"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it." Thomas Paine
"Death is better, a milder fate than tyranny." Aeschylus
"Destiny waits alike for the free man as well as for him enslaved by another's might." Aeschylus
"Now I tell you it is time the people of the United States were waking up with the understanding that if they don't save the Constitution from the dangers that threaten it, we will have a change of government." General Conference, April 1950 Joseph Fielding Smith (1876-1972)
"If you have ten thousand regulations you destroy all respect for the law." Winston Churchill
"Where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control." Lord Acton
"Each of us has a natural right to defend his person, his liberty, and his property." Frederic Bastiat
"The Constitution preserves the advantage of being armed which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation where the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms." James Madison
"The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedience, and by parts." Edmund Burke
"No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare." James Madison
"Those who have the privilege to know, have the duty to act." Albert Einstein
"Revolution is not something fixed in ideology, nor is it something fashioned to a particular decade. It is a perpetual process embedded in the human spirit." Abbie Hoffman
"Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad." James Madison
"Every individual necessarily labors to render the annual revenue of society as great as he can. He generally neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. He intends only his own gain, and he is, in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was not part of his intention." Adam Smith
"Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will, within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is oftent by the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual." Thomas Jefferson
"No one can read our Constitution without concluding that the people who wrote it wanted their government severely limited; the words "no" and "not" employed in restraint of government power occur 24 times in the first seven articles of the Constitution and 22 more times in the Bill of Rights." Edmund A. Opitz
"First they came for the communists, and I did not 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 did not speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I did not speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up." Pastor Martin Niemoller
"Governments need armies to protect them against their enslaved and oppressed subjects." Leo Tolstoy
"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 surest way to destruction." Thomas Jefferson
"Let us contemplate our forefathers, and posterity, and resolve to maintain the rights bequeathed to us from the former, for the sake of the latter. The necessity of the times, more than ever, calls for our utmost circumspection, deliberation, fortitude, and perseverance. Let us remember that 'if we suffer tamely a lawless attack upon our liberty, we encourage it, and involve others in our doom.' It is a very serious consideration...that millions yet unborn may be the miserable sharers of the event." --Samuel Adams, speech in Boston, 1771
"When the representative body have lost the confidence of their constituents, when they have notoriously made sale of their most valuable rights, when they have assumed to themselves powers which the people never put into their hands, then indeed their continuing in office becomes dangerous." Thomas Jefferson
"The people are the ultimate guardians of their own liberties. In every government on earth is some trace of human weakness, some germ of corruption and degeneracy . . . Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone." Thomas Jefferson
"The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government -- lest it come to dominate our lives and interests." Patrick Henry
"When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law." Frederic Bastiat
"In the end more than they wanted freedom, they wanted security. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free.” Edward Gibbon (1737-1794)
"Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress." - Frederick Douglass
"I have never seen more Senators express discontent with their jobs .... I think the major cause is that, deep down in our hearts, we have been accomplices in doing something terrible and unforgivable to our wonderful country. Deep down in our heart, we know that we have given our children a legacy of bankruptcy. We have defrauded our country to get ourselves elected." - John Danforth (R-Mo)
"Government that seeks its own preservation looks upon the strength and bravery of the people as the root of its greatest danger; and desires to render them weak, base, corrupt and unfaithful to each other, that they may neither dare to attempt the breaking of the yoke laid upon them, nor trust one another in any generous design for the recovery of their liberty." - Sidney
"Reporters today are far removed from America's founding values and are alarmed and contemptuous of gun owners as dangerous lower classes." Henry Allen, Washington Post
"If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and 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
"No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session." -Mark Twain (1866)
"The power of the state is measured by the power that men surrender to it." - Felix Morley
"Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may 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." Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power." --Benito Mussolini (cited by Lewis Lapham in Harper's, January 2002)
"Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God." - John Bradshaw
"We have plenty of rights in this country, provided you don't get caught exercising them." Terry Mitchell (Editor of The Revolutionary Toker)
"This [the U.S. Constitution] is likely to be administered for a course of years and then end in despotism... when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other." - Benjamin Franklin
"You do not examine legislation in light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered." Lyndon B. Johnson
"Today the path to total dictatorship in the United States can be laid by strictly legal means, unseen and unheard by the Congress, the President, or the people. Outwardly, we have a Constitutional government. We have something within our government... representing another form of government which believes our Constitution, is outmoded and is sure that it is the winning side... All the strange developments in foreign policy agreements may be traced to this group who are going to make us over to suit their pleasure." William E. Jenner (1908-1985) U.S. Senator, Indiana (R)
"I have no reason to suppose, that he, who would take away my Liberty, would not when he had me in his Power, take away everything else." John Locke (1690)
"We are a republic. Real liberty is never found in despotism or in the extremes of democracy." Alexander Hamilton.
"I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." Virginia Convention on the ratification of the Constitution, June 6, 1788 (Elliot's Debates, volume 3, p. 87) James Madison (1751-1836)
"Foolish liberals who are trying to read the Second Amendment out of the Constitution by claiming it's not an individual right or that it's too much of a public safety hazard don't see the danger in the big picture. They're courting disaster by encouraging others to use the same means to eliminate portions of the constitution they don't like." - Alan Dershowitz
"With each newly minted crisis, US leaders roll out the same time-tested scenario. They start demonizing a foreign leader ... charging them with being communistic or otherwise dictatorial, dangerously aggressive, power hungry, genocidal, given to terrorism or drug trafficking, ready to deny us access to vital resources, harboring weapons of mass destruction, or just inexplicably "anti-American" and "anti-West." Lacking any information to the contrary, the frightened public ... are swept along." - Michael Parenti
"That we are to stand by the president, right or wrong is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." - Theodore Roosevelt
"What this country needs are more unemployed politicians." -Edward Langley, Artist (1928 - 1995)
"If those in charge of our society - politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television - can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves." - Howard Zinn, historian and author
"Many politicians are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition, that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story, who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim. If men are to wait for liberty till they become wise and good in slavery, they may indeed wait forever." Lord Thomas Maculay
"It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error." - Justice Robert H. Jackson
"To consider judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions is a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy." Thomas Jefferson
"Courage is contagious. When a brave man takes a stand, the spines of others are often stiffened." Billy Graham
"Law is often the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual." Thomas Jefferson to I. Tiffany, 1819
"The State...both in its genesis and by its primary intention, is purely anti-social. It is not based on the idea of natural rights, but on the idea that the individual has no rights except those that the State may provisionally grant him" - Albert Jay Nock (Our Enemy, the State).
"A government official is a man who has risen from obscurity to something worse." Pat Robertson
"No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him. ...the idea is quite unfounded that on entering into society we give up any natural rights." Thomas Jefferson - from a letter to Francis W. Gilmor, July 7, 1786
"God grants liberty only to those who love it, and are always ready to guard and defend it." Daniel Webster
"Government is instituted for the protection, safety, and happiness of the people, and not for the profit, honour, or private interest of any man, family, or class of men.. the origin of all power is in the people, and they have an incontestable right to check the creatures of their own creation, vested with certain powers to guard the life, liberty and property of the community." Mercy Otis Warren "Observations on the New Constitution"
"Americans cannot escape a certain responsibility for what is done in our name around the world. In a democracy, even one as corrupted as ours, ultimate authority rests with the people. We empower the government with our votes, finance it with our taxes, bolster it with our silent acquiescence. If we are passive in the face of America's official actions overseas, we in effect endorse them." Mark Hertzgaard
"But we’re not a democracy. It’s a terrible misunderstanding and a slander to the idea of democracy to call us that. In reality, we’re a plutocracy: a government by the wealthy.” — Ramsey Clark (former U.S. Attorney General interview in The Sun magazine, August, 2001 )
"The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair." H.L. Mencken
"The most effective means of preventing tyranny is to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts." Thomas Jefferson
"America cannot have an empire abroad and a Republic at home." Mark Twain
"Under the Bush administration, openness and accountability have been replaced by secrecy and evasion of responsibility. They abuse their power, conceal their actions from the American people, and refuse to hold officials accountable." - Senator Edward M. Kennedy
"Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them. There is almost no kind of outrage, torture, imprisonment without trial, assassination, and bombing of civilians, which does not change its moral color when it is committed by our side. The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them." - George Orwell
"You must understand, therefore, that there are two ways of fighting: by law or by force. The first way is natural to men, and the second to beasts. But as the first way often proves inadequate one must have recourse to the second." - Niccolo Machiavelli in "The Prince."
"If this nation is to be wise as well as strong, if we are to achieve our destiny, then we must know all the facts and hear all the alternatives and listen to all the criticisms." John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) 35th President of the U.S. Saturday Review, p. 44. October 29, 1960
"We have the greatest opportunity the world has ever seen, as long as we remain honest -- which will be as long as we can keep the attention of our people alive. If they once become inattentive to public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, judges and governors would all become wolves." Thomas Jefferson
"If the test of patriotism comes only by reflexively falling into lockstep behind the leader whenever the flag is waved, then what we have is a formula for dictatorship, - not democracy... But the American way is to criticize and debate openly, not to accept unthinkingly the doings of government officials of this or any other country." - Michael Parenti
"The gun gives boldness, enterprise, and independence to the mind. Let your gun, therefore, be the constant companion of your walks." - Thomas Jefferson
"Without freedom there will be no firearms among the people; without firearms among the people there will not long be freedom. Certainly there are examples of countries where the people remain relatively free after the people have been disarmed, but there are no examples of a totalitarian state being created or existing where the people have personal arms." - Neal Knox
"No kingdom can be secured otherwise than by arming the people. The possession of arms is the distinction between a freeman and a slave. He, who has nothing, and who himself belongs to another, must be defended by him, whose property he is, and needs no arms. But he, who thinks he is his own master, and has what he can call his own, ought to have arms to defend himself, and what he possesses; else he lives precariously, and at discretion." - James Burgh, Political Disquisitions: Or, an Enquiry into Public Errors, Defects, and Abuses [London, 1774-1775].
"Gun bans don't disarm criminals, gun bans attract them." Walter Mondale
"Gun control? It's the best thing you can do for crooks and gangsters. I want you to have nothing. If I'm a bad guy, I'm always gonna have a gun. Safety locks? You will pull the trigger with a lock on, and I'll pull the trigger. We'll see who wins." - Sammy "The Bull" Gravano, whose testimony convicted John Gotti.
"...but if circumstances should at any time oblige the government to form an army of any magnitude, that army can never be formidable to the liberties of the people, while there is a large body of citizens, little if at all inferior to them in discipline and use of arms, who stand ready to defend their rights..." - Alexander Hamilton speaking of standing armies in Federalist No. 29.
"Arms are the only true badges of liberty. The possession of arms is the distinction of a free man from a slave." - Andrew Fletcher 1698
"There is no distinctly Native American criminal class...save Congress." -Mark Twain
"Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of. Notwithstanding the military establishments in the several kingdoms of Europe, which are carried as far as the public resources will bear, the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms." - James Madison, The Federalist Papers, No. 46
"Are we at last brought to such a humiliating and debasing degradation, that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own defence? Where is the difference between having our arms in our own possession and under our own direction, and having them under the management of Congress? If our defence be the_real_object of having those arms, in whose hands can they be trusted with more propriety, or equal safety to us, as in our own hands?" Patrick Henry
"Certainly one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of citizens to keep and bear arms.... The right of citizens to bear arms is just one guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which now appears remote in America but which historically has proven to be always possible." - Hubert H. Humphrey (1911-1978) US Vice-President, US Senator (D-MN) Source: "Know Your Lawmakers," Guns magazine, February 1960, p.6
"The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the best and most natural defense of a free country..." - James Madison, I Annals of Congress 434, June 8, 1789.
"Both the oligarch and Tyrant mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of arms." - Aristotle
"It is also in the interests of a tyrant to keep his people poor, so that they may not be able to afford the cost of protecting themselves by arms and be so occupied with their daily tasks that they have no time for rebellion." - Aristotle
"After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it." - William Burroughs, 1992
"Americans who value freedom had better be more concerned about the gun control crowd than the criminals. The criminals want your money. The Neo-Totalitarians want your freedom." - Charlie Reese
"The right of the people to keep and bear arms has been recognized by the General Government; but the best security of that right after all is, the military spirit, that taste for martial exercises, which has always distinguished the free citizens of these States....Such men form the best barrier to the liberties of America" - Gazette of the United States, October 14, 1789.
"...to disarm the people - that was the best and most effectual way to enslave them." - George Mason, 3 Elliot, Debates at 380.
"We have "federal sheriffs" beyond imagination. There are forty six civilian agencies of the Federal Government whose agents carry guns and have the power to make arrests. These "great insults on the people" have been allowed because there is little we can do about them, short of armed rebellion. And by the way, no laws authorizing "civil forfeiture" or other related measures of tyranny have been struck down by the federal courts." Kenneth W. Royce (Hologram of Liberty)
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human liberty; it is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves." - William Pitt
"Now what liberty can there be where property is taken away without consent?" Samuel Adams (Nov 20, 1772)
"It is only in this way that we can hope to arrive at truth, and fulfill the great responsibility which we hold to God and our country. Should I keep back my opinions at such a time, through fear of giving offense, I should consider myself as guilty of treason towards my country, and of an act of disloyalty toward the Majesty of Heaven, which I revere above all earthly kings. ... Are we disposed to be of the number of those who, having eyes, see not, and, having ears, hear not, the things, which so nearly concern their temporal salvation? We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth... For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst, and to provide for it. Let us not, I beseech you, sir, deceive ourselves. ... 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
"Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women. When it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it." - Justice Learned Hand
"Those who lay down on their rights make it harder for those who stand up for theirs." - Author Unknown
"Liberty is the only thing you cannot have unless you are willing to give it to others." - William Allen White
"If we can't think for ourselves, if we're unwilling to question authority, then we're just putty in the hands of those in power. But if the citizens are educated and form their own opinions, then those in power work for us. In every country, we should be teaching our children the scientific method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency, humility and community spirit. In the demon-haunted world that we inhabit by virtue of being human, this may be all that stands between us and the enveloping darkness." Carl Sagan
"The essence of constitutionalism in a democracy is not merely to shape and condition the nature of majorities, but also to stipulate that certain things are impermissible, no matter how large and fervent a majority might want them." - George Will
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." - Robert Heinlein
"There is therefore, secondly, another way whereby governments are dissolved, and that is, when the legislative, or the prince, either of them, act contrary to their trust. First, The legislative acts against the trust reposed in them, when they endeavour to invade the property of the subject, and to make themselves, or any part of the community, masters, or arbitrary disposers of the lives, liberties, or fortunes of the people." - "The Second Treatise of Civil Government" (1690) by John Locke, at Chapter XIX "Of the Dissolution of Government"Sec. 221.
"For centuries, pillage by invading armies was a normal part of warfare… Nowadays, at least in more civilized countries, we do not let armies rampage for booty. We leave the pillaging to men in suits, and we don’t call it pillaging anymore. We call it economic development." Brian Whitaker (The Guardian)
"The sacred rights of property are to be guarded at every point. I call them sacred, because, if they are unprotected, all other rights become worthless or visionary. What is personal liberty, if it does not draw after it the right to enjoy the fruits of our own industry? What is political liberty, if it imparts only perpetual poverty to us and all our posterity? What is the privilege of a vote, if the majority of the hour may sweep away the earnings of our whole lives, to gratify the rapacity of the indolent, the cunning, or the profligate, who are borne into power upon the tide of a temporary popularity?" Judge Joseph Story, 1852
"Power is the great evil with which we are contending. We have divided power between three branches of government and erected checks and balances to prevent abuse of power. However, where is the check on the power of the judiciary? If we fail to check the power of the judiciary, I predict that we will eventually live under judicial tyranny." Patrick Henry
"What happened was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to be governed by surprise, to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security ... To live in the process is absolutely not to notice it -- please try to believe me -- unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, regretted. Believe me this is true. Each act, each occasion is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow. Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven't done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we did nothing) ... You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair. - "German professor after World War II describing the rise of Nazism to a journalist
"Judges ought to remember that their office is jus dicere, and not jus dare; to interpret law, and not to make law, or give law." --Francis Bacon, From "The Essays of Counsels, Civil and Moral"
"The trauma of 9/11 stimulated infinite possibilities for worry - some quite plausible, but most inspired by remote what-if fantasies. A society bingeing on fear makes itself vulnerable to far more profound forms of destruction than terror attacks. The "terrorism war", like a nostalgic echo of the cold war, is using these popular fears to advance a different agenda - the re-engineering of American life through permanent mobilization." - William Greider
"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, "A Defense of the American Constitutions," 1787
"In the general course of human nature, a power over a man's subsistence [i.e., property] amounts to a power over his will." "The Federalist", No. 79, by Alexander Hamilton
"I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it." Thomas Jefferson
"Democracy is not about trust; it is about distrust. It is about accountability, exposure, open debate, critical challenge, and popular input and feedback from the citizenry. It is about responsible government. We have to get our fellow Americans to trust their leaders less and themselves more, trust their own questions and suspicions, and their own desire to know what is going on." - Michael Parenti
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." - C. S. Lewis
"Somebody's paying the corporations that destroyed Iraq and the corporations that are rebuilding it. They're getting paid by the American taxpayer in both cases. So we pay them to destroy the country, and then we pay them to rebuild it. Those are gifts from U.S. taxpayer to U.S. corporations..." - Noam Chomsky
"Away with the whims of governmental administrators, their socialized projects, their centralization, their tariffs, their government schools, their state religions, their free credit, their bank monopolies, their regulations, their restrictions, their equalization by taxation, and their pious moralizations! And now that the legislators and do-gooders have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: MAY THEY REJECT ALL SYSTEMS, and try liberty; for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works." THE LAW by Fredrick Bastiat
"The quest for homeland security is heading ... toward the quasi-militarization of everyday life ... If danger might lurk anywhere, maybe everything must be protected and policed." - William Greider
"The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery." -Winston Churchill
"The pattern is as old as human life. The new rulers use more and more force, more police, more soldiers, trying to enforce more efficient control, trying to make the planned economy work by piling regulations on regulations, decree on decree. The people are hungry and hungrier. And how does a man on this earth get butter? Doesn’t the government give butter? But government does not produce food from the earth; Government is guns. It is one common distinction of all civilized peoples, that they give their guns to the Government. Men in Government monopolize the necessary use of force; they are not using their energies productively; they are not milking cows. To get butter, they must use guns; they have nothing else to use.” Rose Wilder Lane
"It is not the business of government to make men virtuous or religious, or to preserve the fool from the consequences of his own folly. Government should be repressive no further than is necessary to secure liberty by protecting the equal rights of each from aggression on the part of others, and the moment governmental prohibitions extend beyond this line they are in danger of defeating the very ends they are intended to serve.” Henry George
"Government is instituted to protect property of every sort... This being the end of government, that alone is a just government which impartially secures to every man whatever is his own." James Madison
"Criminals are a small minority in any age or community. And the harm they have done to mankind is infinitesimal when compared to the horrors – the bloodshed, the wars, the persecution, the famines, the enslavements, the wholesale destruction – perpetrated by mankind’s governments. Potentially, a government is the most dangerous threat to man’s rights - When unlimited and unrestricted by individual rights, a government is men’s deadliest enemy." Ayn Rand
"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.” Thomas Jefferson (1812 )
"We meet," it said, "in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political and material ruin....Corruption dominates the ballot box, the [state] legislatures and the Congress and touches even the bench.....The newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled, public opinion silenced....The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few." - The founding convention of the People's Party – better known as the "Populists" (1892).
"The government is merely a servant - merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. It's function is to obey orders, not originate them." Mark Twain
"Law represents the effort of man to organize society; governments, the efforts of selfishness to overthrow liberty." Henry Ward Beecher 1813- 1887
"A gang is a group of men under the command of a leader, bound by a compact of association, in which the plunder is divided according to an agreed convention. If this villainy wins so many recruits from the ranks of the demoralized that it acquires territory, establishes a base, captures cities and subdues peoples, it then openly arrogates to itself the title of kingdom, which is conferred on it in the eyes of the world, not by the renunciation of aggression, but by the attainment of impunity" St. Augustine on what we now call government
"Those who so glibly dismiss as 'mere legal technicalities' the procedural guarantees of the Constitution limiting law-enforcement activities forget that nothing is more basic to civil liberty than freedom from arbitrary arrest and imprisonment by policemen who are masters, not servants, of the law. The most characteristic symbol of the police state is the ominous rap on the door at night. Freedom from the fear of that rap is the basic condition for the exercise of every other form of freedom." 'The history of liberty', Mr Justice Frankfurter once observed, 'is the history of the observances of procedural safeguards.'
"For as long as men have sought to be free, arbitrary arrest has been a mark and measure of despotism. In every land and time, men have protested and fought against it. It has been a principal cause of every major uprising against established government. It was one of the grievances of the English barons against King John in 1215 and prompted their insistence in Magna Carta that 'no free man shall be taken or imprisoned...except by the legal judgement of his peers or by the law of the land.' Bitter resentment against capricious arrest and incarceration was one of the prime causes of the French Revolution. And so the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen stipulated that 'No man should be accused, arrested, or held in confinement except in cases determined by the law, and according to the forms which it has prescribed. Arbitrary arrest and arbitrary searches conducted under the infamous writs of assistance and general warrants were among the bitterest grievances against George III recited in the American Declaration of Independence. When they established their independence Americans were determined that no government of their own creation should ever engage in these forms of despotism. Accordingly, they imposed heavy restraint upon police activity in the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution." The Rights of Free Men by Alan Barth
"The people are the masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who would pervert it!" Abraham Lincoln
"You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot help the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by encouraging class hatred. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than you earn. You cannot build character and courage by taking away man's initiative and independence. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves." Abraham Lincoln
"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that government long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly 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. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for thir future security." The Declaration of Independence (1776)
"It is a precedent fraught with danger for the country, for when Congress once begins to stretch its power beyond the limits of the Constitution, there is no limit to it and no security for the people... ... the Constitution, to be worth anything, must be held sacred and rigidly observed in all its provisions." -- Colonel member of the U.S. Congress 1827-31 & 1832-35 David Crockett, AKA Davvy Crockett
"The liberties of none are safe unless the liberties of all are protected." - William O. Douglas
"Should we wander from [the essential principles of our government] in moments of error or alarm, let us hasten to retrace our steps and to regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty, and prosperity." Thomas Jefferson
"Occupants of public offices love power and are prone to abuse it." George Washington , Farewell Address
"No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation." Article 5, The Bill of Rights
"We must pity the poor wretched, timid soul who is too faint-hearted to resist his oppressors. He sings the song of the dammed: "I can't fight back; I have too much to lose; I own too much property; I have worked too hard to get what I have; They will put me out of business if I resist; I might go to jail; I have my family to think about." Such poor miserable creatures have misplaced values and are hiding their cowardice behind pretended family responsibility - blindly refusing to see that the most glorious legacy that one can bequeath to posterity is liberty; and that the only true security is liberty." - Cooley
"Ours is a sick profession. [A profession marked by] incompetence, lack of training, misconduct, and bad manners. Ineptness, bungling, malpractice, and bad ethics can be observed in court houses all over this country every day." Justice Warren Burger
"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root." Henry David Thoreau
"Poor people have access to the courts in the same sense that the Christians had access to the lions.” Judge Earl Johnson, Jr.
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