"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
"The Americans of 1776 were among the first men in modern society to defend rather than to seek an open society and constitutional liberty.... Perhaps the most remarkable characteristic of this political theory sits in its deep-seated conservatism. However radical the principles of the Revolution may have seemed to the rest of the world, in the minds of the colonists they were thoroughly preservative and respectful of the past."
-Clinton Lawrence Rossiter III-
(1917-1970) American historian, political scientist Cornell University
Source: Seedtime of the Republic, 1953
"If we abide by the principles taught in the Bible, our country will go on prospering."
-Daniel Webster-
(1782-1852) US Senator
"He is the best friend to American liberty, who is most sincere and active in promoting true and undefiled religion, and who set himself with the greatest firmness to bear down on profanity and immorality of every kind. Whoever is an avowed enemy of God, I scruple not to call him an enemy to his country."
-John Witherspoon-
the only clergyman in the Continental Congress
"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
-Abraham Lincoln-
(1809-1865) 16th US President
Source: Attributed, but no source found
Truer words...
"When you control opinion, as corporate America controls opinion in the United States by owning the media, you can make the [many] believe almost anything you want, and you can guide them."
-Gore Vidal-
(1925-2012) American novelist, essayist, playwright, and provocateur
Source: from The Golden Age
"Too many Americans have twisted the sensible right to pursue happiness into the delusion that we are entitled to a guarantee of happiness. If we don't get exactly what we want, we assume someone must be violating our rights. We're no longer willing to write off some of life's disappointments to simple bad luck."
-Susan Jacoby-
(1945-) American author
"What we need to do in this country is make sure the majority of the American people really want their freedoms back again. We have to have people once again believe in liberty, foreign policy that defends America, but is not the policeman of the world. We don't have the right nor the facilities to throw our weight around and tell the rest of the world how to live."
-Dr. Ron Paul-
(1935-) American physician, US Congressman (R-TX), US Presidential candidate
Source: June 3, 2015, Politicking with Larry King
"Liberty without virtue would be no blessing to us."
-Dr. Benjamin Rush-
(1745-1813) signed the Declaration of Independence, physician, politician, social reformer, humanitarian, educator, founder of Dickinson College
"In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happened, you can bet it was planned that way."
-Franklin D. Roosevelt-
(1882-1945), 32nd US President
1941
"Since the State thrives on what it expropriates, the general decline in production that it induces by its avarice foretells its own doom. Its source of income dries up. Thus, in pulling Society down it pulls itself down. Its ultimate collapse is usually occasioned by a disastrous war, but preceding that event is a history of increasing and discouraging levies on the marketplace, causing a decline in the aspirations, hopes, and self-esteem of its victims."
-Frank Chodorov-
The Rise and Fall of Society
“In the struggle between those seeking power there is no middle course.”
-Cornelius Tacitus-
(55-117 A.D.) Senator and historian of the Roman Empire
"Freedom has its life in the hearts, the actions, the spirit of men and so it must be daily earned and refreshed—else like a flower cut from its life-giving roots, it will wither and die."
-Dwight D. Eisenhower-
(1890-1969), 34th US President, WWII General
Source: speech to English Speaking Union, London, England 1944
"Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names."
-John F. Kennedy-
(1917-1963) 35th US President
"A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: Federalist No. 51, February 8, 1788
"Perseverance is more prevailing than violence; and many things which cannot be overcome when they are together, yield themselves up when taken little by little."
-Plutarch-
(c.45-125 A.D.) Greek Priest of the Delphic Oracle
"If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
1964
"The main point of a constitution is to put limits on what aspects of life are subject to majority rule."
-Ronald Bailey-
"Honesty. That's the thing in the theater today. Honesty ... and just as soon as I can learn to fake that, I'll have it made."
-anonymous-
"Why, if we had to do that we could not pass most of the laws we enact around here... Americans just want us to solve America's problems of health and safety -- and not be concerned if they can be constitutionally justified."
-Sen. John Glenn-
(1921- ) First American astronaut to orbit the Earth, US Senator (D-OH)
On July 16, 1996, the Senate Committee on Governmental affairs held hearings considering a bill to require Congress to specify for each new law which section of the Constitution gives it authority to pass the law. Sen. Glenn spoke out strongly against this requirement.
"The American constitutions were to liberty, what a grammar is to language: they define its parts of speech and practically construct them into syntax."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
Source: The Rights of Man, 1791
"The bold effort the present bank had made to control the government ... are but premonitions of the fate that await the American people should they be deluded into a perpetuation of this institution or the establishment of another like it."
-Andrew Jackson-
(1767-1845) 7th US President
Source: To Congress in 1836, Jackson closed the second Federal Bank (est. 1816) with these comments
"[The program of American disarmament outlined in State Department Paper 7277] is the fixed, determined and approved policy of the government of the United States."
-Joseph S. Clark-
(1901-1990) US Senator (Pennsylvania-D)
March 1, 1962
Source: on the floor of the U.S. Senate during debate of State Department Paper 7277
"The Internet... has become the voice of the people in the first genuine experiment in democracy yet conducted in America. It stands ready to serve every facet, every faction."
-Gerry Spence-
Lawyer and author
Source: Give Me Liberty, 1998
"In the eyes of government we are just one race here. It is American."
-Justice Antonin Scalia-
(1936-2016) American jurist, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
Source: Adarand v. Pena
No, it is human. And every single one of them is endowed with precisely identical unalienable rights. That's why the Founders instituted government: to secure them for "all men".
"Liberty has never lasted long in a democracy, nor has it ever ended in anything better than despotism."
-Fisher Ames-
"Republicans don't know how to defend morally an individual's right to achieve wealth and to keep it, and that is why they fail. ... It's part and parcel with their ambivalence over the individualist heritage of the nation. ... One of the things that people have to understand is that the American Revolution was truly an epic revolution in the way individuals were perceived in relation to the rest of the society. Throughout history individuals had always been cogs in some machine; they'd always been something to be sacrificed for the king, the tribe, the gang, the chieftain, the society around them, the race, whatever, and the real revolution, in America especially, was a moral revolution. It was a moral revolution in that ... suddenly, with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the individual, his life, his well-being, his property, his happiness became central to our values, and that is what really made America unique. People came here from all over the world to try to escape the kind of oppression they had and experienced in the past. They came here for freedom; they came here for self-expression and self-realization, and America offered them that kind of a place."
-Robert Bidinotto-
"Whenever justice is uncertain and police spying and terror are at work, human beings fall into isolation, which, of course, is the aim and purpose of the dictator state, since it is based on the greatest possible accumulation of depotentiated social units."
-Carl Gustav Jung-
(1875-1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology
Source: The Undiscovered Self, 1957
"The technetronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values.
"Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities."
-Zbigniew Brzezinski-
(1928-) Polish American political scientist, National Security Advisor, Executive Director of Trilateral Commission
Source: Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era, 1970
"Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
-Rob Siltanen-
variously misattributed to both Jack Kerouac and Steve Jobs
"It is not conclusive proof of a doctrine’s correctness that its adversaries use the police, the hangman, and violent mobs to fight it. But it is a proof of the fact that those taking recourse to violent oppression are in their subconscious convinced of the untenability of their own doctrines."
-Ludwig Von Mises-
(1881-1973) Economist and social philosopher
"In societies like the American and West European where the dynamics of energy come from freedom and where the climate and the whole ethos are those of freedom, censorship is bound to be at worst, stupid; at best, futile; and always, to some degree, inconsonant with the character of the society as a whole."
-Max Lerner-
(1902-1992) Russian-born American journalist and educator
Source: quoted in Censorship: For And Against, 1971
"I tolerate with utmost latitude the right of others to differ with me in opinion without imputing to them criminality. I know too well all the weaknesses and uncertainty of human reason to wonder at its different results."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: Letter to Mrs. Adams, 1804
"Indifference must be a crime in us, to be ranked but one degree below treachery; for deserting the commonwealth is next to betraying it."
-Henry St. John-
(1678-1751) 1st Viscount Bolingbroke, English politician and philosopher
"Through the rapid proliferation of laws reaching every corner of human existence, 'the government is manufacturing more criminals now than ever before.' The list of illegal activities includes more minutiae than one would think possible. Beer-makers are barred from listing alcohol content on bottles, and liquor distilleries cannot advertise on TV. Filling one’s own prairie pothole can land a property owner in jail, as can protecting private property from unlawful intruders. Placing handbills in neighbors’ mailboxes is strictly prohibited, and attempting to sell nectarines of an improper size is a federal offense. Companies are no longer allowed to give salaried professionals partial days off without pay, and in Texas it is a crime to call oneself an interior designer without the government’s permission. It is perhaps easier to recount all that remains legal than all that is now prohibited."
-Jonathan H. Adler-
Source: Tyranny Now, LIBERTY, p. 55, November, 1994.
&q"What is the essence of America? Finding and maintaining that perfect, delicate balance between freedom 'to' and freedom 'from'."
-Marilyn vos Savant-
Columnist for Parade magazine
"The people hold the Invasion of their Rights & Liberties the most horrid rebellion and a Neglect to defend them against any Power whatsoever the highest Treason."
-Samuel Adams-
"Guns cause crime like flies cause garbage."
-L. Neil Smith-
American writer
Source: The Probability Broach, 129 (Tor 1980).
"The militia of these free commonwealths, entitled and accustomed to their arms, when compared with any possible army, must be tremendous and irresistible. Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? Is it feared, then, that we shall turn our arms each man against his own bosom. Congress have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birth-right of an American ... the unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people."
-Tench Coxe-
(1755-1824) American political economistr>SoSource: Pennsylvania Gazette, February 20, 1788
"So much misery and death is caused by governments that won't just let people buy a plane ticket to get out of harm's way and move to a better place when they want. It's a world of Berlin Walls done with bureaucrats and paperwork instead of barbed wire and machine guns."
-Andy Craig-
"Those who have sought the most in gun control have sought the least in the punishment of criminals."
-Robert J. Kukla-
Source: Gun Control
"The contempt for law and the contempt for the human consequences of lawbreaking go from the bottom to the top of American society."
-Margaret Mead-
(1901-1978) American cultural anthropologist and author
"The constitution which at any time exists, till changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole people, is sacredly obligatory upon all."
-Rhode Island Declaration of Rights Article I, Section I-
"It is becoming increasingly apparent that many -- arguably most -- of the problems that plague our nation have been aggravated rather than alleviated by federal intervention. In one area after another, massive infusions of tax dollars have been squandered on false solutions which, when they fail to achieve their stated objectives, are cited to justify even more spending on other futile schemes that result in bigger government. Examples include programs and laws supposedly intended to reduce racial animosity which have instead heightened race-related tensions;
welfare schemes that, rather than reducing poverty, have enticed millions of Americans to become dependent on Washington for their daily bread;
federal funding (and control) of education, which has spawned a monumental education crisis; br>aa 'war' on drugs which has done little to curb drug traffic, but which has eroded many personal liberties;
a health-care finance system that has deteriorated as government meddling and regulation have increased; br>aand a masochistic immigration policy larded with false 'solutions' that, while failing to stop the inflow of illegal aliens, have paved the way for further government intrusion into the lives of nearly all Americans."
-a href="http://libertytree.ca/quotes/Robert.Lee.Quote.983E">Robert W. Lee-
"We cannot expect the American People to jump from Capitalism to Communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving them small doses of Socialism, until they awaken one day to find that they have Communism."
-Nikita Khrushchev-
(1894-1971) Premier of the Soviet Union
Source: Attributed to Nikita Khrushchev. Entered into Congressional Record, July 26, 1961, p. 12622 by Sen. J. Strom Thurmond, in which Ezra Taft Benson summarized his encounter with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in September 1959.
One of the ten steps called for 'centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly' just like our own Federal Reserve! ...
Another of the ten steps called for instituting 'a heavy progressive or graduated income tax' just like our own federal income tax! ...
Another step proposed by Marx and Engels was 'abolition of all right of inheritance,' which we come ever closer to as inheritance taxes increase. Taking wealth at gunpoint, if necessary, that one person has created and given to another person is theft. Whether the wealth creator is alive or dead, the act and the impact are the same.
Another step was 'free education for all children in public schools.' Although our country still has many private schools in addition to the public ones, the content of both is dictated by aggression-through-government, to teach aggression.
Marx and Engels also recommended the 'extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state.' In the past century, more and more services have become exclusive, subsidized government monopolies (e.g., garbage collection, water distribution, mass transit, etc.). As a result, we pay twice as much for lower quality service!
Marx also called for the 'centralization of the means of communications and transport in the hands of the state.' Television and radio stations are licensed by the Federal Communications Commission. A station that does not pursue programming considered 'in the public interest' is stopped at gunpoint, if necessary, from further broadcast. ...
Radio stations have an elite ownership as well. Those who benefit from aggression-through-government have little incentive to tell the public that licensing is a tool of the rich! ...
Another of the ten steps calls for 'confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels' ...
[O]ur law enforcement agents can seize the wealth of anyone suspected of drug crimes without a trial!...
[T]he Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has also been seizing the assets of taxpayers without a trial if the IRS thinks they might have underpaid their taxes! The wealth we have created can be taken from us at gunpoint, if necessary, without a formal accusation or a chance to defend ourselves! ...
In addition, Marx and Engels called for 'abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.' In other words, land would not be privately owned. No homesteading would be permitted.
Our federal and local governments have title to 42% of the land mass of the United States. Most of the remaining land is under government control as well. For example, today's homeowners can pay off their mortgages, but must still pay property taxes to the local government. If they stop payments, their property is taken from them. They are, in essence, renting their home from the local government."
-Dr. Mary J. Ruwart-
(1949- )
Source: Healing Our World: The Other Piece of the Puzzle, Ch 19. (1992)
"Nothing is more frightful than to see ignorance in action."
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe-<-
"The American communists worked energetically and tirelessly to lay the foundations for the United Nations which we were sure would come into existence. … It can be said, without exaggeration, that ever closer relations between our nation and the Soviet Union are an unconditional requirement for the United Nations as a world coalition. … The United Nations is the instrument for victory. Victory is required for the survival of our nation. The Soviet Union is an essential part of the United Nations. Mutual confidence between our country and the Soviet Union and joint work in the leadership of the United Nations are absolutely necessary."
-Earl Browder-
(1891-1973) General Secretary of the Communist Party USA (1934-1945), writer
Source: Victory--and after. New York: International Publishers, 1942
"Great popular support and enthusiasm for the United Nations policies should be built up, well organized and fully articulate. But it is necessary to do more than that. The opposition must be rendered so impotent that it will be unable to gather any significant support in the Senate against the United Nations Charter and the treaties which will follow."
-Political Affairs-
the official publication of the American Communist Party (CPUSA)
Source: (April 1945)
"There is no doubt that America is now the prime target of international communism."
-J. Edgar Hoover-
(1895-1972) first Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
Source: Masters of Deceit (1958)
"The time has come to recognize the United Nations for the anti-American, anti-freedom organization that it has become. The time has come for us to cut off all financial help, withdraw as a member, and ask the United Nations to find headquarters location outside the United States that is more in keeping with the philosophy of the majority of voting members, someplace like Moscow or Peking."
-Barry Goldwater-
(1909-1998) US Senator (R-Arizona)
Source: Congressional Record, October 26, 1971
"We will offer the Christian world unheard of peace overtures, and these nations, stupid and decadent, will leap at the chance to be our friends; they will willingly cooperate in their own destruction. Then, when their guard is down, and they have gone to sleep, we will smash them with our clenched fist."
-Dmitri Manuilsky-
[Dmytro Zakharovych Manuilsky] (1883-1959) Bolshevik/Soviet Diplomat
1947
"What I had failed to understand was that the security I felt in the Party was that of a group and that affection in that strange communist world is never a personal emotion. You were loved or hated on the basis of group acceptance, and emotions were stirred or dulled by propaganda. That propaganda was made by the powerful people at the top. That is why ordinary Communists get along well with their groups: they think and feel together and work toward a common goal."
-Dr. Bella Dodd-
(1904-1969) head of the New York State Teachers Union , member of the Communist Party of America (CPUSA) in the 1930s and 1940s, later a vocal anti-communist
Source: School of Darkness, Chapter 16 (1954)
"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."
-Karl Marx-
(1818-1883) Prussian-born philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist, father of Communism, co-author of the 'Communist Manifesto'
"But it became clear as time went on that in Mr. Bush’s mind the New World Order was founded on a convergence of goals and interests between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, so strong and permanent that they would work as a team through the U.N. Security Council."
-A. M. Rosenthal-
Source: New York Times, January 1991
"Indeed, the U.N. is the main Soviet espionage center in this country."
-Jack Anderson-
Source: Washington Post (1971)
"I don’t care what becomes of Russia. To hell with it. All this is only the road to a World Revolution."
-Vladimir Ilyich Lenin-
[Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov] (1870-1924) First Leader of the Soviet Union
Source: 1918
"Beware of those who would use violence, too often it is violence they want and neither truth nor freedom."
-Louis Lamour-
(1908-1988) American author
Source: The Walking Drum, 1984
"Of war men ask the outcome, not the cause."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: Tragedies, Hercules Furens (The Madness of Hercules), line 407; (Lycus)
"When in charge, ponder...
When in trouble, delegate...
When in doubt, mumble."
-Dr. Jim Boren-
Humorist and Author
Source: his book, When in Doubt, Mumble
"Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got used to it."
-H. L. Mencken-
"America is like a healthy body and its resistance is threefold: its patriotism, its morality, and its spiritual life. If we can undermine these three areas, America will collapse from within."
-Josef Stalin-
(1879-1953) Communist leader of the USSR
Source: Attributed
"There is no 'slippery slope' toward loss of liberty, only a long staircase where each step down must first be tolerated by the American people and their leaders."
-Alan K. Simpson-
(1931- ) US Senator
Source: New York Times, 26 September 1982
"The great difficulty of all schemes for leagues of nations and the like has been to find an effective sanction against nations determined to break the peace. I will not now discuss at length the difficulties of joint armed action, but every one who has studied the question knows they are very great. It may be, however, that a league of nations, properly furnished with machinery to enforce the financial, commercial, and economic isolation of any nation determined to force its will upon the world by mere violence, would be a real safeguard for the peace of the world."
-Robert Cecil, 1st Viscount Cecil of Chelwood-
"Arbitrary power has seldom... been introduced in any country at once. It must be introduced by slow degrees, and as it were step by step."
-Lord Chesterfield-
(1694-1773)
"Very few established institutions, governments and constitutions... are ever destroyed by their enemies until they have been corrupted and weakened by their friends."
-Walter Lippmann-
(1889-1974) American writer, journalist, and political commentator
With "friends" like these, who NEEDS enemies...
"The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers; and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them."
-Joseph Story-
"One of our faults is to believe that evil is somewhere else and inherent in another nation. My book was to say you think that now the war is over and an evil thing destroyed, you are safe because you are naturally kind and decent. But I know why the thing rose in Germany. I know it could happen in any country. It could happen here."
-William Golding-
"Washington, of course, aside from being one of the most mismanaged, crime-ridden cities on the planet, is a place where 535 federal legislators and about 38,000 lobbyists work at confiscating and redistributing the incomes of the American people."
-Charley Reese-
(1937-2013) American syndicated columnist
Source: Conservative Chronicle, September 20, 1995
"The way you lower the temperature of politics is to lower the stakes of politics."
-George Will-
"[W]e have to realize that the real problem is that the American people have been too submissive. We have been too submissive. It has been going on for a long time. ... [T]he bill that I have introduced ... is very simple. It is one paragraph long. It removes the immunity from anybody in the Federal government that does anything that you or I can't do.
If you can't grope another person and if you can't X-ray people and endanger them with possible X-rays, [and] you can't take nude photographs of individuals, why do we allow the government to do it? We would go to jail. He would be immediately arrested, if an individual citizen went up and did these things, and yet we just sit there and calmly say, 'oh, they are making us safe.' And besides, the argument from the executive branch is that when you buy a ticket, you have sacrificed your rights and it is the duty of the government to make us safe. That isn't the case. You never have to sacrifice your rights. The duty of the government is to protect our rights, not to use them and do what they have been doing to us."
-Dr. Ron Paul-
(1935-) American physician, US Congressman (R-TX), US Presidential candidate
Source: Congressional Record, Nov. 17, 2010
"Democracy in itself does not define or guarantee a free society. History has told many stories of democratic societies that have degenerated into corruption, plunder, and tyranny."
-Richard M. Ebeling-
(1950- ) Author, Professor of Economics, Hillsdale College
"If you don't read the newspaper you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper you are misinformed."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910) American author and humorist
"Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion, against injustice and lying and greed. If you, not just you in this room tonight, but in all the thousands of other rooms like this one about the world today and tomorrow and next week, will do this … as individuals, men and women, you will change the earth; in one generation all the Napoleons and Hitlers and Caesars and Mussolinis and Stalins and all the other tyrants who want power and aggrandizement, and the simple politicians and time-servers who themselves are merely baffled or ignorant or afraid, who have used, or are using, or hope to use, man’s fear and greed for man’s enslavement, will have vanished from the face of it."
-William Faulkner-
"There exists a shadowy government with its own Air Force, its own Navy, its own fundraising mechanism, and the ability to pursue its own ideas of national interest, free from all checks and balances, and free from the law itself."
-Daniel K. Inouye-
(1924- ) US Senator, Hawaii-D (1963-present)
Source: at the Iran Contra Hearings, 1986
"I never would have agreed to the formulation of the Central Intelligence Agency back in forty-seven, if I had known it would become the American Gestapo."
-Harry S. Truman-
(1884-1972), 33rd US President
1961
"The man who is admired for the ingenuity of his larceny is almost always rediscovering some earlier form of fraud. The basic forms are all known, have all been practiced. The manners of capitalism improve. The morals may not."
-John Kenneth Galbraith-
(1908-2006) Canadian-born economist, Harvard professor
"The world is weary of statesmen whom democracy has degraded into politicians."
-Benjamin Disraeli-
(1804-1881) Prime Minister of England, British statesman, novelist
Source: Lothair, XVII, 1870
"When we got organized as a country and we wrote a fairly radical Constitution with a radical Bill of Rights, giving a radical amount of individual freedom to Americans, it was assumed that the Americans who had that freedom would use it responsibly.... [However, now] there's a lot of irresponsibility. And so a lot of people say there's too much freedom. When personal freedom's being abused, you have to move to limit it."
-Bill Clinton-
[William Jefferson Blythe III] (1946- ), 42nd US President
Source: MTV's "Enough is Enough" 4-19-94
"It has been said that the greatest threat to our liberty is from well-meaning, and almost imperceptible encroachments upon our personal freedom."
-John Louis Coffey-
(1922- ) Judge, U. S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit
Source: Quilici v. Village of Morton Grove, 695 F.2d 261, 272 (1982) (dissent) cert. denied 464 U.S. 863 (1983).
"It was not accidental. 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.
"Did the protection we received annul our rights as men, and lay us under an obligation of being miserable? Who among you, my countrymen, that is a father, would claim authority to make your child a slave because you had nourished him in infancy?"
-Samuel Adams-
Or make your GREAT GREAT GRANDCHILDREN slaves because you made an agreement with your neighbors?
"Anarchists argue that even the most minimal 'nightwatchman' State advocated by modern libertarians would be controlled by the rich and powerful and be used to defend their interests and privileges. However much it claims to protect individual rights, the government will always become 'an instrument in the hands of the ruling classes to maintain power over the people'. Rather than providing healthy stability, it prevents positive change; instead of imposing order, it creates conflict; where it tries to foster enterprise, it destroys initiative. It claims to bring about security, but it only increases anxiety."
-Peter Marshall-
Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism
"Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one's government is not necessarily to secure freedom."
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
"A democratic despotism is like a theocracy: it assumes its own correctness."
-Walter Bagehot-
(1826-1877) British journalist, businessman, essayist
"Order derived through submission and maintained by terror is not much of a safe guaranty; yet that is the only 'order' that governments have ever maintained. True social harmony grows naturally out of solidarity of interests. In a society where those who always work never have anything, while those who never work enjoy everything, solidarity of interests is non-existent; hence social harmony is but a myth.... Thus the entire arsenal of governments - laws, police, soldiers, the courts, legislatures, prisons - is strenuously engaged in 'harmonizing' the most antagonistic elements in society."
-Emma Goldman-
(1869-1940)
Source: Anarchism
"It matters not how straight the gate,
How charged with punishment the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul."
-William Ernest Henley-
"The intellectuals and the young, booted and spurred, feel themselves born to ride us."
-Eric Hoffer-
(1902-1983) American author, philosopher, awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
"The world looks as if it has been left in the custody of trolls."
-Father Robert F. Capon-
(1925-2013) American Episcopal priest, author
"Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism."
-Mary McCarthy-
Source: The New Yorker, 18 October 1958
"There is a de facto 'secret government' operating nationally and internationally and involved in the highest circles of the U.S. government, exercising an impact over domestic policies and economics ranging between extreme influence to, at times, outright control. This extreme influence to outright control naturally includes the Presidency. The de facto 'secret government,' much of whose intellectual -- and financial -- muscle are to be found in the New York office of the CFR, the great tax-free foundations, and certain international firms and corporations."
-Mike Culbert-
Source: in Independent-Gazette (Richmond, California, 27 June 1974), in reference to his discussions with Charles Colson (a member of Nixon’s cabinet) on the almost total control of U.S. presidents by the outside forces.
"No truly sophisticated proponent of repression would be stupid enough to shatter the façade of democratic institutions."
-Murray B. Levin-
Source: Political Hysteria in America, 1971
"I go further and affirm that bills of rights, in the sense and to the extent in which they are contended for, are not only unnecessary in the proposed Constitution but would even be dangerous. They would contain various exceptions to powers not granted; and, on this very account, would afford a colorable pretext to claim more than were granted. For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do? Why, for instance, should it be said that the liberty of the press shall not be restrained, when no power is given by which restrictions may be imposed? I will not contend that such a provision would confer a regulating power; but it is evident that it would furnish, to men disposed to usurp, a plausible pretense for claiming that power. They might urge with a semblance of reason that the Constitution ought not to be charged with the absurdity of providing against the abuse of an authority whilh was not given, and that the provision against restraining the liberty of the press afforded a clear implication that a power to prescribe proper regulations concerning it was intended to be vested in the national government."
-Alexander Hamilton-
in opposition to a Bill of Rights
Always makes me nervouse when I find I agree with Al. Prompts me to rethink my reasoning. 'Course, it DID turn out to be a scam, so... I'm with Jefferson: 10A was really all that was needed.
"The truth is, after all the declamations we have heard, that the Constitution is itself, in every rational sense, and to every useful purpose, a bill of rights."
-Alexander Hamilton-
in opposition to a Bill of Rights
"When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things bought and sold are legislators."
-P. J. O'Rourke-
(1947-2022) US humorist, journalist, & political commentator
"There are some acts of justice which corrupt those who perform them."
-Joseph Joubert-
(1754-1824)
Source: Pensees
"National Socialism is a religion. All we lack is a religious genius capable of uprooting outmoded religious practices and putting new ones in their place. We lack traditions and ritual. One day soon National Socialism will be the religion of all Germans. My Party is my church, and I believe I serve the Lord best if I do his will, and liberate my oppressed people from the fetters of slavery. That is my gospel."
-- Joseph Paul Goebbels
(1897-1945) German politician and Reich Minister of Propaganda of Nazi Germany
Source: Geobbels' diary, 16 October 1928
http://libertytree.ca/quotes/Joseph.Goebbels.Quote.7B2C
"For every idealistic peacemaker willing to renounce his self-defence in favour of a weapons-free world, there is at least one warmaker anxious to exploit the other's good intentions."
-Margaret Thatcher-
"I Said to my Wife, I have accepted a Seat in the House of Representatives and thereby have consented to my own Ruin to your Ruin and the Ruin of our Children. I give you this Warning that you may prepare your Mind for your Fate."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: In a letter to Benjamin Rush, dated 4 April 1809, Adams recounts telling his wife Abigail in May 1770 after accepting the office
"We're bending the law as far as we can to ban an entirely new class of guns."
-Rahm Emmanuel-
(1959- ) US Congressman (D-IL)
"Concepts of justice must have hands and feet or they remain sterile abstractions. The hands and feet we need are efficient means and methods to carry out justice in every case in the shortest possible time and at the lowest possible cost."
-Justice Warren E. Burger-
(1907-1995) Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1969-1986)
"No victim of crime should be required to surrender his life, health, safety, personal dignity, or property to a criminal, nor should a victim be required to retreat in the face of an attack."
-Wayne LaPierre-
CEO of National Rifle Association
Source: Guns, Crime And Freedom, p. 106 (Harper Collins 1995)
"The difficulty with so many of these policies is that they deny Hayek's observation that we are not gods or God and that therefore neither economists nor government officials possess the divine- like qualities that they would need to overcome the serious limitations created by the knowledge problem."
-Samuel Gregg-
Knowledge’s Limits and a Nobel Economist’s Humility
"We consistently have adhered to the principle that the will of the people is the paramount consideration. Our goal today…[is] to reach the result that reflects the will of the voters…. The laws are intended to facilitate and safeguard the right of each voter to express his or her will in the context of our representative democracy. Technical statutory requirements must not be exalted over the substance of this right."
-Florida Supreme Court-
2000
"Legislators like pork because it helps them get reelected. They are interested in administrative details because long tenure promotes narrow specialization. The constituent service racket allows lawmakers to ignore big problems by fixing small ones. In becoming ombudsman -- glorified errand boys, -- incumbents build up enough good will for most to survive even a watershed year like 1992. By ending congressional careerism, term limits will encourage attention to larger legislative issues. By changing the understanding of the legislator's role, term limits are probably the most effective single reform that can be imposed on Congress. And imposed it will have to be: While great majorities of the American people support term limits, lawmakers oppose them in even larger proportions. With a career Congress, voters face a dilemma: They do not like paying taxes to Washington and hoping to get them back in the form of pork and entitlements, but as long as the system is rigged, it makes sense to vote for the incumbent to maximize your own take. Congressmen face a similar dilemma: Take the easy road to reelection or face the often difficult choices of balancing local and national interests. Take away the career mindset and both representatives and voters can make choices based on the merits of each case. ... In fact, one of the biggest benefits of non-professional legislators is that they would be unlikely to join with the bureaucrats and special interests in blowing smoke at the voters."
-Eric Felton-
Source: The Ruling Class, The Heritage Foundation, 1993
"You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American"
-Ronald Reagan-
1988
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess of the public treasury. From that time on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship."
-Sir Alex Fraser Tytler-
(1742-1813) Lord Woodhouselee, Scottish jurist, professor and historian
Source: supposedly from The Decline and Fall of the Athenian Republic, c.1799 but no book has been found.
Questionable. See http://www.snopes.com/politics/quotes/tyler.asp
"We stand today at a crossroads:
One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness.
The other leads to total extinction.
Let us hope we have the wisdom to make the right choice."
-Woody Allen-
(1935- ) American film director and comedian
"We have a great many politicians in the country, perhaps as many as the country requires. I should not wish to ask for a larger supply of these; but there is a wide difference between the politician and the statesman. A politician, for example, is a man who thinks of the next election; while the statesman thinks of the next generation. The politician thinks of the success of his party, the statesman of the good of his country. The politician wishes to carry this or that measure, the statesman to establish this or the other principle. Finally, the statesman wishes to steer; while the politician is contented to drift. The difficulty about a politician, no matter how honest and well-intentioned he may be, is always this: that the matter of absolute importance in his mind, to which every thing else must yield, is to carry the next election for his party."
-James Freeman Clarke-
"Most people know more about their congressmen via smear campaigns than they know about their own neighbor via conversations, and a lot of people know more about Britney Spears via tabloids than they know about their own congressmen via voting booklets. Does anyone else see the problem here?"
-Brock Fiant-
"Nothing can so alienate a voter from the political system as backing a winning candidate."
-Mark B. Cohen-
(1939-) Member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives (1974-)
"Now that eighteen-year-olds have the right to vote, it is obvious that they must be allowed the freedom to form their political views on the basis of uncensored speech before they turn eighteen, so that their minds are not a blank when they first exercise the franchise. And since an eighteen-year-old’s right to vote is a right personal to him rather than a right to be exercised on his behalf by his parents, the right of parents to enlist the aid of the state to shield their children from ideas of which the parents disapprove cannot be plenary either. People are unlikely to become well-functioning, independent-minded adults and responsible citizens if they are raised in an intellectual bubble."
-Richard Posner-
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit
Source: American Amusement Machine Association, et al., Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. Teri Kendrick, et al., Defendants-Appellees (2001)
"An honest politician is one who, when he is bought, will stay bought."
-Simon Cameron-
(1799-1889) United States Secretary of War for Abraham Lincoln from 1861 to 1862
"Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten."
-Neil Gaiman-
"Without bigots, eccentrics, cranks and heretics the world would not progress."
-Frank Gelett Burgess-
(1866-1951)
"A fanatic is a person who can't change his mind and won't change the subject."
-Sir Winston Churchill-
(1874-1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1940-1945, 1951-1955)
"Every really new idea looks crazy at first."
-Alfred North Whitehead-
(1861-1947)
"As the Legislative, Executive & Judicial Departments of the U. S. are co-ordinate, and each equally bound to support the Constitution, it follows that each must in the exercise of its functions, be guided by the text of the Constitution according to its own interpretation of it."
-James Madison-
in an 1834 letter to an unknown correspondent
"[M]y construction of the constitution ... is that each department is truly independant of the others, and has an equal right to decide for itself what is the meaning of the constitution in the cases submitted to it's action; and especially where it is to act ultimately and without appeal."
-Thomas Jefferson-
Letter to Spencer Roane (6 Sept 1819)
"I discharged every person under punishment or prosecution under the Sedition law, because I considered & now consider that law to be a nullity as absolute and as palpable as if Congress had ordered us to fall down and worship a golden image; and that it was as much my duty to arrest it's execution in every stage, as it would have been to have rescued from the fiery furnace those who should have been cast into it for refusing to worship their image. it was accordingly done in every instance, without asking what the offenders had done, or against whom they had offended, but whether the pains they were suffering were inflicted under the pretended Sedition law."
-Thomas Jefferson-
Letter to Abigail Adams (22 July 1804)
"There is no such thing as a majority right. Only those who understand and act according to this principle can promote true freedom."
-Harry H. Hoiles-
(1916-1998) co-publisher of the Orange County Register
"Intelligence appears to be the thing that enables a man to get along without education. Education enables a man to get along without the use of his intelligence."
-Albert Edward Wiggin-
"Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform."
-Mark Twain-
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910) American author and humorist
"Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains."
-Jean-Jacques Rousseau-
(1712-1778) Political philosopher, educationist and essayist
Source: The Social Contract
"Let them revere nothing but religion, morality and liberty."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: advice to his wife, in concern for his sons
"Christ has set us free to live a free life. So take your stand! Never again let anyone put a harness of slavery on you."
-St. Paul-
Source: Holy Bible, Gal 5:1 (paraphrased), Paul’s letter to the people at Galatia
"Life is a gift. Freedom is a responsibility."
-Eric Schaub-
Editor of Liberty Quotes
Source: The Common Man, 2003
"Liberty is not a right but a duty."
-Ezra Pound-
(1885-1972) American poet
March 8, 1942
"The proverb warns that 'You should not bite the hand that feeds you.' But maybe you should if it prevents you from feeding yourself."
-Thomas Szasz-
(1920-2012) Hungarian-American Professor of Psychiatry, Author, Libertarian
"Opinions have caused more ills than the plague or earthquakes on this little globe of ours."
-Voltaire-
"Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it."
-George Bernard Shaw-
(1856-1950) Irish comic dramatist
Source: Maxims for Revolutionists, 1912
"The human race divides itself politically into those who want to be controlled, and those who have no such desire."
-Robert A. Heinlein-
(1907-1988) American writer
"No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted."
-Aesop-
(c. 550 B.C.) legendary Greek fabulist
Source: The Lion and the Mouse
Nor left unpunished, of course...
"Your success as a family, our success as a society, depends not on what happens at the White House, but what happens inside your house."
-Barbara Bush-
(1925-2018) wife of the 41st President of the United States, George H. W. Bush, First Lady of the United States from 1989-1993
And which is precisely why the White House NEEDS TO KNOW what happens inside your house. Only makes sense...
"If people are creating more wealth than they are receiving as income, then they are not making other people poorer."
-Thomas Sowell-
"The remarkable thing is that we really love our neighbor as ourselves: we do unto others as we do unto ourselves. We hate others when we hate ourselves. We are tolerant toward others when we tolerate ourselves. We forgive others when we forgive ourselves. We are prone to sacrifice others when we are ready to sacrifice ourselves."
-Eric Hoffer-
(1902-1983) American author, philosopher, awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
Source: The Passionate State of Mind
Unless we're in power, obviously. Then we're MUCH more willing to sacrifice others than ourselves...
"I had rather be shut up in a very modest cottage with my books, my family and a few old friends, dining on simple bacon, and letting the world roll on as it liked, than to occupy the most splendid post, which any human power can give."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: letter to Alexander Donald, February 7, 1788
"Not to forgive is to be imprisoned by the past, by old grievances that do not permit life to proceed with new business. Not to forgive is to yield oneself to another's control... to be locked into a sequence of act and response, of outrage and revenge, tit for tat, escalating always. The present is endlessly overwhelmed and devoured by the past. Forgiveness frees the forgiver. It extracts the forgiver from someone else's nightmare."
-Lance Morrow-
"Some mistakes cannot be redeemed but by forgiveness."
-Eric Schaub-
Individualist, activist, speaker, writer
"Forgive all who have offended you, not for them, but for yourself."
-Harriet Nelson-
(1909-1994) American singer and actress
"When the doctrine of allegiance to party can utterly up-end a man's moral constitution and make a temporary fool of him besides, what excuse are you going to offer for preaching it, teaching it, extending it, perpetuating it? Shall you say, the best good of the country demands allegiance to party? Shall you also say it demands that a man kick his truth and his conscience into the gutter, and become a mouthing lunatic, besides?"
-Mark Twain-
"Forgive, but never forget."
-John F. Kennedy-
(1917-1963) 35th US President
"If all were to share alike, and all were to do alike, then all were on an equality throughout, and one was as good as another; and so, if it did not actually abolish those very relations which God himself has set among men, it did at least greatly diminish the mutual respect that is so important should be preserved amongst them. Let none argue that this is due to human failing, rather than to this communistic plan of life in itself...."
-William Bradford-
(c.1590-1657) American colonist, helped found the Plymouth Colony, signatory to the Mayflower Compact, served as Plymouth Colony Governor
1623
Source: Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation, 1606-1646
"Only free men are thoroughly grateful one to another."
-Baruch Spinoza-
(1632-1677) Dutch philosopher of Sephardi Portuguese origin
"A family is a place where minds come in contact with one another. If these minds love one another the home will be as beautiful as a flower garden. But if these minds get out of harmony with one another it is like a storm that plays havoc with the garden."
-Buddha-
[Gautama Siddharta] (563 - 483 BC), Hindu Prince, founder of Buddhism
"Representative government cannot express the will of the mass of the people, because there is no mass of the people; The People is a fiction, like The State. You cannot get a Will of the Mass, even among a dozen persons who all want to go on a picnic. The only human mass with a common will is a mob, and that will is a temporary insanity. In actual fact, the population of a country is a multitude of diverse human beings with an infinite variety of purposes and desires and fluctuating wills."
-Rose Wilder Lane-
"Give Me Liberty" (1936)
"Chutzpa: that quality enshrined in a man who having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan."
-Leo Rosten-
"That man is richest whose pleasures are cheapest."
-Henry David Thoreau-
(1817-1862) American author, poet, philosopher, polymath, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and transcendentalist
Source: Journals, March 11, 1856
"The smallest act of kindness is worth more than the greatest intention."
-Khalil Gibran-
(1883-1931) Lebanese-American philosophical essayist, novelist, mystical poet, and artist
"He deserves Paradise who makes his companions laugh."
-The Koran-
"Things ’twas hard to bear ’tis pleasant to recall."
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca-
(4 B.C.-A.D. 65) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, "Seneca the Younger"
Source: Tragedies, Hercules Furens (The Madness of Hercules), lines 656-657; (Amphitryon)
"The greatest part of our happiness depends on our dispositions, not our circumstances."
-Martha Washington-
[Martha Dandridge Custis Washington] (1731-1802) wife of George Washington, the first president of the United States. Known as 'Lady Washington.'
"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."
-Plato-
(429-347 BC) Greek philosopher
"The fact that so many politicians are such shameless liars is not only a reflection on them, it is also a reflection on us. When people want the impossible, only liars can satisfy."
-Thomas Sowell-
"The aspiration toward freedom is the most essentially human of all human manifestations."
-Eric Hoffer-
(1902-1983) American author, philosopher, awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
Apparently not as essentially human as the aspiration toward control and domination...
"The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it."
-John Stuart Mill-
(1806-1873) English philosopher and economist
Source: On Liberty, 1859
"I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air -- that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"Morality cannot exist one minute without freedom... Only a free man can possibly be moral. Unless a good deed is voluntary, it has no moral significance."
-Everett Dean Martin-
(1880-1941) American minister, writer, journalist, instructor, lecturer, social psychologist, social philosopher, advocate of adult education
Source: Liberty, 1930
"Among a people generally corrupt liberty cannot long exist."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
Source: Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol, 3 April 1777
"The first destroyer of the liberties of a people is he who first gave them bounties and largess."
-Plutarch-
(c.45-125 A.D.) Greek Priest of the Delphic Oracle
"Families would be in better shape if our tax code didn't push married mothers who wish to raise their own children into the labor force, in large part to pay for a welfare state that encourages unskilled, unmarried teenagers to bear illegitimate children the rest of us must support."
-Lisa Schiffen-
Source: Hail to the Chief, The American Spectator, March 1996, p. 68
"Good men and bad men differ radically. Bad men never appreciate kindness shown them, but wise men appreciate and are grateful. Wise men try to express their appreciation and gratitude by some return of kindness, not only to their benefactor, but to everyone else."
-Buddha-
[Gautama Siddharta] (563 - 483 BC), Hindu Prince, founder of Buddhism
So... Are wise men necessarily always good, or are good men necessarily always wise...
"Liberty is worth whatever the country is worth. It is by liberty that man has a country; it is by liberty he has rights."
-Henry Giles-
(1809-1882)
Source: The Worth of Liberty, 1847
"[A]nd obedience, Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth, Makes slaves of men and of the human frame, A mechanized automaton."
-Percy Bysshe Shelley-
(1792-1822) British poet
Source: Queen Mab, 1813
"Few men desire liberty; most men wish only for a just master."
-Sallust-
[Gaius Sallustius Crispus] (86-34 BC) Statesman and Historian during the last century of the Roman Republic
Source: Sallust (Gaius Sallustius Crispus) in Histories
Something about 'They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters'...
"An anarchist is an uncompromising liberal."
-Emile Faguet-
(1847-1916) French writer and critic
Source: Politiques et moralistes du dix-neuvième siècle, Vol. 1 (Paris: Société Française d'Imprimerie et de Librairie, c. 1898), p. 226
"The function of the true state is to impose the minimum restrictions and safeguard the maximum liberties of the people, and it never regards the person as a thing."
-Immanuel Kant-
(1724-1804) German philosopher
"Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you're a man, you take it."
-Malcolm X-
[Malcolm Little] (1925-1965) Civil rights activist, Black Muslim leaderr>SoSoSource: Malcolm X Speaks, 1965
"Driven from every other corner of the earth, freedom of thought and the right of private judgment in matters of conscience, direct their course to this happy country as their last asylum."
-Samuel Adams-
(1722-1803), was known as the "Father of the American Revolution."
Source: Speech, 1 August 1776
"Among the liberties of citizens that are guaranteed are ...
the right to believe what one chooses,
the right to differ from his neighbor,
the right to pick and choose the political philosophy he likes best,
the right to associate with whomever he chooses,
the right to join groups he prefers ..."
-William O. Douglas-
(1898-1980), U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: 1958
&q"All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge. "
-Francis Church-
(1839-1906) American publisher, editor
Source:
'Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus,' first published in the New York newspaper The Sun on September 21, 1897
"The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name."
-Confucius-
"One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results. We all know a famous road that is paved with good intentions."
-Milton Friedman-
(1912-2006) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"
Source: Interview with Richard Heffner on The Open Mind (7 December 1975)
"Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves."
-Jesus of Nazareth-
(c. 4 BC – c. AD 30/33)
Source: Matthew 7:5
"Three things are necessary for the salvation of man:
to know what he ought to believe;
to know what he ought to desire;
and to know what he ought to do."
-Saint Thomas Aquinas-
(1225-1274) Italian philosopher and theologian
&q"Let us, then, fellow citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things. And let us reflect that having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled, we have yet gained little if we counternance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of a bitter and bloody persecutions."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
"The cry of the soul is for freedom. It longs for liberty, from the date of its first conscious moments."
-Josiah Gilbert Holland-
(used pseudonym Timothy Titcomb)
"The only rational liberty is that which is born of subjection, reared in the fear of God and the love of man."
-William Gilmore Simms-
(1806-1870) American writer
"Liberty is not the right of one, but of all."
-Herbert Spencer-
(1820-1903) British author, economist, philosopher
"Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof."
-Liberty Bell-
Source: inscription on the Liberty Bell from Leviticus 25:10
"What light is to the eyes -- what air is to the lungs -- what love is to the heart, liberty is to the soul of man. Without liberty, the brain is a dungeon, where the chained thoughts die with their pinions pressed against the hingeless doors."
-Robert G. Ingersoll-
(1833-1899) American lawyer, Civil War veteran, political leader, orator of United States during the Golden Age of Free Thought, nicknamed "The Great Agnostic">SouSource: Lecture, 14 May 1866
"The state is anything but the result of a contract! No one with even just an ounce of common sense would agree to such a contract. I have a lot of contracts in my files, but nowhere is there one like this. The state is the result of aggressive force and subjugation. It has evolved without contractual foundation, just like a gang of protection racketeers."
-Hans-Hermann Hoppe-
"Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be.
But she 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 will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.
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 Qunicy Adams-
"If you think it's simple, then you have misunderstood the problem."
-Bjarne Stroustrup-
"I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any Church that I know of. My own mind is my own Church."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
"Ignorance leads men into a party, and shame keeps them from getting out again."
-Benjamin Franklin-
"Who then is free? The wise man who can command himself."
-Horace-
[Quintus Horatius Flaccus] (65-8BC) Roman poet
"Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude."
-Marcus Tullius Cicero-
(106-43 B.C.) Roman Statesman, Philosopher and Orator
"Show me the prison,
Show me the jail,
Show me the prisoner
whose life has gone stale.
And I'll show you a young man
with so many reasons why
And there, but for fortune,
go you or I."
-Phil Ochs-
(1940-1976) Singer and lyricist
Source: song, There But For Fortune, 1968
"'For your own good' is a persuasive argument that will eventually make a man agree to his own destruction."
-Janet Frame-
Source: Faces In The Water, 1982
"The freedom to read is essential to our democracy. It is continuously under attack... These actions apparently arise from a view that our national tradition of free expression is no longer valid; that censorship and suppression are needed to avoid the subversion of politics and the corruption of morals."
-American Library Association-
Source: The Freedom to Read Statement, 2000
"My crime is that I have never labored to make myself popular -- I admit that much -- and I have paid too little attention to fools who are old enough to be senile but young enough to have power."
-Isaac Asimov-
"Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others."
-Cicero-
"Freedom is always wise."
-Alexander Meiklejohn-
(1872-1964)
Source: Testimony, First Session, 84th Congress, 1955
"Give me again my hollow tree
A crust of bread, and liberty!"
-Alexander Pope-
(1688-1744) English poet
"I am not a Federalist, because I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in any thing else where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"But these critics are all crazy."
-Diogenes Laertius-
3rd Century AD
"Without freedom of thought there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech."
-Benjamin Franklin-
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
Source: writing as Silence Dogood, No. 8, The New England Courant, 9 July 1722
"There can be no truly moral choice unless that choice is made in freedom; similarly, there can be no really firmly grounded and consistent defense of freedom unless that defense is rooted in moral principle. In concentrating on the ends of choice, the conservative, by neglecting the conditions of choice, loses that very morality of conduct with which he is so concerned. And the libertarian, by concentrating only on the means, or conditions, of choice and ignoring the ends, throws away an essential moral defense of his own position."
-Murray N. Rothbard-
(1926-1995) Dean of the Austrian School of Economics
"My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular."
-Adlai E. Stevenson II-
(1900-1965) Governor of Illinois (1949-1953), U.S. presidential candidate (1952, 1956), U.N. Ambassador (1961-1965)
Source: Speech, 1952
"Personal liberty is the paramount essential to human dignity and human happiness."
-Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton-
[Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton] (1803-1873) 1st Baron Lytton PC, English politician, poet, playwright, and prolific novelist
"We are defined by how we use our power. Power often stands in the way of learning. Wisdom revealed by simple lessons is hard to see for leaders wearing the blinders of power. But we, too, have choices. We can relieve much of the suffering in this world and promote the potential of the species, or we can horde our power and exercise it for our own aggrandizement."
-Gerry Spence-
"The only way to achieve a practical, liveable peace in a world of competing nations is to take the profit out of war."
-Richard Nixon-
"Surely a large part of the zealous repression of radical protest in America has its roots in the fact that millions of men who are apparently 'insiders' know how vulnerable the system is because they know how ambiguous their own attachments to it are. The slightest challenge exposes the fragile foundations of legitimacy of the state."
-John Scharr-
Source: Power and Community, 1970
"When the state intervenes to insure the indoctrination of some doctrine, it does so because there is no conclusive evidence in favor of that doctrine."
-Bertrand Russell-
[Bertrand Arthur William Russell] (1872-1970) Philosopher, educator
1928
"The cry has been that when war is declared, all opposition should therefore be hushed. A sentiment more unworthy of a free country could hardly be propagated. If the doctrine be admitted, rulers have only to declare war and they are screened at once from scrutiny."
-William Ellery Channing-
(1780-1842) American Unitarian preacher
Source: Life, 1848
"Loud speech, profusion of words, and possessing skillfulness in expounding scriptures are merely for the enjoyment of the learned. They do not lead to liberation."
-Adi Shankaracharya-
(c. 650) Hindu reformer
"How I wish that somewhere there existed an island for those who are wise and of goodwill! In such a place even I would be an ardent patriot."
-Albert Einstein-
(1879-1955) Physicist and Professor, Nobel Prize 1921
"Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-
(1929-1968) US civil rights leader
"You know, being black doesn’t give you a license to call people racist any more than being Jewish gives you license to call people anti-Semitic."
-Alan Dershowitz-
(1938- ) Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School
Source: Responding to Congresswoman Maxine Waters' 'racist' claims, “Fox & Friends Weekend,” Aug 6, 2017
"As we celebrate the 100th birthday of Margaret Sanger, our outrageous and our courageous leader, we will probably find a number of areas in which we may find more about Margaret Sanger than we thought we wanted to know..."
-Faye Wattleton-
Past-president of Planned Parenthood
"Eugenics is … the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political and social problems."
-Margaret Sanger-
(1879-1966) American birth control activist, sex educator, nurse, founded the American Birth Control League, which later became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America
"You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
-John Ehrlichman-
(1925-1999) Counsel and Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon
Source: 1994 interview with Dan Baum
"Let no Negroe or mulattoe be cabable of taking, holding, or exercising any public office, freehold, franchise or privilege. ... Nor of keeping, or bearing arms, unless authorized to do by some act of the general assembly, whose duration shall be limited to three years."
-St. George Tucker-
(1752-1827) born in Bermuda, American lawyer, professor of law, judge
Source: in Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1803, p. 144), quoted in Stephen P. Halbrook, That Every Man Be Armed: The Evolution of a Constitutional Right (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984), p. 100
"We shall have our follies without doubt. Some one or more of them will always be afloat. But ours will be the follies of enthusiasm, not of bigotry, not of Jesuitism. Bigotry is the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds; enthusiasm of the free and buoyant. Education and free discussion are the antidotes of both."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
Source: letter to John Adams, August 1, 1816
"No man has ever been born a Negro hater, a Jew hater, or any other kind of hater. Nature refuses to be involved in such suicidal practices."
-Harry Bridges-
(1901-1990) American labor leader in the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU)
"We have seen the mere distinction of color made in the most enlightened period of time, a ground of the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man."
-James Madison-
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: speech at the Constitutional Convention, June 6, 1787
"John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!"
-Andrew Jackson-
apocryphal, referencing Worcester v. Georgia
"'By my hand and for the good of the state; the bearer has done what has been done.' Hmmmm ~~~ one should be careful what one writes, for one never knows into whose hands it may fall."
-Cardinal Richelieu-
Four Musketeers
"We, Negro Americans, sing with all loyal Americans:
My country 'tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee I sing.
Land where my fathers died,
Land of the Pilgrims' pride
From every mountainside
Let freedom ring!
That's exactly what we mean -- from every mountain side, let freedom ring.
Not only from the Green Mountains and White Mountains of Vermont and New Hampshire; not only from the Catskills of New York; but from the Ozarks in Arkansas, from the Stone Mountain in Georgia, from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia -- let it ring not only for the minorities of the United States, but for the disinherited of all the earth -- may the Republican Party, under God, from every mountainside, LET FREEDOM RING!"
-Rev. Archibald Carey, Jr.-
(1908-81) American lawyer, judge, politician, diplomat and clergyman from the south side of Chicago.
Source: Speech at Republican National Convention, 1952, often attributed to Martin Luther King, Jr.
"There can be no assumption that today’s majority is 'right' and the Amish or others like them are 'wrong.' A way of life that is odd or even erratic but interferes with no right or interests of others is not to be condemned because it is different."
-Justice Warren E. Burger-
(1907-1995) Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1969-1986)
Source: Wisconsin v. Yoder, 15 May 1972
"Prejudice is the child of ignorance."
-William Hazlitt-
(1778-1830) English writer, literary critic
"We have two evils to fight, capitalism and racism. We must destroy both racism and capitalism."
-Huey P. Newton-
(1942-1989) Founder of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense
Source: Interview with Huey P. Newton (1968)
"Government can’t do anything for you except in proportion as it can do something to you."
-William F. Buckley Jr.-
"Liberty cannot be caged into a charter or handed on ready-made to the next generation. Each generation must recreate liberty for its own times. Whether or not we establish freedom rests with ourselves."
-Florence Ellinwood Allen-
(1884-1966) American judge, first woman to serve on a state supreme court, and one of the first two women to serve as a US federal judge
Source: This Constitution of Ours, 1940
"When men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
"Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too."
-Voltaire-
[François Marie Arouet] (1694-1778) French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher
"There are two good things in life -- freedom of thought and freedom of action."
-W. Somerset Maugham-
(1874-1965) British playwright, novelist, short story writer
Source: Of Human Bondage, 1915
"Why don’t they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as well as Prohibition did, in five years Americans would be the smartest race of people on Earth."
-Will Rogers-
"If history teaches us anything, it teaches that simple-minded appeasement or wishful thinking about our adversaries is folly."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
Source: in Orlando, Florida, 3/3/1983
"Agriculture, manufacturers, commerce, and navigation, the four pillars of our prosperity, are then most thriving when left most free to individual enterprise."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
December 8, 1801
Source: in his first annual message to Congress
"And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others."
-Marianne Williamson-
(1952- ) Spiritual activist, author, lecturer and founder of The Peace Alliance
Source: A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of "A Course in Miracles", Harper Collins, 1992. From Chapter 7, Section 3
"We are not liberated until we liberate others. So long as we need to control other people, however benign our motives, we are captive to that need. In giving them freedom, we free ourselves."
-Marilyn Ferguson-
(1938-2008) American author, editor, public speaker
Source: The Aquarian Conspiracy
"Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most."
-Norman Mailer-
"The inescapable price of liberty is an ability to preserve it from destruction."
-General Douglas MacArthur-
(1880-1964) WWII Supreme Allied Commander of the Southwest Pacific, Supreme United Nations Commander
"Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have."
-Harry Emerson Fosdick-
(1878-1969) American pastor
"The struggle between the opponents and defenders of capitalism is a struggle between innovators who do not know what innovation to make and conservatives who do not know what to conserve."
-Simone Weil-
"The basis of a democratic state is liberty."
-Aristotle-
(384-322 BC) Greek philosopher
Source: Politics
"I would not be beholden to a tyrant, for his acts of tyranny. For it is but usurpation in him to save, as their rightful lord, the lives of men over whom he has no title to reign."
-Cato the Younger-
"The whole notion of loyalty inquisitions is a national characteristic of the police state, not of democracy. The history of Soviet Russia is a modern example of this ancient practice. I must, in good conscience, protest against any unnecessary suppression of our rights as free men. We must not burn down the house to kill the rats."
-Adlai Stevenson II-
"We are a nation that has a government — not the other way around. And this makes us special among the nations of the Earth. Our Government has no power except that granted it by the people. It is time to check and reverse the growth of government which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed."
-Ronald Reagan-
"I must say that, as I hope for mercy, I can have no other notion of all the other governments that I see or know, than that they are a conspiracy of the rich, who, on pretence of managing the public, only pursue their private ends, and devise all the ways and arts they can find out; first, that they may, without danger, preserve all that they have so ill-acquired, and then, that they may engage the poor to toil and labour for them at as low rates as possible, and oppress them as much as they please; and if they can but prevail to get these contrivances established by the show of public authority, which is considered as the representative of the whole people, then they are accounted laws."
-Thomas More-
"If large numbers of people believe in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech even if the law forbids it. But if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them."
-George Orwell-
[Eric Arthur Blair] (1903-1950) British author
"The voice of the majority is no proof of justice."
-Johann von Schiller-
[Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller]
"All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state."
-Benito Mussolini-
"The American Constitution, one of the few modern political documents drawn up by men who were forced by the sternest circumstances to think out what they really had to face, instead of chopping logic in a university classroom."
-George Bernard Shaw-
(1856-1950) Irish comic dramatist
"Restraint of government is the true liberty and freedom of the people."
-John P. Reid-
"Liberals have a new wish every time their latest wish is granted. Conservatives should make them spell out their principles and ideals. Instead of doing this, conservatives allow liberals to pursue incremental goals without revealing their ultimate destination. So, thanks to the negligence of their opponents, liberals control the terms of every debate by always demanding 'more' while never defining 'enough.' The predictable result is that they always get more, and it's never enough."
-Joseph Sobran-
(1946-2010) American columnist
"If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that, too."
-W. Somerset Maugham-
(1874-1965)
Source: Strictly Personal, 1941
"No age is unique in producing privileged persons who can happily dichotomize condemnation of their society and enjoyment of its fruits. The eighteenth century had its landau liberals as the nineteenth would have its carriage Communists."
-Alf Mapp, Jr.-
“In America, the law is King. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other. But lest any ill use should afterwards arise, let the crown at the conclusion of the ceremony be demolished, and scattered among the people whose right it is.”
-Thomas Paine-
Common Sense, 1776
"... liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith."
-Alexis de Tocqueville-
[Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clerel, le Comte de Tocqueville] (1805-1859) French historian
"Extreme taxation, excessive controls, oppressive government competition with business, frustrated minorities and forgotten Americans are not the products of free enterprise. They are the residue of centralized bureaucracy, of government by a self-anointed elite."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
"The history of liberty is the history of the limitation of government power, not the increase of it."
-Woodrow Wilson-
(1856-1924) 28th US President
"The only liberty that is valuable is a liberty connected with order; that not only exists along with order and virtue, but which cannot exist at all without them. It inheres in good and steady government, as in its substance and vital principle."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
"There is no freedom on earth or in any star for those who deny freedom to others."
-Elbert Hubbard-
(1856-1915)
Source: Roycroft Dictionary and Book of Epigrams, 1923
"To each according to his threat advantage does not count as a principle of justice."
-John Rawls-
"If, in the opinion of the people, the distribution or modification of the constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way which the Constitution designates. But let there be no change by usurpation; for though this, in one instance, may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed. The precedent must always greatly overbalance in permanent evil any partial or transient benefit, which the use can at any time yield."
-George Washington-
Farewell Address
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once."
-David Hume-
(1711-1776) Scottish philosopher, historian and economist
"Liberty is not merely a privilege to be conferred; it is a habit to be acquired."
-David Lloyd George-
[1st Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor OM, PC] (1863-1945) first Welsh Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
"You can muffle the drum, and you can loosen the strings of the lyre, but who shall command the skylark not to sing?"
-Khalil Gibran-
(1883-1931) Lebanese-American philosophical essayist, novelist, mystical poet, and artist
Source: The Prophet
"... And there's nothing so precious and irreplaceable as America's freedom. In a speech I gave 25 years ago, I told a story that I think bears repeating. Two friends of mine were talking to a refugee from Communist Cuba. He had escaped from Castro, and as he told the story of his horrible experiences, one of my friends turned to the other and said, 'We don't know how lucky we are.' And the Cuban stopped and said, 'How lucky you are? I had someplace to escape to.'
Well, no, America's freedom does not belong to just one nation. We're custodians of freedom for the world. In Philadelphia, two centuries ago, James Allen wrote in his diary that 'If we fail, liberty no longer continues an inhabitant of this globe.' Well, we didn't fail. And still, we must not fail. For freedom is not the property of one generation; it's the obligation of this and every generation. It's our duty to protect it and expand it and pass it undiminished to those still unborn.
Now, tomorrow is a special day for me. I'm going to receive my gold watch. And since this is the last speech that I will give as President, I think it's fitting to leave one final thought, an observation about a country which I love. It was stated best in a letter I received not long ago. A man wrote me and said: 'You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.'
Yes, the torch of Lady Liberty symbolizes our freedom and represents our heritage, the compact with our parents, our grandparents, and our ancestors. It is that lady who gives us our great and special place in the world. For it's the great life force of each generation of new Americans that guarantees that America's triumph shall continue unsurpassed into the next century and beyond. Other countries may seek to compete with us; but in one vital area, as a beacon of freedom and opportunity that draws the people of the world, no country on Earth comes close.
This, I believe, is one of the most important sources of America's greatness. We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people -- our strength -- from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation. While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America we breathe life into dreams. We create the future, and the world follows us into tomorrow. Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we're a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier. This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost. ..."
-Ronald Reagan-
Remarks at the Presentation Ceremony for the Presidential Medal of Freedom
January 19, 1989
"Beware how you trifle with your marvelous inheritance, this great land of ordered liberty, for if we stumble and fall, freedom and civilization everywhere will go down in ruin."
-Henry Cabot Lodge-
(1850-1924) US Senator for Massachusetts (1893-1924), US Congressman (1887-1893), and historian.
1919
"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places."
-St. Paul-
Source: The Holy Bible, Ephesians 6:12
"Because just as good morals, if they are to be maintained, have need of the laws, so the laws, if they are to be observed, have need of good morals."
-Niccolo Machiavelli-
(1469-1527) Italian Statesman and Political Philosopher
"There is no way; we make the road by walking it."
-Antonio Machado-
(1875-1939) Spanish poet
Source: "Proverbios y cantares" in Campos de Castilla, 1912
"Eternal vigilence is the price of liberty."
-Wendell Phillips-
(1811-1884) American abolitionist, advocate for Native Americans, orator, lawyer
"No man escapes
When freedom fails,
The best men rot in filthy jails;
And they who cried: “Appease, Appease!”
Are hanged by men they tried to please."
-Hiram Mann-
[George Hiram Mann] (1872-1955) New York City self-taught attorney, took a case involving overtime payments for 1,400 Navy yard workers, settled 27 years later when Congress passed a bill authorizing $332,342.72 for the back pay.
Source: 28 March 1947, Wall Street Journal, Letters to the Editor, Hiram Mann, New York City
"The free-thinking of one age is the common sense of the next."
-Matthew Arnold-
(1822-1887)
Source: 1875
"Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good."
-Thomas Paine-
(1737-1809) US Founding father, pamphleteer, author
"Liberty is to the collective body what health is to every individual body. Without health no pleasure can be tasted by man; without liberty, no happiness can be enjoyed by society."
-Henry St. John-
(1678-1751) 1st Viscount Bolingbroke, English politician and philosopher
"Intellectual and cultural freedom is the most important single precondition for the breakdown of the kinds of tyrannical and totalitarian systems that periodically threaten us."
-James Billington-
(1885-1981)
"Never be insolent unless it is a deliberate decision, and only toward a man more powerful than yourself."
-Émile Chartier-
"Interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the constitution is a Glorious Liberty Document!"
-Frederick Douglass-
[Frederick Baily] (1818-1895), escaped slave, Abolitionist, author, editor of the North Star and later the New National Era
Source: in an antislavery oration delivered July 5, 1852
"The very reason for the First Amendment is to make the people of this country free to think, speak, write and worship as they wish, not as the Government commands."
-Justice Hugo L. Black-
(1886-1971) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: IAM v. Street, 367 U.S., 1961
"Give me the centralism of liberty; give me the imperialism of equal rights."
-Charles Sumner-
"I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone."
-H. L. Mencken-
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"You must believe in free will; there is no choice."
-Isaac Bashevis Singer-
(1904-1991) Polish-born Jewish author, Nobel Prize in Literature, 1978
"Political correctness is simply tyranny with manners."
-Charlton Heston-
(1923-2008) American actor, former president of National Rifle Association
"Freedom has never been free. Sometimes it costs everything you've got."
-Eric Schaub-
Individualist, activist, speaker, author
"There is not a syllable in the constitution, that makes a decision of the judiciary — of its own force, and without regard to its correctness — binding upon any body."
-Lysander Spooner-
"An unconstitutional judicial decision is no more binding, than an unconstitutional legislative enactment — and a man has the same right to resist, by force, one as the other, and to be tried for such resistance by a jury, who judge of the law for themselves."
-Lysander Spooner-
"The idea, so constantly asserted, that the permanent judiciary, the judges, have a right to decide all constitutional questions, authoritatively for the people, is one of those gross impostures, by which men have always been defrauded of their rights."
-Lysander Spooner-
"We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship."
-E. M. Forster-
(1879-1970) English novelist, short story writer, essayist, and librettist
Source: Two Cheers for Democracy, 1951
"The business of America is not business. Neither is it war. The business of America is justice and securing the blessings of liberty."
-George Will-
(1941-) American newspaper columnist, journalist, and author
"Liberty, understood by materialists as the right to do or not to do anything not directly injurious to others, we understand as the faculty of choosing, among the various modes of fulfilling duty, those most in harmony with our own tendencies."
-Giuseppe Mazzini-
(1805-1872)
Source: On the Unity of Italy, 1861
"The literature of a people must so ring from the sense of its nationality; and nationality is impossible without self-respect, and self-respect is impossible without liberty."
-Harriet Beecher Stowe-
(1814-1896) Abolitionist author
"Justice, like liberty and coercion, is a concept which, for the sake of clarity, ought to be confined to the deliberate treatment of men by other men."
-Friedrich August von Hayek-
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
"If liberty with law is fire on the hearth, liberty without law is fire on the floor."
-George Stillman Hillard-
(1808-1879) American lawyer, author
"Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison ... the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor."
-Henry David Thoreau-
(1817-1862) American author, poet, philosopher, polymath, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and transcendentalist
Source: Stray Birds, 1849
"The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side."
-James Baldwin-
(1924-1987) Novelist, Essayist, and Playwright
"People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid."
-Soren Kierkegaard-
(1813-1855) Danish philosopher
"To preserve the freedom of the human mind then and freedom of the press, every spirit should be ready to devote itself to martyrdom."
-Thomas Jefferson-
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
June 18, 1799
"The contest, for ages, has been to rescue Liberty from the grasp of executive power."
-Daniel Webster-
(1782-1852) US Senator
Source: Speech, 27 May 1834
"Liberty, not communism, is the most contagious force in the world."
-Earl Warren-
(1891-1974) Chief Justice, U. S. Supreme Court
"Liberty is not to be enjoyed, indeed it cannot exist, without the habits of just subordination; it consists, not so much in removing all restraint from the orderly, as in imposing it on the violent."
-Fisher Ames-
(1758-1808), American statesman, orator and political writer
Source: Essay on Equality, December 15, 1801
"'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.'"
-Lewis Carroll-
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
"We cannot choose freedom established on a hierarchy of degrees of freedom, on a caste system of equality like military rank. We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it."
-William Faulkner-
(1897-1962)
Source: Harper’s Magazine, June 1956
"I must own, I know not what Treason is, if sapping and betraying the liberties of a people be not treason, in the eternal and original Nature of Things."
-Cato-
John Trenchard (1662-1723) & Thomas Gordon (169?-1750)
Source: Reflections upon Libelling, June 10, 1721. Ref: Cato's Letters; or Essays on liberty, pg 249. (1737)
"Our natural, inalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation from government, and freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp as it is at this moment."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
"Liberty, without wisdom, is license."
-Edmund Burke-
(1729-1797) Irish-born British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker
"Liberty's too precious a thing to be buried in history text books."
-Jimmy Stewart-
Source: in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
"If a blending of individualism and of cooperative participation is a prerequisite to a democratic solution of the problems of a society of free men, it must also be noted that an atmosphere of freedom is required if these problems are to be met constructively and as they arise."
-Marshall Field-
(1835-1906)
Source: Freedom Is More Than A Word, 1945
"The main political problem is how to prevent the police power from becoming tyrannical. This is the meaning of all the struggles for liberty."
-Ludwig Von Mises-
(1881-1973) Economist and social philosopher
"Free is not the same as free and easy."
-Larry Eisenberg-
"A judicial activist is a judge who interprets the Constitution to mean what it would have said if he, instead of the Founding Fathers, had written it."
-Senator Sam Ervin-
(1896-1985) United States Senator NC-D (1954-1974)
The salient distinction there being that only the Founding Fathers' version was ratified...
"There are many who are hypocrites although they think they are not, and there are many who are afraid of being hypocrites although they certainly are not. Which is the one and which is the other God knows, and none but He."
-Walter Hilton-
"Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind."
-Plato-
(429-347 BC) Greek philosopher
"The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real."
-John Taylor Gatto-
(1937-2018) American school teacher of 29 years, author, New York State Teacher of the Year, 1991
Source: The Underground History of American Education, 2001
"I know very well that because I am unlettered some presumptuous people will think they have the right to criticize me, saying that I am an uncultured man. What stupid fools! Do they not know that I could reply to them as Marius did to the Roman patricians: 'Do those who pride themselves on the works of other men claim to challenge mine?'"
-Leonardo da Vinci-
(1452-1519) Italian inventor, artist, polymath, the "Universal Genius" or "Renaissance Man"
"The first precept was never to accept a thing as true until I knew it as such without a single doubt."
-Discourse on the Method-
"You can never get enough of what you don't really need."
-Eric Hoffer-
(1902-1983) American author, philosopher, awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
"It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so."
-Mark Twain-
likely misattributed
"There is something so wanton and monstrous in lawless power, that there scarce ever was a human spirit that could bear it; and the mind of man, which is weak and limited, ought never to be trusted with a power that is boundless. The state of tyranny is a state of war ..."
-Thomas Gordon-
"Every delegated authority implies a trust; responsibility follows as the shadow does its substance. But where there is no responsibility, authority is no longer a trust, but an act of usurpation. And every act of usurpation is either an act of treason, or an act of warfare."
-St. George Tucker-
"We must win the common people in every corner. This will be obtained chiefly by means of the schools; and by open, hearty behavior, show condescension, popularity, and toleration of their prejudices, which we shall at leisure root out and dispel."
-Adam Weishaupt-
(1748-1830?) [Spartacus] Professor of Natural and Canon Law at Germany's Ingolstadt University,
founded The Order of the Illuminati on May 1, 1776.
He designed the very plan of world domination that is still in use today to enslave the world's masses.
Source: quoted in John Robinson’s Proofs of a Conspiracy, 1795, reprinted by Western Islands, Boston, 1967, p. 111
"Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged."
-Northwest Ordinance, Article III, 1787-
"Children should be educated and instructed in the principles of freedom."
-John Adams-
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: "Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America," 1787
"Society produces rogues, and education makes one rogue cleverer than another."
-Oscar Wilde-
(1854-1900) Anglo-Irish poet, novelist, writer
"I think the world is run by 'C' students."
-Al McGuire-
(1931-2001) American college basketball coach and broadcaster, head coach Marquette University (1964-1977)
"Universities should be safe havens where ruthless examination of realities will not be distorted by the aim to please or inhibited by the risk of displeasure."
-Kingman Brewster-
(1919-1988) President Yale University
Source: Speech, 11 April 1964
"Education -- compulsory schooling, compulsory learning -- is a tyranny and a crime against the human mind and spirit. Let all those escape it who can, any way they can."
-John Holt-
(1923-1985) American author and educator, proponent of homeschooling, and pioneer in youth rights theory
"Consider compulsory school-attendance laws, for instance. They fill government schools with children who don't want to be there. Some students are violent, attacking -- and even killing -- teachers and other students. Teachers must lock their classrooms to keep hoodlums at bay in the hallways. Thus, compulsory attendance laws, alleged to promote education, can make it almost impossible."
-Marisa Manley-
Source: Why Laws Backfire, The Freeman, p. 545, August 1996
"It is not by the consolidation or concentration of powers, but by their distribution that good government is effected."
-Thomas Jefferson-
"We developed at the local school district level probably the best public school system in the world. Or it was until the Federal government added Federal interference to Federal financial aid and eroded educational quality in the process."
-Ronald Reagan-
(1911-2004) 40th US President
"Civilization, as we know it, is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbour. No known civilization has, ever reached the goal of civilization yet. There has never been a communion of saints on earth. In the least uncivilized society at its least uncivilized moment, the vast majority of its members have remained very near indeed to the primitive human level. And no society has ever been secure of holding such ground as it has managed to gain in its spiritual advance."
-Arnold J. Toynbee-
Because inevitably they all, at least eventually, implement a government. And then "civilization" is never again more than a thin, taunting facade...
"Among the innumerable mortifications which waylay human arrogance on every side may well be reckoned our ignorance of the most common objects and effects, a defect of which we become more sensible by every attempt to supply it. Vulgar and inactive minds confound familiarity with knowledge and conceive themselves informed of the whole nature of things when they are shown their form or told their use; but the speculatist, who is not content with superficial views, harasses himself with fruitless curiosity, and still, as he inquires more, perceives only that he knows less."
-Dr. Samuel Johnson-
(1709-1784) English author, poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer
1758
"Whenever people talk glibly of a need to achieve educational 'excellence,' I think of what an improvement it would be if our public schools could just achieve mediocrity."
-Thomas Sowell-
(1930- ) Writer and economist
"By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-
"In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists."
-Eric Hoffer-
(1902-1983) American author, philosopher, awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
"The best of all government is that which teaches us to govern ourselves."
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe-
(1749-1832) German writer, statesman
"The knowledge of the world is only to be acquired in the world, and not in a closet."
-Philip Dormer Stanhope-
(1694-1773) 4th Earl of Chesterfield
"If it would be wrong for the government to adopt an official religion, then, for the same reasons, it would be wrong for the government to adopt official education policies. The moral case for freedom of religion stands or falls with that for freedom of education. A society that champions freedom of religion but at the same time countenances state regulation of education has a great deal of explaining to do."
-James R. Otteson-
American philosopher, professor, author
"The roots of liberalism - and its associated madness - can be clearly identified by understanding how children develop from infancy to adulthood and how distorted development produces the irrational beliefs of the liberal mind. When the modern liberal mind whines about imaginary victims, rages against imaginary villains and seeks above all else to run the lives of persons competent to run their own lives, the neurosis of the liberal mind becomes painfully obvious."
-Lyle H. Rossiter, Jr.-
American Psychiatrist, Author
Source: “The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness,” 2006
Sir Ranulf: I hold my office from the King himself!
Robin Hood: I never liked your King much.
Sir Ranulf: You're his subject... and his servant.
Robin Hood: He's not King here. Not in Sherwood.
Sir Ranulf: [mocking] *You're* the ruler? Should I bow?
Robin Hood: I wouldn't have you in my service, nobleman. I've known your kind all my life. You're everything I'm meant to fight. *You're* the enemy. You gobble good red meat, and we get bread and cheese. The laws can't touch you and there's no crime you can be punished for, and we can shoot a deer and have our eyes put out. This is *my* forest. I'll live here as I like. You come in again, I'll kill you.
-Robin and Marian-
"So shall I keep thy law continually for ever and ever. And I will walk at liberty: for I seek thy precepts."
-The Holy Bible-
Source: 2 Corinthians 3:17
"The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live. Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men."
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-
(1929-1968) US civil rights leader
