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JSONFreedom
Quotes relating to freedom, liberty, and government.
Quote | Author | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasury. Democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by dictatorship. | Alexander Fraser Tytler, The Decline and Fall of the Athenian Republic | |||
| A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine. | Thomas Jefferson | |||
| 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. | George Washington | |||
| A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular. | Adlai Stevenson | |||
| A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away. | Barry Goldwater | |||
| A government with the policy to rob Peter to pay Paul can be assured of the support of Paul. | George Bernard Shaw | |||
| A judicial activist is a judge who interprets the Constitution to mean what it would have said if he, instead of the Founding Fathers, had written it. | Senator Sam Ervin | |||
| A monarch's neck should always have a noose around it--it keeps him upright. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| A multitude of laws in a country is like a great number of physicians, a sign of weakness and malady. | Voltaire | |||
| A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves. | Edward R. Morrow | |||
| A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. | Edward Abbey | |||
| A perfect democracy, a ‘warm body’ democracy in which every adult may vote and all votes count equally, has no internal feedback for self-correction. It depends solely on the wisdom and self-restraint of citizens… which is opposed by the folly and lack of self-restraint of other citizens. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| A pure democracy can admit no cure for the mischiefs 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. | James Madison | |||
| A society that puts equality ahead of freedom will wind up with neither. | Milton Friedman | |||
| A society which maintains that the interest of the individual is neglible compared to the interest of the nation is a lawless society. | Alexander Zinoviev | |||
| A vote is like a rifle; its usefulness depends upon the character of the user. | Theodore Roosevelt | |||
| 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 | |||
| Above all the unity of a nation's spirit and will are worth far more than the freedom of the spirit and will of an individual. | Adolf Hitler (scary, huh?) | |||
| After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood. | Fred Thompson, US senator, lawyer, writer, actor | |||
| All that is needed to give rise to a mighty nation is a simple, irrevocable guarantee that individual members of the productive class be permitted to keep whatever they create. | L. Neil Smith | |||
| All those other constitutions are documents that say, 'We, the government, allow the people the following rights,' and our Constitution says 'We the People, allow the government the following privileges and rights.' We give our permission to government to do the things that it does. And that's the whole story of the difference--why we're unique in the world and why no matter what our troubles may be, we're going to overcome. | Ronald Reagan | |||
| Almost all the world's constitutions are documents in which governments tell the people what their privileges are. Our Constitution is a document in which 'We the people' tell the government what it is allowed to do. | Ronald Reagan | |||
| America is unique, strong, great because of our commitment to personal freedom... We are a free people who consented to be governed. Not vice versa. | Sen. John Sununu | |||
| America sometimes fails to live up to its ideals... So has every nation since history began. But it must be admitted that so far, the United States of America has the most magnificent set of ideals any nation has ever failed to live up to. | Spider Robinson | |||
| America wasn't founded so we could all be better. America was founded so we could all be anything we damned well pleased. | P.J. O'Rourke | |||
| Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: First a right to life, secondly to liberty, thirdly to property; together with the right to defend them in the best manner they can. | Samuel Adams | |||
| An economy hampered by restrictive tax rates will never produce enough revenue to balance our budget, just as it will never produce enough jobs or enough profits. | John F. Kennedy | |||
| An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens. ... There has never been a moment of my life in which I should have relinquished for it the enjoyments of my family, my farm, my friends & books. | Thomas Jefferson | |||
| An unlimited power to tax involves, necessarily, a power to destroy; because there is a limit beyond which no institution and no property can bear taxation. | John Marshall | |||
| And the first thing I would do in my government, I would have nobody to control me. | Cervantes | |||
| And those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness. | Alcuin of York, 798 A.D. | |||
| And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch... the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so. | Julius Caesar | |||
| As Americans we must always remember that we all have a common enemy, an enemy that is dangerous, powerful and relentless. I refer, of course, to the federal government. | Dave Barry | |||
| As the modern nation-state has expanded, taking on ever more functions, the powers of the state bureaucracy have come to resemble the powers of an unaccountable aristocracy. Periodic elections merely deliver a somewhat different batch of aristocrats to the throne. | Will Wilkinson | |||
| Assuming you can never lose your freedom is a mistake a free people get to make only once. | Judge Alex Kozinski, Ninth Circuit | |||
| Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge, fitter to bruise than to polish. | Anne Bradstreet | |||
| Bad businesses go out of business; unfortunately, bad governments don't. | Esther Dyson | |||
| Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny. | Edmund Burke | |||
| Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. | Julius Caesar | |||
| Big government depends, in large part, on going around the country stirring up apathy — creating the sense that problems are so big, so complex, so intractable that even attempting to think about them for yourself gives you such a splitting headache it’s easier to shrug and accept as given the proposition that only government can deal with them. | Mark Steyn | |||
| Bringing the government in to run Wall Street is like saying, 'Dad burned dinner, let's get the dog to cook.' | P.J. O'Rourke | |||
| 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. | Lysander Spooner | |||
| Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare but only those specifically enumerated. | Thomas Jefferson | |||
| Conservatives are just as willing to distort the Constitution as liberals are. I say a pox on both their houses. | Justice Antonin Scalia | |||
| Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude. | Alexis de Tocqueville | |||
| Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve. | George Bernard Shaw | |||
| Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote. | ||||
| Democracy might be the most appropriate means of choosing government officials, but that does not imply that democracy equals freedom. Freedom requires more than the right to vote; it requires that each person be as unrestrained as possible from the arbitrary will of others--regardless of whether the others are conquering tyrants, hereditary oligarchs, black-robed judges, or a majority of neighbors or countrymen. | Thomas Sowell | |||
| Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. | James Bovard | |||
| Does history record any case in which the majority was right? | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| Economic history is a long record of government policies that failed because they were designed with a bold disregard for the laws of economics. | Ludwig von Mises | |||
| Equal opportunity for all, special privileges for none. | Andrew Jackson | |||
| Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves, therefore, are its only safe depositories. And to render even them safe, their minds must be improved to a certain degree. | Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Virginia, 1782. | |||
| Everybody wants the government to 'do something!' until it does it to them. | Rick Gaber | |||
| Excessive laws are worse than useless. Many new laws confer legitimacy on what common sense would recognize as crimes. | Joseph Sobran | |||
| Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms [of government] those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny. | Thomas Jefferson | |||
| Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficial ... the greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding. | Louis D. Brandeis, Supreme Court Justice | |||
| Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. | Barry Goldwater | |||
| Fear is the foundation of most governments. | John Adams | |||
| Federal law is invariably carried to its most ludicrous extreme. | Diane Alden | |||
| Few men desire liberty; most men wish only for a just master. | Sallust | |||
| For almost three decades we've been trying to teach average Americans to act like 'stakeholders' in their economy. They learned. They're crying and whining for government bailouts just like the billionaire stakeholders in banks and investment houses. | P.J. O'Rourke | |||
| For evidence that private property rather than democracy is the key to prosperity and freedom, I point to India and Hong Kong. In India the electoral franchise is wide and elections have long been regular, but property rights are weak. For most of the post-World War II era, in contrast, Hong Kong had no democracy, but property rights there have been among the strongest the world has ever seen. Indians are poor and shackled by a massively corrupt state; the people of Hong Kong are wealthy and free. Private property, not democracy, is the great guarantor of prosperity and liberty. And because it decentralizes power, it safeguards us from madmen with utopian hallucinations. | Thomas Sowell | |||
| For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader—the barbarians enter Rome. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| Force is the antithesis of freedom, but force must be used, if only to defend against other force. | Thomas Sowell | |||
| Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric. | Thomas Sowell | |||
| Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free | Ronald Reagan | |||
| Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err. It passes my comprehension how human beings, be they ever so experienced and able, can delight in depriving other human beings of that precious right. | Mahatma Gandhi | |||
| Freedom is something that cannot be passed on in the blood stream, or genetically. And it’s never more than one generation away from extinction. Every generation has to learn how to protect and defend it, or it’s gone and gone for a long, long time. | Ronald Reagan | |||
| Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good. | H.L. Mencken | |||
| Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys. | P.J. O'Rourke | |||
| God grants liberty only to those who love it, and are always ready to guard and defend it. | Daniel Webster | |||
| Good ideas never come from Washington. | Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education | |||
| Good intentions will always be pleaded for any assumption of power. 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. | Daniel Webster | |||
| Government by the votes of illiterate and uneducated people isn't guaranteed to be good government or even rational government. | Jerry Pournelle | |||
| Government expands to absorb revenue... and then some. | Tom Wicker | |||
| Government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods. | H.L. Mencken | |||
| Government is about coercion. Limiting government is the single most important instrument for guaranteeing liberty. We're working on a third generation which has little in the way of education about what our Constitution means and why it was written. Thus, we've fallen easy prey to charlatans, quacks, and hustlers. | Dr. Walter Williams | |||
| Government is good at one thing: It knows how to break your legs, hand you a crutch, and say, 'See, if it weren't for the government, you wouldn't be able to walk.' | Harry Browne | |||
| Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action. | George Washington | |||
| Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it. | Ronald Reagan | |||
| Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined. | Patrick Henry | |||
| Helping the poor through the government is like feeding the sparrows through cows. | Walter Williams | |||
| 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 | |||
| Here we see the governmental principle that if you are paid to solve a problem, and in fact solve it, you stop getting paid | Fred Reed | |||
| High tax rates don't redistribute income; they redistribute people. | George Gilder | |||
| High taxes, sometimes by diminishing the consumption of the taxed commodities, and sometimes by encouraging smuggling, frequently afford a smaller revenue to government than what might be drawn from more moderate taxes. | Adam Smith | |||
| History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid. | Dwight D. Eisenhower | |||
| I am not robbed by people who have more money than I. I am robbed by a government that wants to penalize my industry and give increasing portions of what I earn to people who do not emulate my principles, morals and ethics. | Cal Thomas | |||
| I believe that every individual is naturally entitled to do as he pleases with himself and the fruits of his labor, so far as it in no way interferes with any other men's rights. | Abraham Lincoln | |||
| I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant. | H.L. Mencken | |||
| I cannot find any authority in the Constitution for public charity. To approve such spending would be contrary to the letter and the spirit of the Constitution and subversive to the whole theory upon which the Union of these States is founded. | President Franklin Pierce | |||
| I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which grant[s] a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents. | James Madison, 1794 | |||
| I can't think of anything that would do more toward putting us back on the road to liberty and personal responsibility than for the average American, and for the news media, to come to the understanding that we are not a democracy, nor were we supposed to be. | Neal Boortz | |||
| I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground that 'all powers not delegated to the United States, by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states or to the people.' To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power, not longer susceptible of any definition. | Thomas Jefferson | |||
| I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money. [But who decides?] | Barack Obama | |||
| I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub. | Grover Norquist | |||
| I have come to the conclusion that one useless man is a disgrace, two men are called a Law Firm, and three or more are called a Congress. | John Adams | |||
| I have wondered at times what the Ten Commandments would have looked like if Moses had run them through the US Congress. | Ronald Reagan | |||
| I hope we win the war on terrorism in time for people to remember what freedom was like... | Randall Clague | |||
| I know no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution. | U.S. Grant | |||
| I would like to electrocute everyone who uses the word 'fair' in connection with income tax policies. | William F. Buckley Jr. | |||
| I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it. | Thomas Jefferson | |||
| If a nation expects to be ignorant and free... it expects what never was and never will be. | Thomas Jefferson | |||
| If a nation or an individual values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony is that if it is comfort or money it values more, it will lose that too. | W. Somerset Maugham | |||
| If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men... the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege. | Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878 | |||
| If guns are outlawed, only the government will have guns. | Edward Abbey | |||
| If Howard Dean was living back [when Paul Revere came riding through] he would have yelled out the window, 'Shut up I'm trying to get some sleep in here!' It's a disgrace. | Sen. Zell Miller | |||
| If one person has a right to something he didn't produce, simultaneously and of necessity it means that some other person does not have right to something he did produce. That's because, since there's no Santa Claus or Tooth Fairy, in order for government to give one American a dollar, it must, through intimidation, threats and coercion, confiscate that dollar from some other American. I'd like to hear the moral argument for taking what belongs to one person to give to another person. | Walter Williams | |||
| If people behaved like governments, you'd call the cops. | Kelvin Throop | |||
| If the Constitution becomes a 'living document' then it will mean whatever the ruling majority wants it to mean, and we will have a true democracy: a government of mob rule | Neal Boortz | |||
| If the Government is big enough to give you everything you want, it is big enough to take away everything you have. | Gerald Ford | |||
| If there had only been government research establishments in the Stone Age, by now we would have had absolutely superb flint tools. But no one would have invented steel. | Arthur C. Clarke | |||
| If U.S. politicians had minded their own business in 1917, instead of plunging America into a war that didn't threaten us, an armistice would have occurred, and the existing governments in Russia and Germany most likely would have remained in power -- meaning no Soviet Union and no Hitler. But do-gooders always believe they know what's best for the world -- and they claim that some simple act of force will settle matters once and for all. It never does. | Harry Browne | |||
| If we fixed a hangnail the way our government fixes the economy, we'd slam a car door on it. | Cullen Hightower | |||
| If you establish a democracy, you must in due time reap the fruits of a democracy... You will in due season have wars entered into from passion and not from reason... You will in due season find your property is less valuable, and your freedom less complete. | Benjamin Disraeli | |||
| If you have been voting for politicians who promise to give you goodies at someone else's expense, then you have no right to complain when they take your money and give it to someone else. | Thomas Sowell | |||
| If you have ten thousand regulations, you destroy all respect for the law. | Winston Churchill | |||
| If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel nor your arms... May your chains rest lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen. | Samuel Adams | |||
| Imperialism degrades both oppressor and oppressed. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| In 1794, Congress appropriated $15,000 for relief of French refugees. James Madison stood on the floor of the House to object, saying, '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.' | ||||
| In America, conscription is unknown; men are enlisted for payment. Compulsory recruitment is so alien to the ideas and so foreign to the customs of the people of the United States that I doubt whether they would ever dare to introduce it into their law. | Alexis de Tocqueville | |||
| In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. | Alan Greenspan (!), 1966 | |||
| Institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty or civilization or both. | T.B. Macaulay | |||
| 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 | |||
| It has always been in the interest of the federal government to encourage certain attitudes and ideas that support our fundamental freedoms and the responsibilities that go with them. A viable, living republic depends on it. The government, however, does not have the right to legislate what we must believe. | Alan Caruba | |||
| It has been discovered that the best way to insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery. | Benjamin Disraeli | |||
| It has long, however, been my opinion, and I have never shrunk from its expression... that the germ of dissolution of our federal government is in the constitution of the federal Judiciary... working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped. | Thomas Jefferson | |||
| It is a bad sign when the people of a country stop identifying themselves with the country and start identifying with a group. A racial group. Or a religion. Or a language. Anything, as long as it isn't the whole population. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| It is a good thing that we do not get as much government as we pay for. | Will Rogers | |||
| It is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low--and the soundest way to raise revenues in the long run is to cut rates now. | John F. Kennedy | |||
| It is a signal advantage of taxes on articles of consumption that they contain in their own nature a security against excess. They prescribe their own limit; which cannot be exceeded without defeating the end proposed, that is, an extension of the revenue. When applied to this object, the saying is as just as it is witty, that, 'in political arithmetic, two and two do not always make four.' If duties are too high, they lessen the consumption; the collection is eluded; and the product to the treasury is not so great as when they are confined within proper and moderate bounds. This forms a complete barrier against any material oppression of the citizens by taxes of this class, and is itself a natural limitation of the power of imposing them. | Alexander Hamilton | |||
| It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication *and* a government bureaucracy to administer 'universal health care.' | Thomas Sowell | |||
| It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority. For there is a reserve of latent power in the masses which, if it is called into play, the minority can seldom resist. But from the absolute will of an entire people there is no appeal, no redemption, no refuge but treason. | Lord Acton | |||
| It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong. | Thomas Sowell | |||
| It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones. | Calvin Coolidge | |||
| It is not by the consolidation or concentration of powers, but by their distribution, that good government is effected. | Thomas Jefferson | |||
| 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 | |||
| It is not the responsibility of the government or the legal system to protect a citizen from himself. | Justice Casey Percell | |||
| It is seldom that liberty of any kinds is lost all at once. | David Hume | |||
| It is the besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which the masses of men exhibit their tyranny. | James Fenimore Cooper | |||
| It is true that liberty is precious--so precious that it must be rationed. | Vladimir Ilyich Lenin | |||
| It isn't a very long step from a conformist society to a regimented society. Although it would take longer to create an Orwellian nightmare through voluntary surrender of individuality -- and thus of independence -- than through totalitarian edict, the results would be very much the same. | J. Paul Getty | |||
| 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 | |||
| It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me. But it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important. | Martin Luther King | |||
| It must not be forgotten that it is especially dangerous to enslave men in the minor details of life. For my own part, I should be inclined to think freedom less necessary in great things than in little ones. | Alexis de Tocqueville | |||
| 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 | |||
| It takes more man-hours in this country to pay federal income taxes than it does to build every car, van and truck produced in this country during the same year. | Money Magazine | |||
| It will be found an unjust and unwise jealousy to deprive a man of his natural liberty upon the supposition he may abuse it. | Oliver Cromwell | |||
| It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood. | James Madison | |||
| It would be an absurdity for jurors to be required to accept the judge's view of the law, against their own opinion, judgment, and conscience. | John Adams | |||
| Just because James Madison forgot to ban it, that doesn't mean you ought to do it. | David Keene | |||
| Just because something is a good idea doesn't mean it should be a law--let alone a Federal law. | Sen. John Sununu | |||
| Last century over 170 million people were murdered by their own governments, and your government doesn't want you to have a gun. Doesn't that bother you just a little? | ||||
| Law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual. | Thomas Jefferson | |||
| Let this be the distinctive mark of an American that in cases of commotion, he enlists himself under no man's banner, inquires for no man's name, but repairs to the standard of the laws. Do this, and you need never fear anarchy or tyranny. Your government will be perpetual. | Thomas Jefferson | |||
| Liberalism seems to have become a new religion for those who profess contempt for religion. It has been reduced to an elitist set of rhetorical formulas, which posit the working class as passive, mindless victims in desperate need of salvation by the state. Individual rights and free expression, which used to be liberal values, are being gradually subsumed to worship of government power. | Camille Paglia | |||
| Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people. | John Adams | |||
| Liberty has never come from government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of government. The history of liberty is the history of resistance. | Woodrow Wilson | |||
| Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have. | Harry Emerson Fosdick | |||
| Liberty is an opportunity for doing good, but this is only so when it is also an opportunity for doing wrong. | F.A. Hayek | |||
| Liberty is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes. Of all the so-called natural human rights that have ever been invented, liberty is least likely to be cheap and is never free of cost. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| Liberty is the great parent of science and of virtue; and a nation will be great in both in proportion as it is free. | Thomas Jefferson | |||
| Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it | Billings Learned Hand | |||
| Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it. | George Bernard Shaw | |||
| Liberty without learning is always in peril and learning without liberty is always in vain. | John F. Kennedy | |||
| Loss of freedom seldom happens overnight. Oppression doesn't stand on the doorstep with toothbrush mustache and swastika armband--it creeps up insidiously step by step, and all of a sudden the unfortunate citizen realizes that it is gone. | Baron Lane | |||
| Medicare is a huge, single-payer, government-run program. It ought to provide the perfect environment for experimentation. If more-efficient government management can slash health-care costs by addressing all these problems, why not start with Medicare? Let’s see what 'better management' looks like applied to Medicare before we roll it out to the rest of the country. | Virginia Postrel | |||
| Most of the presidential candidates' economic packages involve 'tax breaks,' which is when the government, amid great fanfare, generously decides not to take quite so much of your income. In other words, these candidates are trying to buy your votes with your own money. | Dave Barry | |||
| Most people want security in this world, not liberty. | H.L. Mencken | |||
| My government's got a war on drugs. But get this: The two most widely abused and addictive and destructive of all substances are both perfectly legal. | Kurt Vonnegut | |||
| NASA has two remarkable records: first, a space program far more successful than anyone had dared hope; and, second, the most incredibly bumbling, stupid, inept public relations of any government agency. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| National health insurance means combining the efficiency of the Postal Service with the compassion of the IRS and the cost accounting of the Pentagon. | Louis Sullivan | |||
| Neither the wisest constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt. | Samuel Adams | |||
| No business wants to invest in a place where the government skims 20 percent off the top. | President Barack Obama, July 2009 | |||
| Nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. | Albert Einstein | |||
| Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program. | Milton Friedman | |||
| Now the government's going to take over the auto industry. I can predict the result--a light-weight, compact, sustainable vehicle using alternative energy. When I was a kid we called it a Schwinn. | P.J. O'Rourke | |||
| Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive... 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 | |||
| Once a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| Once you have a national government with no limits to its powers, you will find that you have created an engine that can be restrained only by force. | Jerry Pournelle | |||
| One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results. | Milton Friedman | |||
| One of the greatest threats to mankind today is that the world may be choked by an explosively pervading but well camouflaged bureaucracy. | Norman Borlaug (Nobel Peace Prize winner) | |||
| Only a complete economic ignoramus would believe that Americans would for some reason be better at socialism than Russians. | Lew Rockwell | |||
| Our Constitution was not written in the sands to be washed away by each wave of new judges blown in by each successive political wind. | Hugo L. Black | |||
| Our forefathers made one mistake. What they should have fought for was representation without taxation. | Fletcher Knebel | |||
| Our policy is simple: We are not going to betray our friends, reward the enemies of freedom, or permit fear and retreat to become American policies... None of the four wars in my lifetime came about because we were too strong. It is weakness... that invites adventurous adversaries to make mistaken judgments. | Ronald Reagan | |||
| Our problems are both acute and chronic, yet all we hear from those in positions of leadership are the same tired proposals for more government tinkering, more meddling and more control, all of which led us to this state in the first place. ... We must have the clarity of vision to see the difference between what is essential and what is merely desirable, and then the courage to bring our government back under control and make it acceptable to the people. | Ronald Reagan | |||
| People are beginning to realize that the apparatus of government is costly. But what they do not know is that the burden falls inevitably on them. | Frederic Bastiat | |||
| People have got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There's no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation. | Margaret Thatcher | |||
| 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 social democracy is a hollow farce without an armed populace to make it work. | L. Neil Smith | |||
| Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one's government is not necessarily to secure freedom. | F.A. Hayek | |||
| Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of central government. | Aldous Huxley | |||
| Politicians and government bureaucrats are not good at recognizing the unintended consequences of their own actions. ...Most people, most of the time, will behave in a relatively rational manner, and thus government should leave them alone unless they are a clear and present danger to others. | Richard W. Rahn | |||
| Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. | John Adams (1814) | |||
| Republics end through luxury; monarchies through poverty. | Charles de Montesquieu | |||
| Right now the Republicans and Democrats in Washington seem, from the outside, to be an elite colluding against the voter. | Peggy Noonan | |||
| Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| Secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy... censorship. When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects,"this you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know," the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motive. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| 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. Then abolish this law without delay ... If such a law is not abolished immediately it will spread, multiply and develop into a system. | Frederic Bastiat | |||
| See, when the government spends money, it creates jobs; whereas when the money is left in the hands of taxpayers, God only knows what they do with it. Bake it into pies, probably. Anything to avoid creating jobs. | Dave Barry | |||
| So people on the left and right are both worried sick about the election. ... They're right to be worried, of course, at least to a degree. The Presidency is an office of great power. On the other hand, if the federal government were properly limited to its constitutional powers, there would be much less to fear, and elections would be less stressful for all concerned. | Glenn Reynolds | |||
| Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy. | Winston Churchill | |||
| Some may disagree with the decision of the Founders to enshrine a given right in the Constitution. If so, then the people can amend the document. But such amendments are not for the courts to ordain. | Diarmuid O’Scannlain, Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals | |||
| Some people believe in limited government as a principle. Others see limited government as simply a fact--that there are only a limited number of things that government can do more effectively than individuals or other organizations can do. | Thomas Sowell | |||
| Statesmen, therefore, will do well to abstain from a form a liberality which robs one man to enrich another. Their first care will be to secure the rights of property by the equity of the law. | Marcus Tullius Cicero | |||
| Statistics can fool you. In fact it is fooling your government right now. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | |||
| Students often ask what can be done about the 'problem' of young people who don't care enough to vote. I always say that I don't see it as much of problem 'because most of you don't know anything yet. I'm OK with you not voting!' The students laugh, but I'm not joking. ... I only started to think I knew what ought to be done after years of reporting and reading voraciously to absorb arguments from left and right. The idea that most voters vote without having done much of that work is, frankly, scary. | John Stossel | |||
| Take any three letters of the alphabet — it doesn’t matter, pick three at random — put them in any order you want, it doesn’t matter — you will have an acronym designating a federal agency we can do without. | Milton Friedman | |||
| Taxes are not levied for the benefit of the taxed. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| That government is best which governs someone else. | Rex F. May | |||
| The advantage of a free market is that it allows millions of decision-makers to respond individually to freely determined prices, allocating resources -- labor, capital and human ingenuity-- in a manner that can't be mimicked by a central plan, however brilliant the central planner. | F.A. Hayek | |||
| The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money. | Alexis de Tocqueville | |||
| The average age of the world's great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage. | Alexander Fraser Tytler, The Decline and Fall of the Athenian Republic | |||
| The best minds are not in government. If any were, business would hire them away. | Ronald Reagan | |||
| The Bill of Rights does not come from the people and is not subject to change by majorities. It comes from the nature of things. It declares the inalienable rights of man not only against all government but also against the people collectively. | Walter Lippmann | |||
| The choice before the American people is the choice between two visions: on the one hand, the policies of limited government, economic growth, a strong defense, and a firm foreign policy; and on the other hand, policies of tax and spend, economic stagnation, international weakness and accommodation, and always, always, from them, 'Blame America first.' | Ronald Reagan | |||
| The consolidation of the states into one vast republic, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of the ruin which has overwhelmed all those that have preceded it. | Robert E. Lee | |||
| The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government. | Patrick Henry | |||
| The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of the people. | William O. Douglas | |||
| The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not. | Thomas Jefferson | |||
| The deterioration of a government begins almost always by the decay of its principles. | Charles de Montesquieu | |||
| The difference between Congress and drunken sailors is that drunken sailors are spending their own money. | Florida Republican Rep. Tom Feene | |||
| The difference between death and taxes is: death doesn't get worse every time Congress meets. | Will Rogers | |||
| The difference between free-market capitalism and state capitalism is precisely the difference between, on the one hand, peaceful, voluntary exchange, and on the other, violent expropriation. | Murray Rothbard | |||
| The free market is a bathroom scale. You may hate what you see when you step on the scale. 'Jeeze, 230 pounds!' But you can't pass a law making yourself weigh 185. Liberals think you can. | P.J. O'Rourke | |||
| The goal to strive for is a poor government but a rich people. | Andrew Johnson | |||
| The government of the United States is a definite government, confined to specified objects. It is not like the state government, whose powers are more general. Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government. | James Madison | |||
| The government says to the citizen: 'Your earnings are not exclusively your own; we have a claim on them, and our claim precedes yours; we will allow you to keep some of it, because we recognize your need, not your right; but whatever we grant you for yourself is for us to decide.' | Frank Chodorov | |||
| The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem. | Milton Friedman | |||
| The governmental policies in the United States of America are a damper, a wet blanket. They retard investment; they retard job formation; they retard the creation of a better life for the citizens in spite of the rhetoric of the president. | Steve Wynn | |||
| The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding. | Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis | |||
| The hardest thing to understand in the world is the income tax. | Albert Einstein | |||
| The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| The idea of equal natural rights is not only the ground for government by consent, but also sets the limit for what that government may rightfully do. If rights precede the formation of government, the primary goal of government is to secure those rights. It cannot grant them, nor can it violate them. To achieve this, government must protect individuals equally under the law. | Thomas L. Krannawitter | |||
| The income tax is 'a vicious, inequitable, unpopular, impolitic and socialistic act... The crusade for an income tax is the most unreasoning and un-American movement in the politics of the last quarter-century.' | Editorial, New York Times, 1894 | |||
| The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent vice of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries. | Winston Churchill | |||
| The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic. | H.L. Mencken | |||
| The law cannot be made identical with morality. Scan the list of the Ten Commandments and see how many could be enforced even by Rudy Giuliani. | P.J. O'Rourke | |||
| The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. | Thomas Jefferson | |||
| The more corrupt the State the more numerous the laws. | Cornelius Tacitus | |||
| The multiplication of public offices, increase of expense beyond income, growth and entailment of a public debt, are indications soliciting the employment of the pruning knife. | Thomas Jefferson | |||
| The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop. | P.J. O'Rourke | |||
| The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground. | Thomas Jefferson | |||
| The normal state of mankind is subsistence poverty with a layer of rich oligarchs above it. I think we're headed there again. | Jerry Pournelle | |||
| The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant. | John Stuart Mill | |||
| The only way to make sure that government doesn't abuse its power is to not grant it in the first place. | Tom DeWeese | |||
| The past shows unvaryingly that when a people's freedom disappears, it goes not with a bang, but in silence amid the comfort of being cared for. That is the dire peril in the present trend toward statism. If freedom is not found accompanied by a willingness to resist, and to reject favors, rather than to give up what is intangible but precarious, it will not long be found at all. | Richard Weaver | |||
| The people who cast the votes don't decide an election, the people who count the votes do. | Josef Stalin | |||
| The people who comprise the government respond to incentives just like anyone else and are not magically transformed to selfless agents of the good merely by accepting government employment. | John Hasnas | |||
| The plans differ; the planners are all alike... | Frederic Bastiat | |||
| The point of terrorism is not to 'destroy.' It is to terrify. And for eight and a half years now, the dominant federal government response to terrorist threats and attacks has been to magnify their harm by increasing a mood of fear and intimidation. | James Fallows | |||
| The police are like parents. They're not really interested in justice. They simply want *quiet*. | L. Neil Smith | |||
| The power to tax is the power to destroy. | John Marshall | |||
| The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. | James Madison | |||
| The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined... The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives and liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement and prosperity of the State. | James Madison | |||
| The president said today he would go along with Congress' request to establish benchmarks regarding Iraq. For example, the Iraqi government would have to show results by certain dates before they are given any more money. Forget Iraq. Why don't we try that here? | Jay Leno | |||
| The primary role of government is to increase the size of government. | Neal Boortz | |||
| The principal purpose of the Democratic Party is to use the force of government to take property away from the people who earn it and give it to people who do not. | Neal Boortz | |||
| The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money. | Margaret Thatcher | |||
| The problem with trying to equalize is that you can usually only equalize downward. | Thomas Sowell | |||
| The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then gets elected and proves it. | P.J. O'Rourke | |||
| The right to be let alone is the underlying principle of the Constitution's Bill of Rights. | Erwin N. Griswold | |||
| The short memories of the American voters is what keeps our politicians in office. | Will Rogers | |||
| The single most prevalent form of child abuse in this country is the act of sending a child to a government school. | Ann Coulter | |||
| The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. | Thomas Jefferson | |||
| The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government. | Thomas Jefferson | |||
| The tank, the B-52, the fighter-bomber, the state controlled police and the military are the weapons of dictatorship. The rifle is the weapon of democracy .... If guns are outlawed, only the government will have guns. | Edward Abbey | |||
| The ten most dangerous words in the English language are, 'I'm from the federal government, and I'm here to help.' | Ronald Reagan | |||
| The totalitarian states can do great things, but there is one thing they cannot do: they cannot give the factory-worker a rifle and tell him to take it home and keep it in his bedroom. That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer's cottage, is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there. | George Orwell | |||
| The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. | Thomas Jefferson | |||
| The true danger is when Liberty is nibbled away for expedients. | Edmund Burke | |||
| The truth is that no government is ever at a loss for methods of controlling its population. No computer is needed, no codes, no dossiers. The history of mankind is a history of tyranny and of government by repression, and some of the most repressive and efficiently despotic governments have had very little in the way of technology at their service. | Isaac Asimov | |||
| The ultimate touchstone of constitutionality is the Constitution itself and not what we have said about it. | Felix Frankfurter | |||
| The use of extraordinary power in extraordinary times, soon becomes the ordinary use of power in ordinary times. | John Locke | |||
| The U.S. Constitution may be flawed, but it's a whole lot better than what we have now. | ||||
| The war for liberty never ends. One day liberty has to be defended against the power of wealth, on another day against the intrigues of politicians, on another against the dead hand of bureaucrats, on another against the patrioter and the militarist, on another against the profiteer, and then against the hysteria and the passions of the mobs, against obscurantism and stupidity, against the criminal and against the over-righteous. | Walter Lippmann | |||
| The way to have good and safe government, is not to trust it all to one, but to divide it among the many, distributing to every one exactly the functions he is competent to. Let the national government be entrusted with the defence of the nation... the State governments with the civil rights, laws, police... the counties with the local concerns. | Thomas Jefferson | |||
| The whole of that Bill [of Rights] is a declaration of the right of the people at large or considered as individuals.... It establishes some rights of the individual as unalienable and which consequently, no majority has a right to deprive them of. | Albert Gallatin | |||
| The 'private sector' of the economy is, in fact, the 'voluntary' sector; and...the 'public sector' is, in fact, the 'coercive' sector. | Henry Hazlitt | |||
| There are a lot of good, kindly people who are internationalists these days. Nine out of ten of them are soft in the head and the tenth is ignorant | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order. | Ed Howdershelt | |||
| There are just two rules of governance in a free society: Mind your own business. Keep your hands to yourself. | P.J. O'Rourke | |||
| There are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by the gradual and silent encroachment of those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpation. | James Madison | |||
| There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president. | Kurt Vonnegut | |||
| There is no crueler form of tyranny than which is perpetuated under the shield of law and in the name of justice. | Baron de Montesquieu | |||
| There is no such thing as a good tax. | Winston Churchill | |||
| 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 A. Heinlein | |||
| There is nothing so permanent in this world as a temporary emergency. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| There may be no candidates and measures you want to vote for... But there are certain to be ones you want to vote against. In case of doubt, vote against. By this rule you will rarely go wrong. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| There was a time when there was enough freedom that it hardly mattered which brand of crooks ran government. That has not been true for a long time -- not during most of your lifetimes, and for much of mine -- and it will probably never be true again. | Jerry Pournelle | |||
| There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power government has is power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things a crime that it becomes impossible to live without breaking laws. | Ayn Rand | |||
| There's 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. | P.J. O'Rourke | |||
| Things in our country run in spite of government, not by aid of it. | Will Rogers | |||
| Those who give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. | Benjamin Franklin | |||
| TM2000-25: 118-120 DEMOCRACY: A government of the masses. Authority derived through mass meeting or any other form of direct expression. Results in mobocracy. Attitude toward property is communistic- negating property rights. Attitude toward law is that the will of the majority shall regulate, whether it be based upon deliberation or governed by passion, prejudice, and impulse, without restraint or regard to consequences. Results in demagogism, license, agitation, discontent, anarchy. | U.S. Army training manual, 1928 | |||
| TM2000-25: 120-121 REPUBLIC: Authority is derived throughout the election by the people of public officials best fitted to represent them. Attitude toward property is respect for laws and individual rights, and a sensible economic procedure. Attitude toward law is the administration of justice in accord with fixed principles and established evidence, with a strict regard to consequences. A greater number of citizens and extent of territory may be brought within its compass. Avoids the dangerous extreme of either tyranny or mobocracy [democracy]. Results in statesmanship, liberty, reason, justice, contentment, and progress. | U.S. Army training manual, 1928 | |||
| To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves, is sinful and tyrannical. | Thomas Jefferson | |||
| To consider the 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 | |||
| To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt. | Elizabeth Cady Stanton | |||
| 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 | |||
| Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. | Dwight D. Eisenhower | |||
| Today, there is a name for the political doctrine that rejoices in scarcity of everything except government. The name is environmentalism. | George Will | |||
| Today, we’re spending like we’re Paris Hilton, regulating like we’re Ralph Nader, nationalizing like we’re Hugo Chavez, printing money like we’re the Weimar Republic and taxing like we’re, well, the Democratic Congress. | Former Sen. Zell Miller, 2009 | |||
| Too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it's the government's job to cope with it... They're casting their problem on society. And you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. | Margaret Thatcher | |||
| Unnecessary taxation is unjust taxation. | Abram Stevens Hewitt | |||
| Voting is serious business. It works best when people educate themselves. If uninformed people stay home on Election Day, good | John Stossel | |||
| War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse. A man who has nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety is a miserable creature who has no chance at being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. | John Stuart Mill | |||
| Washington D.C.: What happens when Congress has complete control of a society. Take that as a warning. | Michael Z. Williamson | |||
| We can't simply make things up because we don't like the consequences of the laws we created. Just like we simply can't make up numbers and say the budget's balanced. We can't give the public false impressions that answers are both easy and painless. | Jon Corzine | |||
| We contend that for a nation to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle. | Winston Churchill | |||
| We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism... We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert. | J. Robert Oppenheimer | |||
| We do not live by rule of law, because no one can possibly go a day without breaking one or another of the goofy laws that have been imposed on us over the years. No one even KNOWS all the laws that apply to almost anything we do now. We live in a time of selective enforcement of law. | Jerry Pournelle | |||
| We don't have a trillion-dollar debt because we haven't taxed enough; we have a trillion-dollar debt because we spend too much. | Ronald Reagan | |||
| We have always known that eternal vigilance is the price of freedom. It's worse now, because capture of government is so much more important than it once was. | Jerry Pournelle | |||
| We have involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, having blundered in the control of a delicate machine, the working of which we do not understand. | John Maynard Keynes | |||
| 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, Congressman 1827-35 | |||
| We now seek to establish a centralized national state with socialist principles, but not formal nationalization of industries and the means of production. The social classes will be required to work together. We will not call it a Fascist state, but Huey Long would have. | Jerry Pournelle | |||
| We will be a compassionate empire, to make whole the broken parts of the world, to protect the weak and make humble the proud; we will carry liberty across the world on the points of our bayonets. | ||||
| Wealth is, for most people, the only honest and likely path to liberty. With money comes power over the world. Men are freed from drudgery, women from exploitation. Businesses can be started, homes built, communities formed, religions practiced, educations pursued. But liberals aren't very interested in such real and material freedoms. They have a more innocent not to say toddlerlike idea of freedom. Liberals want the freedom to put anything into their mouths, to say bad words and to expose their private parts in art museums. | P.J. O'Rourke | |||
| Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we should soon want bread. | Thomas Jefferson | |||
| What has destroyed liberty and the rights of man in every government which has ever existed under the sun? The generalizing and concentrating all cares and powers into one body, no matter whether of the autocrats of Russia or France, or of the aristocrats of a Venetian Senate. | Thomas Jefferson | |||
| What I fear most are... actions of sober and well-intentioned men, granting to government powers to do something that appears to need doing. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| What is politically defined as economic 'planning' is the forcible superseding of other people's plans by government officials. | Thomas Sowell | |||
| What is supposed to happen in a democracy is that each sovereign citizen will always vote in the public interest for the safety and welfare of all. But what does happen is that he votes his own self-interest as he sees it... which for the majority translates as 'Bread and Circuses'. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| What most people really object to when they object to a free market is that it is so hard for them to shape it to their own will. The market gives people what the people want instead of what other people think they ought to want. At the bottom of many criticisms of the market economy is really lack of belief in freedom itself. | Milton Friedman | |||
| What the government is good at is collecting taxes, taking away your freedoms and killing people. It's not good at much else. | Tom Clancy | |||
| Whatsoever, for any cause,<BR> Seeketh to take or give,<BR> Power above or beyond the Laws,<BR> Suffer it not to live!<BR> <BR> Holy State or Holy King--<BR>Or Holy People's Will--<BR> Have no truck with the senseless thing.<BR> Order the guns and kill! | Rudyard Kipling, 'MacDonough's Song' | |||
| 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 | |||
| When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators. | P.J. O'Rourke | |||
| When goods don't cross borders, soldiers will. | Frederic Bastiat | |||
| When governments fear the people there is liberty. When the people fear the government there is tyranny. | Thomas Jefferson | |||
| When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it. | Adrian Rogers | |||
| When money is delivered in expectation of results, rather than for the results themselves, the decision makers have an obligation to put the money where they think it will likely accomplish something. This almost guarantees that nothing too far outside the norm will be funded, because it could make the decision-makers look very foolish. | John Carmack | |||
| When taxes are too high, there will never be enough jobs or enough revenues to balance the budget. | John F. Kennedy | |||
| When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, then Athens ceased to be free. | Edmund Gibbon | |||
| When the government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. | Thomas Jefferson | |||
| When you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship. | Harry S Truman | |||
| Where benevolent planning, armed with political and economic power, becomes wicked is when it tramples on peoples' rights for the sake of their own good. | C.S. Lewis | |||
| While capitalism may not be a sufficient condition of human freedom, it is almost certainly a necessary one. | Peter Saunders | |||
| Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation must begin by subduing the Freeness of Speech. | Benjamin Franklin | |||
| Women campaigning for sobriety did not intend to give rise to the income tax, plea bargaining, a nationwide crime syndicate, Las Vegas, NASCAR (country boys outrunning government agents), a redefined role for the federal government and a privacy right — the 'right to be let alone' — that eventually was extended to abortion rights. But they did. | George Will | |||
| Yes, we did produce a near-perfect republic. But will they keep it? Or will they, in the enjoyment of plenty, lose the memory of Freedom? Material abundance without character is the path of destruction. | Thomas Jefferson | |||
| You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having both at once. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer. | Abraham Lincoln | |||
| You can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| 'Necessity' is the excuse for every infringement of freedom. It is the argument of the tyrant; it is the creed of the slave. | Prime Minister William Pitt (the Younger) | |||
| 'One World' means a concept in which the United States is not sovereign, any more than one of our states is truly sovereign. That means that the United States would be outvoted... which just as certainly means that they would swarm over us immediately after counting the votes. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| ...almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| ‘Bread and Circuses’ is the cancer of democracy, the fatal disease for which there is no cure. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| [After 1776] ...the term 'democrat' originated as an epithet and referred to 'one who panders to the crude and mindless whims of the masses.' | Joseph Ellis, "Founding Brothers" | |||
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