Liberty Quotes
By John Fogg on 1:28 PM
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Lord Acton
"The finest opportunity ever given to the world was thrown away because the passion for equality made vain the hope for freedom."
John Adams
"Arms in the hands of citizens [may] be used at individual discretion... in private self defense... "
"Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."
"Mankind will in time discover that unbridled majorities are as tyrannical and cruel as unlimited despots."
Samuel Adams
"If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest for freedom, go home and leave us in peace. We seek not your council nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen."
"And that the said Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press, or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms; or to raise standing armies, unless necessary for the defense of the United States, or of some one or more of them; or to prevent the people from petitioning, in a peaceable and orderly manner, the federal legislature, for a redress of grievances; or to subject the people to unreasonable searches and seizures of their persons, papers or possesions."
Shlomo Aharonisk (Israeli Police Inspector General)
"There's no question that weapons in the hands of the public have prevented acts of terror or stopped them."
Aristotle
“Both oligarch and tyrant mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of their arms.”
Stephen Arons
"Why is it that millions of children who are pushouts or dropouts amount to business as usual in the public schools, while one family educating a child at home becomes a major threat to universal public education and the survival of democracy?"
Fredric Bastiat
"When goods don't cross borders, soldiers will."
"There is in all of us a strong disposition to believe that anything lawful is also legitimate. This belief is so widespread that many persons have erroneously held that things are 'just' because the law makes them so."
"[H]ow is … legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime."
Hilaire Belloc
"The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself."
David D. Boaz
"The difference between libertarianism and socialism is that libertarians will tolerate the existence of a socialist community, but socialists can't tolerate a libertarian community."
Neal Boortz
"How many Catholic schools do you think teach the students to question the authority of the Pope? Do you believe Christian schools teach students to question or challenge the authority of Jesus Christ? Do military schools teach the cadets to challenge the authority of superior officers? Well, why should we then expect government schools to teach children to question the authority of government?"
"Government schools will teach children that government is wonderful."
Harry Browne
"There are no violent gangs fighting over aspirin territories. There are no violent gangs fighting over whisky territories or computer territories or anything else that's legal. There are only criminal gangs fighting over territories covering drugs, gambling, prostitution, and other victimless crimes. Making a non-violent activity a crime creates a black market, which attracts criminals and gangs, which turns what was once a relatively harmless activity affecting a small group of people into a widespread epidemic of drug use and gang warfare."
"Govt [will] break your legs, and then hand you a crutch and say, 'If it weren't for the govt, you wouldn't be able to walk'."
"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."
Charles Bukowski
"The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don't have to waste your time voting."
Edmund Burke
"The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing."
William Burroughs
"After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it."
Stephen T. Byington
"It must never be unpatriotic to support your country against your government. It must always be unpatriotic to support your government against your country."
Douglas Casey
"Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries."
Frank Chodorov
"The more subsidized it is, the less free it is. What is known as 'free education' is the least free of all, for it is a state-owned institution; it is socialized education - just like socialized medicine or the socialized post office - and cannot possibly be separated from political control."
Winston Churchill
"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter."
Ron Crickenberger
"If the govt can't keep drugs away from inmates locked in steel cages, surrounded by barbed wire, watched by armed guards, drug-tested, strip-searched, X-rayed, and videotaped, how can it possibly stop the flow of drugs to an entire nation?"
Benjamin Disraeli
"Whenever is found what is called a paternal government, there is found state education. It has been discovered that the best way to ensure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery."
John Dobbins
"If a law compels you to do evil, then you do in fact have a moral obligation to violate it."
Hugh Downs
"This country is a one-party country. Half of it is called Republican and half is called Democrat. It doesn't make any difference. All the really good ideas belong to the Libertarians."
Jimmy Durante
"Why doesn't everybody just leave everybody else the hell alone?"
Albert Einstein
“It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Do not go where the path may lead; Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail."
“A man in debt is so far a slave.”
“Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well.”
Andrew Fletcher
"Arms are the only true badge of liberty. The possession of arms is the distinction of a free man from a slave."
Stephen H. Foerster
"What difference is it to me if a decision is forced upon me by a dictator or by half of my neighbors? Either way my right to free, peaceful action has been nullified."
Andrew Ford
"25 States allow anyone to buy a gun, strap it on, and walk down the street with no permit of any kind: some say it's crazy. However, 4 out 5 U.S. murders are committed in the other half of the country: so who is crazy?"
Henry Ford
"It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning."
Benjamin Franklin
"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both."
"The Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself."
"Certainty? In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes."
"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the outcome of the vote."
"Make yourselves sheep and the wolves will eat you."
Marilyn French
"When they kept you out it was because you were black; when they let you in, it is because you are black. That's progress?"
Milton Friedman
"If a government were put in charge of the Sahara Desert, within five years they’d have a shortage of sand."
"The high rate of unemployment among teenagers, and especially black teenagers, is both a scandal and a serious source of social unrest. Yet it is largely a result of minimum wage laws. We regard the minimum wage law as one of the most, if not the most, anti-black laws on the statute books."
"Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program."
Mohandas K. Gandhi
"Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest. If we want the Arms Act to be repealed, if we want to learn the use of arms, here is a golden opportunity. If the middle classes render voluntary help to Government in the hour of its trial, distrust will disappear, and the ban on possessing arms will be withdrawn."
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then you win!"
"In matters of conscience, the law of the majority has no place."
“An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind."
"The state represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the state is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence."
William Lloyd Garrison
"I am in earnest--I will not equivocate--I will not excuse--I will not retreat a single inch--AND I WILL BE HEARD."
Charles de Gaulle
"In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant."
Elbridge Gerry
"What, sir, is the use of a militia? It is to prevent the establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty."
Andre Gide
"Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free."
Sammy "The Bull" Gravano
"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."
Stephen P. Halbrook
"In recent years it has been suggested that the Second Amendment protects the 'collective' right of states to maintain militias, while it does not protect the right of "the people" to keep and bear arms. If anyone entertained this notion in the period during which the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were debated and ratified, it remains one of the most closely guarded secrets of the eighteenth century, for no known writing surviving from the period between 1787 and 1791 states such a thesis."
Evelyn Beatrice Hall
"I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
Alexander Hamilton
"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed."
"Bills of rights...are not only unnecessary in the proposed Constitution, but would even be dangerous...For why declare that things shall not be done [by Congress] which there is no power to do? Why, for instance, should it be said that the liberty of the press shall not be restrained, when no power is given [to Congress] by which restrictions may be imposed?"
John Hardwick
"Don't do drugs because if you do drugs you'll go to prison, and drugs are really expensive in prison."
Justice John Marshall Harlan
"There is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil-rights, all citizens are equal before the law."
Paul Harvey
"They have gun control in Cuba. They have universal health care in Cuba. So why do they want to come here?"
Masanori Hashimoto
"Past studies by and large confirm the prediction that higher minimum wages reduce employment opportunities and raise unemployment, particularly among teenagers, minorities and other low-skilled workers."
F.A. Hayek
"If we strive for money, it is because it offers us the widest of choice in enjoying the fruits of our efforts."
"Collectivism on a world scale seems to be unthinkable--except in the service of a small ruling elite."
“A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers.”
“'Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.”
“It seems to me that socialists today can preserve their position in academic economics merely by the pretense that the differences are entirely moral questions about which science cannot decide.”
Rutherford B. Hayes
"It is a government of the people by the people for the people no longer; it is a government of corporations by corporations for corporations."
Patrick Henry
"The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government."
"You have given to Congress the sword and the purse, and they will take the rest whether you will it or not."
Bill Hicks
"If child molestation is actually your concern, how come we don't see Bradley tanks knocking down Catholic churches?"
Hölderlin
"What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it his heaven."
Herbert Hoover
"Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt."
Yoshimi Ishikawa
"Americans have the will to resist because they have weapons. If you don't have a gun, freedom of speech has no power."
Thomas Jefferson
"I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them."
"My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government."
"The beauty of the Second Amendment is that it will not be needed until they try to take it."
"If people let government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny."
"Democracy is 51% of the people taking away the rights of the other 49%."
"Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none."
"To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical."
"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks, and the corporations which grow up around them, will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered."
“The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.”
"A strong body makes the mind strong. As to the species of exercises, I advise the gun. While this gives moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise and independence to the mind. Games played with the ball and others of that nature, are too violent for the body and stamp no character on the mind. Let your gun therefore be the constant companion of your walks."
"I have sworn upon the altar of god, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."
"Paper is poverty... it is only the ghost of money, and not money itself."
"Dissent is the highest form of patriotism."
"All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression."
"When a man assumes a public trust, he should consider himself as public property."
"Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day."
"War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses."
"Our citizens have been always free to make, vend and export arms. It is the constant occupation and livelihood of some of them."
"Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if He ever had a chosen people, whose breast He has made His peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue"
"An elective despotism was not the government we fought for"
Samuel Johnson
"Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."
John F. Kennedy
"I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent and of human knowledge that has ever been gathered together at the White House — with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone." (welcoming 49 Nobel Prize Winners to the White House)
"By calling attention to ‘a well-regulated militia’, the ’security’ of the nation, and the right of each citizen ‘to keep and bear arms’, our founding fathers recognized the essentially civilian nature of our economy. Although it is extremely unlikely that the fears of governmental tyranny which gave rise to the Second Amendment will ever be a major danger to our nation, the Amendment still remains an important declaration of our basic civilian-military relationships, in which every citizen must be ready to participate in the defense of his country. For that reason, I believe the Second Amendment will always be important."
"Those who make peaceful change impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
"Terror is not a new weapon. Throughout history it has been used by those who could not prevail, either by persuasion or example."
"Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind."
"A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people."
Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."
“If a man has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.”
"An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law."
"Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal."
Karl Kraus
"War: first, one hopes to win...in the end, one is surprised that everyone has lost."
Lewis H. Lapham II
“The supply of government exceeds the demand.”
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
"51% of a nation can establish a totalitarian regime, suppress minorities and still remain democratic."
Richard Henry Lee
"To preserve liberty it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them... "
"A militia, when properly formed, are in fact the people themselves... and include all men capable of bearing arms."
"To say that a bad government must be established for fear of anarchy is really saying that we should kill ourselves for fear of dying."
Robert LeFevre
"If men are good, you don't need government; if men are evil or ambivalent, you don't dare have one."
Robert E. Lee
"The war...was an unnecessary condition of affairs, and might have been avoided if forbearance and wisdom had been practiced on both sides."
"What a cruel thing is war...to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors, and to devastate the fair face of this beautiful world."
G. Gordon Liddy
"What's the point of [gun control legislation], other than to inconvenience the honest citizen who follows the rules?... I can assure you that the guys I met in the nine prisons I served my sentence in did not get their guns at the gun store. "
Abraham Lincoln
"Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right---a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people, that can, may revolutionize, and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit."
John Locke
"The people cannot delegate to government the power to do anything which would be unlawful for them to do themselves."
James Madison
"If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy."
"The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home."
Andre Marrou
"Liberals want the government to be your Mommy. Conservatives want government to be your Daddy. Libertarians want it to treat you like an adult."
H.L. Mencken
"The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it."
"It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty – and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies."
Ludwig von Mises
“Government is the negation of liberty”
“If some peoples pretend that history or geography gives them the right to subjugate other races, nations, or peoples, there can be no peace.”
“Manufacturing and commercial monopolies owe their origin not to a tendency imminent in a capitalist economy but to governmental interventionist policy directed against free trade and laissez faire.”
Lyle Myhr
"When they took the 4th Amendment, I was quiet because I didn't deal drugs. When they took the 6th Amendment, I was quiet because I am innocent. When they took the 2nd Amendment, I was quiet because I don't own a gun. Now they have taken the 1st Amendment, and I can only be quiet."
P.J. O'Rourke
"When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators."
"There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences."
George Orwell
"The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them."
Thomas Paine
"...The floor of freedom is as level as water."
"...but if a thief breaks into my house, burns and destroys my property, and kills or threatens to kill me, or those that are in it, and to 'blind me in all cases whatsoever' to his absolute will, am I to suffer it?"
Ron Paul
"If people are only free to make good choices, they are not truly free."
"We should let the best measure of our American greatness come from free and peaceful trade with other nations, not from displays of our military might."
"A policy of overthrowing or destabilizing every regime our government dislikes is no strategy at all, unless our goal is international chaos and domestic impoverishment."
"Legitimate use of violence can only be that which is required in self-defense."
"If it was a good program and everybody liked it, you wouldn’t need 16,500 thugs coming with their guns and putting you in jail if you didn’t follow all the rules”
“Racism is simply an ugly form of collectivism, the mindset that views humans strictly as members of groups rather than individuals . . . By encouraging Americans to adopt a group mentality, the advocates of so-called 'diversity' actually perpetuate racism. Their obsession with racial group identity is inherently racists . . . we should understand that racism will endure until we stop thinking in terms of groups and begin thinking in terms of individual liberty.”
"My fantasy...is to auction off the government buildings to private enterprise, with me as the auctioneer. I'd go down in front of Health and Human Services, then over to the Labor Department building, then down the street, and all of a sudden, we would have disposed of all the buildings and reduced government by 80 percent at least."
"Do they think if we destroy our freedoms for the terrorists they will no longer have a reason to attack us?"
Casey Percell
"It is not the responsibility of the government or the legal system to protect a citizen from himself."
Ezra Pound
“A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.”
Ayn Rand
"The question isn't who is going to let me, it's who is going to stop me."
"If censorship and the suppression of free speech ever get established in this country, they will have originated in radio and television."
"Since 'public property' is a collectivist fiction, since the public as a whole can neither use nor dispose of its 'property,' that 'property' will always be taken over by some political 'elite,' by a small clique which will then rule public--a public of literal, dispossessed proletarians."
"I swear by my life, and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."
Ronald Reagan
"The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help."
"People do not make wars; governments do."
Lawrence W. Reed
"Have you ever noticed how statists are constantly 'reforming' their own handiwork? Education reform. Health-care reform. Welfare reform. Tax reform. The very fact that they're always busy 'reforming' is an implicit admission that they didn't get it right the first 50 times."
Paul Craig Roberts
“While the various evangelical Christians preach war in the Middle East, they condemn Islam for being a ‘warlike religion.’”
George L. Roman
"I am convinced that we can do to guns what we've done to drugs: create a multi-billion dollar underground market over which we have absolutely no control."
Theodore Roosevelt
"If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn't sit for a month."
"When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer 'Present' or 'Not guilty.'"
Murray Rothbard
"There is one good thing about Marx: he was not a Keynesian."
"All government wars are unjust."
"Libertarians have not come to promise human beings a technocratic utopia; we have come to bring everyone freedom, the freedom of each individual to pursue whatever his or her dreams of the future may be."
Amschel Rothschild
“Allow me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who writes the laws.”
Lucius Annaeus Seneca
"A sword never kills anybody; it is a tool in the killer's hand."
L. Neil Smith
"Armed people are free. No state can control those who have the machinery and the will to resist, no mob can take their liberty and property. And no 220-pound thug can threaten the well-being or dignity of a 110-pound woman who has two pounds of iron to even things out ... People who object to weapons aren't abolishing violence, they're begging for rule by brute force, when the biggest, strongest animals among men were always automatically 'right.' Guns ended that, and a social democracy is a hollow farce without an armed populace to make it work."
Joseph Sobran
"The measure of the state's success is that the word anarchy frightens people, while the word state does not."
“The U.S. Constitution poses no serious threat to our form of government.”
Socrates
"When the debate is lost, slander becomes the tool of the loser."
Lysander Spooner
"A man is none the less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years."
"If our fathers, in 1776, had acknowledged the principle that a majority had the right to rule the minority, we should never have become a nation; for they were in a small minority, as compared with those who claimed the right to rule over them."
"The only idea they have ever manifested as to what is a government of consent, is this - that it is one to which everybody must consent, or be shot."
“But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain - that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.”
“If taxation without consent is not robbery, then any band of robbers have only to declare themselves a government, and all their robberies are legalized.”
“If the jury have no right to judge of the justice of a law of the government, they plainly can do nothing to protect the people against the oppressions of the government; for there are no oppressions which the government may not authorize by law.”
Tacitus
"The more corrupt the state, the more it legislates."
Henry David Thoreau
"Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison."
"Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves."
"If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law."
“Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.”
“How does it become a man to behave towards the American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.”
Bruce Tiemann
"’A well-crafted pepperoni pizza, being necessary to the preservation of a diverse menu, the right of the people to keep and cook tomatoes, shall not be infringed.’ I would ask you to try to argue that this statement says that only pepperoni pizzas can keep and cook tomatoes, and only well-crafted ones at that. This is basically what the so-called states rights people argue with respect to the well-regulated militia, vs. the right to keep and bear arms.”
Alex de Tocqueville
"The Union was formed by the voluntary agreement of the States; and these, in uniting together, have not forfeited their Nationality, nor have they been reduced to the condition of one and the same people. If one of the States chose to withdraw its name from the contract, it would be difficult to disprove its right of doing so ..."
Lao Tzu
"Only fools seek power, and the greatest fools seek it through force."
Benjamin Tucker
"The Anarchists are simply unterrified Jeffersonian Democrats. They believe that 'the best government is that which governs least,' and that which governs least is no government at all."
Mark Twain
"In the beginning of a change, the Patriot is a scarce man and brave, hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds however, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a Patriot."
"When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in just seven years."
"I have never let schooling interfere with my education."
"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect."
Voltaire
"It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong."
"No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible."
Booker T. Washington
"Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome."
George Washington
"Firearms are second only to the Constitution in importance; they are the peoples' liberty's teeth."
"A free people ought not only to be armed and disciplined, but they should have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own government."
Claire Wolfe
"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but it's too early to shoot the bastards."
Thomas E. Woods, Jr.
"With all the emphasis that is normally placed on the Constitution’s Framers, we are apt to neglect the importance of the ratifiers, for it is they whose interpretation of the Constitution – and in particular, the precise nature of what they believed they were getting into – is of ultimate importance."
Fred Woodworth
"If human beings are fundamentally good, no government is necessary; if they are fundamentally bad, any government, being composed of human beings, would be bad also."
Magazine Articles, Court Cases, Proverbs, & Misc.
3rd Regiment, Company C Florida
“Any fate but submission.”
Albanian Proverb
"Fire, water, and government know nothing of mercy."
The Atlanta Journal
"The Ten Commandments contain 297 words. The Bill of Rights is stated in 463 words. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address contains 266 words. A recent federal directive to regulate the price of cabbage contains 26,911 words."
A church sign in Northern Ireland
"If we'd been born where they were born and taught what they were taught, we would believe what they believe."
Jones v. Barnes, 463 U.S. 745, 764 (1983) (dissenting)
"I cannot accept the notion that lawyers are one of the punishments a person receives merely for being accused of a crime."
Matthew 5:9
"Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God."
McCleskey v. Kemp, 481 U.S. 279 (1987) (dissenting)
"Those whom we would banish from society or from the human community itself often speak in too faint a voice to be heard above society's demand for punishment. It is the particular role of courts to hear these voices, for the Constitution declares that the majoritarian chorus may not alone dictate the conditions of social life."
Subcommittee on the Constitution (on the rights guaranteed by the Second Amendment)
"the conclusion is thus inescapable that the history, concept and working of the second amendment to the Constitution of the United States, as well as its interpretation by every major commentator and court in the first half of the century after its ratification, indicates that what is protected is an individual right of a private citizen to own or carry firearms in a peaceful manner." Note: This committee included Arlen Specter and Ted Kennedy.
The Times (London)
"When authority presents itself in the guise of organization, it develops charms fascinating enough to convert communities of free people into totalitarian States."
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