"Why?"
-anonymous-
"The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it."
-Henry David T!ioreau-
"Despicable means used to achieve laudable goals render the goals themselves despicable."
-Anton Chekhov-
"Gun manufacturers can be sued for manufacturing defects but vaccine manufacturers cannot.
Injuring someone with a gun or a knife or even a car, is a serious crime, but injuring someone with a vaccine isn't even a misdemeanor.
This is not justice."
-Thomas Massie-
"The Fascist State lays claim to rule in the economic field no less than in others; it makes its action felt throughout the length and breadth of the country by means of its corporate, social, and educational institutions, and all the political, economic, and spiritual forces of the nation, organised in their respective associations, circulate within the State."
-Benito Mussolini-
(1883-1945) Italian dictator during WW2, founder of Italian Fascism, 'Il Duce'
Source: Benito Mussolini, 1935, The Doctrine of Fascism, Firenze: Vallecchi Editore, (p. 41)
"... it was the calculated 'shearing' of the public by the World-Money powers triggered by the planned sudden shortage of call money in the New York Market."
-Curtis Dall-
son-in-law of FDR and a syndicate manager for Lehman Brothers, an investment firm
Source: was on the N.Y. Stock Exchange floor the day of the crash. In "FDR: My Exploited Father-In-Law"
"For the first time in its history, Western Civilization is in danger of being destroyed internally by a corrupt, criminal ruling cabal which is centered around the Rockefeller interests, which include elements from the Morgan, Brown, Rothschild, Du Pont, Harriman, Kuhn-Loeb, and other groupings as well. This junta took control of the political, financial, and cultural life of America in the first two decades of the twentieth century."
-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: No source found. Supposedly from 'Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time' (1966)
"Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
"We are in danger of being overwhelmed with irredeemable paper, mere paper, representing not gold nor silver; no sir, representing nothing but broken promises, bad faith, bankrupt corporations, cheated creditors and a ruined people."
-Daniel Webster-
(1782-1852) US Senator
Source: speech in the Senate, 1833
"Those who create and issue money and credit direct the policies of government and hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people."
-Reginald McKenna-
(1863-1943) British Secretary to the Treasury (1903), President of the Board of Education (1907–08) First Lord of the Admiralty (1908–1911), Home Secretary (1911–1915) and Chancellor of the Exchequer (1915–1916), and Chairman of the Midland Bank (1918)
"American money was never more sound, or banking more free, than 200 years ago. Since then, it’s been a long steady decline from the gold standard and competitive banking to our Fed-run system of inflated paper currency, deposit insurance, and perpetually shaky banks on the dole."
-Lew Rockwell-
[Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.] (1944- ) Chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute
Source: Banks On The Dole, The Free Market, November 1995.
"It was not accidental [the 1929 stock-market 'crash']. It was a carefully contrived occurrence. ... The international bankers sought to bring about a condition of despair here so that they might emerge as rulers of us all."
-Louis McFadden-
(1876-1936) US Congressman (R-PA) (1915-1935), Chairman of House Banking and Currency Committee. Poisoned in 1936.
"Are you entitled to the fruits of your labor or does government have some presumptive right to spend and spend and spend?"
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
"I saw in States’ rights the only availing check upon the absolutism of the sovereign will, and secession filled me with hope, not as the destruction but as the redemption of Democracy. The institutions of your Republic [i.e., the Confederate Constitution] have not exercised on the old world the salutary and liberating influence which ought to have belonged to them, by reason of those defects and abuses of principle which the Confederate Constitution was expressly and wisely calculated to remedy. I believed that the example of that great Reform would have blessed all the races of mankind by establishing true freedom purged of the native dangers and disorders of Republics. Therefore I deemed that you were fighting 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-
letter to Robert E. Lee after the War Between the States
"While I have considered the preservation of the constitutional power of the General Government to be the foundation of our peace and safety at home and abroad, I yet believe that the maintenance of the rights and authority reserved to the states and to the people, not only are essential to the adjustment and balance of the general system, but the safeguard to the continuance of a free government. I consider it as the chief source of stability to our political system, whereas the consolidation of the states into one vast republic, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of that ruin which has overwhelmed all those that have preceded it."
-Robert E. Lee-
response to Lord Acton
"The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender."
-Proverbs-
Source: Proverbs 22:7 (KJV)
"The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
Source: Reflections on the Revolution in France
"To make your children capable of honesty is the beginning of education."
-John Ruskin-
... and the end of their political career...
"The greatest threat facing America today is the disastrous fiscal policies of our own government, marked by shameless deficit spending and Federal Reserve currency devaluation. It is this one-two punch -- Congress spending more than it can tax or borrow, and the Fed printing money to make up the difference -- that threatens to impoverish us by further destroying the value of our dollars."
-Dr. Ron Paul-
(1935-) American physician, US Congressman (R-TX), US Presidential candidate
"The decrease in purchasing power incurred by holders of money due to inflation imparts gains to the issuers of money..."
-Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis-
Source: Review, Nov. 1975, p.22, Published by The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
"A recent poll showed that nearly half the American public believes that the government should redistribute wealth. That so many people are so willing to blithely put such an enormous and dangerous arbitrary power in the hands of politicians -- risking their own freedom, in hopes of getting what someone else has -- is a painful sign of how far many citizens and voters fall short of what is needed to preserve a democratic republic."
-Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
"No state shall emit bills of credit, make any thing but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts, coin money..."
-United States Constitution-
Source: United States Constitution, Article One, Section Ten
"Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value -- zero."
-Voltaire-
[François Marie Arouet] (1694-1778) French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher
1729
"The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds; the pessimist knows it."
-J. Robert Oppenheimer-
"To beat the bureaucracy, make your problem their problem."
-Marshall L. Smith-
"A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is privately concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men who, even if their action be honest and intended for the public interest, are necessarily concentrated upon the great undertakings in which their own money is involved and who necessarily, by very reason of their own limitations, chill and check and destroy genuine economic freedom."
-Woodrow Wilson-
(1856-1924) 28th US Presidentnt
1913
"The heaviest penalty for declining to rule is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself."
-Plato-
"Far from trying to rig the system, I have spent decades opposing cronyism and all political favors, including mandates, subsidies and protective tariffs -- even when we benefit from them. I believe that cronyism is nothing more than welfare for the rich and powerful, and should be abolished."
-Charles Koch-
(1935-) American businessman and philanthropist
Source: Koch, Charles (April 3, 2014). 'Instead of welcoming free debate, collectivists engage in character assassination.' "Charles Koch: I'm Fighting to Restore a Free Society". The Wall Street Journal
"Free lunch strategies have a habit of self-destructing. The Swiss economist Eugene Boehler had the context of such false and unsustainable images in mind when he noted that the 'modern economy is as much a dream factory as Hollywood.' It is based only a small part on real needs, and for the greatest part on fantasy and myth, he claimed. The stock exchange, far from ruling economic life, is at the mercy of tides of collective make-believe. Depressions come about when there is a loss of economic myth - (Eugene Boehler 'Der Mythus in der Wirtschaft,' Industrielle Organization, XXXI, 1962.)"
-J. Orlin Grabbe-
Source: 'The Collapse of the New World Order'
"Fiat-money systems tend to make people insatiable in their quest for ever higher monetary returns on their investments."
-Jorg Guido Hulsmann-
Economist
"It is the very essence of despotism that it can never afford to fail. This is what distinguishes it most vitally from democracy. In a despotism there is no organized opposition which can take over the power when the Administration in office has failed. All the eggs are in one basket. Everything is staked on one coterie of men. When the going is good, they move more quickly and efficiently than democracies, where the opposition has to be persuaded and conciliated. But when they lose, there are no reserves. There are no substitutes on the bench ready to go out on the field and carry the ball. That is why democracies with the habit of party government have outlived all other forms of government in the modern world. They have, as it were, at least two governments always at hand, and when one fails they have the other. They have diversified the risks of mortality, corruption, and stupidity which pervade all human affairs. They have remembered that the most beautifully impressive machine cannot run for very long unless there is available a complete supply of spare parts."
-Walter Lippmann-
(1889-1974) American writer, journalist, and political commentator
"The Federal Reserve System is treated by nearly all economists with reverence. On no matter is their instruction of the young in the subtlety and benignity of established institutions more admiring - or, in broad effect, more successful. Corporations are flawed by an instinct for monopoly. Trade unions interfere with the market, urge trade restrictions, resist new technology and thus obstruct progress, and they can fall victim to extortionists and racketeers. The regulatory agencies of the government are notably imperfect instruments of economic guidance. The Federal Reserve System is not totally above criticism. It makes many mistakes but these are always interesting errors of judgment. They are examined not critically but respectfully to discover why men of insight went wrong. That for such error anyone should be sacked or even seriously rebuked is, for economists, nearly unthinkable. This approval goes back to the origins and can be highly negligent of circumstance. The most widely read account of the genesis of the System tells glowingly of its birth in the closing weeks of 1913 when the Federal Reserve Act was passed by Congress and signed by President Wilson."
-John Kenneth Galbraith-
(1908-2006) Canadian-born economist, Harvard professor
Source: "Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went"
"When you pay social security taxes, you are in no way making provision for your own retirement. You are paying the pensions of those who are already retired. Once you understand this, you see that whether you will get the benefits you are counting on when you retire depends on whether Congress will levy enough taxes, borrow enough, or print enough money..."
-W. Allen Wallis-
former Chairman of the 1975 Advisory Council on Social Security
Source: May 27, 1976
"Public educators, like Soviet farmers, lack any incentive to produce results, innovate, to be efficient, to make the kinds of difficult changes that private firms operating in a competitive market must make to survive."
-Carolyn Lochhead-
American journalist
"Never — and I mean never — blindly trust the statistics you read [or hear] about the economy."
-Don Luskin-
(1954-) American columnist
"We can't spend more than we have. ... This is no longer a matter of right versus left, liberal versus conservative, we can prove our conclusion on this by basic mathematics. The United States Federal Government from all sources, for all purposes, takes in $2.2 trillion a year. Keep that number in mind. $2.2 trillion a year. We have total unfunded liabilities of $65 trillion, $2.2 trillion in revenue, $65 trillion in total unfunded liabilities. That is more than 30 to 1 leverage. If the United States Federal Government were a bank regulated by itself, they would shut themselves down. We live in a nation where not long ago our United States Secretary of State [Hillary Clinton] was on rhetorical bended knee in communist China pleading with the Chinese to continue to buy our debt, because if they don't buy our debt and other foreign sovereign wealth funds don't buy our debt our beloved United States of America can't pay its bills. The United States of America my friends is not a beggar nation."
-Gov. Tim Pawlenty-
(1960-) 39th Governor of Minnesota (2003-2011)
Source: http://www.conservative.org/cpac/archives/cpac-2010-tim-pawlenty
"Politicians say they're beefing up our economy. Most don't know beef from pork."
-Harold Lowman-
"With the monetary system we have now, the careful saving of a lifetime can be wiped out in an eyeblink."
-Larry Parks-
Executive Director, Foundation for the Advancement of Monetary Education (FAME)
"For the sake of humanity it is devoutly to be wished, that the manly employment of agriculture and the humanizing benefits of commerce, would supersede the waste of war and the rage of conquest; that the swords might be turned into plough-shares, the spears into pruning hooks, and, as the Scripture expresses it, 'the nations learn war no more.'
-George Washington-
"Property is a central economic institution of any society, and private property is the central institution of a free society."
-David D. Friedman-
(1945- ) American economist, physicist, legal scholar, and libertarian theorist
"[T]he only security men can have for their political liberty, consists in keeping their money in their own pockets ..."
-Lysander Spooner-
(1808-1887) Political theorist, activist, abolitionist
"Sir Walter Raleigh declared in the early 17th century that 'whoever commands the sea, commands the trade; whosoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world, and consequently the world itself.' This principle is as true today as when uttered, and its effect will continue as long as ships traverse the seas."
-Chester W. Nimitz-
Now consider the implications if you controlled (only) your own trade -- no manipulative tariffs, no fiat prohibitions, no arbitrary mandates. As if you had an unalienable unilateral right to set the acceptable terms of your own private contracts in a competitive free market, and to pursue voluntary commerce with willing partners wherever you found them (to the extent that their servants "permitted" them, anyway)...
"Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-
(1803-1882) American essayist, lecturer, and poet
"Money is the sign of liberty. To curse money is to curse liberty -- to curse life, which is nothing, if it be not free."
-Remy de Gourmont-
(1858-1915) French poet, novelist, and critic
"Why be thrifty when your old age and health care are provided for, no matter how profligate you act in your youth? Why be prudent when the state insures your bank deposits, replaces your flooded-out house, buys all the wheat you can grow? ... Why be diligent when half of your earnings are taken from you and given to the idle?"
-David Frum-
(1960-) Canadian-American journalist
Source: Dead Right, 1994
"Welfarism and excessive spending and deficits and socialism divide us, because everybody has to go to Washington. Those who have the biggest clout, those who are the best lobbyists, those who go and they grab. And whether it's the medical industrial complex, or the banking industry, or the military industrial complex, that's who ends up controlling our government... For so long, conservatives and constitutionalists have lost the argument, they lost the moral high ground. Because those who want to give things away, not talking about where they steal it from, but they want to give things and take care of people, they get the moral high ground and they come by as being compassionate. And we who believe in liberty, we lack compassion. But the truth is, there's only one compassionate system known to man, and that is freedom and personal responsibility, then there's enough wealth, and then we will all have personal responsibility to use this compassion that we have, first to take care of our families and friends and neighbors, and there would be so much wealth that we could spread this wealth around the world."
-Dr. Ron Paul-
(1935-) American physician, US Congressman (R-TX), US Presidential candidate
Source: New Hampshire Homeschool Meet and Greet, September 30, 2007
"If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
"I am for a government rigorously frugal and simple. Were we directed from Washington when to sow, when to reap, we should soon want bread."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Thomas Jefferson: Autobiography, 1821. ME 1:122
"He that goes a borrowing goes a sorrowing."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
Source: from his writings, 1758
"No one spends someone else's money as carefully as he spends his own."
-Mark Skousen-
(1947-) American economist, investment analyst, newsletter editor, college professor and author
Source: Economics in One Page
"A depression is a large-scale decline in production and trade... there is nothing in the nature of a free-market economy to cause such an event."
-Nathaniel Branden-
(1930- ) Canadian psychotherapist, writer
Source: essay "Common Fallacies About Capitalism"
"In 1983 $21 billion was spent in agricultural subsidies -- almost equal to the net income of all American farmers."
-Patrick Detches-
Source: Letter to the Orange County Register, April 17, 1984
"Without the confidence factor, many believe a paper money system is liable to collapse eventually."
-Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia-
Source: Gold!, p. 10, Published by The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia
"I hate this 'crime doesn't pay' stuff. Crime in the U.S. is perhaps one of the biggest businesses in the world today."
-Paul Kirk-
(1902-1970) Chemist, forensic scientist, participant in the Manhattan Project
Source: Wall Street Journal
"The Latin American drug cartels have stretched their tentacles much deeper into our lives than most people believe. It’s possible they are calling the shots at all levels of government."
-William Colby-
(1920-1996) former Director of the CIA
Source: writing for an investment newsletter in 1995
Government does like its 'taste'. What if we simply compelled ending terribly profitable unauthorized, serially failed, and horrifically expensive - in blood, treasure and liberty -- fiat prohibition...?
"It is said, mostly by Libertarians, that ‘taxation is theft.’ Theft is too mild a word. Typically, a thief strikes only once, and doesn’t pretend that his robbery is legitimate. Taxation is actually slavery."
-Rick Tompkins-
Attorney
Source: Quoted In Ohio Libertarian, October-November, 1995
"By the experience of commercial nations in all ages it has been found that gold and silver afford the only safe foundation for a monetary system. Confusion has recently been created by variations in the relative value of the two metals, but I confidently believe that arrangements can be made between the leading commercial nations which will secure the general use of both metals. Congress should provide that the compulsory coinage of silver now required by law may not disturb our monetary system by driving either metal out of circulation. If possible, such an adjustment should be made that the purchasing power of every coined dollar will be exactly equal to its debt-paying power in all the markets of the world."
-James A. Garfield-
(1831-1881) 20th President of the United States (1881), assassinated
Source: Inaugural Address, March 14, 1891
"In finance, everything that is agreeable is unsound."
-Winston Churchill-
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1940-1945, 1951-1955)
"I have never believed that man's freedom consisted in doing what he wants, but rather in never doing what he does not want to do."
-Jean-Jacques Rousseau-
"The worship of the state is the worship of force. There is no more dangerous menace to civilization than a government of incompetent, corrupt, or vile men. The worst evils which mankind 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-
"Statism – the subordination of the individual to the state - leads inevitably to the most hideous oppression."
-Andrew Bernstein-
Professor of philosophy, writer
Source: The Capitalist Manifesto - The Great Disconnect
"We've been asleep for about 50 years. Ever since the end of World War II we just steadily handed our future and our bank accounts and now our children, handed them all over to the federal government..."
-Michael Moriarty-
(1941) American-Canadian stage and screen actor, jazz musician
"The aspiration to such uniformity and order alerts us to the fact that modern statecraft is largely a project of internal colonization, often glossed, as it is in its imperial rhetoric, as a 'civilizing mission'."
-James C. Scott-
Source: Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 82
"Why nationalize industry when you can nationalize the people?"
-Adolf Hitler-
(1889-1945) German Nazi Dictator
Source: quoted in Robert N. Proctor, The Nazi War on Cancer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 74
"Government control of the economy, no matter in whose behalf, has been the source of all the evils in our industrial society -– and the solution is laissez-faire capitalism, i.e., the abolition of any and all forms of intervention in production and trade, the separation of State and Economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of Church and State."
-Ayn Rand-
[Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum] (1905-1982) Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter
Source: Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 1966
"The primary goal of collectivism -- of socialism in Europe and contemporary liberalism in America -- is to enlarge governmental supervision of individuals' lives. This is done in the name of equality. People are to be conscripted into one large cohort, everyone equal (although not equal in status or power to the governing class) in their status as wards of a self-aggrandizing government."
-George Will-
(1941-) American newspaper columnist, journalist, and author
Source: December 15, 2005, Environmentalism as a Cover for Collectivism -
"Collectivism is the doctrine that the social collective -- called society, the people, the state, etc. -- has rights, needs, or moral authority above and apart from the individuals who comprise it. We hear this idea continually championed in such familiar platitudes as 'the needs of the people take precedence over the rights of the individual,' 'production for people, not profits,' and 'the common good.'
Collectivism often sounds humane because it stresses the importance of human needs. In reality, it is little more than a rationalization for sacrificing you and me to the desires of others."
-Jarret B. Wollstein-
American author, writer, director at The International Society for Individual Liberty, co-founder of the original Society for Individual Liberty in 1969
Source: The Causes of Aggression
"We should not expect the state to appear in the guise of an extravagant good fairy at every christening, a loquacious companion at every stage of life's journey, and the unknown mourner at every funeral."
-Margaret Thatcher-
(1925-2013) British Prime Minister (1979–1990)
"You have no enemies, you say?
Alas, my friend, the boast is poor;
He, who has mingled in the fray
Of duty that the brave endure,
Must have made foes! If you have none,
Small is the work that you have done,
You've hit no traitor on the hip,
You've dashed no cup from perjured lip,
You've never turned the wrong to right,
You've been a coward in the fight."
-Charles Mackay-
"The crucial distinction between systems ... was no longer ideological. The main political difference was between those who did, and those who did not, believe that the citizen could -- or should -- be the property of the state."
-Christopher Hitchens-
(1949-2011) British-American author, journalist
Source: Adam Michnik in Letters to a Young Contrarian by Christopher Hitchens
"The misapprehension springs from the fact that the learned jurists, deceiving themselves as well as others, depict in their books an ideal of government -- not as it really is, an assembly of men who oppress their fellow-citizens, but in accordance with the scientific postulate, as a body of men who act as the representatives of the rest of the nation. They have gone on repeating this to others so long that they have ended by believing it themselves, and they really seem to think that justice is one of the duties of governments. History, however, shows us that governments, as seen from the reign of Caesar to those of the two Napoleons and Prince Bismarck, are in their very essence a violation of justice; a man or a body of men having at command an army of trained soldiers, deluded creatures who are ready for any violence, and through whose agency they govern the State, will have no keen sense of the obligation of justice. Therefore governments will never consent to diminish the number of those well-trained and submissive servants, who constitute their power and influence."
-Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi-
(1828-1910) Russian writer
Source: Writings on Civil Disobedience and Non-Violence (Signet Books, 1968), pp. 238-239
"For this future emancipation, we have to rule out ideologies that aim at reinforcing the state, the police and controls in general, and at reducing liberty."
-André Thirion-
(1907-2001) French writer, member of the group of surrealists, theorist and political activist
Source: Éloge de l'indocilité (Paris: Laffont, 1973), p. 326
"[I]n America it is the so-called capitalist who is to blame for the fulfillment of Marx's prophecies. Beguiled by the state's siren song of special privilege, the capitalists have abandoned capitalism."
-Frank Chodorov-
(1887-1966) American author, publisher
"The real reason to abolish departments like Energy and Education is not to promote efficiency, nor even to save taxpayers’ money. It is that many agencies perform functions that are not Federal responsibility. The founders delegated to the Government only strictly defined authority in Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution. Search the entire Constitution, and you will find no authorization for Congress to subsidize the arts, finance and regulate education or invest tax revenues in energy research."
-David Boaz-
(1953-) Author, executive vice president of the Cato Institute
Source: Budget Cuts: Less Than Meets the Eye, New York Times, Op-Ed Thursday, July 6, 1995
Nor to impose prohibitions -- of substances, of objects, of peaceful actions, nor of ideas...
"Since the State necessarily lives by the compulsory confiscation of private capital, and since its expansion necessarily involves ever-greater incursions on private individuals and private enterprise, we must assert that the state is profoundly and inherently anti-capitalist."
-Murray N. Rothbard-
(1926-1995) Dean of the Austrian School of Economics
Source: Anatomy of the State
"Increasing the power of the state in response to the Soviet menace would not defeat socialism in Russia but bring it to the United States."
-Frank Chodorov-
(1887-1966) American author, publisher
"Such questions have never been discussed in scholarly publications because the Nazi laws, policies, and practices have never been adequately documented. The record establishes that a well-meaning liberal republic would enact a gun control act that would later be highly useful to a dictatorship."
-Stephen P. Halbrook-
Source: "Nazi Firearms Law and the Disarming of the German Jews," Arizona Journal of International and Comparative Law, Vol. 17, No. 3 (2000), pp. 483-535
"One day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but that it is a means by which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means."
-Martin Luther King, Jr.-
"To own firearms is to affirm that freedom and liberty are not gifts from the state. It is to reserve final judgment about whether the state is encroaching on freedom and liberty, to stand ready to defend that freedom with more than mere words, and to stand outside the state’s totalitarian reach."
-Jeffrey R. Snyder-
American attorney, author
Source: A Nation of Cowards, 113 Public Interest (Fall 1993)
"There is little to be feared from the standard picture of a totalitarian society in which 'cogs,' who are watched by Big Brother or his equivalent, carry out orders emanating from the top. Such a society would collapse in inefficiency. What is infinitely more fearsome is the capacity of a dictatorship to use the principle of competition to organize terror and murder."
-Ronald Wintrobe-
Source: The Political Economy of Dictatorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 328
"I think a major reason why intellectuals tend to move towards collectivism is that the collectivist answer is a simple one. If there’s something wrong, pass a law and do something about it."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
Source: From “An Interview With Milton Friedman,” December 1974, conducted by Tibor Machan, Joe Cobb, and Ralph Raico
"COLLECTIVISM: Collectivism is defined as the theory and practice that makes some sort of group rather than the individual the fundamental unit of political, social, and economic concern. In theory, collectivists insist that the claims of groups, associations, or the state must normally supersede the claims of individuals."
-Stephen Grabill-
Source: Stephen Grabill and Gregory M. A. Gronbacher, Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty
"Based on strikingly irrational beliefs and emotions, modern liberals relentlessly undermine the most important principles on which our freedoms were founded. Like spoiled, angry children, they rebel against the normal responsibilities of adulthood and demand that a parental government meet their needs from cradle to grave."
-Lyle H. Rossiter, Jr.-
American Psychiatrist, Author
Source: “The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness,” 2006
"It would not be unreasonable, by analogy with a motor vehicle licence, that a permit to reproduce should also be needed with a minimum age of, for example, twenty-five, and a proof required that the parents are of sufficient maturity and financial resource to take proper care of the child. Young, sexually active, but emotionally immature teenagers would need help."
-Sir Roy Yorke Calne-
(1930-2024) British surgeon, pioneer in organ transplantation
Source: Too Many People (London and New York: Calder Publications and Riverrun Press, 1994), p.113.
"If someone offers you a deal accompanied by the promise, 'If you don't accept my offer I'll hurt you,' you can be quite sure that you are not being offered a good deal. This is the sort of deal the government offers you: accept my deal with all its provisions or you'll be caged or killed. Strange to say, nearly all the victims of this coerced dealing regard themselves as living in a free society."
-Robert Higgs-
"I have ever deemed it more honorable and profitable, too, to set a good example than to follow a bad one."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"It is curious to note that when for reasons of conscience, people refuse to kill, they are often exempted from active military duty. But there are no exemptions for people who, for reasons of conscience, refuse to financially support the bureaucracy that actually does the killing. Apparently, the state takes money more seriously than life."
-Karl Hess-
"The only fence against the world is a thorough knowledge of it."
-John Locke-
(1632-1704) English philosopher and political theorist
1693
"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
"What is the task of higher education? To make a man into a machine. What are the means employed? He is taught how to suffer being bored."
-Friedrich Nietzsche-
(1844-1900) German philosopher, cultural critic, poet, philologist
Source: (1889)
“With all the pious talk about 'tolerance' in the media and in academia, there is virtually none for those who challenge the dogmas of political correctness in most of our colleges and universities."
-Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
"Education is the best provision for old age."
-Aristotle-
(384-322 BC) Greek philosopher
"Upon the education of the people of this country, the fate of this country depends."
-Benjamin Disraeli-
(1804-1881) Prime Minister of England, British statesman, novelist
"I've noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my thirty years of teaching: Schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in english class. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders."
- John Taylor Gatto-
"The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any."
-Hannah Arendt-
"Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently maintained."
-James A. Garfield-
(1831-1881) 20th President of the United States (1881), assassinated
July 12, 1880
"We must not believe the many, who say that only free people ought to be educated, but we should rather believe the philosophers who say that only the educated are free."
-Epictetus-
(ca 55-135 A.D.) Greek philospher
Source: Discourses
"You cannot become a truly effective advocate unless you know all sides of your subject thoroughly, opposing arguments as well as your own."
-G. R. Capp-
Source: Principles of Argumentation and Debate, 1965
"Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"In short, the 'house of world order' will have to be built from the bottom up rather than from the top down...An end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old fashioned assault..."
-Richard N. Gardner-
former deputy assistant Secretary of State
Source: in the opinion of Richard N. Gardner, in "Foreign Affairs," April 1974.
"Just as any moron can destroy a priceless Ming vase, so the shallow and ill-educated people who run our schools can undermine and destroy from within a great civilization that took centuries of dedicated effort to create and maintain."
-Dr. Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
"Varieties of Envy
The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts. He ascribes all his failure to get on in the world, all of his congenital incapacity and damnfoolishness, to the machinations of werewolves assembled in Wall Street, or some other such den of infamy. If these villains could be put down, he holds, he would at once become rich, powerful and eminent. Nine politicians out of every ten, of whatever party, live and have their being by promising to perform this putting down. In brief, they are knaves who maintain themselves by preying on the idiotic vanities and pathetic hopes of halfwits.
What is thus promised, of course, always falls far short of fulfillment.
The politicians devote themselves ardently enough to robbing A, who is an honest and useful man, eager only to pay his way, in order to bribe and flatter B, who is lazy, stupid and incompetent, and a very large part of the national income is dissipated in the process. But B still remains clearly inferior to A. He was inferior as a blastocyte, and he continues so as a nascent cadaver at a rally of Townsendites or New Dealers. He is therefore easy meat for the rascals who promise to give him, not merely a dole, but irresistible power. He dreams of becoming so mighty, _en masse_, if not on his own, that the nation will tremble at his tread, and Wall Street will entreat him for peace terms. In brief, he puts on a night-shirt and joins the Ku Klux Klan, The Black Legion, or some other such amalgam of crooks and fools.
It seems to be little noticed that this yearning to dragoon and terrify all persons who happen to be lucky is at the bottom of the puerile radicalism now prevailing among us, just as it is at the bottom of Ku Kluxery. The average American radical today likes to think of himself as a profound and somber fellow, privy to arcana not open to the general; he is actually only a poor fish, with overtones of the jackass. What ails him, first and last, is simply envy of his betters. Unable to make any progress against them under the rules in vogue, he proposes to fetch them below the belt by making the rules over. He is no more an altruist than J. Pierpont Morgan is an altruist, or Jim Farley, or indeed Al Capone.
Every such rescuer of the downtrodden entertains himself with gaudy dreams of power, far beyond his natural fortunes and capacities. He sees himself at the head of an overwhelming legion of morons, marching upon the fellows he envies and hates. He thinks of himself in his private reflections (and gives it away every time he makes a speech or prints an article) as a gorgeous amalgam of Lenin, Mussolini and Genghis Khan, with the republic under his thumb, his check for any amount good at any bank, and ten million heels clicking every time he winks his eye. Not infrequently, he throws in a private brewery or distillery, belching smoke in his personal service, and a girl considerably more sightly than he can scare up by his native magnetism. When such grotesque megalomania reaches a certain virulence a black wagon dashes up, and its two honest deckhands, Jack and Emil, haul off another nut to the psychopathic hoosegow. But not many of the patients go that far. They retain all their ordinary faculties. They can eat, drink, talk, sweat, walk, dance and hope. They read the _New Masses_, sing 'The Internationale', and lecture on 'Das Kapital' without having read it. A vision enchants them, and perhaps one should allow that, considering their natural gifts, it is as beautiful as any they are capable of. But it will come to nothing. Like the dupes of the Black Legion, they are doomed to be fooled."
-H. L. Mencken-
Baltimore Evening Sun, June 15th, 1936
"Abraham Lincoln did not cause the death of so many people from a mere love of slaughter, but only to bring about a state of consent that could not otherwise be secured for the government he had undertaken to administer. When a government has once reduced its people to a state of consent — that is, of submission to its will — it can put them to a much better use than to kill them; for it can then plunder them, enslave them, and use them as tools for plundering and enslaving others."
-Lysander Spooner-
Forced Consent (1873)
"The group consisting of mother, father and child is the main educational agency of mankind."
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
(1929-1968) US civil rights leader
"As a general thing the only persons who have a legal right to give orders to the teacher are his employers, namely, the committee in some States, and in others the directors or trustees. If his conduct is approved by his employers the parents have no remedy as against him or them."
-John Swett-
(1830-1913) Superintendent of California Public School System, "Father of the California public school" system, "Horace Mann of the Pacific"
Source: John Swett's Biennial Report, 1864, page 166
Sure. 'Middle management' is ALWAYS self-directed and omnipotent...
"Democracy? I want nothing to do with a system which operates on the premise that my rights don't exist simply because I am outnumbered."
-R. Lee Wrights-
"Place the lives of children in their formative years, despite the convictions of their parents, under the intimate control of experts appointed by the state, force them to attend schools where the higher aspirations of humanity are crushed out, and where the mind is filled with the materialism of the day, and it is difficult to see how even the remnants of liberty can subsist."
-J. Gresham Machen-
(1881-1937) American Presbyterian New Testament scholar, educator, professor at Princeton Seminary, formed the Westminster Theological Seminary
"Until war is constitutionally declared, the nation and all its members must observe and preserve peace."
-John Jay-
“Education... now seems to me perhaps the most authoritarian and dangerous of all the social inventions of mankind. It is the deepest foundation of the modern slave state, in which most people feel themselves to be nothing but producers, consumers, spectators, and 'fans,' driven more and more, in all parts of their lives, by greed, envy, and fear. My concern is not to improve 'education' but to do away with it, to end the ugly and antihuman business of people-shaping and to allow and help people to shape themselves."
-John Holt-
(1923-1985) American author and educator, proponent of homeschooling, and pioneer in youth rights theory
Source: Holt, J. (1967). How Children Learn. New York: Pitman Publishing Corporation
"The greatest dangers to liberty lie in insidious encroachments by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."
-Justice Louis Brandeis-
dissent in Olmstead v. U.S.
"In the second half of the 17th century, Germany was made up of 234 countries, 51 free cities, and 1,500 independent knightly manors. By the early 19th century all three had fallen below 50. And then, of course, in 1871 we get German unification.
What might the world have been like in the absence of German unification is the kind of question that is not raised because it’s not in the card."
-Tom Woods-
Mises Institute talk
"The First and Fourteenth Amendments say that Congress and the States shall make 'no law' which abridges freedom of speech or of the press. In order to sanction a system of censorship I would have to say that 'no law' does not mean what it says, that 'no law' is qualified to mean 'some' laws. I cannot take this step."
-William O. Douglas-
(1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Superior Films v. Department of Education of the State of Ohio, 1954
Oh, the hidden "except" clauses just hadn't revealed themselves yet...
"Liberty of thought soon shrivels without freedom of expression. Nor can truth be pursued in an atmosphere hostile to the endeavor or under dangers which are hazarded only by heroes."
-Felix Frankfurter-
(1882-1965) U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Dennis et al v. United States, 1951
"I cannot assent to the view, if it be meant that the legislature may impair or abridge the rights of a free press and of free speech whenever it thinks that the public welfare requires that it be done. The public welfare cannot override constitutional privilege."
-John Marshall Harlan-
(1833–1911), US Supreme Court Justice, 1877–1911
Source: Patterson v. Colorado (1907)
"Freedom to publish means freedom for all and not for some. Freedom to publish is guaranteed by the constitution but freedom to continue to prevent others from publishing is not."
-Justice Hugo L. Black-
(1886-1971) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: One Man’s Stand For Freedom, 1963
"No legislative act contrary to the Constitution can be valid. To deny this would be to affirm that the deputy (agent) is greater than his principal; that the servant is above the master; that the representatives of the people are superior to the people; that men, acting by virtue of powers may do not only what their powers do not authorize, but what they forbid. It is not to be supposed that the Constitution could intend to enable the representatives of the people to substitute their will to that of their constituents. A Constitution is, in fact, and must be regarded by judges as fundamental law. If there should happen to be a irreconcilable variance between the two, the Constitution is to be preferred to the statute."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: Federalist Papers #78, See also Warning v. The Mayor of Savannah, 60 Georgia, P.93; First Trust Co. v. Smith, 277 SW 762, Marbury v. Madison, 2 L Ed 60; and Am.Juris. 2d Constitutional Law, section 177-178)
And mere statutes can't somehow -- aren't required to -- validate the Constitution.
"There is no zeal blinder than that which is inspired with a love of justice against offenders."
-Henry Fielding-
(1707-1754) English novelist and dramatist
"The dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution, is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes. History teems with instances of truth put down by persecution. If not suppressed for ever, it may be thrown back for centuries. … Men are not more zealous for truth than they often are for error, and a sufficient application of legal or even of social penalties will generally succeed in stopping the propagation of either. The real advantage which truth has, consists in this, that when an opinion is true, it may be extinguished once, twice, or many times, but in the course of ages there will generally be found persons to rediscover it, until some one of its reappearances falls on a time when from favourable circumstances it escapes persecution until it has made such head as to withstand all subsequent attempts to suppress it."
-John Stuart Mill-
"We'll provide a few services, and use the lion's share of revenues to pay the bribes. More than providing services to 'em, taking people's money is what makes organizations real, be they formal, informal or temporary."
-E.B. Farnum-
Deadwood
"All that is good is not embodied in the law; and all that is evil is not proscribed by the law. A well-disciplined society needs few laws; but it needs strong mores."
-William F. Buckley, Jr.-
(1925-2008) American author and journalist, founded 'National Review'
"The big thieves hang the little ones."
-Czech Proverb-
"The more laws the more offenders."
-Dr. Thomas Fuller-
(1608-1661) English clergyman, writer
Source: Gnomologia, 1732
"We may try to see things as objectively as we please. None the less, we can never see them with any eyes except our own."
-Benjamin N. Cardozo-
"The free market, that is, the free pricing system, works automatically. How complex is it? So complex that no man on this earth has the capabilities to enforce a price for one day on one simple item without causing more harm than good."
-Leonard E Read-
"I cannot conceive a rank more honorable, than that which flows from the uncorrupted choice of a brave and free people, the purest source and original fountain of all power."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
"Yes, we did produce a near-perfect republic. But will they keep it? Or will they, in the enjoyment of plenty, lose the memory of freedom? Material abundance without character is the path of destruction."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Attributed. No source found. Supposedly in a letter to John Adams as quoted in John A. Stormer, None Dare Call it Treason (Florissant, MO: Liberty Bell Press, 1964) 93
"We enjoy freedom and the rule of law on which it depends, not because we deserve it, but because others before us put their lives on the line to defend it."
-Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
"A theory deeply etched in our law [is that] a free society prefers to punish the few who abuse the rights of free speech after they break the law rather than to throttle them and all others beforehand."
-Justice Clarence Thomas-
(1948- ) U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Avis v. Aguilar, 2000
"If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence."
-Justice Louis D. Brandeis-
(1856-1941) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: Whitney v. California, 1927
"The very aim and end of our institutions is just this: that we may think what we like and say what we think."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.-
(1841-1935) US Supreme Court Justice, also known as "The Great Dissenter"
Source: The Professor at the Breakfast Table, 1860
"Judges are but men, and are swayed like other men by vehement prejudices. This is corruption in reality, give it whatever other name you please."
-David Dudley Field, II-
(1805-1894) American lawyer and law reformer
"I am a sinner who does not expect forgiveness. But I am not a government official."
-Francis Wolcott-
Deadwood
"Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion all have a double aspect – freedom of thought and freedom of action."
-Frank Murphy-
(1890-1959) U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Jones v. Opelika, 1941
"Every prudent and cautious judge ... will remember, that his duty and his business is, not to make the law, but to interpret and apply it."
-James Wilson-
(1742-1798) Member of Continental Congress, signed Declaration of Independence; U.S. Supreme Court Justice and delegate from Pennsylvania
Source: Lectures on Law, 1791
"Of...freedom [of thought and speech] one may say that it is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom."
-Justice Benjamin Cardozo-
(1870-1938) U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Palko v. Connecticut, 1937
"Where the state exists, there will be rent-seeking, the quest for advantage that can be had only through force."
-Sheldon Richman-
"One of the greatest problems that we as a free people face today is that for the past 100 years trial judges in the U.S. have routinely misinformed jurors that they were bound to accept the judge's opinion of what the law is; which law to apply; and whether or not they had to find a defendant guilty. In so doing these judges have welded shut this all important safety valve, which our Founders so wisely provided our society -- and the result has been an explosive one."
-Mike Robbins-
Source: Fully Informed Jury Association Activist, Summer 1995
"Immigration is a sour topic for both parties. Republicans don't like to admit labor mobility is a part of a capitalism, and commies on the left don't like to admit it accentuates the flaws in their welfare state. Seems we are forever doomed to a centrally planned immigration system, being used as a political tool in elections."
-Anthony Myers-
"Lawyers [are] operators of the toll bridge across which anyone in search of justice has to pass."
-Jane Bryant Quinn-
(1939-) American financial journalist
Source: Newsweek, 9 October 1975
"A guilty man is punished as an example for the mob; an innocent man convicted is the business of every honest citizen."
-Jean de la Bruyere-
(1645-1696) French essayist and moralist
Source: Les Caracteres, 1688
"Decency, security, and liberty alike demand that government officials shall be subjected to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen... If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy."
-Justice Louis D. Brandeis-
(1856-1941) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: Olmstead v. United States, 1928
"The function of the prosecutor under the federal Constitution is not to tack as many skins of victims as possible against the wall. His function is to vindicate the rights of the people as expressed in the laws and give those accused of crime a fair trial."
-Justice William O. Douglas-
(1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
"If the prosecutor is obliged to choose his case, it follows that he can choose his defendants. Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people he thinks he should get, rather than cases that need to be prosecuted. With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him. It is in this realm -- in which the prosecutor picks some person whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass, or selects some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense, that the greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power lies. It is here that law enforcement becomes personal, and the real crime becomes that of being unpopular with the predominant or governing group, being attached to the wrong political views, or being personally obnoxious to or in the way of the prosecutor himself."
-Justice Robert H. Jackson-
(1892-1954), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
"Wherever standing armies are kept up, and when the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any color or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction"
-St. George Tucker-
"One thing that humbles me deeply is to see that human genius has its limits while human stupidity does not. "
-Alexandre Dumas-
"Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped."
-Elbert Hubbard-
"It is the essence of the institutions of liberty that it be recognized that guilt is personal and cannot be attributed to the holding of opinions or to mere intent in the absence of overt acts."
-Justice Charles Evans Hughes-
(1862-1948) Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court
Source: Harvard Law Review, April 1948
"Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable."
-Milton Friedman-
"The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the Constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Attributed - no source found in Jefferson's writings
"For a punishment to be just it should consist of only such gradations of intensity as suffice to deter men from committing crimes."
-Cesare Beccaria-
(1735-1794) [Bonesana, Marchese di] Italian nobleman, criminologist, and penal reformer
Source: On Crimes and Punishments, 1764
"Life and liberty can be as much endangered from illegal methods used to convict those thought to be criminals as from the actual criminals themselves."
-Earl Warren-
(1891-1974) Chief Justice, U. S. Supreme Court
Source: 1959
"(America) goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. .... She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own. were they even the banners of foreign independence. she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication. in all the wars of interest and intrigue. of individual avarice. envy. and ambition. which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom."
-John Quincy Adams-
July 4. 1821
"Prohibition will work great injury to the cause of temperance. It is a species of intemperance within itself, for it goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. A Prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded."
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
Source: Dec. 18, 1840
Plato's Five Regimes of Government
* Aristocracy
* Timocracy
* Oligarchy
* Democracy
* Tyranny
"We are good citizens, and we cannot protect ourselves because you allow the criminals to run wild. ... I'd like you to come and live in the inner city for a week and see the importance of having a weapon. ... Go after the criminals and not the good people."
-Jesse Lee Peterson-
L.A. resident
Source: at a press conference on L.A.’s city hall, quoted in the Los Angeles Times, May 29, 1997.
"Laws do not curb the lawless. After all, that's why we call them 'lawless.'"
-Joel Miller-
Editor Real Mensch
Source: Mensch Notes, April 21, 1999
"The constitutional right of free expression... is designed and intended to remove governmental restraints from the arena of public discussion, putting the decision as to what views shall be voiced in the hands of each of us, in the hope that the use of such freedom will ultimately produce a more capable citizenry and more perfect polity and in the belief that no other approach would comport with the premise of individual dignity and choice upon which our political systems rests."
-John Marshall Harlan II-
(1899-1971) U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Cohen v. California, 1971
"The First Amendment is often inconvenient. But that is besides the point. Inconvenience does not absolve the government of its obligation to tolerate speech."
-Justice Anthony Kennedy
(1936-) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (1988-2018)
"O liberty! how many crimes are committed in thy name!
[Fr., O liberte! que de crimes on commet dans ton nom!]"
-Madame Jeanne Marie Phlipon de La Platiere Roland-
"Ladies and Gentlemen, we only pass laws against people who obey the law. Drug dealers, bank robbers and rapists don’t care what we do because they willfully violate the law anyway."
-Rod Wright-
California State Assemblyman, D-L.A.
"A reasonable man adjusts himself to the world. An unreasonable man expects the world to adjust itself to him. Therefore, all progress is made by unreasonable people."
-George Bernard Shaw-
"The door of the Free Exercise Clause stands tightly closed against any government regulation of religious beliefs as such. Government may neither compel affirmation of a repugnant belief, nor penalize or discriminate against individuals or groups because they hold views abhorrent to the authorities."
-Justice William J. Brennan-
(1906-1997) U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Sherbert v. Verner, 1963
"In Germany, the Nazis first came for the communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, but I didn't speak up because I was a protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak for me."
-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: paraphrased and inscribed at the New England Holocaust Memorial in Boston, Massachusetts
"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy."
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-
(1929-1968) US civil rights leader
"In a society in which it is a moral offense to be different from your neighbor your only escape is to never let them find out."
-Robert A. Heinlein-
(1907-1988) American writer
"In a democracy, the opposition is not only tolerated as constitutional, but must be maintained because it is indispensable."
-Walter Lippmann-
(1889-1974) American writer, journalist, and political commentator
"I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands; one Nation, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all."
-Rev. Francis Bellamy-
(1855-1931) Baptist minister, Christian Socialist
Source: The original words and accompanying ritual of the Pledge of Allegiance was first published in the September 8th, 1892, issue of The Youth's Companion, a popular weekly magazine published in Boston.
And thus a private-sector flag franchise -- a capitalist venture -- was enriched by State idolatry...
"Procedure is the bone structure of a democratic society. Our scheme of law affords great latitude for dissent and opposition. It compels wide tolerance not only for their expression but also for the organization of people and forces to bring about the acceptance of the dissenter’s claim.... We have alternatives to violence."
-Abe Fortas-
(1910-1982) U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Concerning Dissent and Civil Disobedience, 1968
-anonymous-
"The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it."
-Henry David T!ioreau-
"Despicable means used to achieve laudable goals render the goals themselves despicable."
-Anton Chekhov-
"Gun manufacturers can be sued for manufacturing defects but vaccine manufacturers cannot.
Injuring someone with a gun or a knife or even a car, is a serious crime, but injuring someone with a vaccine isn't even a misdemeanor.
This is not justice."
-Thomas Massie-
"The Fascist State lays claim to rule in the economic field no less than in others; it makes its action felt throughout the length and breadth of the country by means of its corporate, social, and educational institutions, and all the political, economic, and spiritual forces of the nation, organised in their respective associations, circulate within the State."
-Benito Mussolini-
(1883-1945) Italian dictator during WW2, founder of Italian Fascism, 'Il Duce'
Source: Benito Mussolini, 1935, The Doctrine of Fascism, Firenze: Vallecchi Editore, (p. 41)
"... it was the calculated 'shearing' of the public by the World-Money powers triggered by the planned sudden shortage of call money in the New York Market."
-Curtis Dall-
son-in-law of FDR and a syndicate manager for Lehman Brothers, an investment firm
Source: was on the N.Y. Stock Exchange floor the day of the crash. In "FDR: My Exploited Father-In-Law"
"For the first time in its history, Western Civilization is in danger of being destroyed internally by a corrupt, criminal ruling cabal which is centered around the Rockefeller interests, which include elements from the Morgan, Brown, Rothschild, Du Pont, Harriman, Kuhn-Loeb, and other groupings as well. This junta took control of the political, financial, and cultural life of America in the first two decades of the twentieth century."
-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: No source found. Supposedly from 'Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time' (1966)
"Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
"We are in danger of being overwhelmed with irredeemable paper, mere paper, representing not gold nor silver; no sir, representing nothing but broken promises, bad faith, bankrupt corporations, cheated creditors and a ruined people."
-Daniel Webster-
(1782-1852) US Senator
Source: speech in the Senate, 1833
"Those who create and issue money and credit direct the policies of government and hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people."
-Reginald McKenna-
(1863-1943) British Secretary to the Treasury (1903), President of the Board of Education (1907–08) First Lord of the Admiralty (1908–1911), Home Secretary (1911–1915) and Chancellor of the Exchequer (1915–1916), and Chairman of the Midland Bank (1918)
"American money was never more sound, or banking more free, than 200 years ago. Since then, it’s been a long steady decline from the gold standard and competitive banking to our Fed-run system of inflated paper currency, deposit insurance, and perpetually shaky banks on the dole."
-Lew Rockwell-
[Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.] (1944- ) Chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute
Source: Banks On The Dole, The Free Market, November 1995.
"It was not accidental [the 1929 stock-market 'crash']. It was a carefully contrived occurrence. ... The international bankers sought to bring about a condition of despair here so that they might emerge as rulers of us all."
-Louis McFadden-
(1876-1936) US Congressman (R-PA) (1915-1935), Chairman of House Banking and Currency Committee. Poisoned in 1936.
"Are you entitled to the fruits of your labor or does government have some presumptive right to spend and spend and spend?"
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
"I saw in States’ rights the only availing check upon the absolutism of the sovereign will, and secession filled me with hope, not as the destruction but as the redemption of Democracy. The institutions of your Republic [i.e., the Confederate Constitution] have not exercised on the old world the salutary and liberating influence which ought to have belonged to them, by reason of those defects and abuses of principle which the Confederate Constitution was expressly and wisely calculated to remedy. I believed that the example of that great Reform would have blessed all the races of mankind by establishing true freedom purged of the native dangers and disorders of Republics. Therefore I deemed that you were fighting 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-
letter to Robert E. Lee after the War Between the States
"While I have considered the preservation of the constitutional power of the General Government to be the foundation of our peace and safety at home and abroad, I yet believe that the maintenance of the rights and authority reserved to the states and to the people, not only are essential to the adjustment and balance of the general system, but the safeguard to the continuance of a free government. I consider it as the chief source of stability to our political system, whereas the consolidation of the states into one vast republic, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of that ruin which has overwhelmed all those that have preceded it."
-Robert E. Lee-
response to Lord Acton
"The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender."
-Proverbs-
Source: Proverbs 22:7 (KJV)
"The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
Source: Reflections on the Revolution in France
"To make your children capable of honesty is the beginning of education."
-John Ruskin-
... and the end of their political career...
"The greatest threat facing America today is the disastrous fiscal policies of our own government, marked by shameless deficit spending and Federal Reserve currency devaluation. It is this one-two punch -- Congress spending more than it can tax or borrow, and the Fed printing money to make up the difference -- that threatens to impoverish us by further destroying the value of our dollars."
-Dr. Ron Paul-
(1935-) American physician, US Congressman (R-TX), US Presidential candidate
"The decrease in purchasing power incurred by holders of money due to inflation imparts gains to the issuers of money..."
-Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis-
Source: Review, Nov. 1975, p.22, Published by The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
"A recent poll showed that nearly half the American public believes that the government should redistribute wealth. That so many people are so willing to blithely put such an enormous and dangerous arbitrary power in the hands of politicians -- risking their own freedom, in hopes of getting what someone else has -- is a painful sign of how far many citizens and voters fall short of what is needed to preserve a democratic republic."
-Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
"No state shall emit bills of credit, make any thing but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts, coin money..."
-United States Constitution-
Source: United States Constitution, Article One, Section Ten
"Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value -- zero."
-Voltaire-
[François Marie Arouet] (1694-1778) French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher
1729
"The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds; the pessimist knows it."
-J. Robert Oppenheimer-
"To beat the bureaucracy, make your problem their problem."
-Marshall L. Smith-
"A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is privately concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men who, even if their action be honest and intended for the public interest, are necessarily concentrated upon the great undertakings in which their own money is involved and who necessarily, by very reason of their own limitations, chill and check and destroy genuine economic freedom."
-Woodrow Wilson-
(1856-1924) 28th US Presidentnt
1913
"The heaviest penalty for declining to rule is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself."
-Plato-
"Far from trying to rig the system, I have spent decades opposing cronyism and all political favors, including mandates, subsidies and protective tariffs -- even when we benefit from them. I believe that cronyism is nothing more than welfare for the rich and powerful, and should be abolished."
-Charles Koch-
(1935-) American businessman and philanthropist
Source: Koch, Charles (April 3, 2014). 'Instead of welcoming free debate, collectivists engage in character assassination.' "Charles Koch: I'm Fighting to Restore a Free Society". The Wall Street Journal
"Free lunch strategies have a habit of self-destructing. The Swiss economist Eugene Boehler had the context of such false and unsustainable images in mind when he noted that the 'modern economy is as much a dream factory as Hollywood.' It is based only a small part on real needs, and for the greatest part on fantasy and myth, he claimed. The stock exchange, far from ruling economic life, is at the mercy of tides of collective make-believe. Depressions come about when there is a loss of economic myth - (Eugene Boehler 'Der Mythus in der Wirtschaft,' Industrielle Organization, XXXI, 1962.)"
-J. Orlin Grabbe-
Source: 'The Collapse of the New World Order'
"Fiat-money systems tend to make people insatiable in their quest for ever higher monetary returns on their investments."
-Jorg Guido Hulsmann-
Economist
"It is the very essence of despotism that it can never afford to fail. This is what distinguishes it most vitally from democracy. In a despotism there is no organized opposition which can take over the power when the Administration in office has failed. All the eggs are in one basket. Everything is staked on one coterie of men. When the going is good, they move more quickly and efficiently than democracies, where the opposition has to be persuaded and conciliated. But when they lose, there are no reserves. There are no substitutes on the bench ready to go out on the field and carry the ball. That is why democracies with the habit of party government have outlived all other forms of government in the modern world. They have, as it were, at least two governments always at hand, and when one fails they have the other. They have diversified the risks of mortality, corruption, and stupidity which pervade all human affairs. They have remembered that the most beautifully impressive machine cannot run for very long unless there is available a complete supply of spare parts."
-Walter Lippmann-
(1889-1974) American writer, journalist, and political commentator
"The Federal Reserve System is treated by nearly all economists with reverence. On no matter is their instruction of the young in the subtlety and benignity of established institutions more admiring - or, in broad effect, more successful. Corporations are flawed by an instinct for monopoly. Trade unions interfere with the market, urge trade restrictions, resist new technology and thus obstruct progress, and they can fall victim to extortionists and racketeers. The regulatory agencies of the government are notably imperfect instruments of economic guidance. The Federal Reserve System is not totally above criticism. It makes many mistakes but these are always interesting errors of judgment. They are examined not critically but respectfully to discover why men of insight went wrong. That for such error anyone should be sacked or even seriously rebuked is, for economists, nearly unthinkable. This approval goes back to the origins and can be highly negligent of circumstance. The most widely read account of the genesis of the System tells glowingly of its birth in the closing weeks of 1913 when the Federal Reserve Act was passed by Congress and signed by President Wilson."
-John Kenneth Galbraith-
(1908-2006) Canadian-born economist, Harvard professor
Source: "Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went"
"When you pay social security taxes, you are in no way making provision for your own retirement. You are paying the pensions of those who are already retired. Once you understand this, you see that whether you will get the benefits you are counting on when you retire depends on whether Congress will levy enough taxes, borrow enough, or print enough money..."
-W. Allen Wallis-
former Chairman of the 1975 Advisory Council on Social Security
Source: May 27, 1976
"Public educators, like Soviet farmers, lack any incentive to produce results, innovate, to be efficient, to make the kinds of difficult changes that private firms operating in a competitive market must make to survive."
-Carolyn Lochhead-
American journalist
"Never — and I mean never — blindly trust the statistics you read [or hear] about the economy."
-Don Luskin-
(1954-) American columnist
"We can't spend more than we have. ... This is no longer a matter of right versus left, liberal versus conservative, we can prove our conclusion on this by basic mathematics. The United States Federal Government from all sources, for all purposes, takes in $2.2 trillion a year. Keep that number in mind. $2.2 trillion a year. We have total unfunded liabilities of $65 trillion, $2.2 trillion in revenue, $65 trillion in total unfunded liabilities. That is more than 30 to 1 leverage. If the United States Federal Government were a bank regulated by itself, they would shut themselves down. We live in a nation where not long ago our United States Secretary of State [Hillary Clinton] was on rhetorical bended knee in communist China pleading with the Chinese to continue to buy our debt, because if they don't buy our debt and other foreign sovereign wealth funds don't buy our debt our beloved United States of America can't pay its bills. The United States of America my friends is not a beggar nation."
-Gov. Tim Pawlenty-
(1960-) 39th Governor of Minnesota (2003-2011)
Source: http://www.conservative.org/cpac/archives/cpac-2010-tim-pawlenty
"Politicians say they're beefing up our economy. Most don't know beef from pork."
-Harold Lowman-
"With the monetary system we have now, the careful saving of a lifetime can be wiped out in an eyeblink."
-Larry Parks-
Executive Director, Foundation for the Advancement of Monetary Education (FAME)
"For the sake of humanity it is devoutly to be wished, that the manly employment of agriculture and the humanizing benefits of commerce, would supersede the waste of war and the rage of conquest; that the swords might be turned into plough-shares, the spears into pruning hooks, and, as the Scripture expresses it, 'the nations learn war no more.'
-George Washington-
"Property is a central economic institution of any society, and private property is the central institution of a free society."
-David D. Friedman-
(1945- ) American economist, physicist, legal scholar, and libertarian theorist
"[T]he only security men can have for their political liberty, consists in keeping their money in their own pockets ..."
-Lysander Spooner-
(1808-1887) Political theorist, activist, abolitionist
"Sir Walter Raleigh declared in the early 17th century that 'whoever commands the sea, commands the trade; whosoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world, and consequently the world itself.' This principle is as true today as when uttered, and its effect will continue as long as ships traverse the seas."
-Chester W. Nimitz-
Now consider the implications if you controlled (only) your own trade -- no manipulative tariffs, no fiat prohibitions, no arbitrary mandates. As if you had an unalienable unilateral right to set the acceptable terms of your own private contracts in a competitive free market, and to pursue voluntary commerce with willing partners wherever you found them (to the extent that their servants "permitted" them, anyway)...
"Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-
(1803-1882) American essayist, lecturer, and poet
"Money is the sign of liberty. To curse money is to curse liberty -- to curse life, which is nothing, if it be not free."
-Remy de Gourmont-
(1858-1915) French poet, novelist, and critic
"Why be thrifty when your old age and health care are provided for, no matter how profligate you act in your youth? Why be prudent when the state insures your bank deposits, replaces your flooded-out house, buys all the wheat you can grow? ... Why be diligent when half of your earnings are taken from you and given to the idle?"
-David Frum-
(1960-) Canadian-American journalist
Source: Dead Right, 1994
"Welfarism and excessive spending and deficits and socialism divide us, because everybody has to go to Washington. Those who have the biggest clout, those who are the best lobbyists, those who go and they grab. And whether it's the medical industrial complex, or the banking industry, or the military industrial complex, that's who ends up controlling our government... For so long, conservatives and constitutionalists have lost the argument, they lost the moral high ground. Because those who want to give things away, not talking about where they steal it from, but they want to give things and take care of people, they get the moral high ground and they come by as being compassionate. And we who believe in liberty, we lack compassion. But the truth is, there's only one compassionate system known to man, and that is freedom and personal responsibility, then there's enough wealth, and then we will all have personal responsibility to use this compassion that we have, first to take care of our families and friends and neighbors, and there would be so much wealth that we could spread this wealth around the world."
-Dr. Ron Paul-
(1935-) American physician, US Congressman (R-TX), US Presidential candidate
Source: New Hampshire Homeschool Meet and Greet, September 30, 2007
"If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
"I am for a government rigorously frugal and simple. Were we directed from Washington when to sow, when to reap, we should soon want bread."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Thomas Jefferson: Autobiography, 1821. ME 1:122
"He that goes a borrowing goes a sorrowing."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
Source: from his writings, 1758
"No one spends someone else's money as carefully as he spends his own."
-Mark Skousen-
(1947-) American economist, investment analyst, newsletter editor, college professor and author
Source: Economics in One Page
"A depression is a large-scale decline in production and trade... there is nothing in the nature of a free-market economy to cause such an event."
-Nathaniel Branden-
(1930- ) Canadian psychotherapist, writer
Source: essay "Common Fallacies About Capitalism"
"In 1983 $21 billion was spent in agricultural subsidies -- almost equal to the net income of all American farmers."
-Patrick Detches-
Source: Letter to the Orange County Register, April 17, 1984
"Without the confidence factor, many believe a paper money system is liable to collapse eventually."
-Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia-
Source: Gold!, p. 10, Published by The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia
"I hate this 'crime doesn't pay' stuff. Crime in the U.S. is perhaps one of the biggest businesses in the world today."
-Paul Kirk-
(1902-1970) Chemist, forensic scientist, participant in the Manhattan Project
Source: Wall Street Journal
"The Latin American drug cartels have stretched their tentacles much deeper into our lives than most people believe. It’s possible they are calling the shots at all levels of government."
-William Colby-
(1920-1996) former Director of the CIA
Source: writing for an investment newsletter in 1995
Government does like its 'taste'. What if we simply compelled ending terribly profitable unauthorized, serially failed, and horrifically expensive - in blood, treasure and liberty -- fiat prohibition...?
"It is said, mostly by Libertarians, that ‘taxation is theft.’ Theft is too mild a word. Typically, a thief strikes only once, and doesn’t pretend that his robbery is legitimate. Taxation is actually slavery."
-Rick Tompkins-
Attorney
Source: Quoted In Ohio Libertarian, October-November, 1995
"By the experience of commercial nations in all ages it has been found that gold and silver afford the only safe foundation for a monetary system. Confusion has recently been created by variations in the relative value of the two metals, but I confidently believe that arrangements can be made between the leading commercial nations which will secure the general use of both metals. Congress should provide that the compulsory coinage of silver now required by law may not disturb our monetary system by driving either metal out of circulation. If possible, such an adjustment should be made that the purchasing power of every coined dollar will be exactly equal to its debt-paying power in all the markets of the world."
-James A. Garfield-
(1831-1881) 20th President of the United States (1881), assassinated
Source: Inaugural Address, March 14, 1891
"In finance, everything that is agreeable is unsound."
-Winston Churchill-
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1940-1945, 1951-1955)
"I have never believed that man's freedom consisted in doing what he wants, but rather in never doing what he does not want to do."
-Jean-Jacques Rousseau-
"The worship of the state is the worship of force. There is no more dangerous menace to civilization than a government of incompetent, corrupt, or vile men. The worst evils which mankind 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-
"Statism – the subordination of the individual to the state - leads inevitably to the most hideous oppression."
-Andrew Bernstein-
Professor of philosophy, writer
Source: The Capitalist Manifesto - The Great Disconnect
"We've been asleep for about 50 years. Ever since the end of World War II we just steadily handed our future and our bank accounts and now our children, handed them all over to the federal government..."
-Michael Moriarty-
(1941) American-Canadian stage and screen actor, jazz musician
"The aspiration to such uniformity and order alerts us to the fact that modern statecraft is largely a project of internal colonization, often glossed, as it is in its imperial rhetoric, as a 'civilizing mission'."
-James C. Scott-
Source: Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 82
"Why nationalize industry when you can nationalize the people?"
-Adolf Hitler-
(1889-1945) German Nazi Dictator
Source: quoted in Robert N. Proctor, The Nazi War on Cancer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 74
"Government control of the economy, no matter in whose behalf, has been the source of all the evils in our industrial society -– and the solution is laissez-faire capitalism, i.e., the abolition of any and all forms of intervention in production and trade, the separation of State and Economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of Church and State."
-Ayn Rand-
[Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum] (1905-1982) Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter
Source: Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 1966
"The primary goal of collectivism -- of socialism in Europe and contemporary liberalism in America -- is to enlarge governmental supervision of individuals' lives. This is done in the name of equality. People are to be conscripted into one large cohort, everyone equal (although not equal in status or power to the governing class) in their status as wards of a self-aggrandizing government."
-George Will-
(1941-) American newspaper columnist, journalist, and author
Source: December 15, 2005, Environmentalism as a Cover for Collectivism -
"Collectivism is the doctrine that the social collective -- called society, the people, the state, etc. -- has rights, needs, or moral authority above and apart from the individuals who comprise it. We hear this idea continually championed in such familiar platitudes as 'the needs of the people take precedence over the rights of the individual,' 'production for people, not profits,' and 'the common good.'
Collectivism often sounds humane because it stresses the importance of human needs. In reality, it is little more than a rationalization for sacrificing you and me to the desires of others."
-Jarret B. Wollstein-
American author, writer, director at The International Society for Individual Liberty, co-founder of the original Society for Individual Liberty in 1969
Source: The Causes of Aggression
"We should not expect the state to appear in the guise of an extravagant good fairy at every christening, a loquacious companion at every stage of life's journey, and the unknown mourner at every funeral."
-Margaret Thatcher-
(1925-2013) British Prime Minister (1979–1990)
"You have no enemies, you say?
Alas, my friend, the boast is poor;
He, who has mingled in the fray
Of duty that the brave endure,
Must have made foes! If you have none,
Small is the work that you have done,
You've hit no traitor on the hip,
You've dashed no cup from perjured lip,
You've never turned the wrong to right,
You've been a coward in the fight."
-Charles Mackay-
"The crucial distinction between systems ... was no longer ideological. The main political difference was between those who did, and those who did not, believe that the citizen could -- or should -- be the property of the state."
-Christopher Hitchens-
(1949-2011) British-American author, journalist
Source: Adam Michnik in Letters to a Young Contrarian by Christopher Hitchens
"The misapprehension springs from the fact that the learned jurists, deceiving themselves as well as others, depict in their books an ideal of government -- not as it really is, an assembly of men who oppress their fellow-citizens, but in accordance with the scientific postulate, as a body of men who act as the representatives of the rest of the nation. They have gone on repeating this to others so long that they have ended by believing it themselves, and they really seem to think that justice is one of the duties of governments. History, however, shows us that governments, as seen from the reign of Caesar to those of the two Napoleons and Prince Bismarck, are in their very essence a violation of justice; a man or a body of men having at command an army of trained soldiers, deluded creatures who are ready for any violence, and through whose agency they govern the State, will have no keen sense of the obligation of justice. Therefore governments will never consent to diminish the number of those well-trained and submissive servants, who constitute their power and influence."
-Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi-
(1828-1910) Russian writer
Source: Writings on Civil Disobedience and Non-Violence (Signet Books, 1968), pp. 238-239
"For this future emancipation, we have to rule out ideologies that aim at reinforcing the state, the police and controls in general, and at reducing liberty."
-André Thirion-
(1907-2001) French writer, member of the group of surrealists, theorist and political activist
Source: Éloge de l'indocilité (Paris: Laffont, 1973), p. 326
"[I]n America it is the so-called capitalist who is to blame for the fulfillment of Marx's prophecies. Beguiled by the state's siren song of special privilege, the capitalists have abandoned capitalism."
-Frank Chodorov-
(1887-1966) American author, publisher
"The real reason to abolish departments like Energy and Education is not to promote efficiency, nor even to save taxpayers’ money. It is that many agencies perform functions that are not Federal responsibility. The founders delegated to the Government only strictly defined authority in Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution. Search the entire Constitution, and you will find no authorization for Congress to subsidize the arts, finance and regulate education or invest tax revenues in energy research."
-David Boaz-
(1953-) Author, executive vice president of the Cato Institute
Source: Budget Cuts: Less Than Meets the Eye, New York Times, Op-Ed Thursday, July 6, 1995
Nor to impose prohibitions -- of substances, of objects, of peaceful actions, nor of ideas...
"Since the State necessarily lives by the compulsory confiscation of private capital, and since its expansion necessarily involves ever-greater incursions on private individuals and private enterprise, we must assert that the state is profoundly and inherently anti-capitalist."
-Murray N. Rothbard-
(1926-1995) Dean of the Austrian School of Economics
Source: Anatomy of the State
"Increasing the power of the state in response to the Soviet menace would not defeat socialism in Russia but bring it to the United States."
-Frank Chodorov-
(1887-1966) American author, publisher
"Such questions have never been discussed in scholarly publications because the Nazi laws, policies, and practices have never been adequately documented. The record establishes that a well-meaning liberal republic would enact a gun control act that would later be highly useful to a dictatorship."
-Stephen P. Halbrook-
Source: "Nazi Firearms Law and the Disarming of the German Jews," Arizona Journal of International and Comparative Law, Vol. 17, No. 3 (2000), pp. 483-535
"One day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but that it is a means by which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means."
-Martin Luther King, Jr.-
"To own firearms is to affirm that freedom and liberty are not gifts from the state. It is to reserve final judgment about whether the state is encroaching on freedom and liberty, to stand ready to defend that freedom with more than mere words, and to stand outside the state’s totalitarian reach."
-Jeffrey R. Snyder-
American attorney, author
Source: A Nation of Cowards, 113 Public Interest (Fall 1993)
"There is little to be feared from the standard picture of a totalitarian society in which 'cogs,' who are watched by Big Brother or his equivalent, carry out orders emanating from the top. Such a society would collapse in inefficiency. What is infinitely more fearsome is the capacity of a dictatorship to use the principle of competition to organize terror and murder."
-Ronald Wintrobe-
Source: The Political Economy of Dictatorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 328
"I think a major reason why intellectuals tend to move towards collectivism is that the collectivist answer is a simple one. If there’s something wrong, pass a law and do something about it."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
Source: From “An Interview With Milton Friedman,” December 1974, conducted by Tibor Machan, Joe Cobb, and Ralph Raico
"COLLECTIVISM: Collectivism is defined as the theory and practice that makes some sort of group rather than the individual the fundamental unit of political, social, and economic concern. In theory, collectivists insist that the claims of groups, associations, or the state must normally supersede the claims of individuals."
-Stephen Grabill-
Source: Stephen Grabill and Gregory M. A. Gronbacher, Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty
"Based on strikingly irrational beliefs and emotions, modern liberals relentlessly undermine the most important principles on which our freedoms were founded. Like spoiled, angry children, they rebel against the normal responsibilities of adulthood and demand that a parental government meet their needs from cradle to grave."
-Lyle H. Rossiter, Jr.-
American Psychiatrist, Author
Source: “The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness,” 2006
"It would not be unreasonable, by analogy with a motor vehicle licence, that a permit to reproduce should also be needed with a minimum age of, for example, twenty-five, and a proof required that the parents are of sufficient maturity and financial resource to take proper care of the child. Young, sexually active, but emotionally immature teenagers would need help."
-Sir Roy Yorke Calne-
(1930-2024) British surgeon, pioneer in organ transplantation
Source: Too Many People (London and New York: Calder Publications and Riverrun Press, 1994), p.113.
"If someone offers you a deal accompanied by the promise, 'If you don't accept my offer I'll hurt you,' you can be quite sure that you are not being offered a good deal. This is the sort of deal the government offers you: accept my deal with all its provisions or you'll be caged or killed. Strange to say, nearly all the victims of this coerced dealing regard themselves as living in a free society."
-Robert Higgs-
"I have ever deemed it more honorable and profitable, too, to set a good example than to follow a bad one."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"It is curious to note that when for reasons of conscience, people refuse to kill, they are often exempted from active military duty. But there are no exemptions for people who, for reasons of conscience, refuse to financially support the bureaucracy that actually does the killing. Apparently, the state takes money more seriously than life."
-Karl Hess-
"The only fence against the world is a thorough knowledge of it."
-John Locke-
(1632-1704) English philosopher and political theorist
1693
"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
"What is the task of higher education? To make a man into a machine. What are the means employed? He is taught how to suffer being bored."
-Friedrich Nietzsche-
(1844-1900) German philosopher, cultural critic, poet, philologist
Source: (1889)
“With all the pious talk about 'tolerance' in the media and in academia, there is virtually none for those who challenge the dogmas of political correctness in most of our colleges and universities."
-Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
"Education is the best provision for old age."
-Aristotle-
(384-322 BC) Greek philosopher
"Upon the education of the people of this country, the fate of this country depends."
-Benjamin Disraeli-
(1804-1881) Prime Minister of England, British statesman, novelist
"I've noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my thirty years of teaching: Schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in english class. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders."
- John Taylor Gatto-
"The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any."
-Hannah Arendt-
"Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently maintained."
-James A. Garfield-
(1831-1881) 20th President of the United States (1881), assassinated
July 12, 1880
"We must not believe the many, who say that only free people ought to be educated, but we should rather believe the philosophers who say that only the educated are free."
-Epictetus-
(ca 55-135 A.D.) Greek philospher
Source: Discourses
"You cannot become a truly effective advocate unless you know all sides of your subject thoroughly, opposing arguments as well as your own."
-G. R. Capp-
Source: Principles of Argumentation and Debate, 1965
"Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"In short, the 'house of world order' will have to be built from the bottom up rather than from the top down...An end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old fashioned assault..."
-Richard N. Gardner-
former deputy assistant Secretary of State
Source: in the opinion of Richard N. Gardner, in "Foreign Affairs," April 1974.
"Just as any moron can destroy a priceless Ming vase, so the shallow and ill-educated people who run our schools can undermine and destroy from within a great civilization that took centuries of dedicated effort to create and maintain."
-Dr. Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
"Varieties of Envy
The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts. He ascribes all his failure to get on in the world, all of his congenital incapacity and damnfoolishness, to the machinations of werewolves assembled in Wall Street, or some other such den of infamy. If these villains could be put down, he holds, he would at once become rich, powerful and eminent. Nine politicians out of every ten, of whatever party, live and have their being by promising to perform this putting down. In brief, they are knaves who maintain themselves by preying on the idiotic vanities and pathetic hopes of halfwits.
What is thus promised, of course, always falls far short of fulfillment.
The politicians devote themselves ardently enough to robbing A, who is an honest and useful man, eager only to pay his way, in order to bribe and flatter B, who is lazy, stupid and incompetent, and a very large part of the national income is dissipated in the process. But B still remains clearly inferior to A. He was inferior as a blastocyte, and he continues so as a nascent cadaver at a rally of Townsendites or New Dealers. He is therefore easy meat for the rascals who promise to give him, not merely a dole, but irresistible power. He dreams of becoming so mighty, _en masse_, if not on his own, that the nation will tremble at his tread, and Wall Street will entreat him for peace terms. In brief, he puts on a night-shirt and joins the Ku Klux Klan, The Black Legion, or some other such amalgam of crooks and fools.
It seems to be little noticed that this yearning to dragoon and terrify all persons who happen to be lucky is at the bottom of the puerile radicalism now prevailing among us, just as it is at the bottom of Ku Kluxery. The average American radical today likes to think of himself as a profound and somber fellow, privy to arcana not open to the general; he is actually only a poor fish, with overtones of the jackass. What ails him, first and last, is simply envy of his betters. Unable to make any progress against them under the rules in vogue, he proposes to fetch them below the belt by making the rules over. He is no more an altruist than J. Pierpont Morgan is an altruist, or Jim Farley, or indeed Al Capone.
Every such rescuer of the downtrodden entertains himself with gaudy dreams of power, far beyond his natural fortunes and capacities. He sees himself at the head of an overwhelming legion of morons, marching upon the fellows he envies and hates. He thinks of himself in his private reflections (and gives it away every time he makes a speech or prints an article) as a gorgeous amalgam of Lenin, Mussolini and Genghis Khan, with the republic under his thumb, his check for any amount good at any bank, and ten million heels clicking every time he winks his eye. Not infrequently, he throws in a private brewery or distillery, belching smoke in his personal service, and a girl considerably more sightly than he can scare up by his native magnetism. When such grotesque megalomania reaches a certain virulence a black wagon dashes up, and its two honest deckhands, Jack and Emil, haul off another nut to the psychopathic hoosegow. But not many of the patients go that far. They retain all their ordinary faculties. They can eat, drink, talk, sweat, walk, dance and hope. They read the _New Masses_, sing 'The Internationale', and lecture on 'Das Kapital' without having read it. A vision enchants them, and perhaps one should allow that, considering their natural gifts, it is as beautiful as any they are capable of. But it will come to nothing. Like the dupes of the Black Legion, they are doomed to be fooled."
-H. L. Mencken-
Baltimore Evening Sun, June 15th, 1936
"Abraham Lincoln did not cause the death of so many people from a mere love of slaughter, but only to bring about a state of consent that could not otherwise be secured for the government he had undertaken to administer. When a government has once reduced its people to a state of consent — that is, of submission to its will — it can put them to a much better use than to kill them; for it can then plunder them, enslave them, and use them as tools for plundering and enslaving others."
-Lysander Spooner-
Forced Consent (1873)
"The group consisting of mother, father and child is the main educational agency of mankind."
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
(1929-1968) US civil rights leader
"As a general thing the only persons who have a legal right to give orders to the teacher are his employers, namely, the committee in some States, and in others the directors or trustees. If his conduct is approved by his employers the parents have no remedy as against him or them."
-John Swett-
(1830-1913) Superintendent of California Public School System, "Father of the California public school" system, "Horace Mann of the Pacific"
Source: John Swett's Biennial Report, 1864, page 166
Sure. 'Middle management' is ALWAYS self-directed and omnipotent...
"Democracy? I want nothing to do with a system which operates on the premise that my rights don't exist simply because I am outnumbered."
-R. Lee Wrights-
"Place the lives of children in their formative years, despite the convictions of their parents, under the intimate control of experts appointed by the state, force them to attend schools where the higher aspirations of humanity are crushed out, and where the mind is filled with the materialism of the day, and it is difficult to see how even the remnants of liberty can subsist."
-J. Gresham Machen-
(1881-1937) American Presbyterian New Testament scholar, educator, professor at Princeton Seminary, formed the Westminster Theological Seminary
"Until war is constitutionally declared, the nation and all its members must observe and preserve peace."
-John Jay-
“Education... now seems to me perhaps the most authoritarian and dangerous of all the social inventions of mankind. It is the deepest foundation of the modern slave state, in which most people feel themselves to be nothing but producers, consumers, spectators, and 'fans,' driven more and more, in all parts of their lives, by greed, envy, and fear. My concern is not to improve 'education' but to do away with it, to end the ugly and antihuman business of people-shaping and to allow and help people to shape themselves."
-John Holt-
(1923-1985) American author and educator, proponent of homeschooling, and pioneer in youth rights theory
Source: Holt, J. (1967). How Children Learn. New York: Pitman Publishing Corporation
"The greatest dangers to liberty lie in insidious encroachments by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."
-Justice Louis Brandeis-
dissent in Olmstead v. U.S.
"In the second half of the 17th century, Germany was made up of 234 countries, 51 free cities, and 1,500 independent knightly manors. By the early 19th century all three had fallen below 50. And then, of course, in 1871 we get German unification.
What might the world have been like in the absence of German unification is the kind of question that is not raised because it’s not in the card."
-Tom Woods-
Mises Institute talk
"The First and Fourteenth Amendments say that Congress and the States shall make 'no law' which abridges freedom of speech or of the press. In order to sanction a system of censorship I would have to say that 'no law' does not mean what it says, that 'no law' is qualified to mean 'some' laws. I cannot take this step."
-William O. Douglas-
(1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Superior Films v. Department of Education of the State of Ohio, 1954
Oh, the hidden "except" clauses just hadn't revealed themselves yet...
"Liberty of thought soon shrivels without freedom of expression. Nor can truth be pursued in an atmosphere hostile to the endeavor or under dangers which are hazarded only by heroes."
-Felix Frankfurter-
(1882-1965) U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Dennis et al v. United States, 1951
"I cannot assent to the view, if it be meant that the legislature may impair or abridge the rights of a free press and of free speech whenever it thinks that the public welfare requires that it be done. The public welfare cannot override constitutional privilege."
-John Marshall Harlan-
(1833–1911), US Supreme Court Justice, 1877–1911
Source: Patterson v. Colorado (1907)
"Freedom to publish means freedom for all and not for some. Freedom to publish is guaranteed by the constitution but freedom to continue to prevent others from publishing is not."
-Justice Hugo L. Black-
(1886-1971) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: One Man’s Stand For Freedom, 1963
"No legislative act contrary to the Constitution can be valid. To deny this would be to affirm that the deputy (agent) is greater than his principal; that the servant is above the master; that the representatives of the people are superior to the people; that men, acting by virtue of powers may do not only what their powers do not authorize, but what they forbid. It is not to be supposed that the Constitution could intend to enable the representatives of the people to substitute their will to that of their constituents. A Constitution is, in fact, and must be regarded by judges as fundamental law. If there should happen to be a irreconcilable variance between the two, the Constitution is to be preferred to the statute."
-Alexander Hamilton-
(1757-1804) American statesman, Secretary of the Treasury
Source: Federalist Papers #78, See also Warning v. The Mayor of Savannah, 60 Georgia, P.93; First Trust Co. v. Smith, 277 SW 762, Marbury v. Madison, 2 L Ed 60; and Am.Juris. 2d Constitutional Law, section 177-178)
And mere statutes can't somehow -- aren't required to -- validate the Constitution.
"There is no zeal blinder than that which is inspired with a love of justice against offenders."
-Henry Fielding-
(1707-1754) English novelist and dramatist
"The dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution, is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes. History teems with instances of truth put down by persecution. If not suppressed for ever, it may be thrown back for centuries. … Men are not more zealous for truth than they often are for error, and a sufficient application of legal or even of social penalties will generally succeed in stopping the propagation of either. The real advantage which truth has, consists in this, that when an opinion is true, it may be extinguished once, twice, or many times, but in the course of ages there will generally be found persons to rediscover it, until some one of its reappearances falls on a time when from favourable circumstances it escapes persecution until it has made such head as to withstand all subsequent attempts to suppress it."
-John Stuart Mill-
"We'll provide a few services, and use the lion's share of revenues to pay the bribes. More than providing services to 'em, taking people's money is what makes organizations real, be they formal, informal or temporary."
-E.B. Farnum-
Deadwood
"All that is good is not embodied in the law; and all that is evil is not proscribed by the law. A well-disciplined society needs few laws; but it needs strong mores."
-William F. Buckley, Jr.-
(1925-2008) American author and journalist, founded 'National Review'
"The big thieves hang the little ones."
-Czech Proverb-
"The more laws the more offenders."
-Dr. Thomas Fuller-
(1608-1661) English clergyman, writer
Source: Gnomologia, 1732
"We may try to see things as objectively as we please. None the less, we can never see them with any eyes except our own."
-Benjamin N. Cardozo-
"The free market, that is, the free pricing system, works automatically. How complex is it? So complex that no man on this earth has the capabilities to enforce a price for one day on one simple item without causing more harm than good."
-Leonard E Read-
"I cannot conceive a rank more honorable, than that which flows from the uncorrupted choice of a brave and free people, the purest source and original fountain of all power."
-George Washington-
(1732-1799) Founding Father, 1st US President, 'Father of the Country'
"Yes, we did produce a near-perfect republic. But will they keep it? Or will they, in the enjoyment of plenty, lose the memory of freedom? Material abundance without character is the path of destruction."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Attributed. No source found. Supposedly in a letter to John Adams as quoted in John A. Stormer, None Dare Call it Treason (Florissant, MO: Liberty Bell Press, 1964) 93
"We enjoy freedom and the rule of law on which it depends, not because we deserve it, but because others before us put their lives on the line to defend it."
-Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
"A theory deeply etched in our law [is that] a free society prefers to punish the few who abuse the rights of free speech after they break the law rather than to throttle them and all others beforehand."
-Justice Clarence Thomas-
(1948- ) U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Avis v. Aguilar, 2000
"If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence."
-Justice Louis D. Brandeis-
(1856-1941) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: Whitney v. California, 1927
"The very aim and end of our institutions is just this: that we may think what we like and say what we think."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.-
(1841-1935) US Supreme Court Justice, also known as "The Great Dissenter"
Source: The Professor at the Breakfast Table, 1860
"Judges are but men, and are swayed like other men by vehement prejudices. This is corruption in reality, give it whatever other name you please."
-David Dudley Field, II-
(1805-1894) American lawyer and law reformer
"I am a sinner who does not expect forgiveness. But I am not a government official."
-Francis Wolcott-
Deadwood
"Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion all have a double aspect – freedom of thought and freedom of action."
-Frank Murphy-
(1890-1959) U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Jones v. Opelika, 1941
"Every prudent and cautious judge ... will remember, that his duty and his business is, not to make the law, but to interpret and apply it."
-James Wilson-
(1742-1798) Member of Continental Congress, signed Declaration of Independence; U.S. Supreme Court Justice and delegate from Pennsylvania
Source: Lectures on Law, 1791
"Of...freedom [of thought and speech] one may say that it is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom."
-Justice Benjamin Cardozo-
(1870-1938) U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Palko v. Connecticut, 1937
"Where the state exists, there will be rent-seeking, the quest for advantage that can be had only through force."
-Sheldon Richman-
"One of the greatest problems that we as a free people face today is that for the past 100 years trial judges in the U.S. have routinely misinformed jurors that they were bound to accept the judge's opinion of what the law is; which law to apply; and whether or not they had to find a defendant guilty. In so doing these judges have welded shut this all important safety valve, which our Founders so wisely provided our society -- and the result has been an explosive one."
-Mike Robbins-
Source: Fully Informed Jury Association Activist, Summer 1995
"Immigration is a sour topic for both parties. Republicans don't like to admit labor mobility is a part of a capitalism, and commies on the left don't like to admit it accentuates the flaws in their welfare state. Seems we are forever doomed to a centrally planned immigration system, being used as a political tool in elections."
-Anthony Myers-
"Lawyers [are] operators of the toll bridge across which anyone in search of justice has to pass."
-Jane Bryant Quinn-
(1939-) American financial journalist
Source: Newsweek, 9 October 1975
"A guilty man is punished as an example for the mob; an innocent man convicted is the business of every honest citizen."
-Jean de la Bruyere-
(1645-1696) French essayist and moralist
Source: Les Caracteres, 1688
"Decency, security, and liberty alike demand that government officials shall be subjected to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen... If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy."
-Justice Louis D. Brandeis-
(1856-1941) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: Olmstead v. United States, 1928
"The function of the prosecutor under the federal Constitution is not to tack as many skins of victims as possible against the wall. His function is to vindicate the rights of the people as expressed in the laws and give those accused of crime a fair trial."
-Justice William O. Douglas-
(1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
"If the prosecutor is obliged to choose his case, it follows that he can choose his defendants. Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people he thinks he should get, rather than cases that need to be prosecuted. With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him. It is in this realm -- in which the prosecutor picks some person whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass, or selects some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense, that the greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power lies. It is here that law enforcement becomes personal, and the real crime becomes that of being unpopular with the predominant or governing group, being attached to the wrong political views, or being personally obnoxious to or in the way of the prosecutor himself."
-Justice Robert H. Jackson-
(1892-1954), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
"Wherever standing armies are kept up, and when the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any color or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction"
-St. George Tucker-
"One thing that humbles me deeply is to see that human genius has its limits while human stupidity does not. "
-Alexandre Dumas-
"Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped."
-Elbert Hubbard-
"It is the essence of the institutions of liberty that it be recognized that guilt is personal and cannot be attributed to the holding of opinions or to mere intent in the absence of overt acts."
-Justice Charles Evans Hughes-
(1862-1948) Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court
Source: Harvard Law Review, April 1948
"Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable."
-Milton Friedman-
"The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the Constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Attributed - no source found in Jefferson's writings
"For a punishment to be just it should consist of only such gradations of intensity as suffice to deter men from committing crimes."
-Cesare Beccaria-
(1735-1794) [Bonesana, Marchese di] Italian nobleman, criminologist, and penal reformer
Source: On Crimes and Punishments, 1764
"Life and liberty can be as much endangered from illegal methods used to convict those thought to be criminals as from the actual criminals themselves."
-Earl Warren-
(1891-1974) Chief Justice, U. S. Supreme Court
Source: 1959
"(America) goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. .... She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own. were they even the banners of foreign independence. she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication. in all the wars of interest and intrigue. of individual avarice. envy. and ambition. which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom."
-John Quincy Adams-
July 4. 1821
"Prohibition will work great injury to the cause of temperance. It is a species of intemperance within itself, for it goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. A Prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded."
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
Source: Dec. 18, 1840
Plato's Five Regimes of Government
* Aristocracy
* Timocracy
* Oligarchy
* Democracy
* Tyranny
"We are good citizens, and we cannot protect ourselves because you allow the criminals to run wild. ... I'd like you to come and live in the inner city for a week and see the importance of having a weapon. ... Go after the criminals and not the good people."
-Jesse Lee Peterson-
L.A. resident
Source: at a press conference on L.A.’s city hall, quoted in the Los Angeles Times, May 29, 1997.
"Laws do not curb the lawless. After all, that's why we call them 'lawless.'"
-Joel Miller-
Editor Real Mensch
Source: Mensch Notes, April 21, 1999
"The constitutional right of free expression... is designed and intended to remove governmental restraints from the arena of public discussion, putting the decision as to what views shall be voiced in the hands of each of us, in the hope that the use of such freedom will ultimately produce a more capable citizenry and more perfect polity and in the belief that no other approach would comport with the premise of individual dignity and choice upon which our political systems rests."
-John Marshall Harlan II-
(1899-1971) U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Cohen v. California, 1971
"The First Amendment is often inconvenient. But that is besides the point. Inconvenience does not absolve the government of its obligation to tolerate speech."
-Justice Anthony Kennedy
(1936-) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (1988-2018)
"O liberty! how many crimes are committed in thy name!
[Fr., O liberte! que de crimes on commet dans ton nom!]"
-Madame Jeanne Marie Phlipon de La Platiere Roland-
"Ladies and Gentlemen, we only pass laws against people who obey the law. Drug dealers, bank robbers and rapists don’t care what we do because they willfully violate the law anyway."
-Rod Wright-
California State Assemblyman, D-L.A.
"A reasonable man adjusts himself to the world. An unreasonable man expects the world to adjust itself to him. Therefore, all progress is made by unreasonable people."
-George Bernard Shaw-
"The door of the Free Exercise Clause stands tightly closed against any government regulation of religious beliefs as such. Government may neither compel affirmation of a repugnant belief, nor penalize or discriminate against individuals or groups because they hold views abhorrent to the authorities."
-Justice William J. Brennan-
(1906-1997) U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Sherbert v. Verner, 1963
"In Germany, the Nazis first came for the communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, but I didn't speak up because I was a protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak for me."
-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: paraphrased and inscribed at the New England Holocaust Memorial in Boston, Massachusetts
"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy."
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-
(1929-1968) US civil rights leader
"In a society in which it is a moral offense to be different from your neighbor your only escape is to never let them find out."
-Robert A. Heinlein-
(1907-1988) American writer
"In a democracy, the opposition is not only tolerated as constitutional, but must be maintained because it is indispensable."
-Walter Lippmann-
(1889-1974) American writer, journalist, and political commentator
"I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands; one Nation, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all."
-Rev. Francis Bellamy-
(1855-1931) Baptist minister, Christian Socialist
Source: The original words and accompanying ritual of the Pledge of Allegiance was first published in the September 8th, 1892, issue of The Youth's Companion, a popular weekly magazine published in Boston.
And thus a private-sector flag franchise -- a capitalist venture -- was enriched by State idolatry...
"Procedure is the bone structure of a democratic society. Our scheme of law affords great latitude for dissent and opposition. It compels wide tolerance not only for their expression but also for the organization of people and forces to bring about the acceptance of the dissenter’s claim.... We have alternatives to violence."
-Abe Fortas-
(1910-1982) U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Concerning Dissent and Civil Disobedience, 1968
