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"Hate doth never prosper, for if it prosper, none dare call it hate."
19th Century Author Unknown
"Liberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker. But if we had not, our fathers have earned and bought it for us, at the expense of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood."
John Adams
"The difference between the path toward greater freedom or bigger government is the difference between success and failure; between opportunity and coercion; between faith in a glorious future and fear of mediocrity and despair; between respecting people as adults, each with a spark of greatness, and treating them as helpless children to be forever dependent; between a drab, materialistic world where Big Brother rules by promises to special interest groups, and a world of adventure where everyday people set their sights on impossible dreams, distant stars, and the Kingdom of God. We have the true message of hope for America."
Ronald Reagan (1984)
"Let us contemplate our forefathers, and posterity, and resolve to maintain the rights bequeathed to us from the former, for the sake of the latter. The necessity of the times, more than ever, calls for our utmost circumspection, deliberation, fortitude and perseverance."
Samuel Adams
"I saw in State Rights the only availing check upon the absolutism of the sovereign will."
Lord Acton writing to Robert E. Lee
"I believe that the maintenance of the rights and authority reserved to the states and to the people are the safeguard to the continuance of a free government 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 responding to Lord Acton
"There is no government regulation, no matter how plausible it initially appears, that will not eventually be applied by some bureaucrat in a way that defies common sense."
North's Law of Bureaucracy
"A dangerous situation is tenable if brave men make it so."
John F. Kennedy
Washington's chronic failure lies in its chronic failure to deal with its chronic failure."
Norman Liebmann
"To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it."
Thomas Jefferson
"Once a nation becomes a democracy, the whole purpose of government changes. Instead of the government's goal being that of guaranteeing liberty, equal justice, private property, and voluntary exchange, the government embarks on the impossible task of achieving economic equality, micromanaging the economy, and protecting citizens from themselves and all their activities. The destruction of the wealth-building process, which is inherent in a free society, is never anticipated. Once it's realized that it has been undermined, it is too late to easily reverse the attacks against limited government and personal liberty."
Ron Paul
"The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave."
Patrick Henry
"No freeman shall be debarred the use of arms."
Thomas Jefferson
"The shallow consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise see in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws."
Walt Whitman
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
John F. Kennedy
"Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty."
Thomas Jefferson
"'Tis time to fear when tyrants seem to kiss."
William Shakespeare
"Do not trust governments more than governments trust their own people."
Andrei Sakharov
"There is no safety for honest men except by believing all possible evil of evil men."
Edmund Burke
"The supreme quality for leadership is unquestionably integrity. Without it, no real success is possible, no matter whether it is on a section gang, a football field, in an army, or in an office."
Dwight D. Eisenhower
"The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for, among old parchments, or musty records. They are written, as with a sun beam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the Divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power."
Alexander Hamilton
"Honor, justice, and humanity, forbid us tamely to surrender that freedom which we received from our gallant ancestors, and which our innocent posterity have a right to receive from us."
Thomas Jefferson
"Freedom is not synonymous with an easy life.... There are many difficult things about freedom: It does not give you safety, it creates moral dilemmas for you; it requires self-discipline; it imposes great responsibilities; but such is the nature of Man and in such consists his glory and salvation."
Margaret Thatcher
'What we obtain too cheaply we esteem too lightly. It is dearness only that gives everything its value.'
Thomas Paine
'Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods, and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated.'
Thomas Paine
"Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison."
Henry David Thoreau
"The hour is fast approaching, on which the Honor and Success of this army, and the safety of our bleeding Country depend. Remember officers and Soldiers, that you are Freemen, fighting for the blessings of Liberty -- that slavery will be your portion, and that of your posterity, if you do not acquit yourselves like men."
George Washington
"...[W]e shall most sincerely rejoice with you in the happy hour when the establishment of American Liberty, upon the most firm and solid foundations shall enable us to return to our Private Stations in the bosom of a free, peacefully and happy Country."
George Washington
"One might plausibly argue, indeed, that the complete disappearance of France would produce no more perturbation in the world than the loss of an ear produces in a man. Brussels and Lucerne would quickly put in better cooks, and Copenhagen, I venture, could take care of the peep-show business without any need of an international loan."
H.L. Mencken, editorial in the American Mercury, April 1927
"The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed - where the government refuses to stand for re-election and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees.... However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once."
Judge Alex Kozinski, a native of Romania appointed by President Reagan.
"There are too many people who imagine that there is something sophisticated about always believing the best of those who hate your country, and the worst of those who defend it."
Margaret Thatcher
"Equal rights and equal opportunity mean just that. They do not mean preferential treatment. Preferences, no matter how well intended, ultimately breed resentment among the non-preferred. And preferential treatment demeans the achievements that minority Americans win by their own efforts."
Colin Powell
"The man who produces while others dispose of his product is a slave."
Ayn Rand
"We have rights, as individuals, to give as much of our own money as we please to charity; but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of public money."
David Crockett, U.S. Congressman (1827-1835)
"Now what liberty can there be where property is taken without consent?"
Samuel Adams
"The fact is that government, like a highwayman, says to a man: 'Your money or your life.'"
Lysander Spooner
"It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives."
John Adams
"It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived."
Gen. George S. Patton
"Peace is more important than all justice; and peace was not made for the sake of justice, but justice for the sake of peace."
Martin Luther
"But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint."
Edmund Burke
"By profession I am a soldier and take great pride in that fact, but I am prouder, infinitely prouder, to be a father. A soldier destroys in order to build; the father only builds, never destroys. The one has the potentialities of death; the other embodies creations and life. And while the hordes of death are mighty, the battalions of life are mightier still."
General Douglas MacArthur
"The notion that obedience to a society's laws is always moral is itself immoral."
Dennis Prager
"The God which gave us life gave us at the same time liberty. The hands of force may destroy but can never divide these."
Thomas Jefferson
"The genius of the Constitution is its division of powers - summed up in that clause reserving to the several states, or the people, all powers not expressly granted to the federal government."
M. Stanton Evans
"Liberty is the mother, not daughter, of order"
Pierre J. Proudhon
"Innocence seldom utters outraged shrieks. Guilt does."
Whittaker Chambers
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Thomas Jefferson
"Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it."
Thomas Sowell
"The War between the States established . . . this principle, that the federal government is, through its courts, the final judge of its own powers."
Woodrow Wilson, re-affirming the hegemony of the federal government brought about by the War of Federal Aggression
"The government created by this compact [i.e., the Constitution] was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself, since that would have made its discretion, and not the Constitution, the measure of its powers; but that as in all other cases of compact among parties having no common judge, each party has an equal right to judge for itself, as well of infractions as of the mode and measure of redress."
Thomas Jefferson
"If the federal government were ever to become the sole judge of the limits of its own powers through its own courts, Jefferson warned, then there would eventually be no limits to those powers and the Constitution would effectively become a dead letter."
Thomas DiLorenzo
"[The powers of the federal government are] limited by the plain sense and intention [of the Constitution, and are] no further valid than they are authorized by the grants enumerated in that compact."
U.S. Senator John Taylor
"[Whenever there is a] dangerous exercise of other powers, not granted by the said compact, the States . . . have the right, and are duty bound, to interpose for arresting the progress of the evil . . ."
U.S. Senator John Taylor
"[T]he flames kindled on the 4 of July 1776, have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism; on the contrary, they will consume these engines and all who work them."
Thomas Jefferson
"What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?"
James Madison
"Let the American youth never forget, that they possess a noble inheritance, bought by the toils, and sufferings, and blood of their ancestors; and capacity, if wisely improved, and faithfully guarded, of transmitting to their latest posterity all the substantial blessings of life, the peaceful enjoyment of liberty, property, religion, and independence."
Justice Joseph Story
I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us!"
Fredrick Douglas
"If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are worm-eaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall!"
Fredrick Douglas
"Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention, have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property, and have in general been as short in the lives as they have been violent in their deaths."
James Madison
"It stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there's someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master."
Ayn Rand
"Democracy is a form of religion. It is the worship of jackals by jackasses."
H.L. Mencken
"The college idealists who fill the ranks of the environmental movement seem willing to do absolutely anything to save the biosphere, except take science courses and learn something about it."
P.J. O'Rourke
"...[T]he danger is not, that the judges will be too firm in resisting public opinion, and in defence of private rights or public liberties; but, that they will be ready to yield themselves to the passions, and politics, and prejudices of the day."
Joseph Story
"The opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional and what not, not only for themselves in their own sphere of action but for the Legislature and Executive also in their spheres, would make the Judiciary a despotic branch."
Thomas Jefferson
"For no people will tamely surrender their Liberties, nor can any be easily subdued, when Knowledge is diffus'd and Virtue is preserv'd. On the contrary, when People are universally ignorant, and debauch'd in their Manners, they will sink under their own weight without the Aid of foreign Invaders."
Samuel Adams
"...No people ever yet groaned under the heavy yoke of slavery, but when they deserv'd it. ...The truth is, all might be free if they valued freedom, and defended it as they ought. ...If therefore a people will not be free; if they have not virtue enough to maintain their liberty against a presumptuous invader, they deserve no pity, and are to be treated with contempt and ignominy."
Samuel Adams
"If you love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen."
Samuel Adams
"Prejudice, which sees what it pleases, cannot see what is plain."
Aubrey T. DeVera
"There is nothing more terrifying than ignorance in action."
Goethe
"The U.S. Constitution poses no serious threat to our form of government."
Joseph Sobran
"Courage, then, my countrymen, our contest is not only whether we ourselves shall be free, but whether there shall be left to mankind an asylum on earth for civil and religious liberty."
Samuel Adams
"History fails to record a single precedent in which nations subject to moral decay have not passed into political and economic decline. There has been either a spiritual awakening to overcome the moral lapse, or a progressive deterioration leading to ultimate national disaster."
General Douglas MacArthur
"More powerful than any law, executive order or court decision is the culture of equality fashioned by the words to be found in that Declaration [of Independence]. It is that culture of equality -- a belief that all Americans are not only equal in the eyes of God but equal in the eyes of the government -- that binds us and unites us as one people 'indivisible.' Should a significant segment of the people lose faith in the principles contained in the document that represents the social contract we have with each other, that culture of equality will erode and America will cease to be a nation that promises and delivers 'liberty and justice for all'."
Ward Connerly
"Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God."
Motto suggested to be included in the original Seal of the United States
"Something to ponder, as our Left-judiciary courts are becoming ever less distinguishable from the tyrant King George, who, the Declaration charges, "refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public Good ... [and] made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the Tenure of their Offices ... [and] combined with others to subject us to a Jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution, and unacknowledged by our Laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation ... [and] taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments ... and declaring themselves invested with Power to legislate for us in all Cases whatsoever....""
The Federalist
"...the difference between socialism and communism is the difference between seduction and rape."
Helen Wood Birnie
"It is not only his right, but his duty ... to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court."
John Adams
"Sin lies only in hurting others unnecessarily. All other "sins" are invented nonsense."
Robert Heinlein
"Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice."
Barry Goldwater
"There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him."
Robert Heinlein
"A society that does not recognize that each individual has values of his own which he is entitled to follow can have no respect for the dignity of the individual and cannot really know freedom."
F.A. Hayek
"Observe good faith and justice towards all Nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all. Religion and Morality enjoin this conduct; and can it be, that good policy does not equally enjoin it? It will be worthy of a free, enlightened, and, at no distant period, a great Nation, to give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence."
George Washington
"Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force.... Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."
George Washington
"There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence; and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism."
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
"When a whole nation is roaring Patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and purity of its heart."
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), Journals, 1824
"Today's political process is nothing more than a street fight between various groups seeking to vote themselves other people's money."
Congressman Ron Paul
"The legal tender quality [of money] is only valuable for the purposes of dishonesty."
Salmon P. Chase, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, dissenting in Knox vs. Lee
"The arguments in favor of the constitutionality of legal tender paper currency tend directly to break down the barriers which separate a government of limited powers from a government resting in the unrestrained will of Congress. Those limitations must be preserved, or our government will inevitably drift from the system established by our Fathers into a vast, centralized, and consolidated government."
Justice Stephen Field
"A government with unrestrained powers is properly characterized as tyrannical."
Congressman Ron Paul
"Repeal of legal tender laws will help restore constitutional government and protect the people's right to a medium of exchange chosen by the market, thereby protecting their current purchasing power as well as their pensions, savings, and other promises of future payment. Because honest money serves the needs of ordinary people, instead of fiat irredeemable paper-ticket electronic money that improperly transfers the wealth of society to a small specially privileged financial elite along with other special interests, I urge my colleagues to cosponsor the Honest Money Act."
Congressman Ron Paul
"Truth crushed to earth shall rise again."
Martin Luther King, Jr.
"The means to social peace and prosperity is a free market, a sound currency, and the elimination of government power to destroy people's lives."
Lew Rockwell
"Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare but only those specifically enumerated."
Thomas Jefferson
"Freedom had been hunted round the globe; reason was considered as rebellion; and the slavery of fear had made men afraid to think. But such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing."
Thomas Paine
"Socialism is the opiate of the intelligentsia..."
The Federalist Society
"A nation of well informed men, who have been taught to know and prize the rights that God has given them, cannot be enslaved. It is in the region of ignorance that tyranny begins!"
Benjamin Franklin
"It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others: or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own."
Thomas Jefferson
"A thing moderately good is not so good as it ought to be. Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice."
Thomas Paine
"The U.S. government has no business telling the American people what they may and may not buy from people living outside the country. That's called freedom, something earlier Americans actually understood and valued."
Sheldon Richman, a scholar at the Future of Freedom Foundation,
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."
Aristotle
"I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble."
Helen Keller
"In a free society, government has the responsibility of protecting us from others, but not from ourselves."
Walter Williams
"Americans are becoming increasingly addicted to government, and politicians are becoming the dealers of the drug named 'dependency'."
Rep. Jim DeMint
"[The federal tax code is a confusing conglomeration that] 'at best is a walking due process violation.'"
Larry Becraft, Huntville, AL lawyer defending Vernice Kuglin against tax evasion charges levied by the IRS
"In the long run, even the most despotic governments with all their brutality and cruelty are no match for ideas."
Ludwig Von Mises
"In a battle between force and an idea, the latter always prevails."
Ludwig Von Mises
"The question is: Will [gold] ever again become money? This is the most important of all monetary questions."
Gary North
"Nothing is permanent except death, taxes, and the lies of politicians, but in the West, the de-monetization of gold appears to be as permanent as the West. The West has bet its future on fractional reserve banking. This is additional evidence that the West is doomed. It has placed the extension of the division of labor into the hands of the bankers' cartel."
Gary North
"How do those individuals with the wisdom to recognize human failings act so as to restrict or restrain those who want power? The answer of the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 was: with a written Constitution. The document wasn't perfect. It was subject to criticism at the time as having too many loopholes through which the power-hungry would eventually slither. History would seem to be on the side of the critics. Even die-hard Constitutionalists such as myself have to concede as much."
Stephen Yates
"The public cannot be too curious concerning the characters of public men."
Samuel Adams
"There is no greater service that we can render the oppressed of the earth than to maintain inviolate the freedom of our own citizens."
Calvin Coolidge
"...[I]n imperial Washington, states have become nothing more than glorified counties."
Ron Paul
"What the friends of freedom need more than anything else today is the personal stamina that comes with moral conviction."
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
"Liberty, the greatest of all earthly blessings -- give us that precious jewel, and you may take every things else! ... Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel."
Patrick Henry
"Morality has perished through poverty of great men; a poverty for which we must not only assign a reason, but for the guilt of which we must answer as criminals charged with a capital crime. For it is through our vices, and not by any mishap, that we retain only the name of a republic, and have long since lost the reality."
Augustine
"History won't be very kind to today's black mayors, state legislators and congressmen when it examines how black youngsters have had their futures compromised by a callous, corrupt education system while black politicians not only fiddled but organized resistance to any measure that might introduce accountability."
Walter Williams
"No judge has the authority to impose his will on the people of a state, and no judge has the constitutional authority to forbid public officials from acknowledging the same God specifically mentioned in the charter documents of our nation, the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution."
Judge Roy Moore
"It was the abandonment of the gold standard that made modern barbarism affordable."
Gary North
"There's no such thing as "sustainable" development. Human progress and individual liberty have advanced on the backs of one unsustainable development after another: When we needed trees for heating and transportation, we chopped 'em down. Then we discovered oil, and the trees grew back. When the oil runs out, we won't notice because our SUVs will be powered by something else. Bet on human ingenuity every time. We're not animals, and it's a cult as deranged as the screwiest fringe religion to insist we are. Earth's most valuable resource is us."
Mark Steyn
"The tyranny of a principal in an oligarchy is not so dangerous to the public welfare as the apathy of a citizen in a democracy."
Montesquieu, 1748
"A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both."
James Madison
"The ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all."
President John F. Kennedy, 1963
"Madness is often a combination of cold reason and [imaginative] fantasy severed from all reality."
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism Revisited
"Let there be no doubt: the business cycle, the stagflation, the recessions, the depressions, and the inflations are not a result of capitalism and sound money, but rather are a direct result of paper money and a central bank that is incapable of managing it."
Congressman Ron Paul, Texas
"Real economic growth won't return until confidence in the entire system is restored. And that is impossible as long as it depends on the politicians not spending too much money and the Federal Reserve limiting its propensity to inflate our way to prosperity. Only sound money and limited government can do that."
Congressman Ron Paul, Texas
"For all practical purposes, there are no races anymore. In America, there are freedom fighters and there are those who would enslave all of us, regardless of race - and it's time to choose a side."
Erik Rush
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
George Santayana
"No legal tender law is ever needed to make men take good money; its only use is to make them take bad money."
Stephen T. Byington, 1895
"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."
John Quincy Adams
"A pure democracy can admit no cure for the mischief's of faction. A common passion or interest will be felt by a majority, and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party. Hence it is, that democracies have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths."
James Madison
"The powers in charge keep us in a perpetual state of fear, keep us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant sums demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real."
Douglas MacArthur
"But, of course, no one will ever hijack an American plane ever again -- not because of idiotic confiscations of tweezers, but because of the brave passengers on that fourth flight. That's why, three months later, the great British shoebomber had barely got the match to his sock before half the cabin pounded the crap out of him. Even the French. To expect the government to save you is to be a bystander in your own fate."
Mark Steyn, Chicago Sun-Times, 9/17/2003
"Righteousness is usually inversely proportional to understanding."
Ed Powell
"I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution."
President Grover Cleveland, vetoing an 1887 bill granting relief for drought-stricken Texas Farmers
"In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution."
Thomas Jefferson, 1798, specifically warning against relying on the good intentions of politicians to enforce the Constitution
"The problem isn't the abuse of power, it's the power to abuse."
Michael Cloud
"The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else."
Fredrick Bastiat
"...since no individual has the right to enslave another individual, then no group of individuals can possibly have such a right."
Fredrick Bastiat
"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard for their own interest."
Adam Smith
" . . . the poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail - it's roof may shake - the wind may blow through it - the storms may enter - but the king of England cannot enter - all his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement."
William Pitt
"When goods don't cross borders, soldiers will."
Fredrick Bastiat
"No better weapon against poverty, disease, illiteracy, and tyranny has yet been found . . . Capitalism's compassion for the material needs of humankind has not in history, yet, had a peer."
Michael Novak
"If you will not fight for your rights when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight - when your victory will be sure and not too costly - then you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and with only a small chance of survival. There may even be a worse case: you may have to fight when there is no hope of victory because it is better to perish than to live as slaves."
Winston Churchill
"The instrumentality of union, with its united strength and its subordination of the parts, is an irresistible temptation to the power-hungry of every generation."
Richard Weaver, Historian
"The strength of union may first be exercised in the name of freedom, but once it has been made monopolistic and unassailable, it will, if history teaches anything, be used for other purposes."
Richard Weaver, Historian
"[w]hen doctrinaire liberalism is applied to societies," the result is "an enforced Utopia sustained by the police state."
Richard Weaver, Historian
"One cannot feign surprise, therefore, that thirty years after the great struggle to consolidate and unionize American power, the nation embarked on its career of imperialism. The new nationalism enabled Theodore Roosevelt, than whom there was no more staunch advocate of union, to strut and bluster and intimidate our weaker neighbors. Ultimately it launched America upon its career of world imperialism, whose results are now being seen in indefinite military conscription, mountainous debt, restriction of dissent, and other abridgments of classical liberty."
Richard Weaver, Historian
"Its wars and totalitarian revolutions have been without precedent in their barbarism and ferocity. But in addition to this, it has persistently subverted and continues to subvert those independent social authorities and moral communities on which eighteenth-century monarchs had not dared to lay their hands. Its subversion of these authorities, along with its success in providing material welfare, has produced an ever increasing number of rootless individuals whose characters are hedonistic, self-absorbed, and without spirit. We daily accept expropriations, both material and spiritual, from the central government which our ancestors in 1776 and 1861 would have considered non-negotiable."
Donald Livingston, Emory University professor, commenting on the modern, unitary state.
"If centralism is ultimately to prevail; if our entire system of free Institutions as established by our common ancestors is to be subverted, and an Empire is to be established in their stead; if that is to be the last scene of the great tragic drama now being enacted: then, be assured, that we of the South will be acquitted, not only in our own consciences, but in the judgment of mankind, of all responsibility for so terrible a catastrophe, and from all guilt of so great a crime against humanity."
Alexander Stephens, Vice President of the Confederate States of America
"The Confederate Battle Flag, ignorantly condemned by American Jacobins as a symbol of slavery that should be forcibly uprooted wherever it is found, has been seen to fly wherever in the world a people seeks to resist their subordination to unchecked central authority."
Thomas Woods, Jr, Professor of History, Suny Suffolk University
"Once the right to tax is conceded to an institution said to possess a monopoly on the use of force, no feeble constitution can stand in the way of its expansion."
Thomas Woods, Jr, commenting on wisdom from Hans Herman Hoppe.
"The expansion of capitalism owes its origins and raison d'être to political anarchy."
Jean Baechler
"Thus, again, economics is properly a value-free science that shows us how our ends can be reached. It doesn't contain all the answers of life, nor does it claim to. It does, however, show how the morally acceptable desire for profit leads to spontaneous social cooperation that obviates the need for a bloated state apparatus to direct production. It shows us the fascinating mechanisms by which peaceful social cooperation leads to overall prosperity."
Thomas Woods, Jr
"It is a distortion of facts to say that the factories carried off the housewives from the nurseries and the kitchens and the children from their play. These women had nothing to cook with and to feed their children. These children were destitute and starving. Their only refuge was the factory. It saved them, in the strict sense of the term, from starvation.... the fact remains that for the surplus population which the enclosure movement had reduced to dire wretchedness and for which there was literally no room left in the frame of the prevailing system of production, work in the factories was salvation. These people thronged into the plants for no reason other than the urge to improve their standard of living."
Ludwig von Mises
"If ever the free institutions of America are destroyed, that event may be attributed to the omnipotence of the majority."
Alexis De Tocqueville
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigues of supporting it."
Thomas Paine
"One man with courage makes a majority,"
Andrew Jackson
"The people of this country, if ever they lose their liberties, will do it by sacrificing some great principle of government to temporary passion. There are certain great principles, which if they are not held inviolable, at all seasons, our liberty is gone. If we give them up, it is perfectly immaterial what is the character of our sovereign; whether he be King or President, elective or hereditary - it is perfectly immaterial what is his character - we shall be slaves - it is not an elective government which will preserve us."
John Randolph, Southern Conservative, Roanoke, VA, 1813.
"... there is no defense for freedom other than vigilance against the State."
Ryan McMaken, writing in LewRockwell.com
"Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters."
Daniel Webster
"Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain."
Fredrick Bastiat
"Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all."
Frederic Bastiat, 1837
"The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they suppress."
Frederick Douglas, 1849
"Human or individual rights, such as the rights to life, liberty and property, are derived from man's innate moral agency and capacity for reason."
Ilana Mercer, 2003
"Where there is no market there is no price system, and where there is no price system there can be no economic calculation."
Ludwig Von Mises, Socialism
"It is a matter of temperament how we shape lives in the knowledge of an inescapable catastrophe. In high school I had chosen a verse by Virgil as my motto: Tu ne cede malis sed contra audentior ito ("Do not yield to the bad, but always oppose it with courage.") In the darkest hours of the war, I recalled this dictum.... I would not lose courage even now. I would do everything an economist could do. I would not tire in professing what I knew to be right."
Ludwig von Mises, Autobiography
"The only thing liberals have done for blacks is give them an inferiority complex."
Charles Barkley
The problem of socialist economic calculation is precisely this: that in the absence of market prices for the factors of production, a computation of profit or loss is not feasible.
Ludwig Von Mises, Human Action
The overwhelmingly rapid triumph of the demonstration that no economic calculation is possible under a socialist system is without precedent indeed in the history of human thought. The socialists cannot help admitting their crushing final defeat. They no longer claim that socialism is matchlessly superior to capitalism because it brushes away markets, market prices, and competition. On the contrary. They are now eager to justify socialism by pointing out that it is possible to preserve these institutions even under socialism. They are drafting outlines for a socialism in which there are prices and competition.
Ludwig Von Mises, Human Action
"A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government."
Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address
"I can only say that 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 essential to the adjustment and balance of the general system, but the safeguard to the continuance of a free government."
Robert E. Lee, Letter to Jonathan D. Lord Acton
"Life, faculties, production - in other words, individuality, liberty, property - this is man. And in spite of the cunning of artful political leaders, these three gifts from God precede all human legislation, and are superior to it. Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place."
Frédéric Bastiat, The Law
Our children and grand babies have no future except as indentured servants, that's a fact."
Devvy Kidd
"...liberty...the people's zeal to preserve it has ever been called ingratitude by such as had designs against it..."
Cato
"Let people alone, and they will take care of themselves, and do it best; and if they do not, a sufficient punishment will follow their neglect, without the magistrate's interposition and penalties..."
Cato
"We cannot ignore the fact that when the Soviets took power in Russia, they taught Russians to hate their past, to reject their parents, to condemn and even to forget their history."
Ronald F. Maxwell, Film Maker, Director of Gettysburg and Gods and Generals
"The true reason for allegiance to the Flag is the "republic for which it stands." ... And what does that vast thing, the Republic mean? It is the concise political word for the Nation - the One Nation which the Civil War was fought to prove. To make that One Nation idea clear, we must specify that it is indivisible, as Webster and Lincoln used to repeat in their great speeches."
Francis Bellamy, socialist and author of the Pledge of Allegiance (See John W. Baer, "The Pledge of Allegiance: A Short History)
"The Pledge itself is an oath of allegiance to the central state, and the "under God" language only serves to deify the state. From the perspective of a Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, or James Madison, nothing could be more un-American. After all, they and their contemporaries had fought a long and bloody war of secession to sever their forced allegiance, complete with loyalty oaths, to another overbearing and tyrannical state, namely the British empire."
Thomas J. DiLorenzo
"Where government moves in, community retreats, civil society disintegrates and our ability to control our own destiny atrophies."
Janice Rogers Brown, California Supreme Court Justice
"How can there possibly be liberty and justice for all, when, in the name of justice, people claim rights to income, food, housing, education, health care, transportation, ad infinitum? We can't. Positive rights to receive such things, absent an obligation to earn them, must violate others' liberty, by taking some of their income without their consent. They are really just wishes, convertible into benefits for some only by employing the government to violate others' rights not to have what is theirs taken."
Prof. Gary Galles of Pepperdine University
"When a government has ceased to protect the lives, liberty, and property of the people...and...becomes an instrument in the hands of evil rulers for their oppression...it is a...sacred obligation to their posterity to abolish such government, and create another in its stead."
Sam Houston
"There are only two means by which men can deal with one another: guns or logic. Force or persuasion. Those who know that they cannot win by means of logic have always resorted to guns."
Ayn Rand
"The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom."
Justice William O. Douglas
"In matters of principle, stand like a rock."
Thomas Jefferson
"Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end."
Prof. John E. E. D. Acton
"If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free."
P. J. O'Rourke
"That the sole object and only legitimate end of government is to protect the citizen in the enjoyment of life, liberty, and property, and when the government assumes other functions it is usurpation and oppression."
Section 35, Alabama Constitution of 1901.
"It seems obvious to me now - though I was slow coming to the conclusion - that the institution of private property, the dispersion of power and importance that goes with it, has been a main factor in producing that limited amount of free-and-equalness which Marx hoped to render infinite by abolishing this institution."
Max Eastman, Marxist
"One does not encourage "responsibility" by forcibly restricting the range of people's authority over their own lives."
Butler Shaffer, Law Professor, Southwestern University
"The postulate of the all-commanding central government has resulted, for the first time in mankind's long and painful existence, in what were literally World Wars."
Dr. Clyde Wilson, Professor of History, University of South Carolina
"Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance and the gospel of envy."
Winston Churchill, 1948
"All experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."
Thomas Jefferson
"But know this: every time you learn something new about liberty; share a book, article or idea; contribute to a good cause; write a letter to the editor; or give another hero of liberty moral support, you are taking a sledgehammer to the foundation of despotism in our time."
Lew Rockwell
"Legitimacy can vanish in an instant, exposed as a façade that covers up the massive looting machine that is government. It is the role of all of us to break the silence."
Lew Rockwell
"Live free or die; death is not the worst of evils"
Revolutionary hero Gen. Stark
"Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive."
Ayn Rand
"To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good."
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
"Politicians, Like Bombers, Seldom See Their Victims..."
Dr. Donald Boudreaux, in his article, "Losing Touch"
"[a]rbitrary government actions which infringe property interests cannot be saved from constitutional infirmity by the beneficial purposes of the regulators."
Janice Rogers Brown
"Theft is still theft even when the government approves of the thievery."
Janice Rogers Brown
"The right to express one's individuality and essential human dignity through the free use of property is just as important as the right to do so through speech, the press, or the free exercise of religion."
Janice Rogers Brown
"The most important political office is that of the private citizen."
Justice Louis D. Brandeis
"Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again;
Th' eternal years of God are hers;
But Error, wounded, writhes in pain,
And dies among his worshippers"
Bryant
"The Fed Causes Misallocation of Capital entrepreneurs need to estimate the likely success of their undertakings, and for that they rely on economic calculation and the market price system."
George F. Smith, The Laissez Faire Electronic Times, Vol 2, No 39, October 6, 2003
"On the unhampered market, the interest rate becomes a reliable signal to business people that authentic savings are available for capital goods investment."
George F. Smith, The Laissez Faire Electronic Times, Vol 2, No 39, October 6, 2003
"I believe in the federalist system, which means when you have difficult problems to sort out, they should do that at the local level. The one thing that is hard for a lot of conservatives to accept is that if you legalize freedom, you also legalize the right of people to do dumb things and to offend people. And as long as those dumb things only hurt oneself, the constitutionalist doesn't object."
Rep. Ron Paul
"You cannot love freedom and seek government-provided economic security from your government. You chose either one or the other."
Neal Boortz
"Some people say that Libertarians want anarchy. But anarchy is what we have now. Our cities aren't safe, our schools are centers of violence, the politicians have turned the rule of law into a chaotic web of millions of regulations and mandates. Libertarians want to restore order by removing, wherever possible, the destabilizing influence of government."
Harry Browne
"The problem with politics isn't the money, it's the power. So long as politicians have the power to grant favors, exemptions, and business protection, people will find some way to subvert them -- if not with money now, then with promises to take care of them later. The only way we will clean up campaign financing is by taking power away from the politicians -- reducing the federal government to just the functions specified in the Constitution."
Harry Browne
"In my experience, people who are truly compassionate rarely use the word "compassion." Those who do talk compassion generally intend to be compassionate with your money, not their own. It's wrong for someone to confiscate your money, give it to someone else, and call that "compassion.""
Harry Browne
"They say that politics is the art of compromise. And that's true. The politicians compromise away our money, our civil liberties, and our property."
Harry Browne
"Conservatives say the government can't end poverty by force, but they believe it can use force to make people moral. Liberals say government can't make people be moral, but they believe it can end poverty. Neither group attempts to explain why government is so clumsy and destructive in one area but a paragon of efficiency and benevolence in the other."
Harry Browne
"The Constitution authorizes the federal government to defend us from enemies -- not run around the world creating enemies. The politicians justify U.S. military power by saying, "It's still a dangerous world out there." But if it is dangerous to us, it's because our government has repeatedly stuck its nose in matters that are none of our business -- and thereby created enemies all over the world."
Harry Browne
"The government can't keep the peace in Washington, DC, but it sends troops on "peacekeeping missions" to Somalia and Haiti -- to save those countries from being run by the wrong thugs."
Harry Browne
"If we repeal the income tax, you'll be able to afford to put your children in any private or religious school you want -- where they'll be taught the subjects and values you want them to learn, not those imposed by the educational bureaucracy. Every attempt to fix education through national standards, testing, vouchers, charter schools, or some other Band-Aid amounts to just another government program that requires you to continue fighting to make the program work as you want."
Harry Browne
"Most pollution takes place on government property -- on government lands and roads, in government lakes, rivers, and streams. If someone dumped garbage on your property every day, you'd call the police and get them to stop the trespasser from polluting your property. But government allowed companies to dump toxic wastes in its lakes and streams, and to clear-cut or strip-mine its lands. Then, when public outrage became overwhelming, the government responded by passing new laws and setting up new agencies that harass companies and property owners who have always kept far better care of their property than the government has."
Harry Browne
"Is it extreme to want the government to abide by the Constitution? To believe that when federal, state, and local taxes amount to 48% of the national income, government is too big and oppressive? To think that people should be free to invest their retirement money as they see fit? To believe that the Bill of Rights should be honored literally?"
Harry Browne
"If you had a package that absolutely had to be somewhere in the U.S. tomorrow morning, would you send it by the Post Office -- which is a government agency -- or by Federal Express, a private company that can make a profit only if it keeps its promise to you? If your life depended on the accurate testing of a medicine, would you want it done by a government agency or by a company whose success depended on absolute accuracy?"
Harry Browne
"The free market punishes irresponsibility. Government rewards it."
Harry Browne
"Whatever the issue, let freedom offer us a hundred choices, instead of having government force one answer on everyone."
Harry Browne
"I want a government small enough to fit inside the Constitution."
Harry Browne
"Today 51% of all health-care dollars in America are spent by governments -- not insurance companies, employers, or individuals, but by governments. If there is a crisis in health care -- and there certainly is -- the government, not the free market, is responsible for it."
Harry Browne
"Immigrants used to come to America seeking freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom from government. Now they come looking for free health care, free education, and a free lunch."
Harry Browne
"Every time you help pass a law you think is needed, you make it easier for others to pass a law you won't like. Give the government the weapons to fight your enemy and it will use them against you."
Harry Browne
"I don't agree with the idea that a libertarian is someone who is fiscally conservative and socially liberal. It is a mistake to define libertarians in terms of conservatives or liberals. Conservative politicians are as fiscally imprudent as liberals, and liberal politicians are as contemptuous of individual rights as conservatives. Libertarians stand for individual liberty and personal responsibility on all issues at all times. Conservatives and liberals each sometimes take positions similar to libertarians, but -- unlike libertarians -- there is no consistent principle running through all their political positions."
Harry Browne
"If you ask the government to impose morality, then moral questions will be decided by whoever has the most political power."
Harry Browne
"Politicians play cruel jokes on us. They talk of plans to bring peace to the world, when their real interest is in subsidizing military contractors. They speak of "empowering" minorities, when their real interest is in empowering the leaders of special-interest groups. They talk of helping the poor, but eagerly put them out of work with minimum wage laws. Whatever they proclaim publicly, there always seems to be someone in the background with extraordinary political influence who benefits far more than those the politicians claim to help."
Harry Browne
"The great delusion of political activity is the belief that you can have the government do exactly what you want -- that, somehow, you can get it to perform some function for some good purpose, with nothing bad thrown into the bargain -- and that the program you envision will be carried out dutifully by thousands of bureaucrats in just the way you think it should be handled."
Harry Browne
"Whenever the government fails to prevent a plane crash, the event is cited as justification for having the government prevent plane crashes."
Harry Browne
"Republicans campaign like Libertarians and govern like Democrats."
Harry Browne
"Government seems to operate on the principle that if even one individual is incapable of using his freedom competently, no one can be allowed to be free."
Harry Browne
"The most secure safety net in the world is the generosity of family, friends, churches, service clubs, foundations, the United Way, and other charitable agencies. These people are determined to help. Government bureaucrats are determined to enlarge their power by keeping as many people as possible on welfare."
Harry Browne
"If you want to win an argument, appeal to natural rights or economic theory. If you want to win a convert, appeal to self-interest. No one will pay much attention to you until you show how your proposals will change his life for the better."
Harry Browne
"Federal, state, and local taxes take 48% of the national income. That means if you and your spouse both work, one of you is working for the government and the other is working for your family."
Harry Browne
"Robert Bork has said that Libertarians have an unrealistic "sweet view of human nature," and that is why they oppose government attempts to impose morality. He has this matter precisely backward. It is because there are evil, incompetent people in the world that we must never give government the power to enforce morality, economic equality, or any other social goal. The coercive power of government is always a beacon to those who want to dominate others -- summoning the worst dregs of society to Washington to use that power to impose their will upon others."
Harry Browne
"There is no waste in government. Politicians create programs for the specific purpose of helping their friends and political supporters -- to make it easier to re-elect the politicians. The re-election rate of incumbents proves that the programs are very efficient; they do exactly what they're designed to do."
Harry Browne
"Who is helped by being made a ward of the state, forced to live in slums, cornered in a housing development to be preyed upon by criminals and drug dealers, and unable to take a job without losing money on the deal? Only politicians and bureaucrats benefit from welfare -- and that's why every welfare reform leads to bigger budgets and more people on welfare."
Harry Browne
"I'm for a flat tax -- as long as the flat rate is zero. The object is to get rid of big government, not find a new way of financing it."
Harry Browne
"Energy and persistence conquer all things."
Benjamin Franklin
"Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'press on' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race."
Calvin Coolidge
"Any ideology can probably be described as a systematic way of misunderstanding the world."
Fred Reed
"The war against drugs is wrong both tactically and morally. It assumes people are too stupid, too reckless and too irresponsible to decide whether and under what conditions to consume drugs. The war on drugs is morally bankrupt."
Larry Elder
"1. The use of informers, 2. Filling the prisons, 3. Disproportionate imprisonment of blacks, 4. Destruction of inner cities, 5. Compounding the harm to users, 6. Undertreatment of chronic pain, 7. Harming foreign countries."
Economist Milton Friedman, listing reasons to abandon the drug war
"The Democrats' conception of a "plan" is like the liberal fantasy that there's a room somewhere full of unlimited amounts of "free" money that we could just give to teachers and hospitals and poor people and AIDS sufferers and the homeless if only the bad, greedy Republicans would give us the key to that wonderful room. Republicans should claim the "plan" is in that room. In a lockbox."
Ann Coulter
"These United States are confronted with an economic affliction of great proportions...our economic decisions, penalizes thrift, and crushes the struggling young and the fixed-income elderly alike. It threatens to shatter the lives of millions of our people."
Ronald Reagan
"Idle industries have cast workers into unemployment, causing human misery and personal indignity. Those who do work are denied a fair return for their labor by a tax system which penalizes successful achievement and keeps us from maintaining full productivity.”
Ronald Reagan
"For decades, we have piled deficit upon deficit, mortgaging our future and our children's future for the temporary convenience of the present. To continue this long trend is to guarantee tremendous social, cultural, political, and economic upheavals."
Ronald Reagan
"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
"All of us need to be reminded that the Federal Government did not create the States; the States created the Federal Government."
Ronald Reagan
"What is the present family based on? On capitalism, the acquisition of private property. It exists in all of its meaning only for the bourgeoisie... and will vanish when capitalism vanishes. Are you accusing us that we want to end the exploitation by parents of their children? We confess to that crime... The bourgeois sees in his wife nothing but an instrument of production."
Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto. Columnist Richard Poe pointed out the feminist movement heralding back to, and cynically symbiotically linked with, Marxist ideology.
"There is a saying among activists of the Left that "worse is better." The more alienated and unhappy people feel, the more susceptible they are for recruitment into the revolutionary cause. For that reason, many leftists deliberately promote policies that they know will cause misery, suffering and chaos."
Richard Poe
"As the power of the family declines, the power of the Left grows."
Richard Poe
"When personal freedom's being abused, you have to move to limit it."
Bill Clinton, in a 1993 speech justifying random weapon sweeps by police acting without search warrants in public housing
"Could it be that, given a choice between a "bourgeois" society of happy, prosperous families and an authoritarian police state, Bill Clinton actually preferred the latter?"
Richard Poe
"Would-be planners are busily foisting tyranny and poverty on people in pursuit of plans which cannot succeed."
Murray Rothbard
"Politics belongs to those who show up."
Unknown
"I'm proud to be a taxpaying American, but I could be just as proud for half the money!"
Will Rogers
"Leaders are visionaries with a poorly developed sense of fear and no concept of the odds against them. They make things happen."
Dr. Robert Jarvick
"Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under."
H.L. Mencken
"Sir, I have not yet begun to fight!"
John Paul Jones
"So, as you go into battle, remember your ancestors and remember your descendants."
Tacitus
"Breathes there the man with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land!"
Walter Scott
"A man's country is not a certain area of land, of mountains, rivers, and woods, but it is a principle; and patriotism is loyalty to that principle."
George William Curtis
"Let abhorrence be for those who wage wanton or wicked wars, who with ruthless violence oppress the upright and the unoffending."
Theodore Roosevelt
"It's become a matter of survival for business to pay tributes to politicians in return for protection against harmful edicts and legislation."
George Smith
"... [I]n the long run stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty."
George W. Bush
"Did 9-11 teach us nothing about blowback? The terrorists were over here because we were over there, dominating the Islamic world culturally, politically, militarily."
Pat Buchanan
"The Bush strategy of moral interventionism in the internal affairs of foreign nations, to rearrange their societies on an American model, is a formula for endless war abroad and Big Government forever at home."
Pat Buchanan
"Whenever government intervenes in the market, it aggravates rather than settles the problems it has set out to solve."
Murray Rothbard
"Secular nations have one thing in common -- mass graves, and the reason is that they believe the government is the final arbiter of right and wrong and good and evil."
Unidentified supporter of Judge Roy Moore
"Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent."
Isaac Asimov
"When something cannot go on, it has a tendency to stop."
Herb Stein, chairman of Nixon's Council of Economic Advisers
"The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics."
Thomas Sowell
"Selfish group interests may impel a man to ask [the government] for protection for his own firm. ...The only effect of protection is to divert production from those places in which it could produce more per unit of capital and labor expanded to places in which it produces less. It makes people poorer, not more prosperous."
Ludwig von Mises
"[G]un control often serves as a gateway to tyranny. Tyrants from Hitler to Mao to Stalin have sought to disarm their own citizens, for the simple reason that unarmed people are easier to control. Our Founders, having just expelled the British army, knew that the right to bear arms serves as the guardian of every other right. This is the principle so often ignored by both sides in the gun control debate. Only armed citizens can resist tyrannical government."
Ron Paul
"It has been pointed out that the days of democracy are numbered once the belly takes command of the head. When the less affluent feel the urge to break a commandment and begin to covet that which their more affluent neighbors possess, they are tempted to use their votes to obtain instant satisfaction. Then equal opportunity at the starting line becomes an extended guarantee of at least a tie at the finish of the race. Under the euphemism 'the greatest good for the greatest number,' we destroy a system which has accomplished just that and move toward the managed economy which strangles freedom and mortgages generations yet to come."
Ronald Reagan
"Even now politicians use the phrase "federal dollars" as a synonym for "free money." It's a dangerous tendency, for it leaves the states accountable to Washington rather than to their own voters. This mix of state and federal governments is not just economically suspect but politically corrosive; it undermines the essence of real federalism: the integrity of both state and federal governments."
Paul Greenberg
"Private property rights are the bulwark for liberty, and should be jealously guarded and not be sacrificed for the sake of expediency."
Walter E. Williams
"It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt."
John Philpot Curran
"The First Amendment of the Constitution was not written to protect the people of this country from religious values; it was written to protect religious values from government tyranny."
Ronald Reagan
"One of these days, someone smarter and younger and more articulate than I is going to get through to the American people just how really messed up the federal government has become. And when that happens, the American people are going to rise up like that football crowd in Cleveland and run both teams off the field."
Senator Zell Miller
"Beware the greedy hand of government, thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry."
Thomas Paine
"The authority of government ... can have no pure right over my person and my property but what I concede to it."
Henry David Thoreau
"Most bad government results from too much government."
Thomas Jefferson
"Utopian dreams, fulfilled by autocratic means, hardly qualify as being morally justifiable."
Ron Paul
"Justifying conscription to promote the cause of liberty is one of the most bizarre notions ever conceived by man!"
Ron Paul
"A government that is willing to enslave a portion of its people to fight an unjust war can never be trusted to protect the liberties of its own citizens."
Ron Paul
"The fraud and the poseur have the run of our institutions and cultural products!"
Ilana Mercer
"The truth is, the only enemies we have are those our own government is manufacturing to justify a powerful central government that is sucking the wealth and liberty out of this country like some monstrous leech."
Charley Reese
"The degree of integrity is inversely proportional to the number and complexities of rules and bureaucracy."
Geoff Metcalf
"The first step toward solving a problem is to find some humor in it."
Unknown
"The necessary consequence of an egalitarian program is the decidedly inegalitarian creation of a ruthless power elite."
Murray Rothbard
"Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion."
Murray Rothbard
"Though my heart may be left of centre, I have always known that the only economic system that works is a market economy... it is the only one that reflects the nature of life itself."
Vaclax Havel, Summer Meditations
"... There is no such thing in America as an independent press ... We are the tools and vassals for rich men behind the scenes ... Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."
John Swinton, former New York Times Chief of Staff
"The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms...Let it come. I repeat, Sir, Let it come...Is life so dear or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"
Patrick Henry
"I am not well versed in history, but I will submit to your recollection whether liberty has been destroyed most often by the licentiousness of the people or by the tyranny of rulers? I imagine, Sir, you will find the balance on the side of tyranny."
Patrick Henry
"But now, Sir, the American spirit, assisted by the ropes and chains of consolidation, is about to convert this country to a powerful and mighty empire."
Patrick Henry
"Fear is the passion of slaves"
Patrick Henry
"I am literally a grandchild of the American Civil War, and I belonged to the losing side. Had the issue of that war been the abolition of slavery, I could not have faulted our defeat-morally at least. But Mr. Lincoln-the first of the modern tyrants-chose to fight the war not on the issue of slavery but on the holiness and indivisibility of a union that he alone had any understanding of. With his centralizing of all power at Washington this "reborn" (sic) union was ready for a world empire that has done us as little good as it has done the world we have made so many messes in."
Gore Vidal
"When everyone is out to get you, paranoia is just good thinking."
Unknown
"[H]istory repeats itself first as tragedy, and then as farce..."
Ryan McMaken (original?)
"...the powers which the general government may exercise are only those specifically enumerated in the Constitution and such implied powers as are necessary and proper to carry into effect the enumerated powers...The supremacy of the Constitution as law is declared without qualification. That supremacy is absolute; the supremacy of a statute enacted by Congress is not absolute, but conditioned upon its being made in pursuance of the Constitution."
U.S. Supreme Court, may 18, 1936
"A tax, in the general understanding of the term, and as used in the Constitution, signifies an exaction for the support of the Government. The word has never been thought to connote the expropriation of money from one group for the benefit of another."
Justice Owen Roberts
"The question is not what power the Federal Government ought to have, but what powers, in fact, have been given by the people...The federal union is a government of delegated powers. It has only such as are expressly conferred upon it and such as are reasonably to be implied from those granted. In this respect, we differ radically from nations where all legislative power, without restriction or limitation, is vested in a parliament or other legislative body subject to no restrictions except the discretion of its members...From the accepted doctrine that the United States is a government of delegated powers, it follows that those not expressly granted, or reasonably to be implied from such as are conferred, are reserved to the states, or to the people."
Justice Owen Roberts
"I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution."
President Grover Cleveland, reasoning his veto of hundreds of spending bills
"With respect to the two words 'general welfare,' I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators."
James Madison
"The great object is that every man be armed. Everyone who is able may have a gun."
Patrick Henry, "Gun Nut"
"The way the country puked up its ancient principles at the first touch of temptation was sickening."
William James, commenting on the Senate's “jingoinst approval” of annexing the Phillipines
"We are false in all we have believed in. This great free land which for more than a century has offered a refuge to the oppressed of every land has now turned to oppression."
Moorfield Storey
"How much longer will the rest of the world be willing to accept debt instruments from the United States in exchange for real goods and services? It is only a matter of time before the United States will no longer be considered creditworthy. It is only a matter of time before the United States will not be creditworthy."
Richard Duncan
" 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death."
Thomas Paine
"The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and notwithstanding go out to meet it."
Thucydides
"He who reigns within himself and rules his passions, desires, and fears is more than a king."
John Milton
"Politics, n. strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles."
Ambrose Bierce
"If Columbus had an advisory committee he would probably still be at the dock."
Justice Arthur Goldberg
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
Albert Einstein
"It does not take a majority to prevail ... but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men."
Samuel Adams
"Political forecasting has one essential function, which is to make astrology look respectable."
Argus Hamilton
"They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong. There are no easy answers, but there are simple answers. We must have the courage to do what we know is morally right."
Ronald Reagan
"The author hopes she has done justice to that nobility, generosity, and humanity which in many cases characterizes individuals at the South. Such instances save us from utter despair of our kind. To you, generous, noble-minded men and women of the South - you, whose virtue, and magnanimity, and purity of character are the greater for the severer trial it has encountered - to you is her appeal."
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Postscript
"Do you say that the people of the free states have nothing to do with it? The people of the free states have defended, encouraged, and participated; and are more guilty for it, before God, than the South. There are multitudes of slaves temporarily owned, and sold again, by merchants in Northern cities; and shall the whole guilt or obloquy of slavery fall only on the South? Northern men, Northern mothers, Northern Christians, have something more to do than denounce their brethren at the South; they have to look to the evil among themselves."
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Postscript
"Because we live and work ensnared in a seamless web of statism, market solutions are often circuitous responses to the government's laws and wars. These statist assaults on our prosperity ought to be the proper focus of the fight."
Ilana Mercer
"The Eyes of all our Countrymen are now upon us, and we shall have their blessings, and praises, if happily we are the instruments of saving them from the Tyranny mediated against them."
George Washington
"You know how Congress is. They'll vote for anything if the thing they vote for will turn around and vote for them. Politics ain't nothing but reciprocity."
Will Rogers
"The evils produced by the system of paper money and moneyed corporations are of such a nature that they cannot be remedied by acts of legislation. When they come they must be endured. If we will have the system, we must bear its consequences."
William M. Gouge, Short History of Paper Money and Banking in the United States (1833).
"In July 1832, when President Andrew Jackson vetoed the bill to extend the charter for the Bank of the United States another 20 years, Biddle sought to contract the economy to deny him reelection in the fall. When that failed and Jackson was reelected, Biddle continued to constrict credit for another two years in order to destroy Jackson's popularity and coerce a re-charter."
H.A. Scott Trask, writing for the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Dec 19, 2003, demonstrating the political tactics available to central bankers
"A fearful people are the easiest to govern. Their freedom and liberty can be taken away and they can be convinced to believe that it was done for their own good - to give them security. They can be convinced to give up their liberty voluntarily."
Gene E. Franchini, retired chief justice of the New Mexico Supreme Court, Sept 12, 2003
"Posterity -- you will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it."
John Quincy Adams
"The recorded progress of our Republic, materially and spiritually, in itself proves the wisdom of the inherited policy of noninvolvement in Old World affairs. Confident of our ability to work out our own destiny, and jealously guarding our right to do so, we seek no part in directing the destinies of the Old World. We do not mean to be entangled...the America builded on the foundation laid by the inspired fathers, can be a party to no permanent military alliance. It can enter into no political commitments, nor assume any economic obligations which will subject our decisions to any other than our own authority."
Warren Harding, Inaugural Address, March 4, 1921:
"Political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism."
George Orwell
"Politicians have learned well how to swamp us with garbage while claiming it's ambrosia."
Brad Edmonds
"A Union of the States containing such an ingredient seemed to provide for its own destruction. The use of force against a State would look more like a declaration of war than an infliction of punishment and would probably be considered by the party attacked as a dissolution of all previous compacts by which it might be bound."
James Madison, on rejecting a clause in the Constitution prohibiting a state's right to secede
"Those who are too smart to enter into politics will be governed by those who are not."
Plato
"Noise proves nothing. Often the hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid."
Mark Twain
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
William Pitt
"Difference of opinion leads to enquiry, and enquiry to truth."
Thomas Jefferson
"The friendliness and charity of our countrymen can always be relied upon to relieve their fellow-citizens in misfortune. This has been repeatedly and quite lately demonstrated. Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the Government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character, while it prevents the indulgence among our people of that kindly sentiment and conduct which strengthens the bonds of a common brotherhood."
Grover Cleveland
"A country that goes out of its way to imprison the innocent has no business preaching democracy to the world."
Paul Craig Roberts
"Roll back the state. It is bloated beyond any reasonable view of the Constitution, and is an affront to the principles of the American founding."
David Deiteman
"I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution or that have failed their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is "needed" before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents "interests, " I shall reply that I was informed that their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can."
Barry Goldwater
"A people ... who are possessed of the spirit of commerce, who see and who will pursue their advantages may achieve almost anything."
George Washington
“Sir, in granting Congress the power to raise armies, the people have granted all the means which are ordinary and usual, and which are consistent with the liberties and security of the people themselves; and they have granted no others. To talk about the unlimited power of the government over the means to execute its authority, is to hold a language which is true only in regard to despotism. The tyranny of arbitrary government consists as much in its means as in its end; and it would be a ridiculous and absurd constitution which should be less cautious to guard against abuses in the one case than in the other. … A free government with arbitrary means to administer it is a contradiction; a free government without adequate provision for personal security is an absurdity; a free government, with an uncontrolled power of military conscription, is a solecism, at once the most ridiculous and abominable that ever entered into the head of man. ...”
Daniel Webster, before the House of Representatives, 1814
"Liberty means responsibility. That's why most men dread it."
George Bernard Shaw
"I do not believe in vile acquittals, phony appeasements, easy forgiveness. Even less, in the exploitation or the blackmail of the word Peace. When peace stands for surrender, fear, loss of dignity and freedom, it is no longer peace. It is suicide."
Oriana Fallaci
"I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents...."
James Madison
"To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical. ... A wise and frugal government ... shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. ... Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare but only those specifically enumerated. ... Would it not be better to simplify the system of taxation rather than to spread it over such a variety of subjects and pass through so many new hands?"
Thomas Jefferson
"The apportionment of taxes on the various descriptions of property is an act which seems to require the most exact impartiality; yet there is, perhaps, no legislative act in which greater opportunity and temptation are given to a predominant party to trample on the rules of justice. Every shilling which they overburden the inferior number is a shilling saved to their own pockets. ... A just security to property is not afforded by that government, under which unequal taxes oppress one species of property and reward another species. ... Government is instituted to protect property of every sort; as well that which lies in the various rights of individuals, as that which the term particularly expresses. This being the end of government, that alone is a just government which impartially secures to every man whatever is his own."
James Madison
"The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. If 'Thou shalt not covet' and 'Thou shalt not steal' were not commandments of Heaven, they must be made inviolable precepts in every society before it can be civilized or made free."
John Adams
"It is easy to think the State has a lot of different objects -- military, political, economic, and what not. But in a way things are much simpler than that. The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging in his own garden -- that is what the State is there for. And unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc., are simply a waste of time."
C.S. Lewis
"When you wake up in the morning and drink that first cup of coffee, you pay a sales tax. When you start your car, you pay an automobile tax. Drive to work, you pay a gas tax. At work, you pay an income tax -- and a payroll tax. You get home at night, and you pay a property tax. Flip on the light -- you're paying an electricity tax. Turn on the TV -- you pay a cable tax. Make a telephone call, you pay a utility tax. Brush your teeth, you'll pay a water tax. Even when you die, you pay a death tax. We are an overtaxed nation and hard-working Americans deserve a break."
Sen. Trent Lott
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, followed always by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years."
Alexander Fraser Tytler
"We need true tax reform that will at least make a start toward restoring for our children the American Dream that wealth is denied to no one, that each individual has the right to fly as high as his strength and ability will take him.... But we cannot have such reform while our tax policy is engineered by people who view the tax as a means of achieving changes in our social structure...."
Ronald Reagan (1964)
"The class war tactic highlights what the Left does best: divide Americans into groups. Collectivists see all issues of wealth and taxation as a zero-sum game played between competing groups. If one group gets a tax break, other groups must be rallied against it -- even if such a cut would ultimately benefit them. Yet the class warriors forget that American wealth is not static, but rather very dynamic. Poor people become rich, and rich people lose all of their money. In fact, at no time in American history have more of the nation's wealthy earned rather than inherited their money. Rich family dynasties are increasingly rare, and are quickly destroyed by unproductive spendthrift generations. So when the Left attacks the rich, they're attacking a fluid group that many poor Americans hope to join someday by moving up in life. Upward mobility is possible only in a free-market capitalist system, whereas collectivism dooms the poor to remain exactly where they are. I'm in favor of cutting everybody's taxes -- rich, poor, and otherwise. Whether a tax cut reduces a single mother's payroll taxes by forty dollars a month, or allows a wealthy business owner to save millions in capital gains, the net effect is beneficial. Both either spend, save, or invest the extra dollars, which helps all of us infinitely more than if those dollars were sent to the black hole known as the federal Treasury. The single mother desperately needs those extra dollars, and that's why we should reduce or eliminate her payroll taxes. As for the wealthy business owner and whether he 'needs' the extra dollars, I'll simply relate the old adage of the man who said 'I've never had my paycheck signed by a poor man'."
Ron Paul
"Our unalterable resolution would be to be free. They have attempted to subdue us by force, but God be praised! in vain. Their arts may be more dangerous then their arms. Let us then ... under God trust our cause to our swords."
Samuel Adams
“Freedom means little without property rights. What good is your freedom to use your talents and your willingness to work hard to acquire wealth if your rights to that wealth can be denied at the whim of a few politicians?”
Neal Boortz
"The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined."
James Madison, Federalist No. 45
"He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual.... This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart."
Thomas Jefferson, letter to Peter Carr, August 19, 1785
"History is only a tiresome repetition of one story."
William Graham Sumner
"When governments fear the people there is liberty. When the people fear the government there is tyranny."
Thomas Jefferson
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed and hence, clamorous to be led to safety - by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
H.L. Mencken, In Politics
"Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great."
Mark Twain
"If opportunity doesn't knock, build a door.
Milton Berle
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