VIEW OF THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES 125-26, 1829 (2nd ed.) reprinted in THE FOUNDERS’ CONSTITUTION Volume Five (Amendments I-XII) p. 214 (Univ. of Chicago Press)
"To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them."
-Richard Henry Lee-
(1732-1794) Founding Father
"The people have a right to keep and bear arms for the common defense. And as, in times of peace, armies are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be maintained without the consent of the Legislature; and the military power shall always be held in an exact subordination to the Civil authority, and be governed by it."
-Massachusetts Constitution-
Source: Part of the First, article xvii.
"What country before ever existed a century and a half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: November 13, 1787, letter to William S. Smith, quoted in Padover's Jefferson On Democracy, ed., 1939
"No slaves shall keep any arms whatever, nor pass, unless with written orders from his master or employer, or in his company, with arms from one place to another."
-A Bill Concerning Slaves-
Source: [1785], reproduced in Alfred Fried, Ed., The Essential Jefferson (Collier Books, 1963), p. 140
"Every citizen has a right to bear arms in defense of himself and the state."
-Connecticut Constitution-
Source: Article First, Section 15
"The claim and exercise of a Constitutional right cannot be converted into a crime."
-Miller v. U.S.-
Source: 230 F 2d 486, 489
"Every citizen has a right to keep and bear arms; and this right shall never be questioned."
-Maine Constitution-
Source: article I, section 16
"All persons have the right to keep and bear arms in defense of themselves, their families, their property and the state."
-New Hampshire Constitution-
Source: Part First, article 2-a
"Recent school shootings have lured ill-informed Americans into a war on our Second Amendment guarantees, led by the nation’s tyrants and their useful idiots. ... The Second Amendment was given to us as protection against tyranny by the federal government and the Congress of the United States."
-Walter E. Williams-
(1936-2020) Columnist, Professor of Economics at George Mason University
Source: An Armed Citizenry and Liberty, WorldNetDaily, May 26, 1999.
"This truth may be unfashionable, unpalatable, no doubt unpopular, but, if it is the truth, the story of mankind shows that war was universal and unceasing for millions of years before armaments were invented or armies organized. Indeed, the lucid intervals of peace and order only occurred in human history after armaments in the hands of strong governments have come into being, and civilization in every age has been nursed only in cradles guarded by superior weapons and superior discipline."
-Winston Churchill-
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1940-1945, 1951-1955)
"Fascism and communism are not two opposites, but two rival gangs fighting over the same territory, based on the collectivist principle that man is the rightless slave of the state."
-Ayn Rand-
"If men are good, you don't need government; if men are evil or ambivalent, you don't dare have one."
-Robert LeFevre-
'Cuz who's gonna run this here government...?
"If you don’t read the newspaper you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper you are misinformed."
-Mark Twain-
likely misattributed
"Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"Were it left to me to decide whether we should have government without newspapers or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"Every ambitious would-be empire clarions it abroad that she is conquering the world to bring it peace, security and freedom, and is sacrificing her sons only for the most noble and humanitarian purposes. That is a lie, and it is an ancient lie, yet generations still rise and believe it!"
-Taylor Caldwell-
attributed to Henry David Thoreau via George S. Boutwell in Caldwell's novel "Testimony of Two Men"
“[W]hen the resolution of enslaving America was formed in Great Britain, the British Parliament was advised by an artful man, who was governor of Pennsylvania, to disarm the people; that it was the best and most effectual way to enslave them; but that they should not do it openly, but weaken them, and let them sink gradually, by totally disusing and neglecting the militia.”
-George Mason-
(1725-1792), drafted the Virgina Declaration of Rights, ally of James Madison and George Washington
Source: from debates during the Virginia state ratifying convention (June 14, 1788), quoted in Elliot’s Debates
"A free people ought not only to be armed, but disciplined; to which end a uniform and well-digested plan is requisite."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
"Jim Creechan, a University of Alberta sociologist, said some of the love of guns may have its roots in Alberta's pervasive free-enterprise model of behaviour. 'It's the whole idea that the individual is more important than the collective.'"
-Alanna Mitchell-
Source: "Canada's Copycat Killing: Gun ownership in Alberta approaches U.S. levels", Globe and Mail, April 30, 1999, p. A-1
"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."
-Martin Rees-
"Every person has a right to keep and bear arms for the defense of himself and the state."
-Michigan Constitution-
Source: Article I, Section 6
"Since independence in the fourteenth century, the Swiss have been required to keep and bear arms, and since 1515, have had a policy of armed neutrality. Its form of government is similar to the one set up by our Founders -- a weak central government exercising few, defined powers having to do mostly with external affairs and limited authority over internal matters at the canton (state) and local levels."
-Benedict D. LaRosa-
historian, author
Source: Gun Control: A Historical Perspective, The Tyranny of Gun Control, 49 (Future of Freedom Foundation 1997).
"Who are the militia, if they be not the people of this country...? I ask, who are the militia? They consist of now of the whole people, except a few public officers."
-George Mason-
(1725-1792), drafted the Virgina Declaration of Rights, ally of James Madison and George Washington
Source: in the Virginia Convention on the ratification of the Constitution, June 16, 1788,
in_Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution,_
Jonathan Elliot, ed., v.3 p.425 (Philadelphia, 1836)
"The maintenance of the right to bear arms is a most essential one to every free people and should not be whittled down by technical constructions."
-State vs. Kerner-
Source: 181 N.C. 574, 107 S.E. 222, at 224 (1921)
"The foundation of our Empire was not laid in the gloomy age of Ignorance and Superstition, but at an Epoch when the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined, than at any former period."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: Circular to the States, 1783, Ref: Our Sacred Honor, Bennett (379)
"There is an opinion that parties in free countries are useful checks upon the administration of the government, and serve to keep alive the spirit of liberty. This, within certain limits, is probably true; and in governments of a monarchical cast patriotism may look with indulgence, if not with favour, upon the spirit of party: but, in those of the popular character, in governments purely elective, it is a spirit not to be encouraged. From their natural tendency it is certain there will always be enough of that spirit for every salutary purpose. And there being constant danger of excess, the effort ought to be, by force of public opinion, to mitigate and assuage it. A fire not to be quenched, it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest, instead of warming, it should consume."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: George Washington's Farewell Address, September 17, 1796
"The nature of the encroachment upon 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 of society."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
February 6, 1775
Source: Novanglus and Massachusettensis, by John Adams, p. 34, ADDRESSED To the inhabitants of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay
"A free and prosperous society has no fear of anyone entering it. But a welfare state is scared to death of every poor person who tries to get in and every rich person who tries to get out."
-Harry Browne-
"Freedom is not a gift bestowed upon us by other men, but a right that belongs to us by the laws of God and nature."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
"It has been a source of great pain to me to have met with so many among [my] opponents who had not the liberality to distinguish between political and social opposition; who transferred at once to the person, the hatred they bore to his political opinions."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Richard Mentor Johnson, 10 March 1808
"The legislative powers of the government reach actions only, and not opinions."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth... For my part, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst; and to provide for it."
-Patrick Henry-
(1736-1799) US Founding Father
Source: "The War Inevitable" speech to the Virginia Convention, March 23, 1775
"No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue; and by a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles."
-Patrick Henry-
(1736-1799) US Founding Father
"All good government is and must be republican. But at the same time, you can or will agree with me, that there is not in lexicography a more fraudulent word... Are we not, my friend, in danger of rendering the word republican unpopular in this country by an indiscreet, indeterminate, and equivocal use of it? [...] Whenever I use the word republic with approbation, I mean a government in which the people have collectively, or by representation, an essential share in the sovereignty... the republican forms in Poland and Venice are much worse, and those of Holland and Bern very little better, than the monarchical form in France before the late revolution."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: Adams to Samuel Adams, 18 Oct, 1789 in Works, VI:415,420-421
"The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. To the naive mind that can conceive of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement, it may seem absurd that in complex conditions order, and adaptation to the unknown, can be achieved more effectively by decentralizing decisions and that a division of authority will actually extend the possibility of overall order. Yet that decentralization actually leads to more information being taken into account."
-Friedrich Hayek-
The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism
"Mention slavery, and immediately the image that arises is that of Africans enslaved by Europeans. The form in which the story of slavery has reached most people today has been along the lines of the best-selling book and widely-watched television miniseries 'Roots' by Alex Haley. Challenged on the historical accuracy of 'Roots', Haley said, 'I tried to give my people a myth to live by.' However, contrary to the 'myth' Haley created, Africans were by no means the innocents portrayed in 'Roots', baffled as to why white men were coming in and taking their people away in chains. The region of West Africa from which Kunta Kinte supposedly came was one of the great slave-trading regions of the continent before, during, and after the white man arrived. During the era of the massive slave trade, a white man was more likely to catch malaria in Africa than to catch slaves himself. Europeans typically saw only the end-results of the enslavement process -- enslaved people being offered for sale on the coast. Africa was then largely ruled by Africans, who established the conditions under which slave sales took place: Stronger African peoples enslaved weaker African peoples, selling some of these slaves to Europeans and keeping others for themselves. Even at the peak of the Atlantic slave trade, Africans retained more slaves for themselves than they sent to the Western hemisphere. Slavery, therefore, was an evil of greater scope and magnitude than most people imagine, and as a result its place in history is radically different from the way it is usually portrayed."
-Thomas Sowell-
"Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line. What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views on others."
-Doris Lessing-
(1919-2013) British author
Source: Sunday Times, 10 May 1992
"Express everything you like. No word can hurt you. None. No idea can hurt you. Not being able to express an idea or word will hurt you more. Like a bullet."
-Jamaica Kincaid-
[Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson] (1949- ) American novelist
"The liberty of the press is essential to the security of freedom in a state; it ought not, therefore, to be restricted in this commonwealth."
-Massachusetts Declaration of Rights-
Source: Article XVI, 1780
"Academic freedom means the right, long accepted in the academic world, to study, discuss, and write about facts and ideas without restrictions, other than those imposed by conscience and morality."
-Yale University-
Source: Report, New York Times, 18 February 1952
"It is profit and loss that force the capitalists to employ their capital for the best possible service to the consumers. It is profit and loss that make those people supreme in the conduct of business who are best fit to satisfy the public. If profit is abolished, chaos results."
-Ludwig von Mises-
from Profit and Loss
"Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
"There's a standard formula for success in the entertainment medium, and that is: 'Beat it to death if it succeeds.'"
-Ernie Kovacs-
(1919-1962) American comedian, actor, television pioneer
"Liberty is the possibility of doubting,
the possibility of making a mistake,
the possibility of searching and experimenting,
the possibility of saying 'No' to any authority --
literary, artistic, philosophic, religious, social and even political."
-Ignazio Silone-
(1900-1978)
Source: The God That Failed, 1950
"Liberty and good government do not exclude each other; and there are excellent reasons why they should go together. Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end."
-Lord Acton-
[John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton] (1834-1902), First Baron Acton of Aldenham
Source: Lord Acton, in The History of Freedom in Antiquity (1877)
"To subject an artist’s work to a litmus test of political probity -- and to punish institutions that will not carry out the mandate of the state -- is to traffic in the thought control that gave us Stalinism and Nazism..."
-Richard Goldstein-
Source: “Editorial: Mr. Frohnmayer’s Wall,” Village Voice, 21 November 1989
"Everything you read in the press is absolutely true. Except the rare event of which you have personal knowledge."
-Erwin Knoll-
editor of The Progressive magazine
Source: “Knoll’s Law of Accuracy in Media.”
"The price of freedom of religion, or of speech, or of the press, is that we must put up with, and even pay for, a good deal of rubbish."
-Justice Robert H. Jackson-
(1892-1954), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
"We have an obligation to one another, responsibilities and trusts. That does not mean we must be pigeons, that we must be exploited. But it does mean that we should look out for one another when and as much as we can; and that we have a personal responsibility for our behavior; and that our behavior has consequences of a very real and profound nature. We are not powerless. We have tremendous potential for good or ill. How we choose to use that power is up to us; but first we must choose to use it. We're told every day, "You can't change the world." But the world is changing every day. Only question is … who's doing it? You or somebody else?"
-J. Michael Straczynski-
"In order to enjoy the inestimable benefits that the liberty of the press ensures, it is necessary to submit to the inevitable evils it creates..."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
[Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clerel, le Comte de Tocqueville] (1805-1859) French historian
Source: Democracy in America
"We owe to democracy, at least in part, the regime of discussion with which we live; we owe it to the principal modern liberties: those of thought, press and association. And the regime of free discussion is the only one which permits the ruling class to renew itself… which eliminates that class quasi-automatically when it no longer corresponds to the interests of the country."
-Gaetano Mosca-
(1858-1941) Italian political scientist, journalist and public servant
Source: Partiti e Sindacata nella crisi del regime parlamentare, 1961
"And I honor the man who is willing to sink
half his present repute for the freedom to think,
and, when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak,
Will risk t' other half for the freedom to speak."
-James Russell Lowell-
(1819-1891) American author and diplomatist
Source: A Fable for Critics, 1848
"Among other causes of misfortune which your not being armed brings upon you, it makes you despised..."
-Niccolo Machiavelli-
(1469-1527) Italian Statesman and Political Philosopher
"To my mind it is wholly irresponsible to go into the world incapable of preventing violence, injury, crime, and death. How feeble is the mindset to accept defenselessness. How unnatural. How cheap. How cowardly. How pathetic."
-Ted Nugent-
(1948- ) American rock musician, author, activist
"The loss of liberty in general would soon follow the suppression of the liberty of the press; for it is an essential branch of liberty, so perhaps it is the best preservative of the whole."
-John Peter Zenger-
(1697-1746)
Source: 1733
"The freedom to express varying and often opposing ideas is essential to a variety of conceptions of democracy. If democracy is viewed as essentially a process – a way in which collective decisions for a society are made – free expression is crucial to the openness of the process and to such characteristics as elections, representation of interests, and the like."
-Jonathan D. Casper-
Source: The Politics of Civil Liberties, 1972
"Only oppression should fear the full exercise of freedom."
-Jose Marti y Perez-
(1853-1895)
"Under capitalism, rich people become powerful. But under socialism, powerful people become rich."
-Glenn Reynolds-
Under crony capitalism, the powerful become rich, too. Hey. Maybe there's a connection there...
"Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened."
-Thomas Hardy-
"Posterity -- you will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it."
-John Quincy Adams-
(1767-1848) 6th US President
"Arms, like laws, discourage and keep the invader and the plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
"Loose the bands of wickedness, undo the bundles that oppress, let those who are broken go free, and break asunder every burden. Share your bread with the hungry, welcome into your house the afflicted and homeless; when you see a naked man, clothe him, and do not turn your back on your own flesh. Then your light will arise like the dawn, and your wound will quickly be healed. Your justice shall go before you, the glory of the Lord will closely follow you"
-Isaiah-
Source: Holy Bible, Isaiah 58:6-8
"I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people."
-Issac Newton-
(1642-1727) English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist and theologian
Source: 1721, after having lost huge amounts of money in the South Sea Bubble
"In those wretched countries where a man cannot call his tongue his own, he can scarce call anything his own. Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
Source: Dogwood Papers
"It is a common observation here that our cause is the cause of all mankind, and that we are fighting for their liberty in defending our own."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
Source: letter to Samuel Cooper, May 1, 1777
"Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
Masters elevated from those very same corrupt and vicious people, of course.
"The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."
-George Orwell-
[Eric Arthur Blair] (1903-1950) British author
"The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled."
-John Kenneth Galbraith-
(1908-2006) Canadian-born economist, Harvard professor
Source: Money: Whence it came, where it went - 1975, p29
"If they take the ship, they'll rape us to death, eat our flesh and sew our skins into their clothing. And if we're very very lucky, they'll do it in that order."
-Zoe Alleyne Washburn-
Firefly S1E1b, 'Serenity', regarding a Reaver ship
Not all that different from government, really...
"So many vows. They make you swear and swear. Defend the King, obey the King, obey your father, protect the innocent, defend the weak. But what if your father despises the King? What if the King massacres the innocent? It's too much. No matter what you do, you're forsaking one vow or another."
-Jaime Lannister-
Game of Thrones
Man Without Honor - S2E7
Unless your vow is only to principle, and not to men.
"If you really want to compete with Russia and China to prevent the 21st Century from being dominated by a new axis of evil, you must first defeat the Church of Global Warming. As long as that’s the official state religion of the Western world, we haven’t got a prayer."
-John Hayward-
National Security Deputy Editor for Breitbart News
2022
"One of the most pathetic — and dangerous — signs of our times is the growing number of individuals and groups who believe that no one can possibly disagree with them for any honest reason."
-Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
"Every corner of the public psyche is canvassed by some of the most talented citizens to see if the desire for some merchandisable product can be cultivated."
-John Kenneth Galbraith-
(1908-2006) Canadian-born economist, Harvard professor
"No mask like open truth to cover lies,
As to go naked is the best disguise."
-William Congreve-
(1670-1729) English playwright and poet
"The Liberty of the press is the Palladium of all the civil, political and religious rights of an Englishman."
-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
Source: London Public Advertiser, 1769
"It has been frequently remarked, that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force. "
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: The Federalist Papers No. 1
"The next great heresy is going to be simply an attack on morality; and especially on sexual morality. And it is coming, not from a few Socialists surviving from the Fabian Society, but from the living exultant energy of the rich resolved to enjoy themselves at last, with neither Popery nor Puritanism nor Socialism to hold them back. … The roots of the new heresy, God knows, are as deep as nature itself, whose power is the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eye and the pride of life. I say that the man who cannot see this cannot see the signs of the times; cannot see even the skysigns in the street that are the new sort of signs in heaven. The madness of tomorrow is not in Moscow but much more in Manhattan."
-Gilbert Keith Chesterton-
(1874-1936) British essayist, critic, poet, and novelist
"To create conditions in which competition will be as effective as possible, to prevent fraud and deception, to break up monopolies -- these tasks provide a wide and unquestioned field for state activity."
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
Source: The Road to Serfdom
"If gun control bore any relation to homicide rates, Washington, DC would be the safest place in the country."
-Mark Steyn-
(1959-) Canadian author, writer, journalist, and columnist
Source: You can’t blame it all on the guns, Electronic Telegraph, Sunday April 26, 1999
"Cowardice asks the question, is it safe?
Expediency asks the question, is it politic?
Vanity asks the question, is it popular?
But conscience asks the question, is it right?
And there comes a time when one must take a position
that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular,
but one must take it because it is right."
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-
(1929-1968) US civil rights leader
"This leftist political strategy to win office and power relies on something very powerful: the desire to increase the number of Americans who are dependent on getting money that is taken from other citizens.
Sadly, this strategy has worked for half a century! And now it works because Americans who are trapped in this nightmare do not want their government money taken away from them!"
-Star Parker-
(1956-) American syndicated columnist, Republican politician, author, founder of Center for Urban Renewal and Education (CURE)
Source: Oct. 23, 2015
"In a world largely free of slavery today, it may seem hard to realize that slavery was an almost universal institution for thousands of years. Despite widespread misconceptions in the United States today that the institution of slavery was based on race, for most of the millennia in which slavery existed around the world, it was based on whoever was vulnerable to enslavement and within striking distance."
-Thomas Sowell-
"The sword of the law should never fall but on those whose guilt is so apparent as to be pronounced by their friends as well as foes."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Letter, 1801
Well. Unless the cops just wanna keep their shit, obviously...
"Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it. Sometimes the law places the whole apparatus of judges, police, prisons and gendarmes at the service of the plunderers, and treats the victim -- when he defends himself -- as a criminal."
-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)
"The power of the executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charges known to the law, and particularly to deny him judgment by his peers for an indefinite period, is in the highest degree odious, and is the foundation of all totalitarian governments...Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilisation."
-Winston Churchill-
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1940-1945, 1951-1955)
Source: The Second World War; Book 5, pg 635
"The only, absolute and best friend that a man has, in this selfish world, the only one that will not betray or deny him, is his Dog."
-King Frederick of Prussia-
1789
"You want a friend in Washington? Get a dog."
-Harry S Truman-
"Let us contemplate our forefathers, and posterity, and resolve to maintain the rights bequeathed to us from the former, for the sake of the latter. The necessity of the times, more than ever, calls for our utmost circumspection, deliberation, fortitude and perseverance. Let us remember that "if we suffer tamely a lawless attack upon our liberty, we encourage it, and involve others in our doom," it is a very serious consideration ... that millions yet unborn may be the miserable sharers of the event."
-Samuel Adams-
(1722-1803), was known as the "Father of the American Revolution."
1771
"Only the IRS can attach 100% of a tax debtor's wages and/or property.
Only the IRS can invade the privacy of a citizen without court process of any kind.
Only the IRS can seize property without a court order.
Only the IRS can force a citizen to try his case in a special court governed by the IRS.
Only the IRS can compel the production of documents, records, and other materials without a court case being in existence.
Only the IRS can with impunity publish the details of a citizens debt.
Only the IRS can legally, without a court order, subject citizens to electronic surveillance.
Only the IRS can force waiver of statute of limitations and other citizen's rights through the threat of Arbitrary assesment.
Only the IRS uses extralegal coercion. Threats to witnesses to examine their taxes regularly produces whatever evidence the IRS dictates.
Only the IRS is free to violate a written agreement with a citizen.
Only the IRS uses reprisals against citizen and public officials alike.
Only the IRS can take property on the basis of conjecture.
Only the IRS is free to maintain lists of citizen guilty of no crime for the purpose of harassing and monitoring them.
Only the IRS envelops all citizens.
Only the IRS publicly admits that it's purpose is to instill fear in the citizenry as a technique of performing it's function."
-George V. Hansen-
(1930-) US Congressman (R-ID)
Source: To Harass Our People, by George Hansen, (August 1993)
"When governments use the judiciary to recover 'damage,' the courts intrude on the regulatory and revenue responsibilities of legislatures. And when lawsuits based on tenuous legal theories impose high costs on defendants, due process gives way to a form of extortion, with public officials serving as bagmen for private contingency fee lawyers."
-Michael I. Kraus-
Source: Michael I. Kraus and Robert A. Levy, (Michael Kraus is professor of law at George Mason University in Arlington, VA, and Robert A. Levy is a senior fellow of constitutional studies at the Cato Institute), in So Sue Them, Sue Them, CATO COMMENTARY, June 7, 1999.
"No man suffers injustice without learning, vaguely but surely, what justice is."
-Isaac Rosenfeld-
(1918-1956) Jewish-American writer
"In the Halls of Justice the only justice is in the halls."
-Lenny Bruce-
[Leonard Alfred Schneider] (1925-1966) American comedian, social critic and satirist
"Judicial minds have systematically rejected arguments that clashed with their ideologies. Consequently, the forum of last resort has not checked the excesses of the executive and legislative branches."
-Robert Dowlut-
General Counsel for the National Rifle Association
Source: Arms: A Right to Self-Defense Against Criminals and Despots, 8 STANFORD L. & POL’Y REV. 25 (1997).
"How does something immoral, when done privately, become moral when it is done collectively? Furthermore, does legality establish morality? Slavery was legal; apartheid is legal; Stalinist, Nazi, and Maoist urges were legal. Clearly, the fact of legality does not justify these crimes. Legality, alone, cannot be the talisman of moral people."
-Walter E. Williams-
(1936-2020) Columnist, Professor of Economics at George Mason University
Source: All It Takes Is Guts
"In Anthony Day's review of Walter Laquerur's book, 'The New Terrorism,' it is proposed that those who dislike or distrust government are the sources of the 'new terrorism,' No clearer example of projection could be offered than this, for the real terrorists of the 20th century have been political systems, which have managed, through wars and genocidal practices, to slaughter over 200 million men, women, and children, as well as to dehumanize society and reduce personal liberty. What sense of history informs the judgments of those who have not grasped the fact that state power -- not those who distrust politics -- has inflicted untold misery upon the human race? Terrorism is only politics by other means, whether practiced by governments or by those seeking to influence government policies.
There appears to be a growing awareness, on the part of many intelligent and peaceful men and women, of the danger that political systems pose to us all, and of the need for fundamentally new social principles. To those who can offer no better response to our politically managed mindset of 'diplomacy, law and politics' that has brought us to where we are, such growing distrust of government must, indeed, be terrorizing."
-Butler Shaffer-
professor of law
letter to the LA Times book review editor 11/16/1999
"It is, indeed, difficult to conceive how men who have entirely given up the habit of self-government should succeed in making a proper choice of those by whom they are to be governed; and no one will ever believe that a liberal, wise, and energetic government can spring from the suffrages of a subservient people."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
"Those who oppose the novel most vociferously today are of the opinion that intermingling with a different culture will inevitably weaken and ruin their own. I am of the opposite opinion. The Satanic Verses celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Melange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world. It is the great possibility that mass migration gives the world... The Satanic Verses is for change- by-fusion, change-by-conjoining. It is a love song to our mongrel selves."
-Salman Rushdie-
"Where the very safety of the country depends upon the resolution to be taken, no consideration of justice or injustice, humanity or cruelty, nor of glory or of shame, should be allowed to prevail. But putting all other considerations aside, the only question should be: What course will save the life and liberty of the country?"
-Niccolo Machiavelli-
(1469-1527) Italian Statesman and Political Philosopher
Source: Discourses
"...truth is great and will prevail if left to herself; that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"Take heed of doing irrevocable acts in thy passion, As the revealing of secrets, which makes thee a bankrupt for society ever after: neither do such things which done once are done for ever, so that no bemoaning can amend them. Sampsons hair grew again, but not his eyes: Time may restore some losses, others are never to be repaird. Wherefore in thy rage make no Persian decree which cannot be revers'd or repeald; but rather Polonian laws which (they say) last but three dayes: Do not in an instant what an age cannot recompence."
-Thomas Fuller-
Accepting under-tested novel "vaccines", for example...
"Figures don't lie, but liars can figure."
-anonymous-
"A free man is he who does not fear to go to the end of his thought."
-Leon Blum-
(1872-1950) Prime Minister of France
"Those who refuse to rule themselves are usually bent on ruling others. Those who can rule themselves usually have no interest in ruling others."
-Leonard E. Read-
"Unjust rule never abides continually."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: Tragedies, Medea, line 196; (Medea)
"Disobedience or evasion of a constitutional mandate may not be tolerated, even though such disobedience may, at least temporarily, promote in some respects the best interests of the public."
-State v. Board of Examiners-
Source: State v. Board of Examiners, 274 N.Y. 367; 9 NE 2d 12; 112 ALR 660.
"If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true is really true, there would be little hope of advance."
-Orville Wright-
"That the king can do no wrong is a necessary and fundamental principle of the English constitution."
-Sir William Blackstone-
(1723-1780) English jurist, judge, Tory politician
1769
"The tree of liberty could not grow were it not watered with the blood of tyrants"
-Bertrand Barere de Vieuzac-
(1755-1841) French politician and journalist, member of the National Convention during the French Revolution
Source: Speech in the Convention Nationale, 1872
"Only reason can convince us of those three fundamental truths without a recognition of which there can be no effective liberty: that what we believe is not necessarily true; that what we like is not necessarily good; and that all questions are open."
-Clive Bell-
(1881-1964)
Source: Civilization, 1928
"A welfare state is frightened of every poor person who tries to get in and every rich person who tries to get out."
-Harry Browne-
(1933-2006) American libertarian writer, politician, and free-market investment analyst. Libertarian candidate for US President 1996 & 2000
"If you think we are free today, you know nothing about tyranny and even less about freedom."
-Tom Braun-
Source: Radio Show, Spirit of '76 -- Voice of Warning
"Pure 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-
Federalist 10
"Freedom is not a reward or a decoration that is celebrated with champagne... Oh no! It's a...long distance race, quite solitary and very exhausting."
-Albert Camus-
(1913-1960) French Algerian author
"A great step towards independence is a good-humored stomach, one that is willing to endure rough treatment."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter CXXIII: On the conflict between pleasure and virtue, line 3
"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."
-Dugald Bell-
"Society is always engaged in a vast conspiracy to preserve itself -- at the expense of the new demands of each new generation."
-John Haynes Holmes-
(1879-1964) prominent Unitarian minister and pacifist
"What then? Shall I not follow in the footsteps of my predecessors? I shall indeed use the old road, but if I find one that makes a shorter cut and is smoother to travel, I shall open the new road. Men who have made these discoveries before us are not our masters, but our guides. Truth lies open for all; it has not yet been monopolized. And there is plenty of it left even for posterity to discover."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter XXXIII
"When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, 'Who is destroying the world?' You are."
-Ayn Rand-
[Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum] (1905-1982) Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter
Source: Atlas Shrugged, p. 386 (1957)
"[M]onopoly profits exist over the long run only when the government guarantees them, as in utilities and cable. And for concentration of market power, no robber baron can hold a candle to the U.S. government.... The hugest concentration of market power in this country does not lie with the likes of Rupert Murdoch or Bill Gates, but with government itself.... No private company, no matter how huge or wealthy, could possibly have as much widespread power over the function of American markets as government does. And this power is exercised with essential unseriousness.... And unlike business attempts to make money, which necessarily involve selling something to a willing consumer, government’s market manipulations require forcing people into situations -- whether paying for cars or food, paying for R&D or new technologies, or selling off a part of their company -- that they would not have wanted to be in but for the government’s ham-handed threat of force.... Nothing could serve the workings of the marketplace better than [government] leaving it."
-Brian Doherty-
(1968-) American journalist, author, Senior Editor at Reason magazine
Source: Monopoly Games, Reason, p 7, Aug./Sept. 1995.
"The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly."
-Abraham Lincoln-
"The rub is that the pursuit of happiness, as an end in itself, tends automatically, and widely, to be replaced by the pursuit of pleasure with a consequent general softening of the fibers of will, intelligence, spirit."
-Whittaker Chambers-
[Jay Vivian Chambers] (aka David Whittaker) (1901-1961) American writer, editor. A Communist party member and Soviet spy, he later renounced communism and became an outspoken opponent.
"As for the rage to believe that we have found the secret of liberty in general permissiveness from the cradle on, this seems to me a disastrous sentimentality, which, whatever liberties it sets loose, loosens also the cement that alone can bind society into a stable compound -- a code of obeyed taboos. I can only recall the saying of a wise Frenchman that 'liberty is the luxury of self-discipline.' Historically, those peoples that did not discipline themselves had discipline thrust on them from the outside. That is why the normal cycle in the life and death of great nations has been first a powerful tyranny broken by revolt, the enjoyment of liberty, the abuse of liberty -- and back to tyranny again. As I see it, in this country -- a land of the most persistent idealism and the blandest cynicism -- the race is on between its decadence and its vitality."
-Alistair Cooke-
Source: America
"The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat."
-Lily Tomlin-
(1939-) American actress, comedian, writer, producer
"Gentlemen, I have had men watching you for a long time and I am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter, I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves."
-Andrew Jackson-
(1767-1845) 7th US President
Source: in 1836, Jackson forced the closing of the Second Bank of the U.S. by revoking its charter
"With regard to Banks, they have taken too deep and too wide a root in social transactions, to be got rid of altogether, if that were desirable. They have a hold on public opinion, which alone would make it expedient to aim rather at the improvement, than the suppression of them. As now generally constituted, their advantages whatever they be, are outweighed by the excesses of their paper emissions, and the partialities and corruption with which they are administered."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: May 1827, James Madison letter to his friend James K. Paulding
"Fascism will come at the hands of perfectly authentic Americans, as violently against Hitler and Mussolini as the next one, but who are convinced that the present economic system is washed up and that the present political system in America has outlived its usefulness and who wish to commit this country to the rule of the bureaucratic state; interfering in the affairs of the states and cities; taking part in the management of industry and finance and agriculture; assuming the role of great national banker and investor, borrowing billions every year and spending them on all sorts of projects through which such a government can paralyze opposition and command public support; marshaling great armies and navies at crushing costs to support the industry of war and preparation for war which will become our greatest industry; and adding to all this the most romantic adventures in global planning, regeneration, and domination all to be done under the authority of a powerfully centralized government in which the executive will hold in effect all the powers with Congress reduced to the role of a debating society. That is your fascist. And the sooner America realizes this dreadful fact the sooner it will arm itself to make an end of American fascism masquerading under the guise of the champion of democracy."
-John T. Flynn-
As We Go Marching (1944)
"Dissent and dissenters have no monopoly on freedom. They must tolerate opposition. They must accept dissent from their dissent. And they must give it the respect and the latitude which they claim for themselves."
-Abe Fortas-
(1910-1982) U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: New York Times Magazine, 12 May 1968
"[Trade licensing] almost inevitably becomes a tool in the hands of a special producer group to maintain a monopoly position at the expense of the rest of the public. There is no way to avoid this result."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
"The unions might be good for the people who are in the unions but it doesn't do a thing for the people who are unemployed. Because the union keeps down the number of jobs, it doesn't do a thing for them."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
Source: Interview with Brian Lamb, In Depth Book TV (2000)
"We are students of words; we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-
(1803-1882) American essayist, lecturer, and poet
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences."
-C. S. Lewis-
(1898-1963), British novelist
Source: "God in the Dock" (1948)
"To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society."
-Theodore Roosevelt-
(1858-1919) 26th US President
"Do you think nobody would willingly entrust his children to you or pay you for teaching them? Why do you have to extort your fees and collect your pupils by compulsion?"
-Isabel Paterson-
(1886-1961) Canadian-American journalist, author, political philosopher, literary critic
"[P]ublic schooling often ends up to be little more than majoritarian domination of minority viewpoints."
-Robert B. Everhart-
Professor of Education, Univ. of Ca Santa Barbara
"It's very helpful for tyrants that most people have no real idea how much value they produce. Many millions of people work at least eight hours a day, five days a week, because they view that as 'normal.' If they are then able to pay their bills, have a car, a house, food, etc., then they assume all is well. They have no idea how rich they WOULD be if not for the state stealing a chunk every step of the way--whenever they earn money (income taxes), when they save money (inflation), when they spend money (sales taxes), when they own stuff (property taxes), and so on. If you're a tyrant, and you can steal a huge chunk from all of your subjects, and still leave them feeling relatively secure and financially 'comfortable,' very few will even THINK about the situation, much less cause you any sort of trouble. The moral of the story: keep your livestock fat, entertained and stupid, and you'll have a long, successful reign."
-Larken Rose-
"Anti - social behavior is a trait of intelligence in a world full of conformists."
-Nikola Tesla-
"There is nothing in the Constitution that professes or attempts to bind the posterity of those who established it. The question arises whether their posterity have bound themselves."
-Lysander Spooner-
The Constitution of No Authority, 1870
"An opinion, right or wrong, can never constitute a moral offense, nor be in itself a moral obligation. It may be mistaken; it may involve an absurdity, or a contradiction. It is a truth, or it is an error; it can never be a crime or a virtue."
-Frances Wright-
(1795-1852) Scottish-born lecturer, writer, freethinker, feminist, abolitionist, and social reformer
Source: A Few Days in Athens
"Too much of what is called education is little more than an expensive isolation from reality."
-Thomas Sowell-
"Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless.
Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one's prejudgment simply need not be believed — in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical — and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous."
-Dietrich Bonhoeffer-
(1906 - 1945)
On Stupidity - Letters and Papers from Prison
"POLITICS, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.”
-Ambrose Bierce-
"Monopoly favors the rich (on the whole) just as competition (on the whole) favors the poor."
-George Watson-
Source: Journal of Economic Affairs
"Competition, free enterprise, and an open market were never meant to be symbolic fig leaves for corporate socialism and monopolistic capitalism."
-Ralph Nader-
(1934-) American attorney and political activist
Source: introduction to The Closed Enterprise System
"Let monopolies and all kinds and degrees of oppression be carefully guarded against."
-Samuel Webster-
(1813–1872) British founder of Webster's Brewery (Samuel Webster & Sons Ltd)
1777
"Imagine an organization so unscrupulous that its leaders routinely kill people and punish others wholly without due process of law, an organization that could not exist except for the resources it seizes by extortion and robbery, an organization that takes massively -- both in resources and in liberties -- from the general public in order to enrich its own leaders and key supporters, an organization that hands back a portion of its plunder to its victims in order to create the (quite false) impression that the capos are the friends of ordinary people, an organization that shamelessly employs every means possible to misrepresent its true nature and to lie about its actual activities and the motives that impel them. Now imagine what sort of people you would expect to succeed in fighting or intriguing their way into leadership positions in such an organization. Now imagine throwing yourself enthusiastically into supporting one or another of these wannabe crime kings as if he or she were a veritable savior of humanity (or at least your favorite subset of it)."
-Robert Higgs-
"The law becomes perverted when it is used to violate the rights of the individual."
-Frédéric Bastiat-
"In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence."
-Laurence J. Peter-
"Others -- as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders -- serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God. A very few -- as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men -- serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part ..."
-Henry David Thoreau-
(1817-1862) American author, poet, philosopher, polymath, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and transcendentalist
Source: A Duty of Civil Disobedience [1849]; La Désobéissance civile, translated by Micheline Flak (Montréal: La Presse, 1973), p. 60
"We are human and our lot is to learn and to be hurled into inconceivable new worlds."
-Novalis-
[Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg] (2 May 1772 – 25 March 1801)
"People often fail to perceive the fundamental difference between the liberal and the anarchistic idea. Anarchism rejects all coercive social organizations, and repudiates coercion as a social technique. It wishes in fact to abolish the State and the legal order, because it believes that society could do better without them. It does not fear anarchical disorder because it believes that without compulsion men would unite for social co-operation and would behave in the manner that social life demands.
Anarchism as such is neither liberal nor socialistic: it moves on a different plane from either. Whoever denies the basic idea of Anarchism, whoever denies that it is or ever will be possible to unite men without coercion under a binding legal order for peaceful co-operation, will, whether liberal or socialist, repudiate anarchistic ideals."
-Ludwig von Mises-
Stated differently, anarchism respects the possibilities of SPONTANEOUS order -- much as you most likely live the majority of your own life even now...
"It used to be a fashion amongst men that when a charge was made, some sort of proof was brought forward to establish it, and if no proof was found to exist, the charge was dropped."
-A. Lincoln-
Third Lincoln-Douglas Debate, 9/15/1858
How weird...
"Being right too soon is socially unacceptable."
-Robert A. Heinlein-
"We believe that theft is theft and does not become legitimated because organized robbers call their theft 'taxation.' We believe that enslavement is enslavement even if the institution committing that act calls it 'conscription.' In short, the key to libertarian theory is that it makes no exceptions in its universal ethic for government"
-Murray Rothbard-
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance."
-Thomas Sowel-
"The two major political parties are so filled to the brim with anti-constitution and anti-liberty sociopaths, that I don't believe there is such a thing as a 'lesser of two evils.' They're both thoroughly evil."
-Michael Boldin-
Tenth Amendment Center
"Liberty is the soul's right to breathe and, when it cannot take a long breath, laws are girdled too tight."
-Rev. Henry Ward Beecher-
(1813-1887) American abolitionist, clergyman
Source: Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, 1887
"You have enemies? Why, it is the story of every man who has done a great deed or created a new idea. It is the cloud which thunders around everything that shines."
-Victor Hugo-
"If you do not specify and confront real issues, what you will do will surely obscure them. If you do not alarm anyone morally, you will yourself remain morally asleep. If you do not embody controversy, what you say will be an acceptance of the drift to the coming human hell."
-C. Wright Mills-
(1916-1962)
"[Natural rights are] moral claims to those spheres of action which are necessary for the welfare of the individual and the development of his personality."
-Miner Searle Bates-
(1897-1978) American political activist in Japan, Vice President of Nanjing University
Source: Religious Liberty: An Inquiry, 1945
"An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it."
-Jeff Cooper-
"The fighting pistol, in this new concept, is not the weapon of an aggressor. It is not the arm of anyone whose foremost concern is battle. On the contrary it is the safeguard of a person who is trying his best to carry out his unwarlike business of ranching, surveying, mining, running a store, or otherwise making a living, but under circumstances where he may find lethal trouble served up at any moment, without warning. This is the real mission of the sidearm, and while it was particularly applicable to the life of the pioneer, it remains identical and equally important today."
-Jeff Cooper-
Fighting Handguns
"Al Capone operated his racket in 3 districts. I operated on 3 continents. I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 1 helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested."
-SMEDLEY BUTLER-
Major General, United States Marine Corps
"If, as it appears, the experiment that was called 'America' is at an end... then perhaps a fitting epitaph would be ... 'here lies America the greatest nation that might have been had it not been for the Edomite bankers who first stole their money, used their stolen money to buy their politicians and press and lastly deprived them of their constitutional freedom by the most evil device yet created --- The Federal Reserve Banking System.' "
-G. D. McDaniel-
"In ancient Babylon, Sumeria, Egypt, China, Greece, and Rome, for instance, price controls promoted not fairness but famine. During the twentieth century, central banks were supposed to help safeguard economies, but they brought on the worst inflations and depressions. Alcohol and drug prohibition, intended to enforce moral behavior, contributed to escalating violence."
-Marisa Manley-
Source: Why Laws Backfire, THE FREEMAN, p. 545, August 1996.
"They were men that had not learned the art of submission, nor had they been trained to the art of war. But our astonishing success taught the enemies of liberty that undisciplined freemen are superior to veteran slaves. Live free or die. Death is not greatest of evils."
-General John Stark-
"I am I plus my circumstances."
-José Ortega y Gasset-
(1883-1955) Spanish philosopher
"Labor, in itself, is neither elevating or otherwise. It is the laborer's privilege to ennoble his work by the aim with which he undertakes it, and by the enthusiasm and faithfulness he puts into it."
-Lucy Larcom-
(1824-1893) American poet, author
"Forms of expression always appear turgid to those who do not share the emotions they represent."
-Gilbert Keith Chesterton-
(1874-1936) British essayist, critic, poet, and novelist
Source: A Handful of Authors
"Government should allow persons to engage in whatever conduct they want to, no matter how deviant or abnormal it may be, so long as
(a) they know what they are doing,
(b) they consent to it, and
(c) no one -- at least no one other than the participants -- is harmed by it."
-Hugo Adam Bedau-
(1926-2012) Professor of Philosophy, Tufts University (Emeritus)
That should be true for ANY government. But to a Constitutionally constrained SERVANT government, thoughts regarding "permission" should not even occur.
"A man is either free or he is not. There cannot be any apprenticeship for freedom."
-Imamu Amiri Baraka-
Source: in Kulchur
"For what avail the plough or sail,
Or land or life, if freedom fail?"
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-
(1803-1882) American essayist, lecturer, and poet
Source: "Boston" Stanza 15
"My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was less competition there."
-Indira Gandhi-
(1917-1984) Prime Minister of India
"Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else’s resources as carefully as he uses his own. So if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of private property."
-Milton Friedman-
"The way to maximize production is to maximize the incentives to production. And the way to do that, as the modern world has discovered, is through the system known as capitalism—the system of private property, free markets, and free enterprise."
-Henry Hazlitt-
"Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship."
-George Orwell-
"Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and the simple, however cruel; our worst enemies are the intelligent and corrupt."
-Graham Greene-
"Labor is the fabled magician's wand, the philosophers stone, and the cap of good fortune."
-James Weldon Johnson-
(1871-1938) American author, educator, lawyer, diplomat, songwriter, civil rights activist, first black executive secretary of the NAACP
"The learned ignore the evidence of their senses to preserve the coherence of the ideas of their imagination."
-Adam Smith-
"Labor disgraces no man; unfortunately, you occasionally find men who disgrace labor."
-Ulysses S. Grant-
(1822-1885) 18th US President
"Every man is dishonest who lives upon the labor of others, no matter if he occupies a throne."
-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"
"Weary the path that does not challenge. Doubt is an incentive to truth and patient inquiry leadeth the way."
-Hosea Ballou-
(1771-1852) American Universalist clergyman, theological writer
"Does a populace have informed consent when a ruling minority acts in secret to ignite a war, doing this to justify the existence of the minority's forces? History already has answered that question. Every society in the ConSentiency today reflects the historical judgment that failure to provide full information for informed consent on such an issue represents an ultimate crime."
-Frank Herbert-
"A man’s greatest pleasure is to defeat his enemies, to drive them before him, to take from them that which they possessed, to see those whom they cherished in tears, to ride their horses, and to hold their wives and daughters in his arms."
-Genghis Khan-
(c. 1162-1227) [Temüjin] founder and Great Khan (Emperor) of the Mongol Empire
"'I will have no man in my boat,' said Starbuck, 'who is not afraid of a whale.' By this, he seemed to mean, not only that the most reliable and useful courage was that which arises from the fair estimation of the encountered peril, but that an utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward."
-Moby Dick-
"Every attempt to gag the free expression of thought is an unsocial act against society. That is why judges and juries who try to enforce such laws make themselves ridiculous."
-Jay Fox-
(1870-1961) was an American journalist, trade unionist, and political activist
Source: in Liberty and the Great Libertarians (Charles Spradling), 1913
"History fails to record a single precedent in which nations subject to moral decay have not passed into political and economic decline. There has been either a spiritual awakening to overcome the moral lapse, or a progressive deterioration leading to ultimate national disaster."
-General Douglas MacArthur-
(1880-1964) WWII Supreme Allied Commander of the Southwest Pacific, Supreme United Nations Commander
"Nature never deceives us; it is always we who deceive ourselves."
-Jean-Jacques Rousseau-
(1712-1778) Political philosopher, educationist and essayist
"The earth becomes more crowded, and our dependence upon our neighbours becomes more intimate. In these circumstances life cannot remain tolerable unless we learn to let each other alone in all matters that are not of immediate and obvious concern to the community. We must learn to respect each other's privacy, and not to impose our moral standards upon each other. The Puritan imagines that his moral standard is the moral standard; he does not realize that other ages and other countries, and even other groups in his own country, have moral standards different from his, to which they have as good a right as he has to his. Unfortunately, the love of power which is the natural outcome of Puritan self-denial makes the Puritan more executive than other people, and makes it difficult for others to resist him. Let us hope that a broader education and a wider knowledge of mankind may gradually weaken the ardour of our too virtuous masters."
-Bertrand Russell-
[Bertrand Arthur William Russell] (1872-1970) Philosopher, educator
Source: The Recrudescence of Puritanism, in Sceptical Essays, 1928
"It is always dangerous to the liberties of the people to have an army stationed among them, over which they have no control ... The Militia is composed of free Citizens. There is therefore no danger of their making use of their Power to the destruction of their own Rights, or suffering others to invade them."
-Samuel Adams-
(1722-1803), was known as the "Father of the American Revolution."
Source: 3 Samuel Adams, Writings 251 (Henry A. Cushing Ed., 1906).
"After years spent trying to deal with the effects of COINTELPRO, my rage at the FBI's almost unimaginable evil remains undiminished because I believe that it succeeded in many of its horrifying goals, given the deaths of Martin King, Malcolm X, and other sixties leaders. Since the FBI uses taxpayer dollars to fund its extreme and ridiculous investigations of anyone who expresses dissenting opinions, even resorting to crime -- including theft, encouragement to murder, subornation of perjury, and manipulation of the judicial process -- to achieve its ends, I have always advocated its disbanding."
-William M. Kunstler-
civil rights attorney
"If the right to vote were expanded to seven year olds ... its policies would most definitely reflect the ‘legitimate concerns’ of children to have ‘adequate’ and ‘equal’ access to ‘free’ french fries, lemonade and videos."
-Hans-Hermann Hoppe-
Source: Democracy–The God That Failed: The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order
"Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"The great thing about democracy is that it gives every voter a chance to do something stupid."
-Art Spander-
Sports columnist, baseball Hall of Fame
"It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting."
-Tom Stoppard-
[Tomáš Straussler] (1937- ) Czechoslovakian screenwriter, playwright
Source: his philosophical play, Jumpers, first produced in 1972
"If a single writer in a country is in chains, then there are some links of that chain that binds us all."
-Vaclav Havel-
(1936-2011) Czech writer, philosopher, dissident, statesman, last President of Czechoslovakia
"Your book is dedicated by the soundest reason. You had better get out of France as quickly as you can."
-Voltaire-
[François Marie Arouet] (1694-1778) French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher
1758
"We will all be better citizens when voting records of our Congressmen are followed as carefully as scores of pro-football games."
-Lou Erickson-
"There is no safety. Only varying states of risk. And failure."
-Lois McMaster Bujold-
"The tax that was supposed to soak the rich has instead soaked America. The beneficiary of the income tax has not been the poor, but big government. The income tax has given us a government bureaucracy that outnumbers the manufacturing work force. It has created welfare dependencies that have entrapped millions of Americans in an underclass that is forced to live a sordid existence of trading votes for government handouts."
-Paul Craig Roberts-
(1939- ) Economist, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration ("Father of Reaganomics"), former editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Scripps Howard News Service.
Source: The Columbus Dispatch.
"Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main bulwark."
-Walter Lippmann-
(1889-1974) American writer, journalist, and political commentator
"The priesthood have, in all ancient nations, nearly monopolized learning.... And, even since the Reformation, when or where has existed a Protestant or dissenting sect who would tolerate A FREE INQUIRY? The blackest billingsgate, the most ungentlemanly insolence, the most yahooish brutality is patiently endured, countenanced, propagated, and applauded. But touch a solemn truth in collision with a dogma of a sect, though capable of the clearest proof, and you will soon find you have disturbed a nest, and the hornets will swarm about your legs and hands, and fly into your face and eyes."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: letter to John Taylor, 1814
"In literature as in love, we are astonished by what is chosen by others."
-Andre Maurois-
(1885-1967) French writer
Politics, too. At least in the other 2, we accept "to each his own", "live and let live". More or less...
"This is only the land of take-what-you-want. Anarchy means 'without leaders', not 'without order'. With anarchy comes an age of Ordnung, of true order, which is to say voluntary order … this age of Ordnung will begin when the mad and incoherent cycle of verwirrung that these bulletins reveal has run its course … This is not anarchy, Eve. This is chaos."
-V for Vendetta-
"He who joyfully marches to music rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder."
-Albert Einstein-
"You can get everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want."
-Zig Ziglar-
Ahh, capitalism... (The alternative: 'That's too hard! I'll just take what THEY have...!')
"We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
at the signing of The Declaration of Independence
"Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
"The truth is that neither then nor at any former time, since I had attained my maturity in Age, Reading and reflection had I imbibed any general Prejudice against Kings, or in favour of them. It appeared to me then as it has done ever since, that there is a State of Society in which a Republican Government is the best, and in America the only one..."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: Adams, Diary & Autobiography, 6 May, 1778, IV, 91)
"Demagogues and agitators are very unpleasant, they are incidental to a free and constitutional country, and you must put up with these inconveniences or do without many important advantages."
-Benjamin Disraeli-
(1804-1881) Prime Minister of England, British statesman, novelist
Source: Speech, 1867
"The history of intellectual growth and discovery clearly demonstrates the need for unfettered freedom, the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable."
-C. Van Woodward-
(1908-1999) American historian
Source: Report On Free Speech, New York Times, 28 January 1975
"We are a workers’ party because we see in the coming battle between finance and labor the beginning and the end of the structure of the twentieth century. We are on the side of labor and against finance ... The value of labor under socialism will be determined by its value to the state, to the whole community. Labor means creating value, not haggling over things."
-Joseph Paul Goebbels-
(1897-1945) German politician and Reich Minister of Propaganda of Nazi Germany
Source: “Those Damn Nazis: Why Are We a Workers’ Party?” written by Joseph Goebbels and Mjölnir, Die verfluchten Hakenkreuzler. Etwas zum Nachdenken, Nazi propaganda pamphlet (Munich: Verlag Frz. Eher, 1932)
"The choice facing the nation is between two totally different ways of life. And what a prize we have to fight for: no less than the chance to banish from our land the dark, divisive clouds of Marxist socialism and bring together men and women from all walks of life who share a belief in freedom."
-Margaret Thatcher-
(1925-2013) British Prime Minister (1979–1990)
"If you pinch the sea of its liberty, though it be walls of stone or brass, it will beat them down."
-John Cotton-
(1585-1652) Puritan minister of Congregationalism, "Patriarch of New England"
Source: An Exposition upon the Thirteenth Chapter of the Revelation, Limitation of Government, 1655
"The will of the people is the only legitimate foundation of any government, and to protect its free expression should be our first object."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: First Inaugural Address, 4 March 1801
"Do not count your chickens before they are hatched."
-Aesop-
(c. 550 B.C.) legendary Greek fabulist
Source: The Milkmaid and Her Pail
"Illegitimati non carborundum.
(Don't let the bastards grind you down.)"
-General Joseph W. Stilwell-
(1883-1946) US General in Asia during WWII, "Vinegar Joe"
"I would rather starve and rot and keep the privilege of speaking the truth as I see it, than of holding all the offices that capital has to give from the presidency down."
-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 Degradation of the Democratic Dogma, 1919
"Money is a matter of functions four:
A medium, a measure, a standard, a store."
(more completely,
medium of exchange
measure of value
unit of accounts
store of wealth)
"The Puritans had accused the Quakers of 'troubling the world by preaching peace to it.' They refused to pay church taxes; they refused to bear arms; they refused to swear allegiance to any government. (In so doing they were direct actionists, what we may call negative direct actionists.) So the Puritans, being political actionists, passed laws to keep them out, to deport, to fine, to imprison, to mutilate, and finally, to hang them. And the Quakers just kept on coming (which was positive direct action); and history records that after the hanging of four Quakers, and the flogging of Margaret Brewster at the cart's tail through the streets of Boston, 'the Puritans gave up trying to silence the new missionaries'; that 'Quaker persistence and Quaker non-resistance' had won the day."
-Voltairine de Cleyre-
"Sadly today, much of the political Left has become a hate group. As a hate group, they truly believe they alone have the unique right to censor others, to defame others, even to violently attack and murder others whose speech they don’t like. This is now evident everywhere throughout Leftist culture, including in Hollywood and the Oscars. With Google clearly being run by Leftists, and Facebook run by Leftists, and most of the internet gatekeepers dominated by intolerant Leftists, the shocking realization is that none of us are safe from the hatred, intolerance and censorship of the techno-liberals who tell themselves “the ends justify the means” to silence Trump supporters and defame those who support Trump."
-Mike Adams-
Editor of Natural News
2/28/2017
Source: http://trump.news/2017-02-28-google-censorship-of-natural-news-statement-from-the-health-ranger.html
"Appropriated to justice, to security, to reason, to restraint; where there is no respect of persons; where will is nothing and power is nothing and numbers are nothing, and all are equal and all secure before the law."
-Rufus Choate-
(1799-1859) American lawyer, orator
Source: in his speech before the Constitutional Convention in Massachusetts in 1853, presented to those who were crying for unrestrained and unlimited power of the people as the final bulwark of law and justice, guaranteed by our constitution to every citizen. Ref: Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Volume 43, by American Academy of Political and Social Science, National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection (Library of Congress) 1912
"Blessings of the state, blessings of the masses. ... Work hard, increase production, prevent accidents, and be happy."
-Big Brother-
Source: George Lucas's movie, THX 1138
"Certainly anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices. If you do not use the intelligence with which God endowed your mind to resist believing impossibilities, you will not be able to use the sense of injustice which God planted in your heart to resist a command to do evil. Once a single faculty of your soul has been tyrannized, all the other faculties will submit to the same fate."
-Voltaire-
"Politicians have immense power to do harm to the economy. But they have very little power to do good. What our nation needs is a separation of 'business and state'… That would mean crony capitalism and crony socialism could not survive."
-Walter E. Williams-
"Private capitalism makes a steam engine; State capitalism makes pyramids."
-Frank Chodorov-
(1887-1966) American author, publisher
"The sole advantage of power is that you can do more good."
-Baltasar Gracian-
(1601-1658) Spanish philosopher and writer
Source: The Art of Worldly Wisdom, 1647
"Political repression consists of government action which grossly discriminates against persons or organizations viewed as presenting a fundamental challenge to existing power relationships or key governmental policies, because of their perceived political beliefs."
-Robert Justin Goldstein-
American author, professor
Source: Political Repression in Modern America, 1978
"The empires of the future are the empires of the mind."
-Winston Churchill-
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1940-1945, 1951-1955)
"I don't understand any of it. I never did."
-Michael's father-
'The Boys in the Band'
"Those who manipulate the unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested largely by men we have never heard of."
-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)
"In March, 1915, the J.P. Morgan interests, the steel, shipbuilding, and powder interest, and their subsidiary organizations, got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press. … They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of 25 of the greatest papers. An agreement was reached; the policy of the papers was bought, to be paid for by the month; an editor was furnished for each paper to properly supervise and edit information regarding the questions of preparedness, militarism, financial policies, and other things of national and international nature considered vital to the interests of the purchasers."
-Oscar Callaway-
(1872-1947) U.S. Congressman, TX-D (1911-1917)
Source: Congressional Record of February 9, 1917, page 2947, as entered by Representative Oscar Callaway of Texas
"People who denounce the free market and voluntary exchange…are for control and coercion.
Economic planning is nothing more than the forcible superseding of other people’s plans by the powerful elite backed up by the brute force of government."
-Walter E. Williams-
"If Congress sees fit to impose a capitation, or other direct tax, it must be laid in proportion to the census; if Congress determines to impose duties, imposts, and excises, they must be uniform throughout the United States. These are not strictly limitations of power. They are rules prescribing the mode in which it shall be exercised. ... This review shows that personal property, contracts, occupations, and the like have never been regarded by Congress as proper subjects of direct tax."
-Salmon P. Chase-
(1808-1873) U.S. Senator from Ohio, 23rd Governor of Ohio, U.S. Treasury Secretary under President Abraham Lincoln, 6th Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court
Source: As Chief Justice delivering the opinion of the Court in Veazie Bank v. Fenno, 76 U.S. 8 Wallace 533 (1869)
"He must be a man of little faith, who would fear to subject his own religion to the same critical tests to which the historian subjects all other religions. We need not surely crave a tender or merciful treatment for that faith which we hold to be the only true one. We should rather challenge it for the severest tests and trials, as the sailor would for the good ship to which he trusts his own life, and the lives of those who are dear to him. In the Science of Religion, we can decline no comparisons, nor claim any immunities for Christianity, as little as the missionary can, when wrestling with the subtle Brahmin, or the fanatical Mussulman, or the plain speaking Zulu."
-Max Müller-
"The freedom of the press is one of the great bulwarks of liberty, and can never be restrained but by despotic governments."
-George Mason-
(1725-1792), drafted the Virgina Declaration of Rights, ally of James Madison and George Washington
Source: Virginia Bill of Rights, 1776
"A large part of mankind is angry not with the sins, but with the sinners."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: Moral Essays, De Ira (On Anger): Book 2, cap. 28, line 8
"The real guarantee of freedom is an equilibrium of social forces in conflict, not the triumph of any one force."
-Max Eastman-
(1883-1969) American writer, poet, political activist
Source: Reflections on the Failure of Socialism, 1955
"It is the right of our people to organize to oppose any law and any part of the constitution with which they are not in sympathy."
-Alfred E. Smith-
(1873-1944)
Source: Speech, League of Women Voters, 1927
"Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another."
-Gilbert Keith Chesterton-
(1874-1936) British essayist, critic, poet, and novelist
Source: "On the Cryptic and the Elliptic", 1908
"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?"
-Epicurus-
If he is God, he is not good. If he is good, he is not God.
"The mission of the Gestapo expanded steadily as, from 1933 onward, 'political criminality' was given a much broader definition than ever before and most forms of dissent and criticism were gradually criminalized. The result was that more 'laws' or lawlike measures were put on the books than ever."
-Shelia Fitzpatrick-
Source: Accusatory Practices: Denunciation in Modern European History, 1789-1989, 1997
"By rendering the labor of one, the property of the other, they cherish pride, luxury, and vanity on one side; on the other, vice and servility, or hatred and revolt."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
"Our ultimate freedom is the right and power to decide how anybody or anything outside of ourselves will affect us."
-Steven R. Covey-
(1932-2012) American educator, author, businessman, speaker
"Above all, every member of the university has an obligation to permit free expression in the university. No member has a right to prevent such expression. Every official of the university, moreover, has a special obligation to foster free expression and to ensure that it is not obstructed."
-C. Van Woodward-
(1908-1999) American historian
Source: “Report On Free Speech,” New York Times, 28 January 1975
"The size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed, for the vast masses of a nation are in the depths of their hearts more easily deceived than they are consciously and intentionally bad. The primitive simplicity of their minds renders them a more easy prey to a big lie than a small one, for they themselves often tell little lies, but would be ashamed to tell big lies."
-Adolf Hitler-
(1889-1945) German Nazi Dictator
1935
Source: Mein Kampf, p. 197(?) 14th Edition
"During war, the laws are silent."
-Quintus Tullius Cicero-
(c.102-43 B.C.), Roman general; brother of Cicero the orator
Thus, wars must be permanent.
"You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before."
-Rahm Emanuel-
(1959-) Mayor of Chicago, Chicago's first Jewish mayor
Source: at the Wall Street Journal CEO Council in Washington, D.C., Nov 19, 2008
And try to get a "war" out of it.
"We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was 'legal' and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was 'illegal.'"
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-
(1929-1968) US civil rights leader
Source: Letter from Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963
"I place economy among the first and most important virtues and public debt as the greatest dangers to be feared ... We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our choice between economy and liberty or profusion and servitude ... The same prudence which in private life would forbid our paying money for unexplained projects, forbids it in the disposition of public money. We are endeavoring to reduce the government to the practice of rigid economy to avoid burdening the people ..."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"Allow a government to decline paying its debts and you overthrow all public morality — you unhinge all the principles that preserve the limits of free constitutions. Nothing can more affect national prosperity than a constant and systematic attention to extinguish the present debt and to avoid as much as possible the incurring of any new debt."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
"You have to choose [as a voter] between trusting to the natural stability of gold and the natural stability of the honesty and intelligence of the members of the Government. And, with due respect for these gentlemen, I advise you, as long as the Capitalist system lasts, to vote for gold."
-George Bernard Shaw-
(1856-1950) Irish comic dramatist
"In a recent conversation with an official at the Internal Revenue Service, I was amazed when he told me that 'If the taxpayers of this country ever discover that the IRS operates on 90% bluff the entire system will collapse'."
-Henry Bellmon-
(1921-) Governor of Oklahoma, US Senator (R-OK)
1969
"How prone all human institutions have been to decay; how subject the best-formed and most wisely organized governments have been to lose their check and totally dissolve; how difficult it has been for mankind, in all ages and countries, to preserve their dearest rights and best privileges, impelled as it were by an irresistible fate of despotism."
-James Monroe-
(1758-1831), 5th US President
1788
"Truth never tranquilizes. The defining property of truth is its ability to disturb. Jesus only told half the story. The truth 'will' set you free. But, first it's going to piss you off."
-Solomon Short-
fictional character of David Gerrold
"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
http://libertytree.ca/quotes/George.Orwell.Quote.E93D
"Fear can only prevail when victims are ignorant of the facts."
-- Thomas Jefferson
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
http://libertytree.ca/quotes/Thomas.Jefferson.Quote.B25A
"He who dares not offend cannot be honest."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
'Course, he who dares to offend isn't necessarily being honest...
"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."
-Jesus of Nazareth-
(c.4 BC – c.AD 30/33)
Source: Holy Bible, John 8:32
"The truth which makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer
not to hear."
-Jim Bishop-
(1907-1987)
Source: The Day Lincoln Was Shot
"He is the freeman whom the truth makes free,
And all are slaves besides."
-William Cowper-
(1731-1800) English poet, hymnodist
"All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them."
-Galileo Galilei-
(1564-1642) Italian astronomer, physicist, engineer, philosopher, and mathematician
"Without seeking, truth cannot be known at all. It can neither be declared from pulpits, nor set down in articles, nor in any wise prepared and sold in packages ready for use. Truth must be ground for every man by itself out of it such, with such help as he can get, indeed, but not without stern labor of his own."
-John Ruskin-
(1819-1900) British author, artist, social critic
"I never give them hell. I just tell the truth and they think it's hell."
-Harry S. Truman-
(1884-1972), 33rd US President
"Chase after the truth like all hell and you'll free yourself, even though you never touch its coattails."
-Clarence S. Darrow-
(1857-1938)
"Why did they devise censorship? To show a world which doesn’t exist, an ideal world, or what they envisaged as the ideal world. And we wanted to depict the world as it was."
-Krzysztof Kieslowski-
(1941-1996) Polish filmmaker
"Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true."
-Alfred Lord Tennyson-
(1809-1892) Poet Laureate of Great Britain and Ireland
1850
"It is not our task to secure the triumph of truth, but merely to fight on its behalf."
-Blaise Pascal-
(1623-1662) French mathematician and philosopher
"And, finally, that truth is great and will prevail if left to herself; that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: The Virginia Act For Establishing Religious Freedom, 1786
"This nation was conceived in liberty and dedicated to the principle – among others – that honest men may honestly disagree; that if they all say what they think, a majority of the people will be able to distinguish truth from error; that in the competition of the marketplace of ideas, the sounder ideas will in the long run win out."
-Elmer Davis-
(1890-1958), American writer, commentator
Source: But We Were Born Free, 1954
"People have a right to the Truth as they have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
-Frank Norris-
(1870-1902)
Source: The Responsibilities of the Novelist, 1903
"The truth is found when men are free to pursue it."
-Franklin D. Roosevelt-
(1882-1945), 32nd US President
Source: Speech, Temple University, 22 February 1936
"We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances."
-Isaac Newton-
"Stop judging by mere appearances, and make a right judgment."
-Jesus of Nazareth-
(c. 4 BC – c. AD 30/33)
Source: The Holy Bible, John 7:24
"If you add to the truth, you subtract from it."
-The Talmud-
"The right to know is like the right to live. It is fundamental and unconditional in its assumption that knowledge, like life, is a desirable thing."
-George Bernard Shaw-
(1856-1950) Irish comic dramatist
Source: The Doctor’s Dilemma, 1906
"There is no truth sure enough to justify persecution."
-John Milton-
(1608-1674) English Poet
Source: Areopagitica, 1644
"And as for him who lacks the courage to defend even his own soul: Let him not brag of his progressive views, boast of his status as an academician or a recognized artist, a distinguished citizen or general. Let him say to himself plainly: I am cattle, I am a coward, I seek only warmth and to eat my fill."
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn-
"Despite the often express dichotomy between chaos and planning, what is called 'planning' is the forcible suppression of millions of people's plans by a government-imposed plan.
What is considered to be chaos are systematic interactions whose nature, logic, and consequences are seldom examined by those who simply assume that planning by surrogate decisions-makers must be better."
-Thomas Sowell-
"Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad."
-Aldous Huxley-
(1894-1963) English writer, novelist, philosopher
"The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom."
-Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel-
(1770-1831) German philosopher
Source: The Philosophy of History, 1832
"Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and consciencious stupidity."
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-
(1929-1968) US civil rights leader
"Finding the occasional straw of truth awash in a great ocean of confusion and bamboozle requires intelligence, vigilance, dedication and courage. But if we don't practice these tough habits of thought, we cannot hope to solve the truly serious problems that face us -- and we risk becoming a nation of suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan who comes along."
-Carl Sagan-
(1934-1996), Astro-physicist
Source: "The Fine Art of Baloney Detection," Parade, February 1, 1987
"In order that all men might be taught to speak truth, it is necessary that all likewise should learn to hear it."
-Dr. Samuel Johnson-
(1709-1784) English author, poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer
Source: The Rambler, 1750-52
"The truth doesn't sell. It is high in supply, but little in demand."
-Eric Schaub-
Individualist, activist, speaker, author
"... the Constitution is no such instrument as it has generally been assumed to be; but that by false interpretations, and naked usurpations, the government has been made in practice a very widely, and almost wholly, different thing from what the Constitution itself purports to authorize…. But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain—that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.
In our modern day and age, anything that the regime's federal judges decide is 'constitutional' is, in fact, de facto constitutional. In other words, appealing to the text of the Constitution to claim illegitimacy for the latest government power grab is pointless and irrelevant to the task of actually limiting the power of the state. ..."
-Lysander Spooner-
"The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
"The rising power of the United States in world affairs ... requires, not a more compliant press, but a relentless barrage of facts and criticism ... Our job in this age, as I see it, is not to serve as cheerleaders for our side ... but to help the largest possible number of people to see the realities."
-James Reston-
(1909-1995) Scottish-born ("Scotty") New York Times journalist, editor, bureau chief, two Pultizer Prizes, Presidential Medal of Freedom
"I think the greatest single enemy is the misuse of information, the perversion of truth in the hands of terribly skillful people."
-John le Carré-
[David John Moore Cornwell ] (1931-) British author of espionage novels
"And I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government."
-Martin Luther King, Jr.-
"We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them, and holding them in bondage where we could set them free."
-William Seward-
Secretary of State
1861-1869
regarding the so-called Emancipation Proclamation
"Courage is the first of all the virtues because if you haven't courage, you may not have the opportunity to use any of the others."
-Dr. Samuel Johnson-
(1709-1784) English author, poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer
"Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away."
-Elvis Presley-
(1935-1977) American singer, actor, and cultural icon
"Men prefer to believe what they prefer to be true."
-Francis Bacon-
(1561-1626) Philosopher, British Lord Chancellor
"The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made."
-Groucho Marx-
(1890-1977) American comedian and film and television star
"The one function that TV news performs very well is that when there is no news we give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were."
-David Brinkley-
(1920-2003) American newscaster for NBC and ABC in a career lasting from 1943 to 1997
"Whenever the media covers anything I know about in intimate detail ... they always get it wrong. True on the left, and true on the right. Sigh. Double sigh."
-Don Luskin-
(1954 -) American columnist
"The truth is the only thing worth having, and, in a civilized life, like ours, where so many risks are removed, facing it is almost the only courageous thing left to do."
-E. V. Lucas-
[Edward Verrall Lucas] (1868-1938) English writer
"The most odious of all oppressions are those which mask as justice."
-Justice Robert H. Jackson-
(1892-1954), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
"The simple believeth every word: but the prudent man looketh well to his going."
-Proverbs-
Source: Proverbs 14:15
"The terrible thing about the quest for truth is that you find it."
-Remy De Gourmont-
(1858-1915) French Symbolist poet, novelist, and influential critic
"The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer."
-Edward R. Murrow-
(1908-1965) American broadcast journalist and war correspondent
"A heretic is a man who sees with his own eyes."
-Gotthold Ephraim Lessing-
(1729-1781) German Dramatist
"Freedom does not always win. This is one of the bitterest lessons of history."
-A. J. P. Taylor-
[Alan John Percivale Taylor] (1906-1990) British historian
"Wherever a Knave is not punished, an honest Man is laugh'd at."
-George Savile-
(1633–1695)
"Give a good man great powers and crooks grab his job."
-Rick Gaber-
Libertarian writer
"It is not laissez-faire that has failed. That would be an ill day for men. What has failed is the courage to see what is true and speak it to the people, to point to the true remedies."
-Auberon Herbert-
(1838-1906) English writer, theorist, philosopher, 19th century individualist, member of the Parliament of the U.K.
"There's nothing I like less than bad arguments for a view that I hold dear."
-Daniel Dennett-
(1942-) American philosopher, writer, and cognitive scientist
"A good argument diluted to avoid criticism is not nearly as good as the undiluted argument, because we best arrive at truth through a process of honest and vigorous debate. Arguments should not sneak around in disguise, as if dissent were somehow sinister… For it is bravery that is required to secure freedom."
-Justice Clarence Thomas-
(1948- ) U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Lecture, 13 February 2001
"If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought -- not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate."
-Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.-
(1841-1935) US Supreme Court Justice, also known as "The Great Dissenter"
Source: United States v. Schwimmer,
1928
"A lie has speed, but truth has endurance."
-Edgar J. Mohn-
"If falsehood, like truth, had but one face, we would be more on equal terms. For we would consider the contrary of what the liar said to be certain. But the opposite of truth has a hundred thousand faces and an infinite field."
-Michel De Montaigne-
[Michel Eyquem De Montaigne] (1532-1592) French Renaissance scholar, philosopher, writer
"Truth is incontrovertible, ignorance can deride it, panic may resent it, malice may destroy it, but there it is."
-Sir Winston Churchill-
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1940-1945, 1951-1955)
"A truth that's told with bad intent,
beats all the lies you can invent."
-William Blake-
(1757-1827) English poet, painter, engraver
Source: "Auguries of Innocence," Poems from the Pickering Manuscript
"Americans don't go around carrying guns with the idea they're using them to influence other Americans. There's no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons."
-Ronald Reagan-
California Legislature Stunned By Invasion Of Armed "Black Panthers", Gettysburg Times (3 May 1967)
"The worst forms of tyranny, or certainly the most successful ones, are not those we rail against but those that so insinuate themselves into the imagery of our consciousness, and the fabric of our lives, as not to be perceived as tyranny."
-Michael Parenti-
(1933- )
"The early bird gets the worm, but the early worm gets eaten. And the 2nd mouse gets the cheese."
"Security is when everything is settled. When nothing can happen to you. Security is the denial of life."
-Germaine Greer-
(1939- ) Australian feminist
"When we went to school we were told that we were governed by laws, not men. As a result of that, many people think there is no need to pay any attention to judicial candidates because judges merely apply the law by some mathematical formula and a good judge and a bad judge all apply the same kind of law. The fact is that the most important part of a judge's work is the exercise of judgment and that the law in a court is never better than the common sense judgment of the judge that is presiding."
-Robert H. Jackson-
"A year from now, ten, they'll swing back to the belief that they can make people... better. And I do not hold to that. So no more running; I aim to misbehave."
-Malcolm Reynolds-
"In 100 years we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to teaching Remedial English in college."
-Joseph Sobran-
(1946-2010) American columnist
"If our social conditions curtail manhood and womanhood, we must alter the social conditions. We must not go on quietly in a corner making men unmanly and women unwomanly, that they may fit into their filthy and slavish civilization."
-Gilbert Keith Chesterton-
(1874-1936) British essayist, critic, poet, and novelist
"A rock in bad hands killed Abel. A rock in good hands killed Goliath. It's not about the rock."
"Rational argument can be conducted with some prospect of success only so long as the emotionality of a given situation does not exceed a certain critical degree. If the affective temperature rises above this level, the possibility of reason’s having any effect ceases and its place is taken by slogans and chimerical wish fantasies. That is to say, a sort of collective possession results which rapidly develops into a psychic epidemic."
-Carl Jung-
Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology
Source: book by C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self
"The struggle for power is universal in time and space and is an undeniable fact of experience. It cannot be denied that throughout historic time, regardless of social, economic and political conditions, states have met each other in contests for power. Even though anthropologists have shown that certain primitive peoples seem to be free from the desire for power, nobody has yet shown how their state of mind can be re-created on a worldwide scale so as to eliminate the struggle for power from the international scene. … International politics, like all politics, is a struggle for power. Whatever the ultimate aims of international politics, power is always the immediate aim."
-Hans Morgenthau-
"Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment nothing can fail. Without it nothing can succeed. He who molds opinion is greater than he who enacts laws."
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
"The modern press itself is a new phenomenon. Its typical unit is the great agency of mass communication. These agencies can facilitate thought and discussion. They can stifle it…. They can play up or down the news and its significance, foster and feed emotions, create complacent fictions and blind spots, misuse the great words and uphold empty slogans."
-Commission On Freedom Of The Press-
Source: A Free and Responsible Press, 1947
"May the father of all mercies scatter light, and not darkness, upon our paths, and make us in all our several vocations useful here, and in His own due time and way everlastingly happy."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, August 1790, Ref: George Washington: A Collection, W.B. Allen, ed. (548)
"Republicanism is not the phantom of a deluded imagination. On the contrary, laws, under no form of government, are better supported, liberty and property better secured, or happiness more effectually dispensed to mankind."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
"A boy of 15 who is not a democrat is good for nothing, and he is no better who is a democrat at 20."
-John Adams-
"Not to be a republican at 20 is proof of want of heart; to be one at 30 is proof of want of head."
-Francois Guizot-
French premier and historian (1787-1874)
"Only the suppressed word is dangerous."
-Ludwig Börne-
(1786-1837) German journalist
"While often categorized as a democracy, the United States is more accurately defined as a constitutional federal republic. What does this mean? 'Constitutional' refers to the fact that government in the United States is based on a Constitution which is the supreme law of the United States. The Constitution not only provides the framework for how the federal and state governments are structured, but also places significant limits on their powers. 'Federal' means that there is both a national government and governments of the 50 states. A 'republic' is a form of government in which the people hold power, but elect representatives to exercise that power."
-U.S. Embassy in Argentina-
A representative ("republican") form of distributed ("federal"), expressly limited ("Constitutional") government.
"Let us … animate and encourage each other, and show the whole world that a Freeman, contending for liberty on his own ground, is superior to any slavish mercenary on earth."
-George Washington-
"This is, in theory, still a free country, but our politically correct, censorious times are such that many of us tremble to give vent to perfectly acceptable views for fear of condemnation. Freedom of speech is thereby imperiled, big questions go undebated, and great lies become accepted, unequivocally as great truths."
-Simon Heffer-
(18 July 1960) is an English historian, journalist, author and political commentator.
Source: Daily Mail, 7 June 2000
"Liberty trains for liberty. Responsibility is the first step in responsibility.
-W. E. B. Du Bois-
"Tolerance is the eager and glad acceptance of the way along which others seek the truth."
-Sir Walter Besant-
(1836-1901) English novelist
"Nobody can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own."
-Sydney J. Harris-
(1917-1986) American journalist
"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."
-Aldous Huxley-
(1894-1963) English writer, novelist, philosopher
"It is a common heresy and its graves are to be found all over the earth. It is the heresy that says you can kill an idea by killing a man, defeat a principle by defeating a person, bury truth by burying its vehicle."
-Adlai E. Stevenson II-
(1900-1965) Governor of Illinois (1949-1953), U.S. presidential candidate (1952, 1956), U.N. Ambassador (1961-1965)
Source: Speech, 9 November 1952
"My business is to bring my aspirations to conform to fact, not to try to harmonize fact with my aspirations."
-Thomas Henry Huxley-
(1825-1895) English biologist, known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his advocacy of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution
"Occupants of public offices love power and are prone to abuse it."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: attributed
"Unless the people, through unified action, arise and take charge of their government, they will find that their government has taken charge of them. Independence and liberty will be gone, and the general public will find itself in a condition of servitude to an aggregation of organized and selfish interest."
-Calvin Coolidge-
(1872-1933) 30th US President
"The law is created by demonstrable criminals, enforced by demonstrable criminals, interpreted by demonstrable criminals, all for demonstrably criminal purposes. Of course I'm above the law. And so are you."
-L. Neil Smith-
'Pallas'
"The problem is, of course, that not only is economics bankrupt but it has always been nothing more than politics in disguise ... economics is a form of brain damage."
-Hazel Henderson-
(1933-2022) British American futurist, author, environmental activist
"Contrariwise", continued Tweedledee, "If it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic."
-Lewis Carroll-
[Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832-1898) English author, mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer.
Source: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, 1865
"It is well for people who think to change their minds occasionally in order to keep them clean. For those who do not think, it is best at least to rearrange their prejudices once in a while."
-Luther Burbank-
(1849-1926) American botanist, horticulturist, pioneer in agricultural science
"History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon."
-Napoleon Bonaparte-
(1769-1821) French emperor
"Civilization has been a continuous struggle of the individual or of groups of individuals against the State and even against 'society', that is, against the majority subdued and hypnotized by the State and State worship."
-Emma Goldman-
"The entire concept of 'law' is vain and fallacious, for what shall we have accomplished by enacting one? Those who agree with it will obey it, as they did BEFORE it existed. Those who disagree will break it, so it has no effect on them. We have been occupied in an empty gesture of which but two consequences shall follow: those who take comfort in such things will be comforted, and those who derive perverted pleasure by enforcing their will upon others may now find positions among the police."
-Lysander Spooner-
"Puritans argue against the goodness of creation, finding the source of evil in material things of pleasure (as tobacco, alcohol, art, and so on) rather than in the disordered human will to misuse the good things nature affords us."
-G.K. Chesterton-
"Every shot that takes an innocent life must result in a legal and fair sentence that punishes murder. Every violence that destroys a person's life must result in a legal and fair judicial decision that protects human dignity. These are constants for civilized and democratic countries. For the countries in which the rule of law is consistently ensured. But it is time to make it constant for international relations as well. The constants that will act universally and most importantly — irrevocably in relation to any violator of international law. Especially when it comes to the crime of aggression. The world needs a real embodiment of the rule of law, which is guaranteed to protect humanity from the 'right of force' — from the source of all aggressions."
-Volodymyr Zelenskyy-
"Heaven is where the cooks are French, the police are British, the mechanics are German, the lovers are Italian, and everything is organized by the Swiss.
Hell is where the cooks are British, the police are German, the mechanics are French, the lovers are Swiss, and everything is organized by the Italians."
-anonymous-
"If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things."
-Rene Descartes-
(1596-1650) French philosopher, mathematician, scientist, lay Catholic who invented analytic geometry
Source: Principles of Philosophy, 1644
"The unexamined life, said Socrates, is unfit to be lived by man. This is the virtue of liberty, and the ground on which we may justify our belief in it, that it tolerates error in order to serve truth."
-Walter Lippmann-
(1889-1974) American writer, journalist, and political commentator
"Wisdom is not communicable. The wisdom which a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish."
-Herman Hesse-
(1877-1962) German-born Swiss poet, novelist, and painter
Source: Siddhartha
"The greatest and noblest pleasure which men can have in this world is to discover new truths; and the next is to shake off old prejudices."
-Frederick the Great-
(1712-1786) King of Prussia, Frederick II
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."
-Noam Chomsky-
How the World Works
"Freedom of expression is the well-spring of our civilization... The history of civilization is in considerable measure the displacement of error which once held sway as official truth by beliefs which in turn have yielded to other truths. Therefore the liberty of man to search for truth ought not to be fettered, no matter what orthodoxies he may challenge."
-Felix Frankfurter-
(1882-1965) U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Concurring Opinion, Dennis et al. v. U.S. (1951)
"Persecution, whenever it occurs, establishes only the power and cunning of the persecutor, not the truth and worth of his belief."
-H. M. Kallen-
(1882-1974)
"A criminal trial is not a search for truth. It is much too circumscribed for that. Rather, a trial is a formalized contest for the hearts and minds of a panel of twelve. It is a quest for a verdict in which information is selected and screened (we can almost say 'processed') before it is allowed to reach jurors."
-Phillip Finch-
Source: Fatal Flaw, 1992
"For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don’t believe, no proof is possible."
-Stuart Chase-
(1888-1985) American economist, social theorist, writer
"By doubting we all come at truth."
-Marcus Tullius Cicero-
(106-43 B.C.) Roman Statesman, Philosopher and Orator
"I see men ordinarily more eager to discover a reason for things than to find out whether things are so."
-Michel De Montaigne-
[Michel Eyquem De Montaigne] (1532-1592) French Renaissance scholar, philosopher, writer
Source: Essays
"There are two kinds of statistics, the kind you look up and the kind you make up."
-Rex Stout-
(1886-1975) American author
"When you notice that to produce you need to get permission from those who do not produce anything; when you check that money flows to those who do not deal with goods but with favors; when you realize that many become rich by the bribery and for influence more than by your work and that the laws do not protect you against them, but on the contrary, they are the ones who are protected against you; when you discover that corruption is rewarded and honesty becomes a self-sacrifice, then you can assert, without fear of being wrong, that your society is doomed."
-Ayn Rand-
"Anarchy is the radical notion that other people are not your property. You own yourself and the effects of your actions. All human interaction should be voluntary association or mutual exchange. All force, and fraud, and threats, and coercion are inherent'y illegitimate. The State is by definition a monopoly on violence which is the moral blight at the heart of all conquest, and slaughter, and famine, and death. Taxation is theft. War is a racket. And national borders are nothing more than chalk outlines around unprosecuted mass murder."
"There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them."
-Heisenberg-
"If you fear making anyone mad, then you ultimately probe for the lowest common denominator of human achievement."
-Jimmy Carter-
[James Earl Carter] (1924- ) 39th US President
"The rich will strive to establish their dominion and enslave the rest. They always did...they always will. They will have the same effect here as elsewhere, if we do not, by the power of government, keep them in their proper spheres."
-Gouverneur Morris-
(1752-1816) represented Pennsylvania in the Constitutional Convention of 1787, author of large sections of the Constitution for the United States, credited as the author of its Preamble
"The few who understand the system, will either be so interested in its profits, or so dependent on its favours that there will be no opposition from that class, while on the other hand, the great body of the people mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that capital derives from the system, will bear its burdens without complaint, and perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests."
-John Sherman-
(1823-1900) US Congressman, Senator (R-OH), Secretary of the Treasury and Secretary of State
June 25, 1863
Source: in a letter sent to New York bankers, Morton, and Gould, in support of the then proposed National Banking Act
"The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks."
-Lord Acton-
[John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton] (1834-1902), First Baron Acton of Aldenham
"[The] Bank of the United States... is one of the most deadly hostility existing, against the principles and form of our Constitution... An institution like this, penetrating by its branches every part of the Union, acting by command and in phalanx, may, in a critical moment, upset the government. I deem no government safe which is under the vassalage of any self-constituted authorities, or any other authority than that of the nation, or its regular functionaries. What an obstruction could not this bank of the United States, with all its branch banks, be in time of war! It might dictate to us the peace we should accept, or withdraw its aids. Ought we then to give further growth to an institution so powerful, so hostile?"
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Thomas Jefferson did write this (about Banks) to Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin in 1803
"...first ascertain exactly the position of the various capitalists, then control them, influence them by restricting or enlarging, facilitating or hindering their credits, and finally they can entirely determine their fate."
-Vladimir Ilyich Lenin-
[Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov] (1870-1924) First Leader of the Soviet Union
"These statements were made 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:
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.
"Times change but principles endure. The jury has protected us from the abuse of power. While human government exists the tendency to abuse power will remain. This system, coming down from former generations crowned with the honors of age, is today and for the future our hope. Let us correct its defects with kindly hands, let us purge it of its imperfections and it will be, as in the past, the bulwark of our liberties."
-William Jennings Bryan-
"The high office of the President has been used to foment a plot to destroy the American's freedom and before I leave office, I must inform the citizen of this plight."
-John F. Kennedy-
(1917-1963) 35th US President
Source: Questionable: supposedly spoken at a speech at Columbia University on Nov. 12, 1963, 10 days before his assassination. There is no record of this speech.
"What is needed here is a return to the Constitution of the United States. We need to have a complete divorce of Bank and State. The old struggle that was fought out here in Jackson's day must be fought over again... The Federal Reserve Act should be repealed and the Federal Reserve Banks, having violated their charters, should be liquidated immediately. Faithless Government officers who have violated their oaths of office should be impeached and brought to trial. Unless this is done by us, I predict that the American people, outraged, robbed, pillaged, insulted, and betrayed as they are in their own land, will rise in their wrath and send a President here who will sweep the money changers out of the temple."
-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
"The modern banking system manufactures 'money' out of nothing; and the process is, perhaps, the most, astounding piece of 'sleight of hand' that was ever invented. In fact, it was not invented. It merely 'grew'. ... Banks in fact are able to create (and cancel) modern 'deposit money', just as much as they were originally able to create, or call in, their own original forms of private notes. They can, in fact, inflate and deflate, i.e., mint, and un-mint the modern 'edger-entry' currency."
-Major L. L. B. Angas-
[Lawrence Lee Bazley White/Angas] (1893-1973) Australian-born British statesman, economist
Source: Slump ahead in bonds, 1937.
see Billions for the Bankers, Debt for the People by Sheldon Emry
"Bankruptcies of governments have, on the whole, done less harm to mankind than their ability to raise loans."
-R. H. Tawney-
(1880-1962)
Source: Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, 1926
"Fascism, Nazism and Stalinism have in common that they offered the atomized individual a new refuge and security. These systems are the culmination of alienation. The individual is made to feel powerless and insignificant, but taught to project all of his human powers into the figure of the leader, the state, the "fatherland," to whom he has to submit and whom he has to worship. He escapes from freedom and into a new idolatry. All the achievements of individuality and reason, from the late Middle Ages to the nineteenth century are sacrificed on the altars of the new idols. ...built on the most flagrant lies, both with regard to their programs and to their leaders."
-The Sane Society-
"Banking was conceived in iniquity and was born in sin. The Bankers own the earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create deposits, and with the flick of the pen they will create enough deposits to buy it back again. However, take it away from them, and all the great fortunes like mine will disappear and they ought to disappear, for this would be a happier and better world to live in. But, if you wish to remain the slaves of Bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, let them continue to create deposits."
-Sir Josiah Stamp-
(1880-1941) President of the Bank of England in the 1920's, the second richest man in Britain
Source: Speaking at the Commencement Address of the University of Texas in 1927
Ref: The Legalized Crime of Banking (1958) by Silas W. Adams
"Banks do not have an obligation to promote the public good."
-Alexander Dielius-
CEO Germany, Austria, Eastern Europe Goldman Sachs
Source: January 2010, Source: Wall Street Journal, May 2010
"Why the transfer of decisions from those with personal experience and a stake in the outcome to those with neither can be expected to lead to better decisions is a question seldom asked, much less answered."
-Thomas Sowell-
Intellectuals and Society
"The fundamental difference between decision makers in the market and decision makers in government is that the former are subject to continuous and consequential feedback which can force them to adjust to what others prefer and are willing to pay for, while those who make decisions in the political arena face no such inescapable feedback to force them to adjust to other people’s desires and preferences.
-Thomas Sowell-
Intellectuals and Society
"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. ..."
-Winston S Churchill-
11 November 1947
Well. All those that have been permitted to be tried, anyway...
"When the President signs this act [Federal Reserve Act of 1913], the invisible government by the money power -- proven to exist by the Monetary Trust Investigation -- will be legalized. The new law will create inflation whenever the trusts want inflation. From now on, depressions will be scientifically created."
-Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr.-
(1859-1924) Congressman (R-MN), father of famous aviator
Source: U.S. Senate, Nov. 1912
"The trouble with gold is that it turns its back on world improvers, empire builders and do-gooders."
-Bill Bonner-
Source: Bill Bonner and Addison Wiggin in 'Empire of Debt'
"Of all contrivances for cheating the laboring classes of mankind, none has been more effective than that which deludes them with paper money."
-Daniel Webster-
(1782-1852) US Senator
"Monetary policy today is guided by little more than government fiat -- by the calculations, often mistaken economic theories, and whims of central bankers or, even worse, politicians. Under such a regime, inflation of three or four percent annually has come to be viewed as a stellar monetary performance. However, under a more sound monetary system -- i.e., a gold standard -- such increases in the general price level would be seen as wildly inflationary."
-Raymond J. Keating-
American writer, economist
Source: BOOK REVIEW: THE ANATOMY OF AN INTERNATIONAL MONETARY REGIME: THE CLASSICAL GOLD STANDARD 1880-1914, THE FREEMAN, p. 645, September, 1996
"Repeal the entire Banking Act of 1933, and Austrian School economists will cheer, especially if the current system were replaced by a 100%-reserve competitive banking with no central bank. That banking reform would give us a sound money system, meaning no more business cycle, bailouts, or inflation."
-Lew Rockwell-
[Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.] (1944- ) Chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute
Source: Banks on the Dole, THE FREE MARKET, November 1995.
"Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes the laws."
-Mayer Amschel Rothschild-
[Mayer Amschel Bauer] (1744 -1812), Godfather of the Rothschild Banking Cartel of Europe
Source: in 'The Creature from Jekyll Island' (American Opinion Publishing), p. 218
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world."
-Alan Greenspan-
(1926- ) Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors (1987-2006)
Source: Testimony before US House Banking Committee, May 1999
"We make money the old fashioned way. We print it."
-Art Rolnick-
former Chief Economist, Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank
"Paper money has had the effect in your state that it will ever have, to ruin commerce, oppress the honest, and open the door to every species of fraud and injustice."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: in letter to J. Bowen, Rhode Island, Jan. 9, 1787
"Because of 'fractional' reserve system, banks, as a whole, can expand our money supply several times, by making loans and investments."
-Federal Reserve Bank of New York-
Source: The Story of Banks, p.5. (2006), Story by Gail Donovan; Art by Norman Nodel, Published by Federal Reserve Bank of New York
"Happiness is more effectually dispensed to mankind under a republican form of government than any other."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
"Bankers have no right to establish a customary law among themselves, at the expence of other men."
-Sir Michael Foster-
(1689–1763) English judge
Source: Foster, J., Hankey v. Trotman (1746), 1 Black. Rep. 2; reported in James William Norton-Kyshe, The Dictionary of Legal Quotations(1904), p. 17
"Give a small boy a hammer and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding."
-Abraham Kaplan
(1918-1993) Ukranian-born philosopher, professor
"Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels."
-Goya-
"One death is a tragedy, but a million deaths are a statistic."
-Josef Stalin-
(1879-1953) Communist leader of the USSR
Source: Attributed
"In 1950, the average family of four paid 2% of its earnings to federal taxes. Today it pays 24%."
-William R. Mattox, Jr.-
Columnist
"Nothing did more to spur the boom in stocks than the decision made by the New York Federal Reserve bank, in the spring of 1927, to cut the rediscount rate. Benjamin Strong, Governor of the bank, was chief advocate of this unwise measure, which was taken largely at the behest of Montagu Norman of the Bank of England... At the time of the Bank's action I warned of its consequences... I felt that sooner or later the market had to break."
-Bernard Baruch-
(1870-1965) American financier, stock market speculator, and presidential adviser to Woodrow Wilson and FDR
Source: in Baruch: The Public Years (1960)
"Petty laws breed great crimes."
-Ouida-
[Marie Louise de la Ramée] (1839-1908) English novelist
1880
"For every problem there is one solution which is simple, neat, and wrong."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"Where the tongue slips, it speaks the truth."
-Irish Proverb-
"Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"There is no man so friendless but what he can find a friend sincere enough to tell him disagreeable truths."
-Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton-
(1803-1873) English writer, politician
"Prejudice rarely survives experience."
-Eve Zibart-
American author, columnist
Source: The Washington Post
Pretty much by definition, though, right? Post-experience is no longer pre-judging.
"Who is more foolish, the child afraid of the dark or the man afraid of the light?"
-Maurice Freehill-
(1899-1939) British World War I flying ace
"Not one cent should be raised unless it is in accord with the law."
-Napoleon Bonaparte-
(1769-1821) French emperor
"He [King George III] has erected a multitude of New Offices and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
1776
Source: Declaration of Independence, listing the reasons for declaring independence from England
"Our Constitution is in actual operation; everything appears to promise that it will last; but in this world nothing is certain but death and taxes."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
"The bottom is loaded with nice people, Albert. Only cream and bastards rise."
-Harper-
"The best way to understand this whole issue is to look at what the government does: it takes money from some people, keeps a bunch of it, and gives the rest to other people."
-Dave Barry-
(1947- ) Humorist
"I have never voted in my life… I have always known and understood that the idiots are in a majority so it’s certain they will win."
-Louis-Ferdinand Celine-
"It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder."
-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)
"I don't believe that it can end. Now that I've seen what war is, what civil war is, I know that everybody, if one day it should end, ought to ask himself: "And what shall we make of the fallen? Why are they dead?" I wouldn't know what to say. Not now, at any rate. Nor does it seem to me that the others know. Perhaps only dead know, and only for them is the war really over."
-Cesare Pavese-
"No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck."
-Frederick Douglass-
[Frederick Baily] (1818-1895), escaped slave, Abolitionist, author, editor of the North Star and later the New National Era
1883
"It is the logic of our times,
No subject for immortal verse --
That we who lived by honest dreams
Defend the bad against the worse."
-Cecil Day Lewis-
"What is so mind boggling is that all of this is being financed by the American people themselves through their own taxes. In other words, the American people are underwriting the destruction of their own freedom and way of life by lavishly financing through federal and state grants the very social scientists who are undermining our national sovereignty and preparing our children to become the dumbed-down vassals of the new world order."
-Samuel L. Blumenfeld-
(1927-2015) American author, educator
"If our Trade be taxed, why not our Lands, or Produce in short, everything we possess? They tax us without having legal representation."
-Samuel Adams-
(1722-1803), was known as the "Father of the American Revolution."
Source: after the Stamp Act of 1765
"For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places."
-The Holy Bible-
Source: Ephesians 6:12
"The media I've had a lot to do with is lazy. We fed them and they ate it every day."
-Michael Deaver-
Former top aide to President Reagan
"The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to Socialism."
-Karl Marx-
(1818-1883) Prussian-born philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist, father of Communism, co-author of the 'Communist Manifesto'
"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."
-James Madison-
"There are two kinds of restrictions on human liberty -- the restraint of law and that of custom. No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion."
-Carrie Chapman Catt-
(1859-1947)
Source: Speech, 8 February 1900
"The man who asks of freedom anything other than itself is born to be a slave."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
[Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clerel, le Comte de Tocqueville] (1805-1859) French historian
"People who make careers out of helping others -- sometimes at great sacrifice, often not -- usually don't like to hear that those others might get along fine, might even get along better, without their help."
-John Holt-
(1923-1985) American author and educator, proponent of homeschooling, and pioneer in youth rights theory
"The invisible Money Power is working to control and enslave mankind. It financed Communism, Fascism, Marxism, Zionism and Socialism. All of these are directed to making the United States a member of World Government."
-American Mercury Magazine-
December 1957
Source: AMERICAN MERCURY MAGAZINE, December 1957, pg. 92
"The highest glory of the American Revolution was this; it connected, in one indissoluble bond the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity."
-John Quincy Adams-
(1767-1848) 6th US President
July 4, 1821
Source: in a speech to the U.S. House of Representatives
"In the end, the state of the Union comes down to the character of the people. ... I sought for the greatness and genius of America in her commodious harbors, her ample rivers, and it was not there. I sought for it in the fertile fields, and boundless prairies, and it was not there. I sought it in her rich mines, and vast world commerce, and it was not there. Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits aflame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
[Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clerel, le Comte de Tocqueville] (1805-1859) French historian
Source: No source has ever been found for this popular quote. See:
http://www.tocqueville.org/pitney.htm
"The Trilateralist Commission is international...(and)...is intended to be the vehicle for multinational consolidation of the commercial and banking interests by seizing control of the political government of the United States. The Trilateralist Commission represents a skillful, coordinated effort to seize control and consolidate the four centers of power - political, monetary, intellectual, and ecclesiastical."
-Barry Goldwater-
(1909-1998) US Senator (R-Arizona)
Source: in his book "With No Apologies"
"To expose a 4.2 Trillion dollar ripoff of the American people by the stockholders of the 1000 largest corporations over the last one-hundred years will be a tall order of business."
-Buckminster Fuller-
[Richard Buckminster Fuller] (1895-1983) American visionary, designer, architect, poet, author, and inventor
"Perhaps Communists had wormed their way so deeply into our government on both the working and planning levels that they were able to exercise an inordinate degree of power in shaping the course of America in the dangerous postwar era. I could not help wondering and worrying whether we were faced with open enemies across the conference table and hidden enemies who sat with us in our most secret councils."
-General Mark Clark-
(1896-1984) American general during World War II and the Korean War
Source: From the Danube to the Yalu (1954)
"We must now face the harsh truth that the objectives of communism are being steadily advanced because many of us do not recognize the means used to advance them. ... The individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a Conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists. The American mind simply has not come to a realization of the evil which has been introduced into our midst."
-J. Edgar Hoover-
former FBI director
Source: in Elks Magazine (August 1956)
"The fundamental fact in the lives of the poor in most parts of America is that the wages of common labor are far below the benefits of AFDC, Medicaid, food stamps, public housing, public defenders, leisure time and all the other goods and services of the welfare state."
-George Gilder-
(1939-) American writer
Source: Wealth And Poverty, 1981
"It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived."
-General George S. Patton, Jr.-
(1885-1945) US Army General
"I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country."
-Nathan Hale-
(1755-1776) American Patriot
Source: his last words before being hanged by the British, without a trial, September 22, 1776
"The sum of all known reverence I add up in you whoever you are, The President is there in the White House for you, it is not you who are here for him, The Secretaries act in their bureaus for you, not you here for them, The Congress convenes every Twelfth-month for you, Laws, courts, the forming of States, the charters of cities, the going and coming of commerce and malls, are all for you."
-Walt Whitman-
Leaves of Grass
"The highest patriotism is not a blind acceptance of official policy, but a love of one's country deep enough to call her to a higher standard."
-George McGovern-
(1922-2012) US Congressman (D-SD), 1972 Democratic presidential nominee
"Americans find it intolerable that one constitutional right should have to be surrendered in order to assert another. America is the land of the free and home of the brave -- we don't need a Patriot Act, because we are already patriots. We know freedom means responsibility, but I am not sure Congress and its domestic enforcement agencies do. More often than not, new security measures enacted by the government have resulted in more violations of the citizenry than terrorists have ever done. The terrorists want us to be afraid -- well, we are not afraid. Stop wasting dollars on this program -- it is not good for America. To give up essential liberty for a little security provides neither. The right to be left alone from government intrusion is the beginning of all freedoms."
-Eric Schaub-
Individualist, activist, speaker, author
2009-12-15
Source: letter to Congress, December 15th, 2009
"Where liberty dwells, there is my country."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
Source: (attributed), letter to Benjamin Vaughn, March 14, 1783
"If we do not learn to regard a war, and the separate campaigns of which it is composed, as a chain of linked engagements each leading to the next, but instead succumb to the idea that the capture of certain geographical points or the seizure of undefended provinces are of value in themselves, we are liable to regard them as windfall profits. In so doing, and in ignoring the fact that they are links in a continuous chain of events, we also ignore the possibility that their possession may later lead to definite disadvantages."
-Carl von Clausewitz-
"We could say the government spend like drunken sailors, but that would be unfair to drunken sailors, because the sailors are spending their own money."
-Ronald Reagan-
"The best results in the operation of a government wherein every citizen has a share largely depend upon a proper limitation of the purely partisan zeal and effort and a correct appreciation of the time when the heat of the partisan should be merged in the patriotism of the citizen. ... At this hour the animosities of political strife, the bitterness of partisan defeat, and the exultation of partisan triumph should be supplanted by an ungrudging acquiescence in the popular will and a sober, conscientious concern for the general weal. ... Public extravagance begets extravagance among the people."
-Grover Cleveland-
(1837-1908) 22nd & 24th US President
Source: First Inaugural Address, 1885
"We're gonna give you a fair trial, followed by a first class hangin'."
-Cobb-
Silverado
"The obligations of our representatives in Washington are to protect our liberty, not coddle the world, precipitating no-win wars, while bringing bankruptcy and economic turmoil to our people."
-Dr. Ron Paul-
(1935-) American physician, US Congressman (R-TX), US Presidential candidate
Source: Freedom Under Siege, 1987
"...A spider web of 'patriots for profit', operating from the highest positions of special trust and confidence, have successfully circumvented our constitutional system in pursuit of a New World Order. They have infused America with drugs in order to fund covert operations while sealing the fate of our servicemen left in communist prisons."
-Lt. Col. James "Bo" Gritz (Ret)
(1939-) American former US Army Special Forces officer, Commander, U.S. Army Special Forces, Latin America, Chief, Delta force, most decorated Green Beret Commander in American history
"My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of the higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military."
-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
"The only prize much cared for by the powerful is power."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.-
(1841-1935) US Supreme Court Justice, also known as "The Great Dissenter"
1913
"The finest trick of the devil is to persuade you that he does not exist."
-Charles Baudelaire-
(1821-1867) French poet, essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe
Source: Le Spleen de Paris (1862), XXIX: "Le Joueur généreux"
"The Rothschilds can start or prevent wars. Their word could make or break empires."
-Chicago Evening American-
Source: 3 December 1923
"From the days of Spartacus, Weishophf, Karl Marx, Trotski, Belacoon, Rosa Luxenburg, and Ema Goldman, this world conspiracy has been steadily growing. This conspiracy played a definite recognizable role in the tragedy of the French revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the 19th Century. And now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their head and have become the undisputed masters of that enormous empire."
-Sir Winston Churchill-
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1940-1945, 1951-1955)
Source: “Zionism versus Bolshevism,” Illustrated Sunday Herald, 8 Feb. 1920, p. 5
"Power, like a desolating pestilence,
Pollutes whate'er it touches; and obedience,
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,
Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame,
A mechanized automaton."
-Percy Bysshe Shelley-
(1792-1822) British poet
Source: Queen Mab [1813], pt. III
"When written in Chinese, the word for ‘crisis’ is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity."
-John F. Kennedy-
"Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism."
-Carl Gustav Jung-
(1875-1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology
"False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for everyone takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness; and when this is done, one path towards error is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened."
-Charles Darwin-
(1809-1882)
"A university’s essential character is that of being a center of free inquiry and criticism -- a thing not to be sacrificed for anything else."
-Richard Hofstadter-
(1916-1970) American historian, professor
Source: Commencement Address, Columbia University, 1968.
"Limiting the freedom of news 'just a little bit' is in the same category within the classic example 'a little bit pregnant.' "
-Robert A. Heinlein-
(1907-1988) American writer
Source: A Rabble in Arms
"For whatever deserves to exist deserves also to be known, for knowledge is the image of existence, and things mean and splendid exist alike."
-Sir Francis Bacon-
(1561-1626) Philosopher, British Lord Chancellor
Source: The Advancement of Learning, 1605
"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens. Even a beggar does not depend upon it entirely."
-Adam Smith-
"What basic psychological distortion can be found in every civilization of which we know anything? The only psychological force capable of producing these perversions is morality - the concept of right and wrong. The re-interpretation and eventual eradication of the concept of right and wrong are the belated objectives of nearly all of psychotherapy."
-Dr. G. Brock Chisolm-
(1896-1971) Canadian psychiatrist, medical practitioner, World War I veteran, first head of the World Federation of Mental Health, first director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO)
"During my training I was trained in Psycho-politics. This was the art of capturing the minds of a nation through brainwashing and fake mental health."
-Kenneth Goff-
(1914-1972) anti-Fluoride, Christian Identity, anti-Communist minister, 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"
"People hardly ever make use of the freedom they have, for example, freedom of thought; instead they demand freedom of speech as a compensation."
-Soren Kierkegaard-
(1813-1855) Danish philosopher
"A lie would have no sense unless the truth were felt dangerous."
-Alfred Adler-
(1870-1937) Austrian medical doctor, psychologist and founder of the school of Individual Psychology
"Advances are made by answering questions. Discoveries are made by questioning answers."
-Bernhard Haisch-
(1949- ) German-born American astrophysicist, Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Scientific Exploration
"War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength."
-George Orwell-
1984
"Nature is inexorable. If men do not follow the truth they cannot live."
-Calvin Coolidge-
(1872-1933) 30th US President
"To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first, and call whatever you hit the target."
-Ashleigh Brilliant-
(1933- ) British-American author, syndicated cartoonist
"Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe... till we come to the hard bottom of rocks in place, which we can call reality."
-Henry David Thoreau-
(1817-1862) American author, poet, philosopher, polymath, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and transcendentalist
"Reasonable argument is impossible when authority becomes the arbiter."
-Orson Scott Card-
(1951- ) American novelist, critic, public speaker, essayist, columnist
"As individuals, men believe they ought to love and serve each other and establish justice between each other. As racial, economic and national groups they take for themselves, whatever their power can command."
-Reinhold Niebuhr-
"There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal."
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
"While they promise them liberty, they themselves are the servants of corruption: for of whom a man is overcome, of the same is he brought in bondage."
-The Holy Bible-
Source: 2 Peter 2:19
"Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance."
-Confucius-
[Kung Fu-tse] (551-479 B.C.) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher
"The elegance of honesty needs no adornment."
-Merry Browne-
"Throughout history, the attachment of even the humblest people to their freedom... has come as an unpleasant shock to condescending ideologues."
-Paul Bede Johnson-
(1928-) English journalist, popular historian, speechwriter, and author
Source: Enemies of Society, 1977
"Authority has every reason to fear the skeptic, for authority can rarely survive in the face of doubt."
-Robert Lindner-
(1914-1956)
Source: Must You Conform?, 1956
"Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility."
-Ambrose Bierce-
"It is a mysterious thing, the loss of faith — as mysterious as faith itself. Like faith, it is ultimately not rooted in logic; it is a change in the climate of the mind."
-George Orwell-
No, sometimes it's just an eventual acceptance of a lack of evidence. And extraordinary claims, as they say... 'Course, I suppose that can be viewed as a change in the climate of the rational mind...
"And now, what has Anarchism to say to all this, this bankruptcy of republicanism, this modern empire that has grown up on the ruins of our early freedom? We say this, that the sin our fathers sinned was that they did not trust liberty wholly. They thought it possible to compromise between liberty and government, believing the latter to be 'a necessary evil,' and the moment the compromise was made, the whole misbegotten monster of our present tyranny began to grow. Instruments which are set up to safeguard rights become the very whip with which the free are struck."
-Voltairine de Cleyre-
"The Anarchist agrees that Hamilton was logical, and understood the core of government; the difference is, that while strong governmentalists believe this is necessary and desirable, we choose the opposite conclusion, No Government Whatsoever."
-Voltairine de Cleyre-
"I believe that America is the greatest country in history and for good reasons, but America has been changing and not for the better. Our free society has been falling prey to a more repressive system with methods for the increased control of people. The return of groups and individuals to the controlling ideology of Imperialism and Marxism using the structures of Corporatism, Socialism and Democracy. The result is that this nation's foundational principles based on the ideology of Liberty are now in danger of extinction."
-Darren Perkins-
"The Declaration of Independence... is not a legal prescription conferring powers upon the courts; and the Constitution's refusal to 'deny or disparage' other rights is far removed from affirming any one of them, and even farther removed from authorizing judges to identify what they might be, and to enforce the judges' list against laws duly enacted by the people."
-Dr. Laura Schlessinger-
(1947- ) American commentator, author
Source: Wrongly attributed to Dr. Schlessinger. The quote is from Justice Antonin Scalia
"There, I guess King George will be able to read that."
-John Hancock-
(1737-1793) American merchant, statesman, and prominent Patriot of the American Revolution, Scholar President of the Continental Congress (1775-1777), governor of Massachussets, first signer of the Declaration of Independence, remembered for his large and stylish signature on the Declaration of Independence
Source: Remark on signing American Declaration of Independence
"The Declaration of Independence predicated upon the glory of man and the corresponding duty to society that the rights of citizens ought to be protected with every power and resource of the state, and a government that does any less is false to the teachings of that great document — false to the name American. The assertion of human rights is naught but a call to human sacrifice. This is yet the spirit of the American people. Only so long as this flame burns shall we endure, and the light of liberty be shed over the nations of the earth."
-Calvin Coolidge-
"The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it."
-Henry David Thoreau-
"The States are nations."
-Daniel Webster-
(1782-1852) US Senator
"The thirteen States are thirteen Sovereignties."
-James Wilson-
(1742-1798) Member of Continental Congress, signed Declaration of Independence; U.S. Supreme Court Justice and delegate from Pennsylvania
Source: Commentaries on the Constitution, Vol. III, p 287
"How can justice be present in an institution which, by necessity, violates the rights of at least some of those over whom it rules? So long as at least one libertarian exists on the face of the earth the idea that the state and justice can co-exist in the same political container must be a false proposition. And even after the state has killed off the last libertarian can it be said to be a just institution if all those who accept it do so because they fear for their lives and the confiscation of their property? What kind of justice is it that says 'Your money or your life,' and whichever way you answer, your antagonist wins the game?"
-Carl Watner-
"I am beginning to realize that 'sanity' is no longer a value or an end in itself. If modern people were a little less sane, a little more doubtful, a little more aware of their absurdities and contradictions, perhaps there might be the possibility of their survival."
-Thomas Merton-
(1915-1968)
Source: his book, Peacemaking Day by Day
"To act without clear understanding, to form habits without investigation, to follow a path all one's life without knowing where it really leads -- such is the behavior of the multitude."
-Mencius-
[Mengzi Meng-tse] (c.371 - c.288 B.C.) Chinese Confucian philosopher
"I will not surrender responsibility for my life and my actions."
-John Enoch Powell-
(1912-1998) British politician and member of Parliament
"There is a great deal of self-will in the world, but very little genuine independence of character."
-Frederick W. Faber-
(1814-1863) British hymn writer and theologian
"It used to be the boast of free men that, so long as they kept within the bounds of the known law, there was no need to ask anybody's permission or to obey anybody's orders. It is doubtful whether any of us can make this claim today."
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
Source: The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), p. 208
"There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest."
-Elie Wiesel-
(1928-) Author, Nobel Peace Prize 1986
"At the bottom of a good deal of bravery... lurks a miserable cowardice. Men will face powder and steel because they cannot face public opinion."
-E. H. Chapin-
[Edwin Hubbell Chapin] (1814-1880) American preacher, editor of the Christian Leader
"We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another."
-Robert Oppenheimer-
"Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty."
-The Holy Bible-
Source: 2 Corinthians 3:17
"None of us would trade freedom of expression for the narrowness of the public censor. America is a free market for people who have something to say, and need not fear to say it."
-Hubert H. Humphrey-
(1911-1978) US Vice-President, US Senator (D-MN)
Source: New York Times, 9 March 1967
"He alone is free who lives with free consent under the entire guidance of reason."
-Baruch Spinoza-
(1632-1677) Dutch philosopher of Sephardi Portuguese origin
"Not only do I hate violence, but I firmly believe that the fight against it is not hopeless. I realize that the task is difficult. I realize that, only too often in the course of history, it has happened that what appeared at first to be a great success in the fight against violence was followed by a defeat. I do not overlook the fact that the new age of violence which was opened by the two World wars is by no means at an end. Nazism and Fascism are thoroughly beaten, but I must admit that their defeat does not mean that barbarism and brutality have been defeated. On the contrary, it is no use closing our eyes to the fact that these hateful ideas achieved something like a victory in defeat. I have to admit that Hitler succeeded in degrading the moral standards of our Western world, and that in the world of today there is more violence and brutal force than would have been tolerated even in the decade after the first World war. And we must face the possibility that our civilization may ultimately be destroyed by those new weapons which Hitlerism wished upon us, perhaps even within the first decade after the second World war; for no doubt the spirit of Hitlerism won its greatest victory over us when, after its defeat, we used the weapons which the threat of Nazism had induced us to develop."
-Karl Popper-
"Much of what are called 'social problems' consists of the fact that intellectuals have theories that do not fit the real world. From this they conclude that it is the real world which is wrong and needs changing."
"Liberty's view of the government could be summed up in a few short phrases:
If it works, work with it.
If it doesn't, work against it.
If it works you over, abolish it."
-Angel Shamaya-
"Read, every day, something no one else is reading.
Think, every day, something no one else is thinking.
Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do.
It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity."
-Gotthold Ephraim Lessing-
(1729-1781) German Dramatist
"Him that I love, I wish to be free -- even from me."
-Anne Morrow Lindbergh-
pioneering American aviator, author, and spouse of fellow aviator Charles Lindbergh, Jr.
"Now the 21st century approaches and with it the inevitability of change. We must wonder if the American people will find renewal and rejuvenation within themselves, will discover again their capacity for innovation and adaptation. If not, alas, the nation's future will be shaped by sightless forces of history over which Americans will have no control."
-John Chancellor-
(1927-1996) American journalist, news anchorman
"It is the mark of an educated man to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."
-Aristotle-
(384-322 BC) Greek philosopher
"As compared with impulsive commitment to the first idea which dawns, that is, with intuitive action, reasoning is patient, exploratory of other possibilities, and deliberative."
-Edwin Arthur Burtt-
(1892-1989) American philosopher
Source: Right Thinking, 1946
"That is true liberty, which bears a pure and firm breast."
-Quintus Ennius-
(c.239 BC - c.169 BC) Considered the father of Roman poetry
"Truth is always exciting. Speak it, then; life is dull without it."
-Pearl S. Buck-
(1892-1973)
"It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America."
-Molly Ivins-
[Mary Tyler Ivins] (1944-2007) American newspaper columnist, political commentator, and best-selling author
"When somebody lies, somebody loses."
-Stephanie Ericsson-
"That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
And strictly constrained by a written charter, right Abe? Right...?
"When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir."
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-
(1929-1968) US civil rights leaderr>SoSource: "I Have a Dream" speech, August 28, 1963
&q"Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty."
-Socrates-
"Augustus won over the soldiers with gifts, the populace with cheap corn, and all men with the sweets of repose, and so grew greater by degrees, while he concentrated in himself the functions of the Senate, the magistrates, and the laws. He was wholly unopposed, for the boldest spirits had fallen in battle, or in the proscription, while the remaining nobles, the readier they were to be slaves, were raised the higher by wealth and promotion, so that, aggrandised by revolution, they preferred the safety of the present to the dangerous past."
-The Annals of Tacitus-
Source: The Annals (Latin: Annales) by Roman historian and senator Tacitus is a history of the Roman Empire from the reign of Tiberius to that of Nero, the years AD 14-68
"Every man has a right to his own opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts."
-Bernard Baruch-
"It is not my intention to doubt that the doctrine of the Illuminati and the principles of Jacobinism had not spread in the United States. On the contrary, no one is more satisfied of this fact than I am.
The idea that I meant to convey, was, that I did not believe that the Lodges of Free Masons in _this_ Country had, as Societies, endeavoured to propagate the diabolical tenets of the first, or pernicious principles of the latter (if they are susceptible of separation). That Individuals of them may have done it, or that the founder, or instrument employed to found, the Democratic Societies in the United States, may have had these objects; and actually had a separation of the People from their Government in view, is too evident to be questioned."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country,' Freemason
Source: letter to George Washington Snyder, October 24, 1798, Mount Vernon, in The Writings of George Washington, vol. 20, p. 518. Washington acknowledged that the Illuminati had begun actively recruiting members from within the American lodges of Freemasonry.
"The most wonderful thing of all is that the distinguished Lutheran and Calvinist theologians who belong to our order really believe that they see in it (Illuminati) the true and genuine sense of Christian Religion. Oh mortal man, is there anything you cannot be made to believe?"
-Adam Weishaupt-
(1748-1830?) [Spartacus] Professor of Natural and Canon Law at Germany's Ingolstadt University
upon establishing his "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.
"There is sufficient evidence that a number of societies, of the Illuminati, have been established in this land of Gospel light and civil liberty, which were first organized from the grand society, in France. They are doubtless secretly striving to undermine all our ancient institutions, civil and sacred. These societies are closely leagued with those of the same Order, in Europe; they have all the same object in view. The enemies of all order are seeking our ruin. Should infidelity generally prevail, our independence would fall of course. Our republican government would be annihilated."
-Joseph Willard-
(1738-1804) U.S. Congregational clergyman, President of Harvard University
Source: 4 July 1812, A Sermon Preached in Lancaster … on the Anniversary of Our National Independence … Before the Washington Benevolent Societies of Lancaster and Guildhall (Windsor, Vermont: Thomas M. Pomroy, 1812), pp. 14–15
[Ed. note - Willard died in 1804, who delivered the sermon in 1812?]
"Secret Societies have existed among all peoples, savage and civilized, since the beginning of recorded history... It is beyond question that the secret societies of all ages have exercised a considerable degree of political influence."
-Manly P. Hall-
(1901-1990) Canadian author, lecturer, astrologer, mystic and Freemasonon
"In 1891, [Cecile] Rhodes organized a secret society with members in a "Circle of Initiates" and an outer circle known as the "Association of Helpers" later organized as the Round Table organization. In 1909-1913, they organized semi-secret groups known as Round Table Groups in the chief British dependencies and the United States. In 1919, they founded the Royal Institute of International Affairs. Similar Institutes of International Affairs were established in the chief British dominions and the United States where it is known as the Council on Foreign Relations. After 1925, the Institute of Pacific Relations was set up in twelve Pacific area countries. They were constantly harping on the lessons to be learned from the failure of the American Revolution and the success of the Canadian federation of 1867 and hoped to federate the various parts of the empire and then confederate the whole with the United Kingdom. ...
There does exist and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates to some extent in the way the Radical Right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so. I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960s, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. I have objected, both in the past and recently, to a few of its policies but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known."
-Carroll Quigley-
(1910-1977) Professor of International Relations, Georgetown University Foreign Service School, Washington, D.C., member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), mentor to Bill Clinton
Source: Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time, 1966, pg 131, 950
"We defer to authority figures because we believe that they know more than we do. If a mistake is made, it’s easy to lay the blame at their feet. Ultimately, however, we are responsible for choosing the authority figure to whom we defer. Our choice to obey someone who urges aggression against others makes us responsible for that aggression. If we truly wish to help our world, we must first identify ways in which we may be causing its problems."
-Mary J. Ruwart-
"[The war in Iraq is] a rare opportunity to move toward an historic period of cooperation. Out of these troubled times... a New World Order can emerge."
-George Herbert Walker Bush-
(1924- ) 41st US President, CIA Director, CFR Director, Trilateralist, Yale Skull & Bones Society
before Congress on September 11, 1990
Source: in a speech Bush entitled "Toward a New World Order"
"Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September the 11th; malicious lies that attempt to shift the blame away from the terrorists, themselves, away from the guilty."
-George W. Bush-
(1946- ) 43rd US President, Yale Skull & Bones Society
Source: at the United Nations, November 11, 2001
"This present window of opportunity which during a truly peaceful and interdependent world order might be built will not be open for too long. Already there are powerful forces at work that threaten to destroy all of our hopes and efforts."
-David Rockefeller-
(1915- ) Internationalist billionaire, CFR kingpin, founder of the Trilateralist Commission, World Order Godfather
Source: Speech to the United Nations Business Council on September 23, 1994
"The government, which was designed for the people, has got into the hands of the bosses and their employers, the special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy."
-Woodrow Wilson-
(1856-1924) 28th US President
"Most true points are fine points. There never was a dispute between mortals where both sides hadn't a bit of right."
-John Buchan-
Here's a point: there's probably more than just the 2 sides you're presented...
"Rulers, Statesmen, Nations, are wont to be emphatically commended to the teaching which experience offers in history. But what experience and history teach is this, that peoples and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it. Each period is involved in such peculiar circumstances, exhibits a condition of things so strictly idiosyncratic, that its conduct must be regulated by considerations connected with itself, and itself alone. Amid the pressure of great events, a general principle gives no help. It is useless to revert to similar circumstances in the Past. The pallid shades of memory struggle in vain with the life and freedom of the Present."
-Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel-
"Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce."
-James A. Garfield-
(1831-1881) 20th President of the United States (1881), assassinated
"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 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."
-J. P. Morgan-
[John Pierpont Morgan] (1837-1913) American financier and banker
Source: Questionable: No reliable source for this quote has been found. Attributed to: Private Communique to Leading U.S. Bankers only, 1934
"Money is a new form of slavery, and distinguishable from the old simply by the fact that it is impersonal -- that there is no human relation between master and slave."
-Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi-
(1828-1910) Russian writer
"Truth travels slowly, but it will reach even you in time."
-Benjamin Disraeli-
(1804-1881) Prime Minister of England, British statesman, novelist
"I don't have a problem with guilt about money. The way I see it is that my money represents an enormous number of claim checks on society. It is like I have these little pieces of paper that I can turn into consumption. If I wanted to, I could hire 10,000 people to do nothing but paint my picture every day for the rest of my life. And the GNP would go up. But the utility of the product would be zilch, and I would be keeping those 10,000 people from doing AIDS research, or teaching, or nursing]. I don't do that though. I don't use very many of those claim checks. There's nothing material I want very much. And I'm going to give virtually all of those claim checks to charity when my wife and I die."
-Warren Buffett-
"If others would but reflect on mathematical truths as deeply and as continuously as I have, they would make my discoveries."
-Carl Friedrich Gauss-
[Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss] (1777-1855) German mathematician
Source: The World of Mathematics (1956) Edited by J. R. Newman
"The foundation of every state is the education of its youth."
-Diogenes-
(413-323 B.C.) Greek philosopher, Cynic
"If the only motive was to help people who could not afford education, advocates of government involvement would have simply proposed tuition subsidies."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
"The agency that is so strict on the way Americans keep their books cannot even pass a financial audit."
-Ted Stevens-
(1923-2010) US Senator (Alaska-R)
Source: on the first-ever audit of the IRS in 1993
And who knows more about fiscal responsibility than Ted "Bridge to Nowhere" Stevens, I ask ya...!
"Illusions are like mistresses. We can have many of them without tying ourselves down to responsibility. But truth insists on marriage. Once a person embraces truth, he is in its ruthless, but gentle, grasp."
-Rebazar Tarzs-
Tibetan lama
"For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another. For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself."
-The Holy Bible-
Source: Galatians 5:13-14
"That religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience; and that it is the duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love and charity towards each other."
-Virginia Declaration of Rights-
Source: Article XVI, Ratified in Virginia on June 12, 1776
"The theory of free speech, that truth is so much larger and stranger and more many-sided than we know of, that it is very much better at all costs to hear everyone’s account of it, is a theory which has been justified on the whole by experiment, but which remains a very daring and even a very surprising theory. It is really one of the great discoveries of the modern time."
-Gilbert Keith Chesterton-
(1874-1936) British essayist, critic, poet, and novelist
Source: Robert Browning, 1914
"We know what a person thinks, not when he tells us what he thinks, but by his actions."
-Isaac Bashevis Singer-
(1904-1991) Polish-born Jewish author, Nobel Prize in Literature, 1978
"Men and governments must act to the best of their ability. There is no such thing as absolute certainty but there is assurance sufficient for the purposes of human life."
-John Stuart Mill-
(1806-1873) English philosopher and economist
"To say, as the arguments of most persons do, that the people, in their individual and natural capacities, have a right to institute government, but that they have no right, in the same capacities, to preserve that government by putting down usurpation—and that any attempt to do so is revolution, is blank absurdity."
-Lysander Spooner-
"We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender."
-Sir Winston Churchill-
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1940-1945, 1951-1955)
"Among the numerous advantages promised by a well constructed Union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction. The friend of popular governments never finds himself so much alarmed for their character and fate, as when he contemplates their propensity to this dangerous vice."
-James Madison-
Federalist No. 10
That's political parties, y'all...
"Now the truth of the matter is, there is nothing wrong with this country. Please. The message I want to leave with you is that there's nothing wrong with this country that the proper leadership won't cure. We've been here before. In 1787, the economy of our nation was in absolute chaos and as a consequence, they met in Philadelphia to form a new country, and when they did, they did the right things, and in the second State of the Union address, which was written at that time by George Washington, he said the foundations, the economic foundations of our nation are on such sound footing that it would have been a madman would have suspected 3 years ago. The fact is that the chaos that they're creating doesn't mean that America can or has to be in decline. It means that we need to remove them as rapidly as possible and get people that know what to do and America will continue to climb."
-Bob McEwen-
(1950-) US Congressman (OH-R) (1981-1993)
Source: http://www.conservative.org/cpac/archives/cpacarchivescpac-2010-bob-mcewen/#ixzz1R9nkjSB1
"Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper."
-Francis Bacon-
(1561-1626) Philosopher, British Lord Chancellor
Hope, it has been said, is like a dose of spiritual clap...
"If you are wise, mingle these two elements: do not hope without despair, or despair without hope."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter CIV: On care of health and peace of mind, line 12
isolationism = North Korea (relentlessly illustrative)
non-interventionism = Switzerland (and, y'know, Ron Paul the "isolationist")
Relatedly...
patriotism: i love my country (if not my government)
nationalism: my country can beat up your country
imperialism: here we come now... (and if you're not all in, you're an isolationist)
"The First Amendment was never intended to insulate our public institutions from any mention of God, the Bible or religion. When such insulation occurs, another religion, such as secular humanism, is effectively established."
-Crockett v. Sorenson-
Source: U.S. District Court stated in Crockett v. Sorenson, W.D. Va,. 1983
Or, y'know, State worship...
"Among the religions in this country which do not teach what would generally be considered a belief in the existence of God are Buddhism, Taoism, ethical culture, secular humanism and others."
-Justice Hugo L. Black-
(1886-1971) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: Torcaso v Watkins (1961)
Or, y'know, State worship...
"Our problems are man-made, therefore they may be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings."
-John F. Kennedy-
(1917-1963) 35th US President
Source: speech at The American University, Washington, D.C., June 10, 1963
"LOGIC The principle governing human intellection. Its nature may be deduced from examining the following propositions, both of which are held by human beings to be true and often by the same people: 'I can't so you musn't,' and 'I can but you musn't.'"
-John Brunner-
"There is in human affairs one order which is best. That order is not always the one which exists; but it is the order which should exist for the greatest good of humanity. God knows, it and will it: man's duty it is to discover and establish it."
-Emile Louis Victor de Laveleye-
(1822-1892) Belgian economist
"In politics, love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it nothing is being achieved except hypocrisy. All the characteristics you stress in the Negro people: their beauty, their capacity for joy, their warmth, and their humanity, are well-known characteristics of all oppressed people. They grow out of suffering and they are the proudest possession of all pariahs. Unfortunately, they have never survived the hour of liberation by even five minutes. Hatred and love belong together, and they are both destructive; you can afford them only in private and, as a people, only so long as you are not free."
-Hannah Arendt-
(1906-1975) German-American political theorist, escaped Nazi Germany
Source: Letter to James Baldwin (21 November 1962).
"The cause of freedom is identified with the destinies of humanity, and in whatever part of the world it gains ground by and by, it will be a common gain to all those who desire it."
-Louis Kossuth-
[Lajos Kossuth de Udvard et Kossuthfalva] (1802-1894) Hungarian lawyer, journalist, politician and Regent-President of Hungary (1849)
"True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others, at whatever cost."
-Arthur Ashe-
(1943-1993) American World No. 1 professional tennis player
"But peace does not rest in the charters and covenants alone. It lies in the hearts and minds of all people. So let us not rest all our hopes on parchment and on paper, let us strive to build peace, a desire for peace, a willingness to work for peace in the hearts and minds of all of our people. I believe that we can. I believe the problems of human destiny are not beyond the reach of human beings."
-John F. Kennedy-
(1917-1963) 35th US President
"I always knew that deep down in every human heart, there is mercy and generosity. No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than the opposite."
-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
Ahh, but isn't the opposite of 'love' not 'hate', but rather 'indifference'...?
"The possibility of coordination through voluntary cooperation rests on the elementary — yet frequently denied — proposition that both parties to an economic transaction benefit from it, provided the economic transaction is bilaterally voluntary and informed."
-Milton Friedman-
"Discovery consists in seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what no one else has thought."
-Albert Szent-Gyorgi-
(1893-1986) Hungarian physiologist, Nobel Prize in 1937
"Indeed the Idols I have loved so long,
have done my credit in this World much wrong;
have drowned my Glory in a shallow Cup,
and sold my Reputation for a Song."
-Omar Khayyam-
(1048-1131) Persian poet, mathematician, astronomer
"Never assume the obvious is true."
-William Safire-
(1929-2009) American author, columnist, journalist, presidential speechwriter
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
Source: Attributed, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759
"The history of totalitarian regimes is reflected in the evolution and perfection of the instruments of terror and more especially the police."
-Carl J. Friedrich-
(1901-1984) German-American professor, political theorist
Source: The Pathology of Politics, 1972
"There is nothing that can help you understand your beliefs more than trying to explain them to an inquisitor."
-Frank Clark-
Source: Reader’s Digest, July 1978
"We tell lies when we are afraid... afraid of what we don't know, afraid of what others will think, afraid of what will be found out about us. But every time we tell a lie, the thing that we fear grows stronger."
-Tad Williams-
(1957- ) Author
Source: in Daw Books (April 1994). Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, Book 3 To Green Angel Tower, Part 1
"Newspaper editors separate the wheat from the chaff -- and print the chaff."
-Adlai E. Stevenson II-
(1900-1965) Governor of Illinois (1949-1953), U.S. presidential candidate (1952, 1956), U.N. Ambassador (1961-1965)
"When an opponent declares, 'I will not come over to your side,' I calmly say, 'Your child belongs to us already. ... What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.'"
-Adolf Hitler-
(1889-1945) German Nazi Dictator
Source: Nov. 6, 1933
“We know of no other enumerated constitutional right whose core protection has been subjected to a freestanding 'interest-balancing' approach. The very enumeration of the right takes out of the hands of government -- even the Third Branch of Government -- the power to decide on a case-by-case basis whether the right is really worth insisting upon. A constitutional guarantee subject to future judges' assessments of its usefulness is no constitutional guarantee at all. Constitutional rights are enshrined with the scope they were understood to have when the people adopted them, whether or not future legislatures or (yes) even future judges think that scope too broad... Undoubtedly some think that the Second Amendment is outmoded. That is perhaps debatable, but what is not debatable is that it is not the role of this Court to pronounce the Second Amendment extinct.”
-Justice Antonin Scalia-
(1936-2016) American jurist, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
Source: District of Columbia v. Heller, June 26, 2008, striking down D.C.'s gun ban as unconstitutional
"The conclusion is thus inescapable that the history, concept, and wording of the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, as well as its interpretation by every major commentator and court in the first half-century after its ratification, indicates that what is protected is an individual right of a private citizen to own and carry firearms in a peaceful manner."
-Report of the Subcommittee on the Constitution of the Committee on the Judiciary-
Source: United States Senate, 97th Congress, Second Session ( February 1982 )
"Gun control has proved to be a grievous failure, a means of disarming honest citizens without limiting firepower available to those who prey on the law-abiding. Attempting to use the legal system to punish the weapon rather than the person misusing the weapon is similarly doomed to fail."
-Doug Bandow-
(1954- ) American columnist, author, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute
"Let experience solve it. To listen to mere speculation in such a case were criminal."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: George Washington's Farewell Address, September 17, 1796
<a href=>http://liberty-tree.ca/research/George.Washingtons.Farewell.Address</a>
"To secure their enjoyment, however, certain protections or barriers have been erected which serve to maintain inviolate the three primary rights of personal security, personal liberty, and private property. These may in America be said to be:
1. The bill of rights and written constitutions ...
2. The rights of bearing arms -- which with us is not limited and restrained by an arbitrary system of game laws as in England, but is particularly enjoyed by every citizen, and is among his most valuable privileges, since it furnishes the means of resisting as a freeman ought, the inroads of usurpation.
3. The right of applying to the courts of justice for the redress of injuries."
-Henry St. George Tucker-
(1780-1848) Virginia jurist, law professor, and U.S. Congressman (1815-1819)
Source: Commentaries on the Laws of Virginia p. 43 (1831)
"You want to know my definition of gun control? Being able to stand at 25 meters and put two rounds in the same hole. That’s gun control."
-Jesse Ventura-
[James George Janos] (1951-) Governor of Minnesota, former professional wrestler
Source: Playboy Interview, September 1999
"What, Sir, is the use of a militia? It is to prevent the establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty. ... Whenever Governments mean to invade the rights and liberties of the people, they always attempt to destroy the militia, in order to raise an army upon their ruins."
-Elbridge Gerry-
(1744-1814) of Massachusetts, Signer of the Declaration of Independence and Member of the Constitutional Convention
Source: spoken during floor debate over the Second Amendment, I Annals of Congress at 750, August 17, 1789
"America united with a handful of troops, or without a single soldier, exhibits a more forbidding posture to foreign ambition than America disunited, with a hundred thousand veterans ready for combat."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Federalist No. 14, November 30, 1787
"[The Bill of Rights is] designed to protect individuals and minorities against the tyranny of the majority, but it's also designed to protect the people against bureaucracy, against the government."
-Laurence Tribe-
(1941-) American professor of constitutional law
"Just as an enemy is more dangerous to a retreating army, so every trouble that fortune brings attacks us all the harder if we yield and turn our backs."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter LXXVIII
"How to create a socialist state by Saul Alinsky:
There are 8 levels of control that must be obtained before you are able to create a socialist state. The first is the most important.
1) Healthcare — Control healthcare and you control the people.
2) Poverty — Increase the Poverty level as high as possible, poor people are easier to control and will not fight back if you are providing everything for them to live.
3) Debt — Increase the debt to an unsustainable level. That way you are able to increase taxes, and this will produce more poverty.
4) Gun Control — Remove the ability to defend themselves from the Government. That way you are able to create a police state.
5) Welfare — Take control of every aspect of their lives (Food, Housing, and Income).
6) Education — Take control of what people read and listen to — take control of what children learn in school.
7) Religion — Remove the belief in the God from the Government and schools.
8) Class Warfare — Divide the people into the wealthy and the poor. This will cause more discontent and it will be easier to take (Tax) the wealthy with the support of the poor."
-Saul Alinksy-
Source: Attributed, no source
"The militia, who are in fact the effective part of the people at large, will render many troops quite unnecessary. They will form a powerful check upon the regular troops, and will generally be sufficient to over-awe them"
-Tench Coxe-
(1755-1824) American political economist
Source: An American Citizen IV, October 21, 1787
"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
"A person has the right to keep and bear arms for the defense of self, family, home and state, and for lawful hunting and recreational use."
-West Virginia Constitution-
Source: West Virginia Constitution, article III, section 22
"...one of the basic conditions for the victory of socialism is the arming of the workers (Communist) and the disarming of the bourgeoisie (the middle class)."
-Vladimir Ilyich Lenin-
[Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov] (1870-1924) First Leader of the Soviet Union
"[U]nderlying the gun control struggle is a fundamental division in our nation. The intensity of passion on this issue suggests to me that we are experiencing a sort of low grade war going on between two alternative views of what America is and ought to be. On the one side are those who take bourgeois Europe as a model of civilized society: a society just, equitable, and democratic; but well ordered, with the lines of responsibility and authority clearly drawn, and with decisions made rationally and correctly by intelligent men for the entire nation. To such people, hunting is atavistic, personal violence is shameful, and uncontrolled gun ownership is a blot on civilization. On the other side is a group of people who do not tend to be especially articulate or literate, and whose world view is rarely expressed in print. .... They ask, because they do not understand the other side, 'Why do these people want to disarm us?' They consider themselves no threat to anyone; they are not criminals, not revolutionaries. But slowly, as they become politicized, they find an analysis that fits the phenomenon they experience: Someone fears their having guns, someone is afraid of their defending their families, property, and liberty. Nasty things may begin to happen if these people begin to feel that they are cornered."
-B. Bruce-Briggs-
Source: The Great American Gun War, 45 Pub. Interest 37, 61 (1976)
"A function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purposes when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger. Speech is often provocative and challenging. It may strike at prejudices and preconceptions and have profound unsettling effects as it presses for acceptance of an idea."
-William O. Douglas-
"The difference between [people who take civil liberties seriously] and others ... is that such serious people begin with a constitutional understanding that declines to trivialize the Second Amendment or the Fourteenth Amendment, just as they likewise decline to trivialize any other right expressly identified elsewhere in the Bill of Rights. It is difficult to see why they are less than entirely right in this unremarkable view. That it has taken the NRA to speak for them, with respect to the Second Amendment, moreover, is merely interesting -- perhaps far more as a comment on others, however, than on the NRA."
-William Van Alstyne-
Professor at Duke University School of Law, served on National Board of the ACLU
Source: The Second Amendment and the Personal Right to Arms, 43 DUKE L. J. 1236, 1254 (1994)
"Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man's nose begins."
-Zechariah Chafee, Jr.-
(1865-1957) American professor of law, judicial philosopher, civil rights advocate
Source: "Freedom of Speech in Wartime", 32 Harvard Law Review 932, 957 (1919).
"The origin of all power is in the people, and they have an incontestible right to check the creatures of their own creation."
-Mercy Otis Warren-
The Muse ofthe American Revolution
"Lots of people use misleading euphemisms to make their position sound more pleasant. Socialists call themselves 'democrats.' Forced wealth redistribution is called 'welfare.' Politicians refer to their extortion as 'asking' for 'contributions.' And so on. In contrast, the terms 'anarchist' and 'voluntaryist' are specific and precise: 'anarchists' want 'rule by no one' (what the word 'anarchy' literally means), and 'voluntaryists' want all human interaction to be voluntary. And the 'non-aggression principle'is self-explanatory.
What's funny is that those who argue AGAINST a stateless society are often accidentally honest. If, for example, you are against anarchy, then you are a statist, and you advocate 'rule by someone.' If you bash 'voluntaryism,' then by definition, you are an INvoluntaryist, meaning you want some degree of violent coercion. If you disagree with the non-aggression principle, that means you are PRO-aggression, and you want violence initiated against people who didn't threaten or harm anyone. It's no wonder statists love their euphemisms and vague obfuscations. If they are simply specific and honest about what they believe, and what they advocate, they've already lost the debate."
-Larken Rose-
"Did you hear that we're writing Iraq's new Constitution? Why not just give them ours? We're not using it anymore."
-Jay Leno-
(1950- ) Comedian
"European merchants supply the best weaponry, contributing to their own defeat."
-Saladin-
enormously successful Muslim commander during the Crusades
Source: in a letter to the Caliph in Baghdad
"[T]he power to declare war is fully and exclusively vested in the legislature."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
1793
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought."
-Matsuo Basho-
(1644-1694) Japanese poet of the Edo period
"Destiny waits alike for the free man as well as for him enslaved by another's might."
-Aeschylus-
(525-456 BC) Greek playwright
Source: The Libation Bearers
"Why should we not form a secret society with but one object, the furtherance of the British Empire and the bringing of the whole world under British rule, for the recovery of the United States, for making the Anglo-Saxon race but one Empire?"
-Cecil Rhodes-
(1853-1902) British imperialist, businessman, mining magnate, and politician in South Africa
Source: Cecil Rhodes in his "Confession of Faith" at age 23.
"If there are those who think we are to jump immediately into a new world order, actuated by complete understanding and brotherly love, they are doomed to disappointment. If we are ever to approach that time, it will be after patient and persistent effort of long duration. The present international situation of mistrust and fear can only be corrected by a formula of equal status, continuously applied, to every phase of international contacts, until the cobwebs of the old order are brushed out of the minds of the people of all lands."
-Dr. Augustus O. Thomas-
Commissioner of Education for the state of Maine, President of the World Federation of Education Associations
Source: 1927, Address to the World Federation of Education Associations (WFEA) at their Toronto, Canada conference, Reference: International Understanding: Agencies Educating for a New World, 1931
"The great foe of democracy now and in the near future is plutocracy. Every year that passes brings out this antagonism more distinctly. It is to be the social war of the twentieth century. In that war militarism, expansion and imperialism will all favor plutocracy. In the first place, war and expansion will favor jobbery, both in the dependencies and at home. In the second place, they will take away the attention of the people from what the plutocrats are doing. In the third place, they will cause large expenditures of the people’s money, the return for which will not go into the treasury, but into the hands of a few schemers. In the fourth place, they will call for a large public debt and taxes, and these things especially tend to make men unequal, because any social burdens bear more heavily on the weak than on the strong, and so make the weak weaker and the strong stronger. Therefore expansion and imperialism are a grand onslaught on democracy."
-William Graham Sumner-
(1840-1910) American classical liberal (now a branch of "libertarianism" in political philosophy), social scientist, professor of sociology, polymath
Source: W. G. Sumner - The Conquest of the U. S. by Spain
"We have a lot of goodness in this country. And we should promote it, but never through the barrel of a gun. We should do it by setting good standards, motivating people and have them want to emulate us. But you can't enforce our goodness, like the neocons preach, with an armed force. It doesn't work."
-Dr. Ron Paul-
(1935-) American physician, US Congressman (R-TX), US Presidential candidate
Source: Republican Presidential Debate, Manchester, New Hampshire, June 5, 2007
“I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag."
-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
Source: from a speech in 1933
"Let us be frank: provoking military-political instability and other regional conflicts is also a convenient way of deflecting people’s attention from mounting social and economic problems. Regrettably, further attempts of this kind cannot be ruled out."
-Vladimir Putin-
(1952-) President of Russia (2012-)
Source: Key-note speech, Davos World Economic Forum, 28 January, 2009
"Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an excess, that itself will need reforming."
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge-
"No, it's not that economic inequality per se harms societies. It's just that systemic gross economic inequality can only result from and be maintained by forcibly distorting the market via statism, and this necessarily stifles the development of that society, impoverishing it as a whole -- bit by bit, subsidy by subsidy, tax by tax, bailout by bailout."
-Brad Spangler-
Regulation by crony/protectionist/corporatist regulation...
"We do not protect freedom in order to indulge error. We protect freedom in order to discover truth."
-Henry Steele Commager-
"All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it."
-Dr. Samuel Johnson-
(1709-1784) English author, poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer
Source: in Boswell’s Life of Johnson, 1791
"It is madness beyond compare
To try to reform the world."
-Molière-
[Jean-Baptiste Poquelin] (1622-1673) French playwright
Source: The Misanthrope, 1666
"The world must be made safe for democracy."
-Woodrow Wilson-
(1856-1924) 28th US President
Source: April 2, 1917, before a joint session of Congress to seek a Declaration of War against Germany
"As against the 'invisible hand' of Adam Smith, there has to be a visible hand of politicians whose objective is to have the kind of society that is caring and humane."
-Pierre Trudeau-
[Joseph Philippe Pierre Yves Elliott Trudeau] (1919-2000) Prime Minister of Canada (1968-1979, 1980-1984)
Source: Memoirs (1993), Part 3, 1974 - 1979 Victory And Defeat, p. 190
"There are good citizens and bad citizens in every class as in every locality, and the attitude of decent people toward great public and social questions should be determined, not by the accidental questions of employment or locality, but by those deep-set principles which represent the innermost souls of men."
-Theodore Roosevelt-
"Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power."
-Aldous Huxley-
(1894-1963) English writer, novelist, philosopher
"The Depreciation of the American Paper is solely owing to the excessive Quantities."
-Benjamin Franklin-
to Durnas, 18 May 1779
"It is not in the nature of politics that the best men should be elected. The best men do not want to govern their fellow men."
-George MacDonald-
"It is collectivism that is the unrealistic expression of utopian belief systems. In its worst form -- the state -- collectivism is the institutionalized exertion of violence to compel living beings to behave contrary to their natural self-interest inclinations. So strong are the motivations for individual preferences that the state must resort to attacks upon the very nature of life to satisfy the ambitions of those who see others as nothing more than resources to be exploited for such ends."
-Butler D. Shaffer-
Professor, Southwestern University School of Law
"A civilization in which there is not a continuous controversy about important issues... is on the way to totalitarianism and death."
-Robert M. Hutchins-
(1899-1977) American educational philosopher, president (1929–1945) and chancellor (1945–1951) of the University of Chicago, and earlier dean of Yale Law School (1927–1929)
Source: The University of Utopia, 1953
"Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification."
-George Washington-
"Liberty of conscience is nowadays only understood to be the liberty of believing what men please, but also of endeavoring to propagate that belief as much as they can."
-Jonathan Swift-
(1667-1745) Irish author
Source: 1715
"The very rich have such a touching faith in the efficacy of small sums."
-Tennessee Williams-
"Let's get back to the zoo before Stanley misses us!"
-Tennessee Tuxedo-
"The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-
(1803-1882) American essayist, lecturer, and poet
SoSource: Essays, 1841
"Science tells us how to heal and how to kill; it reduces the death rate in retail and then kills us wholesale in war; but only wisdom desire coordinated in the light of all experience -- can tell us when to heal and when to kill. To observe processes and to construct means is science; to criticize and coordinate ends is philosophy: and because in these days our means and instruments have multiplied beyond our interpretation and synthesis of ideals and ends, our life is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. For a fact is nothing except in relation to desire; it is not complete except in relation to a purpose and a whole. Science without philosophy, facts without perspective and valuation, cannot save us from havoc and despair. Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom."
-Will Durant-
"That the innocent, though they may have some connection or dependency upon the guilty (which, perhaps, they themselves cannot help), should not upon that account suffer or be punished for the guilty, is one of the plainest and most obvious rules of justice. In the most unjust war, however, it is commonly the sovereign or the rulers only who are guilty. The subjects are almost always perfectly innocent. Whenever it suits the conveniency of a public enemy, however, the goods of the peaceable citizens are seized both at land and at sea; their lands are laid waste, their houses are burnt, and they themselves, if they presume to make any resistance, are murdered or led into captivity; and all this in the most perfect conformity to what are called the laws of nations."
-Adam Smith-
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
"There are some who've forgotten why we have a military. It's not to promote war; it's to be prepared for peace."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
"For when they shall say, 'Peace and Safety', then sudden destruction comes upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape."
-St. Paul-
Source: The Holy Bible, I Thes. 5:3
"Abuse of power isn't limited to bad guys in other nations. It happens in our own country if we’re not vigilant."
-Clint Eastwood-
(1930-) American actor, film director, composer, producer, mayor
Source: Parade Magazine, 12 January 1997
"War is sweet to those who haven't tasted it."
-Desiderius Erasmus-
(1466-1536) Dutch theologian, classical scholar
"War is too serious a matter to entrust to military men."
-Georges Clemenceau-
(1841-1929) French Prime Minister
"In the end it will not matter to us whether we fought with flails or reeds. It will matter to us greatly on what side we fought."
-Gilbert Keith Chesterton-
(1874-1936) British essayist, critic, poet, and novelist
"I am speaking now of the highest duty we owe our friends, the noblest, the most sacred -- that of keeping their own nobleness, goodness, pure and incorrupt."
-Harriet Beecher Stowe-
(1814-1896) Abolitionist author
"It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas … If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you … On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of skeptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish the useful ideas from the worthless ones."
-Carl Sagan-
"The surest way to prevent war is not to fear it."
-John Randolph-
(1773-1833) known as John Randolph of Roanoke, a planter, Congressman from Virginia, Senator, and also Minister to Russia
"He makes a solitude, and calls it - peace."
-Lord Byron-
[George Gordon Noel Byron] (1788-1824), The 6th Baron Byron of Rochdale
"The shaft of the arrow had been feathered with one of the eagle's own plumes. We often give our enemies the means of our own destruction."
-Aesop-
(c. 550 B.C.) legendary Greek fabulist
Source: The Eagle and the Arrow
"[W]e made a great mistake in the beginning of our struggle, and I fear, in spite of all we can do, it will prove to be a fatal mistake. We appointed all our worst generals to command our armies, and all our best generals to edit the newspapers."
-Robert E. Lee-
(1807-1870) General-in-Chief of the Confederate States army
1865
Source: Personal Reminiscences, Anecdotes, and Letters of Gen. Robert E. Lee, 1875
"In order for a war to be just, three things are necessary.
First, the authority of the sovereign....
Secondly, a just cause....
Thirdly ... a rightful intention."
-Saint Thomas Aquinas-
(1225-74) Italian philosopher and theologian
"A high degree of intellect tends to make a man unsocial."
-Arthur Schopenhauer-
"Let the gull'd fool the toil of war pursue,
Where bleed the many to enrich the few."
-William Shenstone-
"The American press is extraordinarily free and vigorous, as it should be. It should be, not because it is free of inaccuracy, oversimplification and bias, but because the alternative to that freedom is worse than those failings."
-Judge Robert Bork-
(1927- ) Cricuit Judge for US Court of Appeals
Source: 1985
"The citizen who criticizes his country is paying it an implied tribute."
-J. William Fulbright-
(1905-1995) US Senator
Source: Speech, American Newspaper Publishers Association, 28 April 1966
"I do not trust my eyes to tell me what a man is: I have a better and more trustworthy light by which I can distinguish what is true from what is false: let the mind find out what is good for the mind."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: Moral Essays, De Vita Beata (On the Happy Life): cap. 2, line 2
"Uniformity, therefore, is an essential built-in element of utopian existence, and it is no less important that this uniformity remain permanent."
-Thomas Molnar-
Source: Utopia: The Perennial Heresy, 1967
"Every individual of the community at large has an equal right to the protection of government."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: Speech, Constitutional Convention, 29 June 1787
"If liberty and equality, as is thought by some are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in the government to the utmost."
- Aristotle-
(384-322 BC) Greek philosopher
Source: Politics, 343 BC
"All men have equal rights, but not to equal things."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
"An equal application of law to every condition of man is fundamental."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"All men have equal rights to liberty, to their property, and to the protection of the laws."
-Voltaire-
[François Marie Arouet] (1694-1778) French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher
Source: Essay on Manners, 1756
"Men are disturbed not by things but by their images of things."
-Epictetus-
Enchiridion
"In the state of nature... all men are born equal, but they cannot continue in this equality. Society makes them lose it, and they recover it only by the protection of the law."
-Charles de Montesquieu-
[Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat] (1689-1755) Baron de Montesquieu
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these, are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed;"
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Jefferson's hand-written draft of the Declaration of Independence, June, 1776
"Nothing is so common as to imitate one's enemies, and to use their weapons."
-Voltaire-
The weapon of coercive, corrosive politics, for example...
"Perhaps I can summarise it best by saying this -- Nations that have pursued equality, like the Iron Curtain countries, I think have finished up with neither equality, nor liberty. Nations, which like us, in the past have pursued liberty, as a fundamental objective, extending it to all, have finished up with liberty, human dignity, and far fewer inequalities than other people."
-Margaret Thatcher-
(1925-2013) British Prime Minister (1979–1990)
Source: 1976 Feb 5, TV Interview for Thames TV 'This Week'
"Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead."
-Arundhati Roy-
"Where freedom is real, equality is the passion of the masses. Where equality is real, freedom is the passion of a small minority."
-Eric Hoffer-
(1902-1983) American author, philosopher, awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
"We clamour for equality chiefly in areas where we cannot ourselves hope to obtain excellence."
-Eric Hoffer-
(1902-1983) American author, philosopher, awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
"If the Declaration of Independence justified the secession of 3,000,000 colonists in 1776, I do not see why the Constitution ratified by the same men should not justify the secession of 5,000,000 of the Southerners from the Federal Union in 1861...and when a section of our Union resolves to go out, we shall resist any coercive acts to keep it in. We hope never to live in a republic where one section is pinned to the other section by bayonets."
-Horace Greeley-
a Republican writing in his own paper
The New York Tribune, December 17, 1860
"Americans are so enamored of equality, they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
[Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clerel, le Comte de Tocqueville] (1805-1859) French historian
"The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny,"
-James Madison-
Federalist No. 47
"A government is republican in proportion as every member composing it has his equal voice in the direction of its concerns, not indeed in person, which would be impracticable beyond the limits of a city or small township, but by representatives chosen by himself and responsible to him at short periods."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"We grant no dukedoms to the few,
We hold like rights and shall;
Equal on Sunday in the pew,
On Monday in the mall.
For what avail the plough or sail,
Or land, or life, if freedom fail?"
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-
(1803-1882) American essayist, lecturer, and poet
Source: Boston (st. 5)
"Freedom is an indivisible word. If we want to enjoy it, and fight for it, we must be prepared to extend it to everyone, whether they are rich or poor, whether they agree with us or not, no matter what their race or the color of their skin."
-Wendell L. Willkie-
(1892-1944) Republican presidential candidate, 1940
Source: One World, 1943
"Morality can only exist in a free society; it can exist to the extent freedom exists."
Henry Hazlitt-
"Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses."
-Plato-
"The great ideals of liberty and equality are preserved against the assaults of opportunism, the expediency of the passing hour, the erosion of small encroachments, the scorn and derision of those who have no patience with general principles."
-Justice Benjamin Cardozo-
(1870-1938) U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Nature of Judicial Process, 1921
"The aim of art, the aim of a life, can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world. It cannot, under any circumstances, be to reduce or suppress that freedom, even temporarily."
-Albert Camus-
(1913-1960) French Algerian author
"Morality and the ideal of freedom which is the political expression of morality, are not the property of a given party or group, but a value that is fundamentally and universally human... No people will be truly free till all are free."
-Benedetto Croce-
(1866-1952) Italian Minister of Education, Philosopher, Historian, Senator, and Author
Source: Freedom, 1940
"What is history but the story of how politicians have squandered the blood and treasure of the human race?"
-Thomas Sowell-
And liberty...
"By Liberty I understand the Power which every Man has over his own Actions, and his Right to enjoy the Fruits of his Labour, Art, and Industry, as far as by it he hurts not the Society, or any Members of it, by taking from any Member, or by hindering him from enjoying what he himself enjoys. The Fruits of a Man's honest Industry are the just Rewards of it, ascertained to him by natural and eternal Equity, as is his Title to use them in the Manner which he thinks fit: And thus, with the above Limitations, every Man is sole Lord and Arbitrer of his own private Actions and Property."
-Cato-
John Trenchard (1662-1723) & Thomas Gordon (169?-1750)
Source: Letter 62 (1722) of Cato's Letters (1720-1723), quoted by Ronald Hamowy, "Cato's Letters, John Locke, and the Republican Paradigm", in Edward J. Harpham (Ed.), John Locke's Two Treatises of Government: New Interpretations (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992), p. 157
"Government…may not be hostile to any religion or to the advocacy of no-religion; and it may not aid, foster, or promote one religion or religious theory against another… The First Amendment mandates governmental neutrality…"
-Abe Fortas-
(1910-1982) U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: 1968
"In a free government, the security for civil rights must be the same as that for religious rights. It consists in the one case in the multiplicity of interests, and in the other in the multiplicity of sects."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: The Federalist, 1788
"All special charters of freedom must be abrogated where the universal law of freedom is to flourish."
-Heinrich Heine-
(1797-1856) German poet, journalist, essayist, literary critic
"The American notion of freedom transcended the political realm and in fact extended to every major category of human relationships, including those between employer and employee, clergyman and layman, husband and wife, parent and child, public official and citizen. Americans believed that, as of July 4, 1776, all men were created equal, and that any impairment of a man's equality was destructive of his liberty also."
-David M. Potter-
(1911-1971)
Source: Freedom and Its Limitations in American Life, 1976
"Every member of the society spies on the rest, and it is his duty to inform against them. All are slaves and equal in their slavery... The great thing about it is equality... Slaves are bound to be equal."
-Fyodor Dostoyevsky-
(1821-1881)
Source: The Possessed
"Law and justice are not always the same."
-Gloria Steinem-
(1944- ) Publisher of Ms. magazine
"The regulation prohibiting abusive comment that tends or is likely to expose a person or a group to hatred or contempt is necessary not only to avoid harm to the persons targeted, but also to ensure that Canadian values are respected for all Canadians. The broadcast of remarks that could expose individuals or groups to hatred or contempt can attract individuals to its cause and in the process create serious discord between various groups in Canadian society to the detriment of all of Canadian society. This harm undermines the cultural, political and social fabric of Canada which the Canadian broadcasting system is expressly meant to safeguard, enrich and strengthen. It also undermines the multicultural and multiracial nature of Canadian society, which the programming of the Canadian broadcasting system should reflect. Protection from the harms of abusive comment is for the benefit of all Canadians."
-Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission-
Source: Broadcasting Decision CRTC 2004-271, Ottawa, July 13, 2004, par. 35
"Of all the tragic facts about the history of slavery, the most astonishing to an American today is that, although slavery was a worldwide institution for thousands of years, nowhere in the world was slavery a controversial issue prior to the 18th century. People of every race and color were enslaved – and enslaved others. White people were still being bought and sold as slaves in the Ottoman Empire, decades after American blacks were freed.
Everyone hated the idea of being a slave but few had any qualms about enslaving others. Slavery was just not an issue, not even among intellectuals, much less among political leaders, until the 18th century – and then it was an issue only in Western civilization. Among those who turned against slavery in the 18th century were George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry and other American leaders. You could research all of the 18th century Africa or Asia or the Middle East without finding any comparable rejection of slavery there. But who is singled out for scathing criticism today? American leaders of the 18th century.
Deciding that slavery was wrong was much easier than deciding what to do with millions of people from another continent, of another race, and without any historical preparation for living as free citizens in a society like that of the United States, where they were 20 percent of the population.
It is clear from the private correspondence of Washington, Jefferson, and many others that their moral rejection of slavery was unambiguous, but the practical question of what to do now had them baffled. That would remain so for more than half a century.
In 1862, a ship carrying slaves from Africa to Cuba, in violation of a ban on the international slave trade, was captured on the high seas by the U.S. Navy. The crew were imprisoned and the captain was hanged in the United States – despite the fact that slavery itself was still legal at the time in Africa, Cuba, and in the United States. What does this tell us? That enslaving people was considered an abomination. But what to do with millions of people who were already enslaved was not equally clear.
That question was finally answered by a war in which one life was lost [620,000 Civil War casualties] for every six people freed [3.9 million]. Maybe that was the only answer. But don’t pretend today that it was an easy answer – or that those who grappled with the dilemma in the 18th century were some special villains when most leaders and most people around the world saw nothing wrong with slavery.
Incidentally, the September 2003 issue of National Geographic had an article about the millions of people still enslaved around the world right now. But where is the moral indignation about that?"
-Thomas Sowell-
"Government creates the problem, denies the problem, acknowledges the problem, blames others for the problem, adopts measures that make the problem worse, and then claims credit for at least doing something about the problem."
-Justin Amash-
"Our institutions were not devised to bring about uniformity of opinion; if they had we might well abandon hope. It is important to remember, as has well been said, 'the essential characteristic of true liberty is that under its shelter many different types of life and character and opinion and belief can develop unmolested and unobstructed.'"
-Justice Charles Evans Hughes-
(1862-1948) Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court
Source: U. S. Supreme Court, Forbes Magazine, 1 November 1957
"The invaluable and the valueless, the noble and the tawdry, the beautiful and the ugly, the true and the false, the good and the evil, are equally protected by the First and the Fourteenth Amendments’ guarantees of a free press and religious freedom."
-Milton Konvitz-
(1908-2003) Professor Cornell Law School
Source: quoted in Censorship: For And Against, 1971
"Each day, it seemed, another law was passed to impoverish and diminish them, punishing them for whatever success they achieved and rewarding their less competent and industrious neighbors."
-L. Neil Smith-
American writer
Source: Pallas, 46 (Tor 1993)
"I am not a conservative but I have spoken out for years against the staggering amount of blind hatred directed at black conservatives by liberals.
Liberals are shockingly quick to demean and dismiss brilliant black people like Rice, Carson, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, U.S. Senator Tim Scott (R-SC), Professor Walter E. Williams and economist Thomas Sowell because they don’t fit into the role they have carved out for a black person in America.
Black Americans must be obedient liberals on all things or risk being called a race traitor or an Uncle Tom."
-Juan Williams-
(1954-) Panamanian-born American journalist, political analyst, author
Source: Rutgers rage against Rice -- why do liberals have so much hate for black conservatives?, March 6, 2014
"Toleration of people who differ in convictions and habits requires a residual awareness of the complexity of truth and the possibility of opposing view having some light on one or the other facet of a many-sided truth."
-Reinhold Niebuhr-
(1892-1971)
Source: “Tolerance,” in Collier’s Encyclopedia, 1966
"Under democracy, you’re a captive of the fears of the least courageous among you, the integrity of the least honorable, the brains of the least intelligent, and the weakness of the least strong."
-L. Neil Smith-
American Zone
"True freedom is to share
All the chains our brothers wear
And, with heart and hand, to be
Earnest to make others free."
-James Russell Lowell-
(1819-1891) American author and diplomatist
Source: Stanzas on Freedom, 1843
"There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism."
-Theodore Roosevelt-
(1858-1919) 26th US President
"God grants liberty only to those who love it, and are always ready to guard and defend it."
-Daniel Webster-
(1782-1852) US Senator
"The cause of freedom is the cause of God."
-William Lisle Bowles-
(1762-1850) English poet and critic
"The only foundation for... a republic is to be laid in Religion. Without this there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object and life of all republican governments."
-Dr. Benjamin Rush-
(1745-1813) signed the Declaration of Independence, physician, politician, social reformer, humanitarian, educator, founder of Dickinson College
1798
Source: The Selected Writings of Benjamin Rush. Edited by Dagobert D. Runes. New York: Philosophical Library, 1947.
"Our coins bear the words 'In God We Trust'. We take the oath of office asking His help in keeping that oath. And we proclaim that we are a nation under God when we pledge allegiance to the flag. But we can't mention His name in a public school or even sing religious hymns that are nondenominational. Christmas can be celebrated in the school room with pine trees, tinsel and reindeers, but there must be no mention of the man whose birthday is being celebrated. One wonders how a teacher would answer if a student asked why it was called Christmas."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
"If a man is not rising upwards to be an angel, depend upon it, he is sinking downwards to be a devil."
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge-
(1772-1834) English poet, critic, philosopher, and a leader of the British Romantic movement
"Just close your eyes and think of England."
-unknown-
"Those people who will not be governed by God will be ruled by tyrants."
-William Penn-
(1644-1718) English real estate entrepreneur, philosopher, early Quaker, founder of the Province of Pennsylvania
"The liberty of a people consists in being governed by laws which they have made themselves, under whatsoever form it be of government; the liberty of a private man, in being master of his own time and actions, as far as may consist with the laws of God and of his country."
-Abraham Cowley-
(1618-1667) English poet
"We have forgotten the gracious hand which has preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and have vainly imagined in the deceitfulness of our hearts that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving Grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us."
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
"As a child I received instruction both in the Bible and in the Talmud. I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene... No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life."
-Albert Einstein-
(1879-1955) Physicist and Professor, Nobel Prize 1921
1929
Source: in an interview with George Sylvester Viereck, "What Life Means to Einstein," The Saturday Evening Post, October 26, 1929, Curtis Publishing Company.
"Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage."
-The Holy Bible-
Source: Galatians 5:1
"[My views on Christianity] are the result of a life of inquiry & reflection, and very different from that anti-Christian system imputed to me by those who know nothing of my opinions. To the corruptions of Christianity I am indeed opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian, in the only sense he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence; & believing he never claimed any other."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush, Apr. 21, 1803
"We must be a people who dare, dare to take responsibility for our hatred and fears and ask God to heal us from within. And we must be a people of prayer, a people who pray as if the strength of our nation depended on it, because it does."
-J. C. Watts, Jr.-
(1957- ) US Congressman from Oklahoma (R), former quarterback in the Canadian Football League
Source: Feb. 5, 1997
"Your opinion of me has no cash value."
-Andre Trochard-
We're No Angels
"A beggar's mistake harms no one but the beggar. A king's mistake, however, harms everyone but the king. Too often, the measure of power lies not in the number who obey your will, but in the number who suffer your stupidity."
-R. Scott Bakker-
The Judging Eye
"There's no sense asking if the air is good if there's nothing else to breathe."
-Henry II-
The Lion in Winter
"Of course he has a knife, he always has a knife, we all have knives! It's 1183 and we're barbarians! How clear we make it. Oh, my piglets, we are the origins of war: not history's forces, nor the times, nor justice, nor the lack of it, nor causes, nor religions, nor ideas, nor kinds of government, nor any other thing. We are the killers. We breed wars. We carry it like syphilis inside. Dead bodies rot in field and stream because the living ones are rotten. For the love of God, can't we love one another just a little - that's how peace begins. We have so much to love each other for. We have such possibilities, my children. We could change the world."
-Eleanor of Aquitaine-
The Lion in Winter
"Unnatural, Mummy? You tell me, what's nature's way? If poisoned mushrooms grow and babies come with crooked backs, if goiters thrive and dogs go mad and wives kill husbands, what's unnatural?"
-Richard-
"I could have conquered Europe - all of it - but I had women in my life."
-Henry II-
The Lion in Winter
"Put up again thy sword into its place:
for all they that take the sword
shall perish by the sword."
-Jesus of Nazareth-
(c. 4 BC – c. AD 30/33)
Source: Holy Bible, Matthew 26:52
"But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you."
-Jesus of Nazareth-
(c. 4 BC – c. AD 30/33)
Source: Holy Bible, Matthew 5:44
"The longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth: 'that God governs in the affairs of men.' And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?"
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
Source: June 28, 1787, in a plea to the delegates of a deadlocked Constitutional Convention
"The Care therefore of every man's Soul belongs unto himself, and is to be left unto himself. But what if he neglect the Care of his Soul? I answer, What if he neglects the Care of his Health, or of his Estate, which things are nearlier related to the Government of the Magistrate than the other? Will the magistrate provide by an express Law, That such an one shall not become poor or sick? Laws provide, as much as is possible, that the Goods and Health of Subjects be not injured by the Fraud and Violence of others; they do not guard them from the Negligence or Ill-husbandry of the Possessors themselves."
-John Locke-
(1632-1704) English philosopher and political theorist
Source: A Letter Concerning Toleration [1689], Edited and Introduced by James H. Tully (Hacklett Publishing Company, 1983), p. 35
"You are doing an excellent thing, one which will be wholesome for you, if, as you write me, you are persisting in your effort to attain sound understanding; it is foolish to pray for this when you can acquire it from yourself. We do not need to uplift our hands towards heaven, or to beg the keeper of a temple to let us approach his idol's ear, as if in this way our prayers were more likely to be heard. A god is near you, with you, and in you. This is what I mean, Lucilius: there sits a holy spirit within us, one who marks our good and bad deeds, and is our a guardian."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter XLI: On the god within us
"Men regard it as their right to return evil for evil -- and if they cannot, feel they have lost their liberty."
-Aristotle-
(384-322 BC) Greek philosopher
Source: Nicomachean Ethics, 340 B.C.
"The nation is sick; trouble is in the land, confusion all around... But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period of the twentieth century. Something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee, the cry is always the same: 'We want to be free.'"
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-
(1929-1968) US civil rights leader
3 April 1968
"Of more worth is one honest man to society and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
"When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, 'Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!'"
-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
"Banking was conceived in iniquity and born in sin… Bankers own the earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create money and control credit, and with a flick of a pen they will create enough to buy it back."
-Josiah Stamp-
"Great authors are admirable in this respect: in every generation they make for disagreement. Through them we become aware of our differences."
-Andre Gide-
(1869-1951) French writer
"Enslave the liberty of but one human being and the liberties of the world are put in peril."
-William Lloyd Garrison-
(1805-1879) American abolitionist, journalist, and social reformer
"There is no belief, however foolish, that will not gather its faithful adherents who will defend it to the death."
-Isaac Asimov-
"Those who lack the capacity to achieve much in an atmosphere of freedom will clamor for power."
-Eric Hoffer-
(1902-1983) American author, philosopher, awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
"Without morals a republic cannot subsist any length of time; they therefore who are decrying the Christian religion, whose morality is so sublime and pure (and) which insures to the good eternal happiness, are undermining the solid foundation of morals, the best security for the duration of free governments."
-Charles Carroll-
Maryland member of the Continental Congress, the only Roman Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence,
US Senator for Maryland (1789-1792)
"Gods always behave like the people who make them."
-Zora Neale Hurston-
"The goal of a free nation is to reveal by example the enlightened possibilities of the human race, not to wield its power of destruction and death over the helpless, the poor, the starving and the war torn masses. The goal of a free nation must be no different outside its borders than within them. In America we do not massacre whole towns because they may be the chosen domicile of a criminal or a conspiracy of criminals. Instead we carefully root out the felons and bring them to justice. In the same way, the goal of a free nation must be to first view all people as members of the human race, and, as such, to insist that they possess fundamental human rights. They are, as we, citizens of the world. The rule of law shows us the way."
-Gerry Spence-
"Civil government cannot let any group ride roughshod over others simply because their consciences tell them to do so."
-Justice Robert H. Jackson-
(1892-1954), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
"We shall support vigorously the principle that no country has the right to impose its will or rule on another by force. We shall continue, in this era of negotiation, to work for the limitation of nuclear arms, and to reduce the danger of confrontation between the great powers. We shall do our share in defending peace and freedom in the world. But we shall expect others to do their share. The time has passed when America will make every other nation's conflict our own, or make every other nation's future our responsibility, or presume to tell the people of other nations how to manage their own affairs. Just as we respect the right of each nation to determine its own future, we also recognize the responsibility of each nation to secure its own future. Just as America's role is indispensable in preserving the world's peace, so is each nation's role indispensable in preserving its own peace. Together with the rest of the world, let us resolve to move forward from the beginnings we have made. Let us continue to bring down the walls of hostility which have divided the world for too long, and to build in their place bridges of understanding -- so that despite profound differences between systems of government, the people of the world can be friends."
-Richard Nixon-
"Republics are formed only after revolution. The change to the empire is slow and gradual. One of the saddest lessons of history is that whenever these schools of politics have met in the republics of old, the imperial school, with its dazzling influence of wealth and power, has always won."
-John F. Shafroth-
[1854-1922] U.S. Congressman (R-CO), Governor of Colorado, and U.S. Senator (D-CO)
Source: (1901)
"I did not come here to guide lambs. I came here to awaken lions."
-Javier Milei-
(1970-) President of Argentina, economist, author
Source: November 21, 2023, Javier Milei televsion interview with host Alejandro Fantino
"We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools."
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-
(1929-1968) US civil rights leader
"The one absolute certain way to bring this nation to ruin ... would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities."
-Theodore Roosevelt-
(1858-1919) 26th US President
"I am entirely persuaded that the American public is more reasonable, restrained and mature than most of the broadcast industry's planners believe. Their fear of controversy is not warranted by the evidence."
-Edward R. Murrow-
(1908-1965) American broadcast journalist and war correspondent
"A nation that forgets its past is doomed to repeat it."
-Sir Winston Churchill-
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1940-1945, 1951-1955)
"All Wars are Follies, very expensive & very mischievous ones. When will Mankind be convinc’d of this, and agree to settle their Differences by Arbitration? Were they to do it even by the Cast of a Dye, it would be better than by Fighting & destroying each other."
-Benjamin Franklin-
"Even though they are a relatively recent policy development, civil rights laws are considered necessary to insure rights for blacks. But they are, in fact, among the most draconian forms of intervention into the free market. They attack the essence of private property, the ability to exercise control over it. Such laws have resulted in lessened economic freedom, lowered prosperity, heightened social tension, and more trouble for the groups the laws are supposed to help. ... A Korean grocer may want to employ only Korean clerks, a magazine for black professionals only black editors and writers, and a German restaurant only German cooks and waiters. An employer may think that Iraqi-Americans have been unfairly treated and want to favor them. A women’s health club may want only women customer’s and a men’s bar may want only men. There is nothing wrong with any of these behaviors, although civil rights laws seek to end them. In addition to violating the free labor contract, civil rights laws guarantee everyone the right of 'access' to 'public accommodations' like restaurants, movie theaters, and shops. In fact, what the civil rights laws call public is really private. These businesses are established by private entrepreneurs with private money. The owners should no more be required to serve everyone who comes into their place than they are required to invite everyone to their home for dinner. A large downtown restaurant is as private as a small house in the country. The real difference between private and public is one of ownership, not function or location."
-Lew Rockwell-
[Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.] (1944- ) Chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute
Source: “Civil rights laws needed, serve to increase freedom”, The Unreported News, p. 6, May 19, 1996
"Liberty is no negation. It is a substantive, tangible reality."
-James A. Garfield-
(1831-1881) 20th President of the United States (1881), assassinated
"Be assured that if this new provision [the 14th Amendment] be engrafted in the Constitution, it will, in time, change the entire structure and texture of our government, and sweep away all the guarantees of safety devised and provided by our patriotic Sires of the Revolution."
-Orville Browning-
(1806-1881) US Senator for Illinois
1867
"Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding."
-Ambrose Bierce-
(1842-1914) American Civil War soldier, humorist, writer
"What is right and what is practicable are two different things."
-James Buchanan-
(1791-1868) -- also known as "The Sage of Wheatland"; "Buck", 15th US President (1857-61)
"There are plenty of good five-cent cigars in the country. The trouble is they cost a quarter. What this country needs is a good five-cent nickel."
-Franklin P. Adams-
(1881-1960)
"The consequences arising from the continual accumulation of public debts in other countries ought to admonish us to be careful to prevent their growth in our own."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
"The entire world economy rests on the consumer; if he ever stops spending money he doesn't have on things he doesn't need -- we're done for."
-Bill Bonner-
Editor of The Daily Reckoning
April 3, 2003
"Anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical, on a physically finite planet, is either mad or an economist."
-Kenneth Boulding-
(1910-1993) British-American economist, educator, peace activist, poet, religious mystic, devoted Quaker, systems scientist, and interdisciplinary philosopher
"Why is it when times get rough only the people have to look for ways to cut back? Why is this always just absolutely impossible for government?"
-Neal Boortz-
(1945- ) Radio talk show host, columnist
Source: http://boortz.com/nealz_nuze/2008/12/and-the-states-come-begging-as.html
"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."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits."
-Plutarch-
(c.45-125 A.D.) Greek Priest of the Delphic Oracle
"Every government interference in the economy consists of giving an unearned benefit, extorted by force, to some men at the expense of others."
-Ayn Rand-
[Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum] (1905-1982) Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter
Source: Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 1966, p. 205
"A large number of people, certainly the majority of the political looter class, think the best way to deal with the rapidly deepening economic crisis is via 'stimulus packages' with money plucked off the magic money tree... which is to say, by trying to re-inflate the credit bubble that actually caused the crisis. This is a bit like treating alcoholics by urging them to buy more whiskey."
-Perry de Havilland-
British founder of Samizdata
-Dr. Thomas Szasz-
"Tongue-suicide is not only the choice of children. It is common among the infantile heads of state and power merchants whose evacuated language leaves them with no access to what is left of their human instincts for they speak only to those who obey, or in order to force obedience. The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek — it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language — all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas."
-Toni Morrison-
"Liberty means that a man is recognized as free and treated as free by those who surround him."
-Mikhail A. Bakunin-
(1814-1876) Russian revolutionary anarchist, founder of collectivist anarchism
Source: God and the State, 1871
"Individualism regards man -- every man -- as an independent, sovereign entity who possesses an inalienable right to his own life, a right derived from his nature as a rational being. Individualism holds that a civilized society, or any form of association, cooperation or peaceful co-existence among men, can be achieved only on the basis of the recognition of individual rights -- and that a group, as such, has no rights other than the individual rights of its members."
-Ayn Rand-
[Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum] (1905-1982) Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter
"Every effort to confine Americanism to a single pattern, to constrain it to a single formula, is disloyalty to everything that is valid in Americanism."
-Henry Steele Commager-
(1902-1998) Historian and author
"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
"If the States were not left to leave the Union when their rights were interfered with, the government would have been National, but the Convention refused to baptize it by that name."
-Daniel Webster-
(1782-1852) US Senator
Source: June 1, 1837; Works 1:403
"Each state enjoys sovereign power."
-Gouverneur Morris-
(1752-1816) represented Pennsylvania in the Constitutional Convention of 1787, author of large sections of the Constitution for the United States, credited as the author of its Preamble
Source: Commentaries on the Constitution, Vol. III, p 287
"[T]he only thing wrong with Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was that it was the South, not the North, that was fighting for a government of the people, by the people and for the people."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"First ask yourselves, Gentlemen, what an Englishman, a Frenchman, and a citizen of the United States of America understand today by the word 'liberty'. For each of them it is the right to be subjected only to the laws, and to be neither arrested, detained, put to death nor maltreated in any way by the arbitrary will of one or more individuals. It is the right of everyone to express their opinion, choose a profession and practice it, to dispose of property, and even to abuse it; to come and go without permission, and without having to account for their motives or undertakings. It is everyone's right to associate with other individuals, either to discuss their interests, or to profess the religion which they or their associates prefer, or even simply to occupy their days or hours in a way which is more compatible with their inclinations or whims. Finally, it is everyone's right to exercise some influence on the administration of the government, either by electing all or particular officials, or through representations, petitions, demands to which the authorities are more or less compelled to pay heed. Now compare this liberty with that of the ancients. The latter consisted in exercising collectively, but directly, several parts of the complete sovereignty; in deliberating, in the public square, over war and peace; in forming alliances with foreign governments; in voting laws, in pronouncing judgments; in examining the accounts, the acts, the stewardship of the magistrates; in calling them to appear in front of the assembled people, in accusing, condemning or absolving them. But if this was what the ancients called liberty, they admitted as compatible with this collective freedom the complete subjection of the individual to the authority of the community."
-Benjamin Constant-
[Henri-Benjamin Constant de Rebecque] (1767-1830) Swiss-born thinker, writer and French politician.
Source: "De la liberté des anciens comparée à celle des modernes" (1819), in De la liberté chez les Modernes (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1980), pp. 494-495; English translation: "The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns" (1819), in Benjamin Constant, Political Writings, Edited by Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 310-311.
"Absolute power corrupts even when exercised for humane purposes. The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still demands from others the submissiveness of sheep. The taint inherent in absolute power is not its inhumanity but its anti-humanity."
-Eric Hoffer-
(1902-1983) American author, philosopher, awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
Source: The Ordeal of Change (1963), Chapter 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.
Stated differently, might doesn't make right.
"The most powerful clique in these (CFR) groups have one objective in common they want to bring about the surrender of the sovereignty and the national independence of the U.S. They want to end national boundaries and racial and ethnic loyalties supposedly to increase business and ensure world peace. What they strive for would inevitably lead to dictatorship and loss of freedoms by the people. The CFR was founded for 'the purpose of promoting disarmament and submergence of U.S. sovereignty and national independence into an all powerful one world government.'"
-Harpers magazine-
Source: Harpers magazine, 1958
"No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore our belief in our own guidance."
-Henry Miller-
(1891-1980) American writer
Source: The Wisdom of the Heart, 1941
"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."
-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)
"For in a Republic, who is 'the country?' Is it the Government which is for the moment in the saddle? Why, the Government is merely a servant -- merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910) American author and humorist
"Today we may say aloud before an awe-struck world: 'We are still masters of our fate. We are still captain of our souls.'"
-Sir Winston Churchill-
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1940-1945, 1951-1955)
Q. What is meant by the term “constitution”?
A. A constitution embodies the fundamental principles of a government. Our constitution, adopted by the sovereign power, is amendable by that power only. To the constitution all laws, executive actions, and judicial decisions must conform, as it is the creator of the powers exercised by the departments of government.
Q. Why has our Constitution been classed as “rigid”?
A. The term “rigid” is used in opposition to “flexible” because the provisions are in a written document which cannot be legally changed with the same ease and in the same manner as ordinary laws. The British constitution, which is unwritten, can, on the other hand be changed overnight by an act of Parliament. ...
Q. Where, in the Constitution, is there mention of education?
A. There is none; education is a matter reserved for the States. ...
Q. Does the Constitution give us our rights and liberties?
A. No, it does not, it only guarantees them. The people had all their rights and liberties before they made the Constitution. The Constitution was formed, among other purposes, to make the people’s liberties secure -- secure not only as against foreign attack but against oppression by their own government. They set specific limits upon their national government and upon the States, and reserved to themselves all powers that they did not grant. The Ninth Amendment declares: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”
-Sol Bloom-
Director General of the United States Constitution Sesquicentennial Commission
Source: The Story Of The Constitution 1787 - We The People - 1937, copyrighted to The United States Constitutional Sesquicentennial Commission, July 28, 1937, Pg. 168, 169, 177.
"These things I believe:
That government should butt out.
That freedom is our most precious commodity and if we are not eternally vigilant, government will take it all away.
That individual freedom demands individual responsibility.
That government is not a necessary good but an unavoidable evil.
That the executive branch has grown too strong, the judicial branch too arrogant and the legislative branch too stupid.
That political parties have become close to meaningless.
That government should work to insure the rights of the individual, not plot to take them away.
That government should provide for the national defense and work to insure domestic tranquillity.
That foreign trade should be fair rather than free.
That America should be wary of foreign entanglements.
That the tree of liberty needs to be watered from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
That guns do more than protect us from criminals; more importantly, they protect us from the ongoing threat of government.
That states are the bulwark of our freedom.
That states should have the right to secede from the Union.
That once a year we should hang someone in government as an example to his fellows."
-Lyn Nofziger-
[Franklyn C. Nofziger] (1924-2006) American journalist, political consultant, author, Press Secretary for President Reagan
Source: 11/9/99 issue of the Federalist Digest
Some of the fuctions that government performs may be unavoidable. The institution itself, however...
And "fair trade" by whose definition...?
And individuals are the bulwark of our freedom.
And governments don't have rights, but only delegated authority. State governments have the authority to secede -- or to support the people's secession, really -- because the federal government hasn't been delegated the authority to stop them.
"Any single man must judge for himself whether circumstances warrant obedience or resistance to the commands of the civil magistrate; we are all qualified, entitled, and morally obliged to evaluate the conduct of our rulers. This political judgment, moreover, is not simply or primarily a right, but like self-preservation, a duty to God. As such it is a judgment that men cannot part with according to the God of Nature. It is the first and foremost of our inalienable rights without which we can preserve no other."
-John Locke
(1632-1704) English philosopher and political theorist
"The wish, which ages have not yet subdued
In man, to have no master save his mood."
-Lord Byron-
[George Gordon Noel Byron] (1788-1824), The 6th Baron Byron of Rochdale
"The liberal insists that the individual must remain so supreme as to make the State his servant."
-Wayne Morse-
(1900-1974) U.S. Senator
Source: New Republic, 22 July 1946
That's the "classical liberal", of course...
"The 'strength' of the People becomes weak when we don't 'exercise' our rights."
-Eric Schaub-
Editor/Publisher of Liberty Quotes
"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."
-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)
"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 nation which signs this [UN] Charter can justly maintain that any of its acts are its own business, or within its own domestic jurisdiction, if the security council says that these acts are a threat to the peace."
-William Carr-
National Education Association, Associate Secretary
Source: One World In The Making,1946
"The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of people."
-Justice William O. Douglas-
(1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: The Court Years, 1939-1975, 1980
"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
"Taxes should be continued by annual or biennial reenactments, because a constant hold, by the nation, of the strings of the public purse is a salutary restraint from which an honest government ought not wish, nor a corrupt one to be permitted, to be free."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"The NRA believes America's laws were made to be obeyed and that our Constitutional liberties are just as important today as 200 years ago. And by the way, the Constitution does not say Government shall decree the right to keep and bear arms. The Constitution says 'The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.' "
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
Source: NRA HQ
"People sometimes rationalize their greed by saying that it is all for the good of their children but this is nothing but an excuse they use to make their despicable actions appear respectable and praiseworthy."
-Democritus-
(460-370 BC) Greek philosopher
"In almost every act of our lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business or in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind."
-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)
"Provided I do not write about the government, or about religion, or politics, or morals, or those in power, or public bodies, or the Opera, or the other state theatres, or about anybody who is active in anything, I can print whatever I want."
-Pierre-Augustin Beaumarchais-
(1732-1799) French playwright, watchmaker, inventor, musician, diplomat, fugitive, spy, publisher, arms dealer, satirist, financier, and revolutionary
"There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice."
-Charles-Louis De Secondat-
(1689-1755) Baron de Montesquieu
Source: The Spirit of the Laws, 1748
"There is one, and only one, thing in modern society more hideous than crime -- namely, repressive justice."
-Simone Weil-
(1909-1943)
Source: Human Personality
"Wise men are instructed by reason;
men of less understanding, by experience;
the most ignorant, by necessity;
the beasts, by nature."
-Marcus Tullius Cicero-
(106-43 B.C.) Roman Statesman, Philosopher and Orator
"I heartily accept the motto, that government is best which governs least ... Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which I also believe, that government is best which governs not at all; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have."
-Henry David Thoreau-
(1817-1862) American author, poet, philosopher, polymath, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and transcendentalist
Source: his book, On The Duty of Civil Disobedience, 1849
"[You have Rights] antecedent to all earthly governments: Rights, that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws; Rights, derived from the Great Legislator of the universe."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, 1765
"If you believe it reprehensible to possess the means and will to use lethal force to repel a criminal assault, how can you call upon another to do so for you?"
-Jeffrey R. Snyder-
American attorney, author
Source: A Nation of Cowards, 113 Public Interest 40, 52 (Fall 1993)
"Governments need armies to protect them against their enslaved and oppressed subjects."
-Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi-
(1828-1910) Russian writer
1893
"No free man shall ever be de-barred the use of arms. The strongest reason for the people to retain their right to keep and bear arms is as a last resort to protect themselves against tyranny in government."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: [Falesly attributed] While the first sentence is found in the proposed Virginia Constitution, the second sentence is not found. The quote is not found in any of his speeches, personal correspondence, or diaries. Nor has the quote ever been cited in law journals by Second Amendment legal scholars.
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
Source: Common Sense, February 14, 1776
"If the opposition (citizen) disarms, well and good. If it refuses to disarm, we shall disarm it ourselves."
-Josef Stalin-
(1879-1953) Communist leader of the USSR
"We hold it for a fundamental and undeniable truth, that religion, or the duty we owe our Creator and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence. The religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate. This right is in its nature an unalienable right."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
"...So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men."
-Voltaire-
[François Marie Arouet] (1694-1778) French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher
Source: Philosophical Dictionary, 1764
"Odious ideas are not entitled to hide from criticism behind the human shield of their believers' feelings."
-Richard Stallman-
"Thus the criminal ceases to be a person, a subject of rights and duties, and becomes merely an object on which society can work. And this is, in principle, how Hitler treated the Jews. They were objects; killed not for ill desert but because, on his theories, they were a disease in society. If society can mend, remake, and unmake men at its pleasure, its pleasure may, of course, be humane or homicidal. The difference is important. But, either way, rulers have become owners."
-C. S. Lewis-
(1898-1963), British novelist
Source: Willing Slaves of the Welfare State, first published in The Observer on July 20, 1958
"Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
"Whenever they burn books, they will also, in the end, burn human beings."
-Heinrich Heine-
(1797-1856) German poet, journalist, essayist, literary critic
Source: Almansor: A Tragedy, 1823
"Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have... a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean the characters and conduct of their rulers."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
"Large and permanent military establishments ... are forbidden by the principles of free government, and against the necessity of which the militia were meant to be a constitutional bulwark."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Fourth Annual Message, November 4, 1812
"Freedom of thought and freedom of speech in our great institutions are absolutely necessary for the preservation of our country. The moment either is restricted, liberty begins to wither and die..."
-John Peter Altgeld-
(1847-1902)
Source: 1897
"Another not unimportant consideration is, that the powers of the general government will be, and indeed must be, principally employed upon external objects, such as war, peace, negotiations with foreign powers, and foreign commerce. In its internal operations it can touch but few objects, except to introduce regulations beneficial to the commerce, intercourse, and other relations, between the states, and to lay taxes for the common good. The powers of the states, on the other hand, extend to all objects, which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, and liberties, and property of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the state."
-Joseph Story-
(1779-1845) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: Commentaries on the Constitution, 1833
"Heretics have been hated from the beginning of recorded time; they have been ostracized, exiled, tortured, maimed and butchered; but it has generally proved impossible to smother them; and when it has not, the society that has succeeded has always declined."
-Judge Learned Hand-
(1872-1961), Judge, U. S. Court of Appeals
Source: Speech, 1955
"The history of the welfare state is the history of public enterprise pushing out private organization. The impact was largely unintentional, but natural and inevitable. Higher taxes left individuals with less money to give; government’s assumption of responsibility for providing welfare shriveled the perceived duty of individuals to respond to their neighbors’ needs; and the availability of public programs gave recipients an alternative to private assistance, one which did not challenge recipients to reform their destructive behavior."
-Doug Bandow-
(1954- ) American columnist, author, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute
Source: National Service -- or Government Service?, Policy Review, P. 34, September-October, 1996
"Many of you are well enough off that ... the tax cuts may have helped you. We're saying that for America to get back on track, we're probably going to cut that short and not give it to you. We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good."
-Hillary Clinton-
(1947- ) Wife of President Bill Clinton, US Senator (NY-D)
Source: speaking at a Democratic party fundraiser in San Francisco, June 28, 2004.
"The tendency of taxation is to create a class of persons who do not labor, to take from those who do labor the produce of that labor, and to give it to those who do not labor."
-William Cobbett-
(1763-1835) English pamphleteer, farmer, journalist
"The cult of the omnipotent state has millions of followers in the United States. Americans of today view their government in the same way as Christians view their God; they worship and adore the state and they render their lives and fortunes to it. Statists believe that their lives -- their very being -- are a privilege that the state has given to them. They believe that everything they do is -- and should be -- dependent on the consent of the government. Thus, statists support such devices as income taxation, licensing laws, regulations, passports, trade restrictions, and the like."
-Jacob G. Hornberger-
American author, journalist, politician, founder and president of the Future of Freedom Foundation
Source: Waco And The Cult Of The Omnipotent State, The Tyranny Of Gun Control, 69 (Future Of Freedom Foundation 1997).
"The politicians don’t just want your money. They want your soul. They want you to be worn down by taxes until you are dependent and helpless."
-James Dale Davidson-
National Taxpayers Union
"Government is saying to the average citizen every January 1: 'For the next five months you’ll be working for us, for goals we shall determine. Is that clear? After May 5 you may look after your own needs and ambitions, but report back to us next January. Now move along.' ... If nearly half of what you make is spent by someone else, that means that half your work time is spent working for someone else. Call me a radical, but I think that comes dangerously close to being a form of indentured servitude."
-Richard Armey-
(1940- ) U.S. Congressman (R-TX) (1985–2003), House Majority Leader (1995–2003).
Source: THE FREEDOM REVOLUTION
"Subsidies entail politicians’ taking the citizen’s paycheck and then using it to buy his submission."
-James Bovard-
(1956- ) American author, lecturer
Source: Harebrained Pot and Wheat Decisions, January 18, 2006
"Thus, if there exists a law which sanctions slavery or monopoly, oppression or robbery, in any form whatever, it must not even be mentioned. For how can it be mentioned without damaging the respect which it inspires? Still further, morality and political economy must be taught from the point of view of this law; from the supposition that it must be a just law merely because it is a law.
Another effect of this tragic perversion of the law is that it gives an exaggerated importance to political passions and conflicts, and to politics in general."
-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)
"The root of the evil... lay not in corruption but in the system which bred it, the alliance between industrialists and politicians which produced benefits in the form of tariffs, public lands, and federal subsidies."
-Samuel P. Hays-
Source: The Response to Industrialism 1885-1914, p. 26, describing the view of E.L. Godkin, who founded the weekly Nation
"The best way to put more money in people's wallets is to leave it there in the first place."
-Edwin Feulner-
(1941- ) Founder and President of the Heritage Foundation
"At first it was the incomes of corporations, then of rich citizens, then of well-provided widows and opulent workers, and finally the wealth of housemaids and the tips of waitresses. This is all in line with the ability to pay doctrine. The poor, simply because there are more of them, have more ability to pay than the rich."
-Frank Chodorov-
(1887-1966) American author, publisher
Source: The Income Tax: Root pf All Evil
"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. [It] has made the individual vastly more dependent on the State."
-W. H. Chamberlin-
(1897-1969) American historian, journalist, author
"If I have worked harder and built myself a good house while you have been content to live in a hovel, the tax gatherer now comes annually to make me pay a penalty for my energy and industry by taxing me more than you. If I have saved while you wasted, I am [taxed] while you are exempt. If a man built a ship, we make him pay for his temerity as though he had done injury to the state; if a railroad be opened, down comes the tax collector upon it as though were a public nuisance.... We punish with a tax the man who covers barren fields with ripening grain; we fine him who puts up machinery and him who drains a swamp. To abolish these taxes would be to lift the whole enormous weight of taxation from productive industry.... The state would say to the producer, 'Be as industrious, as thrifty, as enterprising as you choose. You shall have your full reward!' "
-Henry George-
(1839-1897) American political economist
Source: Progress And Poverty (1879)
"We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
"It is wrong to take half or more of what people earn; wrong to force some people to pay for the support of others, threatening them with jail if they refuse (are in “noncompliance”)."
-Tom Bethel-
Source: A Flat Tax Is Gonna Come, The American Spectator, P. 19, April, 1996.
"The income tax is the biggest single intrusion suffered by the American people. It forces every worker to be a bookkeeper, to open his records to the government, to explain his expenses, to fear conviction for a harmless accounting error. Compliance wastes billions of dollars. It penalizes savings and creates an enormous drag on the U.S. economy. It is incompatible with a free society, and we aren’t libertarians if we tolerate it."
-Harry Browne-
(1933-2006) American libertarian writer, politician, and free-market investment analyst. Libertarian candidate for US President 1996 & 2000
Source: Pamphlet: Harry Browne, Why I’m Running for President. 1995.
"We used to be a free people. Now we are hedged in by millions of laws. Harassed by a plague of opportunistic lawyers. Harmed by regulations meant for our protection. Unnecessarily taxed to pay for a suffocating bureaucracy. Drowning in petty paperwork. Stifled by “rights” that rarely benefit anyone."
-Joan Beck-
Columnist
Source: Houston Chronicle, February 6, 1995
"The men who administer public affairs must first of all see that everyone holds onto what is his, and that private men are never deprived of their goods by public men."
-Marcus Tullius Cicero-
(106-43 B.C.) Roman Statesman, Philosopher and Orator
"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 inquisitorial features, it will provide penalties. It will create a complicated machinery. Under it businessmen 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. They will compel men of business to show their books and disclose the secrets of their affairs. They will dictate forms of bookkeeping. They will require statements and affidavits. On the one hand the inspector can blackmail the taxpayer and on the other, he can profit by selling his secret to his competitor."
-Richard Evelyn Byrd, Sr.-
(1860–1925) Lawyer, politician and newspaperman, Virginia Speaker of the House of Delegates (1908-1914)
Source: Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates, 1910, predicting the consequences of a federal income tax
"The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax."
-Albert Einstein-
(1879-1955) Physicist and Professor, Nobel Prize 1921
"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
"Who could impose such socialistic confiscatory rates?"
-William E. Borah-
(1865-1940) United States Senator (R-Idaho)
Source: denying the possibility that income tax could ever exceed 9%
"The median family of four ... paid $4,722 in federal taxes last year. That’s enough to pay for a new curtain for the secretary of commerce’s office, to bribe a farmer not to plant 38 acres with corn ... seven weeks of salary for a Customs man assigned to save us from the terror of high-quality, low priced foreign TV sets, or the subsidy on 6,000 bushels of wheat to prop up the Soviet regime. Surely civilization would collapse without such essential services."
-Alan Bock-
(1944-2011) Senior editorial writer and former editorial page editor for the Orange County Register, columnist, contributing editor at Liberty magazine
Source: Orange County Register
"The people themselves, not their government, should be trusted with spending their own money and making their own decisions."
-Richard Armey-
(1940- ) U.S. Congressman (R-TX) (1985–2003), House Majority Leader (1995–2003).
Source: THE FREEDOM REVOLUTION
"War, what is it good for? With the same 'socialist' elites backing both sides, it's good for business. It's good for creating chaos and destruction. It's good for launching new global organizations, in the aftermath; organizations that exert a level of control and reach that didn't exist before. It's good for launching organizations like the United Nations and the European Union and the World Trade Organization -- dedicated to Globalism, which in turn is dedicated to planned civilization, in which the individual is demeaned and the group is All. Freedom is demeaned; and dominance by the few over the many is hailed as peace in our time."
-Jon Rappoport-
American author, investigative reporter, writer
Source: Socialism exposed: thick lipstick on a global pig, 19 June 2018
"Men desire to have some share in the management of public affairs chiefly on account of the importance which it gives them."
-Adam Smith-
(1723-1790) Scottish philosopher and economist
Source: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations par. IV.7.160
"By the time the (16th) Amendment had been approved by the states, the Rockefeller Foundation was in full operation...about the same time that Judge Kenesaw Landis was ordering the breakup of the Standard Oil monopoly...John D...not only avoided taxes by creating four great tax-exempt foundations; he used them as repositories for his 'divested' interests...made his assets non-taxable so that they might be passed down through generations without...estate and gift taxes...Each year the Rockefellers can dump up to half their incomes into their pet foundations and deduct the "donations" from their income tax."
-Gary Allen-
(1936-86) American journalist
Source: in his 1976 book "The Rockefeller File"
"The Internal Revenue Service is everything the so-called tax protesters said it was; nonresponsive, unable to withstand scrutiny, tyrannical, and oblivious to the rule of law and the U.S. Constitution."
-Joseph Banister-
CPA, former IRS Criminal Investigator
Source: quoted by Sarah Foster, The Power to Destroy, IRS Special Agent Challenges System, WORLDNETDAILY, March 26, 1999
"The apportionment of taxes on the various descriptions of property is an act which seems to require the most exact impartiality; yet there is, perhaps, no legislative act in which greater opportunity and temptation are given to a predominant party to trample on the rules of justice. Every shilling which they overburden the inferior number is a shilling saved to their own pockets."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
"Social Security is an unfunded pay-as-you-go system, fundamentally flawed and analogous in design to illegal pyramid schemes. Government accounting creates the illusion of a trust fund, but in fact, excess receipts are spent immediately. The government’s own actuaries predict the system will be bankrupt by 2030, but Social Security could face financial crisis as early as 2014. Moreover, Social Security’s relatively poor rate of return makes the program an increasingly worse investment for today’s young worker. ... The system design itself is fundamentally flawed and cannot be repaired. It must instead be replaced by one derived from free markets and operated by free citizenry making individual economic decisions in their own self-interest. ... Reform is long overdue. If we fail to act soon, our children will either inherit a bankrupt system or be forced to pay an impossibly high level of taxes. Only private pensions with individual property rights to accumulate fund balances can create a secure pension system. Chile, which privatized its system in 1981, provides evidence of such a system’s effectiveness."
-Karl Borden-
Professor of financial economics at University of Nebraska
Source: The CATO Project on Social Security, DISMANTLING THE PYRAMID: THE WHY AND HOW OF PRIVATIZING SOCIAL SECURITY, August 14, 1995
"Our tax system is based on individual self-assessment and voluntary compliance."
-Mortimer Caplin-
Source: Internal Revenue Audit Manual (1975)
"We also need to encourage Americans to become more fiscally responsible themselves. We can do this by redesigning our tax system into an expenditure tax with a single flat rate. ... We have to substantially reduce the size and scope of the federal government, fundamentally increase the role of the states in choosing their own practices, and bring decision-making closer to the people, not to unelected administrators. These steps are crucial to getting our nation on a path of fiscal, political and constitutional responsibility."
-Edwin Feulner-
(1941- ) Founder and President of the Heritage Foundation
"[R]evenues drive expenditures, not the inverse. ... tax evasion represents a net benefit to everybody ... A statue should be erected to the unknown tax evader."
-Pierre Lemieux-
Source: In Praise of the Unknown Tax Evader, NATIONAL POST, February 27, 2002
"If you mind your own business, you won't be minding mine."
-Hank Williams-
(1923-1953) Legendary country music singer
"I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging the future but by the past."
-Patrick Henry-
(1736-1799) US Founding Father
March 23, 1775
Source: Speech on the Stamp Act, Virginia Convention
"The Act of Congress which we are impugning before you is communistic in its purposes and tendencies, and is defended here upon principles as communistic, socialistic - what shall I call them - populistic as ever have been addressed to any political assembly in the world."
-Joseph H. Choate-
(1832-1917) attorney who successfully challenged the Income Tax Act of 1894
Source: United States Supreme Court, Pollock v. Farmers Loan & Trust Co. (1898)
"I believe there is a limit beyond which free speech cannot go, but it's a limit that's very seldom mentioned. It's the point where free speech begins to collide with the right to privacy. I don't think there are any other conditions to free speech. I've got a right to say and believe anything I please, but I haven't got a right to press it on anybody else. .... Nobody's got a right to be a nuisance to his neighbors."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"Character is not the enemy of self-expression and personal freedom, it is their necessary precondition."
-James Q. Wilson-
Source: On Character, 1995
"The most efficacious method of dealing with deviancy is to ignore, to the furthest point of our tolerance, those items which we find offensive."
-Ilbert Geis-
"An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself."
-Joseph Pulitzer-
(1847-1911) Hungarian-born American newspaper publisher after whom the Pulitzer Prize was named.
"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 Darrow-
"What censorship accomplishes, creating an unreal and hypocritical mythology, fomenting an attraction for forbidden fruit, inhibiting the creative minds among us and fostering an illicit trade. Above all, it curtails the right of the individual, be he creator or consumer, to satisfy his intellect and his interest without harm. In our law-rooted society, we are not the keeper of our brother's morals -- only of his rights."
-Judith Crist-
(1922- ) US Film Critic
Source: Censorship: For And Against, 1971
"In our country are evangelists and zealots of many different political, economic and religious persuasions whose fanatical conviction is that all thought is divinely classified into two kinds -- that which is their own and that which is false and dangerous."
-Justice Robert H. Jackson-
(1892-1954), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
"Everything secret degenerates, even the administration of justice;
nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity."
-Lord Acton-
[John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton] (1834-1902), First Baron Acton of Aldenham
Source: Letter, 23 January 1861
"Government has no other end than the preservation of property."
-John Locke-
(1632-1704) English philosopher and political theorist
"Travel is lethal to prejudice."
-Mark Twain
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910) American author and humorist
"Without criticism and reliable and intelligent reporting, the government cannot govern."
-Walter Lippmann-
(1889-1974) American writer, journalist, and political commentator
Source: Speech, International Press Institute Association, London, 27 May 1965
"What a state of society is this
in which freethinker is a term of abuse,
and in which doubt is regarded as sin?"
-William Winwood Reade-
(1838-1875) English philosopher, historian, anthropologist and explorer
Source: The Martyrdom of Man, 1872
"I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive."
-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
"Socialism of any type leads to a total destruction of the human spirit."
-Alexander Solzhenitsyn-
(1918-2008) Russian novelist, Soviet dissident, imprisoned for 8 years for critizing Stalin in a personal letter, Nobel Prize for Literature, 1970
"Liberty is never out of bounds or off limits; it spreads wherever it can capture the imagination of men."
-E. B. White-
(1899-1985) American writer, contributor to "The New Yorker" magazine
Source: The Points of My Compass, 1960
-Michael Ellner-
"Enlightened by a benign religion, professed, indeed, and practiced in various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man, acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter -- with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people? Still one thing more... a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US Presidentbr>SSource: First Inaugural Address, 1801
"The right to defy an unconstitutional statute is basic in our scheme. Even when an ordinance requires a permit to make a speech, to deliver a sermon, to picket, to parade, or to assemble, it need not be honored when it’s invalid on its face."
-Justice Potter Stewart-
(1915-1985) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
Source: Walker v. Birmingham, 1967
"Revolution is not something fixed in ideology, nor is it something fashioned to a particular decade. It is a perpetual process embedded in the human spirit."
-Abbie Hoffman-
(1936-1989) American political and social activist, anarchist, and revolutionary who co-founded the Youth International Party ("Yippies")
"We've got to teach history based not on what's in fashion but what's important. If we forget what we did, we won't know who we are. I'm warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
Source: Ronald Reagan in his farewell address in January 1989
"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)
To say nothing of the man who desires to rule...
"The secret of liberty is to enlighten men, as that of tyranny is to keep them in ignorance."
-Maximilien Robespierre
"It is not the business of the law to make anyone good or reverent or moral or clean or upright."
-Murray N. Rothbard-
(1926-1995) Dean of the Austrian School of Economics
"In the recommendation to admit indiscriminately foreign emigrants of every description to the privileges of American citizens on their first entrance into our country, there is an attempt to break down every pale which has been erected for the preservation of a national spirit and a national character; and to let in the most powerful means of perverting and corrupting both the one and the other."
-Alexander Hamilton-
Source: Alexander Hamilton, The Examination, No. 9 (January 18, 1802).
"To admit foreigners indiscriminately to the rights of citizens the moment they put foot in our country would be nothing less than to admit the Grecian horse into the citadel of our liberty and sovereignty."
-Alexander Hamilton-
Source: Alexander Hamilton, The Examination, No. 9 (January 18, 1802)
Al Hamilton, wrong again. Who could have predicted? We hold self-evidently that rights -- universal and unalienable -- belong to "all men", and that this government was expressly instituted to secure those rights FOR "all men". Why the hell else would we keep the dangerous thing around, ferchrissake?!? 'Course, if he'd been referring to, say, central banks or forced-wealth-redistributive entitlements, he'd have been spot on. But then he wouldn't have been Al Hamilton...
"The safety of a republic depends essentially on the energy of a common national sentiment; on a uniformity of principles and habits; on the exemption of the citizens from foreign bias and prejudice, and on the love of country which will almost invariably be found to be closely connected with birth, education, and family. The opinion advanced in Notes on Virginia [by Thomas Jefferson] is undoubtedly correct, that foreigners will generally be apt to bring with them attachments to the persons they have left behind; to the country of their nativity, and to its particular customs and manners. They will also entertain opinions on government congenial with those under which they have lived; or, if they should be led hither from a preference to ours, how extremely unlikely is it that they will bring with them that temperate love of liberty, so essential to real republicanism?"
-Alexander Hamilton-
Source: Alexander Hamilton, The Examination, No. 8 (January 12, 1802).
"What can be more reasonable than that when crowds of them [immigrants] come here, they should be forced to renounce everything contrary to the spirit of the Constitution[?]"
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: James Madison, House of Representatives, Naturalization Bills (January 1, 1795); Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner, eds., The Founders’ Constitution, Volume Two: Preamble through Article I, Section 8, Clause 4 (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000), 577
"When we are considering the advantages that may result from an easy mode of naturalization, we ought also to consider the cautions necessary to guard against abuses. It is no doubt very desirable that we should hold out as many inducements as possible for the worthy part of mankind to come and settle amongst us, and throw their fortunes into a common lot with ours. But why is this desirable? Not merely to swell the catalogue of people. No, sir, it is to increase the wealth and strength of the community; and those who acquire the rights of citizenship without adding to the strength or wealth of the community are not the people we are in want of … I should be exceedingly sorry, sir, that our rule of naturalization excluded a single person of good fame that really meant to incorporate himself into our society; on the other hand, I do not wish that any man should acquire the privilege, but such as would be a real addition to the wealth or strength of the United States."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: James Madison, House of Representatives, Rule of Naturalization (February 3-4, 1790); Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner, eds., The Founders’ Constitution, Volume Two: Preamble through Article I, Section 8, Clause 4 (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000), 562
"[T]he policy or advantage of [immigration] taking place in a body (I mean the settling of them in a body) may be much questioned; for, by so doing, they retain the language, habits, and principles (good or bad) which they bring with them. Whereas by an intermixture with our people, they, or their descendants, get assimilated to our customs, measures, and laws: in a word, soon become one people."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: George Washington, Letter to John Adams (November 15, 1794)
"If aliens might be admitted indiscriminately to enjoy all the rights of citizens at the will of a single state, the Union might itself be endangered by an influx of foreigners, hostile to its institutions, ignorant of its powers, and incapable of a due estimate of its privileges."
-Justice Joseph Story-
(1779-1845) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution, Book 3, §1098 (1833); Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner, eds., The Founders’ Constitution, Volume Two: Preamble through Article I, Section 8, Clause 4 (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000), 619.
"[N]othing can be more opposed [to American principles] than the maxims of absolute monarchies. Yet, from such, we are to expect the greater number of emigrants. They will bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth; or, if able to throw them off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness, passing, as is usual, from one extreme to another. It would be a miracle were they to stop precisely at the point of temperate liberty. These principles, with their language, they will transmit to their children. In proportion to their numbers, they will share with us the legislation. They will infuse into it their spirit, warp and bias its direction, and render it a heterogenous, incoherent, distracted mass."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query 8 (1783)
"[T]here is a wide difference between closing the door altogether and throwing it entirely open; between a postponement of fourteen years and an immediate admission to all the rights of citizenship. Some reasonable term ought to be allowed to enable aliens to get rid of foreign and acquire American attachments; to learn the principles and imbibe the spirit of our government; and to admit of at least a probability of their feeling a real interest in our affairs."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: Alexander Hamilton, The Examination, No. 8 (January 1802).
"All the property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages. He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
Source: letter to Robert Morris, 25 December 1783, Ref: Franklin Collected Works, Lemay, ed., 1082
"Every species of government has its specific principles. Ours perhaps are more peculiar than those of any other in the universe. It is a composition of the freest principles of the English constitution, with others derived from natural right and natural reason."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query 8 (1783)
"The freemen of America will remember, that it is very easy to change a free government into an arbitrary, despotic, or military one: but it is very difficult, almost impossible to reverse the matter -- very difficult to regain freedom once lost."
-Freeman’s Journal-
Source: Freeman’s Journal (Philadelphia), March 5, 1788
"Before the creation of the welfare state, immigrants who came to this country were for the most part attracted by America’s reputation as a land of freedom and opportunity. Laws and customs that then prevailed required immigrants to carve out their individual destinies by their own labor, perseverance, intelligence, and determination."
-James Thornton-
Source: Six Great Immigrants, The New American, February 19, 1996, p. 47
"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-
(1870-1945) American libertarian author, editor, educational theorist, Georgist, social critic
"If you look at Washington, you see permanently camped on the banks of the Potomac spread around in concentric circles an army representing thousands of selfish interests. The sole purpose of their presence is to plunder, by hook or crook, the public treasury for the benefit of their particular people or corporations."
-Charley Reese-
(1937-2013) American syndicated columnist
Source: The “Me” Method Of Government., Conservative Chronicle, P. 17, July 31, 1996
"The Radical creed, as I understand it, is this: We have not abandoned our old belief in liberty, justice, and Self-help, but we say that under certain conditions the people cannot help themselves, and that then they should be helped by the State representing directly the whole people. In giving this State help, we make three conditions: first, the matter must be one of primary social importance; next, it must be proved to be practicable; thirdly, the State interference must not diminish self-reliance. Even if the chance should arise of removing a great social evil, nothing must be done to weaken those habits of individual self-reliance and voluntary association which have built up the greatness of the English people."
-Arnold J. Toynbee-
(1889-1975) British historian
Source: Lectures on The Industrial Revolution in England (1884), p. 219. "Are Radicals Socialists?"
"[D]ecade after decade, through taxes and regulations, governments at all levels took ever-increasing control over people’s lives, wealth, and property. The control grew exponentially, decade after decade. The rationale was that the control was necessary -- for society, for the poor, for the nation, even for freedom itself. Americans continued living their life of the lie: they continued believing that the more control government exercised over their lives and property, the freer they became."
-Jacob G. Hornberger-
American author, journalist, politician, founder and president of the Future of Freedom Foundation
Source: Terrorism—Public And Private, The Tyranny Of Gun Control, 74 (Future Of Freedom Foundation 1997).
"Politicians need human misery. ... Government’s a disease masquerading as its own cure."
-L. Neil Smith-
American writer
Source: The Probability Broach, 129 (Tor 1980).
"Here in America, government began as a tool to assure freedom. It gradually turned into a hideously expensive political toy designed to redistribute your wealth and control most aspects of your business and private life."
-Mark Skousen-
(1947-) American economist, investment analyst, newsletter editor, college professor and author
"The world is governed more by appearance than realities so that it is fully as necessary to seem to know something as to know it."
-Daniel Webster-
(1782-1852) US Senator
"The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history."
-Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel-
(1770-1831) German philosopher
"[T]he power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbor and perhaps my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest fonctionaire possesses who wields the coercive power of the state and on whose discretion it depends whether and how I am to be allowed to live or to work? And who will deny that a world in which the wealthy are powerful is still a better world than one in which only the already powerful can acquire wealth?"
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
Source: The Road To Serfdom, P. 115
"Libertarianism is not and does not pretend to be a complete moral, or aesthetic theory; it is only a political theory, that is, the important subset of moral theory that deals with the proper role of violence in social life. Political theory deals with what is proper or improper for government to do, and government is distinguished from every other group in society as being the institution of organized violence. Libertarianism holds that the only proper role of violence is to defend person and property against violence, that any use of violence that goes beyond such just defense is itself aggressive, unjust, and criminal. Libertarianism, therefore, is a theory which states that everyone should be free of violent invasion, should be free to do as he sees fit except invade the person or property of another. What a person does with his or her life is vital and important, but is simply irrelevant to libertarianism."
-Murray N. Rothbard-
"If every one of those good words — liberty, equality, fraternity, democracy, human rights — has been called "bourgeois", what on earth does that leave for us?
-Fang Lizhi-
"The individual is not accountable to society for his actions, insofar as these concern the interests of no person but himself."
-John Stuart Mill-
(1806-1873) English philosopher and economist
"Unlike ordinary legislation, a constitution is enacted by the people themselves in their sovereign capacity and is therefore the paramount law."
-Justice Frank Cruise Haymond-
(1887-1972) West Virginia Court of Appeals (1946-1972)
Source: Lance v. Board of Education, 170 S.E.2d 783, 793 (1969) (dissent)
"There is no difference in principle, ... between the economic philosophy of Nazism, socialism, communism, and fascism and that of the American welfare state and regulated economy."
-Jacob G. Hornberger-
American author, journalist, politician, founder and president of the Future of Freedom Foundation
Source: paraphrasing F. A. Hayek, Terrorism—Public and Private, THE TYRANNY OF GUN CONTROL, 74 (Future of Freedom Foundation 1997).
"That no government, so called, can reasonably be trusted, or reasonably be supposed to have honest purposes in view, any longer than it depends wholly upon voluntary support."
-Lysander Spooner-
(1808-1887) Political theorist, activist, abolitionist
"Today, of course, the redistributive powers of Congress are everywhere -- except in the Constitution. The result is the feeding frenzy that is modern Washington, the Hobbesian war of all against all as each tries to get his share and more of the common pot the tax system fills. ... It is unseemly and wrong. More than that, it is unconstitutional, whatever the slim and cowed majority on the New Deal Court may have said."
-Roger Pilon-
Vice President for Legal Affairs for the Cato Institute
Source: Restoring Constitutional Government, Cato’s Letter #9, P. 10, Published By The Cato Institute (1995)
"Suum cuique"
[To each his own, to each according to his merits.]
-Latin Proverb-
"The more that is given, the less people will work for themselves, and the less they work, the more their poverty will increase."
-Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi-
(1828-1910) Russian writer
"While the legislature has power, in the most comprehensive manner, to regulate the carrying and use of firearms, it has no power to constitute it a crime for a person, alien or citizen, to possess a revolver for the legitimate defense of himself and his property, said right being expressly granted by section 5, art. 2, of the State Constitution, to every person."
-Michigan Supreme Court-
Source: People v. Zerillo, 219 Mich. 635, 189 N.W. 927, 24 A.L.R. 1115 at headnote 1 (1922).
"There's no valid evidence whatsoever to indicate that depriving law-abiding American citizens of the right to own firearms would in any way lesson crime or criminal activity. ... The National Sheriffs Association unequivocally opposes any legislation that has as its intent the confiscation of firearms ... or the taking away from law-abiding American citizens their right to purchase, own, and keep arms."
-National Sheriffs Association-
"[N]one are so emboldened as thugs who, in spite of the law are armed, in confrontations with law-abiding citizens who, because of the law, are disarmed."
-The New American-
Source: THE NEW AMERICAN, p. 42, February 5, 1996
"[Legislation] cannot constitutionally result in the prohibition of the possession of those arms which, by the common opinion and usage of law-abiding people, are proper and legitimate to be kept upon private premises for the protection of person and property."
-Michigan Supreme Court-
Source: People v. Brown, 235 N.W. 245, 246 -- 47 (1931)
"No law shall abridge the right of the citizen to keep and bear arms for security and defense of themselves, their families, their property and the state."
-New Mexico Constitution-
Source: New Mexico Constitution, Article II, Section 6
"It is our opinion that an ordinance may not deny the people the constitutionally guaranteed right to bear arms, and to that extent the ordinance under consideration is void."
-New Mexico Court of Appeals-
Source: City of Las Vegas v. Moberg, 82 N.M. 626, 627, 485 P.2d 737, 738 (1971)
"A sword by itself does not slay; it is merely the weapon used by the slayer."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter LXXXVII: Some arguments in favor of the simple life, line 30
"The right of every citizen to keep and bear arms for the defense of his home, person, or property, or in aid of the civil power when thereto legally summoned, shall not be called in question, but the legislature may regulate or forbid carrying concealed weapons."
-Mississippi Constitution-
Source: Mississippi Constitution, Article III, Section 12
"That the right of every citizen to keep and bear arms in defense of his home, person and property, or when lawfully summoned in aid of the civil power, shall not be questioned; but this shall not justify the wearing of concealed weapons."
-Missouri Constitution-
Source: Missouri Constitution, Article I, Section 23
"All persons are by nature free and independent, and have certain inherent and unalienable rights; among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and the right to keep and bear arms for security or defense of self, family, home and others, and for lawful common defense, hunting, recreational use, and all other lawful purposes, and such rights shall not be denied or infringed by the state or any subdivision thereof."
-Nebraska Constitution-
Source: Nebraska Constitution, Article I, Section 1
"Every citizen has the right to keep and bear arms for security and defense, for lawful hunting and recreational use and for other lawful purposes."
-Nevada Constitution-
Source: Nevada Constitution, Article I, Section 11(1)
"The end move in politics is always to pick up a gun."
-R. Buckminster Fuller-
[Richard Buckminster Fuller] (1895-1983) American visionary, designer, architect, poet, author, and inventor
Source: Attributed
"The framers gave us the Second Amendment not so we could go deer or duck hunting but to give us a modicum of protection against congressional tyranny."
-Walter E. Williams-
(1936- ) Columnist, Professor of Economics at George Mason University
"It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favor of vegetarianism while the wolf remains of a different opinion."
-William Ralph Inge-
(1860-1954) English author, Anglican prelate
"[G]overnment theft of private money and redistribution by a government elite is communism not democracy. ... Communism has already been tried for over 70 years, and it doesn't work because people work to support themselves, not their neighbors. When the rewards are confiscated and redistributed to others, people produce less or stop producing altogether. The quantity of 'goods in common' declines until the system finally collapses and everybody is hungry, not just 'the poor.' Then totalitarianism steps in to force people to produce (ask the Russians, the Poles, the Estonians)."
-Don Hull-
Source: The UnReported News, August 27, 1995
"These are the rules of big business...Get a monopoly; let society work for you; and remember that the best of all business is politics..."
-Frederick C. Howe-
Source: revealed the strategy of using government in a 1906 book, "Confessions of a Monopolist"
It's the only one with a FORCE monopoly.
"It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it."
-Upton Sinclair-
Source: 1935, "I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked"
"Since time immemorial, governments have claimed moral superiority. Yet they use laws to loot the productive wealth of working people and build palaces, pyramids, religious monuments, military forces, and other symbols of their power."
-Marisa Manley-
Source: Why Laws Backfire, THE FREEMAN, p.546, August 1996
"The Liberal Democrat remain steadfast in their belief that liberty must not be sacrificed on the altar of security and regrets the climate of fear that has been fostered by the approach of both Labour and the Conservatives to issues of domestic and international security. We believe that liberty, justice and the separation of powers are essential to achieving lasting security and that abandoning liberties, particularly in the face of unconventional threats from criminals and terrorists, will only serve to make Britain both less free and less secure."
-Robin Lawrence-
UK Liberal Democrat Park Ward Councillor
Source: Liberal Democrat Conference, Sep. 13, 2008
"I can never join with my voice in the toast which I see in the papers attributed to one of our gallant naval heroes. I cannot ask of heaven success, even for my country, in a cause where she should be in the wrong. Fiat justitia, pereat coelum. My toast would be, may our country be always successful, but whether successful or otherwise, always right."
-John Quincy Adams-
“History shows that governments sometimes seek to regulate our lives finely, acutely, thoroughly, and exhaustively. In our own time and place, criminal laws have grown so exuberantly and come to cover so much previously innocent conduct that almost anyone can be arrested for something. If the state could use these laws not for their intended purposes but to silence those who voice unpopular ideas, little would be left of our First Amendment liberties, and little would separate us from the tyrannies of the past or the malignant fiefdoms of our own age. The freedom to speak without risking arrest is ‘one of the principal characteristics by which we distinguish a free nation.’”
-Justice Neil Gorsuch-
dissenting, Nieves v. Bartlett (2019)
"Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us? The constitutional theory is that we the people are the sovereigns, the state and federal officials only our agents. We who have the final word can speak softly or angrily. We can seek to challenge and annoy, as we need not stay docile and quiet. The situation might have indicated that Colten's techniques were ill-suited to the mission he was on, that diplomacy would have been more effective. But at the constitutional level speech need not be a sedative; it can be disruptive."
-Justice William O. Douglas-
dissenting, Colten v. Kentucky
[S]tatism is a system of institutionalized violence and perpetual civil war. It leaves men no choice but to fight to seize political power -- to rob or be robbed, to kill or be killed. ... Statism survives by looting; a free country survives by production.
-Ayn Rand-
[Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum] (1905-1982) Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter
Source: The Roots Of War
"Taxes are not levied for the benefit of the taxed."
-Robert A. Heinlein-
(1907-1988) American writer
"There are two distinct classes of men in the nation, those who pay taxes, and those who receive and live upon the taxes."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
"Trade is profitable. Conflict is costly."
-DownsizeDC-
"The people suffer from famine because of the multitude of taxes consumed by their superiors. It is through this that they suffer famine."
-Lao-Tzu-
[Li Erh] (570-490 BC) 'Old Sage', Father of Taoism
Source: Tao Te Ching
"To see what is in front of one's nose requires a constant struggle."
-George Orwell-
[Eric Arthur Blair] (1903-1950) British author
"Outwardly we have a Constitutional government. We have operating within our government and political system, another body representing another form of government, a bureaucratic elite which believes our Constitution is outmoded."
-Senator William Jenner-
(1908-1985) U.S. Senator (IN-R)
"The practical objection to Puritanism, as to every form of fanaticism, is that it singles out certain evils as so much worse than others that they must be suppressed at all costs. The fanatic fails to recognise that the suppression of a real evil, if carried out too drastically, produces other evils which are even greater."
-Bertrand Russell-
[Bertrand Arthur William Russell] (1872-1970) Philosopher, educator
Source: The Recrudescence of Puritanism, in Sceptical Essays, 1928
"The majority, oppressing an individual, is guilty of a crime, abuses its strength, and by acting on the law of the strongest breaks up the foundations of society."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Thomas Jefferson to Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours, 1816
"Force is the antithesis of freedom, but force must be used, if only to defend against other force."
-Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
"It takes a very long time to learn that a courtroom is the last place in the world for learning the truth."
-Alice Koller-
Source: The Stations of Solitute (1990)
"Psychologically, it is important to understand that the simple fact of being interviewed and investigated has a coercive influence. As soon as a man is under cross-examination, he may become paralyzed by the procedure and find himself confessing to deeds he never did. In a country where the urge to investigate spreads, suspicion and insecurity grow."
-Joost A. Merloo-
Source: The Rape of the Mind, 1956
"May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the Signal of arousing men to burst the chains, under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings & security of self-government.
That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man . . . The palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of god. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them."
-Thomas Jefferson-
July 4, 1826, marking the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence -- then he died
"The freemen of America did not wait till usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise, and entangled the question in precedents. They saw all the consequences in the principle, and they avoided the consequences by denying the principle."
-James Madison-
1785
"Precedents do not stop where they begin, but, however, narrow the path upon which they enter, they create for themselves a highway whereon they may wander with the utmost latitude."
-Velleius Paterculus-
Roman historian, (19 BC-31 AD)
"Our dreams of bringing the whole of human history under the control of the human will are ironically refuted by the fact that no group of idealists can easily move the pattern of history toward the desired goal of peace and justice. The recalcitrant forces in the historical drama have a power and persistence beyond our reckoning."
-Reinhold Niebuhr-
"The basic problem is simply that the Congress has become professionalized. It has interest much higher than ever existed before in remaining in office. It has a bureaucracy that is serving it. It is much more subject to the power of individualized pressure groups as opposed to the unorganized feelings of the majority of the citizens."
-Justice Antonin Scalia-
(1936-2016) American jurist, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
Source: American Enterprise Institute forum, “A Constitutional Convention: How Well Would It Work?” May 23, 1979
"The vices of the rich and great are mistaken for error; and those of the poor and lowly, for crimes."
-Lady Marguerite Blessington-
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!"
-Patrick Henry-
(1736-1799) US Founding Father
1775
"The first duty of government is to protect the citizen from assault. Unless it does this, all the civil rights and civil liberties in the world aren't worth a dime."
-Richard A. Viguerie-
(1933- ) American writer
"I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample under foot."
-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"
"To those who feel that their values are THE values, the less controlled systems necessarily present a spectacle of "chaos," simply because such systems respond to a diversity of values. The more successfully such systems respond to diversity, the more "chaos" there will be, by definition, according to the standards of ANY specific set of values -- other than diversity or freedom as values. Looked at another way, the more self-righteous observers there are, the more chaos (and 'waste') will be seen."
-Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
"Men love liberty because it protects them from control and humiliation by others, thus affording them the possibility of dignity; they loathe liberty because it throws them back on their own abilities and resources, thus confronting them with the possibility of insignificance."
-Thomas Szasz-
(1920-2012) Hungarian-American Professor of Psychiatry, Author, Libertarian
Source: The Untamed Tongue, 1990
"This new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe. Hither have they fled, not from the tender embraces of the mother, but from the cruelty of the monster; and it is so far true of England, that the same tyranny which drove the first emigrants from home, pursues their descendants still."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
Source: Common Sense, 1776
"People with real power never fear of losing it. People with control think of little else."
-Joss Whedon-
"Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it."
-Thomas Sowell-
"One of the grand fallacies of our time is that something beneficial should be subsidized."
-Thomas Sowell-
"When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear."
-Thomas Sowell-
"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. Know-it-alls in the school system do not lose one dime or one hour's sleep if their bright ideas turn out to be all wrong, or even disastrous, for the child."
-Thomas Sowell-
"Some of the most vocal critics of the way things are being done are people who have done nothing themselves, and whose only contributions to society are their complaints and moral exhibitionism."
-Thomas Sowell-
'Moral exhibitionism', AKA 'virtue signaling'
"People who think that they are being 'exploited' should ask themselves whether they would be missed if they left, or whether people would say: 'Good riddance.'"
-Thomas Sowell-
"It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication and a government bureaucracy to administer 'universal health care.'"
-Thomas Sowell-
"Idiot, n. A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling. The Idiot's activity is not confined to any special field of thought or action, but "pervades and regulates the whole." He has the last word in everything; his decision is unappealable. He sets the fashions and opinion of taste, dictates the limitations of speech and circumscribes conduct with a dead-line."
-Ambrose Bierce-
"In a Society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behaviour is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law. When human beings are governed by 'thou shalt not', the individual can practise a certain amount of eccentricity: when they are supposedly governed by 'love' or 'reason', he is under continuous pressure to make him behave and think in exactly the same way as everyone else."
-George Orwell-
"Anything other than free enterprise always means a society of compulsion and lower living standards, and any form of socialism strictly enforced means dictatorship and the total state. That this statement is still widely disputed only illustrates the degree to which malignant fantasy can capture the imagination of intellectuals."
-Lew Rockwell-
[Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.] (1944- ) Chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute
Source: September 11 and the Anti-Capitalistic Mentality: An Interview with Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr
By: Myles Kantor, FrontPageMagazine.com | Tuesday, March 12, 2002
"Communism, avowedly secularistic and materialistic, has no place for God. This I could never accept,... I strongly disagreed with Communism’s ethical relativism… there are no fixed, immutable principles; consequently, almost anything — force, violence, murder, lying — is a justifiable means to the ‘millennial’ end."
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-
(1929-1968) US civil rights leader
Source: Stride Toward Freedom
"We may define a Puritan as a man who holds that certain kinds of acts, even if they have no visible bad effects upon others than the agent, are inherently sinful, and, being sinful, ought to be prevented by whatever means is most effectual - the criminal law if possible, and, if not that, then public opinion backed by economic pressure."
-Bertrand Russell-
[Bertrand Arthur William Russell] (1872-1970) Philosopher, educator
Source: The Recrudescence of Puritanism, in Sceptical Essays, 1928
"The Democratic constituency is just like a herd of cows. All you have to do is lay out enough silage and they come running. That’s why I became an operative working with Democrats. With Democrats all you have to do is make a lot of noise, lay out the hay, and be ready to use the ole cattle prod in case a few want to bolt the herd."
-James Carville-
[Chester James Carville Jr.] (1944-) American political commentator, Democrat political consultant, campaign manager for Bill Clinton
Source: A Chalice of Miracles, by John W. Casperson (2008)
"Public business, my son, must always be done by somebody. It will be done by somebody or other. If wise men decline it, others will not; if honest men refuse it, others will not."
-John Adams-
"One tells as few lies as possible only by telling as few lies as possible, and not by having the least possible opportunity to do so."
-Franz Kafka-
"It is natural that citizens of great and powerful nations see themselves, collectively speaking, as immortal and immune to the processes that have brought down other illustrious nations and peoples."
-James Thornton-
Source: On The Edge Of Anarchy, The New American, October 16, 1995 At 33.
"The wealthy, not only by private fraud but also by common laws, do every day pluck and snatch away from the people some part of their daily living. Therefore, when I consider and weigh in my mind these commonwealths which nowadays do flourish, I perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men in procuring their own commodities under the name and authority of the commonwealth. They invent and devise all means and crafts, first how to keep safely without fear of losing that which they have unjustly gathered together, and next how to hire and abuse the work and labor of the people for as little money and effort as possible."
-Thomas More-
(1478-1535) English lawyer, social philosopher, author, statesman, Renaissance humanist. Executed by King Henry VIII. Canonized in 1935.
Source: Utopia
And yet as long as they haven't the power to suppress competition...
"You only have power over people as long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything he's no longer in your power -- he's FREE again."
-Alexander Solzhenitsyn-
(1918-2008) Russian novelist, Soviet dissident, imprisoned for 8 years for critizing Stalin in a personal letter, Nobel Prize for Literature, 1970
"Beggars should be abolished. It annoys one to give to them, and it annoys one not to give to them."
-Friedrich Nietzsche-
(1844-1900) German philosopher, cultural critic, poet, philologist
Source: "On the Pitying," Thus Spake Zarathustra
"Laws directed against opinions affect the generous-minded rather than the wicked, and are adapted less for coercing criminals than for irritating the upright."
-Baruch Spinoza-
(1632-1677) Dutch philosopher of Sephardi Portuguese origin
Source: cited in Atlantic Monthly, January 1955
"We feel that an American citizen of voting age and good character should have the right to purchase without restriction a handgun, pistol, revolver, rifle, shotgun, or like item without interference by a government body."
-National Police Officers' Association of America-
"All warfare is based on deception. There is no place where espionage is not used. Offer the enemy bait to lure him."
-Sun Tzu-
(c.500-320 B.C.) name used by the unknown Chinese authors of the sophisticated treatise on philosophy, logistics, espionage, strategy and tactics known as 'The Art of War'
"These, and other grievances, were patiently borne by the people of Texas, untill they reached that point at which forbearance ceases to be a virtue. We then took up arms in defence of the national constitution."
-Texas Declaration of Independence-
March 2, 1836
"Any group or 'collective,' large or small, is only a number of individuals. A group can have no rights other than the rights of its individual members. In a free society, the 'rights' of any group are derived from the rights of its members through their voluntary individual choice and contractual agreement, and are merely the application of these individual rights to a specific undertaking... A group, as such, has no rights."
-Ayn Rand-
[Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum] (1905-1982) Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter
Source: Collectivized Rights
"If the Constitution is adopted the Union will be in fact and in theory an association of States of a Confederacy."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: "The Federalist Papers", vol LX
"Don't forget that pure democracy is a form of collectivism -- it readily sacrifices individual rights to majority wishes. Since it involves no constitutional bill of rights, or at least, no working and effective one, the majority-of-the-moment can and does vote away the rights of the minority-of-the-moment, even of a single individual. This has been called 'mob rule,' the 'tyranny of the majority' and many other pejorative names. It is one of the greatest threats to liberty, the reason why America's founding fathers wrote so much so disparagingly of pure democracy."
-Bert Rand-
"It's a sad and stupid thing to have to proclaim yourself a revolutionary just to be a decent man."
-David Harris-
(1946-) American journalist, author
Source: documentary 'Carry It On' (1970)
"You have to love a nation that celebrates its independence every July 4, not with a parade of guns, tanks, and soldiers who file by the White House in a show of strength and muscle, but with family picnics where kids throw Frisbees, the potato salad gets "iffy", and the flies die from happiness. You may think you have overeaten, but it is patriotism."
-Erma Bombeck-
"No other theory is adequate to explain or comprehend the Declaration of Independence. It is the product of the spiritual insight of the people. We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first. Unless we cling to that, all our material prosperity, overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren sceptre in our grasp. If we are to maintain the great heritage which has been bequeathed to us, we must be like-minded as the fathers who created it. We must not sink into a pagan materialism. We must cultivate the reverence which they had for the things that are holy. We must follow the spiritual and moral leadership which they showed. We must keep replenished, that they may glow with a more compelling flame, the altar fires before which they worshiped."
-Calvin Coolidge-
(1872-1933) 30th US President
"Let the Fourth of July always be a reminder that here in this land, for the first time, it was decided that man is born with certain God-given rights; that government is only a convenience created and managed by the people, with no powers of its own except those voluntarily granted to it by the people. We sometimes forget that great truth, and we never should. Happy Fourth of July."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
Source: Independence Day, 1981
"Every culture and every religion of what we call the civilized world carries, in one form or another, a mythos or story about a time in the past or future when humans lived or will live in peace and harmony. Whether it's referred to as Valhalla or Eden, Shambala or 'A Thousand Years of Peace,' the Satya Yuga or Jannat, stories of past or coming times of paradise go hand-in-hand with hierarchical cultures. Such prophecies were clearly in the minds of America's Founders when they first discussed integrating Greek ideas of democracy, Roman notions of a republic, Masonic utopian ideals, and the Iroquois Federation's constitutionally organized egalitarian society, which was known to Jefferson, Washington, Adams, and Franklin. The creation of the United States of America brought into the world a dramatic new experiment in how people could live together in a modern state."
-Thom Hartmann-
Source: Unequal Protection: The rise of corporate dominance and theft of human rights, by Thom Hartmann
"United teams win. Divided teams lose. Play to our multicultural strengths. Stop preaching the messages of hate and division in your campaign themes. And now, a message to both parties. Please remember that those who have participated in the United We Stand America movement are intelligent, thinking, responsible people. They are not unprogrammed robots who can be emotionally swayed by your negative ads or messages of fear and divisiveness. Bluntly, you will have to face the issues to get their votes. Mud wrestling and messages aimed at destroying your opponent and his loved ones won't work. I love the American people and I am sure that you do, too. I owe them a debt I can never repay and so do you. Today, their Government is a mess, and they want it fixed. By joining together as the owners of this great country, they can solve these problems. As I've said before, it is time to clean out the barn — join us — pick up a shovel. Get to work!"
-Ross Perot-
"Unfortunately, over the course of this century Congress has largely ignored the constitutional limits on its power. And the courts, especially after Franklin Roosevelt threatened to pack the Supreme Court with six additional members, have only abetted the resulting growth of government by fashioning constitutional doctrines that have no basis whatever in the Constitution. As a consequence, many of the programs Congress oversees today are without constitutional foundation, having resulted from acts that Congress had no authority."
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)
"There can be no greater error than to expect, or calculate upon real favours from Nation to Nation. 'Tis an illusion which experience must cure, which a just pride ought to discard."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: Farewell Address, 1796. Reference: Maxims of George Washington, Schroeder, ed. (71)
"[T]he enshrinement of constitutional rights necessarily takes certain policy choices off the table.... Undoubtedly some think that the Second Amendment is outmoded in a society where our standing army is the pride of our Nation, where well-trained police forces provide personal security, and where gun violence is a serious problem. That is perhaps debatable, but what is not debatable is that it is not the role of this Court to pronounce the Second Amendment extinct."
-Justice Antonin Scalia-
(1936-2016) American jurist, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
Source: District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008)
"Hypocrisy in anything whatever may deceive the cleverest and most penetrating man, but the least wide-awake of children recognizes it, and is revolted by it, however ingeniously it may be disguised."
-Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi-
(1828-1910) Russian writer
"... judicial verbicide is calculated to convert the Constitution into a worthless scrap of paper and to replace our government of laws with a judicial oligarchy."
-Senator Sam Ervin-
(1896-1985) United States Senator NC-D (1954-1974)
"Those who cannot afford to sue currently have no protection of their property rights if they come in conflict with a regulation."
-Steve Symms-
US Senator (R-ID)
1991
"Let therefore every man, that, appealing to his own heart, feels the least spark of virtue or freedom there, think that it is an honor which he owes himself, and a duty which he owes his country, to bear arms."
-Thomas Pownhall-
"That is why we give to children a proverb, or that which the Greeks call Chreia, to be learned by heart; that sort of thing can be comprehended by the young mind, which cannot as yet hold more. For a man, however, whose progress is definite, to chase after choice extracts and to prop his weakness by the best known and the briefest sayings and to depend upon his memory, is disgraceful; it is time for him to lean on himself. He should make such maxims and not memorize them. For it is disgraceful even for an old man, or one who has sighted old age, to have a note-book knowledge. "This is what Zeno said." But what have you yourself said? "This is the opinion of Cleanthes." But what is your own opinion? How long shall you march under another man's orders? Take command, and utter some word which posterity will remember. Put forth something from your own stock."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter XXXIII
"Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
Source: Prejudices: Third Series, 1922
"Honest differences are a healthy sign of progress."
-Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi-
(1869-1948)
"The Swiss are well armed and enjoy great freedom."
-Niccolo Machiavelli-
(1469-1527) Italian Statesman and Political Philosopher
Source: The Prince (1513)
"The sentiment that modern day ordinary Canadians do not need firearms for protection is pleasant but unrealistic. To discourage responsible deserving Canadians from possessing firearms for lawful self-defence and other legitimate purposes is to risk sacrificing them at the altar of political correctness."
-Don Demetrick-
Alberta Provincial Court Judge
"Whereas civil rulers, not having their duty to the people duly before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as military forces, which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow citizens, the people are confirmed by the article in their right to keep and bear their private arms."
-Tench Coxe-
(1755-1824) American political economist
Source: Writing as "A Pennsylvanian," in "Remarks On The First Part Of The Amendments To The Federal Constitution,"
in the _Philadelphia Federal Gazette,_ June 18, 1789, p.2 col.1
"Is your life worth protecting? If so, whose responsibility is it to protect it? ... How can you rightfully ask another human being to risk his life to protect yours, when you will assume no responsibility yourself?"
-Jeffrey R. Snyder-
American attorney, author
Source: A Nation of Cowards, 113 Public Interest (Fall 1993).
"The single most frightening thing you encounter is confidence-in-government because it's so common."
-Rick Gaber-
Libertarian writer
"The essential characteristic of all government, whatever its form, is authority. There must, in every instance, be, on the one hand, governors, and on the other hand, those who are governed. And the authority of governors, directly or indirectly, rest in all cases ultimately on FORCE. Government, in its last analysis, is organized force. Not necessarily or invariably organized, armed force, but the will of a few men, of many men, or of a community prepared by organization to realize its own purposes with reference to the common affairs of the community. Organized, that is, to rule, to dominate."
-Woodrow Wilson-
(1856-1924) 28th US President
Source: The State, by Woodrow Wilson (1918), p.572
"The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world."
-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 was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself — anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face ... was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime ..."
-George Orwell-
[Eric Arthur Blair] (1903-1950) British author
Source: his book, '1984'
"Imagine the traditionalist as living in synopticon — a suspect that is the target of 24/7 viewing, indoctrination, and conditioning by progressive auditors. In other words, a 40-45 percent minority of Americans is relentlessly lectured, sermonized, demonized, and neutered by a 360-degree ring of prying institutional overseers. There is no escape. There is no respite. There is no quarter given."
-Victor Davis Hanson-
(1953-) American classicist, military historian, columnist, farmer
Source: The Progressive Synopticon, November 18th, 2018
"Public virtue cannot exist in a nation without private, and public virtue is the only foundation of republics. There must be a positive passion for the public good, the public interest, honor, power and glory, established in the minds of the people, or there can be no republican government, nor any real liberty: and this public passion must be superior to all private passions."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: letter to Mercy Warren, 1776
"The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy. The people do not want virtue, but are the dupes of pretended patriots."
-Elbridge Gerry-
(1744-1814) of Massachusetts, Signer of the Declaration of Independence and Member of the Constitutional Convention
Source: Speech in the Constitutional Convention, 1787
"Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat."
-John Lehman-
Secretary of the Navy, 1981-1987
"Sentimentality is a superstructure covering brutality."
-Carl Gustav Jung-
(1875-1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology
"It is doubtful if the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and 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
"It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness."
-Sigmund Freud-
Source: Civilization and Its Discontents
"Hold on, my friends, to the Constitution and to the Republic for which it stands. Miracles do not cluster and what has happened once in 6,000 years, may not happen again. Hold on to the Constitution, for if the American Constitution should fail, there will be anarchy throughout the world."
-Daniel Webster-
(1782-1852) US Senator
1851
"Progressives did not like the antiquated thinking that saw the Constitution as a barrier to government expansion. The 'living Constitution' was born. That benign-sounding phrase (coined later) was conjured up to justify changing the Constitution, without formal amendment, from a limit on power to a blank check. What was impermissible to the federal government by an earlier interpretation became permissible once the Constitution was construed as a evolving document. But by that philosophy, the Constitution is no limit on government power at all. A constitutional government that defines its own powers is a contradiction in terms."
-Sheldon Richman-
"The superior man acquaints himself with many sayings of antiquity And many deeds of the past, In order to strengthen his character thereby."
-I Ching-
"Since a politician never believes what he says, he is quite surprised to be taken at his word."
-Charles De Gaulle-
(1890-1970) French president and military leader
"A nation, therefore, has no right to say to a province: You belong to me, I want to take you. A province consists of its inhabitants. If anybody has a right to be heard in this case it is these inhabitants. Boundary disputes should be settled by plebiscite."
-Ludwig von Mises-
Omnipotent Government, p. 90
"No people and no part of a people shall be held against its will in a political association that it does not want."
-Ludwig von Mises-
Nation, State, and Economy, p. 34
"Liberalism knows no conquests, no annexations; just as it is indifferent towards the state itself, so the problem of the size of the state is unimportant to it. It forces no one against his will into the structure of the state. Whoever wants to emigrate is not held back. When a part of the people of the state wants to drop out of the union, liberalism does not hinder it from doing so. Colonies that want to become independent need only do so. The nation as an organic entity can be neither increased nor reduced by changes in states; the world as a whole can neither win nor lose from them."
-Ludwig von Mises-
Nation, State, and Economy, pp. 39–40
"The size of a states territory therefore does not matter."
-Ludwig von Mises-
Nation, State, and Economy, p. 82
"The right of self-determination in regard to the question of membership in a state thus means: whenever the inhabitants of a particular territory, whether it be a single village, a whole district, or a series of adjacent districts, make it known, by a freely conducted plebiscite, that they no longer wish to remain united to the state to which they belong at the time, but wish either to form an independent state or to attach themselves to some other state, their wishes are to be respected and complied with. This is the only feasible and effective way of preventing revolutions and civil and international wars."
-Ludwig von Mises-
Liberalism, p. 109
"If it were in any way possible to grant this right of self-determination to every individual person, it would have to be done."
-Ludwig von Mises-
Liberalism, pp. 109–10
"The situation of having to belong to a state to which one does not wish to belong is no less onerous if it is the result of an election than if one must endure it as the consequence of a military conquest."
-Ludwig von Mises-
Liberalism, p. 119
"It makes no difference where the frontiers of a country are drawn. Nobody has a special material interest in enlarging the territory of the state in which he lives; nobody suffers loss if a part of this area is separated from the state. It is also immaterial whether all parts of the states territory are in direct geographical connection, or whether they are separated by a piece of land belonging to another state. It is of no economic importance whether the country has a frontage on the ocean or not. In such a world the people of every village or district could decide by plebiscite to which state they wanted to belong."
-Ludwig von Mises-
Omnipotent Government, p. 92
"The prohibition law, written for weaklings and derelicts, has divided the nation, like Gaul, into three parts -- wets, drys, and hypocrites."
-Florence Sabin-
(1871-1953) American scientist
Source: Speech, February 9, 1931
"It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state."
-Bruce Schneier-
Source: Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World, 2000
"So long as there are earnest believers in the world, they will always wish to punish opinions, even if their judgment tells them it is unwise and their conscience tells them it is wrong."
-Walter Bagehot-
(1826-1877)
Source: Literary Studies
"When Michelle and I decided that I would run for President, it was because of a shared belief in the power of community and connection, a commitment to the idea that we are our brothers' keepers."
-Barack Hussein Obama-
(1961-) 44th President of the United States
Source: Campaign email sent by [email protected], Sep. 13, 2010
That's not community. That's animal husbrandry.
"The only vice that can not be forgiven is hypocrisy."
-William Hazlitt-
(1778 - 1830)
"I will have nought to do with a man who can blow hot and cold with the same breath."
-Aesop-
(c. 550 B.C.) legendary Greek fabulist
Source: The Man and the Satyr
"Hypocrisy is anything whatever may deceive the cleverest and most penetrating man, but the least wide-awake of children recognizes it, and is revolted by it, however ingeniously it may be disguised."
-Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi-
(1828-1910) Russian writer
"Once again prosperous and successful crime goes by the name of virtue; good men obey the bad, might is right and fear oppresses law."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: Tragedies, Hercules Furens (The Madness of Hercules), lines 251-253; (Amphitryon)
"Democracy is a form of religion, it is the worship of jackals by jack asses."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even where there is no river."
-Nikita Khrushchev-
(1894-1971) Premier of the Soviet Union
So what does that say about voters...?
"I once said cynically of a politician, 'He'll doublecross that bridge when he comes to it.'"
-Oscar Levant-
(1906-1972)
"Asked random questions about the First Amendment and how they would like to have it applied, if you believe in polls at all, the average American wants no part of it. But if you ask, 'What if we threw the Constitution away tomorrow?' the answer is 'No, that would be bad!' But living under the Constitution is another story altogether."
-Frank Zappa-
(1940-1993) American Musician
"I'm not here to say that the government is always right, but when the government tells you to do something, I'm sure you would all agree that I think you all recognize that is something you need to do."
-Kit Bond-
[Christopher Samuel "Kit" Bond] (1939-) US Senator (R-MO)
"... [T]he 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-
States Have Powers: The Powers of the People -- Hon. Dan Itse
"A society that puts equality... ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
"'Racism’ has been redefined to mean anyone opposing big government dependency welfare programs."
-Bill Federer-
(1957-) American writer, author
Source: 'The politics of race: It’s not black and white,' July 27, 2019
"There is a certain class of race-problem solvers who do not want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public."
-Booker T. Washington-
(1856-1915) Author
"My mother worked as a domestic, two, sometimes three jobs at a time because she didn’t want to be on welfare. She felt very strongly that if she gave up and went on welfare, that she would give up control of her life and of our lives, and I think she was probably correct about that. … But, one thing that she provided us was a tremendous example of what hard work is like."
-Dr. Ben Carson-
(1951-) American neurosurgeon, former presidential candidate, 17th United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development
"Too often when we talk about racial healing, we make the old assumption that government can heal the racial divide. … Republicans and Democrats – red, yellow, black and white – have to understand that we must individually, all of us, accept our share of responsibility. … It does not happen by dividing us into racial groups. It does not happen by trying to turn rich against poor or by using the politics of fear. It does not happen by reducing our values to the lowest common denominator. And friends, it does not happen by asking Americans to accept what’s immoral and wrong in the name of tolerance. "
-J. C. Watts, Jr.-
(1957- ) US Congressman from Oklahoma (R), former quarterback in the Canadian Football League
Source: Feb. 5, 1997
"It is a sad reminder that many in the media are not interested in journalism but progressive advocacy."
-Mollie Hemingway-
American columnist, political commentator, author
Source: Daily Caller, 18 July 2019
"Understanding of men can be warped and their affections changed by operations upon their passions and prejudices."
-William Henry Harrison-
(1773-1841), 9th U. S. President
Source: Inaugural Address, 1841
"[T]he greatest problem facing the United States today is not racism; it is the disappearance of the can-do attitude that built the country, ... We’ve lost the sense of individual responsibility for our problems, and that’s bad enough. But what’s worse, we’re losing faith in our ability to solve our problems. This acquired sense of helplessness is catastrophic, and it has paralyzed large swaths of the American public – rural, urban and suburban. … Encouraging dependence upon government not only creates generations of helpless people; it inures them to government’s ineffectiveness."
-Laura Hollis-
Source: OUR TRAGIC 'GOVERNMENT AS SAVIOR' MENTALITY, Aug 1, 2019
"Who vaunts his race, lauds what belongs to others."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: Tragedies, Hercules Furens (The Madness of Hercules), lines 340-341; (Lycus)
"The freedom to fail is vital if you’re going to succeed. Most successful people fail from time to time, and it is a measure of their strength that failure merely propels them into some new attempt at success."
-Michael Korda-
(1919-1973)
"Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it."
-George Orwell-
Source: George Orwell's '1984', 1949
"Your children’s children will live under communism. You Americans are so gullible. No, you won’t accept Communism outright, but we’ll keep feeding you small doses of Socialism until you will finally wake up and find that you already have Communism. We won’t have to fight you; We’ll so weaken your economy, until you fall like overripe fruit into our hands."
-Nikita Khrushschev-
Source: reportedly told to Ezra Taft Benson, Eisenhower’s Secretary of Agriculture, in 1959
"Kings … will … take possession of the children, who will be unaffected by the habits of their parents; these they will train in their own habits and laws."
-Plato-
(429-347 BC) Greek philosopher
Source: “Republic” (380 B.C.)
"For the past 30 years our nation’s spent $5 trillion trying to erase poverty, and the result, as you know, is that we didn’t get rid of it at all. In fact, we spread it. We destroyed the self-esteem of millions of people, grinding them down in a welfare system that penalizes moms for wanting to marry the father of their children, and penalizes moms for wanting to save money. Friends, that’s not right."
-J. C. Watts, Jr.-
(1957- ) US Congressman from Oklahoma (R), former quarterback in the Canadian Football League
Source: Feb. 5, 1997
"The classical Liberal, during the Revolutionary time, was a man who wanted less power for the king and more power for the people. He wanted people to have more say in the running of their lives and he wanted protection for the God-given rights of the people. He did not believe those rights were dispensations granted by the king to the people, he believed that he was born with them. Well, that today is the Conservative."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
Source: 1973
"My Son, Freedom is best, I tell thee true, of all things to be won. Then never live within the Bond of Slavery."
-William Wallace-
"At any particular moment in a man's life, he can say that everything he has done and not done, that has been done and not been done to him, has brought him to that moment. If he's being installed as Chieftain or receiving a Nobel Prize, that's a fulfilling notion. But if he's in a sleeping bag at ten thousand feet in a snowstorm, parked in the middle of a highway and waiting to freeze to death, the idea can make him feel calamitously stupid."
-William Least Heat-Moon-
"The fact is that libertarianism is not and does not pretend to be a complete moral or aesthetic theory; it is only a political theory, that is, the important subset of moral theory that deals with the proper role of violence in social life.
Political theory deals with what is proper or improper for government to do, and government is distinguished from every other group in society as being the institution of organized violence. Libertarianism holds that the only proper role of violence is to defend person and property against violence, that any use of violence that goes beyond such just defense is itself aggressive, unjust, and criminal. Libertarianism, therefore, is a theory which states that everyone should be free of violent invasion, should be free to do as he sees fit, except invade the person or property of another. What a person does with his or her life is vital and important, but is simply irrelevant to libertarianism.
It should not be surprising, therefore, that there are libertarians who are indeed hedonists and devotees of alternative lifestyles, and that there are also libertarians who are firm adherents of "bourgeois" conventional or religious morality. There are libertarian libertines and there are libertarians who cleave firmly to the disciplines of natural or religious law. There are other libertarians who have no moral theory at all apart from the imperative of non-violation of rights. That is because libertarianism per se has no general or personal moral theory.
Libertarianism does not offer a way of life; it offers liberty, so that each person is free to adopt and act upon his own values and moral principles. Libertarians agree with Lord Acton that 'liberty is the highest political end' — not necessarily the highest end on everyone's personal scale of values."
-Murray N. Rothbard-
"[H]e that thinks absolute power purifies men's blood, and corrects the baseness of human nature, need read the history of this, or any other age, to be convinced to the contrary."
-John Locke-
(1632-1704) English philosopher and political theorist
"[I]f society acknowledges that handguns have significant defensive value and can help save the lives of police officers and security guards, how can society deny that handguns can also help save the lives of other people?"
-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, 287 (1993)
"Thus perhaps the most dangerous of all socialist attacks on America in the 1990s is the onslaught to register and confiscate America's firearms. America cannot be subjugated to communism or a socialist dictatorship until Americans are first disarmed. Poland has strict gun control; so does Cambodia, Russia, and Red China. Over 100 million people were brutally slaughtered in those countries, but first they were disarmed. The danger to people when they can't own guns is far greater than any danger gun ownership can ever create."
-Donald S. McAlvaney-
Source: Toward a New World Order, 57 (2nd Ed. 1992)
"God requireth not a uniformity of religion."
-Roger Williams-
(1603-1684) Anglo-American clergyman, advocate for the separation of church and state, founder of the Rhode Island colony
Source: "A Plea for Religious Liberty" in The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, for Cause of Conscience (1644)
"Former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart noted (in his dissent of Abington Township, 1963) ‘if religious exercises are held to be impermissible activity in schools, religion is placed at an artificial and state-created disadvantage. Permission for such exercises for those who want them is necessary if the schools are truly to be neutral in the matter of religion. And a refusal to permit them is seen not as the realization of state neutrality, but rather as the establishment of a religion of secularism.'"
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
Source: Ronald Reagan radio address, Feb. 25, 1984
"If a State refused to let religious groups use facilities open to others, then it would demonstrate not neutrality but hostility toward religion. The Establishment Clause does not license government to treat religion and those who teach or practice it … as subversive of American ideals."
-US Supreme Court-
Source: The Supreme Court upheld the Equal Access Act by a vote of 8-1 in Westside Community Schools v. Mergens, June 4, 1990
"The believer is happy, the doubter is wise."
-Hungarian Proverb-
"Mistrust the people and they become untrustworthy."
-I Ching-
"License they mean when they cry, Liberty!
For who loves that, must first be wise and good."
-John Milton-
(1608-1674) English Poet
"Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance."
-C. S. Lewis-
(1898-1963), British novelist
"[T]he Swiss people are the best practitioners of the ideals of non-aggression. The Swiss national government posts are parttime positions. Most decisions are made at the canton (state) level. Swiss per capita income is the highest in the world, showing that non-aggression pays. How did the Swiss come to adopt a relatively non-aggressive constitution in an aggressive world? In the mid-1800s, they imitated our constitution and stuck with it!"
-Dr. Mary J. Ruwart-
(1949- )
Source: Healing Our World, Ch 22
"The same fact that Boccaccio offers in support of religion might be adduced in behalf of a republic: 'It exists in spite of its ministers.'"
-Heinrich Heine-
(1797-1856) German poet, journalist, essayist, literary critic
"It would indeed be ironic if, in the name of national defense, we would sanction the subversion of one of the liberties ... which makes the defense of the Nation worthwhile."
-United States v. Robel-
Source: United States v. Robel, 389 US 258, 264 (1967)
"We are sure living in a peculiar time. You get more for not working than you will for working, and more for not raising a hog than for raising it."
-Will Rogers-
(1879-1935) American humorist
"If I could have entertained the slightest apprehension that the Constitution framed by the Convention, where I had the honor to preside, might possibly endanger the religious rights of any ecclesiastical Society, certainly I would never have placed my signature to it."
-George Washington-
Source: United Baptist Churches of Virginia, May 10, 1789
"Well-meaning Americans in the name of freedom have taken freedom away. For the sake of religious tolerance, they’ve forbidden religious practice."
-Ronald Reagan-
Source: National Day of Prayer, May 6, 1982
"The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."
-W.B. Yeats-
"The decidedly Christian nature of these prayers must not be dismissed as the relic of a time when our Nation was less pluralistic than it is today. Congress continues to permit its appointed and visiting chaplains to express themselves in a religious idiom. … To hold that invocations must be nonsectarian would force the legislatures … and the courts … to act as … censors of religious speech. … Government may not mandate a civic religion that stifles any but the most generic reference to the sacred any more than it may prescribe a religious orthodoxy …"
-Justice Anthony Kennedy-
(1936-) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (1988-2018)
Source: Town of Greece, NY, v. Galloway et al, Justice Kennedy wrote in the decision, May 5, 2014
"In Torcaso v. Watkins, (1961), we did indeed refer to ‘secular humanism’ as a ‘religion.'"
-Justice Antonin Scalia-
(1936-2016) American jurist, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
Source: in Edwards v. Aguillard (1987)
"Among the religions in this country which do not teach what would generally be considered a belief in the existence of God are Buddhism, Taoism, ethical culture, secular humanism and others."
-Justice Hugo L. Black-
(1886-1971) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: Torcaso v Watkins (1961)
"The prosperity of commerce is now perceived and acknowledged by all enlightened statesmen to be the most useful as well as the most productive source of national wealth, and has accordingly become a primary object of its political cares."
-Alexander Hamilton-
Source: 1787
"Google, Amazon (AWS), Apple and other elitist 'alphabets' are controlled by global entities working in collusion through major stakeholders and executives for the benefit of foreign and domestic globalist agendas and not for the protection of their clients or user base. Their neo-Nazi ideology proliferates one world governance through technology. It’s a kind of tech socialism mixed with big brother in the cloud along with other mentally unstable ideas. Thus, independence from these ideologies, individuals and companies are required to maintain security and loyalty to our clients."
-Rich Granville-
CEO of Yippy.com
Source: Interview April 4, 2019
"I constantly long for a Left that doesn't reflexively abandon values simply because the Right adopts some bastardized version of them."
-Christopher Hudson-
And vice versa...
"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby."
-H.L. Mencken-
"[Any] act, a habit, an institution, a law, gives birth not only to an effect, but to a series of effects. Of these effects, the first only is immediate; it manifests itself simultaneously with its cause — it is seen. The others unfold in succession — they are not seen: it is well for us, if they are foreseen. Between a good and a bad economist this constitutes the whole difference — the one takes account of the visible effect; the other takes account both of the effects which are seen, and also of those which it is necessary to foresee."
-Frédéric Bastiat-
"The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you've got it made."
-Jean Giraudoux-
maybe...
"A government which lays taxes on the people not required by urgent public necessity and sound public policy is not a protector of liberty, but an instrument of tyranny. It condemns the citizen to servitude."
-Calvin Coolidge-
"Whosoever wishes to know about the world
must learn about it in its particular details.
Knowledge is not intelligence.
In searching for the truth be ready for the unexpected.
Change alone is unchanging.
The same road goes both up and down.
The beginning of a circle is also its end.
Not I, but the world says it: all is one.
And yet everything comes in season."
-Heraclitus-
(c.540-480 BC) Greek philosopher
"The First Amendment does not require students to leave their religion at the schoolhouse door. … If students can wear T-shirts advertising sports teams, rock groups or politicians, they can also wear T-shirts that promote religion. … Religion is too important to our history and our heritage for us to keep it out of our schools."
-Bill Clinton-
[William Jefferson Blythe III] (1946- ), 42nd US President
Source: James Madison High School, July 12, 1995
"Everyone has the right…to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media regardless of frontiers."
-United Nations-
Source: Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19, 1948
"A man should be upright, not be kept upright."
-Marcus Aurelius Antoninus-
(121 AD -180 AD) Roman Emperor, 161-180 AD
Source: Meditations, Book III, 5 (c.161-180 AD)
"You can’t, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty."
-Joseph Conrad-
(1857-1924)
"In the 1950’s [America was] the richest nation, the richest city on earth was Detroit. They voted for change and so now it is the poorest city in America. At the same time, the nation of South Korea, of all the nations on earth, was third from the bottom. Virtually the poorest nation on earth. It is now tenth from the top. If you understand the principle, the greater freedom, the greater the wealth, you can then put any nation [on this chart]. Now you can go to Tagusagopos, you can go to Buenos Aires, you can go to Cairo, you can go to Philadelphia and all you need to know is what percentage of the Gross Domestic Product is controlled by government, and the greater the government, the greater the poverty, and that’s all politics is about. Every day politicians say, 'I can make a better decision for you than you can for yourself, and let me take your money away from you and make it on your behalf' and thus make the nation poorer."
-Bob McEwen-
(1950-) US Congressman (OH-R) (1981-1993)
Source: http://www.conservative.org/cpac/archives/cpacarchivescpac-2010-bob-mcewen
"Freedom can't be kept for nothing. If you set a high value on liberty, you must set a low value on everything else."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: Letters to Lucilius, 65 A.D.
"Populism is rising because liberals have become unbearable, Okay? And I speak as a liberal… Liberals have become utterly, pathetically illiberal and it’s a massive problem. What’s the point of calling yourself a liberal if you don’t allow anyone else to have a different view? You know, this snowflake culture we operate in, this victimhood culture that everyone, has to think in a certain way, behave a certain way. Everyone has to have a bleeding heart… You say a joke 10 years ago that offended somebody you can never host the Oscars… So what’s happening around the world? Populism is rising because people are fed up with the PC culture. They’re fed up with the snowflake culture. They’re fed up with everyone being offended by everything… They just want to tell people, not just how to lead their life but if you don’t lead it the way I tell you to, It’s a kind of version of fascism. "
-Piers Morgan
(1965-) British journalist, television personality
Source: Daily Wire interview, Aug 17, 2019
"You will ruin no more lives as you ruined mine.
You will wring no more hearts as you wrung mine.
I will free the world of a poisonous thing.
Take that, you hound, and that! -- and that! -- and that! -- and that!"
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle-
(1859-1930) Scottish author, most noted for his stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes
Source: The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton, 1904
"An unexamined idea, to paraphrase Socrates, is not worth having, and a society whose ideas are never explored for possible error may eventually find its foundations insecure."
-Mark Van Doren-
(1894-1972) Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, professor, and critic
Source: Man’s Right to Knowledge, 1954
"The newspaper is of necessity something of a monopoly, and its first duty is to shun the temptations of monopoly. Its primary office is the gathering of news. At the peril of its soul it must see that the supply is not tainted. Neither in what it gives, nor in what it does not give, nor in the mode of presentation, must the unclouded face of truth suffer wrong. Comment is free but facts are sacred."
-C. P. Scott-
(1846-1932)
Source: Manchester Guardian, 6 May 1926
"A half truth is the worst of all lies, because it can be defended in partiality."
-Solon-
(c.638 BC-558 BC) Athenian statesman, lawmaker, Lyric poet, renowned as a founding father of the Athenian polis, one of the Seven Sages of Greece
550 B.C.
Source: Attributed
"No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expediency."
-Theodore Roosevelt-
(1858-1919) 26th US President
"A radical is one who speaks the truth."
-Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr.-
(1859-1924) Congressman (R-MN), father of famous aviator
June 15, 1957
"He who does not bellow out the truth when he knows the truth makes himself the accomplice of liars and forgers."
-Charles Peguy-
(1873-1914) French poet, essayist and editor
"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 person than he, if he had the power, would be in silencing mankind… 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-
(1806-1873) English philosopher and economist
Source: On Liberty, 1859
"The trouble with most of us is that we would rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism."
-Norman Vincent Peale-
(1898-1993) American minister, author
"I never did, or countenanced, in public life, a single act inconsistent with the strictest good faith; having never believed there was one code of morality for a public, and another for a private man."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
1809
"The superior man thinks of virtue; the small man thinks of comfort. The superior man thinks of the sanctions of law; the small man thinks of favors which he may receive."
-Confucius- (孔子 · Kongzi)
"When complaints are freely heard, deeply considered, and speedily reformed, then is the utmost bound of civil liberty obtained that wise men look for."
-John Milton
(1608-1674) English Poet
Source: Areopagitica, 1644
"Where the words of a constitution are unambiguous and in their commonly received sense lead to a reasonable conclusion, it should be read according to the natural and most obvious import of the framers, without resorting to subtle and forced construction for the purpose of limiting or extending its operation."
-A State Ex Rel. Torryson v. Grey-
Source: A State Ex Rel. Torryson v. Grey, 21 Nev. 378, 32 P. 190.
"Gun control advocates need to realize that passing laws that honest gun owners will not obey is a self-defeating strategy. Gun owners are not about to surrender their rights, and only the most foolish of politicians would risk the stability of the government by trying to use the force of the state to disarm the people."
-J. Neil Schulman-
Source: Los Angeles Times, June 8, 1992
"To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good."
-Alexander Solzhenitsyn-
(1918-2008) Russian novelist, Soviet dissident, imprisoned for 8 years for critizing Stalin in a personal letter, Nobel Prize for Literature, 1970
"[A] deep-rooted culture of incompetence and corruption has made it virtually impossible for government to function fairly and efficiently. And because most government employees are shielded by layers of protection, they couldn't care less. Never before in the history of this nation has there been a greater divide between a self-serving federal leviathan and millions of Americans... 'Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,' Ronald Reagan reminded us during his inaugural address in 1981. Nothing's changed since then, with one exception: It's gotten far worse."
-Arnold Ahlert-
American columnist
Aug. 4, 2015
"You taught me to be nice, so nice that now I am so full of niceness, I have no sense of right and wrong, no outrage, no passion."
-Garrison Keillor-
(1942- ) American author, humorist, musician, and radio personality
"Every State is known by the rights it maintains."
-Harold J. Laski-
(1893-1950) British political theorist, economist, author, and lecturer
Source: A Grammar of Politics, 1925
"...[T]here is no more dangerous experiment than that of undertaking to be one thing before a man's face and another behind his back."
-Robert E. Lee-
(1807-1870) General-in-Chief of the Confederate States army
"This is the fundamental fact on which the whole philosophy of individualism is based. It does not assume, as is often asserted, that man is egoistic or selfish or ought to be. It merely starts from the indisputable fact that the limits of our powers of imagination make it impossible to include in our scale of values more than a sector of the needs of the whole society, and that, since strictly speaking, scales of value can exist only in individuals minds, nothing but partial scales of values exist – scales which are inevitably different and often inconsistent with each other. From this the individualist concludes that the individuals should be allowed, within defined limits, to follow their own values and preferences rather than somebody else’s; that within these spheres the individual’s system of ends should be supreme and not subject to dictation by others. It is this recognition of the individual as the ultimate judge of his ends, the belief that as far as possible his own views ought to govern his actions, that forms the essence of the individualist position."
-F.A. Hayek-
The Road to Serfdom
"Happily for the busy lunatics who rule over us, we are permanently the United States of Amnesia. We learn nothing because we remember nothing."
-Gore Vidal-
"The argument for liberty is not an argument against organization, which is one of the most powerful tools human reason can employ, but an argument against all exclusive, privileged, monopolistic organization, against the use of coercion to prevent others from doing better."
-Friedrich Hayek-
"When people talk about traveling to the past, they worry about radically changing the present by doing something small, but barely anyone in the present really thinks that they can change the future by doing something small."
-From the Book of Face-
"The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart."
-Alexander Solzhenitsyn-
(1918-2008) Russian novelist, Soviet dissident, imprisoned for 8 years for critizing Stalin in a personal letter, Nobel Prize for Literature, 1970
"O, what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practice to deceive!"
-Sir Walter Scott-
(1771-1832) Scottish historical novelist, playwright, poet
Source: "Marmion", Canto VI, Stanza 17
"It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
"[T]he delegation of the government, in [a republic], to a small number of citizens elected by the rest ... [is] to refine and enlarge the public views by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
"It's a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it."
-W. Somerset Maugham-
(1874-1965)
"Men must have the right of choice, even to choose wrong, if he shall ever learn to choose right."
-Josiah C. Wedgwood-
(1872-1943) British Member of Parliament
"It is the eternal struggle between these two principles -- right and wrong -- throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time..."
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
"No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause, because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Federalist No. 10, November 23, 1787
"Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself."
-Ludwig Wittgenstein-
(1889-1951) Austrian-British philosopher
"The problem of power is how to achieve its responsible use rather than its irresponsible and indulgent use -- of how to get men of power to live for the public rather than off the public."
-Robert F. Kennedy-
(1925-1968), US Senator, Attorney General
Source: 'I Remember, I Believe,' The Pursuit of Justice, 1964
"Slavery is not wrong because it was badly run.
It's not wrong because the wrong people were in charge.
It's not wrong because it was inefficient.
It's not wrong because it was unequal.
It's not wrong because it was racist.
It's not wrong because many slaves were mistreated.
It's wrong because Other People Are Not Your Property."
-Mike Ruff-
"[T]he ignorance of the people is the footstool of despotism."
-St. George Tucker-
"A man must first govern himself ere he is fit to govern a family; and his family ere he be fit to bear the government of the commonwealth."
-Sir Walter Raleigh-
(1552-1618) British Poet, Courtier and Explorer, executed by King James I
"When the leader is morally weak and his discipline not strict, when his instructions and guidance are not enlightened, when there are no consistent rules, neighboring rulers will take advantage of this."
-Sun Tzu-
(c.500-320 B.C.) name used by the unknown Chinese authors of the sophisticated treatise on philosophy, logistics, espionage, strategy and tactics known as 'The Art of War'
"Liberty, like chastity, once lost, can never be regained in its original purity."
-Henry Wheeler Shaw-
(1818-1885) American humorist and lecturer
"Man's character is his fate."
-Heraclitus-
(c.540-480 BC) Greek philosopher
"Can you imagine working at the following Company? It has a little over 500 employees with the following statistics: 29 have been accused of spousal abuse. 7 have been arrested for fraud. 19 have been accused of writing bad checks. 117 have bankrupted at least two businesses. 3 have been arrested for assault. 71 cannot get a credit card due to bad credit. 14 have been arrested on drug-related charges. 8 have been arrested for shoplifting. 21 are current defendants in law suits. 84 were stopped for drunk driving in 1998 alone. Can you guess which organization this is? Give up? It's the 535 members of your United States Congress. The same group that perpetually cranks out hundreds upon hundreds of new laws designed to keep the rest of us in line."
-Jack Sharp-
Capitol Hill Blue editor
Source: Capitol Hill Blue editor Jack Sharp, researcher Marilyn Crosslyn, and private Investigator James Hargill.
"Arms observe no bounds; nor can the wrath of the sword, once drawn, be easily checked or stayed; war delights in blood."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: Tragedies, Hercules Furens (The Madness of Hercules), lines 403-405; (Lycus).
"Some conservatives are surprised to find people on the Left supporting the war in Afghanistan. It's not surprising at all…It is hard for the government to prosecute a war and not expand…Conservatives may think they can support war and oppose the expansion of the state, but that is like trying to square the circle. What makes them think they can contain the expansion?"
-Sheldon Richman-
Editor of The Freeman, published by The Foundation for Economic Education
Source: Liberty, Security, and the War on Terrorism (2010)
"War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking into the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent."
-George Orwell-
"In every war zone that I've been in, there has been a reality and then there has been the public perception of why the war was being fought. In every crisis, in every confrontation that has come my way, the issues have been far more complex than the public has been allowed to know."
-John le Carré-
Meh. It's simply about consolidating more power to those who have already managed to steal a considerable amount already...
"[Communist Goals for America:]
- Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of “separation of church and state.”
- Control schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda.
- Soften curriculum. Get control of teachers’ associations. Put party line in textbooks.
Control student newspapers.
- Infiltrate churches and replace revealed religion with “social” religion (i.e. “social justice,” “liberation theology”).
- Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a “religious crutch.”
- Discredit American culture.
- Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and divorce.
- Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as “normal, natural, healthy."
-Albert S. Herlong, Jr.-
(1909-1995) US Congressman (D-FL) (1949-1969)
Source: Democrat Congressman Albert S. Herlong, Jr., warned of the socialist-communist agenda infiltrating schools. He read into the Congressional Record, Jan. 10, 1963, the list of Communist goals for America (Vol 109, 88th Congress, 1st Session, Appendix, pp. A34-A35)
"God grant me the courage not to give up what I think is right even though I think it is hopeless."
-Chester W. Nimitz-
(1885-1966) Five-star Admiral of the United States Navy
"The bigger the information media, the less courage and information they allow. Bigness means weakness."
-Eric Sevareid-
(1912-1992) American newsman, journalist, author
Source: 1959
"Let's see socialism for what it is. Not in the abstract, but in reality. Socialism is:
The taking of money (taxes) from some people who work for it and giving it to others who don't work for it. On a grand scale.
The vast expansion of freebies doled out by central government. In order to create and sustain dependence.
The government protection of favored persons and corporations, permitting them and aiding them to expand their fortunes without limit, regardless of what crimes they commit in the process. (Monsanto would be a fine example.)
The squeezing out of those who would compete with the favored persons and corporations.
The dictatorship by and for the very wealthy, pretending to be the servant of the masses.
The lie that the dictatorship is being run by the masses.
The gradual lowering of the standard of living for the overwhelming number of people.
The propaganda claiming socialism is the path to a better world for all.
In other words, socialism is a protection racket and a long con and a heartless system of elite control, posing as the greatest good.
It is just another form of top-down tyranny -- as old as the hills."
-Jon Rappoport-
American author, investigative reporter, writer
Source: Socialism exposed: thick lipstick on a global pig, 19 June 2018
"Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply."
-Stephen Covey-
"One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain."
-Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
"The task of weaning various people and groups from the national nipple will not be easy. The sound of whines, bawls, screams and invective will fill the air as the agony of withdrawal pangs finds voice."
-Linda Bowles-
(1952-2003) Columnist
"What is a left-wing socialist but a Marxist without a gun?"
-Don Feder-
(1950- ) American columnist
"The greatest danger that threatens us is neither heterodox thought nor orthodox thought, but the absence of thought."
-Henry Steele Commager-
"As the history majors among you here today know all too well, when people in power invent their own facts and attack those who question them, it can mark the beginning of the end of a free society. That is not hyperbole. It is what authoritarian regimes throughout history have done. They attempt to control reality. Not just our laws and our rights and our budgets, but our thoughts and beliefs."
-Hillary Clinton-
Well, she'd certainly know...
"When you elevate victimhood as virtue, you will create a culture in which people are tripping over themselves to be oppressed."
-Allie Beth Stuckey-
(1992-) American journalist, commentator
"The whole point of the liberal revolution that gave rise to the 1960’s was to free us from somebody else’s dogma, but now the same people…are striving to impose on others a secularized religion…disguising it behind innocuous labels like ‘diversity training’ and ‘respect for difference.’"
-Richard Bernstein-
(1944-) American journalist, columnist, author
Source: Dictatorship of Virtue, 1994
"One of the ironies, as some have observed, is that the secular project has itself become a religion, pursued with religious fervor. It is taking on all the trappings of a religion – including inquisitions and excommunication. Those who defy the creed risk a figurative burning at the stake – social, educational, and professional ostracism and exclusion waged through lawsuits and savage social media campaigns."
-William Barr-
(1950-) US Attorney General
Source: During a speech at Notre Dame law school on October 11, 2019
"There is no better way of exercising the imagination than the study of law. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth."
-Jean Giraudoux-
"As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty — to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy."
-Abraham Lincoln-
1855
"Let every declamation turn upon the beauty of liberty and virtue, and the deformity, turpitude, and malignity, of slavery and vice. Let the public disputations become researches into the grounds and nature and ends of government, and the means of preserving the good and demolishing the evil. Let the dialogues, and all the exercises, become the instruments of impressing on the tender mind, and of spreading and distributing far and wide, the ideas of right and the sensations of freedom. In a word, let every sluice of knowledge be opened and set a-flowing."
-John Adams-
"I never saw a bipartisan bill that reduced the size of government."
-Jim DeMint-
Echoing Ayn Rand's quote about only evil CAN win in any compromise...
"It would be the greatest mistake, certainly, to think that concessions mean peace. Nothing of the kind. Concessions are nothing but a new form of war."
-Vladimir Ilyich Lenin-
[Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov] (1870-1924) First Leader of the Soviet Union
"Socialism in America will come through the ballot box."
-Gus Hall-
[Arvo Gustav Halberg ] (1910-2000) leader of the Communist Party USA and its four-time U.S. presidential candidate
Source: in an interview with the Cleveland Plain-Dealer (1996)
"The government of the world was [Cecil] Rhodes' simple desire."
-Sarah Gertrude Millin-
(1889-1968) South African writer
"The only path to the final defeat of imperialism and the building of socialism is revolutionary war."
-Bill Ayers-
(1944- ) founder of the self-described communist revolutionary group, the Weather Underground, professor of education at University of Illinois at Chicago, personal friend and financial supporter of Barrack Hussein Obama
"As socialists, we are opponents of the Jews, because we see, in the Hebrews, the incarnation of capitalism, of the misuse of the nation’s goods."
-Joseph Paul Goebbels-
(1897-1945) German politician and Reich Minister of Propaganda of Nazi Germany
Source: Goebbels, Joseph; Mjölnir (1932). Die verfluchten Hakenkreuzler. Etwas zum Nachdenken. Munich: Franz Eher Nachfolger. English translation: Those Damned Nazis
"Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces."
-Étienne de La Boétie-
"The really unforgivable acts are committed by calm men in beautiful green silk rooms, who deal death wholesale, by the shipload, without lust, or anger, or desire, or any redeeming emotion to excuse them but cold fear of some pretended future. But the crimes they hope to prevent in that future are imaginary. The ones they commit in the present — they are real."
-Lois McMaster Bujold-
"In part by their apathy, in part by their passivity, and in part actively, these masses of people make possible the catastrophes under which they themselves suffer more than anybody else. To stress this guilt on the part of masses of people, to hold them solely responsible, means to take them seriously. On the other hand, to commiserate masses of people as victims, means to treat them as small, helpless children. The former is the attitude held by genuine freedom-fighters; the latter the attitude held by the power-thirsty politicians."
-Wilhelm Reich-
"Look at America now; older middle-income Americans are encouraged to divest themselves of their assets in order to qualify for Medicaid so that taxpayers at large must subsidize the costs of warehousing the artificially impoverished nursing homes -- in the name of 'independent living' and 'not being a burden to the children.'"
-Daniel F. Walker-
Attorney
Source: Thielicke on the Modern Welfare State, The Freeman, p. 557, August, 1996
"American [public] schools are failing because they are organized according to a bureaucratic, monopolistic model; their organizing principle is basically the same as that of a socialist economy."
-David Boaz-
[David Boaz and Morris Barrett]
Source: What Would A School Voucher Buy? The Real Cost Of Private Schools, Cato Institute Briefing Paper No. 25, March, 1996.
"I'm an American, and always will be. I happen to love that big, awkward, sprawling country very much — and its big, awkward, sprawling people. Anyway, I don't like politics; and I don't make 'political gestures' … I don't even believe in politics. To me, politics is like one of those annoying, and potentially dangerous (but generally just painful) chronic diseases that you just have to put up with in your life if you happen to have contracted it. Politics is like having diabetes. It's a science, a catch-as-catch-can science, which has grown up out of simple animal necessity more than anything else. If I were twice as big as I am, and twice as physically strong, I think I'd be a total anarchist."
-James Jones-
"When the whole world is running towards a cliff, he who is running in the opposite direction appears to have lost his mind."
-C.S. Lewis-
"The modern State exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good – anyway, to do something to us or to make us something. Hence the new name ‘leaders’ for those who were once ‘rulers’. We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, ‘Mind your own business.’ Our whole lives are their business."
-C.S. Lewis-
Is Progress Possible, God in the Dock
"The struggle for freedom ... is not the struggle of the many against the few, but of minorities -- sometimes of a minority of but one man -- against the majority."
-Ludwig von Mises-
(1881-1973) Economist and social philosopher
Source: Theory and History: An Interpretation of Social and Economic Evolution (Auburn, Ala.: The Ludwig Von Mises Institute, 1985) Pp. 66-67
"No one is free who is not master of himself."
-Pythagoras-
(c. 570-c. 495 BC) Ionian Greek philosopher, mathematician, mystic and scientist
"It is the tragic story of the cultural crusader in a mass society that he cannot win, but that we would be lost without him."
-Paul F. Lazarsfeld-
(1901-1976)
Source: The Mass Media and the Intellectual Community, 1961
"True individualists tend to be quite unobservant; it is the snob, the... sophisticate, the frightened conformist, who keeps a fascinated or worried eye on what is in the wind."
-Louis Kronenberger-
(1904-1980)
Source: Company Manners, 1954
"Society honors its living conformists and its dead troublemakers."
-Mignon McLaughlin-
(1913-1983) American journalist and author
"The most fatal blow to progress is slavery of the intellect. The most sacred right of humanity is the right to think, and next to the right to think is the right to express that thought without fear."
-Helen H. Gardner-
Source: Men, Women and Gods, 1885
"A people are free in proportion as they form their own opinions."
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge-
(1772-1834) English poet, critic, philosopher, and a leader of the British Romantic movement
Source: The Watchman, 1796
"What is common to many is least taken care of, for all men have greater regard for what is their own than what they possess in common with others."
-Aristotle-
(384-322 BC) Greek philosopher
AKA, "tragedy of the commons"
"Consciences keep silence more often than they should, that's why laws were created."
-José Saramago-
"I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail."
-Abraham Maslow-
'the law of the instrument', 1966
"Any attempt to replace a personal conscience by a collective conscience does violence to the individual and is the first step toward totalitarianism."
-Herman Hesse-
(1877-1962)
Source: Reflections, 1974
"And it is not difficult to show, by abundant instances, that to extend the bounds of what may be called moral police, until it encroaches on the most unquestionably legitimate liberty of the individual, is one of the most universal of all human propensities."
-John Stuart Mill-
(1806-1873) English philosopher and economist
Source: On Liberty, by John Stuart Mill, 1859
"Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defense."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910) American author and humorist
Source: Notebooks
"The heart of the liberal philosophy is a belief in the dignity of the individual, in his freedom to make the most of his capacities and opportunities according to his own lights... This implies a belief in the equality of man in one sense; in their inequality in another."
-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, 1962
"Freedom is the recognition that no single person, no single authority or government has a monopoly on the truth, but that every individual life is infinitely precious, that every one of us put in this world has been put there for a reason and has something to offer. It's so hard for government planners, no matter how sophisticated, to ever substitute for millions of individuals working night and day to make their dreams come true. The fact is, bureaucracies are a problem around the world."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
Source: Speech at Moscow State University, 05/31/88
"As Madison expressed it: 'The local or municipal authorities form distinct and independent portions of the supremacy, no more subject, within their respective spheres, to the general authority than the general authority is subject to them, within its own sphere.' The Federalist No. 39, at 245. [n.11]
This separation of the two spheres is one of the Constitution’s structural protections of liberty.
'Just as the separation and independence of the coordinate branches of the Federal Government serve to prevent the accumulation of excessive power in any one branch, a healthy balance of power between the States and the Federal Government will reduce the risk of tyranny and abuse from either front.'"
-Justice Antonin Scalia-
Mack and Printz v. United States (1997)
"I maintain that the word supreme imports no more than this — that the Constitution, and laws made in pursuance thereof, cannot be controlled or defeated by any other law. The acts of the United States, therefore, will be absolutely obligatory as to all the proper objects and powers of the general government … but the laws of Congress are restricted to a certain sphere, and when they depart from this sphere, they are no longer supreme or binding."
-Alexander Hamilton-
"On the other hand, should an unwarrantable measure of the federal government be unpopular in particular States, which would seldom fail to be the case, or even a warrantable measure be so, which may sometimes be the case, the means of opposition to it are powerful and at hand. The disquietude of the people; their repugnance and, perhaps, refusal to co-operate with the officers of the Union; the frowns of the executive magistracy of the State; the embarrassments created by legislative devices, which would often be added on such occasions, would oppose, in any State, difficulties not to be despised; would form, in a large State, very serious impediments; and where the sentiments of several adjoining States happened to be in unison, would present obstructions which the federal government would hardly be willing to encounter."
-James Madison-
Federalist, No. 46
How's that been workin' out...?
"Those who knowingly allow the King to err deserve the same punishment as traitors."
-Alfonso X of Castile-
"He whose honor is rooted in popular approval must, day by day, anxiously strive, act, and scheme in order to retain his reputation. For the populace is variable and inconstant, so that, if a reputation be not kept up, it quickly withers away. Everyone wishes to catch popular applause for himself, and readily represses the fame of others. The object of the strife being estimated as the greatest of all goods, each combatant is seized with a fierce desire to put down his rivals in every possible way, till he who at last comes out victorious is more proud of having done harm to others than of having done good to himself. This sort of honor, then, is really empty, being nothing."
-Ethics-
"They [the founders] proclaimed to all the world the revolutionary doctrine of the divine rights of the common man. That doctrine has ever since been the heart of the American faith."
-Dwight D. Eisenhower-
(1890-1969), 34th US President, WWII General
"All discussion, all debate, all dissidence tends to question and in consequence, to upset existing convictions; that is precisely its purpose and its justification."
-Judge Learned Hand-
(1872-1961), Judge, U. S. Court of Appeals
"There is an almost universal tendency, perhaps an inborn tendency, to suspect the good faith of a man who holds opinions that differ from our own opinions... It obviously endangers the freedom and the objectivity of our discussion if we attack a person instead of attacking an opinion or, more precisely, a theory."
-Sir Karl Popper-
(1902-1993)
Source: “The Importance of Critical Discussion,” in On The Barricades, 1989
"And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in all the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual."
-John Steinbeck-
(1902-1968) Author, Nobel laureate
Source: East of Eden, 1952
"Toleration is good for all, or it is good for none."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
Source: Speech, House of Commons, 1773
"Profound insights arise only in debate, with a possibility of counterargument, only when there is a possibility of expressing not only correct ideas but also dubious ideas."
-Andrei Sakharov-
(1921-1989)
Source: Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom, 1968
"When individuals and nations have once got in their heads the abstract concept of full-blown liberty, there is nothing like it in its uncontrollable strength."
-Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel-
(1770-1831) German philosopher
Source: Philosophy of Mind
"Injustice, poverty, slavery, ignorance -- these may be cured by reform or revolution. But men do not live only by fighting evils. They live by positive goals, individual and collective, a vast variety of them, seldom predictable, at times incompatible."
-Isaiah Berlin-
(1909-1997)
Source: 1909, Four Essays on Liberty, Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century
"There can be no freedom without freedom to fail."
-Eric Hoffer-
(1902-1983) American author, philosopher, awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
Source: The Ordeal of Change, 1964
"A liberal society stands on the proposition that we should all take seriously the idea that we might be wrong. This means we must place no one, including ourselves, beyond the reach of criticism (no final say); it means that we must allow people to err, even where the error offends and upsets, as it often will."
-Jonathan Rauch-
(1960-) American author, journalist, activist
Source: Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought, 1993
"I have always strenuously supported the right of every man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies another this right makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
Source: The Age of Reason, 1783
"Individuality is freedom lived."
-John Dos Passos-
(1896-1970) American novelist, historian, critic, artist
"Prosperity or egalitarianism -- you have to choose. I favor freedom -- you never achieve real equality anyway, you simply sacrifice prosperity for an illusion."
-Marios Vargas Llosa-
(1936- ) Peruvian writer
Source: Independent on Sunday, 5 May 1991
"Only when the human spirit is allowed to invent and create, only when individuals are given a personal stake in deciding economic policies and benefiting from their success -- only then can societies remain economically alive, dynamic, prosperous, progressive and free."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
September 29, 1981
Source: Remarks at the Annual Meeting of the Boards of Governors of the World Bank Group and International Monetary Fund
"The freedom of each individual can only be the freedom of all."
-Friedrich Durrenmatt-
(1921-1990)
Source: About Tolerance, 1977
"Ideas are indeed the most dangerous weapons in the world. Our ideas of freedom are the most powerful political weapons man has ever forged."
-William O. Douglas-
(1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: An Almanac of Liberty, 1954
"Fact of the matter is, there is no hip world, there is no straight world. There's a world, you see, which has people in it who believe in a variety of different things. Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, use that something to support their own existence."
-Frank Zappa-
(1940-1993) American Musician
"A society that does not recognize that each individual has values of his own which he is entitled to follow can have no respect for the dignity of the individual and cannot really know freedom."
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
"I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed."
-Jonathan Swift-
"It behooves every American to encourage home manufactures, that our oppressors may feel through their pockets the effects of their blind folly."
-Samuel Adams-
"The object and practice of liberty lies in the limitation of government power."
-General Douglas MacArthur-
(1880-1964) WWII Supreme Allied Commander of the Southwest Pacific, Supreme United Nations Commander
"Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men."
-John Stuart Mill-
(1806-1873) English philosopher and economist
Source: On Liberty
"A society that robs an individual of the product of his effort, or enslaves him, or attempts to limit the freedom of his mind, or compels him to act against his own rational judgment ... is not, strictly speaking, a society, but a mob held together by institutionalized gang-rule."
-Ayn Rand-
[Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum] (1905-1982) Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter
Source: The Nature Of Government, The Virtues Of Selfishness, 126 (Signet Book 1964)
"The antipode of individualism is collectivism, which subordinates the individual to the group -- be it the 'community,' the tribe, the race, the proletariat, etc. A person's moral worth is judged by how much he sacrifices himself to the group. [Under collectivism] the more emergencies (and victims) the better, because they provide more opportunity for 'virtue'."
-Glenn Woiceshyn-
Canadian writer
Source: Lessons from the Great Ice Storm: Individualism vs Collectivism, (1998.03.07)
"Comrades! We must abolish the cult of the individual decisively, once and for all."
-Nikita Khrushchev-
(1894-1971) Premier of the Soviet Union
Source: addressing the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, 2-25-56
"Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself."
-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
"I am persuaded to believe that God had left nations to the liberty of setting up such governments as best pleased themselves, and that magistrates were set up for the good of nations, not nations for the honor and glory of magistrates."
-Algernon Sydney-
"Fortune does not change men; it unmasks them."
-Suzanne Necker-
"The chief purpose in the establishment of states and constitutional orders was that individual property rights might be secured . . . It is the peculiar function of state and city to guarantee to every man the free and undisturbed control of his own property."
-Marcus Tullius Cicero-
"I have been derisively called a "Woman's Rights Man". I know no such distinction. I claim to the a Human Rights Man, and wherever there is a human being, I see God-given rights inherent in that being, whatever may be the sex or complexion."
-William Lloyd Garrison-
.... or location or citizenship or...
"The strength of a man's virtue should not be measured by his special exertions, but by his habitual acts."
-Blaise Pascal-
(1623- 1662) French mathematician and philosopher
Source: Pensées, 1670
"To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man."
-William Shakespeare-
(1564-1616) Playwright
Source: Hamlet
"One does evil enough when one does nothing good."
-German Proverb-
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
-James D. Miles-
"It has been objected also against a bill of rights, that, by enumerating particular exceptions to the grant of power, it would disparage those rights which were not placed in that enumeration; and it might follow by implication, that those rights which were not singled out, were intended to be assigned into the hands of the General Government, and were consequently insecure. This is one of the most plausible arguments I have ever heard urged against the admission of a bill of rights into this system; but, I conceive, that it may be guarded against. I have attempted it, as gentlemen may see by turning to the last clause of the fourth resolution [the Ninth Amendment]."
-James Madison-
And so how'd that work out...?
"It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives."
-Dr. Samuel Johnson-
(1709-1784) English author, poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer
"[O]ur greatest contributions to the cause of freedom and development overseas is not what we do over there, but what we do right here at home."
-Frances Moore Lappé-
(1944-) Ameican author, activist
Source: Betraying the National Interest, published in 1982 by The Institute for Food and Development Policy (Food First)
"I believe more follies are committed out of complaisance to the world, than in following our own inclinations."
-Mary Wortley Montagu-
(1689-1762) English author
"You shall not, for the sake of one individual, change the meaning of principle and integrity, nor endeavour to persuade yourself or me, that selfishness is prudence, and insensibility of danger security for happiness."
-Pride and Prejudice-
"A man does what he must -- in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers -- and this is the basis of all human morality."
-John F. Kennedy-
(1917-1963) 35th US President
"A lie will easily get you out of a scrape, and yet, strangely and beautifully, rapture possesses you when you have taken the scrape and left out the lie."
-Charles Edward Montague-
(1867-1928) English journalist, writer
Source: Disenchantment, 1922
"If one doesn't know his mistakes, he won't want to correct them."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter XXVIII: On travel as a cure for discontent, line 9
"Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing."
-Thomas Henry Huxley-
(1825-1895) English biologist, known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his advocacy of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution
"Our enemy really isn't capitalism, it's cynicism. That's one the things I learned from Woody … Not to be cynical … That cynicism … It destroys you, it rots you away from the inside. So that sense of optimism and humanity … which 20 years ago I would have called socialism but now I'll call compassion … You know, that idea is still out there and alive and if you can plug into that and encourage that it makes it all worth while."
-Billy Bragg-
Socialism and compassion are not synonymous. Compassion is a fairly straightforward concept, defined for and by each individual for himself -- which can include voluntary socialism. But socialism at the governmental level is the coerced ILLUSION of compassion, to the benefit of that government. One simply cannot be truly compassionate with stolen resources.
"Laws, wisely administered, will secure men in the enjoyment of the fruits of their labour, whether of mind or body, at a comparatively small personal sacrifice; but no laws, however stringent, can make the idle industrious, the thriftless provident, or the drunken sober. Such reforms can only be effected by means of individual action, economy, and self-denial; by better habits, rather than by greater rights. The Government of a nation itself is usually found to be but the reflex of the individuals composing it. The Government that is ahead of the people will inevitably be dragged down to their level, as the Government that is behind them will in the long run be dragged up. In the order of nature, the collective character of a nation will as surely find its befitting results in its law and government, as water finds its own level. The noble people will be nobly ruled, and the ignorant and corrupt ignobly. Indeed all experience serves to prove that the worth and strength of a State depend far less upon the form of its institutions than upon the character of its men. For the nation is only an aggregate of individual conditions, and civilization itself is but a question of the personal improvement of the men, women, and children of whom society is composed."
-Samuel Smiles-
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts."
-Richard Feynman-
"Liberalism regards all absolutes with profound skepticism, including both moral imperatives and final solutions... Insistence upon any particular solution is the mark of an ideologue..."
-Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.-
(1917-2007) Author, historian
Source: The Crisis of Confidence, 1969
"No duty, however, binds us to these so-called laws, whose corrupting influence menaces what is noblest in our being..."
-Benjamin Constant-
[Henri-Benjamin Constant de Rebecque] (1767-1830) Swiss-born thinker, writer and French politician.
Source: Principles of Politics Applicable to All Governments (1810) (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2003), p. 401-402
"It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910) American author and humorist
"We even had to pass a special law in the Congress just a few weeks ago to allow student prayer groups the same access to school rooms after classes that a Young Marxist Society … would already enjoy."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
Source: Aug. 23, 1984 at Reunion Arena, Dallas, Texas
"Freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of person under the protection of habeas corpus; and trial by juries impartially selected – these principles form the bright constellation which has gone before us."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: First Inaugural Address, 4 March 1801
"Doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith."
-Paul Tillich-
German theologian and historian
"What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality."
-Plutarch-
(c.45-125 A.D.) Greek Priest of the Delphic Oracle
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."
-Margaret Mead-
(1901-1978) American cultural anthropologist and author
"Every child, at birth, is the Universal Man. But, as it grows, we turn it into 'a petty man.' It should be the function of education to turn it again into the original 'Universal Man.' The child which by birth was the universal man is fettered by us with such constraints as country, language, religion, caste, race and colour. To free it from all these limitations and transform it into 'the enlightened soul', that is to say, the universal man, — this should become the first and foremost function of our education, culture, civilization, and what not."
-Kuvempu-
"The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for, among old parchments, or musty records. They are written, as with a sun beam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: The Farmer Refuted, February 23, 1775
"The laws in question can, therefore, only be justified by the theory of vindictive punishment, which holds that certain sins, though they may not injure anyone except the sinner, are so heinous as to make it our duty to inflict pain upon the delinquent. This point of view, under the influence of Benthamism, lost its hold during the nineteenth century. But in recent years, with the general decay of Liberalism, it has regained lost ground, and has begun to threaten a new tyranny as oppressive as any in the Middle Ages."
-Bertrand Russell-
[Bertrand Arthur William Russell] (1872-1970) Philosopher, educator
Source: The Recrudescence of Puritanism, in Sceptical Essays, 1928
"Lose this day loitering
'Twill be the same old story,
Tomorrow and the next,
Even more dilatory.
Whatever you would do,
Or dream of doing, begin it!
Boldness has power, genius, and magic in it.
Begin it now."
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe-
(1749-1832) German writer, statesman
Source: "Faust"
"The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can 'throw the rascals out' at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy....Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party which will be none of these things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same basic policies."
-Carroll Quigley-
globalist insider, mentor to Bill Clinton, aauthor 'Tragedy And Hope'
"I begin to think, that a calm is not desirable in any situation in life.... Man was made for action and for bustle too, I believe."
-Abigail Adams-
(1744-1818) wife of John Adams
Source: letter to her sister, Mary Smith Cranch, 1784
"There is an irreducible thing. It's called freedom. It is native to every individual. Sometimes it rears its head in the middle of the night, and the dreamer awakes. And he asks himself: what is my freedom for? And then he begins a voyage that no device can record, measure, or analyze. If he pursues it long enough, it takes him out of the labyrinth."
-Jon Rappoport-
American author, investigative reporter, writer
Source: Bill Gates' stimulus-response empire vs. freedom, Mar 6, 2018
"None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating power of the hope of freedom to those who are not free."
-Pearl S. Buck-
(1892-1973)
Source: What America Means To Me, 1943
Anarchism can teach Christian thinkers to see the realities of our societies from a different standpoint than the dominant one of the state. What seems to be one of the disasters of our time is that we all appear to agree that the nation-state is the norm."
-Jacques Ellul-
"The right to think is the beginning of freedom, and speech must be protected from the government because speech is the beginning of thought."
-Justice Anthony Kennedy-
(1936-) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (1988-2018)
Source: U.S. Supreme Court, 16 Apr 2002, Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition
I'd say, rather more accurately, that thought, hopefully, is the beginning of speech...
"Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard."
-Justice Robert H. Jackson-
(1892-1954), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?navby=CASE&court=US&vol=319&page=624
"The three aims of the tyrant are, one, the humiliation of his subjects; he knows that a mean-spirited man will not conspire against anybody; two, the creation of mistrust among them; for a tyrant is not to be overthrown until men begin to have confidence in one another -- and this is the reason why tyrants are at war with the good; they are under the idea that their power is endangered by them, not only because they will not be ruled despotically, but also because they are too loyal to one another and to other men, and do not inform against one another or against other men -- three, the tyrant desires that all his subjects shall be incapable of action, for no one attempts what is impossible and they will not attempt to overthrow a tyranny if they are powerless."
-Aristotle-
(384-322 BC) Greek philosopher
Source: Politics, Book V Chapter 11
"The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.-
(1841-1935) US Supreme Court Justice, also known as "The Great Dissenter"
Source: Falsely attributed. Various permutations of this quote have been incorrectly attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Original version written by Zechariah Chafee, "Freedom of Speech in Wartime", 32 Harvard Law Review 932, 957 (1919).
"The right to do something does not mean that doing it is right."
-William Safire-
(1929-2009) American author, columnist, journalist, Pulitzer Prize (1978), Presidential Medal of Freedom (2006)
"Machiavelli's teaching would hardly have stood the test of parliamentary government, for public discussion demands at least the profession of good faith. But it gave an immense impulse to absolutism by silencing the consciences of very religious kings, and made the good and the bad very much alike. … The way was paved for absolute monarchy to triumph over the spirit and institutions of a better age, not by isolated acts of wickedness, but by a studied philosophy of crime, and so thorough a perversion of the moral sense that the like of it had not been since the Stoics reformed the morality of paganism."
-John Dalberg-Acton-
1st Baron Acton
"Elections are a good deal like marriages, there's no accounting for anyone's taste. Every time we see a bridegroom we wonder why she ever picked him, and it's the same with Public Officials."
-Will Rogers-
(1879-1935) American humorist
"An avaricious man might be tempted to betray the interests of the State to the acquisition of wealth. An ambitious man might make his own aggrandizement, by the aid of a foreign power, the price of his treachery to his constituents. The history of human conduct does not warrant that exalted opinion of human virtue, which would make it wise in a Nation to commit interests of so delicate and momentous a kind, as those which concern its intercourse with the rest of the world, to the sole disposal of a Magistrate created and circumstanced as would be a President of the United States."
-Alexander Hamilton-
Because HE, having actively sought and won such awesome power, certainly would be no longer susceptible to such base human foibles. Great plan, Al...
"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle. It is not enough in a situation of trust in the commonwealth, that a man means well to his country; it is not enough that in his single person he never did an evil act, but always voted according to his conscience, and even harangued against every design which he apprehended to be prejudicial to the interests of his country. This innoxious and ineffectual character, that seems formed upon a plan of apology and disculpation, falls miserably short of the mark of publick duty. That duty demands and requires, that what is right should not only be made known, but made prevalent; that what is evil should not only be detected, but defeated."
-Edmund Burke-
"We cannot abdicate our conscience to an organization, nor to a government. "Am I my brother's keeper?" Most certainly I am! I cannot escape my responsibility by saying the State will do all that is necessary. It is a tragedy that nowadays so many think and feel otherwise."
-Albert Schweitzer-
"The primary delusion of politics is the notion that someone out there is more qualified to run your life, or at least your neighbor’s life, than you or your neighbor. In the advanced stages of the psychosis, the victim becomes convinced that he or she IS that someone and decides to seek political office."
-Thomas L. Knapp-
"The deterioration of a government begins almost always by the decay of its principles."
-The Spirit of the Laws-
Which, in turn, begins almost always with the first swearing-in...
“For we are presented with a clear and simple statute to be judged against a pure command of the Constitution. The outcome can be laid at no door but ours. The hard fact is that sometimes we must make decisions we do not like. We make them because they are right, right in the sense that the law and the Constitution, as we see them, compel the result. And so great is our commitment to the process that, except in the rare case, we do not pause to express distaste for the result, perhaps for fear of undermining a valued principle that dictates the decision. This is one of those rare cases.
Though symbols often are what we ourselves make of them, the flag is constant in expressing beliefs Americans share, beliefs in law and peace and that freedom which sustains the human spirit. The case here today forces recognition of the costs to which those beliefs commit us. It is poignant but fundamental that the flag protects those who hold it in contempt."
-Justice Anthony Kennedy-
Texas v. Johnson, 491 U.S. 397 (1989)
When this rogue government stops wrapping itself in the flag, I'll have less contempt for the flag.
"It will not be amiss to distinguish the three kinds and, as it were, grades of ambition in mankind. The first is of those who desire to extend their own power in their native country, a vulgar and degenerate kind. The second is of those who labor to extend the power and dominion of their country among men. This certainly has more dignity, though not less covetousness. But if a man endeavor to establish and extend the power and dominion of the human race itself over the universe, his ambition (if ambition it can be called) is without doubt both a more wholesome and a more noble thing than the other two. Now the empire of man over things depends wholly on the arts and sciences. For we cannot command nature except by obeying her."
-Francis Bacon-
"Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law."
-Ayn Rand-
[Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum] (1905-1982) Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket."
-Eric Hoffer-
(1902-1983) American author, philosopher, awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
"In any age, the so-called progressives treat politics as their religion. Their holy mission is to use the coercive power of the State to remake man and society in their own image, according to an abstract ideal of perfection. Whatever means they use are therefore justified because, by definition, they are a virtuous people pursing a deific end. They are willing to use any means necessary to gain momentary advantage in achieving their end, regardless of collateral consequences and the systemic implications. They never ask whether the actions they take could be justified as a general rule of conduct, equally applicable to all sides."
-William Barr-
Source: Federalist Society’s 2019 National Lawyers Convention, November 15, 2019
That applies to statists of all stripes, there, Bill...
"We are socialists, we are enemies, mortal enemies of the present capitalistic economic system with its exploitation of the economically weak, with its unjust wages, with its immoral evaluation of individuals according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and achievement, and we are determined under all circumstances to abolish this system!"
-Gregor Strasser-
(1892-1934) early prominent German Nazi official and politician who was murdered during the Night of the Long Knives in 1934
Source: “Thoughts about the Tasks of the Future", 1926 pamphlet by Gregor Strasser,
Falsely attributed to a Hitler speech on May 1, 1927. Cited in: Toland, John (1992). Adolf Hitler. Anchor Books. pp. 224–225. ISBN 0385037244
"Society's needs come before the individual's needs."
-Adolf Hitler-
(1889-1945) German Nazi Dictator
Source: Attributed by A. E. Samaan in 'From a Race of Masters to a Master Race'
"In our struggle against racial segregation in Montgomery, Alabama, I came to see at a very early stage that a synthesis of Gandhi's method of nonviolence and the Christian ethic of love is the best weapon available to Negroes for this struggle for freedom and human dignity. It may well be that the Gandhian approach will bring about a solution to the race problem in America. His spirit is a continual reminder to oppressed people that it is possible to resist evil and yet not resort to violence."
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-
(1929-1968) US civil rights leader
1958
"To ignore evil is to become an accomplice to it."
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-
(1929-1968) US civil rights leader
"And it proves, in the last place, that liberty can have nothing to fear from the judiciary alone, but would have everything to fear from its union with either of the other departments."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: Federalist No. 78, 1788
"If vice and corruption prevail, liberty cannot subsist; but if virtue have the advantage, arbitrary power cannot be established."
-Algernon Sidney-
(1622-1683) English statesman, writer, Whig leader
"The punishment of death is the war of a nation against a citizen whose destruction it judges to be necessary or useful."
-Cesare Beccaria-
(1735-1794) [Bonesana, Marchese di] Italian nobleman, criminologist, and penal reformer
Source: On Crimes and Punishments, 1764
"Government is, and always has been, the greatest criminal threat to the peaceful members of society."
-Richard M. Ebeling-
(1950- ) Author, Professor of Economics, Hillsdale College
Source: The Tyranny Of Gun Control, xii (Future Of Freedom Foundation 1997)
"I am for socialism, disarmament, and ultimately, for abolishing the state itself. … Communism is the goal."
-Roger Baldwin-
(1884-1981) one of the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
Source: 1935
"The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike at him as hard as you can and as often as you can, and keep moving on."
-Ulysses S. Grant-
(1822-1885) 18th US President
"And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned around on you—where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast—man's laws, not God's—and if you cut them down…d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake."
-Thomas More-
A Man For All Seasons
"Whatever power you give politicians and bureaucrats to use against other people will eventually be used by future politicians and bureaucrats against you."
-Michael Boldin-
Founder of Tenth Amendment Center
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sXWK2909co
"I do not believe there are more than a very limited number of persons, perhaps a hundred who really know what is in the Constitution of the United States."
-Dr. John J. Tigert-
U. S. Commissioner of Education, October, 1924
"Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of liberty."
-Henry Martyn Robert-
(183-1923) American soldier, engineer, and author of "Robert's Rules of Order", which became the most widely used manual of parliamentary procedure and remains today the most common parliamentary authority in the United States
"There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: letter to Edmund Randolph, 1795
"The first duty of a newspaper is to be accurate. If it is accurate, it follows that it is fair."
-Herbert B. Swope-
(1882-1958)
Source: Letter, New York Herald Tribune, 16 March 1958
"We hold that no person or set of persons can properly establish a standard of expression for others."
-William Randolph Hearst-
(1863-1951) American newspaper publisher
Source: Independence League Platform, New York Journal, 1 February 1924
"The task of government in this enlightened time does not extend to actually dealing with problems. Solving problems might put bureaucrats out of work. No, the task of government is to make it look as though problems have been solved, while continuing to keep the maximum number of consultants and bureaucrats employed dealing with them."
-Bob Emmers-
Source: Orange County Register
"Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"`
"The human soul has need of consented obedience and of liberty. Consented obedience is what one concedes to an authority because one judges it to be legitimate. It is not possible in relation to a political power established by conquest or coup d'etat nor to an economic power based upon money. Liberty is the power of choice within the latitude left between the direct constraint of natural forces and the authority accepted as legitimate. The latitude should be sufficiently wide for liberty to be more than a fiction, but it should include only what is innocent and should never be wide enough to permit certain kinds of crime."
-Simone Weil-
"Great cases, like hard cases, make bad law."
-Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.-
Northern Securities Co. v. United States, 193 U.S. 197 (1904)
"That 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-
Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776)
"As during the time of kings it would have been naive to think that the king’s firstborn son would be the fittest to rule, so in our time it is naive to think that the democratically elected ruler will be the fittest. The rule of succession is not a formula for identifying the best ruler, it is a formula for conferring legitimacy on someone or other and thus forestalling civil conflict."
-J. M. Coetzee
"The greatest danger is that the decision will be regulated more by the comparative strength of parties than by the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: Federalist No. 65, regarding impeachment of the President
"There can be no crime, there can be no misdemeanor without a law written or unwritten, express or implied."
-Benjamin Curtis-
(1809-1874) Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court
Source: Dissenting in Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857)
Da fuq? There are no "implied" laws.
"Impeachment is about whatever the Congress says it is. There is no law that dictates impeachment. What the Constitution says is “high crimes and misdemeanors,” and we define that."
-Maxine Waters-
(1938-) US Congresswoman D-CA
Source: September 21, 2017, Congressional Black Caucus Town Hall on Civil Rights
"Powers once assumed are never relinquished, just as bureaucracies, once created, never die."
-Charley Reese-
(1937-2013) American syndicated columnist
"Ultimately, however, as the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter pointed out, a powerful bureaucratic class is in the same relation to commerce as was the scorpion in Aesop to the dog on whose back he crossed the river. They will destroy commerce and establish socialism, even if it kills them, because that is their nature."
-John Derbyshire-
(1945-) British-born American writer, journalist and commentator
"Every bureaucrat has a constitutional right to fuzzify, profundify and drivelate. It's a part of our freedom of speech... If people can understand what is being said in Washington, they might want to take over their own government again."
-Dr. Jim Boren-
Humorist and Author
Source: Wall Street Journal, June 2, 1998
"Government machinery has been described as a marvelous labor saving device which enables ten men to do the work of one."
-John Maynard Keynes-
(1883-1946) British economist
"Where the meaning of the Constitution is clear and unambiguous, there can be no resort to construction to attribute to the founders a purpose or intent not manifest in its letter."
-Norris v. Baltimore-
Source: 192 A 531
"Those who wish to appear wise among fools, among the wise seem foolish."
-Marcus Fabius Quintilianus-
(c.35-c.100) Roman Rhetorician
Source: Institutio Oratoria, c.95 AD
"When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer 'present' or 'not guilty.'"
-Theodore Roosevelt-
(1858-1919) 26th US President
"For most Americans the Constitution had become a hazy document, cited like the Bible on ceremonial occasions but forgotten in the daily transactions of life."
-Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.-
(1917-2007) Author, historian
"Sir, I have found you an argument; but I am not obliged to find you an understanding."
-Dr. Samuel Johnson-
(1709-1784) English author, poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer
"There are four boxes to be used in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
"Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so, whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose, and you allow him to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after having given him so much as you propose. If, to-day, he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada, to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, "I see no probability of the British invading us" but he will say to you, "Be silent; I see it, if you don't." The provision of the Constitution giving the war making power to Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons. Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us."
-Abraham Lincoln-
"Lying has always been a highly approved Nazi technique. Hitler, in Mein Kampf, advocated mendacity as a policy. … Nor is the lie direct the only means of falsehood. They all speak with a Nazi double meaning with which to deceive the unwary. … Before we accept their word at what seems to be its face value, we must always look for hidden meanings. … Besides outright false statements and those with double meanings, there are also other circumventions of truth in the nature of fantastic explanations and absurd professions. … Even Schacht showed that he, too, had adopted the Nazi attitude that truth is any story which succeeds. Confronted on cross-examination with a long record of broken vows and false words, he declared in justification — and I quote from the record: 'I think you can score many more successes when you want to lead someone if you don't tell them the truth than if you tell them the truth.' This was the philosophy of the National Socialists. When for years they have deceived the world, and masked falsehood with plausibilities, can anyone be surprised that they continue that habit of a lifetime in this dock? Credibility is one of the main issues of this trial. Only those who have failed to learn the bitter lessons of the last decade can doubt that men who have always played on the unsuspecting credulity of generous opponents would not hesitate to do the same now."
-Robert H. Jackson-
"A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious."
-Aristotle-
(384-322 BC) Greek philosopher
Source: Politics, 343 B.C.
"A lot of people mistake a short memory for a clear conscience."
-Doug Larson-
(1926-) Syndicated columnist
"You can stand tall without standing on someone. You can be a victor without having victims."
-Harriet Woods-
(1927-2007) Lieutenant Governor of Missouri
"The welfare state that is built upon this conception seems to prove precisely away from the conservative conception of authoritative and personal government, towards a labyrinthine privilege sodden structure of anonymous power, structuring a citizenship that is increasingly reluctant to answer for itself, increasingly parasitic on the dispensations of a bureaucracy towards which it can feel no gratitude."
-Roger Scruton-
(1944- ) English philosopher, professor, writer, and composer
"All socialism involves slavery.... That which fundamentally distinguishes the slave is that he labors under coercion to satisfy another's desires. The relation admits of many gradations. Oppressive taxation is a form of slavery of the individual to the community as a whole. The essential question is -- How much is he compelled to labor for other benefit than his own, and how much can he labor for his own benefit?
-Herbert Spencer-
(1820-1903) British author, economist, philosopher
Source: The Man Versus the State -1884
"The real danger is the gradual erosion of individual liberties through automation, integration, and interconnection of many small, separate record-keeping systems, each of which alone may seem innocuous, even benevolent, and wholly justifiable."
-U. S. Privacy Study Commission-
Source: 1977
"I hear much of people's calling out to punish the guilty, but very few are concerned to clear the innocent."
-Daniel Defoe-
[Daniel Foe] (1660-1731) English writer, famous pamphleteer, journalist and novelist, wrote the novel Robinson Crusoe
Source: An Appeal to Honor and Justice, 1715
"If we were all to be judged by our thoughts, the hills would be swarming with outlaws."
-Johann Sigurjonsson-
(1880-1919) Icelandic playwright and poet
"Reputation is character minus what you've been caught doing."
-Michael Iapoce-
Source: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Boardroom
"The universe seems bankrupt as soon as we begin to discuss the characters of individuals."
-Henry David Thoreau-
(1817-1862) American author, poet, philosopher, polymath, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and transcendentalist
"In all men is evil sleeping; the good man is he who will not awaken it, in himself or in other men."
-Mary Renault-
[Eileen Mary Challans] (1905-1983) English novelist
"Therefore, rid yourselves of all malice and all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander of every kind."
-St. Peter-
Source: Holy Bible, 1 Peter 2:1
"No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself."
-Henry Adams-
"Political realism is aware of the moral significance of political action. It is also aware of the ineluctable tension between the moral command and the requirements of successful political action. And it is unwilling to gloss over and obliterate that tension and thus to obfuscate both the moral and the political issue by making it appear as though the stark facts of politics were morally more satisfying than they actually are, and the moral law less exacting than it actually is."
-Hans Morgenthau-
"Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics.' When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty -- to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy hypocrisy."
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
"We live in a world that has popularized Black people showing the same hate towards white people that people like Martin Luther King Jr. died fighting to overcome. It’s sad. Sad as hell."
-CJ Pearson-
[Coreco Ja'Quan Pearson] (2002-) American political activist and commentator
Source: Twitter, 12/30/2019
"Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of Liberty abused to licentiousness."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
1796
"Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generations which preceded it. Man has no property in man, neither has any generation a property in the generations which are to follow."
-Tom Paine-
"Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow."
-Aesop-
(c. 620–564 BCE) legendary Greek fabulist
Source: The Dog and the Shadow
"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague."
-Marcus Tullius Cicero-
(106-43 B.C.) Roman Statesman, Philosopher and Orator
Source: Attributed to a speech in the Roman Senate in 58 BC as "Recorded by Sallust" in the fictional novel 'A Pillar of Iron,' by Taylor Caldwell (1983), ch. 5.
The quotation bears resemblance to Cicero's Second Oration against Cataline. [2.11]
"I believe Socialism is the grandest theory ever presented, and I am sure it will someday rule the world. Then we will have attained the Millennium... Then men will be content to work for the general welfare and share their riches with their neighbors."
-Andrew Carnegie-
(1835-1919) Scottish-American industrialist, philanthropist
Source: The New York Times, 1 January 1885, "A Millionaire Socialist"
"I was at last beginning to see how ignorant I had become, how long since I had read anything except Party literature. I thought of our bookshelves stripped of books questioned by the Party, how when a writer was expelled from the Party his books went, too. I thought of the systematic rewriting of Soviet history, the revaluation, and in some cases the blotting out of any mention of such persons as Trotsky. I thought of the successive purges. Suddenly I too wanted the answers to the questions Senator Hickenlooper was asking and I wanted the truth. I found myself hitting at the duplicity of the Communist Party."
-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)
"In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king."
-Desiderius Erasmus-
(1466-1536) Dutch author
Source: Adagia (III, IV, 96)
"Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind."
-Henry Miller-
(1891-1980) American writer
"Virtue runs no risk of becoming contemptible by being exposed to view, and it is better to be despised for simplicity than to be tormented by continual hypocrisy."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: On Tranquility of the Mind, A letter to Serenus as translated in Tranquillity of Mind and Providence (1900) by William Bell Langsdorf
"We create an environment where it is alright to hate, to steal, to cheat, and to lie if we dress it up with symbols of respectability, dignity and love."
-Whitney Moore, Jr.-
"Liberty has no horizontal relationship to authoritarianism. Libertarianism’s relationship to authoritarianism is vertical; it is up from the muck of men enslaving man…"
-Leonard Read-
1956
"I saw in States’ rights the only availing check upon the absolutism of he sovereign will, and secession filled me with hope, not as the destruction but as the redemption of Democracy . . . . I deemed that you were fighting for the battles of our liberty, our progress, and our civilization; and I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo."
-Lord Acton-
November 4, 1866 letter to General Robert E. Lee
"A man is usually more careful of his money than of his principles."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.-
(1841-1935) US Supreme Court Justice, also known as "The Great Dissenter"
Source: speech, Boston, 8 January 1897
"Men do not care how nobly they live, but only how long, although it is within the reach of every man to live nobly, but within no man's power to live long."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter XXII: On the futility of half-way measures, line 17.
"For often evil men are rich, and good men poor;
But we will not exchange with them
Our virtue for their wealth since one abides always,
While riches change their owners every day."
-Solon-
(c.638 BC-558 BC) Athenian statesman, lawmaker, Lyric poet, renowned as a founding father of the Athenian polis, one of the Seven Sages of Greece
550 B.C.
Source: Plutarch Solon, ch. 3; translation by Bernadotte Perrin
"Collectivism, unlike individualism, holds the group as the primary, and the standard of moral value."
-Mark Da Cunha-
Publisher of Capitalism magazine
Source: http://capitalism.org/tag/statism/
"The core of racism is the notion that the individual is meaningless and that membership in the collective -- the race -- is the source of his identity and value. ... The notion of 'diversity' entails exactly the same premises as racism -- that one's ideas are determined by one's race and that the source of an individual's identity is his ethnic heritage."
-Peter Schwartz-
Source: The Racism of “Diversity, (2003.12.15 )
"In strategy the longest way round is often the shortest way there; a direct approach to the object exhausts the attacker and hardens the resistance by compression, whereas an indirect approach loosens the defender's hold by upsetting his balance."
-B. H. Liddell Hart-
(1895-1970) British military historian and strategist
"The Communists could succeed if we ever let ourselves be lulled into thinking that they are no longer dangerous to us externally and internally. They would be victorious if we were ever duped by their own nationals or by foolish Americans -- if we were ever duped into believing that they are not aggressive, atheist socialist imperialists. They have proved they never sleep. They have never permanently retreated, and what seems at a particular time to be a cessation of their forward movement or a change in their designs is nothing more than a tactical maneuver on another front."
-Kenneth D. Wells-
President of Valley Forge Freedoms Foundation
Source: BYU Speech, 30 Apr. 1962, in Speeches, 1962, p. 5
"Free speech is my right to say what you don't want to hear."
-George Orwell-
"Left has come to represent increasing government control. The extreme leftist typically seeks total government. Working their way toward total government power are the Communists, socialists, fascists, and modern liberals who advocate government solutions for every real or imagined problem."
-John F. McManus-
Source: Defining "Right" And "Left," The New American, P. 44, December 11, 1995
"Assault weapons laws resemble hate speech laws. Hate speech laws usually begin by targeting a few words that almost no one approves. Once the system for controlling and punishing “hate speech” is put into place, there is little or nothing to stop it from expanding to punish more and more types of everyday speech. Similarly, once an assault weapons law is on the books, there is little to prevent politicians from vastly increasing the number of weapons banned under the law. The main effect of banning assault weapons is to give government an excuse to arrest and imprison millions of Americans while doing little or nothing to reduce crime. America has a limited number of police, and politicians must decide who the real public enemies are. If Mr. Clinton signs an assault weapons ban, it could signal the start of an attack on gun owners’ constitutional rights that could far surpass all previous gun bans."
-James Bovard-
(1956- ) American author, lecturer
"I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy -- I don't disparage envy, but I don't accept it as legitimately my master."
-Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.-
(1841-1935) US Supreme Court Justice, also known as "The Great Dissenter"
Source: Holmes-Laski Letters : The Correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Harold J. Laski, 1916 - 1935 (1953), Vol. 2, p. 942
"A politician will always tip off his true belief by stating the opposite at the beginning of the sentence. For maximum comprehension, do not start listening until the first clause is concluded. Begin instead at the word 'BUT' which begins the second, or active, clause. This is the way to tell a liberal from a conservative - before they tell you. Thus: 'I have always believed in a strong national defense, second to none, but...(a liberal, about to propose a $20 billion defense cut)."
-Frank Mankiewicz-
(1924-) American journalist
"The reputation of a thousand years may be determined by the conduct of one hour."
-Japanese Proverb
"Characters do not change. Opinions alter, but characters are only developed."
-Benjamin Disraeli-
(1804-1881) Prime Minister of England, British statesman, novelist
"If it was necessary to tolerate in other people everything that one permits oneself, life would be unbearable."
-Georges Courteline-
[Georges Victor Marcel Moinaux] (1858-1929) French dramatist, novelist, satiristst
"We now live in a nation where doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the press destroys information, religion destroys morals, and our banks destroy the economy."
-Chris Hedges-
(1956- ) American journalist, author, and war correspondent
"The people of the U.S. owe their Independence & their liberty, to the wisdom of descrying in the minute tax of 3 pence on tea, the magnitude of the evil comprised in the precedent. Let them exert the same wisdom, in watching against every evil lurking under plausible disguises, and growing up from small beginnings."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: James Madison's 'Detached Memoranda,' ca. 1817 W. & M. Q., 3d ser., 3:554--60 1946
"The essential characteristic of socialism is the denial of individual property rights..."
-Ayn Rand-
[Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum] (1905-1982) Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter
Source: _The Virtue of Selfishness_ 1964
"Good government generally begins in the family, and if the moral character of a people once degenerate, their political character must soon follow."
-Elias Boudinot-
(1740-1821) President of the Continental Congress, later a congressman from NJ, and president of the American Bible Society
"The only insecurity which is altogether paralyzing to the active energies of producers is that arising from the government, or from persons vested with its authority. Against all other depredators there is a hope of defending oneself."
-John Stuart Mill-
Principles of Political Economy
"We have seen the mere distinction of colour made in the most enlightened period of time, a ground of the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man. What has been the source of those unjust laws complained of among ourselves? Has it not been the real or supposed interest of the major number? Debtors have defrauded their creditors. The landed interest has borne hard on the mercantile interest. The Holders of one species of property have thrown a disproportion of taxes on the holders of another species. The lesson we are to draw from the whole is that where a majority are united by a common sentiment, and have an opportunity, the rights of the minor party become insecure."
-James Madison-
"The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man."
-B. F. Skinner-
"It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable."
-Eric Hoffer-
(1902-1983) American author, philosopher, awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
Source: The Passionate State of Mind, 1954
"Safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national conduct."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: The Federalist
"Worse than war is the very fear of war."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: Tragedies, Thyestes, line 572 (Chorus)
"No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
"Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all others."
-Sir Winston Churchill-
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1940-1945, 1951-1955)
"The greatest of all infidelities is the fear that the truth will be bad."
-Herbert Spencer-
(1820-1903) British author, economist, philosopher
"Times of tragedy and war naturally bring out strong emotions... Sometimes people are only too anxious to sacrifice their constitutional liberties during a crisis, hoping to gain some measure of security. Yet nothing would please terrorists more than if we willingly gave up our cherished liberties because of their actions."
-Dr. Ron Paul-
(1935-) American physician, US Congressman (R-TX), US Presidential candidate
"The great masses of the people ... will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one."
-Adolf Hitler-
(1889-1945) German Nazi Dictator
Source: Mein Kampf, 1933
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel."
-Ambrose Bierce-
(1842-1914) Humorist
"I practice journalism in accordance with the following guidelines:
• Do nothing I cannot defend.
• Do not distort, lie, slant or hype.
• Do not falsify facts or make up quotes.
• Cover, write and present every story with the care I would want if the story were about me.
• Assume there is at least one other side or version to every story.
• Assume the viewer is as smart and caring and good a person as I am.
• Assume the same about all people on whom I report.
• Assume everyone is innocent until proven guilty.
• Assume personal lives are a private matter until a legitimate turn in the story mandates otherwise.
• Carefully separate opinion and analysis from straight news stories and clearly label it as such.
• Do not use anonymous sources or blind quotes except on rare and monumental occasions. No one should ever be allowed to attack another anonymously.
• Do not broadcast profanity or the end result of violence unless it is an integral and necessary part of the story and/or crucial to its understanding.
• Acknowledge that objectivity may be impossible but fairness never is.
• Journalists who are reckless with facts and reputations should be disciplined by their employers.
• My viewers have a right to know what principles guide my work and the process I use in their practice.
• I am not in the entertainment business. "
-Jim Lehrer-
(1934-2020) American journalist, novelist, screenwriter, playwright
Source: THE 1997 CATTO REPORT ON JOURNALISM AND SOCIETY, Jim Lehrer’s Rules of Journalism
"What a government of limited powers needs, at the beginning and forever, is some means of satisfying the people that it has taken all steps humanly possible to stay within its powers. That is the condition of its legitimacy, and its legitimacy, in the long run, is the condition of its life."
-Charles L. Black, Jr.-
Source: The People And The Court, 52 (1960).
"When a government takes over a people’s economic life it becomes absolute, and when it has become absolute it destroys the arts, the minds, the liberties and the meaning of the people it governs."
-Maxwell Anderson-
(1888-1959)
Source: The Guaranteed Life
"I do encourage you to question authority, apply logic, and think for yourself. Look at the forest, not the trees. And the centuries, not the months. Or you might risk being lead willingly, as a sheep, to the slaughter."
-Rick Gaber-
Libertarian writer
Source: Selfishness vs. “Selfishness”
"True, a socialistic society could see that 1000 litres of wine were better than 800 litres. It could decide whether or not 1000 litres of wine were to be preferred to 500 litres of oil. Such a decision would involve no calculation. The will of some man would decide. But the real business of economic administration, the adaptation of means to ends only begins when such a decision is taken. And only economic calculation makes this adaptation possible. Without such assistance, in the bewildering chaos of alternative materials and processes the human mind would be at a complete loss. Whenever we had to decide between different processes or different centres of production, we would be entirely at sea."
-Ludwig von Mises-
(1881-1973) Economist and social philosopher
Source: Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis
"Although totalitarian democracy is democratic in form, it requires an all-knowing elite to guide the masses toward their determined end, and that elite relies on whipping up mass enthusiasm to preserve its power and achieve its goals. Totalitarian democracy is almost always secular and materialistic, and its adherents tend to treat politics as a substitute for religion. Their sacred mission is to use the coercive power of the state to remake man and society according to an abstract ideal of perfection."
-William Barr-
(1950-) US Attorney General
Source: 2020 National Religious Broadcasters Convention, 2/26/2020
"Self-imposed limits on sovereign power can disarm mistrust, but provide no guarantee of liberty and property beyond those afforded by the balance between state and private force."
-Anthony de Jasay-
(1925- ) Hungarian writer
Source: The State [1985] (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1998), p. 205
"Young man, the secret of my success is that at an early age I discovered that I was not God."
-Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.-
(1841-1935) US Supreme Court Justice, also known as "The Great Dissenter"
Source: On his 90th birthday to a journalist (8 March 1931), as quoted in Information 2000: Library and Information Services for the 21st Century, Vol. 1991, Part 2 (1992) by the U.S. National Commission on Libraries and Information Science, p. 272.
"We shall be judged by what we do, not by how we felt while we were doing it."
-Kenneth Tynan-
Or, actions speak louder than motives...
"Every time you call for the government to do something, you are saying: I've run out of good ideas, creative ideas, peaceful ideas, cooperative ideas. Let's just turn to force and violence."
-Robert Higgs-
"One's first step in wisdom is to question everything -- and one's last is to come to terms with everything."
-Georg Christoph Lichtenberg-
(1742-1799) German scientist, professor, satirist and Anglophile
"It must never be forgotten... that the liberties of the people are not so safe under the gracious manner of government as by the limitation of power."
-Richard Henry Lee-
(1732-1794) Founding Father
"We hold that each man is the best judge of his own interest."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: Constitutions of Government of yhe United States of America, at 475, (Philadelphia 1788)
"Think about the agendas behind universal vaccination, climate change, universal psychiatric treatment, GMO food, and other 'science-based' frauds. They all imply a false collectivist model, in which individuals give up their power in exchange for 'doing good' and becoming members of the largest group in the world: 'disabled' people with needs that must be addressed and satisfied. Instead of supporting the liberation of the individual, the controllers want to squash it. Why? Because they fear individual power. It is forever the unpredictable wild card. They want a society in which every thought an individual thinks connects him to a greater whole---and if that sounds attractive, understand that this Whole is a fiction, intentionally faked to resemble a genuine oceanic feeling."
-Jon Rappoport-
American author, investigative reporter, writer
Source: introduction to 'The Matrix Revealed,' by Jon Rappoport
"When it is a duty to worship the sun it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat."
-John Viscount Morley-
(1838-1923), of Blackburn
Source: Voltaire, 1872
"It is our nature to conform; it is a force which not many people can successfully resist. What is its seat? The inborn requirement of self-approval."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910) American author and humorist
Source: Corn Pone Opinions
"To dragoon man into the adoption of what we think right, is an intolerable tyranny."
-William Godwin-
(1756-1836) English journalist, political philosopher, novelist
Source: William Godwin, ENQUIRY CONCERNING POLITICAL JUSTICE (1798), Book IV, Chapter i, Paragraph 10
"A people who mean to be free must be prepared to meet danger in person, and not rely upon the fallacious protection of armies."
-Edmund Randolph-
(1753-1813) Virginia delegate at the US Constitutional Convention, 1787
Source: January 9, 1800, Annals of the Congress of the United States, p297
"I have made all the calculations; fate will do the rest."
-Napoleon Bonaparte-
(1769-1821) French emperor
"This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But, it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."
-Sir Winston Churchill-
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1940-1945, 1951-1955)
"Besides, he who follows another not only discovers nothing but is not even investigating."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter XXXIII
"Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910) American author and humorist
"... absolutely we see this as an opportunity to reshape the way we do business and how we govern."
-Gavin Newsom-
(1967-) Governor of California
Source: 4/1/2020 asked whether the Corono virus crisis provided an opportunity for taking addional steps towards a new progressive era.
"This is a tremendous opportunity to restructure things to fit our vision."
-James Clyburn-
(1940 -) House Majority Whip (D-SC)
Source: 3/19/2020
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/488543-house-democrats-eyeing-much-broader-phase-3-stimulus
"'Useful,' and 'necessity' was always 'the tyrant's plea'."
-C. S. Lewis-
(1898-1963), British novelist
"The tyranny of a multitude is a multiplied tyranny."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
"The origin of all science is in the desire to know causes; and the origin of all false science and imposture is in the desire to accept false causes rather than none; or, which is the same thing, in the unwillingness to acknowledge our own ignorance."
-William Hazlitt-
"A false conclusion once arrived at and widely accepted is not easily dislodged and the less it is understood the more tenaciously it is held."
-Georg Cantor-
"The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself."
-Hilaire Belloc-
(1870-1953) French-born British writer
Source: THE SERVILE STATE
"The measure of my ambition will be full if when my wife and children shall repair to my grave to drop the tear of affection to my memory they may read on my tombstone He who lies beneath surrendered office, place and power rather than bow down and worship slavery."
-John P. Hale-
First Anti-slavery U. S. Senator, He secured the abolition of flogging and the spirit ration in the Navy
Born at Rochester 1806, Died at Dover 1873
"As long as the world shall last there will be wrongs, and if no man objected and no man rebelled, those wrongs would last forever. 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 Darrow-
"Whenever a single definite object is made the supreme end of the State, be it the advantage of a class, the safety of the power of the country, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, or the support of any speculative idea, the State becomes for the time inevitably absolute."
-Lord Acton-
[John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton] (1834-1902), First Baron Acton of Aldenham
"Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge, fitter to bruise than polish."
-Anne Bradstreet-
"The mortalist enemy unto knowledge, and that which hath done the greatest execution unto truth, has been a preemptory adhesion unto authority."
-Sir Thomas Browne-
(1605-1682)
Source: Religio Medici, 1642
"Historians and economists are very good at creating and perpetuating myths that justify increasing the power placed in the hands of government."
-Reuven Brenner-
(1947- ) Romanian-born Economist, Chair of Economics at McGill University's Desautels Faculty of Management
"An anarchist is anyone who doesn't need a cop to tell him what to do."
-Ammon Hennacy-
(1893-1970) Catholic anarchist, pacifist, vegetarian, draft refuser in two world wars, tax resister, "one-person revolution in America."
Source: Whenever Ammon was arrested for any number of reasons, mostly for "illegal" picketing, instead of pleading guilty or innocent he would plead 'anarchy'. This was his reply to the judge's question 'What is an anarchist?'
"Power gradually extirpates for the mind every humane and gentle virtue."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
"The greater the power the more dangerous the abuse."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
"The great inlet by which a colour for oppression has entered into the world is by one man's pretending to determine concerning the happiness of another."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
Source: quoted by Lord Acton in Lectures on the French Revolution (London: 1910), in J. Rufus Fears (Ed.), Selected Writings of Lord Acton, Vol. 1: Essays in the History of Liberty (Indianapolis: LibertyClassics, 1985), p. 206
"There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: Journal, 1772
"From all evil against which the law bars you, you should be barred, at an infinite distance, by honour, by conscience, and nobility. Does the law require patriotism, philanthropy, self-abnegation, public service, purity of purpose, devotion to the needs of others who have been placed in the world below you? The law is a great thing, — because men are poor and weak, and bad. And it is great, because where it exists in its strength, no tyrant can be above it. But between you and me there should be no mention of law as the guide of conduct. Speak to me of honour, of duty, and of nobility; and tell me what they require of you."
-Anthony Trollope-
"The necessity of every one paying in his own labor for what he consumes, affords the only legitimate and effectual check to excessive luxury, which has so often ruined individuals, states and empires; and which has now brought almost universal bankruptcy upon us."
-Josiah Warren-
(1798-1874)
"We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office."
-Aesop-
(c. 550 B.C.) legendary Greek fabulist
"Dogma is the convictions of one man
imposed authoritatively upon others."
-Felix Adler-
(1851-1933) Professor of political and social ethics
"Liberty, whether natural, civil, or political, is the lawful power in the individual to exercise his corresponding rights. It is greatly favored in law."
-Henry Campbell Black-
(1860-1927) Founder of Black's Law Dictionary, the definitive legal dictionary first published in 1891, editor of The Constitutional Review (1917-1927)
"Freedom is not something that can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be."
-James Baldwin-
(1924-1987) Novelist, Essayist, and Playwright
"A golden bit does not make a better horse."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter XLI: On the god within us
"Tyranny in democratic republics does not proceed in the same way, however. It ignores the body and goes straight for the soul. The master no longer says: You will think as I do or die. He says: You are free not to think as I do. You may keep your life, your property, and everything else. But from this day forth you shall be as a stranger among us. You will retain your civic privileges, but they will be of no use to you. For if you seek the votes of your fellow citizens, they will withhold them, and if you seek only their esteem, they will feign to refuse even that. You will remain among men, but you will forfeit your rights to humanity. When you approach your fellow creatures, they will shun you as one who is impure. And even those who believe in your innocence will abandon you, lest they, too, be shunned in turn. Go in peace, I will not take your life, but the life I leave you with is worse than death."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
"Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language."
-Ludwig Wittgenstein-
"It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character."
-Catch-22-
"Last, but by no means least, courage -- moral courage, the courage of one’s convictions, the courage to see things through. The world is in a constant conspiracy against the brave. It’s the age-old struggle -- the roar of the crowd on one side and the voice of your conscience on the other."
-General Douglas MacArthur-
(1880-1964) WWII Supreme Allied Commander of the Southwest Pacific, Supreme United Nations Commander
"There is no Freedom without Courage."
-Eric Schaub-
American Individualist, activist, speaker, writer
"Every actual state is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-
(1803-1882) American essayist, lecturer, and poet
"To say 'I have to' is to speak the language of compulsion, duty, authority -- the language of injunctions imposed on us from without. Objectivism is not a duty ethic, but an ethic of values, the ultimate value being one's own life and happiness. The language of values is 'I want' and 'I will': I want this, and I will do what it takes to get it."
-David Kelley-
Executive Director Institute for Objectivist Studies, Ph.D.
Source: I Don't Have To, IOS Journal, Volume 6, Number 1, April 1996.
"Rules are written for those who lack the ability to truly reason. But for those who can, rules become nothing more than guidelines, and live their lives governed not by rules but by reason."
-James McGuigan-
(1894-1974) Canadian Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church
"The unity of freedom has never relied on uniformity of opinion."
-John F. Kennedy-
(1917-1963) 35th US President
"You have to ask yourself, 'Who owns me? Do I own myself or am I just another piece of government property?' "
-Neal Boortz-
(1945- ) Radio talk show host, columnist
"The highest manifestation of life consists in this: that a being governs its own actions. A thing which is always subject to the direction of another is somewhat of a dead thing."
-Saint Thomas Aquinas-
(1225-1274) Italian philosopher and theologian
"A standing army, however necessary it may be at some times, is always dangerous to the liberties of the people. Such power should be watched with a jealous eye."
-Samuel Adams-
(1722-1803), was known as the "Father of the American Revolution."
"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity."
-Martin Luthor King-
"To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or knaves."
-Claude-Adrien Helvetius-
(1715-1771)
Source: On The Mind
"The most formidable weapons against errors of every kind is reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
"The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names."
-Chinese Proverb-
"The patriot, like the Christian, must learn to bear revilings and persecutions as a part of his duty; and in proportion as the trial is severe, firmness under it becomes more requisite and praiseworthy. It requires, indeed, self-command. But that will be fortified in proportion as the calls for its exercise are repeated."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"Mind Your Business"
-U. S. Treasury-
Source: The very first motto on a U.S. Minted Coin, the Continental Dollar, in 1776
"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 cannot enter — all his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement!"
-William Pitt-
1st Earl of Chatham
Speech on the Excise Bill, House of Commons (March 1763), quoted in Lord Brougham, Historical Sketches of Statesmen Who Flourished in the Time of George III (1855), I, p. 42
"Men are generally more honest in their private than in their public capacity, and will go greater lengths to serve a party, than when their own private interest is alone concerned. Honour is a great check upon mankind: But where a considerable body of men act together, this check is, in a great measure, removed; since a man is sure to be approved of by his own party, for what promotes the common interest; and he soon learns to despise the clamours of adversaries."
-David Hume-
"A man’s natural rights are his own, against the whole world; and any infringement of them is equally a crime, whether committed by one man, or by millions; whether committed by one man, calling himself a robber, … or by millions, calling themselves a government."
-Lysander Spooner-
"Freedom is risky. Nature makes no promises."
-Eric Schaub-
Individualist, activist, speaker, author
Source: The Liberty Ideal, 2005
"They: The makers of the Constitution: conferred, as against the government, the right to be let alone -- the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men."
-Justice Louis D. Brandeis-
(1856-1941) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: 1928
"A committee is a group of individuals who all put in a perfectly good color, and it comes out gray."
-Alan Sherman-
"[I]t is not the source but the limitation of power which prevents it from being arbitrary."
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
Source: The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944), p. 71
"My grandmother wanted me to have an education, so she kept me out of school."
-Margaret Mead-
(1901-1978) American cultural anthropologist and author
"Reaching consensus in a group is often confused with finding the right answer."
-Norman Mailer-
(1923-2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and film director
"Dignify and glorify common labor. It is at the bottom of life that we must begin, not at the top."
-Booker T. Washington-
(1856-1915) Author
"The strength and power of despotism consists wholly in the fear of resistance."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
"Those great and good men [the Framers] foresaw that troublous times would arise, when rulers and people would become restive under restraint, and seek by sharp and decisive measures to accomplish ends deemed just and proper; and that the principles of constitutional liberty would be in peril, unless established by irrepealable law. The history of the world had taught them that what was done in the past might be attempted in the future. 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."
-Ex parte Milligan-
1866 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court held that civilians could not be tried by military tribunals during the Civil War
"Everybody's a minarchist, you know, who's not an anarchist. Joseph Stalin was a minarchist. Bernie Sanders is a minarchist. If you're just gonna say, well, the State should just do x, y, z, why not x, y, z and a, b, c? And while we're at it, e, f, g, and a whole bunch of other things? Y'know, anarchists get accused of being utopian. But there is nothing more utopian than a minarchist. The idea that a State will stay restrained because it just decides it doesn't want more power. We're gonna create a monopoly on the initiation of violence, and they'll probably decide we'll only stay, you know, a reasonable size. Well, I mean, how much empirical evidence do you need to disprove the idea that that's even possible?
-Dave Smith-
The Monopoly On Violence
"The brave man inattentive to his duty, is worth little more to his country than the coward who deserts her in the hour of danger."
-Andrew Jackson-
(1767-1845) 7th US President
"We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can make for us or spare us."
-Marcel Proust-
(1871-1922) French novelist, critic, essayist
Source: In Search of Lost Time / Remembrance of Things Past, Vol II: Within a Budding Grove (1919)
"Are you willing to spend time studying the issues, making yourself aware, and then conveying that information to family and friends? Will you resist the temptation to get a government handout for your community?"
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
Source: from the speech "A Time For Choosing"
"The seven blunders that human society commits and cause all the violence: wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice, and politics without principles."
-Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi-
(1869-1948)
Source: A written list given to his departing grandson Arun Gandhi (October 1947), as quoted in Marriot (Spring 1998)
"The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor."
-George Orwell-
[Eric Arthur Blair] (1903-1950) British author
"I believe in the dignity of labor, whether with head or hand; that the world owes no man a living but that it owes every man an opportunity to make a living."
-John D. Rockefeller, Jr.-
"All wealth is the product of labor."
-John Locke-
(1632-1704) English philosopher and political theorist
"Fairness does not require the redistribution of wealth; it requires the creation of wealth, geared to an economy that can provide employment for everyone able and willing to work."
-Felix Rohatyn-
(1928- ) American investment banker known for his role in preventing the bankruptcy of New York City in the 1970s, United States Ambassador to France, long term advisor to the U.S. Democratic Party
Source: Wall Street Journal, April 11, 1996.
"The production of wealth is the result of agreement between labor and capital, between employer and employed. Its distribution, therefore, will follow the law of its creation, or great injustice will be done."
-Leland Stanford-
[Amasa Leland Stanford] (1824-1893) American tycoon, industrialist, politician and founder of Stanford University
"Without labor nothing prospers."
-Sophocles-
(c 497/6 BC - 406/5 BC) Greek playwright
"Absence of occupation is not rest,
A mind quite vacant is a mind distress'd."
-William Cowper-
(1731-1800) English poet, hymnodist
"Freedom of exchange and production within a regime of private property rights and freedom of contract harnesses self-interest to the public good. Admiration and endorsement of free markets is not – contrary to much uninformed commentary – admiration and endorsement of greed or materialism. It is, instead, the reflection of an acceptance of the reality that each person’s capacity to care for others is not unlimited.
Yet free markets work wonders in part because each person’s capacity to do no harm to other people’s persons and property is unlimited. And so when strangers meet to exchange, the law of property and contract (and tort) prompts each person to help the others, for only by helping these strangers can each person help himself or herself.
-Dr. Don Boudreaux-
"There are certain injustices in this life you’ve got to do something about. You can’t just say that you can’t fight it, or it’s too much trouble, or that you don’t have the time or the effort, or that you can’t win. Forget all that. Fight them all!
-Harlan Ellison-
"America's abundance was created not by public sacrifices to 'the common good,' but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America's industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance -- and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way."
-Ayn Rand-
[Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum] (1905-1982) Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter
"Let us not forget that the cultivation of the earth is the most important labor of man. When tillage begins, other arts will follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of civilization."
-Daniel Webster-
(1782-1852) US Senator
"In the late 1980s, Soviets were allowed to keep the wealth they created by raising vegetables on their garden plots. Although these plots composed only about 2% of the agricultural lands in the Soviet Union, they produced 25% of the food! When Soviets kept the wealth they created, they produced almost 16 times more than when it was taken from them at gunpoint, if necessary!"
-Dr. Mary J. Ruwart-
(1949- )
Source: Healing Our World, Ch 19.
"You don't have a right to the fruits of somebody else's labor. You don't have a right to a house, you don't have a right to a job, you don't have a right to medical care. You have a right to your life, you have your right to your liberty, you have a right to keep what your earn. And that's what produces prosperity. So you want equal justice. And this is not hard for me to argue, because if you really are compassionate and you care about people, the freer the society the more prosperous it is, and more likely that you are going to have medical care... When you turn it over to central economic planning, they're bound to make mistakes. The bureaucrats and the special interests and the Halliburtons are going to make the money. Whether it's war, or Katrina, these noncompetitive contracts, the bureaucrats make a lot of money and you end up with inefficiency."
-Dr. Ron Paul-
(1935-) American physician, US Congressman (R-TX), US Presidential candidate
Source: All Things Considered, NPR, July 25, 2007
"The Rules for Liberty
1) Don’t hurt people: Free people just want to be left alone, not hassled or harmed by someone else with an agenda or designs over their life and property.
2) Don’t take people’s stuff: America’s founders fought to ensure property rights and our individual right to the fruits of our labors.
3) Take responsibility: Liberty takes responsibility. Don’t sit around waiting for someone else to solve your problems.
4) Work for it: For every action there is an equal reaction. Work hard and you’ll be rewarded.
5) Mind your own business: Free people live and let live.
6) Fight the power: Thanks to the Internet and the decentralization of knowledge, there are more opportunities than ever to take a stand against corrupt authority."
-Matt Kibbe-
American economist, author, FreedomWorks President and CEO
Source: excerpted from 'Don’t Hurt People and Don’t Take Their Stuff: A Libertarian Manifesto,' 2014
"We may explain success mainly by one word and that word is WORK! WORK!! WORK!!! WORK!!!! Not transient and fitful effort, but patient, enduring, honest, unremitting, and indefatigable work, into which the whole heart is put."
-Frederick Douglass-
[Frederick Baily] (1818-1895), escaped slave, Abolitionist, author, editor of the North Star and later the New National Era
"There is no substitute under the heavens for productive labor. It is the process by which dreams become realities. It is the process by which idle visions become dynamic achievements."
-Gordon B. Hinckley-
(1910-2008) 15th President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
"A man who is without capital, and who, by prohibitions upon banking, is practically forbidden to hire any, is in a condition elevated but one degree above that of a chattel slave. He may live; but he can live only as the servant of others; compelled to perform such labor, and to perform it at such prices, as they may see fit to dictate."
-Lysander Spooner-
(1808-1887) Political theorist, activist, abolitionist
"The Democratic Party is made up of trial lawyers, labor unions, government employees, big city political machines, the coercive utopians, the radical environmentalists, feminists, and others who want to restructure society with tax dollars and government fiat."
-Grover Norquist-
(1956-) American political advocate, founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform
"The monarchy is a labor intensive industry."
-Harold Wilson-
(1916-1995) UK Prime Minister (1964-70, 1974-76)
"If a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who’s been arrested."
-Tom Wolf-
"It is unfortunate, that the efforts of mankind to recover the freedom of which they have been so long deprived, will be accompanied with violence, with errors, & even with crimes. But while we weep over the means, we must pray for the end."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Thomas Jefferson to F. D. Ivernois, February 6, 1795
"Modern society, based as it is on the division of labor, can be preserved only under conditions of lasting peace."
-Ludwig von Mises-
(1881-1973) Economist and social philosopher
"Democracy leads to anarchy, which is mob rule."
-Plato-
(429-347 BC) Greek philosopher
Source: The Republic, ca. 390 B.C.
"Democracy is morose, and runs to anarchy."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-
(1803-1882) American essayist, lecturer, and poet
Source: Nominalist and Realist, 1841
"The religious quality of Marxism also explains a characteristic attitude of the orthodox Marxist toward opponents. To him, as to any believer in a faith, the opponent is not merely in error but in sin. Dissent is unapproved of not only intellectually but also morally."
-Joseph A. Schumpeter-
(1883-1950)
Source: Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 1942
"Communism and socialism is [sic] seductive. It promises us that people will contribute according to ability and receive according to needs. Everybody is equal. Everybody has a right to decent housing, decent food and affordable medical care. History should have taught us that when we hear people talk this stuff -- watch out!"
-Walter E. Williams-
(1936- ) Columnist, Professor of Economics at George Mason University
"This is why political correctness, or Cultural Marxism,... lends itself so fashionably to easy labels. Transphobic, homophobic, xenophobic, racist, bigoted, Uncle Tom, white privilege, mainsplaining. All of these are slapped on people with "politically incorrect" opinions in an attempt to silence you. ...
Hate speech is inextricably tied to political correctness, or Cultural Marxism, and that creates intellectual conformity -- or intellectual authoritarianism. And that’s where you start to see things like 'safe spaces' or 'trigger warnings' or speakers banned from campus, or people with unpopular opinions banned from social media."
-Steven Crowder-
Source: Why 'Hate Speech' Doesn't Exist, 12/10/2016
"The ideal type of the Communist is a man in whom all individual, emotional, and unconscious elements have been reduced to a minimum and subjected to the control of an iron will, informed by a supple intellect. That intellect is totally at the service of a single and compelling idea, made incarnate in the Communist Party: the concept of History as an inexorable god whose ways are revealed ‘scientifically’ through the doctrine and method of Marxism-Leninism."
-Frank Straus Meyer-
(1909-1972) American philosopher, political activist, best known for his theory of "fusionism" – a political philosophy that unites elements of libertarianism and traditionalism into a philosophical synthesis which is posited as the definition of modern American conservatism.
Source: The Moulding of Communists: The Training of the Communist Cadre, 1961, p.16
"Open discussion of many major public questions has for some time now been taboo. We can’t open our mouths without being denounced as racists, misogynists, supremacists, imperialists or fascists. As for the media, they stand ready to trash anyone so designated."
-Saul Bellow-
(1915-2005) Canadian author, Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976
"The Framers would have seen a one-size-fits-all government for hundreds of millions of diverse citizens as being utterly unworkable and a straight road to tyranny. That is because they recognized that not every community is exactly the same. What works in Brooklyn might not be a good fit for Birmingham. The federal system allows for this diversity. It also enables people who do not like a certain system to move to a different one."
-William Barr-
(1950-) US Attorney General
Source: 2020 National Religious Broadcasters Convention, 2/26/2020
"Every time I criticize what I consider to be excesses or faults in the news business, I am accused of repression, and the leaders of various media professional groups wave the First Amendment as they denounce me. That happens to be my amendment, too. It guarantees my free speech as it does their freedom of the press... There is room for all of us -- and for our divergent views -- under the First Amendment."
-Spiro Agnew-
U. S. Vice-President
Source: 1972
"Perhaps the most obvious political effect of controlled news is the advantage it gives powerful people in getting their issues on the political agenda and defining those issues in ways likely to influence their resolution."
-W. Lance Bennett-
Author, professor at University of Washington
Source: News: The Politics of Illusion, 1983
"Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth -- more than ruin -- more even than death.... Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man."
-Bertrand Russell-
(1872 - 1970)
"Half the work that is done in this world is to make things appear what they are not."
-Elias Root Beadle-
(1812-1879) American (Afghanistan-born) Clergyman
"The politicians' stirring phrases are meant to keep our eyes averted from the reality of war — to make us imagine heroic young men marching in parades, winning glorious battles, and bringing peace and democracy to the world. But war is something quite different from that. It is your children or your grandchildren dying before they're even fully adults, or being maimed or mentally scarred for life. It is your brothers and sisters being taught to kill other people — and to hate people who are just like themselves and who don't want to kill anyone either. It is your children seeing their buddies' limbs blown off their bodies. It is hundreds of thousands of human beings dying years before their time. It is millions of people separated forever from the ones they love. It is the destruction of homes for which people worked for decades. It is the end of careers that meant as much to others as your career means to you. It is the imposition of heavy taxes on you and on other Americans and on people in other countries — taxes that remain long after the war is over. It is the suppression of free speech and the jailing of people who criticize the government. It is the imposition of slavery by forcing young men to serve in the military. It is goading the public to hate foreign people and races — whether Arabs or Japanese or Cubans or Serbs. It is numbing our sensibilities to cruelties inflicted on foreigners. It is cheering at the news of enemy pilots killed in their planes, of young men blown to bits while trapped inside tanks, of sailors drowned at sea. Other tragedies inevitably trail in the wake of war. Politicians lie even more than usual. Secrecy and cover-ups become the rule rather than the exception. The press becomes even less reliable. War is genocide, torture, cruelty, propaganda, and slavery. War is the worst cruelty government can inflict upon its subjects. It makes every other political crime — corruption, bribery, favoritism, vote-buying, graft, dishonesty — seem petty."
-Harry Browne-
"If police answered to customers just as grocers and hairdressers do, they wouldn’t be wasting time doing things that customers wouldn’t pay for, like pursuing the failed War on Drugs or petty rule infractions that generate revenue for governments."
-Nick Hankoff-
"To be able to think freely, a man must be certain that no consequence will follow whatever he writes."
-Ernest Renan-
(1823-1892)
Source: 1879
"Some who are too scrupulous to steal your possessions nevertheless see no wrong in tampering with your thoughts."
-Khalil Gibran-
(1883-1931) Lebanese-American philosophical essayist, novelist, mystical poet, and artist
Source: Spiritual Sayings of Kahlil Gibran (Anthony R. Ferris) 1962
"The most exhausting thing in life is being insincere."
-Anne Morrow Lindbergh-
(1906-2001) pioneering American aviator, author, and the spouse of fellow aviator Charles Lindbergh
"It takes less time to do a thing right, than it does to explain why you did it wrong."
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow-
(1807-1882) American poet
"It's an old political trick: 'If you can't convince 'em, confuse 'em.' But this time it won't work."
-Harry S. Truman-
(1884-1972), 33rd US President
Source: Address at the National Plowing Match (18 September 1948); as quoted in Miracle of '48: Harry Truman's Major Campaign Speeches and Selected Whistle-stops (2003)
"Are you not ashamed of heaping up the greatest amount of money and honour and reputation, and caring so little about wisdom and truth and the greatest improvement of the soul?"
-Socrates-
(469-399 B.C.) Greek philosopher
"Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth."
-Henry David Thoreau-
(1817-1862) American author, poet, philosopher, polymath, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and transcendentalist
"For an individual, or a society, the difference between moving forward, and moving in circles, is largely one of remaining aware of where you’ve been — of keeping your mistakes squarely in your view so you can be mindful of the direction you’re trying to move in. Hiding your mistakes, or denying that they ever occurred, may feel good in the short run; but in the long run, it’s a recipe for guaranteeing that you’ll make them again in the future."
-Ian Underwood-
"Small minds discuss people, average minds discuss events, but great minds discuss ideas."
-Admiral Hyman Rickover-
... but based on...
"Men and women range themselves into three classes or orders of intelligence; you can tell the lowest class by their habit of always talking about persons; the next by the fact that their habit is always to converse about things; the highest by their preference for the discussion of ideas."
-Henry Thomas Buckle-
"Between 'just desserts' and 'tragic irony' we are given quite a large scope for our particular talent. Generally speaking, things have gone about as far as they can possibly go when things have gotten about as bad as they can reasonably get.
-Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead-
"When government accepts responsibility for people, then people no longer take responsibility for themselves."
-George Pataki-
(1945- ) 53rd Governor of New York State
"The real 'haves' are they who can acquire freedom, self-confidence, and even riches without depriving others of them. They acquire all of these by developing and applying their potentialities. On the other hand, the real 'have nots' are they who cannot have aught except by depriving others of it. They can feel free only by diminishing the freedom of others, self-confident by spreading fear and dependence among others, and rich by making others poor."
-Eric Hoffer-
(1902-1983) American author, philosopher, awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
Source: The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms (1955)
"What is possible for me is possible for you."
-Frederick Douglass-
[Frederick Baily] (1818-1895), escaped slave, Abolitionist, author, editor of the North Star and later the New National Era
"Freedom of conscience is a natural right, both antecedent and superior to all human laws and institutions whatever; a right which laws never gave and a right which laws can never take away."
-John Goodwin-
(1594-1664)
Source: Might and Right Well Met, 1648
"Our forefathers found the evils of free thinking more to be endured than the evils of inquest or suppression. This is because thoughtful, bold and independent minds are essential to the wise and considered self-government."
-Justice Robert H. Jackson-
(1892-1954), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Atlantic Monthly, January 1955
"By a Declaration, Liberty is born. With Courage she is nourished, and with unceasing Commitment she is guarded."
-- Eric Schaub
Editor of Liberty Quotes
Source: The Common Man, 2003
"The Declaration of Independence is the all-time masterpiece of ideological simplification. There in a single sentence of self-evident truth, the founding Fathers put into clear, easily understandable focus, the broad basis of man's relationship to God, to government, and to his fellow man."
-Clarence Manion-
(1896-1979) American conservative radio talk show host, dean of the Notre Dame Law School
1956
"The 1st Amendment embraces the individual's right to purchase and read whatever books she wishes to, without fear the government will take steps to discover which books she buys, reads, and intends to read."
-Colorado Supreme Court-
Source: in a unanimous decision for Tattered Cover
"Two hundred ten years ago, the people who drafted our Bill of Rights decided that banning books wasn't the way to handle disagreements. They thought the best thing was more speech. It is a pity that county commissioners in 2002 don't agree."
-Matt Coles-
director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Lesbian and Gay Rights Projects
Source: on the occasion of a censorship challenge to It's Perfectly Normal
"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."
-Henry David Thoreau-
(1817-1862) American author, poet, philosopher, polymath, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and transcendentalist
"The class of citizens who provide at once their own food and their own raiment, may be viewed as the most truly independent and happy. They are more: they are the best basis of public liberty, and the strongest bulwark of public safety. It follows, that the greater the proportion of this class to the whole society, the more free, the more independent, and the more happy must be the society itself."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: National Gazette, 3 March 1792
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."
-Buckminster Fuller-
"A sure sign of a genius is that all of the dunces are in a confederacy against him."
-Frank Lloyd Wright-
(1867-1959) American architect, designer, writer, and educator
"This, then, is freedom in the external life of man -- that he is independent of the arbitrary power of his fellows."
-Ludwig von Mises-
(1881-1973) Economist and social philosopher
Source: his book, Socialism, par. II.9.26
"[I]f we can but prevent the government from wasting the labours of the people, under the pretence of taking care of them,
they must become happy."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Cooper, November 29, 1802
"My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government. That government is best which governs least."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"What assurance have we that our masters will or can keep the promise which induced us to sell ourselves? Let us not be deceived by phrases about 'Man taking charge of his own destiny'. All that can really happen is that some men will take charge of the destiny of the others. They will be simply men; none perfect; some greedy, cruel and dishonest. The more completely we are planned the more powerful they will be. Have we discovered some new reason why, this time, power should not corrupt as it has done before?"
-C. S. Lewis-
(1898-1963), British novelist
Source: Willing Slaves of the Welfare State, first published in The Observer on July 20, 1958
"Ultimately, the only power to which man should aspire is that which he exercises over himself."
-Elie Wiesel-
(1928-) Author, Nobel Peace Prize 1986
"A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away."
-Barry Goldwater-
(1909-1998) US Senator (R-Arizona)
"Already a couple of the faithful have sent in checks for a foundation memorial to the innocents who perished at the hands of the ninja at Waco ... I have been criticized by referring to our federal masked men as 'ninja' ... Let us reflect upon the fact that a man who covers his face shows reason to be ashamed of what he is doing. A man who takes it upon himself to shed blood while concealing his identity is a revolting perversion of the warrior ethic. It has long been my conviction that a masked man with a gun is a target. I see no reason to change that view."
-Jeff Cooper-
LTC USMC, 1920-2006
"My father taught that the only helping hand you're ever going to be able to rely on is the one at the end of your sleeve."
-J. C. Watts, Jr.-
(1957- ) US Congressman from Oklahoma (R), former quarterback in the Canadian Football League
"Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year, it is the struggle of a lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble."
-John Lewis-
"No man can suffer too much, and no man can fall too soon, if he suffer or if he fall in defense of the liberties and Constitution of his country."
-Daniel Webster-
(1782-1852) US Senator
"The worst evils which mankind has ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments. The state can be and has often been in the course of history the main source of mischief and disaster."
-Ludwig von Mises-
(1881-1973) Economist and social philosopher
"Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we should soon want bread."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured." Aristotle observed, "Anybody can become angry — that is easy — but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose and in the right way — that is not within everybody's power and is not easy."
-Mark Twain-
"I swear by my life, and love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."
-Ayn Rand-
[Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum] (1905-1982) Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter
Source: Atlas Shrugged
"People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them."
-George Bernard Shaw-
(1856-1950) Irish comic dramatistst
Source: "Mrs. Warren's Profession" (1893) Act II
"The man who does not do his own thinking is a slave, and is a traitor to himself and his fellow men."
-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"t;
"No man can climb out beyond the limitations of his own character."
-John Viscount Morley-
(1838-1923), of Blackburn
"Reporters today are far removed from America's founding values and are alarmed and contemptuous of gun owners as dangerous lower classes."
-Henry Allen-
American journalist, poet, musician, and critic
Source: Washington Post
&q"As long as I don't write about the government, religion, politics, and other institutions, I am free to print anything."
-Pierre-Augustin Beaumarchais-
(1732-1799) French playwright, watchmaker, inventor, musician, diplomat, fugitive, spy, publisher, arms dealer, satirist, financier, and revolutionary
"The American people should be made aware of the trend toward monopolization of the great public information vehicles and the concentration of more and more power over public opinion in fewer and fewer hands."
-Spiro Agnew-
U. S. Vice-President
"Today in the United States, the corporate – or ‘mainstream’ – press is massively consolidated. And it has become remarkably monolithic in viewpoint, at the same time that an increasing number of journalists see themselves less as objective reporters of the facts, and more as agents of change."
-William Barr-
(1950-) US Attorney Generalal
Source: 2020 National Religious Broadcasters Convention, 2/26/2020
"A platform is something a candidate stands for and the voters fall for. ... I'm having my platform run up by a movie set designer, so it will be very impressive from the front, but not too permanent. After all, there's no sense putting a lot of time and thought into something you'll have no use for after you're elected."
-Gracie Allen-
"You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline; it helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer."
-Frank Zappa-
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you."
-Don Marquis-
"Every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered...History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right."
-George Orwell-
[Eric Arthur Blair] (1903-1950) British author
Source: "1984" by George Orwell, 1950
"A statesman who keeps his ear permanently glued to the ground will have neither elegance of posture nor flexibility of movement."
-Abba Eban-
[Aubrey Solomon Meir Eban] (1915-2002) Israeli diplomat, politician
"Governing a large country is like frying a small fish. You spoil it with too much poking."
-Lao-Tzu-
[Li Erh] (570-490 BC) 'Old Sage', Father of Taoism
"It is the beginning of all true criticism of our time to realize that it has really nothing to say, at the very moment when it has invented so tremendous a trumpet for saying it."
-Gilbert Keith Chesterton-
(1874-1936) British essayist, critic, poet, and novelist
Source: Illustrated London News, 1923
"It is discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit."
-Noel Coward-
(1899-1973) British playwright
"Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-
(1803-1882) American essayist, lecturer, and poet
Source: Essays, 1841
"There is no man so good that if he placed all his actions and thought under the scrutiny of the laws, he would not deserve hanging ten times in his life."
-Michel de Montaigne-
[Michel Eyquem De Montaigne] (1532-1592) French Renaissance scholar, philosopher, writer
Source: Essays, 1595
"Take care that no one hates you justly."
-Publilius Syrus-
Latin writer of maxims, in the 1st century BCE
"We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable, that all men are created equal and independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: First draft of the Declaration of Independence
"We must not allow ourselves to become like the system we oppose. We cannot afford to use methods of which we will be ashamed when we look back, when we say, '...we shouldn't have done that.' We must remember, my friends, that we have been given a wonderful cause. The cause of freedom! And you and I must be those who will walk with heads held high. We will say, 'We used methods that can stand the harsh scrutiny of history.'"
-Bishop Desmond Tutu-
(1931- ) Nobel Prize for Peace 1984
"Even today a crude sort of persecution is all that is required to create an honorable name for any sect, no matter how indifferent in itself."
-Friedrich Nietzsche-
(1844-1900) German philosopher, cultural critic, poet, philologist
Source: The Anti-Christ, 1889
"One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them."
-Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
"It is possible that the distinction between moral relativism and moral absolutism has sometimes been blurred because an excessively consistent practice of either leads to the same practical result -- ruthlessness in political life."
-Richard Hofstadter-
"All things in moderation, including moderation."
"When I contemplate the natural dignity of man; when I feel ... for the honor and happiness of its character, I become irritated at the attempt to govern mankind by force and fraud, as if they were all knaves and fools, and can scarcely avoid disgust at those who are thus imposed upon."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
"There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences."
-P. J. O'Rourke-
(1947- ) US humorist, journalist, & political commentator
1993
"Tolerance implies a respect for another person, not because he is wrong or even because he is right, but because he is human."
-John Cogley-
Source: Commonwealth, 24 April 1959
"[A]fter unleashing the Red Guards … to serve his political purposes, Mao Zedong was no longer able to control them."
-Nien Cheng-
[Yao Nien-Yuan 姚念媛] (1915 - 2009) Chinese author who recounted her harrowing experiences during the Cultural Revolution in her memoir 'Life and Death in Shanghai'
Source: Life and Death in Shanghai, 1987
"Day and night the city resounded with the loud noise of drums and gongs … looting and the ransacking of private homes … The violence of the Red Guards seemed to have escalated. … Articles in the newspapers … encouraged the Red Guards and congratulated them on their vandalism. They were … exhorted to be fearless in their work of toppling the old world and building a new one based on Mao’s teachings."
-Nien Cheng-
[Yao Nien-Yuan 姚念媛] (1915 - 2009) Chinese author who recounted her harrowing experiences during the Cultural Revolution in her memoir 'Life and Death in Shanghai'
Source: Life and Death in Shanghai, 1987
"The newspaper announced that the mission of the Red Guards was to rid the country of the ‘Four Olds’: old culture, old customs, old habits, and old ways of thinking. There was no clear definition of ‘old’; it was left to the Red Guards to decide. First of all, they changed street names."
-Nien Cheng-
[Yao Nien-Yuan 姚念媛] (1915 - 2009) Chinese author who recounted her harrowing experiences during the Cultural Revolution in her memoir 'Life and Death in Shanghai'
Source: Life and Death in Shanghai, 1987
"A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday."
-Alexander Pope-
(1688-1744) English poet
Source: Thoughts on Various Subjects; published in Swift's Miscellanies (1727)
"A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing."
-George Bernard Shaw-
(1856-1950) Irish comic dramatist
"The opposition is indispensable. A good statesmen, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opponents than from his fervent supporters."
-Walter Lippmann-
(1889-1974) American writer, journalist, and political commentator
Source: Atlantic Monthly, August 1939
"Hypocrisy is an homage that vice pays to virtue."
-François Duc de La Rochefoucauld-
(1613-1680) French author
Source: Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678), Maxim 218
"A wise man neither suffers himself to be governed, nor attempts to govern others."
-Jean de la Bruyere-
(1645-1696) French essayist and moralist
"No one has ever succeeded in keeping nations at war except by lies."
-Salvador de Madariaga-
(1886-1978 ), Spanish writer, diplomat, and historian, noted for his service at the League of Nations
"The highest reward for man’s toil is not what he gets for it, but what he becomes by it."
-John Ruskin-
(1819-1900) British author, artist, social critic
"Mastering others is strength. Mastering yourself is true power."
-Lao-Tzu-
[Li Erh] (570-490 BC) 'Old Sage', Father of Taoism
"The things that will destroy us are:
politics without principle;
pleasure without conscience;
wealth without work;
knowledge without character;
business without morality;
science without humanity;
and worship without sacrifice."
-Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi-
(1869-1948)
"The whole art of government consists in the art of being honest."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"We, today, stand on the shoulders of our predecessors who have gone before us. We, as their successors, must catch the torch of freedom and liberty passed on to us by our ancestors. We cannot lose this battle."
-Benjamin E. Mays-
(1895-1984)
"Freedom may come quickly in robes of peace, or after ages of conflict and war; but come it will, and abide it will, so long as the principles by which it was acquired are held sacred."
-Edward Everett-
(1794-1865) American politician and educator from Massachusetts. US Representative, US Senator, 15th Governor of Massachusetts, Minister to Great Britain, US Secretary of State, professor and president of Harvard
Source: Orations and Speeches. Address, Aug. 25, 1835. Before the Literary Societies of Amherst College
"It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not."
-Andre Gide-
(1869-1951) French writer
"The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous."
-Frederick Douglass-
[Frederick Baily] (1818-1895), escaped slave, Abolitionist, author, editor of the North Star and later the New National Era
"Dare to be true. Nothing can need a lie:
A fault, which needs it most, grows two thereby."
-George Herbert-
[1593-1633] Welsh-born English poet, orator and Anglican priest
Source: The Temple (1633), The Church Porch, Lines 77-78
"I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution, or that have failed their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is "needed" before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents' 'interests,' I shall reply that I was informed that their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can."
-Barry Goldwater-
"Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"War is an ugly thing but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feelings which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."
-John Stuart Mill-
(1806-1873) English philosopher and economist
"Do all the good you can.
By all the means you can.
In all the ways you can.
In all the places you can.
At all the times you can.
To all the people you can.
As long as ever you can."
-John Wesley-
(1703-1791) Church of England cleric, Christian theologian, a founder of the Methodist movement
"I am a Tory Anarchist. I should like every one to go about doing just as he pleased — short of altering any of the things to which I have grown accustomed."
-Max Beerbohm-
"Bad men cannot make good citizens. It is impossible that a nation of infidels or idolaters should be a nation of freemen. It is when a people forget God that tyrants forge their chains. A vitiated state of morals, a corrupted public conscience, is incompatible with freedom. No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue; and by a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles."
-Patrick Henry-
(1736-1799) US Founding Father
Source: Attributed - no source found.
"No man who is corrupt, no man who condones corruption in others, can possibly do his duty by the community."
-Theodore Roosevelt-
(1858-1919) 26th US President
"When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.
When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.
When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.
When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out."
-Reverend Martin Niemoeller-
(1892-1984) German Lutheran pastor, was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Dachau in 1938. He was freed by the allied forces in 1945.
Source: Poem in 1976 translated from German
"Volumes can be and have been written about the issue of freedom versus dictatorship, but, in essence, it comes down to a single question: do you consider it moral to treat men as sacrificial animals and to rule them by physical force?"
-Ayn Rand-
[Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum] (1905-1982) Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter
"During the last dozen years the tales of suppression of free assemblage, free press, and free speech, by local authorities or the State operating under martial law have been so numerous as to have become an old story. They are attacked at the instigation of an economically and socially powerful class, itself enjoying to the full the advantages of free communications, but bent on denying them to the class it holds within its power..."
-Edward Alsworth Ross-
(1866-1951) Professor
Source: Speech, American Sociological Society, 1914
"The public must be put in its place, so that it may exercise its own powers, but no less and perhaps even more, so that each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd."
-Walter Lippmann-
(1889-1974) American writer, journalist, and political commentator
"Politics is the entertainment division of the military-industrial complex."
-Frank Zappa-
"One of these days they are going to remove so much of the 'hooey' and the thousands of things the schools have become clogged up with, and we will find that we can educate our broods for about one-tenth of the price and learn 'em something that they might accidentally use after they escape."
-Will Rogers-
(1879-1935) American humorist
"The most worthwhile form of education is the kind that puts the educator inside you, as it were, so that the appetite for learning persists long after the external pressure for grades and degrees has vanished. Otherwise you are not educated; you are merely trained."
-Sydney J. Harris-
"Libertarianism is a political philosophy that holds that a person should be free to do whatever he wants in life, as long as his conduct is peaceful. Thus, as long a person doesn’t murder, rape, burglarize, defraud, trespass, steal, or inflict any other act of violence against another person’s life, liberty, or property, libertarians hold that the government should leave him alone. In fact, libertarians believe that a primary purpose of government is to prosecute and punish anti-social individuals who initiate force against others."
-Jacob Hornberger-
Future of Freedom Foundation president
"Libertarianism is the philosophy that says that people should be free from individual, societal, or government interference to live their lives any way they desire, pursue their own happiness, accumulate wealth, assess their own risks, make their own choices, participate in any economic activity for their profit, engage in commerce with anyone who is willing to reciprocate, and spend the fruits of their labor as they see fit. As long as people don’t violate the personal or property rights of others, and as long as their actions are peaceful, their associations are voluntary, and their interactions are consensual, they should be free to live their lives without license, regulation, interference, or molestation by the government."
-Laurence M. Vance-
"Ours was the first revolution in the history of mankind that truly reversed the course of government, and with three little words: 'We the people.' 'We the people' tell the government what to do, it doesn't tell us. 'We the people' are the driver, the government is the car. And we decide where it should go, and by what route, and how fast. Almost all the world's constitutions are documents in which governments tell the people what their privileges are. Our Constitution is a document in which 'We the people' tell the government what it is allowed to do. 'We the people' are free. This belief has been the underlying basis for everything I've tried to do these past eight years."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
"The issues can be stated very briefly:
Who will be controlled?
Who will exercise control?
What type of control will be exercised?
Most important of all, toward what end or purpose,
or in the pursuit of what value, will control be exercised?"
-Carl Rogers-
(1902-1987) American psychologist
"There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc., that are common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience."
-Karl Marx-
(1818-1883) Prussian-born philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist, father of Communism, co-author of the 'Communist Manifesto'
Source: The Communist Manifesto, 1848
"You don't have to scratch liberalism very deeply to find socialism underneath, nor socialism to find authoritarianism underneath."
-Don Luskin-
(1954 -) American columnist
"People constantly speak of 'the government' doing this or that, as they might speak of God doing it. But the government is really nothing but a group of men, and usually they are very inferior men."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"Discipline must come through liberty... We do not consider an individual disciplined when he has been rendered as artificially silent as a mute and as immovable as a paralytic. He is an individual annihilated, not disciplined."
-Maria Montessori-
(1870-1952) Italian physician and educator best known for the philosophy of education that bears her name, the Montessori method
Source: The Montessori Method, 1912
"One of the serious results of propaganda is that it has caused the public to think that education and propaganda are the same thing, and thus to make an ignorant multitude believe it is being educated when it is only being manipulated. Education aims at independence of judgement. Propaganda offers ready-made opinions for the unthinking herd."
-Everett Dean Martin-
(1880-1941) American minister, writer, journalist, instructor, lecturer, social psychologist, social philosopher, advocate of adult education
Source: Are We Victims of Propaganda, Our Invisible Masters: A Debate with Edward Bernays (1929)
"It is the trivial, the irrelevant, the sensational, the appeal to obsolete bigotry which naturally give it greatest publicity. In such publicity it becomes a mere vulgar caricature of itself."
-Everett Dean Martin-
(1880-1941) American minister, writer, journalist, instructor, lecturer, social psychologist, social philosopher, advocate of adult education
Source: Are We Victims of Propaganda, Our Invisible Masters: A Debate with Edward Bernays (1929)
"The educator aims at a slow process of development; the propagandist, at quick results. The educator tries to tell people how to think; the propagandist, what to think. The educator strives to develop individual responsibility; the propagandist, mass effects. The educator wants thinking; the propagandist, action. The educator fails unless he achieves an open mind; the propagandist, unless he achieves a closed mind."
-Everett Dean Martin-
(1880-1941) American minister, writer, journalist, instructor, lecturer, social psychologist, social philosopher, advocate of adult education
Source: Are We Victims of Propaganda, Our Invisible Masters: A Debate with Edward Bernays (1929)
"I regret to say it, but we are gradually turning over the business of Congress, turning over all our constitutional rights, turning over our powers delegated by the people to a lot of editors, theorists, and college professors who are not capable of conducting our affairs and to whom we should not abdicate."
-Oscar Callaway-
(1872-1947) U.S. Congressman, TX-D (1911-1917)
Source: Congressional Record of February 9, 1917, page 2947, as entered by Representative Oscar Callaway of Texas
"Political scientists almost everywhere have promoted the expansion of government power. They have functioned as the clergy of oppression."
-Rudolph J. Rummel-
(1932-2014) Professor of political science, University of Hawaii
Source: Death by Government, 1995
"Politics doesn't work. Look at the parts of America where government has had the most power, where government has spent the most money. Look at the housing projects we've got the poor people in."
-P. J. O'Rourke-
(1947- ) US humorist, journalist, & political commentator
Source: "Age And Guile"
"But what is Freedom? Rightly understood,
A universal licence to be good."
-Hartley Coleridge-
(1796-1849) Poet
"Duties are not performed for duty's sake, but because their neglect would make the man uncomfortable. A man performs but one duty -- the duty of contenting his spirit, the duty of making himself agreeable to himself."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910) American author and humorist
"Activate yourself to duty by remembering your position, who you are, and what you have obliged yourself to be."
-Thomas Kempis-
[Thomas à Kempis] (c.1380-1471) Catholic author
"It is a very great mistake to imagine that the object of loyalty is the authority and interest of one individual man, however dignified by the applause or enriched by the success of popular actions."
-Samuel Adams-
"It is not who governs but what government is entitled to do that seems to me the essential problem."
-Friedrich Hayek-
"Why I am not a conservative"
"Before you heal someone, as him if he's willing to give up the things that made him sick."
-Hippocrates-
"If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910) American author and humorist
"Rather fail with honor than succeed by fraud."
-Sophocles-
(c 497/6 BC - 406/5 BC) Greek playwright
"Persons with weight of character carry, like planets, their atmospheres along with them in their orbits."
-Thomas Hardy-
(1840-1928) English novelist, poet
"Leadership is a potent combination of strategy and character. But if you must be without one, be without the strategy."
-General H. Norman Schwarzkopf-
(1934-2012) United States Army general
"Honor, justice, and humanity, forbid us tamely to surrender that freedom which we received from our gallant ancestors, and which our innocent posterity have a right to receive from us."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"My father had a deep and lifelong contempt for politicians in general ('They tell lies,' he used to say with wonder, 'even when they don't have to')."
-Gore Vidal-
"False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil."
-Socrates-
(469-399 B.C.) Greek philosopher
"The creed of our democracy is that liberty is acquired and kept by men and women who are strong and self-reliant, and possessed of such wisdom as God gives mankind -- men and women who are just, and understanding, and generous to others -- men and women who are capable of disciplining themselves. For they are the rulers and they must rule themselves."
-Franklin D. Roosevelt-
(1882-1945), 32nd US President
10/28/44
"Whenever government assumes to deliver us from the trouble of thinking for ourselves, the only consequences it produces are those of torpor and imbecility."
-William Godwin-
(1756-1836) English journalist, political philosopher and novelist
Source: An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 1793
"Those who love peace must learn to organize as effectively as those who love war."
-Martin Luthor King, Jr.-
"The only foundation of a free Constitution, is pure Virtue, and if this cannot be inspired into our People, in a great Measure, than they have it now. They may change their Rulers, and the forms of Government, but they will not obtain a lasting Liberty."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: John Adams, letter to Zabdiel Adams, June 21, 1776
"All free constitutions are formed with two views -- to deter the governed from crime, and the governors from tyranny."
-John Lansing, Jr.-
(1754-1829) American lawyer, politician
Source: Debate, Constitutional Convention, 1787
"In selecting men for office, let principle be your guide. Regard not the particular sect or denomination of the candidate -- look at his character. It is alleged by men of loose principles, or defective views of the subject, that religion and morality are not necessary or important qualifications for political stations. But the scriptures teach a different doctrine. They direct that rulers should be men who rule in the fear of God, men of truth, hating covetousness. It is to the neglect of this rule that we must ascribe the multiplied frauds, breaches of trust, speculations and embezzlements of public property which astonish even ourselves; which tarnish the character of our country and which disgrace our government. When a citizen gives his vote to a man of known immorality, he abuses his civic responsibility; he not only sacrifices his own responsibility; he sacrifices not only his own interest, but that of his neighbor; he betrays the interest of his country."
-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
"Remember to vote early -- and often."
-Al Capone-
(1899-1947) American gangster, nicknamed "Scarface"
Source: Attributed accordog to "Capone," by John Kobler
"I think I have served the purpose that I came here for, which was to provide a credible election product for our members."
-Brenda Snipes-
(1943-) Supervisor of Elections for Broward County, Florida
November 13, 2018, priot to her removal from office
Source: https://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/politics/fl-ne-election-snipes-replacement-20181113-story.html
"I listen to people talking about this universal breakdown we are in and I marvel at their stupid cowardice. It is so obvious that they deliberately cheat themselves because their fear of change won't let them face the truth. They don't want to understand what has happened to them. All they want is to start the merry-go-round of blind greed all over again. They no longer know what they want this country to be, what they want it to become, where they want it to go. It has lost all meaning for them except as pig-wallow. And so their lives as citizens have no beginnings, no ends. They have lost the ideal of the Land of the Free. Freedom demands initiative, courage, the need to decide what life must mean to oneself. To them, that is terror. They explain away their spiritual cowardice by whining that the time for individualism is past, when it is their courage to possess their own souls which is dead — and stinking! No, they don't want to be free. Slavery means security — of a kind, the only kind they have courage for. It means they need not to think. They have only to obey orders from owners who are, in turn, their slaves!"
-Eugene O'Neill-
"It's not the hand that signs the laws that holds the destiny of America. It's the hand that casts the ballot."
-Harry S. Truman-
(1884-1972), 33rd US President
"The lesson that Americans today have forgotten or never learned -- the lesson which our ancestors tried so hard to teach -- is that the greatest threat to our lives, liberty, property, and security is not some foreign government, as our rulers so often tell us. The greatest threat to our freedom and well-being lies with our own government!."
-Jacob G. Hornberger-
(1950- ) American author, journalist, politician, founder and president of the Future of Freedom Foundation
Source: Gun Control, Patriotism and Civil Disobedience, Pamphlet published by International Society for Individual Liberty
"Vote: The instrument and symbol of a free man's power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country."
-Ambrose Bierce-
(1842-1914) American Civil War soldier, humorist, writer
"An election is nothing more than the advanced auction of stolen goods."
-Ambrose Bierce-
(1842-1914) American Civil War soldier, humorist, writer
"Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
Source: to the voters of Bristol, 1774
"Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half the time."
-E. B. White-
(1899-1985) American writer, contributor to "The New Yorker" magazine
More than -- but only just more than -- half. FTFY...
"Our experience has shown us that in the excitement of great popular elections, deciding the policy of the country, and its vast patronage, frauds will be committed, if a chance is given for them. If these frauds are allowed, the result is not only that the popular will may be defeated, and the result falsified, but that the worst side will prevail. The side which has the greater number of dishonest men will poll the most votes. The war cry, "Vote early and vote often!" and the familiar problem, "how to cast the greatest number of votes with the smallest number of voters", indicate the direction in which the dangers lie."
-Richard Henry Dana, Jr.-
(1815-1882) American lawyer, politician from Massachusetts
Source: The British newspaper The Times of 27 August 1859 printed a letter about the use of the ballot for voting in the United States, written by Richard Henry Dana, Jr. to his friend Lord Radstock
"According to the Taranto Principle, the press's failure to hold left-wingers accountable for bad behavior merely encourages the left's bad behavior to the point that its candidates are repellent to ordinary Americans."
-R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.-
(1943-) American magazine editor, book author, columnist
Source: 'The Taranto Principle', The New York Sun, September 25, 2008
"He alone deserves liberty and life who daily must win them anew."
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe-
(1749-1832) German writer, statesman
"There is danger in the concentration of control in the television and radio networks, especially in the large television and radio stations; danger in the concentration of ownership in the press… and danger in the increasing concentration of selection by book publishers and reviewers and by the producers of radio and television programs."
-Eugene McCarthy-
(1916-2005) US Congressman (D-Minnesota) & US Senator (D-Minnesota)
Source: Censorship: For And Against, 1971
"Make men wise, and by that very operation you make them free. Civil liberty follows as a consequence of this; no usurped power can stand against the artillery of opinion."
-William Godwin-
(1756-1836) English journalist, political philosopher and novelist
"A wise man ought not to desire to inhabit that country where men have more authority than laws."
-Walter Raleigh-
"I will not willingly cede more power to anyone, not to the state, not to General Motors, not to the CIO. I will hoard my power like a miser, resisting every effort to drain it away from me. I will then use my power, as I see fit. I mean to live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never to the authority of political truths arrived at yesterday at the voting booth."
-William F. Buckley Jr.-
"Socialists desire to practice legal plunder, not illegal plunder. Socialists, like all other monopolists, desire to make the law their own weapon. And when once the law is on the side of socialism, how can it be used against socialism? For when plunder is abetted by the law, it does not fear your courts, your gendarmes, and your prisons. Rather, it may call upon them for help."
-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
"What does anti-Semitism have to do with socialism? I would put the question this way: What does the Jew have to do with socialism? Socialism has to do with labor. When did one ever see him working instead of plundering, stealing and living from the sweat of others? As socialists we are opponents of the Jews because we see in the Hebrews the incarnation of capitalism."
-Joseph Paul Goebbels-
(1897-1945) German politician and Reich Minister of Propaganda of Nazi Germany
Source: Joseph Goebbels and Mjölnir, Die verfluchten Hakenkreuzler. Etwas zum Nachdenken (Munich: Verlag Frz. Eher, 1932)
"Those who can make you believe in absurdities can make you commit atrocities!"
-Voltaire-
[François Marie Arouet] (1694-1778) French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher
"Metaphysicians and politicians may dispute forever, but they will never find any other moral principle or foundation of rule or obedience, than the consent of governors and governed."
-John Adams-
"The act of voting is one opportunity for us to remember that our whole way of life is predicated on the capacity of ordinary people to judge carefully and well."
-Alan Keyes-
(1950- ) US Politician
"But I go on this great republican principle, that the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom. Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks -- no form of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea. If there be sufficient virtue and intelligence in the community, it will be exercised in the selection of these men. So that we do not depend on their virtue, or put confidence in our rulers, but in the people who are to choose them."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Virginia Ratifying Convention, 1788
“We the willing, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much, with so little, for so long, we are now qualified to do anything, with nothing.”
-anonymous-
"Questions are a burden to others.
Answers are a prison for oneself."
-The Prisoner-
"Rooted in freedom, bonded in the fellowship of danger, sharing everywhere a common human blood, we declare again that all men are brothers, and that mutual tolerance is the price of liberty."
-Will Durant-
"Not to be a republican at twenty is proof of want of heart; to be one at thirty is proof of want of head."
-Francois Guisot-
(1787-1874)
"He who is not a républicain at twenty compels one to doubt the generosity of his heart; but he who, after thirty, persists, compels one to doubt the soundness of his mind."
-Anselme Polycarpe Batbie-
French jurist and academic, 1828-1887
"Give the American people a good cause, and there's nothing they can't lick."
-John Wayne-
[Marion Morrison] (1907-1979) American film actor
"The electors see their representative not only as a legislator for the state but also as the natural protector of local interests in the legislature; indeed, they almost seem to think that he has a power of attorney to represent each constituent, and they trust him to be as eager in their private interests as in those of the country."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
[Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clerel, le Comte de Tocqueville] (1805-1859) French historian
Source: Democracy in America, 1835
"An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for blood; a mud bath for every soul concerned in it."
-George Bernard Shaw-
(1856-1950) Irish comic dramatist
"The true patriot scrutinizes the actions of his own government with unceasing vigilance. And when his government violates the morality and rightness associated with principles of individual freedom and private property, he immediately rises in opposition to his government."
-Jacob G. Hornberger-
(1950- ) American author, journalist, politician, founder and president of the Future of Freedom Foundation
Source: The Tyranny Of Gun Control, 28 (Future Of Freedom Foundation 1997)
"Politicians thrill their supporters with promises to misuse the vast and dangerous power of the state to crush despised opponents. And then we're supposed to wonder why our political seasons turn into societal pressure cookers with election outcomes treated as existential threats. Well, our political class and their rabid partisans are doing their best to make sure that losing a vote really is an existential threat. ...
Traditional philosophical arguments over the proper role of government and the balance of majority wishes with individual autonomy have been replaced by one important observation: the government we have now is so large, powerful, and dangerous that nobody can afford to lose control to their enemies. Politics is now an escalating struggle between death cults whose partisans realistically fear doom if vote totals don't go their way. ...
But one way or another we have to make elections less consequential so that people can afford to lose them without fearing their treatment by the winners. Given that power is inevitably abused by those who wield it, that means reducing government's authority over our lives so that ballot-box victors can't so easily punish their enemies."
-J.D. Tuccille-
"Experts and the educated elite have replaced what worked with what sounded good. Society was far more civilized before they took over our schools, prisons, welfare programs, police departments and courts. It's high time we ran these people out of our lives and went back to common sense."
-Walter E. Williams-
(1936- ) Columnist, Professor of Economics at George Mason University
"Let the people think they govern and they will be governed."
-William Penn-
(1644-1718) English real estate entrepreneur, philosopher, early Quaker, founder of the Province of Pennsylvania
Source: Some Fruits of Solitude, 1693
"If you are afraid to speak against tyranny, then you are already a slave."
-John "Birdman" Bryant-
(1943-2009) self labeled as “The World’s Most Controversial Author”
"[The People] are the ultimate, guardians of their own liberty."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Queries 14 and 19, 1784
"Yield not to evils, but attack all the more boldly."
-Virgil-
[Publius Vergilius Maro] (70-19 BCE) Classical Roman poet
"Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny."
-Robert A. Heinlein-
(1907-1988) American writer
"Anarchy means 'without leaders', not 'without order'. With anarchy comes an age of ordnung, of true order, which is to say voluntary order... this age of ordung will begin when the mad and incoherent cycle of verwirrung that these bulletins reveal has run its course... This is not anarchy, Eve. This is chaos."
-V for Vendetta-
"Where law ends, tyranny begins."
-Margaret Thatcher-
(1925-2013) British Prime Minister (1979–1990)
"There is a class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs. There is a certain class of race-problem solvers who don't want the patient to get well."
-Booker T. Washington-
(1856-1915) Author
"Who profits by a sin has done the sin."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: Tragedies, Medea, lines 500-501; (Medea)
"'Liar' is just as ugly a word as 'thief,' because it implies the presence of just as ugly a sin in one case as in the other. If a man lies under oath or procures the lie of another under oath, if he perjures himself or suborns perjury, he is guilty under the statute law."
-Theodore Roosevelt-
(1858-1919) 26th US President
"If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"The government created by this compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"As long as people will accept crap, it will be financially profitable to dispense it. It becomes an ever-descending spiral."
-Dick Cavett-
Works for politics and governance, too...
"The most difficult struggle of all is the one within ourselves. Let us not get accustomed and adjusted to these conditions. The one who adjusts ceases to discriminate between good and evil. He becomes a slave in body and soul. Whatever may happen to you, remember always: Don’t adjust! Revolt against the reality!"
-Mordechai Anielewicz-
(1919-1943) Jewish resistance leader against Nazi oppression in Warsaw, Poland, 1943
1943
"He that complies against his will,
Is of his own opinion still."
-Samuel Butler-
(1835-1902) Victorian-era English author
"What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly — that is the first law of nature."
-Voltaire-
"A greater principle is at stake than the fate of any particular president."
-Benjamin Curtis-
(1809-1874) Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court
Source: Dissenting in Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857)
"... and Whereas both Houses of Congress have by their joint committee requested me to recommend to the people of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God, especially a form of government for their safety and happiness. Now, therefore, I do recommend and assign Thursday, the 26th day of November, next to be devoted by the people of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being Who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, or will be ...that we may then all unite in rendering unto Him our sincere and humble thanks for His kind care and protection of the people of this country previous to there becoming a nation... And also that we then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations, and beseech Him to pardon our national and other transgressions... to render our National Government a blessing to all the people by constantly being a governmment of wise, just and Constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed...(and) to promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the increase of science among us...given under my hand at the City of New York, the 3rd day of October in the Year of Our Lord 1789."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: in his First Thanksgiving Proclamation before the Congress on October 3, 1789
"The Perfect Way is only difficult for those who pick and choose; Do not like, do not dislike; all will then be clear. Make a hairbreadth difference, and Heaven and Earth are set apart; If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between 'for' and 'against' is the mind's worst disease; While the deep meaning is misunderstood, it is useless to meditate on Rest."
-Sengcan-
"If Canada and the United States can be separate nations without being denounced as being in a state of impermissible 'anarchy,' why may not the South secede from the United States? New York State from the Union? New York City from the state? Why may not Manhattan secede? Each neighborhood? Each block? Each house? Each person?"
-Murray N. Rothbard-
"Don’t ever give a politician any power you wouldn’t want your ex-spouse to have."
-Mike Maharrey-
"Liberty, according to my metaphysics, is an intellectual quality, an attribute that belongs not to fate nor chance. Neither possesses it, neither is capable of it. There is nothing moral or immoral in the idea of it. The definition of it is a self-determining power in an intellectual agent. It implies thought and choice and power; it can elect between objects, indifferent in point of morality, neither morally good nor morally evil."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: John Adams, in a letter to John Taylor (15 April 1814)
"If all men are created equal, that is final.
If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final.
If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final.
No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: In a speech commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence
"Capitalism is relatively new in human history. Prior to capitalism, the way people amassed great wealth was by looting, plundering, and enslaving their fellow man. Capitalism made it possible to become wealthy by serving your fellow man."
-Walter E. Williams-
RIP, Dr. Williams...
"From whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some trans-Atlantic military giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe and Asia…could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide."
-Abraham Lincoln-
"Our government has found that the most effective way to control a person is not by the ballot or the bullet, but rather by the 'bucket'. Today, in a country that fought a revolution to rid itself of a repressive government and excessive taxes, government takes 40 percent of everything we earn in the form of taxes."
-Byron C. Radaker-
Chairman and C.E.O., Congoleum Corp.
"Liberty and happiness have a powerful enemy on each hand; on the one hand tyranny, on the other licentiousness [anarchy]. To guard against the latter, it is necessary to give the proper powers to government; and to guard against the former, it is necessary that those powers should be properly distributed."
-James Wilson-
(1742-1798) Member of Continental Congress, signed Declaration of Independence; U.S. Supreme Court Justice and delegate from Pennsylvania
Source: The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, 15 vols, Pub By, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1984, 2:403
"What’s 'just' has been debated for centuries, but let me offer you my definition of social justice: I keep what I earn and you keep what you earn. Do you disagree? Well then, tell me how much of what I earn 'belongs' to you -- and why?"
-Walter E. Williams-
(1936-2020) Columnist, Professor of Economics at George Mason University
"In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted."
-Bertrand Russell-
[Bertrand Arthur William Russell] (1872-1970) Philosopher, educator
Source: The Recrudescence of Puritanism, in Sceptical Essays, 1928
"There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting."
-Buddha-
[Gautama Siddharta] (563 - 483 BC), Hindu Prince, founder of Buddhism
"How far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without?"
-Dwight D. Eisenhower-
(1890-1969), 34th US President, WWII General
"A nation, which can prefer appeasement over danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
"My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute."
-Ayn Rand-
[Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum] (1905-1982) Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter
"I answered that the die was now cast; I had passed the Rubicon. Swim or sink, live or die, survive or perish with my country was my unalterable determination."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: Mr. Adams, describing a conversation with Jonathan Sewall in 1774, Ref: Webster's Works, vol. iv. p. 8
"The history of liberty has largely been the history of the observance of procedural safeguards."
-Felix Frankfurter-
(1882-1965) U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: McNabb v. United States, 1943
"You can't run a society or cope with its problems if people are not held accountable for what they do."
-John Leo-
Columnist
"Where there is no law there is no freedom."
-John Locke-
(1632-1704) English philosopher and political theorist
"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality."
-Bishop Desmond Tutu-
(1931- ) Nobel Prize for Peace 1984
"We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people."
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-
(1929-1968) US civil rights leader
"True liberty can exist only when justice is equally administered to all."
-Katherine Mansfield-
(1888-1923) New Zealand author
"The guarantee of equal protection cannot mean one thing when applied to one individual and something else when applied to a person of another color. If both are not accorded the same protection, then it is not equal."
-Lewis F. Powell-
(1907-1998) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (1971-1987)
Source: Regents of the University of California v Bakke, 1978
"Somehow strangely the vice of men gets well represented and protected but their virtue has none to plead its cause -- nor any charter of immunities and rights."
-Henry David Thoreau-
(1817-1862) American author, poet, philosopher, polymath, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and transcendentalist
"If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties."
-Francis Bacon-
(1561-1626) Philosopher, British Lord Chancellor
"He hath freedom whoso beareth a clean and constant heart within."
-Quintus Ennius-
(c.239 BC - c.169 BC) Considered the father of Roman poetry
"For man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but, when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all; since armed injustice is the more dangerous, and he is equipped at birth with the arms of intelligence and with moral qualities which he may use for the worst ends."
-Aristotle-
(384-322 BC) Greek philosopher
Source: Politics, 300 B.C.
"No government is respectable which is not just. Without unspotted purity of public faith, without sacred public principle, fidelity, and honor, no machinery of laws, can give dignity to political society."
-Daniel Webster-
(1782-1852) US Senator
"Crime does not pay...as well as politics."
-Alfred E. Newman-
Source: MAD Magazine
"A frequent recurrence to the fundamental principles of the constitution, and a constant adherence to those of piety, justice, moderation, temperance, industry and frugality, are absolutely necessary to preserve the advantages of liberty, and to maintain a free government."
-Massachusetts Bill of Rights-
1780
"If all that Americans want is security, they can go to prison. They'll have enough to eat, a bed and a roof over their heads. But if an American wants to preserve his dignity and his equality as a human being, he must not bow his neck to any dictatorial government."
-Dwight D. Eisenhower-
(1890-1969), 34th US President, WWII General
Source: speech to luncheon clubs, Galveston, Texas, December 8, 1949. The New York Times, December 9, 1949, p. 23
"It [freedom] is a thing of the spirit. Men must be free to worship, to think, to hold opinions, to speak without fear. They must be free to challenge wrong and oppression with the surety of justice."
-Herbert Hoover-
(1874-1964), 31st US President
Source: Addresses on the American Road
"Never give in. Never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy."
-Sir Winston Churchill-
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1940-1945, 1951-1955)
Source: speech given at Harrow, October 29, 1944.
"National injustice is the surest road to national downfall."
-William E. Gladstone-
(1809-1898) English statesman
"We can have justice whenever those who have not been injured by injustice are as outraged by it as those who have been."
-Solon-
(c.638 BC-558 BC) Athenian statesman, lawmaker, Lyric poet, renowned as a founding father of the Athenian polis, one of the Seven Sages of Greece
594 B.C.
Source: when asked how social justice could be achieved in Athens
"Since they have dared, I too shall dare. I shall tell the truth because I pledged myself to tell it if justice regularly empowered did not do so fully, unmitigated. My duty is to speak; I have no wish to be an accomplice."
-Emile Zola-
(1840-1902 French writer
"Every human being has, like Socrates, an attendant spirit; and wise are they who obey its signals. If it does not always tell us what to do, it always cautions us what not to do."
-Lydia M. Child-
(1802-1880) American abolitionist, women's rights activist, opponent of American expansionism, Indian rights activist, novelist, and journalist
"Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime."
"Build a man a fire, and you keep him warm for a night; set a man on fire, and you keep him warm for the rest of his life."
"The worst government is the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and human. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression."
-H.L. Mencken-
"Government is now commonly understood to be, not a mechanism for protecting rights, but a tool by which the majority can force its preferences on the minority. That is, it is a tool for replacing government by consent with government by majority rule. Which means that the very concept of 'representative government' has become an oxymoron.
Frankly, we’d all be better off if we found another term that we can use to discuss what’s actually going on. As Confucius said, the first step towards wisdom is to call things by their right names."
-Ian Underwood-
"I have come to the conclusion that politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians."
-Charles De Gaulle-
(1890-1970) French president and military leader
"Find out just what the 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 until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."
-Frederick Douglass-
[Frederick Baily] (1818-1895), escaped slave, Abolitionist, author, editor of the North Star and later the New National Era
Source: August 4, 1857
"Government can only interfere with personal freedom not by demonstrating the evidentiary basis for its commands but by proving wrongness on the part of the people whose freedom it wants to curtail.
The exercise of a natural right — so long as it does not nullify another's natural right — simply can never be wrong.
When government interferes with natural rights outside of due process, it fails its obligation to uphold the Constitution. And when governors and mayors use the power of the state to interfere with rights that are guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, they explicitly violate federal law and expose themselves to federal prosecution."
-Judge Andrew P. Napolitano-
"The forum [is] an established place for men to cheat one another, and behave covetously."
-Anacharsis-
(c.580 BC) Greek Scythian philosopher
Source: As quoted in The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laërtius, as translated by C. D. Yonge (1853), "Anacharsis" sect. 5, p. 48
"No man's life, liberty or fortune is safe while our legislature is in session."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
"The political means ... is ... communalization by force, or legal thievery. It is simply the political device by which citizens pool their votes to extort the fruits of the labor of others."
-Leonard Read-
Students of Liberty, 1950
Politics -- force -- is the tool you use when you can't get what you want voluntarily.
"Precisely in proportion to our own intellectual weakness will be our credulity as to those mysterious powers assumed by others."
-Charles Caleb Colton-
(1780-1832) English cleric, writer and collector
Source: Lacon, 1825
"Free speech is too dangerous to a democracy to be permitted."
-H.L. Mencken-
"The ultimate decision about what is accepted as right and wrong will be made not by individual human wisdom but by the disappearance of the groups that have adhered to the 'wrong' beliefs."
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
"No matter how noble the original intentions, the seductions of power can turn any movement from one seeking equal rights to one that would deny them to others."
-Tammy Bruce-
(1962-) American radio host, author, and political commentator
Source: The New Thought Police, 2001
"Do not hold the delusion that your advancement is accomplished by crushing others."
-Marcus Tullius Cicero-
(106-43 B.C.) Roman Statesman, Philosopher and Orator
"For the first time in history, the rational and the good are fully armed in the battle against evil. Here we finally find the answer to our paradox; now we can understand the nature of the social power held by evil. Ultimately, the evil, the irrational, truly has no power. The evil men’s control of morality is transient; it lives on borrowed time made possible only by the errors of the good. In time, as more honest men grasp the truth, evil’s stranglehold will be easily broken."
-Andrew Bernstein-
Professor of philosophy, writer
Source: Villainy: An Analysis of the Nature of Evil, (2005.11.05 )
"Perhaps one of the most important accomplishments of my administration has been minding my own business. Government shouldn’t play a part in everyday life. Jefferson said that the people should be left to manage their own affairs. His opposition will bear careful analysis, and the country could stand a good deal more of its application. The trouble with us is we talk about Jefferson, but we do not follow him. In this theory that the people should manage their government, and not be managed by it, he was everlastingly right."
-Calvin Coolidge-
"You demonize...we call it the wrap-up smear, you smear somebody with falsehoods and all the rest, and then you merchandise it and then you write it and say, 'See, it's reported in the press that this, this, and this...' so they have that validation that the press reported the smear and then it's called a wrap-up-smear and the merchandise is the press' report on the smear we made. It's a tactic, and it's self-evident."
-Nancy Pelosi-
(1940-) American politician
Source: June 22, 2017, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi talks about the political tactic called “The Wrap-Up Smear.”
"Propaganda is persuading people to make up their minds while withholding some of the facts from them."
-Harold Evans-
(1928-) British journalist, writer, editor
"As to the evil which results from a censorship, it is impossible to measure it, for it is impossible to tell where it ends."
-Jeremy Bentham-
(1748-1832) English jurist, philosopher, and legal and social reformer
"These decrees of yours are no different from spiders' webs. They'll restrain anyone weak and insignificant who gets caught in them, but they'll be torn to shreds by people with power and wealth."
-Anacharsis-
(c.580 BC) Greek Scythian philosopher
Source: Discussing Solon's laws with him, as quoted by Plutarch, in Solon ch. 5; translation by Robin Waterfield from Plutarch Greek Lives (1998) p. 50
"As the organized Left gained cultural power, it turned into a monster that found perpetual victimhood, combined with thought and speech control, the most efficient way to hold on to that power. Suddenly it was the Left, the protector of liberty, that was setting rules about what could and could not be said or even thought."
-Tammy Bruce-
(1962-) American radio host, author, and political commentator
Source: The New Thought Police, 2001
"Under our form of government, the legislature is not supreme ... like other departments of government, it can only exercise such powers as have been delegated to it, and when it steps beyond that boundary, its acts, like those of the most humble magistrate in the state who transcends his jurisdiction, are utterly void."
-Billings v. Hall-
Source: 7 CA 1
"Leading is showing. Ruling is telling."
-Ian Underwood-
"Freedoms, like privileges, prevail or are imperiled together. You cannot harm or strive to achieve one without harming or furthering all."
-José Martí-
"The 1783 Treaty of Paris ended the war between the colonies and Great Britain. Its first article declared the 13 colonies 'to be free, sovereign and independent states.' These 13 sovereign nations came together in 1787 as principals and created the federal government as their agent. Principals have always held the right to fire agents. In other words, states held a right to withdraw from the pact — secede."
-Walter E. Williams-
"I repeat... that all power is a trust; that we are accountable for its exercise; that, from the people, and for the people, all springs, and all must exist."
-Benjamin Disraeli-
(1804-1881) Prime Minister of England, British statesman, novelist
"Our life is what our thoughts make it. A man will find that as he alters his thoughts toward things and other people, things and others will alter towards him."
-James Allen-
(1864-1912) Author
Source: As a Man Thinketh, 1902
"He who doesn’t know how to be a servant should never be allowed to be a master; the interests of public life are alien to anyone who is unable to enjoy others' successes, and such a person should never be entrusted with public affairs."
-Anton Chekhov-
"Justice in the hands of the powerful is merely a governing system like any other. Why call it justice? Let us rather call it injustice, but of a sly effective order, based entirely on cruel knowledge of the resistance of the weak, their capacity for pain, humiliation and misery."
-Georges Bernanos-
(1888-1948) French author
Source: in Diary of a Country Priest
"The laughter of Mordor will be our only reward, if we quarrel."
-Gandalf-
The Lord of the Rings
"In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant."
-Charles de Gaulle-
(1890-1970) French president and military leader
"Governments have ever been known to hold a high hand over the education of the people. They know, better than anyone else, that their power is based almost entirely on the school. Hence, they monopolize it more and more."
-Francisco Ferrer-
[Francisco Ferrer y Guardia] (1857-1909) founder of 'The Modern School' in Barcelona, Spain, arrested and executed without trial by firing squad following the declaration of martial law in 1909 during the 'Tragic Week'
Source: The Modern School, 1908
"The best rulers are those whom the people hardly know exist.
Next come rulers whom the people love and praise.
After that come rulers whom the people fear.
And the worst rulers are those whom the people despise.
The ruler who does not trust the people will not be trusted by the people.
The best ruler stays in the background, and his voice is rarely heard.
When he accomplishes his tasks, and things go well,
The people declare: It was we who did it by ourselves."
-Dao De Jing-
Ch. 17 (4th Century BCE)
"A race of altruists is necessarily a race of slaves. A race of free men is necessarily a race of egoists."
-Max Stirner-
[Johann Kaspar Schmidt] (1806-1856) German philosopher
"Knowledge is power."
-Sir Francis Bacon-
(1561-1626) Philosopher, British Lord Chancellor
Source: Religious Meditations, Of Heresies, 1597
"Let us consider the effect that coercion produces upon the mind of him against whom it is employed. It cannot begin with convincing; it is no argument. It begins with producing the sensation of pain, and the sentiment of distaste. It begins with violently alienating the mind from the truth with which we wish it to be impressed. It includes in it a tacit confession of imbecility. If he who employs coercion against me could mould me to his purposes by argument, no doubt he would. He pretends to punish me because his argument is important, but he really punishes me because his argument is weak."
-William Godwin-
(1756-1836) English journalist, political philosopher and novelist
Source: William Godwin, ENQUIRY CONCERNING POLITICAL JUSTICE (1798), Book VII, Chapter ii, Paragraph 9
"Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact."
-H.L. Mencken-
"How many crimes are permitted simply because their authors could not endure being wrong."
-Albert Camus-
(1913-1960) French Algerian author
Source: The Fall, 1956
"Collectivism is the political theory that states that the will of the people is omnipotent, an individual must obey; that society as a whole, not the individual, is the unit of moral value. ... Collectivism is the application of the altruist ethics to politics."
-Andrew Bernstein-
Professor of philosophy, writer
Source: Villainy: An Analysis of the Nature of Evil, (2005.11.05 )
"The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim."
-Gustave Le Bon-
(1841-1931) French psychologist and sociologist
"America has furnished to the world the character of Washington! And if our American institutions had done nothing else, that alone would have entitled them to the respect of mankind."
-Daniel Webster-
"Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces. The men become every year more and more creatures of force, massed about central power-houses. The conflict is no longer between the men, but between the motors that drive the men, and the men tend to succumb to their own motive forces."
-Henry Adams-
"Yes! to this thought I hold with firm persistence;
The last result of wisdom stamps it true;
He only earns his freedom and existence
Who daily conquers them anew."
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe-
(1749-1832) German writer, statesman
Source: Faust (act V, sc. 6)
"Freedom is the fundamental character of the will, as weight is of matter... That which is free is the will. Will without freedom is an empty word."
-Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel-
(1770-1831) German philosopher
Source: Philosophy of Right, 1821
"Spiritual movements are revolts of thought against inertia, of the few against the many; of those who because they are strong in spirit are strongest alone against those who can express themselves only in the mass and the mob, and who are significant only because they are numerous."
-Ludwig von Mises-
(1881-1973) Economist and social philosopher
Source: Socialism. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. 1981. p53
"The process of completely freeing oneself emotionally from being a Communist is a thing no outsider can understand. The group thinking and group planning and the group life of the Party had been a part of me for so long that it was desperately difficult for me to be a person again. ... But I had begun the process of 'unbecoming' a Communist. It was a long and painful process, much like that of a polio victim who has to learn to walk all over again. I had to learn to think. I had to learn to love. I had to drain the hate and frenzy from my system. I had to dislodge the self and the pride that had made me arrogant, made me feel that I knew all the answers. I had to learn that I knew nothing. There were many stumbling blocks in this process."
-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)
"The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression."
-W. E. B. Du Bois-
"Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing."
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
"One stumble is enough to deface the character of an honorable life."
-Sir Roger L'Estrange-
(1616-1704) English pamphleteer, author and staunch defender of Royalist claims
Source: Fables of Aesop And Other Eminent Mythologists with Moral Reflections, 5th Edition, 1708
"Character is much easier kept than recovered."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
Source: The American Crisis, no. 13; 1783
"We have set before ourselves the task of inoculating our youth … at a very early age. … This new Reich will give its youth to no one, but will itself take youth and give to youth its own education and its own upbringing."
-Adolf Hitler-
(1889-1945) German Nazi Dictator
Source: May 1, 1937
"The goal of the 'liberals' -- as it emerges from the record of the past decades -- was to smuggle the country into welfare statism by means of single, concrete, specific measures, enlarging the power of the government a step at a time. Never permitting their direction to be summed up into principles, never permitting their direction to be identified or the basic issue to be named. Thus, statism was to come, not by vote or by violence, but by slow rot -- by a long process of evasion and epistemological corruption, leading to a fait accompli. (The goal of the 'conservative' was only to retard that process.)"
-Ayn Rand-
[Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum] (1905-1982) Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter
Source: “‘Extremism,’ or the Art of Smearing,” Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 178
"The truth is that, to many people calling themselves Socialists, revolution does not mean a movement of the masses with which they hope to associate themselves; it means a set of reforms which 'we', the clever ones, are going to impose upon 'them', the Lower Orders."
-George Orwell-
[Eric Arthur Blair] (1903-1950) British author
"It is very imprudent to deprive America of any of her privileges. If her commerce and friendship are of any importance to you, they are to be had on no other terms than leaving her in the full enjoyment of her rights."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
Source: Political Observations
"The freedom of speech, and debates or proceedings in Parliament, ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of Parliament."
-The English Bill Of Rights-
Source: December 1689
"Journalists cannot serve two masters. To the extent that they take on the task of suppressing information or biting their tongue for the sake of some political agenda, they are betraying the trust of the public and corrupting their own profession."
-Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
"Ever since I was a child I have had this instinctive urge for expansion and growth. To me, the function and duty of a quality human being is the sincere and honest development of one's potential."
-Bruce Lee-
[Lee Jun-fan] (1940-1973) Hong Kong American martial artist, actor, martial arts instructor, filmmaker, and the founder of Jeet Kune Do
"Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college."
-Lillian Smith-
(1897-1966) American writer and social critic
"Knowledge must start from some foundation, something must be recognized as known; otherwise we shall be obliged always to define one unknown by means of another."
-P. D. Ouspensky-
Kinda like "We hold these truths to be self-evident"...?
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910) American author and humorist
"Historically, much of the motivation for public schooling has been to stifle variety and institute social control."
-Jack Hugh-
Cato Institute
"There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison."
-William Glasser-
(1925- ) Jewish American psychiatrist, developer of Reality Therapy and Choice Theory
"Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance. A mass movement offers them unlimited opportunities for both."
-Eric Hoffer-
(1902-1983) American author, philosopher, awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
"The tyranny of the many would be when one body takes over the rights of others, and then exercises its power to change the laws in its favor."
-Voltaire-
[François Marie Arouet] (1694-1778) French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher
Source: Philosophical Dictionary, 1764
"There are many well-meaning people today who work at placing an economic floor beneath all of us so that no one shall exist below a certain level or standard of living, and certainly we don't quarrel with this. But look more closely and you may find that all too often these well-meaning people are building a ceiling above which no one shall be permitted to climb and between the two are pressing us all into conformity, into a mold of standardized mediocrity."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
"Always eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or bed -- no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters in your skull."
-George Orwell-
[Eric Arthur Blair] (1903-1950) British author
Source: his book '1984'
"Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently."
-Rosa Luxemburg-
(1871-1919) Polish-German Marxist theorist, philosopher, economist and revolutionary socialist
Source: The Russian Revolution
"A machine has value only as it produces more than it consumes -- so check your value to the community. "
-Martin H. Fischer-
(1879-1962) German-born American physician and author
Source: As quoted in Quote Unquote (A Handbook of Quotations) (2005) by M. P. Singh, p. 86
"Honest difference of views and honest debate are not disunity. They are the vital process of policy among free men."
-Herbert Hoover-
(1874-1964), 31st US President
Source: Speech, 1950
"When people talk of the freedom of writing, speaking, or thinking, I cannot choose but laugh. No such thing ever existed. No such thing now exists; but I hope it will exist. But it must be hundreds of years after you and I shall write and speak no more."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: letter to Thomas Jefferson, 15 July 1817, Ref: The Yale Book of Quotations, 2006
"Patterning your life around other's opinions is nothing more than slavery."
-Lawana Blackwell-
Author
Source: The Dowry of Miss Lydia Clark, 1999
"Freedom of the press, freedom of association, the inviolability of domicile, and all the rest of the rights of man are respected so long as no one tries to use them against the privileged class. On the day they are launched against the privileged they are overthrown."
-Prince Peter Kropotkin-
(1842-1921) Russian prince, author, called "The Anarchist Prince"
"To punish a man because we infer from the nature of some doctrine which he holds, or from the conduct of other persons who hold the same doctrines with him, that he will commit a crime, is persecution, and is, in every case, foolish and wicked."
-Thomas Babington Macaulay-
(1800-1859) [Lord Macaulay] 1st Baron Macaulay, British historian
Source: Hallam, 1828
"As for me, my literary theory, like my politics, is based chiefly upon one main idea, to wit, the idea of freedom. I am, in brief, a libertarian of the most extreme variety, and know of no human right that is one-tenth as valuable as the simple right to utter what seems (at the moment) to be the truth"
-H. L. Mencken-
"Of government, at least in democratic states, it may be said briefly that it is an agency engaged wholesale, and as a matter of solemn duty, in the performance of acts which all self-respecting individuals refrain from as a matter of common decency."
-H. L. Mencken-
"It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority."
-Lord Acton-
[John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton] (1834-1902), First Baron Acton of Aldenham
Source: The History of Freedom in Antiquity, 1877
"The said constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms."
-Samuel Adams-
(1722-1803), was known as the "Father of the American Revolution."
"After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military."
-William S. Burroughs-
(1914-1997) American novelist, essayist, social critic
1992
"Force and reason -- which last is the essence of the moral act -- are at the two opposite poles. The one who compels his neighbor... treats him, not as a being with reason, but as an animal in whom reason is not."
-Auberon Herbert-
(1838-1906) English writer, theorist, philosopher, 19th century individualist, member of the Parliament of the U.K.
"The key to wisdom is this -- constant and frequent questioning ... for by doubting we are led to question and by questioning we arrive at the truth."
-Peter Abelard-
(1099-1142) medieval French scholastic philosopher, leading logician, theologian, teacher, musician, composer, poet
Source: Sic et non, c. 1120
"The rights of all persons are wrapped in the same constitutional bundle
as those of the most hated member of the community."
-A. L. Wirin-
ACLU Attorney
Source: Time Magazine, 10 February 1978
"In my opinion we learn nothing from history except the infinite variety of men’s behaviour. We study it, as we listen to music or read poetry, for pleasure, not for instruction."
-A. J. P. Taylor-
"The freedom to share one’s insights and judgments verbally or in writing is, just like the freedom to think, a holy and inalienable right of humanity that, as a universal human right, is above all the rights of princes."
-Carl Friedrich Bahrdt-
(1740-1792)
Source: On Freedom of The Press and Its Limits, 1787
"We have a natural right to make use of our pens as of our tongue, at our peril, risk and hazard."
-Voltaire-
[François Marie Arouet] (1694-1778) French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher
"Let no man think we can deny civil liberty to others and retain it for ourselves. When zealous agents of the Government arrest suspected 'radicals' without warrant, hold them without prompt trial, deny them access to counsel and admission of bail....we have shorn the Bill of Rights of its sanctity..."
-Robert M. Lafollette, Sr.-
(1855-1925) U.S. Senator
Source: The Progressive, March 1920
"No one is fit to be trusted with power. ... No one. ... Any man who has lived at all knows the follies and wickedness he's capable of. ... And if he does know it, he knows also that neither he nor any man ought to be allowed to decide a single human fate."
-C. P. Snow-
[Charles Percy Snow, Baron Snow, CBE] (1905-1980) English novelist, physical chemist
Source: the book, The Light and the Dark, 1947
"I believe the State exists for the development of individual lives, not individuals for the development of the state."
-Julian Huxley-
(1878-1975) English evolutionary biologist, eugenicist, and internationalist
"Pity the poor opponents of the right to keep and bear arms! They must distrust just everybody except criminals and except the tyrant to whom they concede the armed monopoly of their protection."
-Pierre Lemieux-
Canadian journalist
Source: LIBERTY Magazine Nov. '97
"If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: Address to officers of the Army, 15 March 1783
"Men are never so likely to settle a question rightly as when they discuss it freely."
-Thomas Babington Macaulay-
(1800-1859) [Lord Macaulay] 1st Baron Macaulay, British historian
Source: "Southey's Colloquies on Society" par. SC.64
"Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice and the exercise of choice, a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing."
-Archibald MacLeish-
(1892-1982) Poet, playwright, Librarian of Congress, & Assistant Secretary of State under Franklin Roosevelt
Source: 4 December 1937
"Freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order."
-Justice Robert H. Jackson-
(1892-1954), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 1943
"If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all."
-Virginia Woolf-
(1882-1941)
"I may not agree with what you say, but to the death I will defend your right to say it."
-Voltaire-
[François Marie Arouet] (1694-1778) French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher
Source: Paraphrased by Evelyn Beatrice Halll, writing under the pseudonym of Stephen G. Tallentyre in The Friends of Voltaire (1906)
"We must protect the right of our opponents to speak because we must hear what they have to say."
-Walter Lippmann-
(1889-1974) American writer, journalist, and political commentator
"Tolerance is the positive and cordial effort to understand another's beliefs, practices, and habits without necessarily sharing or accepting them."
-Joshua Liebman-
"Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man or order of men."
-Adam Smith-
(1723-1790) Scottish philosopher and economist
1776
Source: Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith, 1776
"Many of the greatest things man has achieved are not the result of consciously directed thought, and still less the product of a deliberately coordinated effort of many individuals, but of a process in which the individual plays a part which he can never fully understand."
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
"The policy of seeking values from human beings by means of force, when practiced by an individual, is called crime. When practiced by a government, it is called statism ..."
-Nathaniel Branden-
[Nathan Blumenthal] (1930-2014) Canadian psychotherapist, writer
"When a government controls both the economic power of individuals and the coercive power of the state ... this violates a fundamental rule of happy living: Never let the people with all the money and the people with all the guns be the same people."
-P. J. O'Rourke-
(1947- ) US humorist, journalist, & political commentator
"I think that every true reformer, every real friend of liberty, will agree with me in saying that if we must erect safeguards, they should be rather for the security of the individual than of the mass, and that our chiefest care must be to train the majority to respect the rights of the minority, to prevent the claims of the few from being trampled under foot by the caprice or passion of the many."
-Sir Richard John Cartwright-
(1835-1912) Canadian Member of Parliament and Senator
Source: in the Legislative Assembly, Canada, March 9, 1865; reproduced in Janet Ajzenstat, Paul Romney, Ian Gentles, and William D. Gairdner (Eds.), Canada’s Founding Debates (Toronto: Stoddart, 1999), p. 19
"When will the world learn that a million men are of no importance compared with one man?"
-Henry David Thoreau-
(1817-1862) American author, poet, philosopher, polymath, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and transcendentalist
"If the world were perfect, it wouldn't be."
-Yogi Berra-
[Lawrence Peter "Yogi" Berra] (1925-2015) American Major League Baseball catcher, outfielder, and manager
Source: When You Come to a Fork in the Road, Take It!: Inspiration and Wisdom from One of Baseball's Greatest Heroes, Hyperion, 2002, ISBN 0786867752, p. 154
"To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men, their individualism, loyalty to family traditions, national patriotism and religious dogmas."
-Dr. G. Brock Chisolm-
(1896-1971) Canadian World War I veteran, medical practitioner, first Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), first head of the World Federation of Mental Health
"Every dollar released from taxation, that is spent or invested, will create a new job and a new salary."
-John Fitzgerald Kennedy-
"Nothing is easier than spending public money.
It does not appear to belong to anybody.
The temptation is overwhelming to bestow it on somebody."
-Calvin Coolidge-
(1872-1933) 30th US President
"The state is the great fiction by which everybody seeks to live at the expense of everybody else."
-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 State", Journal des débats, issue of September 25, 1848
(in Selected Essays on Political Economy) par. 5.20
"We have rights, as individuals, to give as much of our own money as we please to charity; but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of public money."
-Davy Crockett-
(1786-1836) American hunter, frontiersman, soldier and politician
"I have no sympathy for the narrow, selfish notion of economy which assumes that every crumb of bread which goes into the mouth of one class is so much taken from the mouths of another class."
-Frederick Douglass-
[Frederick Baily] (1818-1895), escaped slave, Abolitionist, author, editor of the North Star and later the New National Era
"The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it."
-John Kenneth Galbraith-
(1908-2006) Canadian-born economist, Harvard professor
Source: Money: Whence it came, where it went - 1975, p15
"The legal tender quality [of money] is only valuable for the purposes of dishonesty."
-Justice Salmon Chase-
(1808-1873) U.S. Senator from Ohio and Governor of Ohio, U.S. Treasury Secretary under President Abraham Lincoln (1861-1864), Chief Justice of the United States (1864-73)
Source: in dissent of Knox vs. Lee (The Legal Tender Cases, 1871)
"The era of big government is over ... We know big government does not have all the answers. We know there's not a program for every problem. And we have to give the American people [a government] that lives within its means."
-President Bill Clinton-
State of the Union address, January 23, 1996
"I've abandoned free market principles to save the free market system,"
-President George W. Bush-
defending his Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to CNN, December, 2008
"Don't let your mouth write no check that your tail can't cash."
-Bo Diddley-
(1928-2008) Blues musician
"He who will not economize will have to agonize."
-Confucius-
[Kung Fu-tse] (551-479 B.C.) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher
"Governments, whatever their pretensions otherwise, try to preserve themselves by holding the individual down ... Government itself, indeed, may be reasonably defined as a conspiracy against him. Its one permanent aim, whatever its form, is to hobble him sufficiently to maintain itself."
-H. L. Mencken-
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."
-Hunter S. Thompson-
“Liberty is not for these slaves; I do not advocate inflicting it against their conscience. On the contrary, I am strongly in favor of letting them crawl and grovel all they please before whatever fraud or combination of frauds they choose to venerate…Our whole practical government is grounded in mob psychology and the Boobus Americanus will follow any command that promises to make him safer."
-H. L. Mencken-
“Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it."
-Albert Camus-
"Endless money forms the sinews of war."
-Marcus Tullius Cicero-
(106-43 B.C.) Roman Statesman, Philosopher and Orator
“Government price-fixing once started, has alike no justice and no end. It is an economic folly from which this country has every right to be spared.”
-Calvin Coolidge-
(1872-1933) 30th US President
Source: when vetoing two bills to establish federal controls over agricultural commodities
"Central bankers always try to avoid their last big mistake. So every time there's the threat of a contraction in the economy, they'll over stimulate the economy, by printing too much money. The result will be a rising roller coaster of inflation, with each high and low being higher than the preceding one."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
"A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it ... gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. 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"
Source: Capitalism and Freedom (1962) Ch. 1 "The Relation Between Economic Freedom and Political Freedom", 2002 edition, page 15
"Money power denounces, as public enemies, all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes."
-William Jennings Bryan-
(1860-1925) US Congressman (1891-1895), US Secretary of State (1913-1915) under President Woodrow Wilson, Democratic Party nominee for President 1896, 1900 and 1908
"But while capitalism may be a convenient scapegoat, it did not cause any of these problems. Indeed, whatever one wishes to call the unruly mixture of freedom and government controls that made up our economic and political system during the last three decades, one cannot call it capitalism."
-Yaron Brook-
Source: 'Stop Blaming Capitalism for Government Failures,' Yaron Brook and Don Watkins, Capitalism Magazine (2008.11.15)
"And, lastly, to vindicate these rights, when actually violated and attacked, the subjects of England are entitled, in the first place, to the regular administration and free course of justice in the courts of law; next to the right of petitioning the king and parliament for redress of grievances; and, lastly, to the right of having and using arms for self preservation and defense."
-Sir William Blackstone-
(1723-1780) English jurist, judge, Tory politician
Source: Commentaries on the Laws of England (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 17th edition, 1966, Vol. 1., Chap.1)
"God who gave us life gave us liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure if we have removed their only firm basis: a conviction in the minds of men that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Thomas Jefferson Memorial building, Panel Three.
This quote has been found to be the paraphrasing of several quotes from different sources.
"Students throughout the totalitarian world risk life and limb for freedom of expression, many American college students are demanding that big brother restrict their freedom of speech on campus. This demand for enhanced censorship is not emanating only from the usual corner – the know-nothing fundamentalist right – it is coming from the radical, and increasingly not-so-radical left as well."
-Alan Dershowitz-
(1938- ) Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School
Source: Shouting Fire: Civil Liberties in a Turbulent Age, 2002
"We believe that free communication is essential to the preservation of a free society and a creative culture."
-American Library Association-
Source: The Freedom to Read Association, 2000
"In the most civilized and progressive countries freedom of discussion is recognized as a fundamental principle."
-C. E. M. Joad-
(1891-1953)
Source: The Recovery of Belief, 1952
"The smaller the mind the greater the conceit."
-Aesop-
(c. 550 B.C.) legendary Greek fabulist
"Any excuse will serve a tyrant."
-Aesop-
(c. 550 B.C.) legendary Greek fabulist
Source: The Wolf and the Lamb
"While I see many hoof marks going in, I see none coming out.
It is easier to get into the enemy's toils than out again."
-Aesop-
(c. 550 B.C.) legendary Greek fabulist
Source: The Lion, the Fox, and the Beasts
"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."
-Ex Parte Milligan-
Supreme Court of the United States, 1866
"'Parent choice' proceeds from the belief that the purpose of education is to provide individual students with an education. In fact, educating the individual is but a means to the true end of education, which is to create a viable social order to which individuals contribute and by which they are sustained. 'Family choice' is, therefore, basically selfish and anti-social in that it focuses on the 'wants' of a single family rather than the 'needs' of society."
-Association of California School Administrators-
Source: (ACSA, October 1979) Ref: Policy Issues for the 1990s, By Ray C. Rist, page 738, also see Presbyterian Journal, December 5, 1979
"You have to remember, rights don’t come in groups we shouldn’t have ‘gay rights’; rights come as individuals, and we wouldn’t have this major debate going on. It would be behavior that would count, not what person belongs to what group."
-Dr. Ron Paul-
(1935-) American physician, US Congressman (R-TX), US Presidential candidate
"I don’t believe in quotas. America was founded on a philosophy of individual rights, not group rights."
-Justice Clarence Thomas-
(1948- ) U.S. Supreme Court Justice
"The creation of money exclusively as debt is the critical, destabilizing flaw in the American Economy."
-Theodore R. Thoren-
Author
Source: The Truth In Money Book
"It is usual in democracies that, when enough people earn a livelihood from solving a problem, the problem itself becomes trivial in comparison with the need to keep the solvers employed, so that it becomes crucial not to solve the problem, which has by now become a national resource."
-Fred Reed-
"The government isn’t smart enough to plan the future, they are just people who just go with the flow and don’t innovate, if it means you may get into trouble for a failure. If the government is so smart why doesn’t it get rich betting on wall street instead of just taxing the people."
-Dallas Weaver-
"A man always has two reasons for what he does -- a good one, and the real one."
-J. P. Morgan-
[John Pierpont Morgan] (1837-1913) American financier and banker
"One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole. We redistribute de facto the world's wealth by climate policy."
-Ottmar Edenhofer-
(1961-) Co-chaired the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group on Mitigation of Climate Change
"We can hardly expect the nation-state to make itself superfluous, at least not overnight. Rather what we must aim for is really nothing more than caretakers of a bankrupt international machine which will have to be transformed slowly into a new one. The transition will not be dramatic, but a gradual one. People will still cling to national symbols."
-Henry Morgenthau, Jr.-
(1891-1967) U.S. Secretary of the Treasury for Franklin D. Roosevelt, CFR member
Source: 1945
"An important art of politicians is to find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the public."
-Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord-
(1754-1838) 1st Sovereign Prince of Beneventum, French diplomat, "Prince of Diplomats"
"Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
-George Orwell-
[Eric Arthur Blair] (1903-1950) British author
"We are entitled to our informed opinions. Without research, without background, without understanding, it’s nothing. It’s just bibble-babble. It’s like a fart in a wind tunnel, folks."
-Harlan Ellison-
"The sober people of America are weary of the fluctuating policy which has directed the public councils. They have seen with regret and indignation that sudden changes and legislative interferences, in cases affecting personal rights, become jobs in the hands of enterprising and influential speculators, and snares to the more-industrious and less informed part of the community. They have seen, too, that one legislative interference is but the first link of a long chain of repetitions, every subsequent interference being naturally produced by the effects of the preceding."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: THE FEDERALIST No. 44
"Man is deeply vulnerable when faced with overwhelming evil. Instead of consolidating his energy to fight it, he wastes valuable time and effort puzzling over it, insisting it is not, cannot possibly be, what it seems."
-Konnilyn G. Feig-
Source: Hitler's Death Camps: The Sanity Of Madness P. 444 (1979)
"Many people today don't want honest answers insofar as honest means unpleasant or disturbing. They want a soft answer that turneth away anxiety."
-Louis Kronenberger-
(1904-1980) American literary critic, novelist, biographer
"The most dangerous untruths are truths moderately distorted."
-Georg Christoph Lichtenberg-
(1742-1799) German scientist, professor, satirist and Anglophile
"The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists."
-Joan Robinson-
(1903-1983) Economist, professor at Cambridge University
"The reduction of political discourse to sound bites is one of the worst things that’s happened in American political life."
-John Silber-
(1926- ) Chancellor, Boston University
Source: USA Today, 1 October 1990
"When you have no basis for argument, abuse the plaintiff."
-Marcus Tullius Cicero-
(106-43 B.C.) Roman Statesman, Philosopher and Orator
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum."
-Noam Chomsky-
(1928- ) American linguist and political writer
"Appearances often are deceiving."
-Aesop-
(c. 550 B.C.) legendary Greek fabulist
Source: The Wolf in Sheep's Clothing
"Why is it so hard for most political figures and their tribes to let people make their own decisions and to apply the same standards of liberty for things they personally agree with to things they don't? Everyone being in a rush to use government force to push their preferred agendas is how we get the hyper-partisan, crush-or-be-crushed mentality that drives so much of our political dysfunction today."
-Elizabeth Nolan Brown-
'Political dysfunction' is redundant...
"The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
[Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clerel, le Comte de Tocqueville] (1805-1859) French historian
"You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, and that's good enough."
-Dr. Edwin Vieira-
President of the National Alliance for Constitutional Money, Constitutional lawyer and scholar
"The Party is not interested in the overt act. The thought is all we care about."
-George Orwell-
[Eric Arthur Blair] (1903-1950) British author
Source: Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false-face for the urge to rule it."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesy and make their prophecies come true, but they can also lie and make their lies come true."
-Eric Hoffer-
(1902-1983) American author, philosopher, awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
Source: The Passionate State of Mind
"The history of government management of money has, except for a few short happy periods, been one of incessant fraud and deception."
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
"The enjoyment of power inevitably corrupts the judgment of reason, and perverts its liberty."
-Immanuel Kant-
(1724-1804) German philosopher
Source: Perpetual Peace, 1795
"When you cannot measure, your knowledge is meager and unsatisfactory."
-Lord Kelvin-
"America is great because America is good. If America ever ceases to be good it will cease to be great."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
[Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clerel, le Comte de Tocqueville] (1805-1859) French historian
Supposedly upon visiting America in the early 19th Century
Source: No source for this quote has ever been found. See:
"After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world."
-Calvin Coolidge-
(1872-1933) 30th US President
"It is capitalist America that produced the modern independent woman. Never in history have women had more freedom of choice in regard to dress, behavior, career, and sexual orientation."
-Camille Paglia-
(1947-) American professor, social critic
"That the sole object and only legitimate end of government is to protect the citizen in the enjoyment of life, liberty, and property, and when the government assumes other functions it is usurpation and oppression."
-Alabama, Declaration of Rights Article I Section 35-
"America would be better off as a country and Americans happier and more prosperous as a people if half of our government boards, bureaus, and commissions were Abolished, hundreds of thousands of our government officials, agents and employees were discharged, and two-thirds of our government regulations, restrictions, inhibitions were removed."
-Albert J. Beveridge-
(1862-1927) American historian, US Senator (R-IN)
"America, my friends, is the only country in the world actually founded on liberty -- the only one. People went to America to be free."
-Margaret Thatcher-
(1925-2013) British Prime Minister (1979–1990)
"A general dissolution of the principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy... While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but once they lose their virtue, they will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader... If virtue and knowledge are diffused among the people, they will never be enslaved. This will be their great security."
-Samuel Adams-
(1722-1803), was known as the "Father of the American Revolution."
Source: The Writings of Samuel Adams, ed., Harry Alonzo Cushing (G. P. Putman's Sons, 1908), Vol. 4, p. 124.
"To divide along the lines of section or caste or creed is un-American."
-Theodore Roosevelt-
(1858-1919) 26th US President
"American tyranny has come gradually, like a slowly rising river. Each of us does not realize the danger until the water comes in our door. Until then, it is merely someone else's problem and a problem that we fool ourselves into thinking won't reach us."
-Charley Reese-
(1937-2013) American syndicated columnist
Source: The Orlando Sentinel, Feb. 28, 1999
"But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security."
-Declaration of Independence-
July 4, 1776
"If newsmen do not tell the truth as they see it because it might make waves, or if their bosses decide something should or should not be broadcast because of Washington or Main Street consequences, we have dishonored ourselves and we have lost the First Amendment by default."
-Richard Salant-
(1914-1993) former President of CBS News
"If it be asked, What is the most sacred duty and the greatest source of our security in a Republic? The answer would be, An inviolable respect for the Constitution and Laws."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: Essay in the American Daily Advertiser, August 28, 1794
"The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."
-Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts-
"I prefer liberty with danger to peace with slavery."
-Jean-Jacques Rousseau-
(1712-1778) Political philosopher, educationist and essayist
"...[W]e insist on the principle that no danger or crisis, foreign or domestic, will be solved by Americans surrendering more of their constitutional liberties, in the foolish hope that a bigger government will provide greater security."
-Larry P. Arnn-
(1952- ) President of Hillsdale College, MI
"The greater the importance to safeguarding the community from incitements to the overthrow of our institutions by force and violence, the more imperative is the need to preserve the constitutional rights of free speech, free press and free assembly in order to maintain the opportunity for free political discussion."
-Justice Charles Evans Hughes-
(1862-1948) Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court
Source: DeJonge v. Oregon, 1937
"The interest of the people lies in being able to join organizations, advocate causes, and make political 'mistakes' without being subjected to governmental penalties."
-Justice Hugo L. Black-
(1886-1971) US Supreme Court Justice
"It had become an universal and almost uncontroverted position in the several States, that the purposes of society do not require a surrender of all our rights to our ordinary governors; that there are certain portions of right not necessary to enable them to carry on an effective government, and which experience has nevertheless proved they will be constantly encroaching on, if submitted to them; that there are also certain fences which experience has proved peculiarly efficacious against wrong, and rarely obstructive of right, which yet the governing powers have ever shown a disposition to weaken and remove. Of the first kind, for instance, is freedom of religion; of the second, trial by jury, habeas corpus laws, free presses."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"No man who knows aught, can be so stupid to deny that all men naturally were born free."
-John Milton-
(1608-1674) English Poet
"The right to enjoy property without unlawful deprivation, no less than the right to speak out or the right to travel is, in truth, a 'personal” right'."
-Justice Potter Stewart-
(1915-1985) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
Source: Lynch v. Household Finance Corporation, 1972
... or, speaking of property, the right to keep and bear arms...
"Liberty is not a matter of words, but a positive and important condition of society. Its greatest safeguard after placing its foundations in a popular base, is in the checks and balances imposed on the public servants."
-James Fenimore Cooper-
(1789-1851) American Novelist
Source: The American Democrat, 1838
"The makers of our constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness... They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred, as against the government, the right to be let alone -- the most comprehensive of the rights and the right most valued by civilized men."
-Justice Louis D. Brandeis-
(1856-1941) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: Olmstead v. United States, 1928
"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-
"May have been the losing side. Still not convinced it was the wrong one."
-Malcolm Reynolds-
"Man will ultimately be governed by God or by tyrants."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
"We the People of the united States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, 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."
-Constitution for the USA-
By the Unanimous Order of the States at the Constitutional Convention, September 17, 1787
"The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government."
-Constitution for the United States-
Source: Constitution for the United States, Art. IV, 1789
"Our founding fathers detested the idea of a democracy and labored long to prevent America becoming one. Once again -- the word 'democracy' does not appear in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, or the constitution of any of the fifty states. Not once. Furthermore, take a look at State of the Union speeches. You won't find the 'D' word uttered once until the Wilson years."
-Neal Boortz-
(1945- ) Radio talk show host, columnist
Source: Nov. 7, 2002
"If America is destroyed, it may be by Americans who salute the flag, sing the national anthem, march in patriotic parades, cheer Fourth of July speakers – normally good Americans, but Americans who fail to comprehend what is required to keep our country strong and free, Americans who have been lulled away into a false security."
-Ezra Taft Benson-
(1899-1994) President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
Source: his book, An Enemy Hath Done This, 2002
"I had always hoped that this land might become a safe and agreeable asylum to the virtuous and persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: 1788, letter to Francis Van der Kamp
"But what do we mean by the American Revolution? Do we mean the American war? The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments, of their duties and obligations…This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people was the real American Revolution."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: letter to H. Niles, February 13, 1818
"There are those who will say
that the liberation of humanity,
the freedom of man and mind,
is nothing but a dream.
They are right.
It is the American Dream."
-Archibald MacLeish-
(1892-1982) Poet, playwright, Librarian of Congress, & Assistant Secretary of State under Franklin Roosevelt
"[L]et me point out that libertarians defend a tradition of liberty that is the fruit of thousands of years of human history."
-Tom G. Palmer-
Source: Myths of Individualism, Volume XVIII Number 5 CATO Policy Report p. 12 (September/October 1996).
"[Liberty] is the right to be subjected only to the laws, and to be neither arrested, detained, put to death or maltreated in any way by the arbitrary will of one or more individuals. It is the right of everyone to express their opinion, choose a profession and practice it, to dispose of property, and even to abuse it; to come and go without permission, and without having to account for their motives or undertakings. It is everyone’s right to associate with other individuals, either to discuss their interests, or to profess the religion which they and their associates prefer, or even simply to occupy their days or hours in a way which is most compatible with their inclinations or whims."
-Benjamin Constant-
1816
"We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes which were, for the moment, unpopular."
-Edward R. Murrow-
(1908-1965) American broadcast journalist and war correspondent
"The American’s conviction that he must be able to look any man in the eye and tell him to go to hell is the very essence of the free man's way of life."
-Walter Lippmann
(1889-1974) American writer, journalist, and political commentator
"The spirit of truth and the spirit of freedom -- they are the pillars of society."
-Henrik Ibsen-
(1828-1906) Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet
Source: Pillars of Society, 1877
"[A]ll power is originally vested in, and consequently derived from, the people. That government is instituted and ought to be exercised for the benefit of the people; which consists in the enjoyment of life and liberty and the right of acquiring property, and generally of pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety. That the people have an indubitable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to reform or change their government whenever it be found adverse or inadequate to the purpose of its institution."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
"A truly American sentiment recognizes the dignity of labor and the fact that honor lies in honest toil."
-Grover Cleveland-
(1837-1908) 22nd & 24th US President
"Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day.
Teach him how to fish and he'll eat forever."
-Chinese Proverb-
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a night.
Set a man on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life...
"...for that nothing doth more hurt in a state, than that cunning men pass for wise."
-Francis Bacon-
(1561-1626) Philosopher, British Lord Chancellor
"The high-minded man must care more for the truth than for what people think."
-Aristotle-
(384-322 BC) Greek philosopher
"Honesty is the rarest wealth anyone can possess, and yet all the honesty in the world ain't lawful tender for a loaf of bread."
-Josh Billings-
[Henry Wheeler Shaw] (1818-1885) American humorist and lecturer
"The fundamental principle is this: No matter how worthwhile an end may be, if there is no constitutional authority to pursue it, then the federal government must step aside and leave the matter to the states or to private parties. The president and Congress can proceed only from constitutional authority, not from good intentions alone. If Congress thinks it necessary to expand its powers, the Framers crafted an amendment process for that purpose. But too often, rather than follow that process, Congress has disregarded the limits set by the Constitution and gutted our frontline defense against overweening federal government."
-Robert A. Levy-
(1941- ) Chairman of Cato Institute, author, lawyer
"The claim that anarchism is utopian is bizarre, but nevertheless common. Much anarchist literature deals with private law enforcement and defence; these would not be needed in a utopia.
In fact, the fallibility of humans is one of the basic tenets of anarchism. The belief that a small group of people can be trusted to run defence and law enforcement efficiently as a monopoly without putting their own needs above those of the people, without ever being corrupt and without overstepping their mandate; now that is utopian. To believe that the “losers” in an election will happily support the policies of the winners, and that the policies aren't being forced upon those people, now that is utopian. To believe that the funding of all this via taxation is a foundation of peace, rather than an act of war, now that is utopian.
Anarchists oppose all those things precisely because they are not utopian dreamers.
Anyone who questions anarchism because of human nature, should take a closer look at how human nature impacts their own proposal. One involves giving fallible humans power, one does not."
-Unknown-
"I can find no warrant for such appropriation in the Constitution."
-Grover Cleveland-
(1837-1908) 22nd & 24th US President
Source: written often during his two terms as president when he vetoed Congressional spending
"When a man who is honestly mistaken hears the truth, he will either quit being mistaken or cease to be honest."
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
"When it comes to space, I see it as my job to build infrastructure the hard way — I'm using my resources to put in place heavy-lifting infrastructure so the next generation of people can have a dynamic, entrepreneurial explosion into space. ... I want thousands of entrepreneurs doing amazing things in space, and to do that we need to dramatically lower the cost of access to space."
-Jeff Bezos-
"It is easier to find a score of men wise enough to discover the truth than to find one intrepid enough, in the face of opposition, to stand up for it."
-A. A. Hodge-
[Archibald Alexander Hodge] (1823-1886) American Presbyterian leader, principal of Princeton Seminary
"Our own heart, and not other men's opinions form our true honor."
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge-
(1772-1834) English poet, critic, philosopher, and a leader of the British Romantic movement
"The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do. The hard part is doing it."
-General H. Norman Schwarzkopf-
(1934-2012) United States Army general
"A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest form of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal in satisfying his vices. And it all comes from lying to others and to yourself."
-Fyodor Dostoyevsky-
(1821-1881)
Source: The Brothers Karamazov
"The hardest tumble a man can make is to fall over his own bluff."
-Ambrose Bierce-
(1842-1914) American Civil War soldier, humorist, writer
"What statists of all types fail to understand is that anarchists don’t believe what they do from a utilitarian perspective. Although they realize that free people will do better in the world than ruled ones, anarchy is not adopted for a better ‘society’, or any other such collectivist notion. The belief in freedom is philosophical. It is held by men with the certain knowledge that they have a right to live their own lives, to pursue their own happiness, and no other man, or groups of men, has any moral right to rule them or impede their individual liberty.
So when you say ‘it won’t work’, it’s entirely irrelevant. There *are* answers to all your irrational fears about roads, police and armies. But, they are entirely beside the point. While anarchists understand that voluntary societies will always outperform ones where your options are limited by the arbitrary use of force, that is not why they believe what they do. Anarchists are anarchists because it is the only fully moral and non-contradictory position a man can hold about himself, and other men.
So, the *real* answer to ‘who will build the roads?’ is: 'what does that have to do with my right to be free?'"
-Gary Margetson-
"Neither your life nor my life, nor the future of this country, will be affected in the slightest by whether Linda Tripp is naughty or nice. But if any president is able to commit crimes with impunity by using the vast powers and perquisites of his office to cover up, then we will have a danger of corruption and abuse of power that can only grow with the passing years and generations."
-Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
07/23/98
"Outside show is a poor substitute for inner worth."
-Aesop-
(c. 550 B.C.) legendary Greek fabulist
"Most of our faults are more pardonable than the means we use to conceal them."
-François Duc de La Rochefoucauld-
(1613-1680) French author
"The best way of avenging thyself is not to become like the wrong-doer."
-Marcus Aurelius Antoninus-
(121 AD -180 AD) Roman Emperor, 161-180 AD
"While the people have property, arms in their hands, and only a spark of noble spirit, the most corrupt Congress must be mad to form any project of tyranny."
-Rev. Nicholas Collin-
(1746-1831) Episcopal pastor, friend of Benjamin Franklin
Source: Fayetteville Gazette (N.C.), October 12, 1789
"Stand with anybody that stands right. Stand with him while he is right, and part with him when he goes wrong."
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
"[L]iberty, or the absence of coercion, or the leaving people to think, speak, and act as they please, is in itself a good thing. It is the object of a favourable presumption. The burden of proving it inexpedient always lies, and wholly lies, on those who wish to abridge it by coercion, whether direct or indirect."
-John Morley-
(1838-1923) British Liberal statesman, writer, newspaper editor
Source: John Morley, ON COMPROMISE, London: Macmillan and Co., 1888, pp. 253-254.
"Liberty is not a cruise ship full of pampered passengers. Liberty is a man-of-war, and we are all crew."
-Kenneth W. Royce-
American author who primarily writes under the pen-name of Boston T. Party
Source: Kenneth W. Royce, in Boston's Gun Bible
"Any training school for free citizens must begin by teaching distrust, not trust. It must teach questioning, not acceptance of stock answers."
-CAMMAR PILRU-
Ambassador-in-Exile for Ix "House Corrino"
"Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt."
-Richard P. Feynman-
"There must be no compromise with slavery -- none whatsoever. Nothing is gained, everything is lost, by subordinating principle to expedience."
-William Lloyd Garrison-
"All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed, they must rely exclusively on force."
-George Orwell-
"I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned."
-Richard P. Feynman-
"The fruit derived from labor is the sweetest of pleasures."
-Luc de Clapiers-
(1715-1747) French writer, marquis de Vauvenargues
"Sound money and free banking are not impossible; they are merely illegal. Freedom of money and freedom of banking... are the principles that must guide our steps."
-Hans F. Sennholz-
(1922-2007) German-born economist from the Austrian school of economics who studied under Ludwig von Mises
"Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch."
-James Baldwin-
(1924-1987) Novelist, Essayist, and Playwright
"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-
"Everything that can be invented has been invented."
-Charles H. Duell-
Commissioner of US patent office in 1899
"We must not always judge of the generality of the opinion by the noise of the acclamation."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
"A dog is not considered a good dog because he is a good barker. A man is not considered a good man because he is a good talker."
-Buddha-
[Gautama Siddharta] (563 - 483 BC), Hindu Prince, founder of Buddhism
"How you can win the population for war: At first, the statesman will invent cheap lying, that impute the guilt of the attacked nation, and each person will be happy over this deceit, that calm the conscience. It will study it detailed and refuse to test arguments of the other opinion. So he will convince step for step even therefrom that the war is just and thank God, that he, after this process of grotesque even deceit, can sleep better."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910) American author and humorist
"The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the U.S. since the days of Andrew Jackson. History depicts Andrew Jackson as the last truly honorable and incorruptible American president."
-Franklin D. Roosevelt-
(1882-1945), 32nd US President
November 21, 1933
Source: in a letter written to Colonel E. Mandell House
"Our modern society is engaged in polishing and decorating the cage in which man is kept imprisoned."
-Swami Nirmalananda-
[Tulasi Charan Dutta] (1863 -1938) Indian monk
Source: Enlightened Anarchism
"The major function of secrecy in Washington is to keep the U.S. people ... from knowing what the nation’s leaders are doing."
-John Stockwell-
(1937-) U.S. Marine Corps Major, and Chief of Station and National Security Council coordinator for the CIA
"Censors are infused with the sentiment of moral indignation – a dangerous and misleading sentiment because, by blinding those who voice it to the real reasons for their indignation, it makes them puppets whose fears can be manipulated for ends and purposes they do not foresee or intend."
-Carey McWilliams-
(1905-1980) American author, editor, and lawyer
Source: Censorship: For And Against, 1971
"What ISN'T in the news is often more important than what IS."
-Ed Biersmith-
1942
"Whereas each man claims his freedom as a matter of right, the freedom he accords to other men is a matter of toleration."
-Walter Lippmann-
(1889-1974) American writer, journalist, and political commentator
"The papers say, 'Congress is deadlocked and can't act.' I think that is the greatest blessing that could befall this country."
-Will Rogers-
"Never blame a legislative body for not doing something. When they do nothing, they don’t hurt anybody. It’s when they do something that they get dangerous."
-Will Rogers-
"Be thankful we’re not getting all the government we’re paying for."
-Will Rogers-
"We will never have true civilization until we have learned to recognize the rights of others."
-Will Rogers-
"An intelligent man neither allows himself to be controlled nor attempts to control others; he wishes reason alone to rule, and that always."
-Les Caractères-
"Because of the diverse conditions of humans, it happens that some acts are virtuous to some people, as appropriate and suitable to them, while the same acts are immoral for others, as inappropriate to them."
-Saint Thomas Aquinas-
(1225-74) Italian philosopher and theologian
"Attack another’s rights and you destroy your own."
-John Jay Chapman-
(1862-1933) American Essayist and Poet
Source: letter, 1897
"They defend their errors as if they were defending their inheritance."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
WeWell...?
"Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity."
-Marshall McLuhan-
(1911-1980) Canadian philosopher of communication theory
"In the United States there is no phenomenon more threatening to popular government than the unwillingness of newspapers to give the facts to their readers."
-Nelson Antrim Crawford-
(1888-1963) American writer, editor, author
"Deal with the faults of others as gently as with your own."
-Chinese Proverb-
"The only way to make sure people you agree with can speak is to support the rights of people you don't agree with."
-Eleanor Holmes Norton-
(1937- ) Congressional Delegate from the District of Columbia
Source: The New York Post, 28 March 1970
"We are all full of weakness and errors, let us mutually pardon each other our follies. It is the first law of nature."
-Voltaire-
[François Marie Arouet] (1694-1778) French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher
"Appeasers believe that if you keep on throwing steaks to a tiger, the tiger will turn vegetarian."
-Heywood Hale Broun-
(1918-2001) American sportswriter, commentator, and actor
"Stop throwing the Constitution in my face. It’s just a goddamned piece of paper!"
-George W. Bush-
debunked
"It may be true, as Confucius said, that 'the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name,' but it can also be the end of politics."
-Jonathan Turley-
"Can anybody point me to that one time in history where the side that was demanding censorship, segregation, propaganda, radical education, papers to move freely in society, plus government forces going door to door to demand compliance were the good guys?"
-Candace Owens-
(born April 29, 1989) American conservative author, talk show host, political commentator, and activist
Source: Twitter July 21, 2021
"No, there is a limit to the tyrant's power!
When the oppressed man finds no justice,
When the burden grows unbearable, he appeals
With fearless heart to Heaven,
And thence brings down his everlasting rights,
Which there abide, inalienably his,
And indestructible as stars themselves.
The primal state of nature reappears,
Wherein man confronts his fellow man;
And if all other means shall fail his need,
One last resort remains—his own good sword.
The dearest of our goods we may defend
From violence.
We stand before our country,
We stand before our wives, before our children!"
-Friedrich Schiller-
[Johann Christoph Friedrich (von) Schiller] (1759-1805) German poet, philosopher, physician, historian, and playwright
Source: from the drama Wilhelm Tell, 1804
"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 strength or weakness of a society depends more on the level of its spiritual life than on its level of industrialization. Neither a market economy nor even general abundance constitutes the crowning achievement of human life. If a nation’s spiritual energies have been exhausted, it will not be saved from collapse by the most perfect government structure or by any industrial development. A tree with a rotten core cannot stand."
-Alexander Solzhenitsyn-
(1918-2008) Russian novelist, Soviet dissident, imprisoned for 8 years for critizing Stalin in a personal letter, Nobel Prize for Literature, 1970
Source: National Review article (Sept. 23, 1991, p.24)
"A lie doesn't become truth, wrong doesn't become right and evil doesn't become good just because it's accepted by a majority. "
-Booker T. Washington-
(1856-1915) Author
"Custom may suffice as the basis of law, but is inadequate as the basis of justice. Tyranny, not liberty, has been the custom in the past; and so Libertarians reject custom as a guiding principle, just as they reject power or might. They know that justice is not something that was, or is, but that is to be."
-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)
"There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs."
-Thomas Sowell-
"In the tragic vision, individual sufferings and social evils are inherent in the innate deficiencies of all human beings, whether these deficiencies are in knowledge, wisdom, morality, or courage. Moreover, the available resources are always inadequate to fulfill all the desires of all the people. Thus there are no 'solutions' in the tragic vision, but only trade-offs that still leave many unfulfilled and much unhappiness in the world."
-Thomas Sowell-
'The Vision of the Anointed' p. 113
"The issue of this campaign -- it IS that word socialism. Some people like it. Younger people like it. Those of us like me, who grew up in a cold war and saw some aspects of it while visiting places like Vietnam, like I have, and seeing countries like Cuba, being there. I’m seeing what socialism’s like. I don’t like it. OK? It’s not only not free. It doesn’t freakin’ work!"
-Chris Matthews-
(1945-) is an American political commentator, talk show host and author
Source: Democratic Presidential Debate in New Hampshire, MSNBC Live, Feb 7, 2020
"There is nothing to take a man's freedom away from him, save other men. To be free, a man must be free of his brothers."
-Ayn Rand-
[Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum] (1905-1982) Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter
"If some people had wings and others didn't, and the government wanted to enforce 'fairness,' soon no one would have wings. Because wings cannot be redistributed, they can only be broken. Likewise, a government edict cannot make people smarter or more capable, but it can impede the growth of those with the potential. Wouldn't it be fair if, in the name of equality, we scar the beautiful, cripple the athletes, lobotomize the scientists, blind the artists, and sever the hands of the musicians? Why not?"
-Oleg Atbashian-
(1960-) born in USSR, teacher, artist, journalist immigrated to USA in 1994
Source: Shakedown Socialism by Oleg Atbashian copyright 2009 Greenleaf Press pp 90-91
"As one reads history, not in the expurgated editions written for schoolboys and passmen, but in the original authorities of each time, one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime."
-Oscar Wilde-
(1854-1900)
Source: The Soul of Man Under Socialism
"On account of being a democracy and run by the people, we are the only nation in the world that has to keep a government four years, no matter what it does."
-Will Rogers-
(1879-1935) American humorist
"Blind submission to the Administration of the government is not devotion to the country or the Constitution. The administration is not the government."
-Edward G. Ryan-
(1810-1880) Wisconsin Supreme Court Chief Justice
"Many people never grow up. They stay all their lives with a passionate need for external authority and guidance, pretending not to trust their own judgment."
-Alan Watts-
(1915-1973) British-American philosopher
"Morality is always the product of terror; its chains and strait-waistcoats are fashioned by those who dare not trust others, because they dare not trust themselves, to walk in liberty."
-Aldous Huxley-
(1894-1963) English writer, novelist, philosopher
"You see what power is -- holding someone else's fear in your hand and showing it to them!"
-Amy Tan-
(1952-) American author
Source: The Kitchen God's Wife (1991), New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. p. 387
"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)
"No government ought to exist for the purpose of checking the prosperity of its people or to allow such a principle in its policy."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
"We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people."
-John F. Kennedy-
(1917-1963) 35th US President
"We may feel genuinely concerned about world conditions, though such a concern should drive us into action and not into a depression."
-Karen Horney-
(1885-1952) German psychoanalyst
"When men have come to the edge of a precipice, it is the lover of life who has the spirit to leap backwards, and only the pessimist who continues to believe in progress."
-Gilbert Keith Chesterton-
(1874-1936) British essayist, critic, poet, and novelist
Source: Illustrated London News, Nov 8, 1924
"Never trust governments absolutely and always do what you can to prevent them from doing too much harm."
-John Arthur Passmore-
(1914-2004) Australian philosopher
"We find few historians who have been diligent enough in their search for truth; it is their common method to take on trust what they help distribute to the public; by which means a falsehood once received from a famed writer becomes traditional to posterity."
-John Dryden-
(1631-1700) English Poet
"It seems foolhardy to assume that the armed state will necessarily be benevolent. The American political tradition is, for good or ill, based in large measure on a healthy mistrust of the state."
-Sanford Levinson-
(1941- ) University of Texas law professor
Source: The Embarrassing Second Amendment, 99 YALE L.J. 637, 656 (1989)
"The aim of every political constitution is, or ought to be, first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society; and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous whilst they continue to hold their public trust."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Federalist #57
"Be not too hasty to trust or admire the teachers of morality; they discourse like angels but they live like men."
-Dr. Samuel Johnson-
(1709-1784) English author, poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer
Source: Rasselas, 1759
"I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance."
-Socrates-
Or did he really...?
"The most important service rendered by the press and the magazines is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust."
-Samuel Butler-
(1835-1902) Victorian-era English author
"Whenever people are well-informed they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: letter to Richard Price, January 8, 1789
"The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business."
-Clarence S. Darrow-
(1857-1938)
"Nobody can be trusted with unlimited power. The more power a regime has, the more likely people will be killed. This is a major reason for promoting freedom."
-Rudolph J. Rummel-
(1932-2014) American professor
"It is better to die for an idea that will live, than to live for an idea that will die."
-Steve Biko-
"It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace -- but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"
-Patrick Henry-
(1736-1799) US Founding Father
Source: March 23, 1775
"What chance of survival does a culture have when its own elites actively seek its destruction?"
-William S. Lind-
(1947- ) American expert on military affairs, pundit on cultural conservatism
"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"In such a strait the wisest may well be perplexed and the boldest staggered."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
"Are we at last brought to such an humiliating and debasing degradation that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own defense? Where is the difference between having our arms under our own possession and under our own direction, and having them under the management of Congress? If our defense be the real object of having those arms, in whose hands can they be trusted with more propriety, or equal safety to us, as in our own hands?"
-Patrick Henry-
(1736-1799) US Founding Father
Source: [3 J. Elliot, Debates in the Several State Conventions 45, 2d ed. Philadelphia, 1836]
"I grew up a right-winger ... I got out of the Right-wing not because I ceased believing in liberty, but because being a libertarian above all, I came to see that the Right-wing specialized in cloaking its authoritarian and neo-fascist policies in the honeyed words of libertarian rhetoric."
-Murray Rothbard-
"Make men large and strong and tyranny will bankrupt itself in making shackles for them."
-Rev. Henry Ward Beecher-
(1813-1887) American abolitionist, clergyman
SoSource: Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, 1887
"We should view our government the way we should a friendly, cuddly lion. Just because he’s friendly and cuddly shouldn’t blind us to the fact that he’s still got teeth and claws."
-Walter E. Williams-
(1936-2020) Columnist, Professor of Economics at George Mason Universityr>SoSource: Conservative Chronicle, August 30, 1995
"A man has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so."
-Walter Lippmann-
(1889-1974) American writer, journalist, and political commentator
"One can ignore reality, but one cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality."
-Ayn Rand-
[Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum] (1905-1982) Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter
Source: ref: Teaching of Ayn Rand : Lines from the Mother of Objectivism (2019), pg 28
"The more laws, the less justice."
-Marcus Tullius Cicero-
(106-43 B.C.) Roman Statesman, Philosopher and Orator
"All men having power ought to be mistrusted."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
"If the governments devalue the currency in order to betray all creditors, you politely call this procedure 'inflation'."
-George Bernard Shaw-
(1856-1950) Irish comic dramatist
"I will no longer pay for the destruction of my country, family, and self. Damn tyranny! Damn the Federal Reserve liars and thieves! Damn all pettifogging, oath-breaking US attorneys and judges.… I will see you all in Hell and shed my blood before I will be robbed of one more dollar to finance a national policy of treason, plunder, and corruption"
-Marvin Cooley-
Arizona tax protester, author of the book, The Big Bluff, documenting the struggles of his fellow anti-tax protester, W. Vaughn Ellsworth. Cooley was jailed for tax evasion in 1973 and 1989
Source: in his book The Big Bluff: Tax Tyranny in the Guise of Law : the Constitution Vs. the Tax Collector, 1971
"100% of what is collected is absorbed solely by interest on the Federal Debt ... all individual income tax revenues are gone before one nickel is spent on the services taxpayers expect from government."
-a href="http://libertytree.ca/quotes/Grace.Commission.Quote.C455">Grace Commission-
Source: report submitted to President Ronald Reagan on January 15, 1984
"If, however, a government refrains from regulations and allows matters to take their course, essential commodities soon attain a level of price out of the reach of all but the rich, the worthlessness of the money becomes apparent, and the fraud upon the public can be concealed no longer."
-John Maynard Keynes-
(1883-1946) British economist
SSource: The Economic Consequences of the Peace, 1920, page 240
If there's no government regulation, then what happened to the entrepreneurial competition? The "not rich" sure does seem to me like way too big a market segment for them to simply disdainfully piss away. Would you just piss it away, John? Or would you price so they could become your customers, like a savvy market participant would...?
"There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as a result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final or total catastrophe of the currency system involved."
-Ludwig von Mises-
(1881-1973) Economist and social philosopher
"They will furnish credits which will serve us for the support of the Communist Party in their countries and, by supplying us materials and technical equipment which we lack, will restore our military industry necessary for our future attacks against our suppliers. To put it in other words, they will work on the preparation of their own suicide."
-Vladimir Ilyich Lenin-
[Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov] (1870-1924) First Leader of the Soviet Union
"You can't truly call yourself 'peaceful' unless you are capable of great violence. If you are not capable of violence, you are not peaceful, you are harmless. Important distinction."
-Stef Starkgaryen-
"Money for me has only one sound: liberty."
-Gabrielle Chanel-
[Gabrielle Bonheur "Coco" Chanel] (1883-1971) French fashion designer, founder of the fashion brand Chanel
“I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket."
-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.
Source: from a speech in 1933
"Hamilton's whole monetary policy is based on unconstitutional grounds and unsound reasoning, and fraudulent statements. His policies were fought through the whole public career of Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, Randolph and many another truly great lovers of Republican Government.
His policies have proved to be more destructive of our independent and democratic form of government than the old subjugation of the Colonies by Great Britain. The deliberations in Congress over Hamilton's Bank Bill, and the opinions of members of The Cabinet show the intensity of feeling between the private money interests and those supporting the Constitution. History records that the “money changers” have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling the money and its issuance."
-Olive Cushing Dwinell-
Source: The Story of Our Money, p. 70-71, by Olive Cushing Dwinell, 1946
"Banks lend by creating credit. They create the means of payment out of nothing."
-Ralph M. Hawtrey-
Former Secretary of the British Treasury
"I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample underfoot."
-Horace Greeley-
(1811-1872), Editor of the New York Tribune
"America is another name for opportunity. Our whole history appears like a last effort of divine Providence in behalf of the human race."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-
(1803-1882) American essayist, lecturer, and poet
"Why are we proud [to be American]? We are proud, first of all, because from the beginning of this Nation, a man can walk upright, no matter who he is, or who she is. He can walk upright and meet his friend -- or his enemy; and he does not fear that because that enemy may be in a position of great power that he can be suddenly thrown in jail to rot there without charges and with no recourse to justice. We have the habeas corpus act, and we respect it."
-Dwight D. Eisenhower-
(1890-1969), 34th US President, WWII General
Source: : Remarks Upon Receiving the America's Democratic Legacy Award at a B'nai B'rith Dinner in Honor of the 40th Anniversary of the Anti-Defamation League
"There are incalculable resources in the human spirit, once it has been set free."
-Hubert H. Humphrey-
(1911-1978) US Vice-President, US Senator (D-MN)
Source: Speech, 10 December 1966
"The dissident does not operate in the realm of genuine power at all. He is not seeking power. He has no desire for office and does not gather votes. He does not attempt to charm the public, he offers nothing and promises nothing. He can offer, if anything, only his own skin — and he offers it solely because he has no other way of affirming the truth he stands for. His actions simply articulate his dignity as a citizen, regardless of the cost."
-Václav Havel-
"Nation states are archaic leftovers from when each man feared the tribe over the hill, an attitude we can’t afford anymore."
-David Brin-
But even then, we as individuals can arrange mutual defense pacts between us. "Representatives" I can accept, if really necessary. But we simply don't need "leaders".
"The whole principle is wrong. It's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't eat steak."
-Robert A. Heinlein-
(1907-1988) American writer
Source: on Censorship, in his book, The Man Who Sold The Moon, p186
"Crimes were committed to punish crimes, and crimes were committed to prevent crimes. The world has been filled with prisons and dungeons, with chains and whips, with crosses and gibbets, with thumbscrews and racks, with hangmen and heads-men - and yet these frightful means and instrumentalities have committed far more crimes than they have prevented.... Ignorance, filth, and poverty are the missionaries of crime. As long as dishonorable success outranks honest effort -- as long as society bows and cringes before the great thieves, there will be little ones enough to fill the jails."
-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: Robert Ingersoll, Crimes Against Criminals
"As long as man remains an inquiring animal, there can never be a complete unanimity in our fundamental beliefs. The more diverse our paths, the greater is likely to be the divergence of beliefs."
-Sir Arthur Keith-
(1866-1927)
"Respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality."
-Dune-
"Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you."
-Jean-Paul Sartre-
(1905-1980)
"There is no such thing as a problem without a gift for you in its hands. You seek problems because you need their gifts."
-Richard Bach-
Source: Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah
"Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again."
-William Cullen Bryant-
(1794-1878)
Source: The Battle-Field (1839), st. 9., Poems, by William Cullen Bryant, 1854
"It is a fundamental human right, a privilege of nature, that every man should worship according to his own convictions. One man’s religion neither harms nor helps another man. It is assuredly no part of religion to compel religion, to which free will and not force should lead us."
-Tertullian-
(160?-230? A.D) Carthaginian “Father of Latin theology”
c. 200 A.D.
"Religious liberty is the chief cornerstone of the American system of government, and provisions for its security are embedded in the written charter and interwoven in the moral fabric of its laws. Anything that tends to invade a right so essential and sacred must be carefully guarded against, and I am satisfied that my countrymen, ever mindful of the suffering and sacrifices necessary to obtain it, will never consent to its impairment for any reason or under any pretext whatsoever."
-Thomas F. Bayard-
(1828-1898) U.S. Senator from Delaware, U.S. Secretary of State, and U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom
Source: Foreign Relations of the United States for 1885, pp.48-51
"More! More! is the cry of a mistaken soul."
-William Blake-
(1757-1827) English poet, painter, engraver
"No, Freedom has a thousand charms to show
That slaves, howe'er contented, never know."
-William Cowper-
(1731-1800) English poet, hymnodist
Source: Table Talk (l. 260)
"The greatest discovery of any generation is that a living soul can alter his life by altering his attitude."
-William James-
(1842-1910) American philosopher, psychologist, 'The father of modern Psychology'
"The conservative is a person who considers very closely every chance, even the longest, of 'throwing out the baby with the bath-water,' as the German proverb puts it, and who determines his conduct accordingly. And so we see that the term conservative has little value as a label; in fact, one might say that its label-value varies inversely with one's right to wear it."
-Albert Jay Nock-
"Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it."
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
"Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world."
-Thomas Carlyle-
(1795-1881) Scottish essayist, satirist, and historian
"It is wrong always, everywhere and for everyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence."
-William Kingdon Clifford-
(1845-1879) English mathematician and philosopher
"The cultivation -- even celebration -- of victimhood by intellectuals, tort lawyers, politicians and the media is both cause and effect of today's culture of complaint."
-George Will-
(1941-) American newspaper columnist, journalist, and author
"We are now considering legislation based on statistics that include name-calling at public rallies as crimes. Are we going on to the school yards of this country and when two kids get angry with each other and call each other names -- what are we going to do, cart them over to the reformatory or add them to the list of 'hate crimes' perpetrators? This is ridiculous."
-Jesse Helms-
(1921-2008), US Senator (R-NC), 1973-2003
Source: in opposition to the Hate Crimes Bill which criminalizes name-calling and motives, the Bill passed the Senate and the House and was signed by Pres. George Bush, Congressional Record, February 8, 1990.
"A reminder that school lessons are less about content, as most of them will inherently be forgotten by graduation. They are fundamentally about threats to obey or be labelled by grades to shame, limit, for control:
'The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders.'
-John Taylor Gatto-"
-The Honest Teacher-
"Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations...entangling alliances with none."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"One who deceives will always find those who allow themselves to be deceived."
-Niccolo Machiavelli-
(1469-1527) Italian Statesman and Political Philosopher
"All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"Observe, I do not mean to suggest that the custom of lying has suffered any decay or interruption -- no, for the Lie, as Virtue, as Principle, is eternal; the Lie, as a recreation, a solace, a refuge in time of need, the fourth Grace, the tenth Muse, man's best and surest friend, is immortal, and cannot perish from the earth while this club remains.
My complaint, simply concerns the decay of the art of lying. No high-minded man, no man of right feeling, can contemplate the lumbering and slovenly lying of the present day without grieving to see a noble art so prostituted. ... If this finest of the fine art arts had everywhere received the attention, encouragement, and conscientious practice and development which this club has devoted to it, I should not need to utter this lament, or cry a single tear. I do not say this to flatter. I say it in a spirit of just and appreciative recognition."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910) American author and humorist
Source: address to Historical and Antiquarian Club of Hartford, 1882
"The world wishes to be deceived."
-Sebastian Franck-
(1499-c.1543) German preacher, author, humanist reformer
"[J]ust because you have an individual right does not mean that the state or local government can't constrain the exercise of that right..."
-Barack Hussein Obama-
(1961-) 44th President of the United States
Source: 2008 Philadelphia primary debate
"If the personal freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution inhibit the government's ability to govern the people, we should look to limit those guarantees."
-Bill Clinton-
[William Jefferson Blythe III] (1946- ), 42nd US President
August 12, 1993
"Individual rights must take a back-seat to the collective."
-Harvey Ruvin-
Vice-chair of International Committee for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI) for implementing UN Agenda 21 in American local communities
"To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good... Ideology - that is what gives devildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others' eyes, so that he won't hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors."
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn-
(1918-2008) Russian novelist, Soviet dissident, imprisoned for 8 years for critizing Stalin in a personal letter, Nobel Prize for Literature, 1970
"The grand paradox of our society is this: we magnify man’s right but we minimize his capacities."
-Joseph Wood Krutch-
(1893-1970) American writer, critic, and naturalist
Source: The Measure of Man, 1954
"If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them."
-Isaac Asimov-
(1920-1992) American author and professor of biochemistry at Boston University
"The dichotomy between personal liberties and property rights is a false one. Property does not have rights. People have rights... In fact, a fundamental interdependence exists between the personal right to liberty and the personal right in property."
-Justice Potter Stewart-
(1915-1985) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
Source: Lynch v. Household Finance Corp., 1972
"Values are social norms — they're personal, emotional, subjective, and arguable. All of us have values. Even criminals have values. The question you must ask yourself is, Are your values based upon principles? In the last analysis, principles are natural laws they're impersonal, factual, objective and self-evident. Consequences are governed by principles and behavior is governed by values; therefore, value principles!"
-Stephen Covey-
"You know, by the time you become the leader of a country, someone else makes all the decisions. ... You may find you can get away with virtual presidents, virtual prime ministers, virtual everything."
-Bill Clinton-
[William Jefferson Blythe III] (1946- ), 42nd US President
Source: Sep 5, 1998, Dublin, Ireland
"If the president alone was vested with the power of appointing all officers, and was left to select a council for himself, he would be liable to be deceived by flatterers and pretenders to patriotism."
-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: Roger Sherman to John Adams, 1789
"Everyone can see that politics is a means by which people seek to get what they want for themselves and others about whom they care. But politics is also, in at least equal part, a means by which people seek to hurt those they dislike for whatever reason. Henry Adams hit the bull's eye when he observed long ago that "Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds." Political events during the past century have done nothing to invalidate this observation."
-Robert Higgs-
"Stability in government is essential to national character and to the advantages annexed to it, as well as to that repose and confidence in the minds of the people, which are among the chief blessings of civil society."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Federalist No. 37, 1788
"Do we still recognize [the Constitution of the United States of America] as the basis of our system of government in America, or not? Do we still have a constitution that guarantees our unalienable rights as the sovereign citizens of a great and free nation, or not? Do we have a federal government and state governments that honor and defend the fundamental principles of equal justice, due process or law, the right to life, liberty, and property - the principles that represent the very foundation of our constitutional form of government, or not? We the People have a right to know the truth. We have a right to know if we still have a Constitution."
-Bob Schultz-
Founder of 'We The People Congress'
Source: Citizens' Truth -in-Taxation Hearing, Washington D.C. 2/27-28/02 - 'New York Times' 2/10/02
"When a government is dependent upon bankers for money, they and not the leaders of the government control the situation, since the hand that gives is above the hand that takes. Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole object is gain."
-Napoleon Bonaparte-
(1769-1821) French emperor
"We are not a charitable institution but a Party of revolutionary socialists."
-Joseph Paul Goebbels-
(1897-1945) German politician and Reich Minister of Propaganda of Nazi Germany
Source: “Einbeitsfront,” Der Angriff editorial, May 27, 1929. David Schoenbaum, Hitler's Social Revolution: Class and Status in Nazi Germany, 1933-1939, W.W. Norton & Company (1997) p. 25
"The money pigs of capitalist democracy… Money has made slaves of us… Money is the curse of mankind. It smothers the seed of everything great and good. Every penny is sticky with sweat and blood."
-Joseph Paul Goebbels-
(1897-1945) German politician and Reich Minister of Propaganda of Nazi Germany
Source: Quoted in The Nazi Party 1919-1945: A Complete History, Dietrich Orlow, New York: NY, Enigma Books, 2012, p 61. Goebbels’ article, “Nationalsozialisten aus Berlin und aus dem Reich”, Voelkischer Beobachter, February 4, 1927
"Lenin is the greatest man, second only to Hitler, and that the difference between Communism and the Hitler faith is very slight."
-Joseph Paul Goebbels-
(1897-1945) German politician and Reich Minister of Propaganda of Nazi Germany
Source: Speech (November 27, 1925), quoted in “Hitlerite Riot in Berlin: Beer Glasses Fly When Speaker Compares Hitler to Lenin”, New York Times (November 28, 1925)
Well, at least he realized that socialism requires faith...
"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 of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result 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."
-James Madison-
"I am not discouraged by [a] little difficulty; nor have I any doubt that the result of our experiment will be, that men are capable of governing themselves without a master."
-Thomas Jefferson-
to T. B. Hollis, 1787. ME 6:156
"[General Washington] has often declared to me that he considered our new Constitution as an experiment on the practicability of republican government, and with what dose of liberty man could be trusted for his own good; that he was determined the experiment should have a fair trial, and would lose the last drop of his blood in support of it.”
-Thomas Jefferson-
to Walter Jones, 1814. ME 14:51
"The men who rule the Democratic Party then promised the people that if they were returned to power there would be no central bank established here while they held the reigns of government. Thirteen months later that promise was broken, and the Wilson administration, under the tutelage of those sinister Wall Street figures who stood behind Colonel House, established here in our free Country the worm-eaten monarchical institution of the "King's Bank" to control us from the top downward, and from the cradle to the grave."
-Louis McFadden-
(1876-1936) US Congressman (R-PA) (1915-1935), Chairman of House Banking and Currency Committee. Poisoned in 1936.
Source: May 23, 1933, speech made on the Floor of the House of Representatives Congressman, the Honorable Louis T. McFadden of Pennsylvania, brought formal charges against the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve Bank system, The Comptroller of the Currency and the Secretary of United States Treasury
"It's impossible to be loyal to your family, your friends, your country, and your principles, all at the same time."
-Mignon McLaughlin-
(1913-1983) American journalist, author
Source: The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960
"If ever a time should come, when vain and 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-
(1722-1803), was known as the "Father of the American Revolution."
1780
"It is not enough to do your best; you must know what to do, and THEN do your best."
-W. Edwards Deming-
(1900-1993) American engineer, statistician, professor, author, lecturer
"The Democrats seem to be basically nicer people, but they have demonstrated time and time again that they have the management skills of celery. They're the kind of people who'd stop to help you change a flat, but would somehow manage to set your car on fire. I would be reluctant to entrust them with a Cuisinart, let alone the economy. The Republicans, on the other hand, would know how to fix your tire, but they wouldn't bother to stop because they'd want to be on time for Ugly Pants Night at the country club."
-Dave Barry-
(1947- ) Humorist
"When you disarm your subjects, however, you offend them by showing that either from cowardliness or lack of faith, you distrust them; and either conclusion will induce them to hate you."
-Niccolo Machiavelli-
(1469-1527) Italian Statesman and Political Philosopher
Source: The Prince
"Freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West coast."
-Viktor Frankyl-
"At least one way of measuring the freedom of any society is the amount of comedy that is permitted, and clearly a healthy society permits more satirical comment than a repressive, so that if comedy is to function in some way as a safety release then it must obviously deal with these taboo areas. This is part of the responsibility we accord our licensed jesters, that nothing be excused the searching light of comedy. If anything can survive the probe of humour it is clearly of value, and conversely all groups who claim immunity from laughter are claiming special privileges which should not be granted."
-Eric Idle-
(1943- ) British Comedian
"Character assassination is at once easier and surer than physical assault; and it involves far less risk for the assassin. It leaves him free to commit the same deed over and over again, and may, indeed, win him the honors of a hero in the country of his victims."
-Alan Barth-
(1906-1979) served on the editorial board of The Washington Post for thirty years
Source: The Loyalty of Free Men, 1951
"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-
"The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails."
-William Arthur Ward-
"Unrighteous fortune seldom spares the highest worth; no one with safety can long front so frequent perils. Whom calamity oft passes by she finds at last."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: Tragedies, Hercules Furens (The Madness of Hercules), lines 325-328; (Megara).
"Tell me who your friends are, and I will tell you who you are."
-Proverb-
"Rogues are preferable to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest."
-Alexandre Dumas-
(1802-1870) French writer
"Growth is slow but collapse is rapid."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: Ugo Bardi (2017), "The Seneca Effect: Why growth is slow but collapse is rapid"
"I am really mortified to be told that, in the United States of America, a fact like this can become a subject of inquiry, and of criminal inquiry too, as an offence against religion; that a question about the sale of a book can be carried before the civil magistrate. Is this then our freedom of religion? and are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule for what we are to read, and what we must believe? It is an insult to our citizens to question whether they are rational beings or not, and blasphemy against religion to suppose it cannot stand the test of truth and reason."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Letter, 19 April 1814
"As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost and science can never regress."
-J. Robert Oppenheimer-
(1904-1967)
Source: Life Magazine, 10 October 1949
On the other hand, when The Science is proclaimed settled...
"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."
-Albert Einstein-
(1879-1955) Physicist and Professor, Nobel Prize 1921
Source: in The New Convergence
"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply too painful to acknowledge -- even to ourselves -- that we've been so credulous. (So the old bamboozles tend to persist as the new bamboozles rise.)"
-Carl Sagan-
(1934-1996), Astro-physicist
Source: "The Fine Art of Baloney Detection," Parade, February 1, 1987
"Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intelligence."
-Dr. Samuel Johnson-
(1709-1784) English author, poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer
Source: The Rambler, 1750-52
"The first and simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind, is curiosity."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
"Within seven centuries, [the ancient Greeks] invented for itself, epic, elegy, lyric, tragedy, novel, democratic government, political and economic science, history, geography, philosophy, physics and biology; and made revolutionary advances in architecture, sculpture, painting, music, oratory, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, anatomy, engineering, law and war... a stupendous feat for whose most brilliant state Attica was the size of Hertfordshire, with a free population (including children) of perhaps 160,000."
-F. J. Lucas-
"Freedom is the oxygen without which science cannot breathe."
-David Sarnoff-
(1891-1971) American businessman, pioneer of American radio and television
"Truth, in its struggles for recognition, passes through four distinct stages.
First, we say it is damnable, dangerous, disorderly, and will surely disrupt society.
Second, we declare it is heretical, infidelic and contrary to the Bible.
Third, we say it is really a matter of no importance either one way or the other.
Fourth, we aver that we have always upheld it and believed it."
-Elbert Hubbard-
(1856-1915)
Source: Roycroft Dictionary and Book of Epigrams, 1923
"Philosophy means the complete liberty of the mind, and therefore independence of all social, political or religious prejudice... It loves one thing only... truth."
-Henri Frederic Amiel-
(1821-1881) Swiss philosopher, poet
Source: Journal, 1873-84
"Man comes into the world naked and unarmed, as if nature had destined him for a social creature, and ordained him to live under equitable laws and in peace; as if she had desired that he should be guided by reason rather than be driven by force; therefore did she endow him with understanding, and furnish him with hands, that he might himself contrive what was necessary to his clothing and protection. To those animals to which nature has given vast strength, she has also presented weapons in harmony with their powers; to those that are not thus vigorous, she has given ingenuity, cunning, and singular dexterity in avoiding injury."
-William Harvey-
"This habit of forming opinions, and acting upon them without evidence, is one of the most immoral habits of the mind. ... As our opinions are the fathers of our actions, to be indifferent about the evidence of our opinions is to be indifferent about the consequences of our actions. But the consequences of our actions are the good and evil of our fellow-creatures. The habit of the neglect of evidence, therefore, is the habit of disregarding the good and evil of our fellow-creatures."
-James Mill-
"Democracy, alas, is also a form of theology, and shows all the immemorial stigmata. Confronted by uncomfortable facts, it invariably tries to dispose of them by appeals to the highest sentiments of the human heart. An anti-democrat is not merely mistaken; he is also wicked, and the more plausible he is the more wicked he becomes."
-H.L. Mencken-
"By freethinking I mean the use of the understanding in endeavoring to find out the meaning of any proposition whatsoever, in considering the nature of the evidence for or against, and in judging of it according to the seeming force or weakness of the evidence."
-Anthony Collins-
(1676-1729) English philosopher, proponent of deism
Source: A Discourse of Freethinking, 1713
"If a theory and its proponents stubbornly refuse falsification by an ever increasing body of substantial conflicting evidence, the theory degenerates into a textbook example of dogmatic pseudo-science. The neo-Darwinian theory of macroevolution has failed on all fronts, from mathematical feasibility, to theoretical plausibility and explanatory power, to empirical support."
-Günter Bechly-
Source: Evolution News, "New Fossil Human Species Thwarts Core Darwinian Predictions," April 19, 2019. In reference to "the late great philosopher of science Sir Karl Popper (1963): Conjectures and Refutations!"
"There is no absolute knowledge. And those who claim it, whether they are scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy. All information is imperfect. We have to treat it with humility."
-Jacob Bronowski-
(1908-1974) Polish-born British mathematician
Source: The Ascent of Man, 1973
"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice, there is."
-Jan L.A. van de Snepscheut-
(1953-1994) Dutch computer scientist and educator
"No great advance has ever been made in science, politics, or religion, without controversy."
-Lyman Beecher-
(1775-1863) American Presbyterian minister, and the father of 13 children, many of whom became noted figures, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Ward Beecher, Charles Beecher, Edward Beecher, Isabella Beecher Hooker, Catharine Beecher, and Thomas K. Beecher
Source: Life Thoughts, 1858
"I was never ruined but twice: once when I lost a lawsuit, and once when I won one."
-Voltaire-
"A lawsuit is the suicide of time."
-Thomas Edison-
"Most new insights come only after a superabundant accumulation of facts have removed the blindness which prevented us from seeing what later comes to be regarded as obvious."
-Isidor Issac Rabi-
(1898-1988) Galician-born American physicist, 1944 Nobel laureate for his discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance
"Free speech is essential to education, especially to a liberal education, which encourages the search for truths in art and science. If expression is restricted, the range of inquiry is also curtailed... The beneficiaries of a free society have a duty to pursue the truth and to protect the freedom of expression that makes possible the search for a new enlightenment."
-Norman Dorsen-
Author, Professor of Consitutional Law (NYU), ACLU president (1976-1991), CFR member
Source: Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression
"It is the great parent of science & of virtue: and that a nation will be great in both, always in proportion as it is free."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: letter to Joseph Willard, March 24, 1789
"I will always hold to those principles by which I have been raised … To seek understanding before taking action, yet to trust my instincts when action is called for. Never to avoid danger from fear, never to seek out danger for its own sake. Never to conform to fashion from fear of eccentricity, never to be eccentric from fear of conformity. … To hold myself to higher standards of conduct than I hold another. To never strike without cause, and, when there is cause, to strike for the heart.
-Steven Brust-
"It takes a long time to understand nothing."
-Edward Dahlberg-
(1900-1977) American novelist and essayist
"It is time for our school systems to stop accepting the gospel of that false religion and start doing their due diligence. Our children should be taught about the demonstrable solar cycles; and the whole human-caused Global Warming theory, along with the Hockey Stick Hoax, should be taught only as another example, after Piltdown Man and pre-Copernican theories of planetary movement, of how science can be corrupted when ideology gets ahead of the data."
-Orson Scott Card-
(1951- ) American novelist, critic, public speaker, essayist, columnist
"For the truth of the conclusions of physical science, observation is the supreme Court of Appeal."
-Sir Arthur Eddington-
Mathematician
"And so, my fellow Americans: Ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: Ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man."
-John F. Kennedy-
(1917-1963) 35th US President
Source: Inaugural address, January 20, 1961
"As we celebrate Thanksgiving ... we should ask what we can do as individuals to demonstrate our gratitude to God for all He has done. Such reflection can only add to the significance of this precious day of remembrance. Let us recommit ourselves to that devotion to God and family that has played such an important role in making this a great Nation, and which will be needed as a source of strength if we are to remain a great people."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
Source: President Reagan's Thanksgiving Proclamation, November 26, 1987
"Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few."
-Sir Winston Churchill-
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1940-1945, 1951-1955)
"A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government."
-Edward Abbey-
(1927-1989) American author and essayist
"Surely the day will come when color means nothing more than skin tone, when religion is seen uniquely as a way to speak one’s soul; when birth places have the weight of a throw of the dice and all men are born free, when understanding breeds love and brotherhood."
-Josephine Baker-
"Of course, the proponents of political tyranny are usually well-motivated. Those who enacted the gun-registration law in California point to criminals who have used semiautomatic weapons to commit horrible, murderous acts. But the illusion -- the pipe dream -- is that bad acts can be prevented by the deprivation of liberty. They cannot be! Life is always insecure. The only choice is between liberty and insecurity, on the one hand, and insecurity and enslavement on the other. The true patriot scrutinizes the actions of his own government with unceasing vigilance. And when his government violates the morality and rightness associated with principles of individual freedom and private property, he immediately rises in opposition to his government. This is why the gun owners of California might ultimately go down in history as among the greatest and most courageous patriots of our time."
-Jacob G. Hornberger-
(1950- ) American author, journalist, politician, founder and president of the Future of Freedom Foundation
Source: Gun Control, Patriotism and Civil Disobedience, Pamphlet published by International Society for Individual
Liberty
"My kind of loyalty was to one's country, not to its institutions or its officeholders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease, and death."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910) American author and humorist
"Equal laws protecting equal rights -- the best guarantee of loyalty and love of country."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: letter to Jacob de la Motta, August 1820
"Political ideas that have dominated the public mind for decades cannot be refuted through rational arguments. They must run their course in life and cannot collapse otherwise than in great catastrophe..."
-Ludwig von Mises-
(1881-1973) Economist and social philosopher
"The authoritarian sets up some book, or man, or tradition to establish the truth. The freethinker sets up reason and private judgment to discover the truth... It takes the highest courage to utter unpopular truths."
-Herbert Spencer-
(1820-1903) British author, economist, philosopher
Source: Freedom and Its Fundamentals
"I discharge every person under punishment or prosecution under the Sedition Law, because I considered, and now consider, that law to be a nullity as absolute and palpable as if Congress had ordered us to fall down and worship a golden image."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Letter to Abigail Adams, 22 July 1804
"Yesterday, December 7, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy — the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. … Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory and our interests are in grave danger. With confidence in our armed forces — with the unbounding determination of our people — we will gain the inevitable triumph — so help us God."
-Franklin D. Roosevelt-
"The question was how we should maneuver them [the Japanese] into firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves."
-Sec. of War Henry Stimson-
writing in his diary after a cabinet meeting with FDR, Nov. 25th, 1941
Cause and effect. Stimson took his title seriously...
"As a matter of constitutional tradition, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, we presume that governmental regulation of the content of speech is more likely to interfere with the free exchange of ideas than to encourage it. The interest in encouraging freedom of expression in a democratic society outweighs any theoretical but unproven benefit of censorship."
-Justice John Paul Stevens-
U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Majority Opinion, Communications Decency Act, 26 June 1997
"A family member asked my wife, 'Aren't you concerned about his (our son's) socialization with other kids?'
My wife gave this response: 'Go to your local middle school, junior high, or high school, walk down the hallways, and tell me which behavior you see that you think our son should emulate.'"
-Manfred B. Zysk-
German-American engineer and researcher
"In my judgment the people of no nation can lose their liberty so long as a Bill of Rights like ours survives and its basic purposes are conscientiously interpreted, enforced and respected so as to afford continuous protection against old, as well as new, devices and practices which might thwart those purposes. I fear to see the consequences of the Court's practice of substituting its own concepts of decency and fundamental justice for the language of the Bill of Rights as its point of departure in interpreting and enforcing that Bill of Rights."
-Justice Hugo L. Black-
(1886-1971) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: Adamson v. California, 332 U.S. 46, 89 (Dissent) (1947)
"Woe to that nation whose literature is disturbed by the intervention of power. Because that is not just a violation against 'freedom of print', it is the closing down of the heart of the nation, a slashing to pieces of its memory. The nation ceases to be mindful of itself, it is deprived of its spiritual unity, and despite a supposedly common language, compatriots suddenly cease to understand one another ."
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn-
(1918-2008) Russian novelist, Soviet dissident, imprisoned for 8 years for critizing Stalin in a personal letter, Nobel Prize for Literature, 1970
Source: Nobel lecture (1970), Lecture prepared for the Swedish Academy, not actually delivered as an address
"A Bible and a newspaper in every house, a good school in every district - all studied and appreciated as they merit - are the principal support of virtue, morality, and civil liberty."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
in a letter dated March 1778 to the Ministry of France
"The burning of an author’s books, imprisonment for opinion’s sake, has always been the tribute that an ignorant age pays to the genius of its time."
-Joseph Lewis-
(1889-1968) American freethinker, atheist activist, publisher, litigator
Source: Voltaire: The Incomparable Infidel, 1929
"Any one having a white face, and being so disposed, could stop us, and subject us to examination. ... When I get there [in Pennsylvania], I shall not be required to have a pass; I can travel without being disturbed."
-Frederick Douglass-
[Frederick Baily] (1818-1895), escaped slave, Abolitionist, author, editor of the North Star and later the New National Era
Source: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself [1845] (Toronto: New American Library, 1968), p. 77 and 93-94
"All that we are is the result of what we have thought. If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him. If a man speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves him."
-Buddha-
[Gautama Siddharta] (563 - 483 BC), Hindu Prince, founder of Buddhism
"I have had more trouble with myself than with any other man I have ever met."
-Dwight Lyman Moody-
(1837-1899) American evangelist and publisher
"Sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences."
-Robert Louis Stevenson-
(1850-1895) Scottish novelist, poet, and travel writer
Source: most likely a paraphrase of "that game of consequences to which we all sit down" from 'Old Mortality'
"Civil liberty can be established on no foundation of human reason which will not at the same time demonstrate the right of religious freedom."
-John Quincy Adams-
(1767-1848) 6th US President
Source: Letter, 1823
"There is but one law for all, namely, that law which governs all law, the law of our Creator, the law of humanity, justice, equity -- the law of nature, and of nations."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
"The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time: the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Summary View of the Rights of British America, 1774
"The new law will create inflation whenever the trusts want inflation...they can unload the stocks on the people at high prices during the excitement and then bring on a panic and buy them back at low prices...the day of reckoning is only a few years removed."
-Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr.-
(1859-1924) Congressman (R-MN), father of famous aviator
"It is more noble to give yourself completely to one individual than to labor diligently for the salvation of the masses."
-Dag Hammarskjold-
(1905-1961) Swedish diplomat, the second United Nations Secretary-General, and a Nobel Peace Prize recipient
Source: as quoted in Living in Grace : The Shift to Spiritual Perception (2002) by Beca Lewis, p. 158
"What is earnest is not always true; on the contrary, error is often more earnest than truth."
-Benjamin Disraeli-
To say nothing of outright deception...
"Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true."
-Sir Francis Bacon-
(1561-1626) Philosopher, British Lord Chancellor
Source: Norvum Organum (1620)
And has every right to do so. Thoughts and conscience and whatnot. Imposing them, of course, is an entirely different matter...
"The recovery of freedom is so splendid a thing that we must not shun even death when seeking to recover it."
-Marcus Tullius Cicero-
(106-43 B.C.) Roman Statesman, Philosopher and Orator
"Whether in chains or in laurels, liberty knows nothing but victories."
-Wendell Phillips-
(1811-1884) American abolitionist, advocate for Native Americans, orator, lawyer
"The patriot volunteer, fighting for country and his rights, makes the most reliable soldier on earth."
-Thomas J. Jackson
(1824-1863) "Stonewall Jackson", Confederate General
"But there is another strong objection which I, one of the laziest of all the children of Adam, have against the Leisure State. Those who think it could be done argue that a vast machinery using electricity, water-power, petrol, and so on, might reduce the work imposed on each of us to a minimum. It might, but it would also reduce our control to a minimum. We should ourselves become parts of a machine, even if the machine only used those parts once a week. The machine would be our master, for the machine would produce our food, and most of us could have no notion of how it was really being produced."
-Gilbert Keith Chesterton-
(1874-1936) British essayist, critic, poet, and novelist
Source: Illustrated London News, March 21, 1925
"The common man is the sovereign consumer whose buying or abstention from buying ultimately determines what should be produced and in what quantity and quality."
-Ludwig von Mises-
(1881-1973) Economist and social philosopher
Source: The Anti-Capitalist Mentality, p.1
"If we cannot live so as to be happy, let us at least live so as to deserve it."
-Immanuel Hermann von Fichte-
(1796-1879) German philosopher
"The purpose of life is to live a life of purpose."
-Robert Byrne-
"The authoritarian impulse is reasserting itself, to challenge free people and free societies, everywhere. In our own country, from the trivial to the truly dangerous, it is the range and regularity of the untruths we see that should be cause for profound alarm, and spur to action. Add to that the by-now predictable habit of calling true things false, and false things true, and we have a recipe for disaster. As George Orwell warned, 'The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.' … The question of why the truth is now under such assault may well be for historians to determine. But for those who cherish American constitutional democracy, what matters is the effect on America and her people and her standing in an increasingly unstable world — made all the more unstable by these very fabrications. What matters is the daily disassembling of our democratic institutions. We are a mature democracy — it is well past time that we stop excusing or ignoring — or worse, endorsing — these attacks on the truth. For if we compromise the truth for the sake of our politics, we are lost."
-Jeff Flake-
"To be what no one ever was, to be what everyone has been:
Freedom is the mean of those extremes that fence all effort in."
-Mark Van Doren-
(1894-1972) Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, professor, and critic
"While there are two ways of contending, one by discussion, the other by force, the former belonging properly to man, the latter to beasts, recourse must be had to the latter if there be no opportunity for employing the former."
-Cicero-
"To put it baldly, there are two ways to become wealthy: to create wealth or to take wealth away from others. The former adds to society. The latter typically subtracts from it, for in the process of taking it away, wealth gets destroyed. A monopolist who overcharges for his product takes money from those whom he is overcharging and at the same time destroys value. To get his monopoly price, he has to restrict production."
-Joseph E. Stiglitz-
(1943-) American economist, public policy analyst, professor
Source: The Price of Inequality (2012)
"Men, to act with vigour and effect, must have time to mature measures, and judgment and experience, as to the best method of applying them. They must not be hurried on to their conclusions by the passions, or the fears of the multitude. They must deliberate, as well as resolve."
-Joseph Story-
(1779-1845) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: (1833)
"... we conclude that the [Federal] Reserve Banks are not federal ... but are independent privately owned and locally controlled corporations... without day to day direction from the federal government."
-9th Circuit Court-
Source: Lewis vs United States, June 24, 1982
"I either want less corruption, or more chance to participate in it."
-Ashleigh Brilliant-
(1933- ) British-American author, syndicated cartoonist
"Inflation is taxation without representation."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
"You are a den of vipers and thieves. I intend to rout you out, and by the grace of the Eternal God, will rout you out."
-Andrew Jackson-
(1767-1845) 7th US President
Source: upon evicting from the Oval Office a delegation of international bankers discussing the Bank Renewal Bill, 1832
"Either the application for renewal of the charter (for the First Bank of the United States) is granted, or the United States will find itself involved in a most disastrous war."
-Baron Nathan Mayer Rothschild-
(1777-1836) London financier, one of the founders of the international Rothschild banking dynasty
Source: 1811, ref: A History of Central Banking, Stephen Milford Goodson
"Corruption is no stranger to Washington; it is a famous resident."
-Walter Goodman-
(1927-2002) American author, journalist, television critic
"A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny."
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn-
(1918-2008) Russian novelist, Soviet dissident, imprisoned for 8 years for critizing Stalin in a personal letter, Nobel Prize for Literature, 1970
"A fondness for power is implanted, in most men, and it is natural to abuse it, when acquired."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: The Farmer Refuted, February 23, 1775
"We now have so many regulations that everyone is guilty of some violation."
-Donald Alexander-
(1921-2009) American tax lawyer, Commissioner of Internal Revenue (1973-1977)
1975
Source: before Congress ~1975
"The government was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself."
-Thomas Jefferson-
That way lies madness...
"One of the most dangerous forms of human error is forgetting what one is trying to achieve."
-Paul Nitze-
When you're up to your ass in alligators, it's difficult to remind yourself that your original objective was to drain the swamp...
"In a small Swiss city sits an international organization so obscure and secretive....Control of the institution, the Bank for International Settlements, lies with some of the world's most powerful and least visible men: the heads of 32 central banks, officials able to shift billions of dollars and alter the course of economies at the stroke of a pen."
-Keith Bradsher-
New York Times bureau chief in Detroit (1996-2001) and Hong Kong (2001- )
Source: New York Times, August 5, 1995
"Every national border in Europe marks the place where two gangs of bandits got too exhausted to kill each other anymore and signed a treaty. Patriotism is the delusion that one of these gangs of bandits is better than all the others"
-Robert Anton Wilson-
"It is no wonder that the contemporary libertarian, seeing the world going socialist and Communist, and believing himself virtually isolated and cut off from any prospect of united mass action, tends to be steeped in long-run pessimism. But the scene immediately brightens when we realize that that indispensable requisite of modern civilization: the overthrow of the Old Order, was accomplished by mass libertarian action erupting in such great revolutions of the West as the French and American Revolutions, and bringing about the glories of the Industrial Revolution and the advances of liberty, mobility, and rising living standards that we still retain today. Despite the reactionary swings backward to statism, the modern world stands towering above the world of the past. When we consider also that, in one form or another, the Old Order of despotism, feudalism, theocracy and militarism dominated every human civilization until the West of the 18th century, optimism over what man has and can achieve must mount still higher."
-Murray Rothbard-
"I've concluded that anarchism is an impractical ideal. Nowadays, I regard myself as a libertarian. I suppose an anarchist would say, paraphrasing what Marx said about agnostics being 'frightened atheists,' that libertarians are simply frightened anarchists. Having just stated the case for the opposition, I will go along and agree with them: yes, I am frightened. I'm a libertarian because I don't trust the people as much as anarchists do. I want to see government limited as much as possible; I would like to see it reduced back to where it was in Jefferson's time, or even smaller. But I would not like to see it abolished. I think the average American, if left totally free, would act exactly like Idi Amin. I don't trust the people any more than I trust the government."
-Robert Anton Wilson-
You don't trust people -- unless they're handed the power and guns, the force monopoly, of government? Then you trust them? Then they're easier to limit? "Government limited as much as possible" is anarchism. Sorry...
"Democracy is more cruel than wars or tyrants."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: 'Epistulse morales'
"The most may err as grossly as the few."
-John Dryden-
(1631-1700) English Poet
Source: Absalom and Achitophel, 1681
"This truth is well known among our principal men now engaged in forming an imperialism of Capital to govern the world. By dividing the voters through the political party system, we can get them to expend their energies in fighting over questions of no importance. Thus by discreet action we can secure for ourselves what has been so well planned and so successfully accomplished."
-Sir Denison Miller-
(1860-1923) first governor of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia
"Choice by the people themselves is not generally distinguished for its wisdom."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: 1776, Jefferson’s Literary Commonplace Book, Wilson, ed., 1989, p. 11.
"Nations grow corrupt, love bondage more than liberty; bondage with ease than strenuous liberty."
-John Milton-
(1608-1674) English Poet
"The cruelest lies are often told in silence."
-Robert Louis Stevenson-
(1850-1895) Scottish novelist, poet, and travel writer
"Do the people of this land…desire to preserve those [liberties] protected by the First Amendment… If so, let them withstand all beginnings of encroachment. For the saddest epitaph which can be carved in memory of a vanquished liberty is that it was lost because its possessors failed to stretch for a saving hand while yet there was time."
-George Sutherland-
(1862-1942) U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Associated Press v. National Labor Relations Board, 1937
"Very commonly in ages when civil rights of one kind are in evidence – those pertaining to freedom of speech and thought in, say, theater, press, and forum, with obscenity and libel laws correspondingly loosened – very real constrictions of individual liberty take place in other, more vital areas: political organization, voluntary association, property, and the right to hold jobs, for example."
-Robert Nisbet-
(1913-1996) American sociologist, author
Source: Twilight of Authority, 1975
"Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. If there is too much cash chasing too few goods, prices will rise."
-Megan McArdle-
December 10, 2021
"The modern susceptibility to conformity and obedience to authority indicates that the truth endorsed by authority is likely to be accepted as such by a majority of the people."
-David Edwards-
(1962-) British political writer, columnist
Source: Burning All Illusions, 1996
"To combat depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about; because we are suffering from a misdirection of production, we want to create further misdirection -- a procedure which can only lead to a much more severe crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end."
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
1933
"It is a sobering fact that the prominence of central banks in this century has coincided with a general tendency towards more inflation, not less. [I]f the overriding objective is price stability, we did better with the nineteenth-century gold standard and passive central banks, with currency boards, or even with ‘free banking.’ The truly unique power of a central bank, after all, is the power to create money, and ultimately the power to create is the power to destroy."
-Paul Volcker-
(1927-2019) American economist, Chairman of the Federal Reserve (1979-1987)
Source: in the Foreword of "The Central Banks"
"Truth never envelops itself in mystery, and the mystery in which it is at any time enveloped is the work of its antagonist, and never of itself."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
"If you stand straight, do not fear a crooked shadow."
-Chinese Proverb-
“War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses."
-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.
Source: from a speech in 1933
"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."
-anonymous-
"In practice, socialism didn’t work. But socialism could never have worked because it is based on false premises about human psychology and society, and gross ignorance of human economy. In the vast library of socialist theory (and in all of Marx’s compendious works), there is hardly a chapter devoted to the creation of wealth to what will cause human beings to work and to innovate, or to what will make their efforts efficient. Socialism is a plan of morally sanctioned theft. It is about dividing up what others have created. Consequently, socialist economies don’t work; they create poverty instead of wealth. This is unarguable historical fact now, but that has not prompted the left to have second thoughts."
-David Horowitz-
"It was not by accident or coincidence that the rights to freedom in speech and press were coupled in a single guaranty with the rights of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition for redress of grievances. All these, though not identical, are inseparable. They are cognate rights, and therefore are united in the first Article’s assurance."
-Judge Wiley B. Rutledge-
[Wiley Blount Rutledge] (1894-1949) U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Thomas v. Collins, 1944
"Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress had been made, through disobedience and through rebellion."
-Oscar Wilde-
(1854-1900) Anglo-Irish poet, novelist, writer
"We do not move forward by curtailing people’s liberty because we are afraid of what they may do or say."
-Eleanor Roosevelt-
[Anna Eleanor Roosevelt] (1884-1963) Wife of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt
Source: The Nation, 1940
"With the destructive power of today's weapons, keeping the peace is not just a goal; it's a sacred obligation. But maintaining peace requires more than sincerity and idealism — more than optimism and good will. As you know well, peace is a product of hard, strenuous labor by those dedicated to its preservation. It requires realism, not wishful thinking."
-Ronald Reagan-
Even when defending said peace against your own government.
"It is the glistening and softly spoken lie; the amiable fallacy; the patriotic lie of the historian, the provident lie of the politician, the zealous lie of the partisan, the merciful lie of the friend, and the careless lie of each man to himself, that cast that black mystery over humanity, through which we thank any man who pierces, as we would thank one who dug a well in a desert."
-John Ruskin-
"The right to revolt has sources deep in our history."
-William O. Douglas-
(1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: An Almanac of Liberty, 1954
"Most men today cannot conceive of a freedom that does not involve somebody's slavery."
-W.E.B. Du Bois-
"Political agitation, by the passions it arouses or the convictions it engenders, may in fact stimulate men to the violation of the law. Detestation of existing politics is easily transformed into forcible resistance of the authority which puts them in execution..."
-Judge Learned Hand-
(1872-1961), Judge, U. S. Court of Appeals
Source: Masses Pub Co. v. Patten, 1917
"He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
"Who can protest and does not, is an accomplice in the act."
-The Talmud-
"Hope, in reality, is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man."
-Nietzsche-
Hope is like a spiritual dose of clap.
"Freedom includes the right to say what others may object to and resent... The essence of citizenship is to be tolerant of strong and provocative words."
-John G. Diefenbaker-
(1895-1979) Prime Minister of Canada
Source: Hansard, 9 April 1970
"Propaganda gives force and direction to the successive movements of popular feeling and desire; but it does not do much to create these movements. The propagandist is a man who canalizes an already existing stream. In a land where there is no water, he digs in vain."
-Aldous Huxley-
"Freedom released the energies of the masses not by exhilarating but by unbalancing, irritating, and goading."
-Eric Hoffer-
(1902-1983) American author, philosopher, awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
"Our tradition is one of protest and revolt, and it is stultifying to celebrate the rebels of the past while we silence the rebels of the present."
-Henry Steele Commager-
(1902-1998) Historian and author
Source: Freedom Loyalty and Dissent, 1966
"The right to comment freely and criticize the action, opinions, and judgment of courts is of primary importance to the public generally. Not only is it good for the public; but it has a salutary effect on courts and judges as well."
-James P. Hughes-
(1874-1961) Justice of the Indiana Supreme Court (1933-1939)
Source: 1935
"There’s a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any over-large concentration of like-minded individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause."
-P. J. O'Rourke-
(1947-2022) US humorist, journalist, & political commentator
Source: Parliament of Whores, 1991
"The Tenth Commandment sends a message to socialists, to egalitarians, to people obsessed with fairness, to American presidential candidates in the year 2000 -- to everyone who believes that wealth should be redistributed. And that message is clear and concise: Go to Hell."
-P. J. O'Rourke-
(1947-2022) US humorist, journalist, & political commentator
Source: his book, Eat the Rich
"They who most loudly clamour for liberty do not most liberally grant it."
- Dr. Samuel Johnson-
(1709-1784) English author, poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer
"Let me get this straight. For the past quarter-century or more, the central government has been stealing hundreds of billions of dollars each year from competent, hard-working, successful people and giving it to incompetent, lazy failures. As a result, middle-class America has increasingly been impoverished while the poor are even poorer. Now come calls for reforming the system, and liberals are denouncing reformers in the vilest language. What planet did you say liberals are from?"
-Paul Thiel-
(1964- ) American financial journalist, investment manager
Source: letter to The Cincinnati Enquirer
"Anonymous pamphlets, leaflets, brochures and even books have played an important role in the progress of mankind. Persecuted groups and sects from time to time throughout history have been able to criticize the oppressive practices and laws either anonymously or not at all... It is plain that anonymity has sometimes been assumed for the most constructive purposes."
-Justice Hugo L. Black-
(1886-1971) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: Tally v. California, 1960
"In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies."
-Sir Winston Churchill-
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1940-1945, 1951-1955)
"There is always a certain glamour about the idea of a nation rising up to crush an evil simply because it is wrong. Unfortunately, this can seldom be realized in real life; for the very existence of the evil usually argues a moral weakness in the very place where extraordinary moral strength is called for."
-W. E. B. Du Bois-
"Diplomacy: The patriotic art of lying for one's country."
-Ambrose Bierce-
(1842-1914) American Civil War soldier, humorist, writer
"The danger to which the success of revolutions is most exposed, is that of attempting them before the principles on which they proceed, and the advantages to result from them, are sufficiently seen and understood."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
"No government of the Centre would seek powers to imprison individuals who have committed no crime merely on the say-so of 'experts' who believe they might commit a crime. No libertarian government would want to reduce our right to trial by jury, to curfew children, to place 'anti-social behaviour orders' on citizens, to conduct compulsory DNA and drug tests on all offenders. No government that was concerned with freedom would seek to ban pursuits that harm no one, such as foxhunting, simply because they are unpopular. No government that has respect for its citizens would seek to interfere so intimately with so many of their private activities -- for instance, what right does a government have to tell me under what terms and conditions I may sell my house. The transaction should, quite simply, be none of their business."
-George Thomas-
Source: Letter to Editor, London Times, October 13, 1999.
"It is a part of the function of 'law' to give recognition to ideas representing the exact opposite of established conduct. Most of the complications arise from the necessity of pretending to do one thing, while actually doing another."
-Thurman Arnold-
(1891-1969) former head of the Anti-Trust Division of the U.S. Justice Department (1938-1943)
Source: The Symbols of Government, 1935
"The great illusion of the current paradigm of statism is that governments achieve a worthwhile reduction of violence. Governments are the greatest cause of violence in the world today. They are coercive monopolies with only an illusion of public support. Everything they do is based on a presumed right to point guns at people who are acting peacefully."
-Adam Kokesh-
"This is a world of compensations; and he who would be no slave must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves."
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
Source: Speech, 1856
"All go free when multitudes offend.
[Lat., Quicquid multis peccatur inultum est.]"
-Lucanus-
[Marcus Annaeus Lucanus] (A.D. 39-65) Roman poet
Source: Pharsalia (V, 260)
"The victim to too severe a law is considered as a martyr rather than a criminal."
-Charles Caleb Colton-
(1780-1832) English cleric, writer and collector
Source: Lacon, 1825
"I consider trial by jury as the only anchor yet devised by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: 1789 in correspondence to Thomas Paine
"No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the main enemy forces."
-Helmuth von Moltke the Elder-
Prussian Field Marshal, 1871
"Everybody has plans until they get hit for the first time."
-Mike Tyson-
1987
"People do not make wars; governments do."
-Ronald Reagan-
"The most extravagant idea that can be born in the head of a political thinker is to believe that it suffices for people to enter, weapons in hand, among a foreign people and expect to have its laws and constitution embraced. No one loves armed missionaries; the first lesson of nature and prudence is to repulse them as enemies."
-Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre-
(6 May 1758 - 28 July 1794) French lawyer, statesman, one of the most influential figures of the French Revolution, member of the Constituent Assembly, Jacobin Club
Source: Opposing proposals to spread the French revolution by war, in Sur la guerre (1ère intervention), a speech to the Jacobin Club (2 January 1792)
"Every citizen should be a soldier. This was the case with the Greeks and Romans, and must be that of every free state."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"[A constitution] naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right."
-Thomas Jefferson-
letter to James Madison in 1789
"No matter what political reasons are given for war, the underlying reason is always economic."
-A. J. P. Taylor-
[Alan John Percivale Taylor] (1906-1990) British historian
"Wars are caused by undefended wealth."
-General Douglas MacArthur-
(1880-1964) WWII Supreme Allied Commander of the Southwest Pacific, Supreme United Nations Commander
"History teaches that wars begin when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
"Is there any man, is there any woman, let me say any child here that does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry?"
-Woodrow Wilson-
(1856-1924) 28th US President
1919
"War is the trade of Kings."
-John Dryden-
(1631-1700) English Poet
Source: King Arthur, II, ii (1691)
"The history of war is the history of powerful individuals willing to sacrifice thousands upon thousands of other people’s lives for personal gains."
-Michael Rivero-
"If we ever have a plan, we're screwed."
-Paul Newman-
referencing "Newman's Own"
"When people begin to understand that the State originated for predatory purposes and for conquest, and realize that its underlying aim ever since has been to camouflage what in reality is its essential feature of controlling people so that it can arbitrarily rob some for the benefit of others, they will begin to understand the motives and effects of State activity in every quarter of the globe. They will begin to ponder on other alternatives for solving their problems than resort to the State machine. Such a recourse is today almost completely absent from the minds of reformers and revolutionists. In fact, subtract the idea of the State as an implementor of social policy from the minds of nearly all those bent on reform and their thinking processes would be immediately halted."
-Laurance Labadie-
"There can be no greater error than to expect or calculate upon real favors from nation to nation."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
"It is an approved maxim in war, never to do what the enemy wishes you to do, for this reason alone, that he desires it."
-Napoleon Bonaparte-
(1769-1821) French emperor
"The moral and constitutional obligations of our representatives in Washington are to protect our liberty, not coddle the world, precipitating no-win wars, while bringing bankruptcy and economic turmoil to our people."
-Dr. Ron Paul-
(1935-) American physician, US Congressman (R-TX), US Presidential candidate
"We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home."
-Edward R. Murrow-
(1908-1965) American broadcast journalist and war correspondent
Defend whatever the hell you consider worthy. That is your right. But "freedom abroad" -- however whoever defines it -- is still not the enforceable Constitutional responsibility of the US taxpayer. Period. Hold a bake sale.
"One of the fondest expressions around is that we can't be the world's policeman. But guess who gets called when somebody needs a cop."
-General Colin Powell-
(1937- ) US Army General, Secretary of State (2001-05)
Which is precisely why people who win the lottery so often soon get an unlisted number.
"You may not be interested in war, but war is very interested in you."
-Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi-
(1828-1910) Russian writer
"Beware lest in your anxiety to avoid war you obtain a master."
-Demosthenes-
(384-322 BC) Greek statesman and orator of ancient Athens
"There are two histories : official history, lying, and then secret history, where you find the real causes of events."
-Honoré de Balzac-
(1799-1850) French novelist, playwright
"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle."
-Sun Tzu-
(c.500-320 B.C.) name used by the unknown Chinese authors of the sophisticated treatise on philosophy, logistics, espionage, strategy and tactics known as 'The Art of War'
500 B.C.
Source: http://www.realityzone.com/granddeception.html
"To come to know your enemy, first you must become his friend, and once you become his friend, all his defences come down. Then you can choose the most fitting method for his demise."
-Tokugawa Ieyasu-
(1542-1616) Japanese Shogun
"The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them."
-Vladimir Ilyich Lenin-
[Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov] (1870-1924) First Leader of the Soviet Union
"Republicanism and ignorance are in bitter antagonism."
-Alphonse de Lamartine-
(1790- 1869) - French writer, poet, politician who was instrumental in the foundation of the Second Republic and the continuation of the Tricolore as the flag of France
"Be convinced that to be happy means to be free and that to be free means to be brave. Therefore do not take lightly the perils of war."
-Thucydides-
[Thoukudídês] (c.455-c.400 BC) Greek historian, author of the History of the Peloponnesian War
"The strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venal love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
"History teaches us that men and nations only behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives."
-Abba Eban-
[Aubrey Solomon Meir] (1915-2002) Israeli diplomat and politician
Source: Speech in London, 16 December 1970
"The Shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which the sheep thanks the shephard as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as a destroyer of liberty. Plainly, the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of liberty."
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
"The people have always some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness... This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs, when he first appears he is a protector."
-Plato-
(429-347 BC) Greek philosopher
Source: The Republic
"From a 'pragmatic' point of view, political philosophy is a monster, and whenever it has been taken seriously, the consequence, almost invariably, has been revolution, war, and eventually, the police state."
-Henry David Aiken-
(1912-1982) Author
Source: Commentary, April 1964
"It was Thomas Edison who brought us electricity, not the Sierra Club. It was the Wright brothers who got us off the ground, not the Federal Aviation Administration. It was Henry Ford who ended the isolation of millions of Americans by making the automobile affordable, not Ralph Nader. Those who have helped the poor the most have not been those who have gone around loudly expressing 'compassion' for the poor, but those who found ways to make industry more productive and distribution more efficient, so that the poor of today can afford things that the affluent of yesterday could only dream about."
-Thomas Sowell-
"To judge from the history of mankind, we shall be compelled to conclude, that the fiery and destructive passions of war, reign in the human breast, with much more powerful sway, than the mild and beneficent sentiments of peace; and, that to model our political systems upon speculations of lasting tranquility, is to calculate on the weaker springs of the human character."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: writing as "Publius," in _Federalist No. 34,_ January 5, 1788
"In the twentieth century the number of people killed by their own governments under authoritarian regimes is four times the number killed in all this century’s wars combined."
-John Shattuck-
(1943-) Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights
"Enemies are necessary for the wheels of the U.S. military machine to turn."
-John Stockwell-
(1937-) U.S. Marine Corps Major, and Chief of Station and National Security Council coordinator for the CIA
"No man is entitled to the blessings of freedom unless he be vigilant in its preservation."
-General Douglas MacArthur-
(1880-1964) WWII Supreme Allied Commander of the Southwest Pacific, Supreme United Nations Commander
"Suppose they gave a war, and nobody came? Why then, the war would come to you!"
-Bertolt Brecht-
[Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht] (1898-1956) German socialist dramatist, stage director, and poet
"He who wants peace must prepare for war."
-Claudius-
[Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus] (10 BC-54 AD) fourth Roman Emperor of the Julio-Claudian dynasty
"Having so pledged myself, and having been elected to my senatorship upon such pledge, and not having been elected to create an organization to which we would give a promise, either express or implied, that it would have the authority to send our boys all over the Earth, I cannot support the Charter. I believe it is fraught with danger to the American people and to American institutions."
-William Langer-
(1886-1959), Governor of North Dakota (1933-34, 1937-39), US Senator (R-ND, 1940-59), one of only two Senators who voted against the United Nations Charter in 1945
Source: Statement to the US Senate - Congressional Record August, 1945
"War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it."
-William Tecumseh Sherman-
(1820-1891) General Commander of the United States Army
"I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell."
-William Tecumseh Sherman-
(1820-1891) General Commander of the United States Army
"The essence of war is violence. Moderation in war is imbecility."
-John A. Fisher-
[Lord John Arbutnoth Fisher of Kilverstone] (1841-1920) English first sea Lord of Admiralty and writer
Source: Macaulay "Essay on Lord Nugent's Memorials of Hampden"
"Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Tolerance in the face of tyranny is no virtue."
-Barry Goldwater-
(1909-1998) US Senator (R-Arizona)
Source: Often attributed to Goldwater but no source found. Perhaps paraphrased from this quote.
"Standing up to a tyrant has always been illegal and dangerous. There is no guarantee but one -- to not live like a slave, nor to die like one."
-Eric Schaub-
Individualist, activist, speaker, writer
"Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains and always was."
-D. H. Lawrence-
(1885-1938)
"I don't measure a man's success by how high he climbs but how high he bounces when he hits bottom."
-General George S. Patton, Jr.-
"Restless is discontent and discontent is the first necessity of progress."
-Thomas A. Edison-
(1847-1931) Inventor
"I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone. Someone once said that Thomas Jefferson was a gentleman of 32 who could calculate an eclipse, survey an estate, tie an artery, plan an edifice, try a cause, break a horse, and dance the minuet."
-John F. Kennedy-
Remarks at a Dinner Honoring Nobel Prize Winners of the Western Hemisphere
29 Apr. 1962
"Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output. … A steady rate of monetary growth at a moderate level can provide a framework under which a country can have little inflation and much growth. It will not produce perfect stability; it will not produce heaven on earth; but it can make an important contribution to a stable economic society."
-Milton Friedman-
"The fiercest serpent may be overcome by a swarm of ants."
-Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto-
(1884-1943) Japanese Naval Marshal General and commander-in-chief of the Combined Fleet during World War II, a graduate of the Imperial Japanese Naval Academy and a student of Harvard University (1919–1921)
Source: Statement in opposition of the planned construction of the Yamato class battleships, as quoted in Scraps of paper: the disarmament treaties between the world wars (1989) by Harlow A. Hyde
"Woe unto you, ye blind guides, which say, Whosoever shall swear by the temple, it is nothing; but whosoever shall swear by the gold of the temple, he is a debtor!"
-Jesus of Nazareth-
(c. 4 BC – c. AD 30/33)
Source: Holy Bible, Matthew 23:16
"Banks have done more injury to the religion, morality, tranquility, prosperity, and even wealth of the nation than they can have done or ever will do good."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: John Adams letter to John Taylor, Of Caroline, Quincy, 12 March, 1819
"Everything is backwards; everything is upside down. Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the major media destroy information, and religions destroy spirituality."
-Michael Ellner-
"Therefore, be ye lamps unto yourselves, be a refuge to yourselves. Hold fast to Truth as a lamp; hold fast to the truth as a refuge. Look not for a refuge in anyone beside yourselves. And those, who shall be a lamp unto themselves, shall betake themselves to no external refuge, but holding fast to the Truth as their lamp, and holding fast to the Truth as their refuge, they shall reach the topmost height."
-Buddha-
[Gautama Siddharta] (563 - 483 BC), Hindu Prince, founder of Buddhism
"The test of every religious, political, or educational system is the man that it forms."
-Henri-Frédéric Amiel-
(1821-1881) Swiss philosopher, poet
"By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes his duty against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion."
-Lord Acton-
[John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton] (1834-1902), First Baron Acton of Aldenham
Source: Lord Acton, in The History of Freedom in Antiquity (1877)
"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
"Fantastic doctrines (like Christianity or Islam or Marxism) require unanimity of belief. One dissenter casts doubt on the creed of millions. Thus the fear and the hate; thus the torture chamber, the iron stake, the gallows, the labor camp, the psychiatric ward."
-Edward Abbey-
(1927-1989) American author and essayist
"The quintessential revolution is that of the spirit, born of an intellectual conviction of the need for change in those mental attitudes and values which shape the course of a nation's development. A revolution which aims merely at changing official policies and institutions with a view to an improvement in material conditions has little chance of genuine success. Without a revolution in spirit, the forces which had produced inequities of the old order would continue to be operative, posing a constant threat to the process of reform and regeneration. It is not enough merely to call for freedom, democracy and human rights. There has to be a united determination to persevere in the struggle, to make sacrifices in the name of enduring truths, to resist the corrupting influences of desire, ill will, ignorance, and fear."
-Aung San Suu Kyi-
Burmese Prime Minster-elect, General Secretary of the National League for Democracy (Myanmar)
"There is usually only a limited amount of damage that can be done by dull or stupid people. For creating a truly monumental disaster, you need people with high IQs."
-Thomas Sowell-
"The assumption that spending more of the taxpayer's money will make things better has survived all kinds of evidence that it has made things worse. The black family - which survived slavery, discrimination, poverty, wars and depressions - began to come apart as the federal government moved in with its well-financed programs to 'help.'"
-Thomas Sowell-
"Twenty times in the course of my late reading have I been on the point of breaking out, 'This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!!!' But in this exclamation I would have been as fanatical as Bryant or Cleverly. Without religion this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite company, I mean hell."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: letter to Thomas Jefferson, June 28, 1813, quoted from Charles Francis Adams, ed., Works of John Adams (1856), vol. X, p. 254
"War is the health of the State. It automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate co-operation with the Government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense."
-Randolph Bourne-
1918
"We have no government armed in power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our Constitution was made only for a religious and moral people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: Oct. 11, 1798; Address to the military
"We are sending a complicated system into an unknown environment at very high speed. I feel calm. I feel ready. I can only conclude it's because I don't have a full grasp of the situation."
-Mark Adler-
Deputy Mission Manager, Mars Spirit Rover, NASA, 1/3/04
"The body of People may with Respect resist intolerable Tyranny."
-John Locke-
(1632-1704) English philosopher and political theorist
Source: Second Treatise On Civil Government 288 (Chicago 1955)
Or, I'd contend, without.
"Nobody should be compelled to respect an ideology that doesn’t respect them."
-Pat Condell-
(1949-) British writer
And tyranny, basically by definition, doesn't respect them, so...
"Our major mistakes have not been the result of democracy, but of the erosion of democracy made possible by the mass media’s manipulation of public opinion."
-Robert Cirino-
Source: Don’t Blame The People, 1971
"Free societies... are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom’s existence."
-Salman Rushdie-
Author
And I think what we have here is a dead shark...
"I think that the influence towards suppression of minority views – towards orthodoxy in thinking about public issues – has been more subconscious than unconscious, stemming to a very great extent from the tendency of Americans to conform…not to deviate or depart from an orthodox point of view."
-William O. Douglas-
(1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: 1952
"The censor’s sword pierces deeply into the heart of free expression."
-Earl Warren-
(1891-1974) Chief Justice, U. S. Supreme Court
Source: Times Film Corps. vs. City of Chicago, 23 January 1961
"No loss by flood and lightning, no destruction of cities and temples by hostile forces of nature, has deprived man of so many noble lives and impulses as those which his intolerance has destroyed."
-Helen Keller-
(1880-1968) Blind-Deaf Author
"Protection against government is now not enough to guarantee that a man who has something to say shall have a chance to say it. The owners and managers of the press determine which person, which facts, which version of the facts, and which ideas shall reach the public."
-Commission On Freedom Of The Press-
Source: A Free and Responsible Press, 1947
"No mighty king, no ambitious emperor, no pope, or prophet ever dreamt of such an awesome pulpit, so potent a magic wand [television]."
-Fred W. Friendly-
(1915-1998) former president of CBS News, creator with Edward R. Murrow of the documentary television program 'See It Now.'
Source: Foreword: Presidential Television, 1973
"It is impossible for ideas to compete in the marketplace if no forum for their presentation is provided or available."
-Thomas Mann-
(1875-1955) German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, Nobel Prize in Literature (1929)
"[A] principle is not a principle until it costs you."
-Lefebure v. D'Aquilla-
15 F.4th 650, 663 (5th Cir. 2021)
citing Psalm 15:4, honoring those who "keep[ ] an oath even when it hurts"
"Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one."
-A. J. Liebling-
[Abbott Joseph Liebling] (1904-1963) American journalist, author
Source: The New Yorker, 1960
"It is our attitude toward free thought and free expression that will determine our fate. There must be no limit on the range of temperate discussion, no limits on thought. No subject must be taboo. No censor must preside at our assemblies."
-Justice William O. Douglas-
(1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Address, Author’s Guild, 1952
"To prevent inquiry is among the worst of evils."
-Thomas Holcroft-
(1745-1816) English dramatist, miscellanist, poet and translator
Source: The Adventures of Hugh Trevor, 1794
"Private opinion is weak, but public opinion is almost omnipotent."
-Harriet Beecher Stowe-
(1814-1896) Abolitionist author
"I would not be fooled by the old myth that reporting is about objectivity. Deciding what is news is the most subjective of acts and it is probably the most important thing that we do."
-Carl Bernstein-
(1944-) American investigative journalist, author, Washington Post reporter for Watergate scandal
"[Tyranny is] to compel men not to think as they do, to compel men to express thoughts that are not their own."
-Milovan Djilas-
(1911-1995) Montenegro communist politician, theorist and author
Source: The New Class, 1957
"Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile. In protest, I declined election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters some years ago, and now I must decline the Pulitzer Prize."
-Sinclair Lewis-
(1885-1951) American novelist, short-story writer, playwright, Nobel Prize in Literature (1930)
Source: Letter, 1926
"The media can now wistfully reflect on their glory days of the 1970's when the majority of people actually bought into their bullshit."
-Laura K. Van Onymous-
"As Hitler showed us, a press suppressed does not make a recovery. As Lenin indicated, a press controlled does not revert to a critic’s role. As history reminds us, free speech surrendered is rarely recovered."
-William J. Small-
Source: Political Power and The Press, 1972
"Persecution for opinion is the master vice of society."
-Frances Wright-
(1795-1852) Scottish-born lecturer, writer, freethinker, feminist, abolitionist, and social reformer
Source: Lecture, 1829
"Freedom of the press, or, to be more precise, the benefit of freedom of the press, belongs to everyone - to the citizen as well as the publisher... The crux is not the publisher's 'freedom to print'; it is, rather, the citizen's 'right
to know.'"
-Arthur Hays Sulzberger-
(1891-1969)
Source: Newspaper publisher
"Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910) American author and humorist
"It is in war that the State really comes into its own: swelling in power, in number, in pride, in absolute dominion over the economy and the society."
-Murray Rothbard-
"It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket, nor breaks my leg."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"Low taxes are the result of low spending."
-Meldrim Thompson-
NH Governor, 1973-1979
"Civil libertarians must often remind government officials (and others) that if the First Amendment only protected the expression of popular and agreeable ideas, it would be totally unnecessary since those ideas would never be threatened by our democratic form of government. Our society's commitment to free speech is tested when we encounter the expression of ideas that are disagreeable -- or even offensive."
-Timothy Lynch-
Director of Cato Institute's Project on Criminal Justice
"Every human being has a right to hear what other wise human beings have spoken to him. It is one of the Rights of Men; a very cruel injustice if you deny it to a man."
-Thomas Carlyle-
(1795-1881) Scottish essayist, satirist, and historian
"[I]t’s an unfortunate reality in many of the journalistic environments we exist today. We can’t criticize certain people, or dig into certain stories, or follow our noses on the trail of corruption if it means upsetting our publishers, sponsors, and donors."
-Zaid Jilani-
Former senior blogger for ThinkProgress at the Center for American Progress Action Fund
Source: How Working In Washington Taught Me We’re All A Little Like RT America, Mar 6th, 2014
"The main thing is to have a soul that loves the truth and harbours it where he finds it. And another thing: truth requires constant repetition, because error is being preached about us all the time, and not only by isolated individuals but by the masses. In the newspapers and encyclopedias, in schools and universities, everywhere error rides high and basks in the consciousness of having the majority on its side."
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe-
(1749-1832) German writer, statesman
"Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press."
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn-
(1918-2008) Russian novelist, Soviet dissident, imprisoned for 8 years for critizing Stalin in a personal letter, Nobel Prize for Literature, 1970
"A newspaper has three things to do. One is to amuse, another is to entertain and the rest is to mislead."
-Ernest Bevin-
(1881-1951) British Foreign Minister
Source: at London Conference of Foreign Ministers, 10 Feb. 1946, quoted in The Barnes Review, vol. 5, no. 3 (Washington D.C.: TBR Co., May/June 1999), p. 29
"Every failure is a step to success. Every detection of what is false directs us towards what is true: every trial exhausts some tempting form of error. Not only so; but scarcely any attempt is entirely a failure; scarcely any theory, the result of steady thought, is altogether false; no tempting form of Error is without some latent charm derived from Truth."
-William Whewell-
But everyone involved in said trial should be so without coercion. No fiat "social experiments" for theoretical "Truth", charm or no charm.
"People everywhere confuse,
What they read in newspapers with news."
-A. J. Liebling-
[Abbott Joseph Liebling] (1904-1963) American journalist, author
Source: The New Yorker, 7 April 1956
"The notion of editorial independence from ownership only dates back to the 1930s. Prior to that time the media was openly biased and that includes the Press that the founding fathers dealt with. Some of the founders like Hamilton and Franklin had actually ran media outlets that were very biased. You used to have things like Newspapers that openly proclaimed they were a Democratic or Republican or Whig or a Federalist newspaper right on the banner. The concept of an independent and allegedly neutral press was and still is mainly pushed by people from the left who do NOT want anything remotely neutral, but who instead want to make sure those 'evil' business interests don't have a means of getting their side aired without it being filtered by their idea of what a neutral press consists of."
-John Dobbins-
"But those dealing in the actual manufacture of mind are dealing in a very explosive material. The material is not merely the clay of which man is master, but the truths or semblances of truth which have a certain mastery over man. The material is explosive because it must be taken seriously. The men writing books really are throwing bombs."
-Gilbert Keith Chesterton-
(1874-1936) British essayist, critic, poet, and novelist
Source: Illustrated London News, 1924
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
-Arthur C. Clarke-
"Only an armed people can be the real bulwark of popular liberty."
-Vladimir Ilyich Lenin-
[Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov] (1870-1924) First Leader of the Soviet Union
Source: "The Beginning of the Revolution in Russia", Selected Works, Vol. I, International Publishers, New York, 1967
"The measures adopted to restore public order are: First of all, the elimination of the so-called subversive elements. ... They were elements of disorder and subversion. On the morrow of each conflict I gave the categorical order to confiscate the largest possible number of weapons of every sort and kind. This confiscation, which continues with the utmost energy, has given satisfactory results."
-Benito Mussolini-
(1883-1945) Italian dictator during WW2, founder of Italian Fascism, 'Il Duce'
Source: Speech delivered by Prime Minister Benito Mussolini before the Italian Senate, June 8, 1923. Reproduced in Mussolini as Revealed in His Political Speeches (London & Toronto: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1923), pp. 308-309
"The issue isn't gun control but state control -- obtuse and arbitrary state control, state control run amok. ... Forget guns. If Dr. Hudson, Mr. Turnbull, Dr. Gingrich and others end up in jail it won't be for their guns but our liberties."
-George Jonas-
Source: "The Issue Isn't Gun Control but State Control", National Post, July 23, 2003, p. A-15
"To prohibit a citizen from wearing or carrying a war arm ... is an unwarranted restriction upon the constitutional right to keep and bear arms. If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of constitutional privilege."
-Wilson v. State-
Source: 33 Ark. 557, at 560, 34Am. Rep. 52, at 54 (1878)
"Here's my credo. There are no good guns, There are no bad guns. A gun in the hands of a bad man is a bad thing. Any gun in the hands of a good man is no threat to anyone, except bad people."
-Charlton Heston-
(1923-2008) American actor, former president of National Rifle Association
"A sword never kills anybody; it's a tool in the killer's hand."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: Letters to Lucilius, circa 63-65 A.D.
"Americans need never fear their government because of the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
"How a politician stands on the Second Amendment tells you how he or she views you as an individual… as a trustworthy and productive citizen, or as part of an unruly crowd that needs to be lorded over, controlled, supervised, and taken care of."
-Suzanna Gratia Hupp-
(1959-) Texas State Representative (R), survivor of 'Luby's Massacre' where both her parents were among 23 people fatally shot and 50 others wounded
"Because this right [of self-defense] cannot be effectively exercised with bare hands, the right to keep and bear arms is the only efficient way to secure the fundamental right of self-defense."
-Robert Dowlut-
General Counsel for the National Rifle Association
Source: Arms: A Right to Self-Defense Against Criminals and Despots, 8 Stanford L. & Pol'y Rev. 25 (1997).
"The prohibition is general. No clause in the Constitution could by any rule of construction be conceived to give congress a power to disarm the people. Such a flagitious attempt could only be made under some general pretense by a state legislature. But if in any blind pursuit of inordinate power, either should attempt it, this amendment may be appealed to as a restraint on both."
-William Rawle-
(1759-1836) Lawyer, had been asked several times by George Washington to serve as Attorney General
Source: commenting on the Second Amendment, A VIEW OF THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES 125-26, 1829 (2nd ed.) reprinted in THE FOUNDERS’ CONSTITUTION Volume Five (Amendments I-XII) p. 214 (Univ. of Chicago Press)
"To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them."
-Richard Henry Lee-
(1732-1794) Founding Father
"The people have a right to keep and bear arms for the common defense. And as, in times of peace, armies are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be maintained without the consent of the Legislature; and the military power shall always be held in an exact subordination to the Civil authority, and be governed by it."
-Massachusetts Constitution-
Source: Part of the First, article xvii.
"What country before ever existed a century and a half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: November 13, 1787, letter to William S. Smith, quoted in Padover's Jefferson On Democracy, ed., 1939
"No slaves shall keep any arms whatever, nor pass, unless with written orders from his master or employer, or in his company, with arms from one place to another."
-A Bill Concerning Slaves-
Source: [1785], reproduced in Alfred Fried, Ed., The Essential Jefferson (Collier Books, 1963), p. 140
"Every citizen has a right to bear arms in defense of himself and the state."
-Connecticut Constitution-
Source: Article First, Section 15
"The claim and exercise of a Constitutional right cannot be converted into a crime."
-Miller v. U.S.-
Source: 230 F 2d 486, 489
"Every citizen has a right to keep and bear arms; and this right shall never be questioned."
-Maine Constitution-
Source: article I, section 16
"All persons have the right to keep and bear arms in defense of themselves, their families, their property and the state."
-New Hampshire Constitution-
Source: Part First, article 2-a
"Recent school shootings have lured ill-informed Americans into a war on our Second Amendment guarantees, led by the nation’s tyrants and their useful idiots. ... The Second Amendment was given to us as protection against tyranny by the federal government and the Congress of the United States."
-Walter E. Williams-
(1936-2020) Columnist, Professor of Economics at George Mason University
Source: An Armed Citizenry and Liberty, WorldNetDaily, May 26, 1999.
"This truth may be unfashionable, unpalatable, no doubt unpopular, but, if it is the truth, the story of mankind shows that war was universal and unceasing for millions of years before armaments were invented or armies organized. Indeed, the lucid intervals of peace and order only occurred in human history after armaments in the hands of strong governments have come into being, and civilization in every age has been nursed only in cradles guarded by superior weapons and superior discipline."
-Winston Churchill-
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1940-1945, 1951-1955)
"Fascism and communism are not two opposites, but two rival gangs fighting over the same territory, based on the collectivist principle that man is the rightless slave of the state."
-Ayn Rand-
"If men are good, you don't need government; if men are evil or ambivalent, you don't dare have one."
-Robert LeFevre-
'Cuz who's gonna run this here government...?
"If you don’t read the newspaper you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper you are misinformed."
-Mark Twain-
likely misattributed
"Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"Were it left to me to decide whether we should have government without newspapers or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"Every ambitious would-be empire clarions it abroad that she is conquering the world to bring it peace, security and freedom, and is sacrificing her sons only for the most noble and humanitarian purposes. That is a lie, and it is an ancient lie, yet generations still rise and believe it!"
-Taylor Caldwell-
attributed to Henry David Thoreau via George S. Boutwell in Caldwell's novel "Testimony of Two Men"
“[W]hen the resolution of enslaving America was formed in Great Britain, the British Parliament was advised by an artful man, who was governor of Pennsylvania, to disarm the people; that it was the best and most effectual way to enslave them; but that they should not do it openly, but weaken them, and let them sink gradually, by totally disusing and neglecting the militia.”
-George Mason-
(1725-1792), drafted the Virgina Declaration of Rights, ally of James Madison and George Washington
Source: from debates during the Virginia state ratifying convention (June 14, 1788), quoted in Elliot’s Debates
"A free people ought not only to be armed, but disciplined; to which end a uniform and well-digested plan is requisite."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
"Jim Creechan, a University of Alberta sociologist, said some of the love of guns may have its roots in Alberta's pervasive free-enterprise model of behaviour. 'It's the whole idea that the individual is more important than the collective.'"
-Alanna Mitchell-
Source: "Canada's Copycat Killing: Gun ownership in Alberta approaches U.S. levels", Globe and Mail, April 30, 1999, p. A-1
"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."
-Martin Rees-
"Every person has a right to keep and bear arms for the defense of himself and the state."
-Michigan Constitution-
Source: Article I, Section 6
"Since independence in the fourteenth century, the Swiss have been required to keep and bear arms, and since 1515, have had a policy of armed neutrality. Its form of government is similar to the one set up by our Founders -- a weak central government exercising few, defined powers having to do mostly with external affairs and limited authority over internal matters at the canton (state) and local levels."
-Benedict D. LaRosa-
historian, author
Source: Gun Control: A Historical Perspective, The Tyranny of Gun Control, 49 (Future of Freedom Foundation 1997).
"Who are the militia, if they be not the people of this country...? I ask, who are the militia? They consist of now of the whole people, except a few public officers."
-George Mason-
(1725-1792), drafted the Virgina Declaration of Rights, ally of James Madison and George Washington
Source: in the Virginia Convention on the ratification of the Constitution, June 16, 1788,
in_Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution,_
Jonathan Elliot, ed., v.3 p.425 (Philadelphia, 1836)
"The maintenance of the right to bear arms is a most essential one to every free people and should not be whittled down by technical constructions."
-State vs. Kerner-
Source: 181 N.C. 574, 107 S.E. 222, at 224 (1921)
"The foundation of our Empire was not laid in the gloomy age of Ignorance and Superstition, but at an Epoch when the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined, than at any former period."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: Circular to the States, 1783, Ref: Our Sacred Honor, Bennett (379)
"There is an opinion that parties in free countries are useful checks upon the administration of the government, and serve to keep alive the spirit of liberty. This, within certain limits, is probably true; and in governments of a monarchical cast patriotism may look with indulgence, if not with favour, upon the spirit of party: but, in those of the popular character, in governments purely elective, it is a spirit not to be encouraged. From their natural tendency it is certain there will always be enough of that spirit for every salutary purpose. And there being constant danger of excess, the effort ought to be, by force of public opinion, to mitigate and assuage it. A fire not to be quenched, it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest, instead of warming, it should consume."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: George Washington's Farewell Address, September 17, 1796
"The nature of the encroachment upon 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 of society."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
February 6, 1775
Source: Novanglus and Massachusettensis, by John Adams, p. 34, ADDRESSED To the inhabitants of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay
"A free and prosperous society has no fear of anyone entering it. But a welfare state is scared to death of every poor person who tries to get in and every rich person who tries to get out."
-Harry Browne-
"Freedom is not a gift bestowed upon us by other men, but a right that belongs to us by the laws of God and nature."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
"It has been a source of great pain to me to have met with so many among [my] opponents who had not the liberality to distinguish between political and social opposition; who transferred at once to the person, the hatred they bore to his political opinions."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Richard Mentor Johnson, 10 March 1808
"The legislative powers of the government reach actions only, and not opinions."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth... For my part, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst; and to provide for it."
-Patrick Henry-
(1736-1799) US Founding Father
Source: "The War Inevitable" speech to the Virginia Convention, March 23, 1775
"No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue; and by a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles."
-Patrick Henry-
(1736-1799) US Founding Father
"All good government is and must be republican. But at the same time, you can or will agree with me, that there is not in lexicography a more fraudulent word... Are we not, my friend, in danger of rendering the word republican unpopular in this country by an indiscreet, indeterminate, and equivocal use of it? [...] Whenever I use the word republic with approbation, I mean a government in which the people have collectively, or by representation, an essential share in the sovereignty... the republican forms in Poland and Venice are much worse, and those of Holland and Bern very little better, than the monarchical form in France before the late revolution."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: Adams to Samuel Adams, 18 Oct, 1789 in Works, VI:415,420-421
"The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. To the naive mind that can conceive of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement, it may seem absurd that in complex conditions order, and adaptation to the unknown, can be achieved more effectively by decentralizing decisions and that a division of authority will actually extend the possibility of overall order. Yet that decentralization actually leads to more information being taken into account."
-Friedrich Hayek-
The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism
"Mention slavery, and immediately the image that arises is that of Africans enslaved by Europeans. The form in which the story of slavery has reached most people today has been along the lines of the best-selling book and widely-watched television miniseries 'Roots' by Alex Haley. Challenged on the historical accuracy of 'Roots', Haley said, 'I tried to give my people a myth to live by.' However, contrary to the 'myth' Haley created, Africans were by no means the innocents portrayed in 'Roots', baffled as to why white men were coming in and taking their people away in chains. The region of West Africa from which Kunta Kinte supposedly came was one of the great slave-trading regions of the continent before, during, and after the white man arrived. During the era of the massive slave trade, a white man was more likely to catch malaria in Africa than to catch slaves himself. Europeans typically saw only the end-results of the enslavement process -- enslaved people being offered for sale on the coast. Africa was then largely ruled by Africans, who established the conditions under which slave sales took place: Stronger African peoples enslaved weaker African peoples, selling some of these slaves to Europeans and keeping others for themselves. Even at the peak of the Atlantic slave trade, Africans retained more slaves for themselves than they sent to the Western hemisphere. Slavery, therefore, was an evil of greater scope and magnitude than most people imagine, and as a result its place in history is radically different from the way it is usually portrayed."
-Thomas Sowell-
"Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line. What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views on others."
-Doris Lessing-
(1919-2013) British author
Source: Sunday Times, 10 May 1992
"Express everything you like. No word can hurt you. None. No idea can hurt you. Not being able to express an idea or word will hurt you more. Like a bullet."
-Jamaica Kincaid-
[Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson] (1949- ) American novelist
"The liberty of the press is essential to the security of freedom in a state; it ought not, therefore, to be restricted in this commonwealth."
-Massachusetts Declaration of Rights-
Source: Article XVI, 1780
"Academic freedom means the right, long accepted in the academic world, to study, discuss, and write about facts and ideas without restrictions, other than those imposed by conscience and morality."
-Yale University-
Source: Report, New York Times, 18 February 1952
"It is profit and loss that force the capitalists to employ their capital for the best possible service to the consumers. It is profit and loss that make those people supreme in the conduct of business who are best fit to satisfy the public. If profit is abolished, chaos results."
-Ludwig von Mises-
from Profit and Loss
"Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
"There's a standard formula for success in the entertainment medium, and that is: 'Beat it to death if it succeeds.'"
-Ernie Kovacs-
(1919-1962) American comedian, actor, television pioneer
"Liberty is the possibility of doubting,
the possibility of making a mistake,
the possibility of searching and experimenting,
the possibility of saying 'No' to any authority --
literary, artistic, philosophic, religious, social and even political."
-Ignazio Silone-
(1900-1978)
Source: The God That Failed, 1950
"Liberty and good government do not exclude each other; and there are excellent reasons why they should go together. Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end."
-Lord Acton-
[John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton] (1834-1902), First Baron Acton of Aldenham
Source: Lord Acton, in The History of Freedom in Antiquity (1877)
"To subject an artist’s work to a litmus test of political probity -- and to punish institutions that will not carry out the mandate of the state -- is to traffic in the thought control that gave us Stalinism and Nazism..."
-Richard Goldstein-
Source: “Editorial: Mr. Frohnmayer’s Wall,” Village Voice, 21 November 1989
"Everything you read in the press is absolutely true. Except the rare event of which you have personal knowledge."
-Erwin Knoll-
editor of The Progressive magazine
Source: “Knoll’s Law of Accuracy in Media.”
"The price of freedom of religion, or of speech, or of the press, is that we must put up with, and even pay for, a good deal of rubbish."
-Justice Robert H. Jackson-
(1892-1954), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
"We have an obligation to one another, responsibilities and trusts. That does not mean we must be pigeons, that we must be exploited. But it does mean that we should look out for one another when and as much as we can; and that we have a personal responsibility for our behavior; and that our behavior has consequences of a very real and profound nature. We are not powerless. We have tremendous potential for good or ill. How we choose to use that power is up to us; but first we must choose to use it. We're told every day, "You can't change the world." But the world is changing every day. Only question is … who's doing it? You or somebody else?"
-J. Michael Straczynski-
"In order to enjoy the inestimable benefits that the liberty of the press ensures, it is necessary to submit to the inevitable evils it creates..."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
[Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clerel, le Comte de Tocqueville] (1805-1859) French historian
Source: Democracy in America
"We owe to democracy, at least in part, the regime of discussion with which we live; we owe it to the principal modern liberties: those of thought, press and association. And the regime of free discussion is the only one which permits the ruling class to renew itself… which eliminates that class quasi-automatically when it no longer corresponds to the interests of the country."
-Gaetano Mosca-
(1858-1941) Italian political scientist, journalist and public servant
Source: Partiti e Sindacata nella crisi del regime parlamentare, 1961
"And I honor the man who is willing to sink
half his present repute for the freedom to think,
and, when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak,
Will risk t' other half for the freedom to speak."
-James Russell Lowell-
(1819-1891) American author and diplomatist
Source: A Fable for Critics, 1848
"Among other causes of misfortune which your not being armed brings upon you, it makes you despised..."
-Niccolo Machiavelli-
(1469-1527) Italian Statesman and Political Philosopher
"To my mind it is wholly irresponsible to go into the world incapable of preventing violence, injury, crime, and death. How feeble is the mindset to accept defenselessness. How unnatural. How cheap. How cowardly. How pathetic."
-Ted Nugent-
(1948- ) American rock musician, author, activist
"The loss of liberty in general would soon follow the suppression of the liberty of the press; for it is an essential branch of liberty, so perhaps it is the best preservative of the whole."
-John Peter Zenger-
(1697-1746)
Source: 1733
"The freedom to express varying and often opposing ideas is essential to a variety of conceptions of democracy. If democracy is viewed as essentially a process – a way in which collective decisions for a society are made – free expression is crucial to the openness of the process and to such characteristics as elections, representation of interests, and the like."
-Jonathan D. Casper-
Source: The Politics of Civil Liberties, 1972
"Only oppression should fear the full exercise of freedom."
-Jose Marti y Perez-
(1853-1895)
"Under capitalism, rich people become powerful. But under socialism, powerful people become rich."
-Glenn Reynolds-
Under crony capitalism, the powerful become rich, too. Hey. Maybe there's a connection there...
"Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened."
-Thomas Hardy-
"Posterity -- you will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it."
-John Quincy Adams-
(1767-1848) 6th US President
"Arms, like laws, discourage and keep the invader and the plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
"Loose the bands of wickedness, undo the bundles that oppress, let those who are broken go free, and break asunder every burden. Share your bread with the hungry, welcome into your house the afflicted and homeless; when you see a naked man, clothe him, and do not turn your back on your own flesh. Then your light will arise like the dawn, and your wound will quickly be healed. Your justice shall go before you, the glory of the Lord will closely follow you"
-Isaiah-
Source: Holy Bible, Isaiah 58:6-8
"I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people."
-Issac Newton-
(1642-1727) English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist and theologian
Source: 1721, after having lost huge amounts of money in the South Sea Bubble
"In those wretched countries where a man cannot call his tongue his own, he can scarce call anything his own. Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
Source: Dogwood Papers
"It is a common observation here that our cause is the cause of all mankind, and that we are fighting for their liberty in defending our own."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
Source: letter to Samuel Cooper, May 1, 1777
"Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
Masters elevated from those very same corrupt and vicious people, of course.
"The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."
-George Orwell-
[Eric Arthur Blair] (1903-1950) British author
"The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled."
-John Kenneth Galbraith-
(1908-2006) Canadian-born economist, Harvard professor
Source: Money: Whence it came, where it went - 1975, p29
"If they take the ship, they'll rape us to death, eat our flesh and sew our skins into their clothing. And if we're very very lucky, they'll do it in that order."
-Zoe Alleyne Washburn-
Firefly S1E1b, 'Serenity', regarding a Reaver ship
Not all that different from government, really...
"So many vows. They make you swear and swear. Defend the King, obey the King, obey your father, protect the innocent, defend the weak. But what if your father despises the King? What if the King massacres the innocent? It's too much. No matter what you do, you're forsaking one vow or another."
-Jaime Lannister-
Game of Thrones
Man Without Honor - S2E7
Unless your vow is only to principle, and not to men.
"If you really want to compete with Russia and China to prevent the 21st Century from being dominated by a new axis of evil, you must first defeat the Church of Global Warming. As long as that’s the official state religion of the Western world, we haven’t got a prayer."
-John Hayward-
National Security Deputy Editor for Breitbart News
2022
"One of the most pathetic — and dangerous — signs of our times is the growing number of individuals and groups who believe that no one can possibly disagree with them for any honest reason."
-Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
"Every corner of the public psyche is canvassed by some of the most talented citizens to see if the desire for some merchandisable product can be cultivated."
-John Kenneth Galbraith-
(1908-2006) Canadian-born economist, Harvard professor
"No mask like open truth to cover lies,
As to go naked is the best disguise."
-William Congreve-
(1670-1729) English playwright and poet
"The Liberty of the press is the Palladium of all the civil, political and religious rights of an Englishman."
-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
Source: London Public Advertiser, 1769
"It has been frequently remarked, that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force. "
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: The Federalist Papers No. 1
"The next great heresy is going to be simply an attack on morality; and especially on sexual morality. And it is coming, not from a few Socialists surviving from the Fabian Society, but from the living exultant energy of the rich resolved to enjoy themselves at last, with neither Popery nor Puritanism nor Socialism to hold them back. … The roots of the new heresy, God knows, are as deep as nature itself, whose power is the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eye and the pride of life. I say that the man who cannot see this cannot see the signs of the times; cannot see even the skysigns in the street that are the new sort of signs in heaven. The madness of tomorrow is not in Moscow but much more in Manhattan."
-Gilbert Keith Chesterton-
(1874-1936) British essayist, critic, poet, and novelist
"To create conditions in which competition will be as effective as possible, to prevent fraud and deception, to break up monopolies -- these tasks provide a wide and unquestioned field for state activity."
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
Source: The Road to Serfdom
"If gun control bore any relation to homicide rates, Washington, DC would be the safest place in the country."
-Mark Steyn-
(1959-) Canadian author, writer, journalist, and columnist
Source: You can’t blame it all on the guns, Electronic Telegraph, Sunday April 26, 1999
"Cowardice asks the question, is it safe?
Expediency asks the question, is it politic?
Vanity asks the question, is it popular?
But conscience asks the question, is it right?
And there comes a time when one must take a position
that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular,
but one must take it because it is right."
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-
(1929-1968) US civil rights leader
"This leftist political strategy to win office and power relies on something very powerful: the desire to increase the number of Americans who are dependent on getting money that is taken from other citizens.
Sadly, this strategy has worked for half a century! And now it works because Americans who are trapped in this nightmare do not want their government money taken away from them!"
-Star Parker-
(1956-) American syndicated columnist, Republican politician, author, founder of Center for Urban Renewal and Education (CURE)
Source: Oct. 23, 2015
"In a world largely free of slavery today, it may seem hard to realize that slavery was an almost universal institution for thousands of years. Despite widespread misconceptions in the United States today that the institution of slavery was based on race, for most of the millennia in which slavery existed around the world, it was based on whoever was vulnerable to enslavement and within striking distance."
-Thomas Sowell-
"The sword of the law should never fall but on those whose guilt is so apparent as to be pronounced by their friends as well as foes."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Letter, 1801
Well. Unless the cops just wanna keep their shit, obviously...
"Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it. Sometimes the law places the whole apparatus of judges, police, prisons and gendarmes at the service of the plunderers, and treats the victim -- when he defends himself -- as a criminal."
-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)
"The power of the executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charges known to the law, and particularly to deny him judgment by his peers for an indefinite period, is in the highest degree odious, and is the foundation of all totalitarian governments...Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilisation."
-Winston Churchill-
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1940-1945, 1951-1955)
Source: The Second World War; Book 5, pg 635
"The only, absolute and best friend that a man has, in this selfish world, the only one that will not betray or deny him, is his Dog."
-King Frederick of Prussia-
1789
"You want a friend in Washington? Get a dog."
-Harry S Truman-
"Let us contemplate our forefathers, and posterity, and resolve to maintain the rights bequeathed to us from the former, for the sake of the latter. The necessity of the times, more than ever, calls for our utmost circumspection, deliberation, fortitude and perseverance. Let us remember that "if we suffer tamely a lawless attack upon our liberty, we encourage it, and involve others in our doom," it is a very serious consideration ... that millions yet unborn may be the miserable sharers of the event."
-Samuel Adams-
(1722-1803), was known as the "Father of the American Revolution."
1771
"Only the IRS can attach 100% of a tax debtor's wages and/or property.
Only the IRS can invade the privacy of a citizen without court process of any kind.
Only the IRS can seize property without a court order.
Only the IRS can force a citizen to try his case in a special court governed by the IRS.
Only the IRS can compel the production of documents, records, and other materials without a court case being in existence.
Only the IRS can with impunity publish the details of a citizens debt.
Only the IRS can legally, without a court order, subject citizens to electronic surveillance.
Only the IRS can force waiver of statute of limitations and other citizen's rights through the threat of Arbitrary assesment.
Only the IRS uses extralegal coercion. Threats to witnesses to examine their taxes regularly produces whatever evidence the IRS dictates.
Only the IRS is free to violate a written agreement with a citizen.
Only the IRS uses reprisals against citizen and public officials alike.
Only the IRS can take property on the basis of conjecture.
Only the IRS is free to maintain lists of citizen guilty of no crime for the purpose of harassing and monitoring them.
Only the IRS envelops all citizens.
Only the IRS publicly admits that it's purpose is to instill fear in the citizenry as a technique of performing it's function."
-George V. Hansen-
(1930-) US Congressman (R-ID)
Source: To Harass Our People, by George Hansen, (August 1993)
"When governments use the judiciary to recover 'damage,' the courts intrude on the regulatory and revenue responsibilities of legislatures. And when lawsuits based on tenuous legal theories impose high costs on defendants, due process gives way to a form of extortion, with public officials serving as bagmen for private contingency fee lawyers."
-Michael I. Kraus-
Source: Michael I. Kraus and Robert A. Levy, (Michael Kraus is professor of law at George Mason University in Arlington, VA, and Robert A. Levy is a senior fellow of constitutional studies at the Cato Institute), in So Sue Them, Sue Them, CATO COMMENTARY, June 7, 1999.
"No man suffers injustice without learning, vaguely but surely, what justice is."
-Isaac Rosenfeld-
(1918-1956) Jewish-American writer
"In the Halls of Justice the only justice is in the halls."
-Lenny Bruce-
[Leonard Alfred Schneider] (1925-1966) American comedian, social critic and satirist
"Judicial minds have systematically rejected arguments that clashed with their ideologies. Consequently, the forum of last resort has not checked the excesses of the executive and legislative branches."
-Robert Dowlut-
General Counsel for the National Rifle Association
Source: Arms: A Right to Self-Defense Against Criminals and Despots, 8 STANFORD L. & POL’Y REV. 25 (1997).
"How does something immoral, when done privately, become moral when it is done collectively? Furthermore, does legality establish morality? Slavery was legal; apartheid is legal; Stalinist, Nazi, and Maoist urges were legal. Clearly, the fact of legality does not justify these crimes. Legality, alone, cannot be the talisman of moral people."
-Walter E. Williams-
(1936-2020) Columnist, Professor of Economics at George Mason University
Source: All It Takes Is Guts
"In Anthony Day's review of Walter Laquerur's book, 'The New Terrorism,' it is proposed that those who dislike or distrust government are the sources of the 'new terrorism,' No clearer example of projection could be offered than this, for the real terrorists of the 20th century have been political systems, which have managed, through wars and genocidal practices, to slaughter over 200 million men, women, and children, as well as to dehumanize society and reduce personal liberty. What sense of history informs the judgments of those who have not grasped the fact that state power -- not those who distrust politics -- has inflicted untold misery upon the human race? Terrorism is only politics by other means, whether practiced by governments or by those seeking to influence government policies.
There appears to be a growing awareness, on the part of many intelligent and peaceful men and women, of the danger that political systems pose to us all, and of the need for fundamentally new social principles. To those who can offer no better response to our politically managed mindset of 'diplomacy, law and politics' that has brought us to where we are, such growing distrust of government must, indeed, be terrorizing."
-Butler Shaffer-
professor of law
letter to the LA Times book review editor 11/16/1999
"It is, indeed, difficult to conceive how men who have entirely given up the habit of self-government should succeed in making a proper choice of those by whom they are to be governed; and no one will ever believe that a liberal, wise, and energetic government can spring from the suffrages of a subservient people."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
"Those who oppose the novel most vociferously today are of the opinion that intermingling with a different culture will inevitably weaken and ruin their own. I am of the opposite opinion. The Satanic Verses celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Melange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world. It is the great possibility that mass migration gives the world... The Satanic Verses is for change- by-fusion, change-by-conjoining. It is a love song to our mongrel selves."
-Salman Rushdie-
"Where the very safety of the country depends upon the resolution to be taken, no consideration of justice or injustice, humanity or cruelty, nor of glory or of shame, should be allowed to prevail. But putting all other considerations aside, the only question should be: What course will save the life and liberty of the country?"
-Niccolo Machiavelli-
(1469-1527) Italian Statesman and Political Philosopher
Source: Discourses
"...truth is great and will prevail if left to herself; that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"Take heed of doing irrevocable acts in thy passion, As the revealing of secrets, which makes thee a bankrupt for society ever after: neither do such things which done once are done for ever, so that no bemoaning can amend them. Sampsons hair grew again, but not his eyes: Time may restore some losses, others are never to be repaird. Wherefore in thy rage make no Persian decree which cannot be revers'd or repeald; but rather Polonian laws which (they say) last but three dayes: Do not in an instant what an age cannot recompence."
-Thomas Fuller-
Accepting under-tested novel "vaccines", for example...
"Figures don't lie, but liars can figure."
-anonymous-
"A free man is he who does not fear to go to the end of his thought."
-Leon Blum-
(1872-1950) Prime Minister of France
"Those who refuse to rule themselves are usually bent on ruling others. Those who can rule themselves usually have no interest in ruling others."
-Leonard E. Read-
"Unjust rule never abides continually."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: Tragedies, Medea, line 196; (Medea)
"Disobedience or evasion of a constitutional mandate may not be tolerated, even though such disobedience may, at least temporarily, promote in some respects the best interests of the public."
-State v. Board of Examiners-
Source: State v. Board of Examiners, 274 N.Y. 367; 9 NE 2d 12; 112 ALR 660.
"If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true is really true, there would be little hope of advance."
-Orville Wright-
"That the king can do no wrong is a necessary and fundamental principle of the English constitution."
-Sir William Blackstone-
(1723-1780) English jurist, judge, Tory politician
1769
"The tree of liberty could not grow were it not watered with the blood of tyrants"
-Bertrand Barere de Vieuzac-
(1755-1841) French politician and journalist, member of the National Convention during the French Revolution
Source: Speech in the Convention Nationale, 1872
"Only reason can convince us of those three fundamental truths without a recognition of which there can be no effective liberty: that what we believe is not necessarily true; that what we like is not necessarily good; and that all questions are open."
-Clive Bell-
(1881-1964)
Source: Civilization, 1928
"A welfare state is frightened of every poor person who tries to get in and every rich person who tries to get out."
-Harry Browne-
(1933-2006) American libertarian writer, politician, and free-market investment analyst. Libertarian candidate for US President 1996 & 2000
"If you think we are free today, you know nothing about tyranny and even less about freedom."
-Tom Braun-
Source: Radio Show, Spirit of '76 -- Voice of Warning
"Pure 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-
Federalist 10
"Freedom is not a reward or a decoration that is celebrated with champagne... Oh no! It's a...long distance race, quite solitary and very exhausting."
-Albert Camus-
(1913-1960) French Algerian author
"A great step towards independence is a good-humored stomach, one that is willing to endure rough treatment."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter CXXIII: On the conflict between pleasure and virtue, line 3
"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."
-Dugald Bell-
"Society is always engaged in a vast conspiracy to preserve itself -- at the expense of the new demands of each new generation."
-John Haynes Holmes-
(1879-1964) prominent Unitarian minister and pacifist
"What then? Shall I not follow in the footsteps of my predecessors? I shall indeed use the old road, but if I find one that makes a shorter cut and is smoother to travel, I shall open the new road. Men who have made these discoveries before us are not our masters, but our guides. Truth lies open for all; it has not yet been monopolized. And there is plenty of it left even for posterity to discover."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter XXXIII
"When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, 'Who is destroying the world?' You are."
-Ayn Rand-
[Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum] (1905-1982) Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter
Source: Atlas Shrugged, p. 386 (1957)
"[M]onopoly profits exist over the long run only when the government guarantees them, as in utilities and cable. And for concentration of market power, no robber baron can hold a candle to the U.S. government.... The hugest concentration of market power in this country does not lie with the likes of Rupert Murdoch or Bill Gates, but with government itself.... No private company, no matter how huge or wealthy, could possibly have as much widespread power over the function of American markets as government does. And this power is exercised with essential unseriousness.... And unlike business attempts to make money, which necessarily involve selling something to a willing consumer, government’s market manipulations require forcing people into situations -- whether paying for cars or food, paying for R&D or new technologies, or selling off a part of their company -- that they would not have wanted to be in but for the government’s ham-handed threat of force.... Nothing could serve the workings of the marketplace better than [government] leaving it."
-Brian Doherty-
(1968-) American journalist, author, Senior Editor at Reason magazine
Source: Monopoly Games, Reason, p 7, Aug./Sept. 1995.
"The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly."
-Abraham Lincoln-
"The rub is that the pursuit of happiness, as an end in itself, tends automatically, and widely, to be replaced by the pursuit of pleasure with a consequent general softening of the fibers of will, intelligence, spirit."
-Whittaker Chambers-
[Jay Vivian Chambers] (aka David Whittaker) (1901-1961) American writer, editor. A Communist party member and Soviet spy, he later renounced communism and became an outspoken opponent.
"As for the rage to believe that we have found the secret of liberty in general permissiveness from the cradle on, this seems to me a disastrous sentimentality, which, whatever liberties it sets loose, loosens also the cement that alone can bind society into a stable compound -- a code of obeyed taboos. I can only recall the saying of a wise Frenchman that 'liberty is the luxury of self-discipline.' Historically, those peoples that did not discipline themselves had discipline thrust on them from the outside. That is why the normal cycle in the life and death of great nations has been first a powerful tyranny broken by revolt, the enjoyment of liberty, the abuse of liberty -- and back to tyranny again. As I see it, in this country -- a land of the most persistent idealism and the blandest cynicism -- the race is on between its decadence and its vitality."
-Alistair Cooke-
Source: America
"The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat."
-Lily Tomlin-
(1939-) American actress, comedian, writer, producer
"Gentlemen, I have had men watching you for a long time and I am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter, I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves."
-Andrew Jackson-
(1767-1845) 7th US President
Source: in 1836, Jackson forced the closing of the Second Bank of the U.S. by revoking its charter
"With regard to Banks, they have taken too deep and too wide a root in social transactions, to be got rid of altogether, if that were desirable. They have a hold on public opinion, which alone would make it expedient to aim rather at the improvement, than the suppression of them. As now generally constituted, their advantages whatever they be, are outweighed by the excesses of their paper emissions, and the partialities and corruption with which they are administered."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: May 1827, James Madison letter to his friend James K. Paulding
"Fascism will come at the hands of perfectly authentic Americans, as violently against Hitler and Mussolini as the next one, but who are convinced that the present economic system is washed up and that the present political system in America has outlived its usefulness and who wish to commit this country to the rule of the bureaucratic state; interfering in the affairs of the states and cities; taking part in the management of industry and finance and agriculture; assuming the role of great national banker and investor, borrowing billions every year and spending them on all sorts of projects through which such a government can paralyze opposition and command public support; marshaling great armies and navies at crushing costs to support the industry of war and preparation for war which will become our greatest industry; and adding to all this the most romantic adventures in global planning, regeneration, and domination all to be done under the authority of a powerfully centralized government in which the executive will hold in effect all the powers with Congress reduced to the role of a debating society. That is your fascist. And the sooner America realizes this dreadful fact the sooner it will arm itself to make an end of American fascism masquerading under the guise of the champion of democracy."
-John T. Flynn-
As We Go Marching (1944)
"Dissent and dissenters have no monopoly on freedom. They must tolerate opposition. They must accept dissent from their dissent. And they must give it the respect and the latitude which they claim for themselves."
-Abe Fortas-
(1910-1982) U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: New York Times Magazine, 12 May 1968
"[Trade licensing] almost inevitably becomes a tool in the hands of a special producer group to maintain a monopoly position at the expense of the rest of the public. There is no way to avoid this result."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
"The unions might be good for the people who are in the unions but it doesn't do a thing for the people who are unemployed. Because the union keeps down the number of jobs, it doesn't do a thing for them."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
Source: Interview with Brian Lamb, In Depth Book TV (2000)
"We are students of words; we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-
(1803-1882) American essayist, lecturer, and poet
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences."
-C. S. Lewis-
(1898-1963), British novelist
Source: "God in the Dock" (1948)
"To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society."
-Theodore Roosevelt-
(1858-1919) 26th US President
"Do you think nobody would willingly entrust his children to you or pay you for teaching them? Why do you have to extort your fees and collect your pupils by compulsion?"
-Isabel Paterson-
(1886-1961) Canadian-American journalist, author, political philosopher, literary critic
"[P]ublic schooling often ends up to be little more than majoritarian domination of minority viewpoints."
-Robert B. Everhart-
Professor of Education, Univ. of Ca Santa Barbara
"It's very helpful for tyrants that most people have no real idea how much value they produce. Many millions of people work at least eight hours a day, five days a week, because they view that as 'normal.' If they are then able to pay their bills, have a car, a house, food, etc., then they assume all is well. They have no idea how rich they WOULD be if not for the state stealing a chunk every step of the way--whenever they earn money (income taxes), when they save money (inflation), when they spend money (sales taxes), when they own stuff (property taxes), and so on. If you're a tyrant, and you can steal a huge chunk from all of your subjects, and still leave them feeling relatively secure and financially 'comfortable,' very few will even THINK about the situation, much less cause you any sort of trouble. The moral of the story: keep your livestock fat, entertained and stupid, and you'll have a long, successful reign."
-Larken Rose-
"Anti - social behavior is a trait of intelligence in a world full of conformists."
-Nikola Tesla-
"There is nothing in the Constitution that professes or attempts to bind the posterity of those who established it. The question arises whether their posterity have bound themselves."
-Lysander Spooner-
The Constitution of No Authority, 1870
"An opinion, right or wrong, can never constitute a moral offense, nor be in itself a moral obligation. It may be mistaken; it may involve an absurdity, or a contradiction. It is a truth, or it is an error; it can never be a crime or a virtue."
-Frances Wright-
(1795-1852) Scottish-born lecturer, writer, freethinker, feminist, abolitionist, and social reformer
Source: A Few Days in Athens
"Too much of what is called education is little more than an expensive isolation from reality."
-Thomas Sowell-
"Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless.
Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one's prejudgment simply need not be believed — in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical — and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous."
-Dietrich Bonhoeffer-
(1906 - 1945)
On Stupidity - Letters and Papers from Prison
"POLITICS, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.”
-Ambrose Bierce-
"Monopoly favors the rich (on the whole) just as competition (on the whole) favors the poor."
-George Watson-
Source: Journal of Economic Affairs
"Competition, free enterprise, and an open market were never meant to be symbolic fig leaves for corporate socialism and monopolistic capitalism."
-Ralph Nader-
(1934-) American attorney and political activist
Source: introduction to The Closed Enterprise System
"Let monopolies and all kinds and degrees of oppression be carefully guarded against."
-Samuel Webster-
(1813–1872) British founder of Webster's Brewery (Samuel Webster & Sons Ltd)
1777
"Imagine an organization so unscrupulous that its leaders routinely kill people and punish others wholly without due process of law, an organization that could not exist except for the resources it seizes by extortion and robbery, an organization that takes massively -- both in resources and in liberties -- from the general public in order to enrich its own leaders and key supporters, an organization that hands back a portion of its plunder to its victims in order to create the (quite false) impression that the capos are the friends of ordinary people, an organization that shamelessly employs every means possible to misrepresent its true nature and to lie about its actual activities and the motives that impel them. Now imagine what sort of people you would expect to succeed in fighting or intriguing their way into leadership positions in such an organization. Now imagine throwing yourself enthusiastically into supporting one or another of these wannabe crime kings as if he or she were a veritable savior of humanity (or at least your favorite subset of it)."
-Robert Higgs-
"The law becomes perverted when it is used to violate the rights of the individual."
-Frédéric Bastiat-
"In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence."
-Laurence J. Peter-
"Others -- as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders -- serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God. A very few -- as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men -- serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part ..."
-Henry David Thoreau-
(1817-1862) American author, poet, philosopher, polymath, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and transcendentalist
Source: A Duty of Civil Disobedience [1849]; La Désobéissance civile, translated by Micheline Flak (Montréal: La Presse, 1973), p. 60
"We are human and our lot is to learn and to be hurled into inconceivable new worlds."
-Novalis-
[Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg] (2 May 1772 – 25 March 1801)
"People often fail to perceive the fundamental difference between the liberal and the anarchistic idea. Anarchism rejects all coercive social organizations, and repudiates coercion as a social technique. It wishes in fact to abolish the State and the legal order, because it believes that society could do better without them. It does not fear anarchical disorder because it believes that without compulsion men would unite for social co-operation and would behave in the manner that social life demands.
Anarchism as such is neither liberal nor socialistic: it moves on a different plane from either. Whoever denies the basic idea of Anarchism, whoever denies that it is or ever will be possible to unite men without coercion under a binding legal order for peaceful co-operation, will, whether liberal or socialist, repudiate anarchistic ideals."
-Ludwig von Mises-
Stated differently, anarchism respects the possibilities of SPONTANEOUS order -- much as you most likely live the majority of your own life even now...
"It used to be a fashion amongst men that when a charge was made, some sort of proof was brought forward to establish it, and if no proof was found to exist, the charge was dropped."
-A. Lincoln-
Third Lincoln-Douglas Debate, 9/15/1858
How weird...
"Being right too soon is socially unacceptable."
-Robert A. Heinlein-
"We believe that theft is theft and does not become legitimated because organized robbers call their theft 'taxation.' We believe that enslavement is enslavement even if the institution committing that act calls it 'conscription.' In short, the key to libertarian theory is that it makes no exceptions in its universal ethic for government"
-Murray Rothbard-
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance."
-Thomas Sowel-
"The two major political parties are so filled to the brim with anti-constitution and anti-liberty sociopaths, that I don't believe there is such a thing as a 'lesser of two evils.' They're both thoroughly evil."
-Michael Boldin-
Tenth Amendment Center
"Liberty is the soul's right to breathe and, when it cannot take a long breath, laws are girdled too tight."
-Rev. Henry Ward Beecher-
(1813-1887) American abolitionist, clergyman
Source: Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, 1887
"You have enemies? Why, it is the story of every man who has done a great deed or created a new idea. It is the cloud which thunders around everything that shines."
-Victor Hugo-
"If you do not specify and confront real issues, what you will do will surely obscure them. If you do not alarm anyone morally, you will yourself remain morally asleep. If you do not embody controversy, what you say will be an acceptance of the drift to the coming human hell."
-C. Wright Mills-
(1916-1962)
"[Natural rights are] moral claims to those spheres of action which are necessary for the welfare of the individual and the development of his personality."
-Miner Searle Bates-
(1897-1978) American political activist in Japan, Vice President of Nanjing University
Source: Religious Liberty: An Inquiry, 1945
"An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it."
-Jeff Cooper-
"The fighting pistol, in this new concept, is not the weapon of an aggressor. It is not the arm of anyone whose foremost concern is battle. On the contrary it is the safeguard of a person who is trying his best to carry out his unwarlike business of ranching, surveying, mining, running a store, or otherwise making a living, but under circumstances where he may find lethal trouble served up at any moment, without warning. This is the real mission of the sidearm, and while it was particularly applicable to the life of the pioneer, it remains identical and equally important today."
-Jeff Cooper-
Fighting Handguns
"Al Capone operated his racket in 3 districts. I operated on 3 continents. I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 1 helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested."
-SMEDLEY BUTLER-
Major General, United States Marine Corps
"If, as it appears, the experiment that was called 'America' is at an end... then perhaps a fitting epitaph would be ... 'here lies America the greatest nation that might have been had it not been for the Edomite bankers who first stole their money, used their stolen money to buy their politicians and press and lastly deprived them of their constitutional freedom by the most evil device yet created --- The Federal Reserve Banking System.' "
-G. D. McDaniel-
"In ancient Babylon, Sumeria, Egypt, China, Greece, and Rome, for instance, price controls promoted not fairness but famine. During the twentieth century, central banks were supposed to help safeguard economies, but they brought on the worst inflations and depressions. Alcohol and drug prohibition, intended to enforce moral behavior, contributed to escalating violence."
-Marisa Manley-
Source: Why Laws Backfire, THE FREEMAN, p. 545, August 1996.
"They were men that had not learned the art of submission, nor had they been trained to the art of war. But our astonishing success taught the enemies of liberty that undisciplined freemen are superior to veteran slaves. Live free or die. Death is not greatest of evils."
-General John Stark-
"I am I plus my circumstances."
-José Ortega y Gasset-
(1883-1955) Spanish philosopher
"Labor, in itself, is neither elevating or otherwise. It is the laborer's privilege to ennoble his work by the aim with which he undertakes it, and by the enthusiasm and faithfulness he puts into it."
-Lucy Larcom-
(1824-1893) American poet, author
"Forms of expression always appear turgid to those who do not share the emotions they represent."
-Gilbert Keith Chesterton-
(1874-1936) British essayist, critic, poet, and novelist
Source: A Handful of Authors
"Government should allow persons to engage in whatever conduct they want to, no matter how deviant or abnormal it may be, so long as
(a) they know what they are doing,
(b) they consent to it, and
(c) no one -- at least no one other than the participants -- is harmed by it."
-Hugo Adam Bedau-
(1926-2012) Professor of Philosophy, Tufts University (Emeritus)
That should be true for ANY government. But to a Constitutionally constrained SERVANT government, thoughts regarding "permission" should not even occur.
"A man is either free or he is not. There cannot be any apprenticeship for freedom."
-Imamu Amiri Baraka-
Source: in Kulchur
"For what avail the plough or sail,
Or land or life, if freedom fail?"
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-
(1803-1882) American essayist, lecturer, and poet
Source: "Boston" Stanza 15
"My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was less competition there."
-Indira Gandhi-
(1917-1984) Prime Minister of India
"Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else’s resources as carefully as he uses his own. So if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of private property."
-Milton Friedman-
"The way to maximize production is to maximize the incentives to production. And the way to do that, as the modern world has discovered, is through the system known as capitalism—the system of private property, free markets, and free enterprise."
-Henry Hazlitt-
"Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship."
-George Orwell-
"Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and the simple, however cruel; our worst enemies are the intelligent and corrupt."
-Graham Greene-
"Labor is the fabled magician's wand, the philosophers stone, and the cap of good fortune."
-James Weldon Johnson-
(1871-1938) American author, educator, lawyer, diplomat, songwriter, civil rights activist, first black executive secretary of the NAACP
"The learned ignore the evidence of their senses to preserve the coherence of the ideas of their imagination."
-Adam Smith-
"Labor disgraces no man; unfortunately, you occasionally find men who disgrace labor."
-Ulysses S. Grant-
(1822-1885) 18th US President
"Every man is dishonest who lives upon the labor of others, no matter if he occupies a throne."
-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"
"Weary the path that does not challenge. Doubt is an incentive to truth and patient inquiry leadeth the way."
-Hosea Ballou-
(1771-1852) American Universalist clergyman, theological writer
"Does a populace have informed consent when a ruling minority acts in secret to ignite a war, doing this to justify the existence of the minority's forces? History already has answered that question. Every society in the ConSentiency today reflects the historical judgment that failure to provide full information for informed consent on such an issue represents an ultimate crime."
-Frank Herbert-
"A man’s greatest pleasure is to defeat his enemies, to drive them before him, to take from them that which they possessed, to see those whom they cherished in tears, to ride their horses, and to hold their wives and daughters in his arms."
-Genghis Khan-
(c. 1162-1227) [Temüjin] founder and Great Khan (Emperor) of the Mongol Empire
"'I will have no man in my boat,' said Starbuck, 'who is not afraid of a whale.' By this, he seemed to mean, not only that the most reliable and useful courage was that which arises from the fair estimation of the encountered peril, but that an utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward."
-Moby Dick-
"Every attempt to gag the free expression of thought is an unsocial act against society. That is why judges and juries who try to enforce such laws make themselves ridiculous."
-Jay Fox-
(1870-1961) was an American journalist, trade unionist, and political activist
Source: in Liberty and the Great Libertarians (Charles Spradling), 1913
"History fails to record a single precedent in which nations subject to moral decay have not passed into political and economic decline. There has been either a spiritual awakening to overcome the moral lapse, or a progressive deterioration leading to ultimate national disaster."
-General Douglas MacArthur-
(1880-1964) WWII Supreme Allied Commander of the Southwest Pacific, Supreme United Nations Commander
"Nature never deceives us; it is always we who deceive ourselves."
-Jean-Jacques Rousseau-
(1712-1778) Political philosopher, educationist and essayist
"The earth becomes more crowded, and our dependence upon our neighbours becomes more intimate. In these circumstances life cannot remain tolerable unless we learn to let each other alone in all matters that are not of immediate and obvious concern to the community. We must learn to respect each other's privacy, and not to impose our moral standards upon each other. The Puritan imagines that his moral standard is the moral standard; he does not realize that other ages and other countries, and even other groups in his own country, have moral standards different from his, to which they have as good a right as he has to his. Unfortunately, the love of power which is the natural outcome of Puritan self-denial makes the Puritan more executive than other people, and makes it difficult for others to resist him. Let us hope that a broader education and a wider knowledge of mankind may gradually weaken the ardour of our too virtuous masters."
-Bertrand Russell-
[Bertrand Arthur William Russell] (1872-1970) Philosopher, educator
Source: The Recrudescence of Puritanism, in Sceptical Essays, 1928
"It is always dangerous to the liberties of the people to have an army stationed among them, over which they have no control ... The Militia is composed of free Citizens. There is therefore no danger of their making use of their Power to the destruction of their own Rights, or suffering others to invade them."
-Samuel Adams-
(1722-1803), was known as the "Father of the American Revolution."
Source: 3 Samuel Adams, Writings 251 (Henry A. Cushing Ed., 1906).
"After years spent trying to deal with the effects of COINTELPRO, my rage at the FBI's almost unimaginable evil remains undiminished because I believe that it succeeded in many of its horrifying goals, given the deaths of Martin King, Malcolm X, and other sixties leaders. Since the FBI uses taxpayer dollars to fund its extreme and ridiculous investigations of anyone who expresses dissenting opinions, even resorting to crime -- including theft, encouragement to murder, subornation of perjury, and manipulation of the judicial process -- to achieve its ends, I have always advocated its disbanding."
-William M. Kunstler-
civil rights attorney
"If the right to vote were expanded to seven year olds ... its policies would most definitely reflect the ‘legitimate concerns’ of children to have ‘adequate’ and ‘equal’ access to ‘free’ french fries, lemonade and videos."
-Hans-Hermann Hoppe-
Source: Democracy–The God That Failed: The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order
"Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"The great thing about democracy is that it gives every voter a chance to do something stupid."
-Art Spander-
Sports columnist, baseball Hall of Fame
"It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting."
-Tom Stoppard-
[Tomáš Straussler] (1937- ) Czechoslovakian screenwriter, playwright
Source: his philosophical play, Jumpers, first produced in 1972
"If a single writer in a country is in chains, then there are some links of that chain that binds us all."
-Vaclav Havel-
(1936-2011) Czech writer, philosopher, dissident, statesman, last President of Czechoslovakia
"Your book is dedicated by the soundest reason. You had better get out of France as quickly as you can."
-Voltaire-
[François Marie Arouet] (1694-1778) French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher
1758
"We will all be better citizens when voting records of our Congressmen are followed as carefully as scores of pro-football games."
-Lou Erickson-
"There is no safety. Only varying states of risk. And failure."
-Lois McMaster Bujold-
"The tax that was supposed to soak the rich has instead soaked America. The beneficiary of the income tax has not been the poor, but big government. The income tax has given us a government bureaucracy that outnumbers the manufacturing work force. It has created welfare dependencies that have entrapped millions of Americans in an underclass that is forced to live a sordid existence of trading votes for government handouts."
-Paul Craig Roberts-
(1939- ) Economist, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration ("Father of Reaganomics"), former editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Scripps Howard News Service.
Source: The Columbus Dispatch.
"Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main bulwark."
-Walter Lippmann-
(1889-1974) American writer, journalist, and political commentator
"The priesthood have, in all ancient nations, nearly monopolized learning.... And, even since the Reformation, when or where has existed a Protestant or dissenting sect who would tolerate A FREE INQUIRY? The blackest billingsgate, the most ungentlemanly insolence, the most yahooish brutality is patiently endured, countenanced, propagated, and applauded. But touch a solemn truth in collision with a dogma of a sect, though capable of the clearest proof, and you will soon find you have disturbed a nest, and the hornets will swarm about your legs and hands, and fly into your face and eyes."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: letter to John Taylor, 1814
"In literature as in love, we are astonished by what is chosen by others."
-Andre Maurois-
(1885-1967) French writer
Politics, too. At least in the other 2, we accept "to each his own", "live and let live". More or less...
"This is only the land of take-what-you-want. Anarchy means 'without leaders', not 'without order'. With anarchy comes an age of Ordnung, of true order, which is to say voluntary order … this age of Ordnung will begin when the mad and incoherent cycle of verwirrung that these bulletins reveal has run its course … This is not anarchy, Eve. This is chaos."
-V for Vendetta-
"He who joyfully marches to music rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder."
-Albert Einstein-
"You can get everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want."
-Zig Ziglar-
Ahh, capitalism... (The alternative: 'That's too hard! I'll just take what THEY have...!')
"We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
at the signing of The Declaration of Independence
"Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
"The truth is that neither then nor at any former time, since I had attained my maturity in Age, Reading and reflection had I imbibed any general Prejudice against Kings, or in favour of them. It appeared to me then as it has done ever since, that there is a State of Society in which a Republican Government is the best, and in America the only one..."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: Adams, Diary & Autobiography, 6 May, 1778, IV, 91)
"Demagogues and agitators are very unpleasant, they are incidental to a free and constitutional country, and you must put up with these inconveniences or do without many important advantages."
-Benjamin Disraeli-
(1804-1881) Prime Minister of England, British statesman, novelist
Source: Speech, 1867
"The history of intellectual growth and discovery clearly demonstrates the need for unfettered freedom, the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable."
-C. Van Woodward-
(1908-1999) American historian
Source: Report On Free Speech, New York Times, 28 January 1975
"We are a workers’ party because we see in the coming battle between finance and labor the beginning and the end of the structure of the twentieth century. We are on the side of labor and against finance ... The value of labor under socialism will be determined by its value to the state, to the whole community. Labor means creating value, not haggling over things."
-Joseph Paul Goebbels-
(1897-1945) German politician and Reich Minister of Propaganda of Nazi Germany
Source: “Those Damn Nazis: Why Are We a Workers’ Party?” written by Joseph Goebbels and Mjölnir, Die verfluchten Hakenkreuzler. Etwas zum Nachdenken, Nazi propaganda pamphlet (Munich: Verlag Frz. Eher, 1932)
"The choice facing the nation is between two totally different ways of life. And what a prize we have to fight for: no less than the chance to banish from our land the dark, divisive clouds of Marxist socialism and bring together men and women from all walks of life who share a belief in freedom."
-Margaret Thatcher-
(1925-2013) British Prime Minister (1979–1990)
"If you pinch the sea of its liberty, though it be walls of stone or brass, it will beat them down."
-John Cotton-
(1585-1652) Puritan minister of Congregationalism, "Patriarch of New England"
Source: An Exposition upon the Thirteenth Chapter of the Revelation, Limitation of Government, 1655
"The will of the people is the only legitimate foundation of any government, and to protect its free expression should be our first object."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: First Inaugural Address, 4 March 1801
"Do not count your chickens before they are hatched."
-Aesop-
(c. 550 B.C.) legendary Greek fabulist
Source: The Milkmaid and Her Pail
"Illegitimati non carborundum.
(Don't let the bastards grind you down.)"
-General Joseph W. Stilwell-
(1883-1946) US General in Asia during WWII, "Vinegar Joe"
"I would rather starve and rot and keep the privilege of speaking the truth as I see it, than of holding all the offices that capital has to give from the presidency down."
-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 Degradation of the Democratic Dogma, 1919
"Money is a matter of functions four:
A medium, a measure, a standard, a store."
(more completely,
medium of exchange
measure of value
unit of accounts
store of wealth)
"The Puritans had accused the Quakers of 'troubling the world by preaching peace to it.' They refused to pay church taxes; they refused to bear arms; they refused to swear allegiance to any government. (In so doing they were direct actionists, what we may call negative direct actionists.) So the Puritans, being political actionists, passed laws to keep them out, to deport, to fine, to imprison, to mutilate, and finally, to hang them. And the Quakers just kept on coming (which was positive direct action); and history records that after the hanging of four Quakers, and the flogging of Margaret Brewster at the cart's tail through the streets of Boston, 'the Puritans gave up trying to silence the new missionaries'; that 'Quaker persistence and Quaker non-resistance' had won the day."
-Voltairine de Cleyre-
"Sadly today, much of the political Left has become a hate group. As a hate group, they truly believe they alone have the unique right to censor others, to defame others, even to violently attack and murder others whose speech they don’t like. This is now evident everywhere throughout Leftist culture, including in Hollywood and the Oscars. With Google clearly being run by Leftists, and Facebook run by Leftists, and most of the internet gatekeepers dominated by intolerant Leftists, the shocking realization is that none of us are safe from the hatred, intolerance and censorship of the techno-liberals who tell themselves “the ends justify the means” to silence Trump supporters and defame those who support Trump."
-Mike Adams-
Editor of Natural News
2/28/2017
Source: http://trump.news/2017-02-28-google-censorship-of-natural-news-statement-from-the-health-ranger.html
"Appropriated to justice, to security, to reason, to restraint; where there is no respect of persons; where will is nothing and power is nothing and numbers are nothing, and all are equal and all secure before the law."
-Rufus Choate-
(1799-1859) American lawyer, orator
Source: in his speech before the Constitutional Convention in Massachusetts in 1853, presented to those who were crying for unrestrained and unlimited power of the people as the final bulwark of law and justice, guaranteed by our constitution to every citizen. Ref: Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Volume 43, by American Academy of Political and Social Science, National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection (Library of Congress) 1912
"Blessings of the state, blessings of the masses. ... Work hard, increase production, prevent accidents, and be happy."
-Big Brother-
Source: George Lucas's movie, THX 1138
"Certainly anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices. If you do not use the intelligence with which God endowed your mind to resist believing impossibilities, you will not be able to use the sense of injustice which God planted in your heart to resist a command to do evil. Once a single faculty of your soul has been tyrannized, all the other faculties will submit to the same fate."
-Voltaire-
"Politicians have immense power to do harm to the economy. But they have very little power to do good. What our nation needs is a separation of 'business and state'… That would mean crony capitalism and crony socialism could not survive."
-Walter E. Williams-
"Private capitalism makes a steam engine; State capitalism makes pyramids."
-Frank Chodorov-
(1887-1966) American author, publisher
"The sole advantage of power is that you can do more good."
-Baltasar Gracian-
(1601-1658) Spanish philosopher and writer
Source: The Art of Worldly Wisdom, 1647
"Political repression consists of government action which grossly discriminates against persons or organizations viewed as presenting a fundamental challenge to existing power relationships or key governmental policies, because of their perceived political beliefs."
-Robert Justin Goldstein-
American author, professor
Source: Political Repression in Modern America, 1978
"The empires of the future are the empires of the mind."
-Winston Churchill-
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1940-1945, 1951-1955)
"I don't understand any of it. I never did."
-Michael's father-
'The Boys in the Band'
"Those who manipulate the unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested largely by men we have never heard of."
-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)
"In March, 1915, the J.P. Morgan interests, the steel, shipbuilding, and powder interest, and their subsidiary organizations, got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press. … They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of 25 of the greatest papers. An agreement was reached; the policy of the papers was bought, to be paid for by the month; an editor was furnished for each paper to properly supervise and edit information regarding the questions of preparedness, militarism, financial policies, and other things of national and international nature considered vital to the interests of the purchasers."
-Oscar Callaway-
(1872-1947) U.S. Congressman, TX-D (1911-1917)
Source: Congressional Record of February 9, 1917, page 2947, as entered by Representative Oscar Callaway of Texas
"People who denounce the free market and voluntary exchange…are for control and coercion.
Economic planning is nothing more than the forcible superseding of other people’s plans by the powerful elite backed up by the brute force of government."
-Walter E. Williams-
"If Congress sees fit to impose a capitation, or other direct tax, it must be laid in proportion to the census; if Congress determines to impose duties, imposts, and excises, they must be uniform throughout the United States. These are not strictly limitations of power. They are rules prescribing the mode in which it shall be exercised. ... This review shows that personal property, contracts, occupations, and the like have never been regarded by Congress as proper subjects of direct tax."
-Salmon P. Chase-
(1808-1873) U.S. Senator from Ohio, 23rd Governor of Ohio, U.S. Treasury Secretary under President Abraham Lincoln, 6th Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court
Source: As Chief Justice delivering the opinion of the Court in Veazie Bank v. Fenno, 76 U.S. 8 Wallace 533 (1869)
"He must be a man of little faith, who would fear to subject his own religion to the same critical tests to which the historian subjects all other religions. We need not surely crave a tender or merciful treatment for that faith which we hold to be the only true one. We should rather challenge it for the severest tests and trials, as the sailor would for the good ship to which he trusts his own life, and the lives of those who are dear to him. In the Science of Religion, we can decline no comparisons, nor claim any immunities for Christianity, as little as the missionary can, when wrestling with the subtle Brahmin, or the fanatical Mussulman, or the plain speaking Zulu."
-Max Müller-
"The freedom of the press is one of the great bulwarks of liberty, and can never be restrained but by despotic governments."
-George Mason-
(1725-1792), drafted the Virgina Declaration of Rights, ally of James Madison and George Washington
Source: Virginia Bill of Rights, 1776
"A large part of mankind is angry not with the sins, but with the sinners."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: Moral Essays, De Ira (On Anger): Book 2, cap. 28, line 8
"The real guarantee of freedom is an equilibrium of social forces in conflict, not the triumph of any one force."
-Max Eastman-
(1883-1969) American writer, poet, political activist
Source: Reflections on the Failure of Socialism, 1955
"It is the right of our people to organize to oppose any law and any part of the constitution with which they are not in sympathy."
-Alfred E. Smith-
(1873-1944)
Source: Speech, League of Women Voters, 1927
"Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another."
-Gilbert Keith Chesterton-
(1874-1936) British essayist, critic, poet, and novelist
Source: "On the Cryptic and the Elliptic", 1908
"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?"
-Epicurus-
If he is God, he is not good. If he is good, he is not God.
"The mission of the Gestapo expanded steadily as, from 1933 onward, 'political criminality' was given a much broader definition than ever before and most forms of dissent and criticism were gradually criminalized. The result was that more 'laws' or lawlike measures were put on the books than ever."
-Shelia Fitzpatrick-
Source: Accusatory Practices: Denunciation in Modern European History, 1789-1989, 1997
"By rendering the labor of one, the property of the other, they cherish pride, luxury, and vanity on one side; on the other, vice and servility, or hatred and revolt."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
"Our ultimate freedom is the right and power to decide how anybody or anything outside of ourselves will affect us."
-Steven R. Covey-
(1932-2012) American educator, author, businessman, speaker
"Above all, every member of the university has an obligation to permit free expression in the university. No member has a right to prevent such expression. Every official of the university, moreover, has a special obligation to foster free expression and to ensure that it is not obstructed."
-C. Van Woodward-
(1908-1999) American historian
Source: “Report On Free Speech,” New York Times, 28 January 1975
"The size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed, for the vast masses of a nation are in the depths of their hearts more easily deceived than they are consciously and intentionally bad. The primitive simplicity of their minds renders them a more easy prey to a big lie than a small one, for they themselves often tell little lies, but would be ashamed to tell big lies."
-Adolf Hitler-
(1889-1945) German Nazi Dictator
1935
Source: Mein Kampf, p. 197(?) 14th Edition
"During war, the laws are silent."
-Quintus Tullius Cicero-
(c.102-43 B.C.), Roman general; brother of Cicero the orator
Thus, wars must be permanent.
"You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before."
-Rahm Emanuel-
(1959-) Mayor of Chicago, Chicago's first Jewish mayor
Source: at the Wall Street Journal CEO Council in Washington, D.C., Nov 19, 2008
And try to get a "war" out of it.
"We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was 'legal' and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was 'illegal.'"
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-
(1929-1968) US civil rights leader
Source: Letter from Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963
"I place economy among the first and most important virtues and public debt as the greatest dangers to be feared ... We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our choice between economy and liberty or profusion and servitude ... The same prudence which in private life would forbid our paying money for unexplained projects, forbids it in the disposition of public money. We are endeavoring to reduce the government to the practice of rigid economy to avoid burdening the people ..."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"Allow a government to decline paying its debts and you overthrow all public morality — you unhinge all the principles that preserve the limits of free constitutions. Nothing can more affect national prosperity than a constant and systematic attention to extinguish the present debt and to avoid as much as possible the incurring of any new debt."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
"You have to choose [as a voter] between trusting to the natural stability of gold and the natural stability of the honesty and intelligence of the members of the Government. And, with due respect for these gentlemen, I advise you, as long as the Capitalist system lasts, to vote for gold."
-George Bernard Shaw-
(1856-1950) Irish comic dramatist
"In a recent conversation with an official at the Internal Revenue Service, I was amazed when he told me that 'If the taxpayers of this country ever discover that the IRS operates on 90% bluff the entire system will collapse'."
-Henry Bellmon-
(1921-) Governor of Oklahoma, US Senator (R-OK)
1969
"How prone all human institutions have been to decay; how subject the best-formed and most wisely organized governments have been to lose their check and totally dissolve; how difficult it has been for mankind, in all ages and countries, to preserve their dearest rights and best privileges, impelled as it were by an irresistible fate of despotism."
-James Monroe-
(1758-1831), 5th US President
1788
"Truth never tranquilizes. The defining property of truth is its ability to disturb. Jesus only told half the story. The truth 'will' set you free. But, first it's going to piss you off."
-Solomon Short-
fictional character of David Gerrold
"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
http://libertytree.ca/quotes/George.Orwell.Quote.E93D
"Fear can only prevail when victims are ignorant of the facts."
-- Thomas Jefferson
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
http://libertytree.ca/quotes/Thomas.Jefferson.Quote.B25A
"He who dares not offend cannot be honest."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
'Course, he who dares to offend isn't necessarily being honest...
"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."
-Jesus of Nazareth-
(c.4 BC – c.AD 30/33)
Source: Holy Bible, John 8:32
"The truth which makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer
not to hear."
-Jim Bishop-
(1907-1987)
Source: The Day Lincoln Was Shot
"He is the freeman whom the truth makes free,
And all are slaves besides."
-William Cowper-
(1731-1800) English poet, hymnodist
"All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them."
-Galileo Galilei-
(1564-1642) Italian astronomer, physicist, engineer, philosopher, and mathematician
"Without seeking, truth cannot be known at all. It can neither be declared from pulpits, nor set down in articles, nor in any wise prepared and sold in packages ready for use. Truth must be ground for every man by itself out of it such, with such help as he can get, indeed, but not without stern labor of his own."
-John Ruskin-
(1819-1900) British author, artist, social critic
"I never give them hell. I just tell the truth and they think it's hell."
-Harry S. Truman-
(1884-1972), 33rd US President
"Chase after the truth like all hell and you'll free yourself, even though you never touch its coattails."
-Clarence S. Darrow-
(1857-1938)
"Why did they devise censorship? To show a world which doesn’t exist, an ideal world, or what they envisaged as the ideal world. And we wanted to depict the world as it was."
-Krzysztof Kieslowski-
(1941-1996) Polish filmmaker
"Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true."
-Alfred Lord Tennyson-
(1809-1892) Poet Laureate of Great Britain and Ireland
1850
"It is not our task to secure the triumph of truth, but merely to fight on its behalf."
-Blaise Pascal-
(1623-1662) French mathematician and philosopher
"And, finally, that truth is great and will prevail if left to herself; that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: The Virginia Act For Establishing Religious Freedom, 1786
"This nation was conceived in liberty and dedicated to the principle – among others – that honest men may honestly disagree; that if they all say what they think, a majority of the people will be able to distinguish truth from error; that in the competition of the marketplace of ideas, the sounder ideas will in the long run win out."
-Elmer Davis-
(1890-1958), American writer, commentator
Source: But We Were Born Free, 1954
"People have a right to the Truth as they have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
-Frank Norris-
(1870-1902)
Source: The Responsibilities of the Novelist, 1903
"The truth is found when men are free to pursue it."
-Franklin D. Roosevelt-
(1882-1945), 32nd US President
Source: Speech, Temple University, 22 February 1936
"We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances."
-Isaac Newton-
"Stop judging by mere appearances, and make a right judgment."
-Jesus of Nazareth-
(c. 4 BC – c. AD 30/33)
Source: The Holy Bible, John 7:24
"If you add to the truth, you subtract from it."
-The Talmud-
"The right to know is like the right to live. It is fundamental and unconditional in its assumption that knowledge, like life, is a desirable thing."
-George Bernard Shaw-
(1856-1950) Irish comic dramatist
Source: The Doctor’s Dilemma, 1906
"There is no truth sure enough to justify persecution."
-John Milton-
(1608-1674) English Poet
Source: Areopagitica, 1644
"And as for him who lacks the courage to defend even his own soul: Let him not brag of his progressive views, boast of his status as an academician or a recognized artist, a distinguished citizen or general. Let him say to himself plainly: I am cattle, I am a coward, I seek only warmth and to eat my fill."
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn-
"Despite the often express dichotomy between chaos and planning, what is called 'planning' is the forcible suppression of millions of people's plans by a government-imposed plan.
What is considered to be chaos are systematic interactions whose nature, logic, and consequences are seldom examined by those who simply assume that planning by surrogate decisions-makers must be better."
-Thomas Sowell-
"Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad."
-Aldous Huxley-
(1894-1963) English writer, novelist, philosopher
"The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom."
-Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel-
(1770-1831) German philosopher
Source: The Philosophy of History, 1832
"Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and consciencious stupidity."
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-
(1929-1968) US civil rights leader
"Finding the occasional straw of truth awash in a great ocean of confusion and bamboozle requires intelligence, vigilance, dedication and courage. But if we don't practice these tough habits of thought, we cannot hope to solve the truly serious problems that face us -- and we risk becoming a nation of suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan who comes along."
-Carl Sagan-
(1934-1996), Astro-physicist
Source: "The Fine Art of Baloney Detection," Parade, February 1, 1987
"In order that all men might be taught to speak truth, it is necessary that all likewise should learn to hear it."
-Dr. Samuel Johnson-
(1709-1784) English author, poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer
Source: The Rambler, 1750-52
"The truth doesn't sell. It is high in supply, but little in demand."
-Eric Schaub-
Individualist, activist, speaker, author
"... the Constitution is no such instrument as it has generally been assumed to be; but that by false interpretations, and naked usurpations, the government has been made in practice a very widely, and almost wholly, different thing from what the Constitution itself purports to authorize…. But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain—that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.
In our modern day and age, anything that the regime's federal judges decide is 'constitutional' is, in fact, de facto constitutional. In other words, appealing to the text of the Constitution to claim illegitimacy for the latest government power grab is pointless and irrelevant to the task of actually limiting the power of the state. ..."
-Lysander Spooner-
"The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
"The rising power of the United States in world affairs ... requires, not a more compliant press, but a relentless barrage of facts and criticism ... Our job in this age, as I see it, is not to serve as cheerleaders for our side ... but to help the largest possible number of people to see the realities."
-James Reston-
(1909-1995) Scottish-born ("Scotty") New York Times journalist, editor, bureau chief, two Pultizer Prizes, Presidential Medal of Freedom
"I think the greatest single enemy is the misuse of information, the perversion of truth in the hands of terribly skillful people."
-John le Carré-
[David John Moore Cornwell ] (1931-) British author of espionage novels
"And I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government."
-Martin Luther King, Jr.-
"We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them, and holding them in bondage where we could set them free."
-William Seward-
Secretary of State
1861-1869
regarding the so-called Emancipation Proclamation
"Courage is the first of all the virtues because if you haven't courage, you may not have the opportunity to use any of the others."
-Dr. Samuel Johnson-
(1709-1784) English author, poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer
"Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away."
-Elvis Presley-
(1935-1977) American singer, actor, and cultural icon
"Men prefer to believe what they prefer to be true."
-Francis Bacon-
(1561-1626) Philosopher, British Lord Chancellor
"The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made."
-Groucho Marx-
(1890-1977) American comedian and film and television star
"The one function that TV news performs very well is that when there is no news we give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were."
-David Brinkley-
(1920-2003) American newscaster for NBC and ABC in a career lasting from 1943 to 1997
"Whenever the media covers anything I know about in intimate detail ... they always get it wrong. True on the left, and true on the right. Sigh. Double sigh."
-Don Luskin-
(1954 -) American columnist
"The truth is the only thing worth having, and, in a civilized life, like ours, where so many risks are removed, facing it is almost the only courageous thing left to do."
-E. V. Lucas-
[Edward Verrall Lucas] (1868-1938) English writer
"The most odious of all oppressions are those which mask as justice."
-Justice Robert H. Jackson-
(1892-1954), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
"The simple believeth every word: but the prudent man looketh well to his going."
-Proverbs-
Source: Proverbs 14:15
"The terrible thing about the quest for truth is that you find it."
-Remy De Gourmont-
(1858-1915) French Symbolist poet, novelist, and influential critic
"The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer."
-Edward R. Murrow-
(1908-1965) American broadcast journalist and war correspondent
"A heretic is a man who sees with his own eyes."
-Gotthold Ephraim Lessing-
(1729-1781) German Dramatist
"Freedom does not always win. This is one of the bitterest lessons of history."
-A. J. P. Taylor-
[Alan John Percivale Taylor] (1906-1990) British historian
"Wherever a Knave is not punished, an honest Man is laugh'd at."
-George Savile-
(1633–1695)
"Give a good man great powers and crooks grab his job."
-Rick Gaber-
Libertarian writer
"It is not laissez-faire that has failed. That would be an ill day for men. What has failed is the courage to see what is true and speak it to the people, to point to the true remedies."
-Auberon Herbert-
(1838-1906) English writer, theorist, philosopher, 19th century individualist, member of the Parliament of the U.K.
"There's nothing I like less than bad arguments for a view that I hold dear."
-Daniel Dennett-
(1942-) American philosopher, writer, and cognitive scientist
"A good argument diluted to avoid criticism is not nearly as good as the undiluted argument, because we best arrive at truth through a process of honest and vigorous debate. Arguments should not sneak around in disguise, as if dissent were somehow sinister… For it is bravery that is required to secure freedom."
-Justice Clarence Thomas-
(1948- ) U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Lecture, 13 February 2001
"If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought -- not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate."
-Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.-
(1841-1935) US Supreme Court Justice, also known as "The Great Dissenter"
Source: United States v. Schwimmer,
1928
"A lie has speed, but truth has endurance."
-Edgar J. Mohn-
"If falsehood, like truth, had but one face, we would be more on equal terms. For we would consider the contrary of what the liar said to be certain. But the opposite of truth has a hundred thousand faces and an infinite field."
-Michel De Montaigne-
[Michel Eyquem De Montaigne] (1532-1592) French Renaissance scholar, philosopher, writer
"Truth is incontrovertible, ignorance can deride it, panic may resent it, malice may destroy it, but there it is."
-Sir Winston Churchill-
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1940-1945, 1951-1955)
"A truth that's told with bad intent,
beats all the lies you can invent."
-William Blake-
(1757-1827) English poet, painter, engraver
Source: "Auguries of Innocence," Poems from the Pickering Manuscript
"Americans don't go around carrying guns with the idea they're using them to influence other Americans. There's no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons."
-Ronald Reagan-
California Legislature Stunned By Invasion Of Armed "Black Panthers", Gettysburg Times (3 May 1967)
"The worst forms of tyranny, or certainly the most successful ones, are not those we rail against but those that so insinuate themselves into the imagery of our consciousness, and the fabric of our lives, as not to be perceived as tyranny."
-Michael Parenti-
(1933- )
"The early bird gets the worm, but the early worm gets eaten. And the 2nd mouse gets the cheese."
"Security is when everything is settled. When nothing can happen to you. Security is the denial of life."
-Germaine Greer-
(1939- ) Australian feminist
"When we went to school we were told that we were governed by laws, not men. As a result of that, many people think there is no need to pay any attention to judicial candidates because judges merely apply the law by some mathematical formula and a good judge and a bad judge all apply the same kind of law. The fact is that the most important part of a judge's work is the exercise of judgment and that the law in a court is never better than the common sense judgment of the judge that is presiding."
-Robert H. Jackson-
"A year from now, ten, they'll swing back to the belief that they can make people... better. And I do not hold to that. So no more running; I aim to misbehave."
-Malcolm Reynolds-
"In 100 years we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to teaching Remedial English in college."
-Joseph Sobran-
(1946-2010) American columnist
"If our social conditions curtail manhood and womanhood, we must alter the social conditions. We must not go on quietly in a corner making men unmanly and women unwomanly, that they may fit into their filthy and slavish civilization."
-Gilbert Keith Chesterton-
(1874-1936) British essayist, critic, poet, and novelist
"A rock in bad hands killed Abel. A rock in good hands killed Goliath. It's not about the rock."
"Rational argument can be conducted with some prospect of success only so long as the emotionality of a given situation does not exceed a certain critical degree. If the affective temperature rises above this level, the possibility of reason’s having any effect ceases and its place is taken by slogans and chimerical wish fantasies. That is to say, a sort of collective possession results which rapidly develops into a psychic epidemic."
-Carl Jung-
Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology
Source: book by C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self
"The struggle for power is universal in time and space and is an undeniable fact of experience. It cannot be denied that throughout historic time, regardless of social, economic and political conditions, states have met each other in contests for power. Even though anthropologists have shown that certain primitive peoples seem to be free from the desire for power, nobody has yet shown how their state of mind can be re-created on a worldwide scale so as to eliminate the struggle for power from the international scene. … International politics, like all politics, is a struggle for power. Whatever the ultimate aims of international politics, power is always the immediate aim."
-Hans Morgenthau-
"Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment nothing can fail. Without it nothing can succeed. He who molds opinion is greater than he who enacts laws."
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
"The modern press itself is a new phenomenon. Its typical unit is the great agency of mass communication. These agencies can facilitate thought and discussion. They can stifle it…. They can play up or down the news and its significance, foster and feed emotions, create complacent fictions and blind spots, misuse the great words and uphold empty slogans."
-Commission On Freedom Of The Press-
Source: A Free and Responsible Press, 1947
"May the father of all mercies scatter light, and not darkness, upon our paths, and make us in all our several vocations useful here, and in His own due time and way everlastingly happy."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, August 1790, Ref: George Washington: A Collection, W.B. Allen, ed. (548)
"Republicanism is not the phantom of a deluded imagination. On the contrary, laws, under no form of government, are better supported, liberty and property better secured, or happiness more effectually dispensed to mankind."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
"A boy of 15 who is not a democrat is good for nothing, and he is no better who is a democrat at 20."
-John Adams-
"Not to be a republican at 20 is proof of want of heart; to be one at 30 is proof of want of head."
-Francois Guizot-
French premier and historian (1787-1874)
"Only the suppressed word is dangerous."
-Ludwig Börne-
(1786-1837) German journalist
"While often categorized as a democracy, the United States is more accurately defined as a constitutional federal republic. What does this mean? 'Constitutional' refers to the fact that government in the United States is based on a Constitution which is the supreme law of the United States. The Constitution not only provides the framework for how the federal and state governments are structured, but also places significant limits on their powers. 'Federal' means that there is both a national government and governments of the 50 states. A 'republic' is a form of government in which the people hold power, but elect representatives to exercise that power."
-U.S. Embassy in Argentina-
A representative ("republican") form of distributed ("federal"), expressly limited ("Constitutional") government.
"Let us … animate and encourage each other, and show the whole world that a Freeman, contending for liberty on his own ground, is superior to any slavish mercenary on earth."
-George Washington-
"This is, in theory, still a free country, but our politically correct, censorious times are such that many of us tremble to give vent to perfectly acceptable views for fear of condemnation. Freedom of speech is thereby imperiled, big questions go undebated, and great lies become accepted, unequivocally as great truths."
-Simon Heffer-
(18 July 1960) is an English historian, journalist, author and political commentator.
Source: Daily Mail, 7 June 2000
"Liberty trains for liberty. Responsibility is the first step in responsibility.
-W. E. B. Du Bois-
"Tolerance is the eager and glad acceptance of the way along which others seek the truth."
-Sir Walter Besant-
(1836-1901) English novelist
"Nobody can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own."
-Sydney J. Harris-
(1917-1986) American journalist
"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."
-Aldous Huxley-
(1894-1963) English writer, novelist, philosopher
"It is a common heresy and its graves are to be found all over the earth. It is the heresy that says you can kill an idea by killing a man, defeat a principle by defeating a person, bury truth by burying its vehicle."
-Adlai E. Stevenson II-
(1900-1965) Governor of Illinois (1949-1953), U.S. presidential candidate (1952, 1956), U.N. Ambassador (1961-1965)
Source: Speech, 9 November 1952
"My business is to bring my aspirations to conform to fact, not to try to harmonize fact with my aspirations."
-Thomas Henry Huxley-
(1825-1895) English biologist, known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his advocacy of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution
"Occupants of public offices love power and are prone to abuse it."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: attributed
"Unless the people, through unified action, arise and take charge of their government, they will find that their government has taken charge of them. Independence and liberty will be gone, and the general public will find itself in a condition of servitude to an aggregation of organized and selfish interest."
-Calvin Coolidge-
(1872-1933) 30th US President
"The law is created by demonstrable criminals, enforced by demonstrable criminals, interpreted by demonstrable criminals, all for demonstrably criminal purposes. Of course I'm above the law. And so are you."
-L. Neil Smith-
'Pallas'
"The problem is, of course, that not only is economics bankrupt but it has always been nothing more than politics in disguise ... economics is a form of brain damage."
-Hazel Henderson-
(1933-2022) British American futurist, author, environmental activist
"Contrariwise", continued Tweedledee, "If it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic."
-Lewis Carroll-
[Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832-1898) English author, mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer.
Source: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, 1865
"It is well for people who think to change their minds occasionally in order to keep them clean. For those who do not think, it is best at least to rearrange their prejudices once in a while."
-Luther Burbank-
(1849-1926) American botanist, horticulturist, pioneer in agricultural science
"History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon."
-Napoleon Bonaparte-
(1769-1821) French emperor
"Civilization has been a continuous struggle of the individual or of groups of individuals against the State and even against 'society', that is, against the majority subdued and hypnotized by the State and State worship."
-Emma Goldman-
"The entire concept of 'law' is vain and fallacious, for what shall we have accomplished by enacting one? Those who agree with it will obey it, as they did BEFORE it existed. Those who disagree will break it, so it has no effect on them. We have been occupied in an empty gesture of which but two consequences shall follow: those who take comfort in such things will be comforted, and those who derive perverted pleasure by enforcing their will upon others may now find positions among the police."
-Lysander Spooner-
"Puritans argue against the goodness of creation, finding the source of evil in material things of pleasure (as tobacco, alcohol, art, and so on) rather than in the disordered human will to misuse the good things nature affords us."
-G.K. Chesterton-
"Every shot that takes an innocent life must result in a legal and fair sentence that punishes murder. Every violence that destroys a person's life must result in a legal and fair judicial decision that protects human dignity. These are constants for civilized and democratic countries. For the countries in which the rule of law is consistently ensured. But it is time to make it constant for international relations as well. The constants that will act universally and most importantly — irrevocably in relation to any violator of international law. Especially when it comes to the crime of aggression. The world needs a real embodiment of the rule of law, which is guaranteed to protect humanity from the 'right of force' — from the source of all aggressions."
-Volodymyr Zelenskyy-
"Heaven is where the cooks are French, the police are British, the mechanics are German, the lovers are Italian, and everything is organized by the Swiss.
Hell is where the cooks are British, the police are German, the mechanics are French, the lovers are Swiss, and everything is organized by the Italians."
-anonymous-
"If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things."
-Rene Descartes-
(1596-1650) French philosopher, mathematician, scientist, lay Catholic who invented analytic geometry
Source: Principles of Philosophy, 1644
"The unexamined life, said Socrates, is unfit to be lived by man. This is the virtue of liberty, and the ground on which we may justify our belief in it, that it tolerates error in order to serve truth."
-Walter Lippmann-
(1889-1974) American writer, journalist, and political commentator
"Wisdom is not communicable. The wisdom which a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish."
-Herman Hesse-
(1877-1962) German-born Swiss poet, novelist, and painter
Source: Siddhartha
"The greatest and noblest pleasure which men can have in this world is to discover new truths; and the next is to shake off old prejudices."
-Frederick the Great-
(1712-1786) King of Prussia, Frederick II
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."
-Noam Chomsky-
How the World Works
"Freedom of expression is the well-spring of our civilization... The history of civilization is in considerable measure the displacement of error which once held sway as official truth by beliefs which in turn have yielded to other truths. Therefore the liberty of man to search for truth ought not to be fettered, no matter what orthodoxies he may challenge."
-Felix Frankfurter-
(1882-1965) U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Concurring Opinion, Dennis et al. v. U.S. (1951)
"Persecution, whenever it occurs, establishes only the power and cunning of the persecutor, not the truth and worth of his belief."
-H. M. Kallen-
(1882-1974)
"A criminal trial is not a search for truth. It is much too circumscribed for that. Rather, a trial is a formalized contest for the hearts and minds of a panel of twelve. It is a quest for a verdict in which information is selected and screened (we can almost say 'processed') before it is allowed to reach jurors."
-Phillip Finch-
Source: Fatal Flaw, 1992
"For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don’t believe, no proof is possible."
-Stuart Chase-
(1888-1985) American economist, social theorist, writer
"By doubting we all come at truth."
-Marcus Tullius Cicero-
(106-43 B.C.) Roman Statesman, Philosopher and Orator
"I see men ordinarily more eager to discover a reason for things than to find out whether things are so."
-Michel De Montaigne-
[Michel Eyquem De Montaigne] (1532-1592) French Renaissance scholar, philosopher, writer
Source: Essays
"There are two kinds of statistics, the kind you look up and the kind you make up."
-Rex Stout-
(1886-1975) American author
"When you notice that to produce you need to get permission from those who do not produce anything; when you check that money flows to those who do not deal with goods but with favors; when you realize that many become rich by the bribery and for influence more than by your work and that the laws do not protect you against them, but on the contrary, they are the ones who are protected against you; when you discover that corruption is rewarded and honesty becomes a self-sacrifice, then you can assert, without fear of being wrong, that your society is doomed."
-Ayn Rand-
"Anarchy is the radical notion that other people are not your property. You own yourself and the effects of your actions. All human interaction should be voluntary association or mutual exchange. All force, and fraud, and threats, and coercion are inherent'y illegitimate. The State is by definition a monopoly on violence which is the moral blight at the heart of all conquest, and slaughter, and famine, and death. Taxation is theft. War is a racket. And national borders are nothing more than chalk outlines around unprosecuted mass murder."
"There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them."
-Heisenberg-
"If you fear making anyone mad, then you ultimately probe for the lowest common denominator of human achievement."
-Jimmy Carter-
[James Earl Carter] (1924- ) 39th US President
"The rich will strive to establish their dominion and enslave the rest. They always did...they always will. They will have the same effect here as elsewhere, if we do not, by the power of government, keep them in their proper spheres."
-Gouverneur Morris-
(1752-1816) represented Pennsylvania in the Constitutional Convention of 1787, author of large sections of the Constitution for the United States, credited as the author of its Preamble
"The few who understand the system, will either be so interested in its profits, or so dependent on its favours that there will be no opposition from that class, while on the other hand, the great body of the people mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that capital derives from the system, will bear its burdens without complaint, and perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests."
-John Sherman-
(1823-1900) US Congressman, Senator (R-OH), Secretary of the Treasury and Secretary of State
June 25, 1863
Source: in a letter sent to New York bankers, Morton, and Gould, in support of the then proposed National Banking Act
"The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks."
-Lord Acton-
[John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton] (1834-1902), First Baron Acton of Aldenham
"[The] Bank of the United States... is one of the most deadly hostility existing, against the principles and form of our Constitution... An institution like this, penetrating by its branches every part of the Union, acting by command and in phalanx, may, in a critical moment, upset the government. I deem no government safe which is under the vassalage of any self-constituted authorities, or any other authority than that of the nation, or its regular functionaries. What an obstruction could not this bank of the United States, with all its branch banks, be in time of war! It might dictate to us the peace we should accept, or withdraw its aids. Ought we then to give further growth to an institution so powerful, so hostile?"
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Thomas Jefferson did write this (about Banks) to Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin in 1803
"...first ascertain exactly the position of the various capitalists, then control them, influence them by restricting or enlarging, facilitating or hindering their credits, and finally they can entirely determine their fate."
-Vladimir Ilyich Lenin-
[Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov] (1870-1924) First Leader of the Soviet Union
"These statements were made 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:
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.
"Times change but principles endure. The jury has protected us from the abuse of power. While human government exists the tendency to abuse power will remain. This system, coming down from former generations crowned with the honors of age, is today and for the future our hope. Let us correct its defects with kindly hands, let us purge it of its imperfections and it will be, as in the past, the bulwark of our liberties."
-William Jennings Bryan-
"The high office of the President has been used to foment a plot to destroy the American's freedom and before I leave office, I must inform the citizen of this plight."
-John F. Kennedy-
(1917-1963) 35th US President
Source: Questionable: supposedly spoken at a speech at Columbia University on Nov. 12, 1963, 10 days before his assassination. There is no record of this speech.
"What is needed here is a return to the Constitution of the United States. We need to have a complete divorce of Bank and State. The old struggle that was fought out here in Jackson's day must be fought over again... The Federal Reserve Act should be repealed and the Federal Reserve Banks, having violated their charters, should be liquidated immediately. Faithless Government officers who have violated their oaths of office should be impeached and brought to trial. Unless this is done by us, I predict that the American people, outraged, robbed, pillaged, insulted, and betrayed as they are in their own land, will rise in their wrath and send a President here who will sweep the money changers out of the temple."
-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
"The modern banking system manufactures 'money' out of nothing; and the process is, perhaps, the most, astounding piece of 'sleight of hand' that was ever invented. In fact, it was not invented. It merely 'grew'. ... Banks in fact are able to create (and cancel) modern 'deposit money', just as much as they were originally able to create, or call in, their own original forms of private notes. They can, in fact, inflate and deflate, i.e., mint, and un-mint the modern 'edger-entry' currency."
-Major L. L. B. Angas-
[Lawrence Lee Bazley White/Angas] (1893-1973) Australian-born British statesman, economist
Source: Slump ahead in bonds, 1937.
see Billions for the Bankers, Debt for the People by Sheldon Emry
"Bankruptcies of governments have, on the whole, done less harm to mankind than their ability to raise loans."
-R. H. Tawney-
(1880-1962)
Source: Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, 1926
"Fascism, Nazism and Stalinism have in common that they offered the atomized individual a new refuge and security. These systems are the culmination of alienation. The individual is made to feel powerless and insignificant, but taught to project all of his human powers into the figure of the leader, the state, the "fatherland," to whom he has to submit and whom he has to worship. He escapes from freedom and into a new idolatry. All the achievements of individuality and reason, from the late Middle Ages to the nineteenth century are sacrificed on the altars of the new idols. ...built on the most flagrant lies, both with regard to their programs and to their leaders."
-The Sane Society-
"Banking was conceived in iniquity and was born in sin. The Bankers own the earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create deposits, and with the flick of the pen they will create enough deposits to buy it back again. However, take it away from them, and all the great fortunes like mine will disappear and they ought to disappear, for this would be a happier and better world to live in. But, if you wish to remain the slaves of Bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, let them continue to create deposits."
-Sir Josiah Stamp-
(1880-1941) President of the Bank of England in the 1920's, the second richest man in Britain
Source: Speaking at the Commencement Address of the University of Texas in 1927
Ref: The Legalized Crime of Banking (1958) by Silas W. Adams
"Banks do not have an obligation to promote the public good."
-Alexander Dielius-
CEO Germany, Austria, Eastern Europe Goldman Sachs
Source: January 2010, Source: Wall Street Journal, May 2010
"Why the transfer of decisions from those with personal experience and a stake in the outcome to those with neither can be expected to lead to better decisions is a question seldom asked, much less answered."
-Thomas Sowell-
Intellectuals and Society
"The fundamental difference between decision makers in the market and decision makers in government is that the former are subject to continuous and consequential feedback which can force them to adjust to what others prefer and are willing to pay for, while those who make decisions in the political arena face no such inescapable feedback to force them to adjust to other people’s desires and preferences.
-Thomas Sowell-
Intellectuals and Society
"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. ..."
-Winston S Churchill-
11 November 1947
Well. All those that have been permitted to be tried, anyway...
"When the President signs this act [Federal Reserve Act of 1913], the invisible government by the money power -- proven to exist by the Monetary Trust Investigation -- will be legalized. The new law will create inflation whenever the trusts want inflation. From now on, depressions will be scientifically created."
-Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr.-
(1859-1924) Congressman (R-MN), father of famous aviator
Source: U.S. Senate, Nov. 1912
"The trouble with gold is that it turns its back on world improvers, empire builders and do-gooders."
-Bill Bonner-
Source: Bill Bonner and Addison Wiggin in 'Empire of Debt'
"Of all contrivances for cheating the laboring classes of mankind, none has been more effective than that which deludes them with paper money."
-Daniel Webster-
(1782-1852) US Senator
"Monetary policy today is guided by little more than government fiat -- by the calculations, often mistaken economic theories, and whims of central bankers or, even worse, politicians. Under such a regime, inflation of three or four percent annually has come to be viewed as a stellar monetary performance. However, under a more sound monetary system -- i.e., a gold standard -- such increases in the general price level would be seen as wildly inflationary."
-Raymond J. Keating-
American writer, economist
Source: BOOK REVIEW: THE ANATOMY OF AN INTERNATIONAL MONETARY REGIME: THE CLASSICAL GOLD STANDARD 1880-1914, THE FREEMAN, p. 645, September, 1996
"Repeal the entire Banking Act of 1933, and Austrian School economists will cheer, especially if the current system were replaced by a 100%-reserve competitive banking with no central bank. That banking reform would give us a sound money system, meaning no more business cycle, bailouts, or inflation."
-Lew Rockwell-
[Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.] (1944- ) Chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute
Source: Banks on the Dole, THE FREE MARKET, November 1995.
"Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes the laws."
-Mayer Amschel Rothschild-
[Mayer Amschel Bauer] (1744 -1812), Godfather of the Rothschild Banking Cartel of Europe
Source: in 'The Creature from Jekyll Island' (American Opinion Publishing), p. 218
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world."
-Alan Greenspan-
(1926- ) Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors (1987-2006)
Source: Testimony before US House Banking Committee, May 1999
"We make money the old fashioned way. We print it."
-Art Rolnick-
former Chief Economist, Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank
"Paper money has had the effect in your state that it will ever have, to ruin commerce, oppress the honest, and open the door to every species of fraud and injustice."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: in letter to J. Bowen, Rhode Island, Jan. 9, 1787
"Because of 'fractional' reserve system, banks, as a whole, can expand our money supply several times, by making loans and investments."
-Federal Reserve Bank of New York-
Source: The Story of Banks, p.5. (2006), Story by Gail Donovan; Art by Norman Nodel, Published by Federal Reserve Bank of New York
"Happiness is more effectually dispensed to mankind under a republican form of government than any other."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
"Bankers have no right to establish a customary law among themselves, at the expence of other men."
-Sir Michael Foster-
(1689–1763) English judge
Source: Foster, J., Hankey v. Trotman (1746), 1 Black. Rep. 2; reported in James William Norton-Kyshe, The Dictionary of Legal Quotations(1904), p. 17
"Give a small boy a hammer and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding."
-Abraham Kaplan
(1918-1993) Ukranian-born philosopher, professor
"Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels."
-Goya-
"One death is a tragedy, but a million deaths are a statistic."
-Josef Stalin-
(1879-1953) Communist leader of the USSR
Source: Attributed
"In 1950, the average family of four paid 2% of its earnings to federal taxes. Today it pays 24%."
-William R. Mattox, Jr.-
Columnist
"Nothing did more to spur the boom in stocks than the decision made by the New York Federal Reserve bank, in the spring of 1927, to cut the rediscount rate. Benjamin Strong, Governor of the bank, was chief advocate of this unwise measure, which was taken largely at the behest of Montagu Norman of the Bank of England... At the time of the Bank's action I warned of its consequences... I felt that sooner or later the market had to break."
-Bernard Baruch-
(1870-1965) American financier, stock market speculator, and presidential adviser to Woodrow Wilson and FDR
Source: in Baruch: The Public Years (1960)
"Petty laws breed great crimes."
-Ouida-
[Marie Louise de la Ramée] (1839-1908) English novelist
1880
"For every problem there is one solution which is simple, neat, and wrong."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"Where the tongue slips, it speaks the truth."
-Irish Proverb-
"Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"There is no man so friendless but what he can find a friend sincere enough to tell him disagreeable truths."
-Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton-
(1803-1873) English writer, politician
"Prejudice rarely survives experience."
-Eve Zibart-
American author, columnist
Source: The Washington Post
Pretty much by definition, though, right? Post-experience is no longer pre-judging.
"Who is more foolish, the child afraid of the dark or the man afraid of the light?"
-Maurice Freehill-
(1899-1939) British World War I flying ace
"Not one cent should be raised unless it is in accord with the law."
-Napoleon Bonaparte-
(1769-1821) French emperor
"He [King George III] has erected a multitude of New Offices and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
1776
Source: Declaration of Independence, listing the reasons for declaring independence from England
"Our Constitution is in actual operation; everything appears to promise that it will last; but in this world nothing is certain but death and taxes."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
"The bottom is loaded with nice people, Albert. Only cream and bastards rise."
-Harper-
"The best way to understand this whole issue is to look at what the government does: it takes money from some people, keeps a bunch of it, and gives the rest to other people."
-Dave Barry-
(1947- ) Humorist
"I have never voted in my life… I have always known and understood that the idiots are in a majority so it’s certain they will win."
-Louis-Ferdinand Celine-
"It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder."
-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)
"I don't believe that it can end. Now that I've seen what war is, what civil war is, I know that everybody, if one day it should end, ought to ask himself: "And what shall we make of the fallen? Why are they dead?" I wouldn't know what to say. Not now, at any rate. Nor does it seem to me that the others know. Perhaps only dead know, and only for them is the war really over."
-Cesare Pavese-
"No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck."
-Frederick Douglass-
[Frederick Baily] (1818-1895), escaped slave, Abolitionist, author, editor of the North Star and later the New National Era
1883
"It is the logic of our times,
No subject for immortal verse --
That we who lived by honest dreams
Defend the bad against the worse."
-Cecil Day Lewis-
"What is so mind boggling is that all of this is being financed by the American people themselves through their own taxes. In other words, the American people are underwriting the destruction of their own freedom and way of life by lavishly financing through federal and state grants the very social scientists who are undermining our national sovereignty and preparing our children to become the dumbed-down vassals of the new world order."
-Samuel L. Blumenfeld-
(1927-2015) American author, educator
"If our Trade be taxed, why not our Lands, or Produce in short, everything we possess? They tax us without having legal representation."
-Samuel Adams-
(1722-1803), was known as the "Father of the American Revolution."
Source: after the Stamp Act of 1765
"For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places."
-The Holy Bible-
Source: Ephesians 6:12
"The media I've had a lot to do with is lazy. We fed them and they ate it every day."
-Michael Deaver-
Former top aide to President Reagan
"The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to Socialism."
-Karl Marx-
(1818-1883) Prussian-born philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist, father of Communism, co-author of the 'Communist Manifesto'
"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."
-James Madison-
"There are two kinds of restrictions on human liberty -- the restraint of law and that of custom. No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion."
-Carrie Chapman Catt-
(1859-1947)
Source: Speech, 8 February 1900
"The man who asks of freedom anything other than itself is born to be a slave."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
[Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clerel, le Comte de Tocqueville] (1805-1859) French historian
"People who make careers out of helping others -- sometimes at great sacrifice, often not -- usually don't like to hear that those others might get along fine, might even get along better, without their help."
-John Holt-
(1923-1985) American author and educator, proponent of homeschooling, and pioneer in youth rights theory
"The invisible Money Power is working to control and enslave mankind. It financed Communism, Fascism, Marxism, Zionism and Socialism. All of these are directed to making the United States a member of World Government."
-American Mercury Magazine-
December 1957
Source: AMERICAN MERCURY MAGAZINE, December 1957, pg. 92
"The highest glory of the American Revolution was this; it connected, in one indissoluble bond the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity."
-John Quincy Adams-
(1767-1848) 6th US President
July 4, 1821
Source: in a speech to the U.S. House of Representatives
"In the end, the state of the Union comes down to the character of the people. ... I sought for the greatness and genius of America in her commodious harbors, her ample rivers, and it was not there. I sought for it in the fertile fields, and boundless prairies, and it was not there. I sought it in her rich mines, and vast world commerce, and it was not there. Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits aflame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
[Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clerel, le Comte de Tocqueville] (1805-1859) French historian
Source: No source has ever been found for this popular quote. See:
http://www.tocqueville.org/pitney.htm
"The Trilateralist Commission is international...(and)...is intended to be the vehicle for multinational consolidation of the commercial and banking interests by seizing control of the political government of the United States. The Trilateralist Commission represents a skillful, coordinated effort to seize control and consolidate the four centers of power - political, monetary, intellectual, and ecclesiastical."
-Barry Goldwater-
(1909-1998) US Senator (R-Arizona)
Source: in his book "With No Apologies"
"To expose a 4.2 Trillion dollar ripoff of the American people by the stockholders of the 1000 largest corporations over the last one-hundred years will be a tall order of business."
-Buckminster Fuller-
[Richard Buckminster Fuller] (1895-1983) American visionary, designer, architect, poet, author, and inventor
"Perhaps Communists had wormed their way so deeply into our government on both the working and planning levels that they were able to exercise an inordinate degree of power in shaping the course of America in the dangerous postwar era. I could not help wondering and worrying whether we were faced with open enemies across the conference table and hidden enemies who sat with us in our most secret councils."
-General Mark Clark-
(1896-1984) American general during World War II and the Korean War
Source: From the Danube to the Yalu (1954)
"We must now face the harsh truth that the objectives of communism are being steadily advanced because many of us do not recognize the means used to advance them. ... The individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a Conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists. The American mind simply has not come to a realization of the evil which has been introduced into our midst."
-J. Edgar Hoover-
former FBI director
Source: in Elks Magazine (August 1956)
"The fundamental fact in the lives of the poor in most parts of America is that the wages of common labor are far below the benefits of AFDC, Medicaid, food stamps, public housing, public defenders, leisure time and all the other goods and services of the welfare state."
-George Gilder-
(1939-) American writer
Source: Wealth And Poverty, 1981
"It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived."
-General George S. Patton, Jr.-
(1885-1945) US Army General
"I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country."
-Nathan Hale-
(1755-1776) American Patriot
Source: his last words before being hanged by the British, without a trial, September 22, 1776
"The sum of all known reverence I add up in you whoever you are, The President is there in the White House for you, it is not you who are here for him, The Secretaries act in their bureaus for you, not you here for them, The Congress convenes every Twelfth-month for you, Laws, courts, the forming of States, the charters of cities, the going and coming of commerce and malls, are all for you."
-Walt Whitman-
Leaves of Grass
"The highest patriotism is not a blind acceptance of official policy, but a love of one's country deep enough to call her to a higher standard."
-George McGovern-
(1922-2012) US Congressman (D-SD), 1972 Democratic presidential nominee
"Americans find it intolerable that one constitutional right should have to be surrendered in order to assert another. America is the land of the free and home of the brave -- we don't need a Patriot Act, because we are already patriots. We know freedom means responsibility, but I am not sure Congress and its domestic enforcement agencies do. More often than not, new security measures enacted by the government have resulted in more violations of the citizenry than terrorists have ever done. The terrorists want us to be afraid -- well, we are not afraid. Stop wasting dollars on this program -- it is not good for America. To give up essential liberty for a little security provides neither. The right to be left alone from government intrusion is the beginning of all freedoms."
-Eric Schaub-
Individualist, activist, speaker, author
2009-12-15
Source: letter to Congress, December 15th, 2009
"Where liberty dwells, there is my country."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
Source: (attributed), letter to Benjamin Vaughn, March 14, 1783
"If we do not learn to regard a war, and the separate campaigns of which it is composed, as a chain of linked engagements each leading to the next, but instead succumb to the idea that the capture of certain geographical points or the seizure of undefended provinces are of value in themselves, we are liable to regard them as windfall profits. In so doing, and in ignoring the fact that they are links in a continuous chain of events, we also ignore the possibility that their possession may later lead to definite disadvantages."
-Carl von Clausewitz-
"We could say the government spend like drunken sailors, but that would be unfair to drunken sailors, because the sailors are spending their own money."
-Ronald Reagan-
"The best results in the operation of a government wherein every citizen has a share largely depend upon a proper limitation of the purely partisan zeal and effort and a correct appreciation of the time when the heat of the partisan should be merged in the patriotism of the citizen. ... At this hour the animosities of political strife, the bitterness of partisan defeat, and the exultation of partisan triumph should be supplanted by an ungrudging acquiescence in the popular will and a sober, conscientious concern for the general weal. ... Public extravagance begets extravagance among the people."
-Grover Cleveland-
(1837-1908) 22nd & 24th US President
Source: First Inaugural Address, 1885
"We're gonna give you a fair trial, followed by a first class hangin'."
-Cobb-
Silverado
"The obligations of our representatives in Washington are to protect our liberty, not coddle the world, precipitating no-win wars, while bringing bankruptcy and economic turmoil to our people."
-Dr. Ron Paul-
(1935-) American physician, US Congressman (R-TX), US Presidential candidate
Source: Freedom Under Siege, 1987
"...A spider web of 'patriots for profit', operating from the highest positions of special trust and confidence, have successfully circumvented our constitutional system in pursuit of a New World Order. They have infused America with drugs in order to fund covert operations while sealing the fate of our servicemen left in communist prisons."
-Lt. Col. James "Bo" Gritz (Ret)
(1939-) American former US Army Special Forces officer, Commander, U.S. Army Special Forces, Latin America, Chief, Delta force, most decorated Green Beret Commander in American history
"My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of the higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military."
-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
"The only prize much cared for by the powerful is power."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.-
(1841-1935) US Supreme Court Justice, also known as "The Great Dissenter"
1913
"The finest trick of the devil is to persuade you that he does not exist."
-Charles Baudelaire-
(1821-1867) French poet, essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe
Source: Le Spleen de Paris (1862), XXIX: "Le Joueur généreux"
"The Rothschilds can start or prevent wars. Their word could make or break empires."
-Chicago Evening American-
Source: 3 December 1923
"From the days of Spartacus, Weishophf, Karl Marx, Trotski, Belacoon, Rosa Luxenburg, and Ema Goldman, this world conspiracy has been steadily growing. This conspiracy played a definite recognizable role in the tragedy of the French revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the 19th Century. And now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their head and have become the undisputed masters of that enormous empire."
-Sir Winston Churchill-
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1940-1945, 1951-1955)
Source: “Zionism versus Bolshevism,” Illustrated Sunday Herald, 8 Feb. 1920, p. 5
"Power, like a desolating pestilence,
Pollutes whate'er it touches; and obedience,
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,
Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame,
A mechanized automaton."
-Percy Bysshe Shelley-
(1792-1822) British poet
Source: Queen Mab [1813], pt. III
"When written in Chinese, the word for ‘crisis’ is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity."
-John F. Kennedy-
"Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism."
-Carl Gustav Jung-
(1875-1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology
"False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for everyone takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness; and when this is done, one path towards error is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened."
-Charles Darwin-
(1809-1882)
"A university’s essential character is that of being a center of free inquiry and criticism -- a thing not to be sacrificed for anything else."
-Richard Hofstadter-
(1916-1970) American historian, professor
Source: Commencement Address, Columbia University, 1968.
"Limiting the freedom of news 'just a little bit' is in the same category within the classic example 'a little bit pregnant.' "
-Robert A. Heinlein-
(1907-1988) American writer
Source: A Rabble in Arms
"For whatever deserves to exist deserves also to be known, for knowledge is the image of existence, and things mean and splendid exist alike."
-Sir Francis Bacon-
(1561-1626) Philosopher, British Lord Chancellor
Source: The Advancement of Learning, 1605
"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens. Even a beggar does not depend upon it entirely."
-Adam Smith-
"What basic psychological distortion can be found in every civilization of which we know anything? The only psychological force capable of producing these perversions is morality - the concept of right and wrong. The re-interpretation and eventual eradication of the concept of right and wrong are the belated objectives of nearly all of psychotherapy."
-Dr. G. Brock Chisolm-
(1896-1971) Canadian psychiatrist, medical practitioner, World War I veteran, first head of the World Federation of Mental Health, first director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO)
"During my training I was trained in Psycho-politics. This was the art of capturing the minds of a nation through brainwashing and fake mental health."
-Kenneth Goff-
(1914-1972) anti-Fluoride, Christian Identity, anti-Communist minister, 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"
"People hardly ever make use of the freedom they have, for example, freedom of thought; instead they demand freedom of speech as a compensation."
-Soren Kierkegaard-
(1813-1855) Danish philosopher
"A lie would have no sense unless the truth were felt dangerous."
-Alfred Adler-
(1870-1937) Austrian medical doctor, psychologist and founder of the school of Individual Psychology
"Advances are made by answering questions. Discoveries are made by questioning answers."
-Bernhard Haisch-
(1949- ) German-born American astrophysicist, Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Scientific Exploration
"War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength."
-George Orwell-
1984
"Nature is inexorable. If men do not follow the truth they cannot live."
-Calvin Coolidge-
(1872-1933) 30th US President
"To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first, and call whatever you hit the target."
-Ashleigh Brilliant-
(1933- ) British-American author, syndicated cartoonist
"Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe... till we come to the hard bottom of rocks in place, which we can call reality."
-Henry David Thoreau-
(1817-1862) American author, poet, philosopher, polymath, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and transcendentalist
"Reasonable argument is impossible when authority becomes the arbiter."
-Orson Scott Card-
(1951- ) American novelist, critic, public speaker, essayist, columnist
"As individuals, men believe they ought to love and serve each other and establish justice between each other. As racial, economic and national groups they take for themselves, whatever their power can command."
-Reinhold Niebuhr-
"There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal."
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
"While they promise them liberty, they themselves are the servants of corruption: for of whom a man is overcome, of the same is he brought in bondage."
-The Holy Bible-
Source: 2 Peter 2:19
"Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance."
-Confucius-
[Kung Fu-tse] (551-479 B.C.) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher
"The elegance of honesty needs no adornment."
-Merry Browne-
"Throughout history, the attachment of even the humblest people to their freedom... has come as an unpleasant shock to condescending ideologues."
-Paul Bede Johnson-
(1928-) English journalist, popular historian, speechwriter, and author
Source: Enemies of Society, 1977
"Authority has every reason to fear the skeptic, for authority can rarely survive in the face of doubt."
-Robert Lindner-
(1914-1956)
Source: Must You Conform?, 1956
"Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility."
-Ambrose Bierce-
"It is a mysterious thing, the loss of faith — as mysterious as faith itself. Like faith, it is ultimately not rooted in logic; it is a change in the climate of the mind."
-George Orwell-
No, sometimes it's just an eventual acceptance of a lack of evidence. And extraordinary claims, as they say... 'Course, I suppose that can be viewed as a change in the climate of the rational mind...
"And now, what has Anarchism to say to all this, this bankruptcy of republicanism, this modern empire that has grown up on the ruins of our early freedom? We say this, that the sin our fathers sinned was that they did not trust liberty wholly. They thought it possible to compromise between liberty and government, believing the latter to be 'a necessary evil,' and the moment the compromise was made, the whole misbegotten monster of our present tyranny began to grow. Instruments which are set up to safeguard rights become the very whip with which the free are struck."
-Voltairine de Cleyre-
"The Anarchist agrees that Hamilton was logical, and understood the core of government; the difference is, that while strong governmentalists believe this is necessary and desirable, we choose the opposite conclusion, No Government Whatsoever."
-Voltairine de Cleyre-
"I believe that America is the greatest country in history and for good reasons, but America has been changing and not for the better. Our free society has been falling prey to a more repressive system with methods for the increased control of people. The return of groups and individuals to the controlling ideology of Imperialism and Marxism using the structures of Corporatism, Socialism and Democracy. The result is that this nation's foundational principles based on the ideology of Liberty are now in danger of extinction."
-Darren Perkins-
"The Declaration of Independence... is not a legal prescription conferring powers upon the courts; and the Constitution's refusal to 'deny or disparage' other rights is far removed from affirming any one of them, and even farther removed from authorizing judges to identify what they might be, and to enforce the judges' list against laws duly enacted by the people."
-Dr. Laura Schlessinger-
(1947- ) American commentator, author
Source: Wrongly attributed to Dr. Schlessinger. The quote is from Justice Antonin Scalia
"There, I guess King George will be able to read that."
-John Hancock-
(1737-1793) American merchant, statesman, and prominent Patriot of the American Revolution, Scholar President of the Continental Congress (1775-1777), governor of Massachussets, first signer of the Declaration of Independence, remembered for his large and stylish signature on the Declaration of Independence
Source: Remark on signing American Declaration of Independence
"The Declaration of Independence predicated upon the glory of man and the corresponding duty to society that the rights of citizens ought to be protected with every power and resource of the state, and a government that does any less is false to the teachings of that great document — false to the name American. The assertion of human rights is naught but a call to human sacrifice. This is yet the spirit of the American people. Only so long as this flame burns shall we endure, and the light of liberty be shed over the nations of the earth."
-Calvin Coolidge-
"The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it."
-Henry David Thoreau-
"The States are nations."
-Daniel Webster-
(1782-1852) US Senator
"The thirteen States are thirteen Sovereignties."
-James Wilson-
(1742-1798) Member of Continental Congress, signed Declaration of Independence; U.S. Supreme Court Justice and delegate from Pennsylvania
Source: Commentaries on the Constitution, Vol. III, p 287
"How can justice be present in an institution which, by necessity, violates the rights of at least some of those over whom it rules? So long as at least one libertarian exists on the face of the earth the idea that the state and justice can co-exist in the same political container must be a false proposition. And even after the state has killed off the last libertarian can it be said to be a just institution if all those who accept it do so because they fear for their lives and the confiscation of their property? What kind of justice is it that says 'Your money or your life,' and whichever way you answer, your antagonist wins the game?"
-Carl Watner-
"I am beginning to realize that 'sanity' is no longer a value or an end in itself. If modern people were a little less sane, a little more doubtful, a little more aware of their absurdities and contradictions, perhaps there might be the possibility of their survival."
-Thomas Merton-
(1915-1968)
Source: his book, Peacemaking Day by Day
"To act without clear understanding, to form habits without investigation, to follow a path all one's life without knowing where it really leads -- such is the behavior of the multitude."
-Mencius-
[Mengzi Meng-tse] (c.371 - c.288 B.C.) Chinese Confucian philosopher
"I will not surrender responsibility for my life and my actions."
-John Enoch Powell-
(1912-1998) British politician and member of Parliament
"There is a great deal of self-will in the world, but very little genuine independence of character."
-Frederick W. Faber-
(1814-1863) British hymn writer and theologian
"It used to be the boast of free men that, so long as they kept within the bounds of the known law, there was no need to ask anybody's permission or to obey anybody's orders. It is doubtful whether any of us can make this claim today."
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
Source: The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), p. 208
"There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest."
-Elie Wiesel-
(1928-) Author, Nobel Peace Prize 1986
"At the bottom of a good deal of bravery... lurks a miserable cowardice. Men will face powder and steel because they cannot face public opinion."
-E. H. Chapin-
[Edwin Hubbell Chapin] (1814-1880) American preacher, editor of the Christian Leader
"We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another."
-Robert Oppenheimer-
"Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty."
-The Holy Bible-
Source: 2 Corinthians 3:17
"None of us would trade freedom of expression for the narrowness of the public censor. America is a free market for people who have something to say, and need not fear to say it."
-Hubert H. Humphrey-
(1911-1978) US Vice-President, US Senator (D-MN)
Source: New York Times, 9 March 1967
"He alone is free who lives with free consent under the entire guidance of reason."
-Baruch Spinoza-
(1632-1677) Dutch philosopher of Sephardi Portuguese origin
"Not only do I hate violence, but I firmly believe that the fight against it is not hopeless. I realize that the task is difficult. I realize that, only too often in the course of history, it has happened that what appeared at first to be a great success in the fight against violence was followed by a defeat. I do not overlook the fact that the new age of violence which was opened by the two World wars is by no means at an end. Nazism and Fascism are thoroughly beaten, but I must admit that their defeat does not mean that barbarism and brutality have been defeated. On the contrary, it is no use closing our eyes to the fact that these hateful ideas achieved something like a victory in defeat. I have to admit that Hitler succeeded in degrading the moral standards of our Western world, and that in the world of today there is more violence and brutal force than would have been tolerated even in the decade after the first World war. And we must face the possibility that our civilization may ultimately be destroyed by those new weapons which Hitlerism wished upon us, perhaps even within the first decade after the second World war; for no doubt the spirit of Hitlerism won its greatest victory over us when, after its defeat, we used the weapons which the threat of Nazism had induced us to develop."
-Karl Popper-
"Much of what are called 'social problems' consists of the fact that intellectuals have theories that do not fit the real world. From this they conclude that it is the real world which is wrong and needs changing."
"Liberty's view of the government could be summed up in a few short phrases:
If it works, work with it.
If it doesn't, work against it.
If it works you over, abolish it."
-Angel Shamaya-
"Read, every day, something no one else is reading.
Think, every day, something no one else is thinking.
Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do.
It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity."
-Gotthold Ephraim Lessing-
(1729-1781) German Dramatist
"Him that I love, I wish to be free -- even from me."
-Anne Morrow Lindbergh-
pioneering American aviator, author, and spouse of fellow aviator Charles Lindbergh, Jr.
"Now the 21st century approaches and with it the inevitability of change. We must wonder if the American people will find renewal and rejuvenation within themselves, will discover again their capacity for innovation and adaptation. If not, alas, the nation's future will be shaped by sightless forces of history over which Americans will have no control."
-John Chancellor-
(1927-1996) American journalist, news anchorman
"It is the mark of an educated man to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."
-Aristotle-
(384-322 BC) Greek philosopher
"As compared with impulsive commitment to the first idea which dawns, that is, with intuitive action, reasoning is patient, exploratory of other possibilities, and deliberative."
-Edwin Arthur Burtt-
(1892-1989) American philosopher
Source: Right Thinking, 1946
"That is true liberty, which bears a pure and firm breast."
-Quintus Ennius-
(c.239 BC - c.169 BC) Considered the father of Roman poetry
"Truth is always exciting. Speak it, then; life is dull without it."
-Pearl S. Buck-
(1892-1973)
"It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America."
-Molly Ivins-
[Mary Tyler Ivins] (1944-2007) American newspaper columnist, political commentator, and best-selling author
"When somebody lies, somebody loses."
-Stephanie Ericsson-
"That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
And strictly constrained by a written charter, right Abe? Right...?
"When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir."
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-
(1929-1968) US civil rights leaderr>SoSource: "I Have a Dream" speech, August 28, 1963
&q"Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty."
-Socrates-
"Augustus won over the soldiers with gifts, the populace with cheap corn, and all men with the sweets of repose, and so grew greater by degrees, while he concentrated in himself the functions of the Senate, the magistrates, and the laws. He was wholly unopposed, for the boldest spirits had fallen in battle, or in the proscription, while the remaining nobles, the readier they were to be slaves, were raised the higher by wealth and promotion, so that, aggrandised by revolution, they preferred the safety of the present to the dangerous past."
-The Annals of Tacitus-
Source: The Annals (Latin: Annales) by Roman historian and senator Tacitus is a history of the Roman Empire from the reign of Tiberius to that of Nero, the years AD 14-68
"Every man has a right to his own opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts."
-Bernard Baruch-
"It is not my intention to doubt that the doctrine of the Illuminati and the principles of Jacobinism had not spread in the United States. On the contrary, no one is more satisfied of this fact than I am.
The idea that I meant to convey, was, that I did not believe that the Lodges of Free Masons in _this_ Country had, as Societies, endeavoured to propagate the diabolical tenets of the first, or pernicious principles of the latter (if they are susceptible of separation). That Individuals of them may have done it, or that the founder, or instrument employed to found, the Democratic Societies in the United States, may have had these objects; and actually had a separation of the People from their Government in view, is too evident to be questioned."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country,' Freemason
Source: letter to George Washington Snyder, October 24, 1798, Mount Vernon, in The Writings of George Washington, vol. 20, p. 518. Washington acknowledged that the Illuminati had begun actively recruiting members from within the American lodges of Freemasonry.
"The most wonderful thing of all is that the distinguished Lutheran and Calvinist theologians who belong to our order really believe that they see in it (Illuminati) the true and genuine sense of Christian Religion. Oh mortal man, is there anything you cannot be made to believe?"
-Adam Weishaupt-
(1748-1830?) [Spartacus] Professor of Natural and Canon Law at Germany's Ingolstadt University
upon establishing his "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.
"There is sufficient evidence that a number of societies, of the Illuminati, have been established in this land of Gospel light and civil liberty, which were first organized from the grand society, in France. They are doubtless secretly striving to undermine all our ancient institutions, civil and sacred. These societies are closely leagued with those of the same Order, in Europe; they have all the same object in view. The enemies of all order are seeking our ruin. Should infidelity generally prevail, our independence would fall of course. Our republican government would be annihilated."
-Joseph Willard-
(1738-1804) U.S. Congregational clergyman, President of Harvard University
Source: 4 July 1812, A Sermon Preached in Lancaster … on the Anniversary of Our National Independence … Before the Washington Benevolent Societies of Lancaster and Guildhall (Windsor, Vermont: Thomas M. Pomroy, 1812), pp. 14–15
[Ed. note - Willard died in 1804, who delivered the sermon in 1812?]
"Secret Societies have existed among all peoples, savage and civilized, since the beginning of recorded history... It is beyond question that the secret societies of all ages have exercised a considerable degree of political influence."
-Manly P. Hall-
(1901-1990) Canadian author, lecturer, astrologer, mystic and Freemasonon
"In 1891, [Cecile] Rhodes organized a secret society with members in a "Circle of Initiates" and an outer circle known as the "Association of Helpers" later organized as the Round Table organization. In 1909-1913, they organized semi-secret groups known as Round Table Groups in the chief British dependencies and the United States. In 1919, they founded the Royal Institute of International Affairs. Similar Institutes of International Affairs were established in the chief British dominions and the United States where it is known as the Council on Foreign Relations. After 1925, the Institute of Pacific Relations was set up in twelve Pacific area countries. They were constantly harping on the lessons to be learned from the failure of the American Revolution and the success of the Canadian federation of 1867 and hoped to federate the various parts of the empire and then confederate the whole with the United Kingdom. ...
There does exist and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates to some extent in the way the Radical Right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so. I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960s, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. I have objected, both in the past and recently, to a few of its policies but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known."
-Carroll Quigley-
(1910-1977) Professor of International Relations, Georgetown University Foreign Service School, Washington, D.C., member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), mentor to Bill Clinton
Source: Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time, 1966, pg 131, 950
"We defer to authority figures because we believe that they know more than we do. If a mistake is made, it’s easy to lay the blame at their feet. Ultimately, however, we are responsible for choosing the authority figure to whom we defer. Our choice to obey someone who urges aggression against others makes us responsible for that aggression. If we truly wish to help our world, we must first identify ways in which we may be causing its problems."
-Mary J. Ruwart-
"[The war in Iraq is] a rare opportunity to move toward an historic period of cooperation. Out of these troubled times... a New World Order can emerge."
-George Herbert Walker Bush-
(1924- ) 41st US President, CIA Director, CFR Director, Trilateralist, Yale Skull & Bones Society
before Congress on September 11, 1990
Source: in a speech Bush entitled "Toward a New World Order"
"Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September the 11th; malicious lies that attempt to shift the blame away from the terrorists, themselves, away from the guilty."
-George W. Bush-
(1946- ) 43rd US President, Yale Skull & Bones Society
Source: at the United Nations, November 11, 2001
"This present window of opportunity which during a truly peaceful and interdependent world order might be built will not be open for too long. Already there are powerful forces at work that threaten to destroy all of our hopes and efforts."
-David Rockefeller-
(1915- ) Internationalist billionaire, CFR kingpin, founder of the Trilateralist Commission, World Order Godfather
Source: Speech to the United Nations Business Council on September 23, 1994
"The government, which was designed for the people, has got into the hands of the bosses and their employers, the special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy."
-Woodrow Wilson-
(1856-1924) 28th US President
"Most true points are fine points. There never was a dispute between mortals where both sides hadn't a bit of right."
-John Buchan-
Here's a point: there's probably more than just the 2 sides you're presented...
"Rulers, Statesmen, Nations, are wont to be emphatically commended to the teaching which experience offers in history. But what experience and history teach is this, that peoples and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it. Each period is involved in such peculiar circumstances, exhibits a condition of things so strictly idiosyncratic, that its conduct must be regulated by considerations connected with itself, and itself alone. Amid the pressure of great events, a general principle gives no help. It is useless to revert to similar circumstances in the Past. The pallid shades of memory struggle in vain with the life and freedom of the Present."
-Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel-
"Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce."
-James A. Garfield-
(1831-1881) 20th President of the United States (1881), assassinated
"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 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."
-J. P. Morgan-
[John Pierpont Morgan] (1837-1913) American financier and banker
Source: Questionable: No reliable source for this quote has been found. Attributed to: Private Communique to Leading U.S. Bankers only, 1934
"Money is a new form of slavery, and distinguishable from the old simply by the fact that it is impersonal -- that there is no human relation between master and slave."
-Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi-
(1828-1910) Russian writer
"Truth travels slowly, but it will reach even you in time."
-Benjamin Disraeli-
(1804-1881) Prime Minister of England, British statesman, novelist
"I don't have a problem with guilt about money. The way I see it is that my money represents an enormous number of claim checks on society. It is like I have these little pieces of paper that I can turn into consumption. If I wanted to, I could hire 10,000 people to do nothing but paint my picture every day for the rest of my life. And the GNP would go up. But the utility of the product would be zilch, and I would be keeping those 10,000 people from doing AIDS research, or teaching, or nursing]. I don't do that though. I don't use very many of those claim checks. There's nothing material I want very much. And I'm going to give virtually all of those claim checks to charity when my wife and I die."
-Warren Buffett-
"If others would but reflect on mathematical truths as deeply and as continuously as I have, they would make my discoveries."
-Carl Friedrich Gauss-
[Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss] (1777-1855) German mathematician
Source: The World of Mathematics (1956) Edited by J. R. Newman
"The foundation of every state is the education of its youth."
-Diogenes-
(413-323 B.C.) Greek philosopher, Cynic
"If the only motive was to help people who could not afford education, advocates of government involvement would have simply proposed tuition subsidies."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
"The agency that is so strict on the way Americans keep their books cannot even pass a financial audit."
-Ted Stevens-
(1923-2010) US Senator (Alaska-R)
Source: on the first-ever audit of the IRS in 1993
And who knows more about fiscal responsibility than Ted "Bridge to Nowhere" Stevens, I ask ya...!
"Illusions are like mistresses. We can have many of them without tying ourselves down to responsibility. But truth insists on marriage. Once a person embraces truth, he is in its ruthless, but gentle, grasp."
-Rebazar Tarzs-
Tibetan lama
"For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another. For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself."
-The Holy Bible-
Source: Galatians 5:13-14
"That religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience; and that it is the duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love and charity towards each other."
-Virginia Declaration of Rights-
Source: Article XVI, Ratified in Virginia on June 12, 1776
"The theory of free speech, that truth is so much larger and stranger and more many-sided than we know of, that it is very much better at all costs to hear everyone’s account of it, is a theory which has been justified on the whole by experiment, but which remains a very daring and even a very surprising theory. It is really one of the great discoveries of the modern time."
-Gilbert Keith Chesterton-
(1874-1936) British essayist, critic, poet, and novelist
Source: Robert Browning, 1914
"We know what a person thinks, not when he tells us what he thinks, but by his actions."
-Isaac Bashevis Singer-
(1904-1991) Polish-born Jewish author, Nobel Prize in Literature, 1978
"Men and governments must act to the best of their ability. There is no such thing as absolute certainty but there is assurance sufficient for the purposes of human life."
-John Stuart Mill-
(1806-1873) English philosopher and economist
"To say, as the arguments of most persons do, that the people, in their individual and natural capacities, have a right to institute government, but that they have no right, in the same capacities, to preserve that government by putting down usurpation—and that any attempt to do so is revolution, is blank absurdity."
-Lysander Spooner-
"We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender."
-Sir Winston Churchill-
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1940-1945, 1951-1955)
"Among the numerous advantages promised by a well constructed Union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction. The friend of popular governments never finds himself so much alarmed for their character and fate, as when he contemplates their propensity to this dangerous vice."
-James Madison-
Federalist No. 10
That's political parties, y'all...
"Now the truth of the matter is, there is nothing wrong with this country. Please. The message I want to leave with you is that there's nothing wrong with this country that the proper leadership won't cure. We've been here before. In 1787, the economy of our nation was in absolute chaos and as a consequence, they met in Philadelphia to form a new country, and when they did, they did the right things, and in the second State of the Union address, which was written at that time by George Washington, he said the foundations, the economic foundations of our nation are on such sound footing that it would have been a madman would have suspected 3 years ago. The fact is that the chaos that they're creating doesn't mean that America can or has to be in decline. It means that we need to remove them as rapidly as possible and get people that know what to do and America will continue to climb."
-Bob McEwen-
(1950-) US Congressman (OH-R) (1981-1993)
Source: http://www.conservative.org/cpac/archives/cpacarchivescpac-2010-bob-mcewen/#ixzz1R9nkjSB1
"Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper."
-Francis Bacon-
(1561-1626) Philosopher, British Lord Chancellor
Hope, it has been said, is like a dose of spiritual clap...
"If you are wise, mingle these two elements: do not hope without despair, or despair without hope."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter CIV: On care of health and peace of mind, line 12
isolationism = North Korea (relentlessly illustrative)
non-interventionism = Switzerland (and, y'know, Ron Paul the "isolationist")
Relatedly...
patriotism: i love my country (if not my government)
nationalism: my country can beat up your country
imperialism: here we come now... (and if you're not all in, you're an isolationist)
"The First Amendment was never intended to insulate our public institutions from any mention of God, the Bible or religion. When such insulation occurs, another religion, such as secular humanism, is effectively established."
-Crockett v. Sorenson-
Source: U.S. District Court stated in Crockett v. Sorenson, W.D. Va,. 1983
Or, y'know, State worship...
"Among the religions in this country which do not teach what would generally be considered a belief in the existence of God are Buddhism, Taoism, ethical culture, secular humanism and others."
-Justice Hugo L. Black-
(1886-1971) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: Torcaso v Watkins (1961)
Or, y'know, State worship...
"Our problems are man-made, therefore they may be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings."
-John F. Kennedy-
(1917-1963) 35th US President
Source: speech at The American University, Washington, D.C., June 10, 1963
"LOGIC The principle governing human intellection. Its nature may be deduced from examining the following propositions, both of which are held by human beings to be true and often by the same people: 'I can't so you musn't,' and 'I can but you musn't.'"
-John Brunner-
"There is in human affairs one order which is best. That order is not always the one which exists; but it is the order which should exist for the greatest good of humanity. God knows, it and will it: man's duty it is to discover and establish it."
-Emile Louis Victor de Laveleye-
(1822-1892) Belgian economist
"In politics, love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it nothing is being achieved except hypocrisy. All the characteristics you stress in the Negro people: their beauty, their capacity for joy, their warmth, and their humanity, are well-known characteristics of all oppressed people. They grow out of suffering and they are the proudest possession of all pariahs. Unfortunately, they have never survived the hour of liberation by even five minutes. Hatred and love belong together, and they are both destructive; you can afford them only in private and, as a people, only so long as you are not free."
-Hannah Arendt-
(1906-1975) German-American political theorist, escaped Nazi Germany
Source: Letter to James Baldwin (21 November 1962).
"The cause of freedom is identified with the destinies of humanity, and in whatever part of the world it gains ground by and by, it will be a common gain to all those who desire it."
-Louis Kossuth-
[Lajos Kossuth de Udvard et Kossuthfalva] (1802-1894) Hungarian lawyer, journalist, politician and Regent-President of Hungary (1849)
"True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others, at whatever cost."
-Arthur Ashe-
(1943-1993) American World No. 1 professional tennis player
"But peace does not rest in the charters and covenants alone. It lies in the hearts and minds of all people. So let us not rest all our hopes on parchment and on paper, let us strive to build peace, a desire for peace, a willingness to work for peace in the hearts and minds of all of our people. I believe that we can. I believe the problems of human destiny are not beyond the reach of human beings."
-John F. Kennedy-
(1917-1963) 35th US President
"I always knew that deep down in every human heart, there is mercy and generosity. No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than the opposite."
-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
Ahh, but isn't the opposite of 'love' not 'hate', but rather 'indifference'...?
"The possibility of coordination through voluntary cooperation rests on the elementary — yet frequently denied — proposition that both parties to an economic transaction benefit from it, provided the economic transaction is bilaterally voluntary and informed."
-Milton Friedman-
"Discovery consists in seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what no one else has thought."
-Albert Szent-Gyorgi-
(1893-1986) Hungarian physiologist, Nobel Prize in 1937
"Indeed the Idols I have loved so long,
have done my credit in this World much wrong;
have drowned my Glory in a shallow Cup,
and sold my Reputation for a Song."
-Omar Khayyam-
(1048-1131) Persian poet, mathematician, astronomer
"Never assume the obvious is true."
-William Safire-
(1929-2009) American author, columnist, journalist, presidential speechwriter
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
Source: Attributed, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759
"The history of totalitarian regimes is reflected in the evolution and perfection of the instruments of terror and more especially the police."
-Carl J. Friedrich-
(1901-1984) German-American professor, political theorist
Source: The Pathology of Politics, 1972
"There is nothing that can help you understand your beliefs more than trying to explain them to an inquisitor."
-Frank Clark-
Source: Reader’s Digest, July 1978
"We tell lies when we are afraid... afraid of what we don't know, afraid of what others will think, afraid of what will be found out about us. But every time we tell a lie, the thing that we fear grows stronger."
-Tad Williams-
(1957- ) Author
Source: in Daw Books (April 1994). Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, Book 3 To Green Angel Tower, Part 1
"Newspaper editors separate the wheat from the chaff -- and print the chaff."
-Adlai E. Stevenson II-
(1900-1965) Governor of Illinois (1949-1953), U.S. presidential candidate (1952, 1956), U.N. Ambassador (1961-1965)
"When an opponent declares, 'I will not come over to your side,' I calmly say, 'Your child belongs to us already. ... What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.'"
-Adolf Hitler-
(1889-1945) German Nazi Dictator
Source: Nov. 6, 1933
“We know of no other enumerated constitutional right whose core protection has been subjected to a freestanding 'interest-balancing' approach. The very enumeration of the right takes out of the hands of government -- even the Third Branch of Government -- the power to decide on a case-by-case basis whether the right is really worth insisting upon. A constitutional guarantee subject to future judges' assessments of its usefulness is no constitutional guarantee at all. Constitutional rights are enshrined with the scope they were understood to have when the people adopted them, whether or not future legislatures or (yes) even future judges think that scope too broad... Undoubtedly some think that the Second Amendment is outmoded. That is perhaps debatable, but what is not debatable is that it is not the role of this Court to pronounce the Second Amendment extinct.”
-Justice Antonin Scalia-
(1936-2016) American jurist, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
Source: District of Columbia v. Heller, June 26, 2008, striking down D.C.'s gun ban as unconstitutional
"The conclusion is thus inescapable that the history, concept, and wording of the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, as well as its interpretation by every major commentator and court in the first half-century after its ratification, indicates that what is protected is an individual right of a private citizen to own and carry firearms in a peaceful manner."
-Report of the Subcommittee on the Constitution of the Committee on the Judiciary-
Source: United States Senate, 97th Congress, Second Session ( February 1982 )
"Gun control has proved to be a grievous failure, a means of disarming honest citizens without limiting firepower available to those who prey on the law-abiding. Attempting to use the legal system to punish the weapon rather than the person misusing the weapon is similarly doomed to fail."
-Doug Bandow-
(1954- ) American columnist, author, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute
"Let experience solve it. To listen to mere speculation in such a case were criminal."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
Source: George Washington's Farewell Address, September 17, 1796
<a href=>http://liberty-tree.ca/research/George.Washingtons.Farewell.Address</a>
"To secure their enjoyment, however, certain protections or barriers have been erected which serve to maintain inviolate the three primary rights of personal security, personal liberty, and private property. These may in America be said to be:
1. The bill of rights and written constitutions ...
2. The rights of bearing arms -- which with us is not limited and restrained by an arbitrary system of game laws as in England, but is particularly enjoyed by every citizen, and is among his most valuable privileges, since it furnishes the means of resisting as a freeman ought, the inroads of usurpation.
3. The right of applying to the courts of justice for the redress of injuries."
-Henry St. George Tucker-
(1780-1848) Virginia jurist, law professor, and U.S. Congressman (1815-1819)
Source: Commentaries on the Laws of Virginia p. 43 (1831)
"You want to know my definition of gun control? Being able to stand at 25 meters and put two rounds in the same hole. That’s gun control."
-Jesse Ventura-
[James George Janos] (1951-) Governor of Minnesota, former professional wrestler
Source: Playboy Interview, September 1999
"What, Sir, is the use of a militia? It is to prevent the establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty. ... Whenever Governments mean to invade the rights and liberties of the people, they always attempt to destroy the militia, in order to raise an army upon their ruins."
-Elbridge Gerry-
(1744-1814) of Massachusetts, Signer of the Declaration of Independence and Member of the Constitutional Convention
Source: spoken during floor debate over the Second Amendment, I Annals of Congress at 750, August 17, 1789
"America united with a handful of troops, or without a single soldier, exhibits a more forbidding posture to foreign ambition than America disunited, with a hundred thousand veterans ready for combat."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Federalist No. 14, November 30, 1787
"[The Bill of Rights is] designed to protect individuals and minorities against the tyranny of the majority, but it's also designed to protect the people against bureaucracy, against the government."
-Laurence Tribe-
(1941-) American professor of constitutional law
"Just as an enemy is more dangerous to a retreating army, so every trouble that fortune brings attacks us all the harder if we yield and turn our backs."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter LXXVIII
"How to create a socialist state by Saul Alinsky:
There are 8 levels of control that must be obtained before you are able to create a socialist state. The first is the most important.
1) Healthcare — Control healthcare and you control the people.
2) Poverty — Increase the Poverty level as high as possible, poor people are easier to control and will not fight back if you are providing everything for them to live.
3) Debt — Increase the debt to an unsustainable level. That way you are able to increase taxes, and this will produce more poverty.
4) Gun Control — Remove the ability to defend themselves from the Government. That way you are able to create a police state.
5) Welfare — Take control of every aspect of their lives (Food, Housing, and Income).
6) Education — Take control of what people read and listen to — take control of what children learn in school.
7) Religion — Remove the belief in the God from the Government and schools.
8) Class Warfare — Divide the people into the wealthy and the poor. This will cause more discontent and it will be easier to take (Tax) the wealthy with the support of the poor."
-Saul Alinksy-
Source: Attributed, no source
"The militia, who are in fact the effective part of the people at large, will render many troops quite unnecessary. They will form a powerful check upon the regular troops, and will generally be sufficient to over-awe them"
-Tench Coxe-
(1755-1824) American political economist
Source: An American Citizen IV, October 21, 1787
"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
"A person has the right to keep and bear arms for the defense of self, family, home and state, and for lawful hunting and recreational use."
-West Virginia Constitution-
Source: West Virginia Constitution, article III, section 22
"...one of the basic conditions for the victory of socialism is the arming of the workers (Communist) and the disarming of the bourgeoisie (the middle class)."
-Vladimir Ilyich Lenin-
[Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov] (1870-1924) First Leader of the Soviet Union
"[U]nderlying the gun control struggle is a fundamental division in our nation. The intensity of passion on this issue suggests to me that we are experiencing a sort of low grade war going on between two alternative views of what America is and ought to be. On the one side are those who take bourgeois Europe as a model of civilized society: a society just, equitable, and democratic; but well ordered, with the lines of responsibility and authority clearly drawn, and with decisions made rationally and correctly by intelligent men for the entire nation. To such people, hunting is atavistic, personal violence is shameful, and uncontrolled gun ownership is a blot on civilization. On the other side is a group of people who do not tend to be especially articulate or literate, and whose world view is rarely expressed in print. .... They ask, because they do not understand the other side, 'Why do these people want to disarm us?' They consider themselves no threat to anyone; they are not criminals, not revolutionaries. But slowly, as they become politicized, they find an analysis that fits the phenomenon they experience: Someone fears their having guns, someone is afraid of their defending their families, property, and liberty. Nasty things may begin to happen if these people begin to feel that they are cornered."
-B. Bruce-Briggs-
Source: The Great American Gun War, 45 Pub. Interest 37, 61 (1976)
"A function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purposes when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger. Speech is often provocative and challenging. It may strike at prejudices and preconceptions and have profound unsettling effects as it presses for acceptance of an idea."
-William O. Douglas-
"The difference between [people who take civil liberties seriously] and others ... is that such serious people begin with a constitutional understanding that declines to trivialize the Second Amendment or the Fourteenth Amendment, just as they likewise decline to trivialize any other right expressly identified elsewhere in the Bill of Rights. It is difficult to see why they are less than entirely right in this unremarkable view. That it has taken the NRA to speak for them, with respect to the Second Amendment, moreover, is merely interesting -- perhaps far more as a comment on others, however, than on the NRA."
-William Van Alstyne-
Professor at Duke University School of Law, served on National Board of the ACLU
Source: The Second Amendment and the Personal Right to Arms, 43 DUKE L. J. 1236, 1254 (1994)
"Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man's nose begins."
-Zechariah Chafee, Jr.-
(1865-1957) American professor of law, judicial philosopher, civil rights advocate
Source: "Freedom of Speech in Wartime", 32 Harvard Law Review 932, 957 (1919).
"The origin of all power is in the people, and they have an incontestible right to check the creatures of their own creation."
-Mercy Otis Warren-
The Muse ofthe American Revolution
"Lots of people use misleading euphemisms to make their position sound more pleasant. Socialists call themselves 'democrats.' Forced wealth redistribution is called 'welfare.' Politicians refer to their extortion as 'asking' for 'contributions.' And so on. In contrast, the terms 'anarchist' and 'voluntaryist' are specific and precise: 'anarchists' want 'rule by no one' (what the word 'anarchy' literally means), and 'voluntaryists' want all human interaction to be voluntary. And the 'non-aggression principle'is self-explanatory.
What's funny is that those who argue AGAINST a stateless society are often accidentally honest. If, for example, you are against anarchy, then you are a statist, and you advocate 'rule by someone.' If you bash 'voluntaryism,' then by definition, you are an INvoluntaryist, meaning you want some degree of violent coercion. If you disagree with the non-aggression principle, that means you are PRO-aggression, and you want violence initiated against people who didn't threaten or harm anyone. It's no wonder statists love their euphemisms and vague obfuscations. If they are simply specific and honest about what they believe, and what they advocate, they've already lost the debate."
-Larken Rose-
"Did you hear that we're writing Iraq's new Constitution? Why not just give them ours? We're not using it anymore."
-Jay Leno-
(1950- ) Comedian
"European merchants supply the best weaponry, contributing to their own defeat."
-Saladin-
enormously successful Muslim commander during the Crusades
Source: in a letter to the Caliph in Baghdad
"[T]he power to declare war is fully and exclusively vested in the legislature."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
1793
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought."
-Matsuo Basho-
(1644-1694) Japanese poet of the Edo period
"Destiny waits alike for the free man as well as for him enslaved by another's might."
-Aeschylus-
(525-456 BC) Greek playwright
Source: The Libation Bearers
"Why should we not form a secret society with but one object, the furtherance of the British Empire and the bringing of the whole world under British rule, for the recovery of the United States, for making the Anglo-Saxon race but one Empire?"
-Cecil Rhodes-
(1853-1902) British imperialist, businessman, mining magnate, and politician in South Africa
Source: Cecil Rhodes in his "Confession of Faith" at age 23.
"If there are those who think we are to jump immediately into a new world order, actuated by complete understanding and brotherly love, they are doomed to disappointment. If we are ever to approach that time, it will be after patient and persistent effort of long duration. The present international situation of mistrust and fear can only be corrected by a formula of equal status, continuously applied, to every phase of international contacts, until the cobwebs of the old order are brushed out of the minds of the people of all lands."
-Dr. Augustus O. Thomas-
Commissioner of Education for the state of Maine, President of the World Federation of Education Associations
Source: 1927, Address to the World Federation of Education Associations (WFEA) at their Toronto, Canada conference, Reference: International Understanding: Agencies Educating for a New World, 1931
"The great foe of democracy now and in the near future is plutocracy. Every year that passes brings out this antagonism more distinctly. It is to be the social war of the twentieth century. In that war militarism, expansion and imperialism will all favor plutocracy. In the first place, war and expansion will favor jobbery, both in the dependencies and at home. In the second place, they will take away the attention of the people from what the plutocrats are doing. In the third place, they will cause large expenditures of the people’s money, the return for which will not go into the treasury, but into the hands of a few schemers. In the fourth place, they will call for a large public debt and taxes, and these things especially tend to make men unequal, because any social burdens bear more heavily on the weak than on the strong, and so make the weak weaker and the strong stronger. Therefore expansion and imperialism are a grand onslaught on democracy."
-William Graham Sumner-
(1840-1910) American classical liberal (now a branch of "libertarianism" in political philosophy), social scientist, professor of sociology, polymath
Source: W. G. Sumner - The Conquest of the U. S. by Spain
"We have a lot of goodness in this country. And we should promote it, but never through the barrel of a gun. We should do it by setting good standards, motivating people and have them want to emulate us. But you can't enforce our goodness, like the neocons preach, with an armed force. It doesn't work."
-Dr. Ron Paul-
(1935-) American physician, US Congressman (R-TX), US Presidential candidate
Source: Republican Presidential Debate, Manchester, New Hampshire, June 5, 2007
“I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag."
-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
Source: from a speech in 1933
"Let us be frank: provoking military-political instability and other regional conflicts is also a convenient way of deflecting people’s attention from mounting social and economic problems. Regrettably, further attempts of this kind cannot be ruled out."
-Vladimir Putin-
(1952-) President of Russia (2012-)
Source: Key-note speech, Davos World Economic Forum, 28 January, 2009
"Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an excess, that itself will need reforming."
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge-
"No, it's not that economic inequality per se harms societies. It's just that systemic gross economic inequality can only result from and be maintained by forcibly distorting the market via statism, and this necessarily stifles the development of that society, impoverishing it as a whole -- bit by bit, subsidy by subsidy, tax by tax, bailout by bailout."
-Brad Spangler-
Regulation by crony/protectionist/corporatist regulation...
"We do not protect freedom in order to indulge error. We protect freedom in order to discover truth."
-Henry Steele Commager-
"All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it."
-Dr. Samuel Johnson-
(1709-1784) English author, poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer
Source: in Boswell’s Life of Johnson, 1791
"It is madness beyond compare
To try to reform the world."
-Molière-
[Jean-Baptiste Poquelin] (1622-1673) French playwright
Source: The Misanthrope, 1666
"The world must be made safe for democracy."
-Woodrow Wilson-
(1856-1924) 28th US President
Source: April 2, 1917, before a joint session of Congress to seek a Declaration of War against Germany
"As against the 'invisible hand' of Adam Smith, there has to be a visible hand of politicians whose objective is to have the kind of society that is caring and humane."
-Pierre Trudeau-
[Joseph Philippe Pierre Yves Elliott Trudeau] (1919-2000) Prime Minister of Canada (1968-1979, 1980-1984)
Source: Memoirs (1993), Part 3, 1974 - 1979 Victory And Defeat, p. 190
"There are good citizens and bad citizens in every class as in every locality, and the attitude of decent people toward great public and social questions should be determined, not by the accidental questions of employment or locality, but by those deep-set principles which represent the innermost souls of men."
-Theodore Roosevelt-
"Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power."
-Aldous Huxley-
(1894-1963) English writer, novelist, philosopher
"The Depreciation of the American Paper is solely owing to the excessive Quantities."
-Benjamin Franklin-
to Durnas, 18 May 1779
"It is not in the nature of politics that the best men should be elected. The best men do not want to govern their fellow men."
-George MacDonald-
"It is collectivism that is the unrealistic expression of utopian belief systems. In its worst form -- the state -- collectivism is the institutionalized exertion of violence to compel living beings to behave contrary to their natural self-interest inclinations. So strong are the motivations for individual preferences that the state must resort to attacks upon the very nature of life to satisfy the ambitions of those who see others as nothing more than resources to be exploited for such ends."
-Butler D. Shaffer-
Professor, Southwestern University School of Law
"A civilization in which there is not a continuous controversy about important issues... is on the way to totalitarianism and death."
-Robert M. Hutchins-
(1899-1977) American educational philosopher, president (1929–1945) and chancellor (1945–1951) of the University of Chicago, and earlier dean of Yale Law School (1927–1929)
Source: The University of Utopia, 1953
"Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification."
-George Washington-
"Liberty of conscience is nowadays only understood to be the liberty of believing what men please, but also of endeavoring to propagate that belief as much as they can."
-Jonathan Swift-
(1667-1745) Irish author
Source: 1715
"The very rich have such a touching faith in the efficacy of small sums."
-Tennessee Williams-
"Let's get back to the zoo before Stanley misses us!"
-Tennessee Tuxedo-
"The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-
(1803-1882) American essayist, lecturer, and poet
SoSource: Essays, 1841
"Science tells us how to heal and how to kill; it reduces the death rate in retail and then kills us wholesale in war; but only wisdom desire coordinated in the light of all experience -- can tell us when to heal and when to kill. To observe processes and to construct means is science; to criticize and coordinate ends is philosophy: and because in these days our means and instruments have multiplied beyond our interpretation and synthesis of ideals and ends, our life is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. For a fact is nothing except in relation to desire; it is not complete except in relation to a purpose and a whole. Science without philosophy, facts without perspective and valuation, cannot save us from havoc and despair. Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom."
-Will Durant-
"That the innocent, though they may have some connection or dependency upon the guilty (which, perhaps, they themselves cannot help), should not upon that account suffer or be punished for the guilty, is one of the plainest and most obvious rules of justice. In the most unjust war, however, it is commonly the sovereign or the rulers only who are guilty. The subjects are almost always perfectly innocent. Whenever it suits the conveniency of a public enemy, however, the goods of the peaceable citizens are seized both at land and at sea; their lands are laid waste, their houses are burnt, and they themselves, if they presume to make any resistance, are murdered or led into captivity; and all this in the most perfect conformity to what are called the laws of nations."
-Adam Smith-
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
"There are some who've forgotten why we have a military. It's not to promote war; it's to be prepared for peace."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
"For when they shall say, 'Peace and Safety', then sudden destruction comes upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape."
-St. Paul-
Source: The Holy Bible, I Thes. 5:3
"Abuse of power isn't limited to bad guys in other nations. It happens in our own country if we’re not vigilant."
-Clint Eastwood-
(1930-) American actor, film director, composer, producer, mayor
Source: Parade Magazine, 12 January 1997
"War is sweet to those who haven't tasted it."
-Desiderius Erasmus-
(1466-1536) Dutch theologian, classical scholar
"War is too serious a matter to entrust to military men."
-Georges Clemenceau-
(1841-1929) French Prime Minister
"In the end it will not matter to us whether we fought with flails or reeds. It will matter to us greatly on what side we fought."
-Gilbert Keith Chesterton-
(1874-1936) British essayist, critic, poet, and novelist
"I am speaking now of the highest duty we owe our friends, the noblest, the most sacred -- that of keeping their own nobleness, goodness, pure and incorrupt."
-Harriet Beecher Stowe-
(1814-1896) Abolitionist author
"It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas … If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you … On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of skeptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish the useful ideas from the worthless ones."
-Carl Sagan-
"The surest way to prevent war is not to fear it."
-John Randolph-
(1773-1833) known as John Randolph of Roanoke, a planter, Congressman from Virginia, Senator, and also Minister to Russia
"He makes a solitude, and calls it - peace."
-Lord Byron-
[George Gordon Noel Byron] (1788-1824), The 6th Baron Byron of Rochdale
"The shaft of the arrow had been feathered with one of the eagle's own plumes. We often give our enemies the means of our own destruction."
-Aesop-
(c. 550 B.C.) legendary Greek fabulist
Source: The Eagle and the Arrow
"[W]e made a great mistake in the beginning of our struggle, and I fear, in spite of all we can do, it will prove to be a fatal mistake. We appointed all our worst generals to command our armies, and all our best generals to edit the newspapers."
-Robert E. Lee-
(1807-1870) General-in-Chief of the Confederate States army
1865
Source: Personal Reminiscences, Anecdotes, and Letters of Gen. Robert E. Lee, 1875
"In order for a war to be just, three things are necessary.
First, the authority of the sovereign....
Secondly, a just cause....
Thirdly ... a rightful intention."
-Saint Thomas Aquinas-
(1225-74) Italian philosopher and theologian
"A high degree of intellect tends to make a man unsocial."
-Arthur Schopenhauer-
"Let the gull'd fool the toil of war pursue,
Where bleed the many to enrich the few."
-William Shenstone-
"The American press is extraordinarily free and vigorous, as it should be. It should be, not because it is free of inaccuracy, oversimplification and bias, but because the alternative to that freedom is worse than those failings."
-Judge Robert Bork-
(1927- ) Cricuit Judge for US Court of Appeals
Source: 1985
"The citizen who criticizes his country is paying it an implied tribute."
-J. William Fulbright-
(1905-1995) US Senator
Source: Speech, American Newspaper Publishers Association, 28 April 1966
"I do not trust my eyes to tell me what a man is: I have a better and more trustworthy light by which I can distinguish what is true from what is false: let the mind find out what is good for the mind."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: Moral Essays, De Vita Beata (On the Happy Life): cap. 2, line 2
"Uniformity, therefore, is an essential built-in element of utopian existence, and it is no less important that this uniformity remain permanent."
-Thomas Molnar-
Source: Utopia: The Perennial Heresy, 1967
"Every individual of the community at large has an equal right to the protection of government."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: Speech, Constitutional Convention, 29 June 1787
"If liberty and equality, as is thought by some are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in the government to the utmost."
- Aristotle-
(384-322 BC) Greek philosopher
Source: Politics, 343 BC
"All men have equal rights, but not to equal things."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
"An equal application of law to every condition of man is fundamental."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"All men have equal rights to liberty, to their property, and to the protection of the laws."
-Voltaire-
[François Marie Arouet] (1694-1778) French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher
Source: Essay on Manners, 1756
"Men are disturbed not by things but by their images of things."
-Epictetus-
Enchiridion
"In the state of nature... all men are born equal, but they cannot continue in this equality. Society makes them lose it, and they recover it only by the protection of the law."
-Charles de Montesquieu-
[Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat] (1689-1755) Baron de Montesquieu
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these, are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed;"
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Jefferson's hand-written draft of the Declaration of Independence, June, 1776
"Nothing is so common as to imitate one's enemies, and to use their weapons."
-Voltaire-
The weapon of coercive, corrosive politics, for example...
"Perhaps I can summarise it best by saying this -- Nations that have pursued equality, like the Iron Curtain countries, I think have finished up with neither equality, nor liberty. Nations, which like us, in the past have pursued liberty, as a fundamental objective, extending it to all, have finished up with liberty, human dignity, and far fewer inequalities than other people."
-Margaret Thatcher-
(1925-2013) British Prime Minister (1979–1990)
Source: 1976 Feb 5, TV Interview for Thames TV 'This Week'
"Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead."
-Arundhati Roy-
"Where freedom is real, equality is the passion of the masses. Where equality is real, freedom is the passion of a small minority."
-Eric Hoffer-
(1902-1983) American author, philosopher, awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
"We clamour for equality chiefly in areas where we cannot ourselves hope to obtain excellence."
-Eric Hoffer-
(1902-1983) American author, philosopher, awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
"If the Declaration of Independence justified the secession of 3,000,000 colonists in 1776, I do not see why the Constitution ratified by the same men should not justify the secession of 5,000,000 of the Southerners from the Federal Union in 1861...and when a section of our Union resolves to go out, we shall resist any coercive acts to keep it in. We hope never to live in a republic where one section is pinned to the other section by bayonets."
-Horace Greeley-
a Republican writing in his own paper
The New York Tribune, December 17, 1860
"Americans are so enamored of equality, they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
[Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clerel, le Comte de Tocqueville] (1805-1859) French historian
"The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny,"
-James Madison-
Federalist No. 47
"A government is republican in proportion as every member composing it has his equal voice in the direction of its concerns, not indeed in person, which would be impracticable beyond the limits of a city or small township, but by representatives chosen by himself and responsible to him at short periods."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"We grant no dukedoms to the few,
We hold like rights and shall;
Equal on Sunday in the pew,
On Monday in the mall.
For what avail the plough or sail,
Or land, or life, if freedom fail?"
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-
(1803-1882) American essayist, lecturer, and poet
Source: Boston (st. 5)
"Freedom is an indivisible word. If we want to enjoy it, and fight for it, we must be prepared to extend it to everyone, whether they are rich or poor, whether they agree with us or not, no matter what their race or the color of their skin."
-Wendell L. Willkie-
(1892-1944) Republican presidential candidate, 1940
Source: One World, 1943
"Morality can only exist in a free society; it can exist to the extent freedom exists."
Henry Hazlitt-
"Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses."
-Plato-
"The great ideals of liberty and equality are preserved against the assaults of opportunism, the expediency of the passing hour, the erosion of small encroachments, the scorn and derision of those who have no patience with general principles."
-Justice Benjamin Cardozo-
(1870-1938) U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Nature of Judicial Process, 1921
"The aim of art, the aim of a life, can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world. It cannot, under any circumstances, be to reduce or suppress that freedom, even temporarily."
-Albert Camus-
(1913-1960) French Algerian author
"Morality and the ideal of freedom which is the political expression of morality, are not the property of a given party or group, but a value that is fundamentally and universally human... No people will be truly free till all are free."
-Benedetto Croce-
(1866-1952) Italian Minister of Education, Philosopher, Historian, Senator, and Author
Source: Freedom, 1940
"What is history but the story of how politicians have squandered the blood and treasure of the human race?"
-Thomas Sowell-
And liberty...
"By Liberty I understand the Power which every Man has over his own Actions, and his Right to enjoy the Fruits of his Labour, Art, and Industry, as far as by it he hurts not the Society, or any Members of it, by taking from any Member, or by hindering him from enjoying what he himself enjoys. The Fruits of a Man's honest Industry are the just Rewards of it, ascertained to him by natural and eternal Equity, as is his Title to use them in the Manner which he thinks fit: And thus, with the above Limitations, every Man is sole Lord and Arbitrer of his own private Actions and Property."
-Cato-
John Trenchard (1662-1723) & Thomas Gordon (169?-1750)
Source: Letter 62 (1722) of Cato's Letters (1720-1723), quoted by Ronald Hamowy, "Cato's Letters, John Locke, and the Republican Paradigm", in Edward J. Harpham (Ed.), John Locke's Two Treatises of Government: New Interpretations (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992), p. 157
"Government…may not be hostile to any religion or to the advocacy of no-religion; and it may not aid, foster, or promote one religion or religious theory against another… The First Amendment mandates governmental neutrality…"
-Abe Fortas-
(1910-1982) U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: 1968
"In a free government, the security for civil rights must be the same as that for religious rights. It consists in the one case in the multiplicity of interests, and in the other in the multiplicity of sects."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: The Federalist, 1788
"All special charters of freedom must be abrogated where the universal law of freedom is to flourish."
-Heinrich Heine-
(1797-1856) German poet, journalist, essayist, literary critic
"The American notion of freedom transcended the political realm and in fact extended to every major category of human relationships, including those between employer and employee, clergyman and layman, husband and wife, parent and child, public official and citizen. Americans believed that, as of July 4, 1776, all men were created equal, and that any impairment of a man's equality was destructive of his liberty also."
-David M. Potter-
(1911-1971)
Source: Freedom and Its Limitations in American Life, 1976
"Every member of the society spies on the rest, and it is his duty to inform against them. All are slaves and equal in their slavery... The great thing about it is equality... Slaves are bound to be equal."
-Fyodor Dostoyevsky-
(1821-1881)
Source: The Possessed
"Law and justice are not always the same."
-Gloria Steinem-
(1944- ) Publisher of Ms. magazine
"The regulation prohibiting abusive comment that tends or is likely to expose a person or a group to hatred or contempt is necessary not only to avoid harm to the persons targeted, but also to ensure that Canadian values are respected for all Canadians. The broadcast of remarks that could expose individuals or groups to hatred or contempt can attract individuals to its cause and in the process create serious discord between various groups in Canadian society to the detriment of all of Canadian society. This harm undermines the cultural, political and social fabric of Canada which the Canadian broadcasting system is expressly meant to safeguard, enrich and strengthen. It also undermines the multicultural and multiracial nature of Canadian society, which the programming of the Canadian broadcasting system should reflect. Protection from the harms of abusive comment is for the benefit of all Canadians."
-Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission-
Source: Broadcasting Decision CRTC 2004-271, Ottawa, July 13, 2004, par. 35
"Of all the tragic facts about the history of slavery, the most astonishing to an American today is that, although slavery was a worldwide institution for thousands of years, nowhere in the world was slavery a controversial issue prior to the 18th century. People of every race and color were enslaved – and enslaved others. White people were still being bought and sold as slaves in the Ottoman Empire, decades after American blacks were freed.
Everyone hated the idea of being a slave but few had any qualms about enslaving others. Slavery was just not an issue, not even among intellectuals, much less among political leaders, until the 18th century – and then it was an issue only in Western civilization. Among those who turned against slavery in the 18th century were George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry and other American leaders. You could research all of the 18th century Africa or Asia or the Middle East without finding any comparable rejection of slavery there. But who is singled out for scathing criticism today? American leaders of the 18th century.
Deciding that slavery was wrong was much easier than deciding what to do with millions of people from another continent, of another race, and without any historical preparation for living as free citizens in a society like that of the United States, where they were 20 percent of the population.
It is clear from the private correspondence of Washington, Jefferson, and many others that their moral rejection of slavery was unambiguous, but the practical question of what to do now had them baffled. That would remain so for more than half a century.
In 1862, a ship carrying slaves from Africa to Cuba, in violation of a ban on the international slave trade, was captured on the high seas by the U.S. Navy. The crew were imprisoned and the captain was hanged in the United States – despite the fact that slavery itself was still legal at the time in Africa, Cuba, and in the United States. What does this tell us? That enslaving people was considered an abomination. But what to do with millions of people who were already enslaved was not equally clear.
That question was finally answered by a war in which one life was lost [620,000 Civil War casualties] for every six people freed [3.9 million]. Maybe that was the only answer. But don’t pretend today that it was an easy answer – or that those who grappled with the dilemma in the 18th century were some special villains when most leaders and most people around the world saw nothing wrong with slavery.
Incidentally, the September 2003 issue of National Geographic had an article about the millions of people still enslaved around the world right now. But where is the moral indignation about that?"
-Thomas Sowell-
"Government creates the problem, denies the problem, acknowledges the problem, blames others for the problem, adopts measures that make the problem worse, and then claims credit for at least doing something about the problem."
-Justin Amash-
"Our institutions were not devised to bring about uniformity of opinion; if they had we might well abandon hope. It is important to remember, as has well been said, 'the essential characteristic of true liberty is that under its shelter many different types of life and character and opinion and belief can develop unmolested and unobstructed.'"
-Justice Charles Evans Hughes-
(1862-1948) Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court
Source: U. S. Supreme Court, Forbes Magazine, 1 November 1957
"The invaluable and the valueless, the noble and the tawdry, the beautiful and the ugly, the true and the false, the good and the evil, are equally protected by the First and the Fourteenth Amendments’ guarantees of a free press and religious freedom."
-Milton Konvitz-
(1908-2003) Professor Cornell Law School
Source: quoted in Censorship: For And Against, 1971
"Each day, it seemed, another law was passed to impoverish and diminish them, punishing them for whatever success they achieved and rewarding their less competent and industrious neighbors."
-L. Neil Smith-
American writer
Source: Pallas, 46 (Tor 1993)
"I am not a conservative but I have spoken out for years against the staggering amount of blind hatred directed at black conservatives by liberals.
Liberals are shockingly quick to demean and dismiss brilliant black people like Rice, Carson, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, U.S. Senator Tim Scott (R-SC), Professor Walter E. Williams and economist Thomas Sowell because they don’t fit into the role they have carved out for a black person in America.
Black Americans must be obedient liberals on all things or risk being called a race traitor or an Uncle Tom."
-Juan Williams-
(1954-) Panamanian-born American journalist, political analyst, author
Source: Rutgers rage against Rice -- why do liberals have so much hate for black conservatives?, March 6, 2014
"Toleration of people who differ in convictions and habits requires a residual awareness of the complexity of truth and the possibility of opposing view having some light on one or the other facet of a many-sided truth."
-Reinhold Niebuhr-
(1892-1971)
Source: “Tolerance,” in Collier’s Encyclopedia, 1966
"Under democracy, you’re a captive of the fears of the least courageous among you, the integrity of the least honorable, the brains of the least intelligent, and the weakness of the least strong."
-L. Neil Smith-
American Zone
"True freedom is to share
All the chains our brothers wear
And, with heart and hand, to be
Earnest to make others free."
-James Russell Lowell-
(1819-1891) American author and diplomatist
Source: Stanzas on Freedom, 1843
"There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism."
-Theodore Roosevelt-
(1858-1919) 26th US President
"God grants liberty only to those who love it, and are always ready to guard and defend it."
-Daniel Webster-
(1782-1852) US Senator
"The cause of freedom is the cause of God."
-William Lisle Bowles-
(1762-1850) English poet and critic
"The only foundation for... a republic is to be laid in Religion. Without this there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object and life of all republican governments."
-Dr. Benjamin Rush-
(1745-1813) signed the Declaration of Independence, physician, politician, social reformer, humanitarian, educator, founder of Dickinson College
1798
Source: The Selected Writings of Benjamin Rush. Edited by Dagobert D. Runes. New York: Philosophical Library, 1947.
"Our coins bear the words 'In God We Trust'. We take the oath of office asking His help in keeping that oath. And we proclaim that we are a nation under God when we pledge allegiance to the flag. But we can't mention His name in a public school or even sing religious hymns that are nondenominational. Christmas can be celebrated in the school room with pine trees, tinsel and reindeers, but there must be no mention of the man whose birthday is being celebrated. One wonders how a teacher would answer if a student asked why it was called Christmas."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
"If a man is not rising upwards to be an angel, depend upon it, he is sinking downwards to be a devil."
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge-
(1772-1834) English poet, critic, philosopher, and a leader of the British Romantic movement
"Just close your eyes and think of England."
-unknown-
"Those people who will not be governed by God will be ruled by tyrants."
-William Penn-
(1644-1718) English real estate entrepreneur, philosopher, early Quaker, founder of the Province of Pennsylvania
"The liberty of a people consists in being governed by laws which they have made themselves, under whatsoever form it be of government; the liberty of a private man, in being master of his own time and actions, as far as may consist with the laws of God and of his country."
-Abraham Cowley-
(1618-1667) English poet
"We have forgotten the gracious hand which has preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and have vainly imagined in the deceitfulness of our hearts that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving Grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us."
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
"As a child I received instruction both in the Bible and in the Talmud. I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene... No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life."
-Albert Einstein-
(1879-1955) Physicist and Professor, Nobel Prize 1921
1929
Source: in an interview with George Sylvester Viereck, "What Life Means to Einstein," The Saturday Evening Post, October 26, 1929, Curtis Publishing Company.
"Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage."
-The Holy Bible-
Source: Galatians 5:1
"[My views on Christianity] are the result of a life of inquiry & reflection, and very different from that anti-Christian system imputed to me by those who know nothing of my opinions. To the corruptions of Christianity I am indeed opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian, in the only sense he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence; & believing he never claimed any other."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush, Apr. 21, 1803
"We must be a people who dare, dare to take responsibility for our hatred and fears and ask God to heal us from within. And we must be a people of prayer, a people who pray as if the strength of our nation depended on it, because it does."
-J. C. Watts, Jr.-
(1957- ) US Congressman from Oklahoma (R), former quarterback in the Canadian Football League
Source: Feb. 5, 1997
"Your opinion of me has no cash value."
-Andre Trochard-
We're No Angels
"A beggar's mistake harms no one but the beggar. A king's mistake, however, harms everyone but the king. Too often, the measure of power lies not in the number who obey your will, but in the number who suffer your stupidity."
-R. Scott Bakker-
The Judging Eye
"There's no sense asking if the air is good if there's nothing else to breathe."
-Henry II-
The Lion in Winter
"Of course he has a knife, he always has a knife, we all have knives! It's 1183 and we're barbarians! How clear we make it. Oh, my piglets, we are the origins of war: not history's forces, nor the times, nor justice, nor the lack of it, nor causes, nor religions, nor ideas, nor kinds of government, nor any other thing. We are the killers. We breed wars. We carry it like syphilis inside. Dead bodies rot in field and stream because the living ones are rotten. For the love of God, can't we love one another just a little - that's how peace begins. We have so much to love each other for. We have such possibilities, my children. We could change the world."
-Eleanor of Aquitaine-
The Lion in Winter
"Unnatural, Mummy? You tell me, what's nature's way? If poisoned mushrooms grow and babies come with crooked backs, if goiters thrive and dogs go mad and wives kill husbands, what's unnatural?"
-Richard-
"I could have conquered Europe - all of it - but I had women in my life."
-Henry II-
The Lion in Winter
"Put up again thy sword into its place:
for all they that take the sword
shall perish by the sword."
-Jesus of Nazareth-
(c. 4 BC – c. AD 30/33)
Source: Holy Bible, Matthew 26:52
"But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you."
-Jesus of Nazareth-
(c. 4 BC – c. AD 30/33)
Source: Holy Bible, Matthew 5:44
"The longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth: 'that God governs in the affairs of men.' And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?"
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
Source: June 28, 1787, in a plea to the delegates of a deadlocked Constitutional Convention
"The Care therefore of every man's Soul belongs unto himself, and is to be left unto himself. But what if he neglect the Care of his Soul? I answer, What if he neglects the Care of his Health, or of his Estate, which things are nearlier related to the Government of the Magistrate than the other? Will the magistrate provide by an express Law, That such an one shall not become poor or sick? Laws provide, as much as is possible, that the Goods and Health of Subjects be not injured by the Fraud and Violence of others; they do not guard them from the Negligence or Ill-husbandry of the Possessors themselves."
-John Locke-
(1632-1704) English philosopher and political theorist
Source: A Letter Concerning Toleration [1689], Edited and Introduced by James H. Tully (Hacklett Publishing Company, 1983), p. 35
"You are doing an excellent thing, one which will be wholesome for you, if, as you write me, you are persisting in your effort to attain sound understanding; it is foolish to pray for this when you can acquire it from yourself. We do not need to uplift our hands towards heaven, or to beg the keeper of a temple to let us approach his idol's ear, as if in this way our prayers were more likely to be heard. A god is near you, with you, and in you. This is what I mean, Lucilius: there sits a holy spirit within us, one who marks our good and bad deeds, and is our a guardian."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter XLI: On the god within us
"Men regard it as their right to return evil for evil -- and if they cannot, feel they have lost their liberty."
-Aristotle-
(384-322 BC) Greek philosopher
Source: Nicomachean Ethics, 340 B.C.
"The nation is sick; trouble is in the land, confusion all around... But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period of the twentieth century. Something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee, the cry is always the same: 'We want to be free.'"
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-
(1929-1968) US civil rights leader
3 April 1968
"Of more worth is one honest man to society and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
"When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, 'Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!'"
-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
"Banking was conceived in iniquity and born in sin… Bankers own the earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create money and control credit, and with a flick of a pen they will create enough to buy it back."
-Josiah Stamp-
"Great authors are admirable in this respect: in every generation they make for disagreement. Through them we become aware of our differences."
-Andre Gide-
(1869-1951) French writer
"Enslave the liberty of but one human being and the liberties of the world are put in peril."
-William Lloyd Garrison-
(1805-1879) American abolitionist, journalist, and social reformer
"There is no belief, however foolish, that will not gather its faithful adherents who will defend it to the death."
-Isaac Asimov-
"Those who lack the capacity to achieve much in an atmosphere of freedom will clamor for power."
-Eric Hoffer-
(1902-1983) American author, philosopher, awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
"Without morals a republic cannot subsist any length of time; they therefore who are decrying the Christian religion, whose morality is so sublime and pure (and) which insures to the good eternal happiness, are undermining the solid foundation of morals, the best security for the duration of free governments."
-Charles Carroll-
Maryland member of the Continental Congress, the only Roman Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence,
US Senator for Maryland (1789-1792)
"Gods always behave like the people who make them."
-Zora Neale Hurston-
"The goal of a free nation is to reveal by example the enlightened possibilities of the human race, not to wield its power of destruction and death over the helpless, the poor, the starving and the war torn masses. The goal of a free nation must be no different outside its borders than within them. In America we do not massacre whole towns because they may be the chosen domicile of a criminal or a conspiracy of criminals. Instead we carefully root out the felons and bring them to justice. In the same way, the goal of a free nation must be to first view all people as members of the human race, and, as such, to insist that they possess fundamental human rights. They are, as we, citizens of the world. The rule of law shows us the way."
-Gerry Spence-
"Civil government cannot let any group ride roughshod over others simply because their consciences tell them to do so."
-Justice Robert H. Jackson-
(1892-1954), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
"We shall support vigorously the principle that no country has the right to impose its will or rule on another by force. We shall continue, in this era of negotiation, to work for the limitation of nuclear arms, and to reduce the danger of confrontation between the great powers. We shall do our share in defending peace and freedom in the world. But we shall expect others to do their share. The time has passed when America will make every other nation's conflict our own, or make every other nation's future our responsibility, or presume to tell the people of other nations how to manage their own affairs. Just as we respect the right of each nation to determine its own future, we also recognize the responsibility of each nation to secure its own future. Just as America's role is indispensable in preserving the world's peace, so is each nation's role indispensable in preserving its own peace. Together with the rest of the world, let us resolve to move forward from the beginnings we have made. Let us continue to bring down the walls of hostility which have divided the world for too long, and to build in their place bridges of understanding -- so that despite profound differences between systems of government, the people of the world can be friends."
-Richard Nixon-
"Republics are formed only after revolution. The change to the empire is slow and gradual. One of the saddest lessons of history is that whenever these schools of politics have met in the republics of old, the imperial school, with its dazzling influence of wealth and power, has always won."
-John F. Shafroth-
[1854-1922] U.S. Congressman (R-CO), Governor of Colorado, and U.S. Senator (D-CO)
Source: (1901)
"I did not come here to guide lambs. I came here to awaken lions."
-Javier Milei-
(1970-) President of Argentina, economist, author
Source: November 21, 2023, Javier Milei televsion interview with host Alejandro Fantino
"We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools."
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-
(1929-1968) US civil rights leader
"The one absolute certain way to bring this nation to ruin ... would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities."
-Theodore Roosevelt-
(1858-1919) 26th US President
"I am entirely persuaded that the American public is more reasonable, restrained and mature than most of the broadcast industry's planners believe. Their fear of controversy is not warranted by the evidence."
-Edward R. Murrow-
(1908-1965) American broadcast journalist and war correspondent
"A nation that forgets its past is doomed to repeat it."
-Sir Winston Churchill-
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1940-1945, 1951-1955)
"All Wars are Follies, very expensive & very mischievous ones. When will Mankind be convinc’d of this, and agree to settle their Differences by Arbitration? Were they to do it even by the Cast of a Dye, it would be better than by Fighting & destroying each other."
-Benjamin Franklin-
"Even though they are a relatively recent policy development, civil rights laws are considered necessary to insure rights for blacks. But they are, in fact, among the most draconian forms of intervention into the free market. They attack the essence of private property, the ability to exercise control over it. Such laws have resulted in lessened economic freedom, lowered prosperity, heightened social tension, and more trouble for the groups the laws are supposed to help. ... A Korean grocer may want to employ only Korean clerks, a magazine for black professionals only black editors and writers, and a German restaurant only German cooks and waiters. An employer may think that Iraqi-Americans have been unfairly treated and want to favor them. A women’s health club may want only women customer’s and a men’s bar may want only men. There is nothing wrong with any of these behaviors, although civil rights laws seek to end them. In addition to violating the free labor contract, civil rights laws guarantee everyone the right of 'access' to 'public accommodations' like restaurants, movie theaters, and shops. In fact, what the civil rights laws call public is really private. These businesses are established by private entrepreneurs with private money. The owners should no more be required to serve everyone who comes into their place than they are required to invite everyone to their home for dinner. A large downtown restaurant is as private as a small house in the country. The real difference between private and public is one of ownership, not function or location."
-Lew Rockwell-
[Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.] (1944- ) Chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute
Source: “Civil rights laws needed, serve to increase freedom”, The Unreported News, p. 6, May 19, 1996
"Liberty is no negation. It is a substantive, tangible reality."
-James A. Garfield-
(1831-1881) 20th President of the United States (1881), assassinated
"Be assured that if this new provision [the 14th Amendment] be engrafted in the Constitution, it will, in time, change the entire structure and texture of our government, and sweep away all the guarantees of safety devised and provided by our patriotic Sires of the Revolution."
-Orville Browning-
(1806-1881) US Senator for Illinois
1867
"Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding."
-Ambrose Bierce-
(1842-1914) American Civil War soldier, humorist, writer
"What is right and what is practicable are two different things."
-James Buchanan-
(1791-1868) -- also known as "The Sage of Wheatland"; "Buck", 15th US President (1857-61)
"There are plenty of good five-cent cigars in the country. The trouble is they cost a quarter. What this country needs is a good five-cent nickel."
-Franklin P. Adams-
(1881-1960)
"The consequences arising from the continual accumulation of public debts in other countries ought to admonish us to be careful to prevent their growth in our own."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
"The entire world economy rests on the consumer; if he ever stops spending money he doesn't have on things he doesn't need -- we're done for."
-Bill Bonner-
Editor of The Daily Reckoning
April 3, 2003
"Anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical, on a physically finite planet, is either mad or an economist."
-Kenneth Boulding-
(1910-1993) British-American economist, educator, peace activist, poet, religious mystic, devoted Quaker, systems scientist, and interdisciplinary philosopher
"Why is it when times get rough only the people have to look for ways to cut back? Why is this always just absolutely impossible for government?"
-Neal Boortz-
(1945- ) Radio talk show host, columnist
Source: http://boortz.com/nealz_nuze/2008/12/and-the-states-come-begging-as.html
"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."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits."
-Plutarch-
(c.45-125 A.D.) Greek Priest of the Delphic Oracle
"Every government interference in the economy consists of giving an unearned benefit, extorted by force, to some men at the expense of others."
-Ayn Rand-
[Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum] (1905-1982) Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter
Source: Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 1966, p. 205
"A large number of people, certainly the majority of the political looter class, think the best way to deal with the rapidly deepening economic crisis is via 'stimulus packages' with money plucked off the magic money tree... which is to say, by trying to re-inflate the credit bubble that actually caused the crisis. This is a bit like treating alcoholics by urging them to buy more whiskey."
-Perry de Havilland-
British founder of Samizdata
