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|  Lord Acton | I cannot accept, your canon that we are to judge pope and king unlike other men, with a favorable presumption that they do no wrong. If there is any presumption, it is the other way against holders of power ... Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. | |
| John Adams | All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arise not from defects in their Constitution or Confederation, nor from want of honor or virtue, so much as downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation. | |
| John Adams | The priesthood have, in all ancient nations, nearly monopolized learning.... And, even since the Reformation, when or where has existed a Protestant or dissenting sect who would tolerate A FREE INQUIRY? The blackest billingsgate, the most ungentlemanly insolence, the most yahooish brutality is patiently endured, countenanced, propagated, and applauded. But touch a solemn truth in collision with a dogma of a sect, though capable of the clearest proof, and you will soon find you have disturbed a nest, and the hornets will swarm about your legs and hands, and fly into your face and eyes. | |
| John Adams | Be not intimidated... nor suffer yourselves to be wheedled out of your liberties by any pretense of politeness, delicacy, or decency. These, as they are often used, are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery and cowardice. | |
| John Adams | The jaws of power are always open to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing. | |
| John Adams | We think ourselves possessed, or, at least, we boast that we are so, of liberty of conscience on all subjects, and of the right of free inquiry and private judgment in all cases, and yet how far are we from these exalted privileges in fact! There exists, I believe, throughout the whole Christian world, a law which makes it blasphemy to deny or doubt the divine inspiration of all the books of the Old and New Testaments, from Genesis to Revelations. In most countries of Europe it is punished by fire at the stake, or the rack, or the wheel. In England itself it is punished by boring through the tongue with a red-hot poker. In America it is not better; even in our own Massachusetts, which I believe, upon the whole, is as temperate and moderate in religious zeal as most of the States, a law was made in the latter end of the last century, repealing the cruel punishments of the former laws, but substituting fine and imprisonment upon all those blasphemers upon any book of the Old Testament or New. Now, what free inquiry, when a writer must surely encounter the risk of fine or imprisonment for adducing any argument for investigating into the divine authority of those books? Who would run the risk of translating Dupuis? But I cannot enlarge upon this subject, though I have it much at heart. I think such laws a great embarrassment, great obstructions to the improvement of the human mind. Books that cannot bear examination, certainly ought not to be established as divine inspiration by penal laws. It is true, few persons appear desirous to put such laws in execution, and it is also true that some few persons are hardy enough to venture to depart from them. But as long as they continue in force as laws, the human mind must make an awkward and clumsy progress in its investigations. I wish they were repealed. The substance and essence of Christianity, as I understand it, is eternal and unchangeable, and will bear examination forever, but it has been mixed with extraneous ingredients, which I think will not bear examination, and they ought to be separated. Adieu. | |
| John Adams | Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people. | |
| John Adams | Liberty, according to my metaphysics, is an intellectual quality, an attribute that belongs not to fate nor chance. Neither possesses it, neither is capable of it. There is nothing moral or immoral in the idea of it. The definition of it is a self-determining power in an intellectual agent. It implies thought and choice and power; it can elect between objects, indifferent in point of morality, neither morally good nor morally evil. | |
| John Adams | There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty. | |
| John Adams | A question arises whether all the powers of government, legislative, executive, and judicial, shall be left in this body? I think a people cannot be long free, nor ever happy, whose government is in one Assembly. | |
| John Adams | Objects of the most stupendous magnitude, and measure in which the lives and liberties of millions yet unborn are intimately interested, are now before us. We are in the very midst of a revolution the most complete, unexpected and remarkable of any in the history of nations. | |
| John Adams | Statesmen, my dear Sir, may plan and speculate for liberty, but it is religion and morality alone, which can establish the principles upon which freedom can securely stand. The only foundation of a free Constitution is pure virtue, and if this cannot be inspired into our People in a greater Measure than they have it now, they may change their rulers and the forms of government, but they will not obtain a lasting liberty. | |
| John Adams | [You have Rights] antecedent to all earthly governments:
Rights, that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws;
Rights, derived from the Great Legislator of the universe. | |
| John Adams | We should be unfaithful to ourselves if we should ever lose sight of the danger to our liberties if anything partial or extraneous should infect the purity of our free, fair, virtuous, and independent elections. | |
| John Adams | When I went home to my family in May, 1770, from the town meeting in Boston, which was the first I had ever attended, and where I had been chosen in my absence, without any solicitation, one of their representatives, I said to my wife, "I have accepted a seat in the House of Representatives, and thereby have consented to my own ruin, to your ruin, and to the ruin of our children. I give you this warning, that you may prepare your mind for your fate." She burst into tears, but instantly cried out in a transport of magnanimity, "Well, I am willing in this cause to run all risks with you, and be ruined with you, if you are ruined." These were times, my friend, in Boston, which tried women's souls as well as men's. | |
| John Adams | We have no government armed in power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our Constitution was made only for a religious and moral people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other. | |
| John Adams | I Said to my Wife, I have accepted a Seat in the House of Representatives and thereby have consented to my own Ruin to your Ruin and the Ruin of our Children. I give you this Warning that you may prepare your Mind for your Fate. | |
| John Adams | The poor people, it is true, have been much less successful than the great. They have seldom found either leisure or opportunity to form a union and exert their strength; ignorant as they were of arts and letters, they have seldom been able to frame and support a regular opposition. This, however, has been known by the great to be the temper of mankind; and they have accordingly labored, in all ages, to wrest from the populace, as they are contemptuously called, the knowledge of their rights and wrongs, and the power to assert the former or redress the latter. I say RIGHTS, for such they have, undoubtedly, antecedent to all earthly government, Rights, that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws, Rights, derived from the great Legislator of the universe. | |
| John Adams | Twenty times in the course of my late reading have I been on the point of breaking out, "This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!!!" But in this exclamation I would have been as fanatical as Bryant or Cleverly. Without religion this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite company, I mean hell. | |
| John Quincy Adams | Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost. | |
| Walter Bagehot | A democratic despotism is like a theocracy: it assumes its own correctness. | |
| Paul Begala | Stroke of the pen. Law of the land. Kinda cool. | |
| Justice Louis D. Brandeis | Decency, security, and liberty alike demand that government officials shall be subjected to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen... If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. | |
| David Broder | Anybody that wants
the Presidency so much
that he'll spend two years
organizing and campaigning for it
is not to be trusted
with the office. | |
| James Buchanan | I like the noise of democracy. | |
| James Buchanan | What is right and what is practicable are two different things. | |
| James Burgh | All lawful authority, legislative, and executive, originates from the people. | |
| George Herbert Walker Bush | [The war in Iraq is] a rare opportunity to move toward an historic period of cooperation. Out of these troubled times...a new world order can emerge. | |
| George Herbert Walker Bush | You know what's interesting about Washington? It's the kind of place where second-guessing has become second nature. | |
| George Herbert Walker Bush | Freedom and the power to choose should not be the privilege of wealth. They are the birthright of every American. | |
| George Herbert Walker Bush | It was just one year ago that the world saw this new, invigorated United Nations in action as this Council stood fast against aggression and stood for the sacred principles enshrined in the U.N. Charter. And now it's time to step forward again, make the internal reforms, accelerate the revitalization, accept the responsibilities necessary for a vigorous and effective United Nations. I want to assure the members of this Council and the Secretary-General, the United Nations can count on our full support in this task. | |
| George Herbert Walker Bush | My vision of a 'new world order' foresees a United Nations with a revitalized peacekeeping function. | |
| George Herbert Walker Bush | It is the sacred principles enshrined in the UN Charter to which we will henceforth pledge our allegiance. | |
| George Herbert Walker Bush | If the people were to ever find out what we have done, we would be chased down the streets and lynched. | |
| George W. Bush | We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans,
and confront the worst threats before they emerge. | |
| George W. Bush | We have every reason to assume the worst. | |
| George W. Bush | Today the Justice Department did issue a blanket alert. It was in recognition of a general threat we received. This is not the first time the Justice Department have acted like this. I hope it is the last. But given the attitude of the evildoers, it may not be. | |
| George W. Bush | I don’t give a goddamn. I’m the President
and the Commander-in-Chief. Do it my way. ...
Stop throwing the Constitution in my face.
It’s just a goddamned piece of paper! | |
| George W. Bush | We will fight with full force and might of the United States military. | |
| George W. Bush | Saddam Hussein's regime is a gray and gathering danger. | |
| George W. Bush | We need an energy bill that encourages consumption. | |
| George W. Bush | I want him [Saddam Hussein]. I want -- I want justice.
There is an old poster seen out west.
As I recall, it said, Wanted Dead or Alive. | |
| George W. Bush | The liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance
in the campaign against terror.
We've removed an ally of al Qaeda. | |
| George W. Bush | There is no telling how many wars it will take to secure freedom in the homeland. | |
| George W. Bush | The choice is his [Saddam Hussein's], and if he does not disarm, the United States of America will lead a coalition and disarm him in the name of Peace. | |
| George W. Bush | I'm a war president. I make decisions here in the Oval Office and foreign policy matters with war on my mind. | |
| George W. Bush | And our security will require all Americans
to be forward-looking and resolute,
to be ready for pre-emptive action. | |
| George W. Bush | There will be no going back to the era before September 11th, 2001, to false comfort in a dangerous world. | |
| George W. Bush | There are some who feel like that, you know, the conditions are such that they can attack us there [in Iraq]. My answer is, 'Bring 'em on.' | |
| George W. Bush | We've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the September 11th. | |
| George W. Bush | Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. | |
| George W. Bush | Our enemies are a radical network of terrorists --
and every government that supports them. | |
| George W. Bush | They misunderestimated me. | |
| George W. Bush | We're too great a nation to allow the evildoers to affect our soul. | |
| John C. Calhoun | To maintain the ascendancy of the Constitution over the lawmaking majority is the great and essential point on which the success of the [American] system must depend; unless that ascendancy can be preserved, the necessary consequence must be that the laws will supersede the Constitution; and, finally, the will of the Executive, by influence of its patronage, will supersede the laws ... | |
| Jimmy Carter | The law is not the private property of lawyers, nor is justice the exclusive province of judges and juries. In the final analysis, true justice is not a matter of courts and law books, but of a commitment in each of us to liberty and mutual respect. | |
| Jimmy Carter | The decision to attack the entire nation [of Yugoslavia] has been counterproductive, and our destruction of civilian life has now become senseless and excessively brutal. ... The United States' insistence on the use of cluster bombs, designed to kill or maim humans, is condemned almost universally and brings discredit on our nation (as does our refusal to support a ban on land mines). Even for the world's only superpower, the ends don't always justify the means. | |
| Jimmy Carter | America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense, it is the other way around. Human rights invented America. | |
| William Ellery Channing | The cry has been that when war is declared, all opposition should therefore be hushed. A sentiment more unworthy of a free country could hardly be propagated. If the doctrine be admitted, rulers have only to declare war and they are screened at once from scrutiny. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist. | |
| Grover Cleveland | I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution, and I do not believe that the power and duty of the general government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit. Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character, while it prevents the indulgence among our people of that kindly sentiment and conduct which strengthens the bonds of a common brotherhood. | |
| Grover Cleveland | I feel obliged to withhold my approval of the plan to indulge in benevolent and charitable sentiment through the appropriation of public funds... I find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution. | |
| Grover Cleveland | I can find no warrant for such appropriation in the Constitution. | |
| Grover Cleveland | Honor lies in honest toil. | |
| Grover Cleveland | The best results in the operation of a government wherein every citizen has a share largely depend upon a proper limitation of the purely partisan zeal and effort and a correct appreciation of the time when the heat of the partisan should be merged in the patriotism of the citizen. ... At this hour the animosities of political strife, the bitterness of partisan defeat, and the exultation of partisan triumph should be supplanted by an ungrudging acquiescence in the popular will and a sober, conscientious concern for the general weal. ... Public extravagance begets extravagance among the people. | |
| Grover Cleveland | A truly American sentiment recognizes the dignity of labor and the fact that honor lies in honest toil. | |
| Grover Cleveland | When more of the people's sustenance is exacted through the form of taxation than is necessary to meet the just obligations of government, such exaction becomes ruthless extortion and a violation of the fundamental principles of a free government. | |
| Bill Clinton | There is no reason for anyone in this country -- anyone except a police officer or military person -- to buy, to own, to have, to use a handgun. The only way to control handgun use in this country is to prohibit the guns. | |
| Bill Clinton | The purpose of government is to rein in the rights of the people. | |
| Bill Clinton | Every time Bush talks about trust it makes chills run up and down my spine. The way he has trampled on the truth is a travesty of the American political system. | |
| Bill Clinton | If the personal freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution
inhibit the government's ability to govern the people,
we should look to limit those guarantees. | |
| Bill Clinton | We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans... | |
| Bill Clinton | You know, by the time you become the leader of a country, someone else makes all the decisions. ... You may find you can get away with virtual presidents, virtual prime ministers, virtual everything. | |
| Bill Clinton | The other thing we have to do is to take seriously the role in this problem of...older men who prey on underage women...There are consequences to decisions and...one way or the other, people always wind up being held accountable. | |
| Bill Clinton | We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans... | |
| Hillary Clinton | I'm not going to have some reporters pawing through our papers. We are the president. | |
| William Colby | The Latin American drug cartels have stretched their tentacles much deeper into our lives than most people believe. It’s possible they are calling the shots at all levels of government. | |
| Calvin Coolidge | I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement. | |
| Calvin Coolidge | The collection of taxes which are not absolutely required, which do not beyond reasonable doubt contribute to the public welfare, is only a species of legalized larceny. The wise and correct course to follow in taxation is not to destroy those who have already secured success, but to create conditions under which everyone will have a better chance to be successful. | |
| Calvin Coolidge | No matter what anyone may say about making the rich and the corporations pay taxes, in the end they come out of the people who toil. | |
| Calvin Coolidge | When more and more people are thrown out of work, unemployment results. | |
| Calvin Coolidge | Liberty is not collective, it is personal. All liberty is individual liberty. | |
| Calvin Coolidge | Nature is inexorable. If men do not follow the truth they cannot live. | |
| Calvin Coolidge | As I went about with my father, when he collected taxes, I knew that when taxes were laid someone had to work hard to earn the money to pay them. | |
| Calvin Coolidge | Collecting more taxes than is absolutely necessary is legalized robbery. | |
| Calvin Coolidge | After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world. | |
| Calvin Coolidge | A wholesome regard for the memory of the great men of long ago is the best assurance to a people of a continuation of great men to come, who shall be able to instruct, to lead, and to inspire. A people who worship at the shrine of true greatness will themselves be truly great. | |
| Calvin Coolidge | No person was ever honored for what he received. Honor has been the reward for what he gave. | |
| Alan Corenk | Democracy consists of choosing your dictators, after they've told you what you think it is you want to hear. | |
| Council on Foreign Relations | [A] possible further difficulty is cited, namely, that arising from the Constitutional provision that only Congress may declare war. This argument is countered with the contention that a treaty will override this barrier, let alone the fact that our participation in such police action as might be recommended by the international security organization need not necessarily be construed as war. | |
| Tench Coxe | As our president bears no resemblance to a king so we shall see the Senate has no similitude to nobles. First, not being hereditary, their collective knowledge, wisdom, and virtue are not precarious. For by these qualities alone are they to obtain their offices, and they will have none of the peculiar qualities and vices of those men who possess power merely because their father held it before them. | |
| Benjamin Curtis | A greater principle is at stake than the fate of any particular president | |
| Clarence S. Darrow | When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President; I'm beginning to believe it. | |
| Justice David Davis | The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people,
equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection
all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances.
No doctrine, involving more pernicious consequences,
was ever invented by the wit of man than
that any of its provisions can be suspended
during any of the great exigencies of government.
Such a doctrine leads directly to anarchy or despotism,
but the theory of necessity on which it is based is false;
for the government, within the Constitution, has all the powers granted to it,
which are necessary to preserve its existence;
as has been happily proved by the result
of the great effort to throw off its just authority. | |
| Frederick Douglass | I know no class of my fellowmen, however just, enlightened, and humane, which can be wisely and safely trusted absolutely with the liberties of any other class. | |
| John Dryden | War is the trade of Kings. | |
| Dwight D. Eisenhower | A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both. | |
| Dwight D. Eisenhower | Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. | |
| Dwight D. Eisenhower | It is an ancient truth that freedom cannot be legislated into existence, so it is no less obvious that freedom cannot be censored into existence. And any who act as if freedom’s defenses are found in suppression and suspicion and fear confess a doctrine that is alien to America. | |
| Dwight D. Eisenhower | Why are we proud [to be American]? We are proud, first of all, because from the beginning of this Nation, a man can walk upright, no matter who he is, or who she is. He can walk upright and meet his friend -- or his enemy; and he does not fear that because that enemy may be in a position of great power that he can be suddenly thrown in jail to rot there without charges and with no recourse to justice. We have the habeas corpus act, and we respect it. | |
| Dwight D. Eisenhower | All of us have heard this term "preventive war" since the earliest days of Hitler. ... A preventive war, to my mind, is an impossibility today. How could you have one if one of its features would be several cities lying in ruins, several cities where many, many thousands of people would be dead and injured and mangled, the transportation systems destroyed, sanitation implements and systems all gone? That isn't preventive war; that is war. ... I don't believe there is such a thing; and, frankly, I wouldn't even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked about such a thing. | |
| Dwight D. Eisenhower | They [the founders] proclaimed to all the world the revolutionary doctrine of the divine rights of the common man. That doctrine has ever since been the heart of the American faith. | |
| Dwight D. Eisenhower | Here in America we are descended in spirit from revolutionaries and rebels -- men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. | |
| Dwight D. Eisenhower | Things are more like they are now than they ever were before. | |
| Dwight D. Eisenhower | Americans, indeed all freemen, remember that in the final choice, a soldier's pack is not so heavy a burden as a prisoner's chains. | |
| Dwight D. Eisenhower | Any time we deny any citizen the full exercise of his constitutional rights, we are weakening our own claim to them. | |
| Dwight D. Eisenhower | Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels -- men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, we may never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion. | |
| Dwight D. Eisenhower | We are going to have peace even if we have to fight for it. | |
| Dwight D. Eisenhower | I developed a practice which, so far as I know, I have never violated. The practice is to avoid public mention of any name unless it can be done with favorable intent and connotation; reserve all criticism for the private conference; speak only good in public. | |
| Millard Fillmore | Let us remember that revolutions do not always establish freedom. Our own free institutions were not the offspring of our revolution. They existed before. | |
| Kevin Freels | Isn't it wonderful to live in a country where anyone can grow up to sleep with the President? | |
| James A. Garfield | Be fit for more than the thing you are now doing. Let every one know that you have a reserve in yourself; that you have more power than you are now using. If you are not too large for the place you occupy, you are too small for it. | |
| James A. Garfield | Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently maintained. | |
| James A. Garfield | Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce. | |
| Edward Gibbon | The principles of a free constitution are irrevocably lost when the legislative power is dominated by the executive. | |
| Hermann Goering | Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country. | |
| Ulysses S. Grant | I have never advocated war except as a means of peace. | |
| Ulysses S. Grant | The right of revolution is an inherent one. When people are oppressed by their government, it is a natural right they enjoy to relieve themselves of the oppression, if they are strong enough, either by withdrawal from it, or by overthrowing it and substituting a government more acceptable. | |
| Ulysses S. Grant | If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon's but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition and ignorance on the other. | |
| Ulysses S. Grant | I know of no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution. | |
| Judge Joyce Hens Green | Although this nation unquestionably must take strong action under the leadership of the commander in chief to protect itself against enormous and unprecedented threats, that necessity cannot negate the existence of the most basic fundamental rights for which the people of this country have fought and died for well over two hundred years... In sum, there can be no question that the Fifth Amendment right asserted by the Guantanamo detainees in this litigation -- the right not to be deprived of liberty without due process of law -- is one of the most fundamental rights recognized by the U.S. Constitution. | |
| Alexander Hamilton | In this distribution of powers the wisdom of our constitution is manifested. It is the province and duty of the Executive to preserve to the Nation the blessings of peace. The Legislature alone can interrupt those blessings, by placing the Nation in a state of War. | |
| Alexander Hamilton | A feeble executive implies a feeble execution of the government. A feeble execution is but another phrase for a bad execution; and a government ill executed, whatever may be its theory, must be, in practice, a bad government. | |
| Alexander Hamilton | The President of the United States would be liable to be impeached, tried, and upon conviction of treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors, removed from office; and would afterwards be liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law. The person of the King of Great Britain is sacred and inviolable: There is no constitutional tribunal to which he is amenable, no punishment to which he can be subjected without involving the crisis of a national revolution. | |
| Alexander Hamilton | The President is to be commander-in-chief of the army and navy of the United States. In this respect his authority would be nominally the same with that of the king of Great Britain, but in substance much inferior to it. It would amount to nothing more than the supreme command and direction of the land and naval forces, as first general and admiral ... while that of the British king extends to the declaring of war and to the raising and regulating of fleets and armies -- all which, by the Constitution under consideration, would appertain to the legislature. | |
| Benjamin Harrison | We Americans have no commission from God to police the world | |
| William Henry Harrison | The plea of necessity, that eternal argument of all conspirators. | |
| Vaclav Havel | I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can probe mightier than ten military divisions. | |
| Adolf Hitler | Without law and order our nation cannot survive. | |
| Gen. Joseph P. Hoar | In their great wisdom, our Founding Fathers, gathered in Philadelphia to draft the new U.S. Constitution, gave the sole authority to declare war to the U.S. Congress. ... our Founders understood that it was essential, to secure a representative form of republican self-government, that the power to declare war must be in the hands of Congress, and not in the Executive Branch. ...
Nothing has transpired in the intervening centuries to justify any alteration in their wise decision. Under our Federal Constitution, only the Congress has the power to declare war, and that must remain a cardinal principle. In recent decades, we have seen an erosion of that Constitutional principle, and I fully concur that this erosion must be halted and reverse. | |
| Herbert Hoover | Honest difference of views and honest debate are not disunity.
They are the vital process of policy among free men. | |
| Herbert Hoover | It [freedom] is a thing of the spirit. Men must be free to worship, to think, to hold opinions, to speak without fear. They must be free to challenge wrong and oppression with the surety of justice. | |
| Herbert Hoover | Freedom conceives that the mind and spirit of man can be free only if he is free to pattern his own life, to develop his own talents, free to earn, to spend, to save, to acquire property as the security of his old age and his family. | |
| Hubert H. Humphrey | Freedom is the most contagious virus known to man. | |
| Hubert H. Humphrey | There are incalculable resources in the human spirit, once it has been set free. | |
| Hubert H. Humphrey | Freedom is hammered out on the anvil of discussion, dissent and debate. | |
| Hubert H. Humphrey | None of us would trade freedom of expression for the narrowness of the public censor. America is a free market for people who have something to say, and need not fear to say it. | |
| Andrew Jackson | It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. | |
| Andrew Jackson | As long as our government is administered for the good of the people, and is regulated by their will; as long as it secures to us the rights of persons and of property, liberty of conscience and of the press, it will be worth defending. | |
| Andrew Jackson | The bold effort the present (central) bank had made to control the government ... are but premonitions of the fate that await the American people should they be deluded into a perpetuation of this institution or the establishment of another like it. | |
| Andrew Jackson | The Bible is the rock on which our Republic rests. | |
| Andrew Jackson | The brave man inattentive to his duty, is worth little more to his country than the coward who deserts her in the hour of danger. | |
| John Jay | The jury has the right to judge both the law as well as the fact in controversy. | |
| John Jay | Providence has given our people the choice of their rulers, and it is the duty, as well as privilege and interest, of a Christian nation to select and prefer Christians for their rulers. | |
| John Jay | The people who own the country ought to govern it. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Choice by the people themselves is not generally distinguished for its wisdom. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I have often thought that nothing would do more extensive good at small expense than the establishment of a small circulating library in every county, to consist of a few well-chosen books, to be lent to the people of the country under regulations as would secure their safe return in due time. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Government can do something for the people only in proportion as it can do something to the people. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | 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 People] are the ultimate, guardians of their own liberty. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | There is no act, however virtuous, for which ingenuity may not find some bad motive. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | When the government fears the people there is liberty; when the people fear the government there is tyranny. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The whole art of government consists in the art of being honest. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | We shall have our follies without doubt. Some one or more of them will always be afloat. But ours will be the follies of enthusiasm, not of bigotry, not of Jesuitism. Bigotry is the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds; enthusiasm of the free and buoyant. Education and free discussion are the antidotes of both. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I tolerate with utmost latitude the right of others to differ with me in opinion without imputing to them criminality. I know too well all the weaknesses and uncertainty of human reason to wonder at its different results. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. Already they have raised up a moneyed aristocracy that has set the Government at defiance. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | On every question of construction [of the Constitution] let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or intended against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Agriculture, manufacturers, commerce, and navigation, the four pillars of our prosperity, are then most thriving when left most free to individual enterprise. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | For a people who are free, and who mean to remain so, a well organized and armed militia is their best security. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I agree with you that it is the duty of every good citizen to use all the opportunities, which occur to him, for preserving documents relating to the history of our country. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | 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' (10th Amendment). To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specifically drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible to any definition. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The will of the people is the only legitimate foundation of any government, and to protect its free expression should be our first object. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I cannot live without books. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Every citizen should be a soldier. This was the case with the Greeks and Romans, and must be that of every free state. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of the day; but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period, and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers (adminstrators) too plainly proves a deliberate, systematic plan of reducing us to slavery. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Our legislators are not sufficiently apprized of the rightful limits of their power; that their true office is to declare and enforce only our natural rights and duties, and to take none of them from us. No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another; and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him; every man is under the natural duty of contributing to the necessities of the society; and this is all the laws should enforce on him; and, no man having a natural right to be the judge between himself and another, it is his natural duty to submit to the umpirage of an impartial third. When the laws have declared and enforced all this, they have fulfilled their functions, and the idea is quite unfounded, that on entering into society we give up any natural right. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich, are our dependence for continued freedom. And to preserve their independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessities and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our calling and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow suffers. Our land-holders, too, like theirs, retaining indeed the title and stewardship of estates called theirs but held really in trust for the treasury, must wander, like theirs, in foreign countries, and be contented with penury, obscurity, exile, and the glory of the nation. This example reads to us the salutary lesson, that private fortunes are destroyed by public as well as by private extravagances. And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for the second; that second for a third; and so on, till the bulk of the society is reduced to mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering. Then begins, indeed, the bellum omnium in omnia, which some philosophers observing to be so general in this world, have mistaken for the natural, instead of the abusive state of man. And the fore horse on this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Reason and free inquiry are the only effective agents against error. Give a loose to them, they will support the true religion by bringing every false one to their tribunal, to the test of their investigation. They are the natural enemies of error and error only. Had not the Roman government permitted free inquiry, Christianity could never have been introduced. Had not free inquiry been indulged at the era of the Reformation, the corruption of Christianity could not have been purged away. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Force (is) the vital principle and immediate parent of despotism. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Yet the hour of emancipation is advancing ... this enterprise is for the young; for those who can follow it up, and bear it through to it's consummation. It shall have all my prayers, and these are the only weapons of an old man. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | No free man shall ever be de-barred the use of arms. The strongest reason for the people to retain their right to keep and bear arms is as a last resort to protect themselves against tyranny in government. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | 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 everyone exactly
the functions in which he is competent ...\\
- To let the National Government be entrusted with the defense of the
nation, and its foreign and federal relations ...\\
- The State Governments with the Civil Rights, Laws, Police and
administration of what concerns the State generally.\\
- The Counties with the local concerns, and each ward direct the interests
within itself.\\
It is by dividing and subdividing these Republics from the great
national one down through all its subordinations until it ends in the
administration of everyman's farm by himself, by placing under everyone
what his own eye may superintend, that all will be done for the best. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Question with boldness even the existence of a God;
because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason,
than that of blind-folded fear...
Do not be frightened from this inquiry
from any fear of its consequences.
If it ends in the belief that there is no God,
you will find incitements to virtue
in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise... | |
| Thomas Jefferson | When angry, count ten before you speak; if very angry, an hundred. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a feather-bed. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I am for a government rigorously frugal and simple. Were we directed from Washington when to sow, when to reap, we should soon want bread. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Botany I rank
with the most
valuable sciences. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The legislative powers of the government reach actions only, and not opinions. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | 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 the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them (around the banks), will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I... [proposed] three distinct grades of education, reaching all classes.
1. Elementary schools for all children generally, rich and poor.
2. Colleges for a middle degree of instruction, calculated for the
common purposes of life and such as should be desirable for all who were
in easy circumstances.
And 3d. an ultimate grade for teaching the sciences generally and in
their highest degree...
The expenses of [the elementary] schools should be borne by the
inhabitants of the county, every one in proportion to his general
tax-rate. This would throw on wealth the education of the poor. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I own I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Cultivators of the earth
are the most
valuable citizens. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | May [the Declaration of Independence] be to the world, what I believe it will be (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all), the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | An elective despotism was not the government we fought for, but one which should not only be founded on true free principles, but in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among general bodies of magistracy, as that no one could transcend their legal limits without being effectually checked and restrained by the others. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | It is a great importance to set a resolution, not to be shaken, never to tell an untruth. There is no vice so mean, so pitiful, so contemptible and he who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual, he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world's believing him. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all it's good dispositions. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | | |
| Thomas Jefferson | 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. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | 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. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Error of opinion may be tolerated when reason is left free to combat it. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man! Who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment & death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment ... inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government; whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied upon to set them to rights. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we should soon want bread. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely
between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for
his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government
reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign
reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that
their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment
of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus
building a wall of separation between church and State. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Experience has already shown that the impeachment the Constitution has provided is not even a scarecrow. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | It is the great parent of science & of virtue: and that a nation will be great in both, always in proportion as it is free. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | What country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add a useful plant to its culture. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Where a new invention promises to be useful, it ought to be tried. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | An equal application of law to every condition of man is fundamental. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | ...truth is great and will prevail if left to herself; that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I could think of no worse example for nations abroad, who for the first time were trying to put free electoral procedures into effect, than that of the United States wrangling over the results of our presidential election, and even suggesting that the presidency itself could be stolen by thievery at the ballot box. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | When a man assumes a public trust, he should consider himself as public property. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I am really mortified to be told that, in the United States of America, a fact like this can become a subject of inquiry, and of criminal inquiry too, as an offence against religion; that a question about the sale of a book can be carried before the civil magistrate. Is this then our freedom of religion? and are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule for what we are to read, and what we must believe? It is an insult to our citizens to question whether they are rational beings or not, and blasphemy against religion to suppose it cannot stand the test of truth and reason. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. ... And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts as are only 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 | Tobacco is a culture
productive of
infinite wretchedness. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Why suspend the habeas corpus in insurrections and rebellions?
Examine the history of England. See how few of the cases of the
suspension of the habeas corpus law have been worthy of that
suspension. They have been either real treasons, wherein the parties
might as well have been charged at once, or sham plots, where it was
shameful they should ever have been suspected. Yet for the few cases
wherein the suspension of the habeas corpus has done real good, that
operation is now become habitual and the minds of the nation almost
prepared to live under its constant suspension. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Our particular principles of religion are a subject of accountability to our god alone. I enquire after no man's and trouble none with mine; nor is it given to us in this life to know whether yours or mine, our friend's or our foe's, are exactly the right. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I discharge every person under punishment or prosecution under the Sedition Law, because I considered, and now consider, that law to be a nullity as absolute and palpable as if Congress had ordered us to fall down and worship a golden image. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | What country before ever existed a century and a half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his Father, in the womb of a virgin will be classified with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with this artificial scaffolding and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this most venerated Reformer of human errors. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but only those specifically enumerated. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | And I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debt, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our calling and our creeds...[we will] have no time to think, no means of calling our miss-managers to account but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers... And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for[ another]... till the bulk of society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery... And the fore-horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves, therefore, are its only safe depositories. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The system of banking we have both equally and ever reprobated. I contemplate it as a blot left in all our constitutions, which, if not covered, will end in their destruction, which is already hit by the gamblers in corruption, and is sweeping away in its progress the fortunes and morals of our citizens. Funding I consider as limited, rightfully, to a redemption of the debt within the lives of a majority of the generation contracting it; every generation coming equally, by the laws of the Creator of the world, to the free possession of the earth he made for their subsistence, unincumbered by their predecessors, who, like them, were but tenants for life. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I do believe that General Washington had not a firm confidence in the durability of our government. He was naturally distrustful of men, and inclined to gloomy apprehensions; and I was ever persuaded that a belief that we must at length end in something like a British constitution, had some weight in his adoption of the ceremonies of levees, birthdays, pompous meetings with Congress, and other forms of the same character, calculated to prepare us gradually for a change which he believed possible, and to let it come on with as little shock as might be to the public mind. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | To preserve the freedom
of the human mind then
and freedom of the press,
every spirit should be ready
to devote itself to martyrdom. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | An individual, thinking himself injured, makes more noise than a State. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | That this privilege of giving or of withholding our monies is an important
barrier against the undue exertion of prerogative, which
if left altogether without control may be exercised to our great oppression;
and all history shews how efficacious is its intercession
for redress of grievances and re-establishment of rights,
and how improvident would be the surrender of so powerful a mediator. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | 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. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | 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, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicity. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | [I]f we can but prevent the government
from wasting the labours of the people,
under the pretence of taking care of them,
they must become happy. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | A government is republican in proportion as every member composing it has his equal voice in the direction of its concerns, not indeed in person, which would be impracticable beyond the limits of a city or small township, but by representatives chosen by himself and responsible to him at short periods. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | In every country and every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own. It is easier to acquire wealth and power by this combination than by deserving them, and to effect this, they have perverted the purest religion ever preached to man into mystery and jargon, unintelligible to all mankind, and therefore the safer for their purposes. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I consider trial by jury as the only anchor yet devised by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | It is in our lives and not our words that our religion must be read. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable, that all men are created equal and independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Nature intended me for the tranquil pursuits of science, by rendering them my supreme delight. But the enormities of the times in which I have lived have forced me to commit myself on the boisterous ocean of political passions. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | [F]alsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The sword of the law should never fall but on those whose guilt is so apparent as to be pronounced by their friends as well as foes. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The two principles on which our conduct towards the Indians should be founded, are justice and fear. After the injuries we have done them, they cannot love us ... | |
| Thomas Jefferson | God who gave us life gave us liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure if we have removed their only firm basis: a conviction in the minds of men that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | History, in general, only informs us what bad government is. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The concentrating [of powers] in the same hands is precisely the definition of despotic government. It will be no alleviation that these powers will be exercised by a plurality of hands, and not by a single one. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The happiness and prosperity of our citizens is the only legitimate object of government. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I am for freedom of religion, and against all maneuvers to bring about a legal ascendancy of one sect over another. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | No freeman shall be debarred the use of arms [within his own lands]. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world´s believing him. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Liberty is to the collective body, what health is to every individual body. Without health no pleasure can be tasted by man; without liberty, no happiness can be enjoyed by society. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | It had become an universal and almost uncontroverted position in the several States, that the purposes of society do not require a surrender of all our rights to our ordinary governors; that there are certain portions of right not necessary to enable them to carry on an effective government, and which experience has nevertheless proved they will be constantly encroaching on, if submitted to them; that there are also certain fences which experience has proved peculiarly efficacious against wrong, and rarely obstructive of right, which yet the governing powers have ever shown a disposition to weaken and remove. Of the first kind, for instance, is freedom of religion; of the second, trial by jury, habeas corpus laws, free presses. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The system of banking [is] a blot left in all our Constitutions, which, if not covered, will end in their destruction... I sincerely believe that banking institutions are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity... is but swindling futurity on a large scale. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I, however, place economy among the first and most important republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I had rather be shut up in a very modest cottage with my books, my family and a few old friends, dining on simple bacon, and letting the world roll on as it liked, than to occupy the most splendid post, which any human power can give. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | 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 | ...Enlightened by a benign religion, professed, indeed, and practiced in various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man, acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter -- with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people? Still one thing more.. .a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, 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, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | If a Nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.... If we are to guard against ignorance and remain free, it is the responsibility of every American to be informed. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The care of human life and happiness and not their destruction is the first and only legitimate object of good government. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | [The] Bank of the United States... is one of the most deadly hostility existing, against the principles and form of our Constitution... An institution like this, penetrating by its branches every part of the Union, acting by command and in phalanx, may, in a critical moment, upset the government. I deem no government safe which is under the vassalage of any self-constituted authorities, or any other authority than that of the nation, or its regular functionaries. What an obstruction could not this bank of the United States, with all its branch banks, be in time of war! It might dictate to us the peace we should accept, or withdraw its aids. Ought we then to give further growth to an institution so powerful, so hostile? | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | It is not only vain, but wicked, in a legislature to frame laws in opposition to the laws of nature, and to arm them with the terrors of death. This is truly creating crimes in order to punish them. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Let us, then, fellow citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things. And let us reflect that having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled, we have yet gained little if we counternance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of a bitter and bloody persecutions. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | 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 | It is part of the American character to consider nothing as desperate. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law,' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | And, finally, that truth is great and will prevail if left to herself; that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | To lay taxes to provide for the general welfare of the United States, that is to say, 'to lay taxes for the purpose of providing for the general welfare.' For the laying of taxes is the power, and the general welfare the purpose for which the power is to be exercised. They are not to lay taxes ad libitum for any purpose they please; but only to pay the debts or provide for the welfare of the Union. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | A bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular, and what no just government should to rest on inference. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Money and not morality is the principle of commerce and commercial nations. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I have no fear that the result of our experiment will be that men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | In questions of power, then, let no more be said of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Delay is preferable to error. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Above all things I hope the education of the common people will be attended to, convinced that on their good sense we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | By a declaration of rights, I mean one which shall stipulate freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of commerce against monopolies, trial by juries in all cases, no suspensions of the habeas corpus, no standing armies. These are fetters against doing evil which no honest government should decline. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of person under the protection of habeas corpus; and trial by juries impartially selected – these principles form the bright constellation which has gone before us. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | No man will ever bring out of the Presidency the reputation which carries him into it. | |
| Andrew Johnson | Outside of the Constitution we have no legal authority more than private citizens, and within it we have only so much as that instrument gives us. This broad principle limits all our functions and applies to all subjects. | |
| Lyndon B. Johnson | Free speech, free press, free religion, the right of free assembly, yes, the right of petition... well, they are still radical ideas. | |
| Lyndon B. Johnson | Books and ideas are the most effective weapons against intolerance and ignorance. | |
| Lyndon B. Johnson | You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harm it would cause if improperly administered. | |
| Lyndon B. Johnson | Every man should know that his conversations, his correspondence, and his personal life are private. | |
| Donald Kennedy | Academic freedom really means freedom of inquiry. To be able to probe according to one’s own interest, knowledge and conscience is the most important freedom the scholar has, and part of that process is to state its results. | |
| John F. Kennedy | Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. | |
| John F. Kennedy | I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute -- where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishoners for whom to vote -- where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference -- and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him. | |
| John F. Kennedy | There is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment. | |
| John F. Kennedy | The wave of the future is not the conquest of the world by a single dogmatic creed but the liberation of the diverse energies of free nations and free men. | |
| John F. Kennedy | The wave of the future is not the conquest of the world by a single dogmatic creed but the liberation of the diverse energies of free nations and free men. | |
| John F. Kennedy | Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth. | |
| John F. Kennedy | Every time that we try to lift a problem from our own shoulders, and shift that problem to the hands of the government, to the same extent we are sacrificing the liberties of our people. | |
| John F. Kennedy | We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For 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. | |
| John F. Kennedy | When we got into office, the thing that surprised me most was to find that things were just as bad as we'd been saying they were. | |
| John F. Kennedy | Tolerance implies no lack of commitment to one’s own beliefs. Rather it condemns the oppression or persecution of others. | |
| John F. Kennedy | And so, my fellow Americans: Ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: Ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man. | |
| John F. Kennedy | The high office of the President has been used to foment a plot to destroy the American's freedom and before I leave office, I must inform the citizen of this plight. | |
| John F. Kennedy | If we cannot end our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. | |
| John F. Kennedy | A man does what he must -- in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers -- and this is the basis of all human morality. | |
| John F. Kennedy | Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other. | |
| John F. Kennedy | Mothers all want their sons to grow up to be president but they don't want them to become politicians in the process. | |
| John F. Kennedy | ...probably the greatest concentration of talent and genius in this house except for perhaps those times when Thomas Jefferson ate alone. | |
| John F. Kennedy | The great French Marshall Lyautey once asked his gardener to plant a tree. The gardener objected that the tree was slow growing and would not reach maturity for 100 years. The Marshall replied, 'In that case, there is no time to lose; plant it this afternoon!' | |
| William Langer | Having so pledged myself, and having been elected to my senatorship upon such pledge, and not having been elected to create an organization to which we would give a promise, either express or implied, that it would have the authority to send our boys all over the Earth, I cannot support the Charter. I believe it is fraught with danger to the American people and to American institutions. | |
| Xavier Lerma | President Vladimir Putin could never have imagined anyone so ignorant or so willing to destroy their people like Obama much less seeing millions vote for someone like Obama. They read history in America don't they? Alas, the schools in the U.S. were conquered by the Communists long ago and history was revised thus paving the way for their Communist presidents. | |
| Robert A. Levy | The fundamental principle is this: No matter how worthwhile an end may be, if there is no constitutional authority to pursue it, then the federal government must step aside and leave the matter to the states or to private parties. The president and Congress can proceed only from constitutional authority, not from good intentions alone. If Congress thinks it necessary to expand its powers, the Framers crafted an amendment process for that purpose. But too often, rather than follow that process, Congress has disregarded the limits set by the Constitution and gutted our frontline defense against overweening federal government. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.
This expresses my idea of democracy. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | I have been told I was on the road to hell, but I had no idea it was just a mile down the road with a Dome on it. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | America will never be destroyed from the outside.
If we falter and lose our freedoms,
it will be because we destroyed ourselves. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | Ballots are the rightful, and peaceful, successors of bullets; and that when ballots have fairly, and constitutionally, decided, there can be no successful appeal, back to bullets; that there can be no successful appeal, except to ballots themselves, at succeeding elections. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | Stand with anybody that stands right. Stand with him while he is right, and part with him when he goes wrong. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | Prohibition goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | The Shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which the sheep thanks the shephard as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as a destroyer of liberty. Plainly, the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of liberty. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | Nearly all men can withstand adversity; if you want to test a man's character, give him power. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | The Bible is not my Book and Christianity is not my religion. I could never give assent to the long complicated statements of Christian dogma. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | This is a world of compensations; and he who would be no slave must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | The government should create, issue, and circulate all the currency and credits needed to satisfy the spending power of the government and the buying power of consumers. By adoption of these principles, the taxpayers will be saved immense sums of interest. Money will cease to be master and become the servant of humanity. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | If by the mere force of numbers a majority should deprive a minority of any clearly written constitutional right, it might, in a moral point of view, justify revolution. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | Military glory -- the attractive rainbow that rises in showers of blood. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | What you do speaks so loud I cannot hear what you say. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country; corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in High Places will follow, and the Money Power of the Country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the People, until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war | |
| Abraham Lincoln | To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step over the ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! -- All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a Thousand years. At what point, then, is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics." When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty -- to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy hypocrisy. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem. It is true that you may fool all the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all of the time; but you can't fool all of the people all the time. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | With malice towards none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | It is the eternal struggle between these two principles - right and wrong - throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time... | |
| Abraham Lincoln | We have forgotten the gracious hand which has preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and have vainly imagined in the deceitfulness of our hearts that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving Grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | I have never had a feeling, politically, that did not spring from ... the Declaration of Independence ... that all should have an equal chance. This is the sentiment embodied in the Declaration of Independence ... I would rather be assassinated on this spot than surrender it. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | Discourage litigation. Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. Point out to them how the nominal winner is often a real loser - in fees, expenses, and waste of time. As a peacemaker the lawyer has a superior opportunity of being a good man. There will still be business enough. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | No man has a good enough memory to make a successful liar. | |
| Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr. | This Act (the Federal Reserve Act, Dec. 23rd 1913) establishes the most gigantic trust on earth. When the President signs this bill, the invisible government by the Monetary Power will be legalized. The people may not know it immediately, but the day of reckoning is only a few years removed. The trusts will soon realize that they have gone too far even for their own good. The people must make a declaration of independence to relieve themselves from the Monetary Power. This they will be able to do by taking control of Congress. Wall Streeters could not cheat us if you Senators and Representatives did not make a humbug of Congress... The greatest crime of Congress is its currency system. The worst legislative crime of the ages is perpetrated by this banking bill. The caucus and the party bosses have again operated and prevented the people from getting the benefit of their own government. | |
| Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr. | This Act (the Federal Reserve Act, Dec. 23rd 1913) establishes the most gigantic trust on earth. When the President (Woodrow Wilson) signs the Bill, the invisible government of the Monetary Power will be legalised... The worst legislative crime of the ages is perpetrated by this banking and currency Bill. | |
| John Locke | Any single man must judge for himself whether circumstances warrant obedience or resistance to the commands of the civil magistrate; we are all qualified, entitled, and morally obliged to evaluate the conduct of our rulers. This political judgment, moreover, is not simply or primarily a right, but like self-preservation, a duty to God. As such it is a judgment that men cannot part with according to the God of Nature. It is the first and foremost of our inalienable rights without which we can preserve no other. | |
| James Madison | Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad. | |
| James Madison | Whilst we assert a freedom to embrace, to profess, and to observe the Religion which we believe to be of divine origin, we cannot deny an equal freedom to choose minds who have not yet yielded to the evidence which has convinced us. | |
| James Madison | We hold it for a fundamental and undeniable truth, that religion, or the duty we owe our Creator and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence. The religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate. This right is in its nature an unalienable right. | |
| James Madison | Landholders ought to have a share in the government to support these invaluable interests and check the other many. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. | |
| James Madison | If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. | |
| James Madison | Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of freedoms of the people by gradual and silent encroachment of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations. | |
| James Madison | The highest number to which a standing army can be carried in any country does not exceed one hundredth part of the souls, or one twenty-fifth part of the number able to bear arms. This portion would not yield, in the United States, an army of more than twenty-five or thirty thousand men. To these would be opposed a militia amounting to near half a million citizens with arms in their hands, officered by men chosen from among themselves, fighting for their common liberties and united and conducted by governments possessing their affections and confidence. It may well be doubted whether a militia thus circumstanced could ever be conquered by such a proportion of regular troops. ... Besides the advantage of being armed, ... the existence of subordinate governments ... forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of. ... [The governments of Europe] are afraid to trust the people with arms. ... Let us not insult the free and gallant citizens of America with the suspicion that they would be less able to defend the rights of which they would be in actual possession than the debased subjects of arbitrary power would be to rescue theirs from the hands of their oppressors. | |
| James Madison | We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future ...upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to sustain ourselves, according to the Ten Commandments of God. | |
| James Madison | If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare, and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare, they may take the care of religion into their own hands; they may appoint teachers in every State, county and parish and pay them out of their public treasury; they may take into their own hands the education of children, establishing in like manner schools throughout the Union; they may assume the provision of the poor; they may undertake the regulation of all roads other than post-roads; in short, every thing, from the highest object of state legislation down to the most minute object of police, would be thrown under the power of Congress... Were the power of Congress to be established in the latitude contended for, it would subvert the very foundations, and transmute the very nature of the limited Government established by the people of America. | |
| James Madison | The aim of every political constitution is, or ought to be, first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society; and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous whilst they continue to hold their public trust. | |
| James Madison | During almost fifteen centuries the legal establishment of Christianity has been upon trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution. | |
| James Madison | [A]ll power is originally vested in, and consequently derived from, the people. That government is instituted and ought to be exercised for the benefit of the people; which consists in the enjoyment of life and liberty and the right of acquiring property, and generally of pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety. That the people have an indubitable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to reform or change their government whenever it be found adverse or inadequate to the purpose of its institution. | |
| James Madison | A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. | |
| James Madison | The strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venal love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace. | |
| James Madison | Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death. | |
| James Madison | One hundred and seventy-three despots would surely be as oppressive as one. | |
| James Madison | Americans need never fear their government because of the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation. | |
| James Madison | ... large and permanent military establishments ... are forbidden by the principles of free government, and against the necessity of which the militia were meant to be a constitutional bulwark. | |
| James Madison | In a society under the forms of which the stronger faction can readily unite and oppress the weaker, anarchy may as truly be said to reign as in a state of nature. | |
| James Madison | What becomes of the surplus of human life? It is either, 1st destroyed by infanticide, as among the Chinese and Lacedemonians; or 2nd it is stifled or starved, as among other nations whose population is commensurate to its food; or 3rd it is consumed by wars and endemic diseases; or 4th it overflows, by emigration, to places where a surplus of food is attainable. | |
| James Madison | War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement. | |
| James Madison | Each State, in ratifying the Constitution, is considered as a sovereign body, independent of all others, and only to be bound by its own voluntary act. In this relation, then, the new Constitution will, if established, be a FEDERAL, and not a NATIONAL constitution | |
| James Madison | In framing a government, which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed, and in the next place, oblige it to control itself. | |
| James Madison | An efficient militia is authorized and contemplated by the Constitution and required by the spirit and safety of free government. | |
| James Madison | It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. We hold this prudent jealousy to be the first duty of citizens, and one of the noblest characteristics of the late Revolution. The freeman of America did not wait till usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise, and entangled the question in precedents. They saw all the consequences in the principle, and they avoided the consequences by denying the principle. | |
| James Madison | With respect to the words general welfare, I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators. | |
| James Madison | There is no maxim, in my opinion, which is more liable to be misapplied, and which, therefore, more needs elucidation, than the current, that the interest of the majority is the political standard of right and wrong. | |
| James Madison | Freedom arises from a multiplicity of sects, which pervades America, and is the best and only security for religious liberty in America. | |
| James Madison | The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse. | |
| James Madison | The Constitution supposes, what the history of all governments demonstrates, that the executive is the branch of government most interested in war, and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care, vested the question of war in the legislature. | |
| James Madison | Learned institutions ought to be favorite objects with every free people. They throw that light over the public mind which is the best security against crafty and dangerous encroachments on public liberty. | |
| James Madison | I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on the objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents. | |
| James Madison | The people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, or to publish their sentiments; and the freedom of the press, as one of the great bulwarks of liberty, shall be inviolable. | |
| James Madison | [T]he delegation of the government, in [a republic], to a small number of citizens elected by the rest . . . [is] to refine and enlarge the public views by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations. | |
| Charles S. Maier | Fascist intellectuals, such as Ugo Spirito, made the round of conferences preaching the virtues of postcapitalism fascism and in fact tried to nudge the structure in a 'leftist' direction by calling for more collective control and even corporative ownership of the economy. Mussolini looked abroad to find that Franklin Roosevelt was merely seeking to emulate Italy's innovations. | |
| William McKinley | We could not leave them to themselves -- they were unfit for self-government -- and they would soon have anarchy and misrule over there worse than Spain's was ... there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them. | |
| H. L. Mencken | A Galileo could no more be elected president of the United States than he could be elected Pope of Rome. Both high posts are reserved for men favored by God with an extraordinary genius for swathing the bitter facts of life in bandages of self-illusion. | |
| H. L. Mencken | [T]he only thing wrong with Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was that it was the South, not the North, that was fighting for a government of the people, by the people and for the people. | |
| James Monroe | [In a republic,] it is not the people themselves who make the decisions, but the people they themselves choose to stand in their places. | |
| James Monroe | Let us by wise and constitutional measures promote intelligence among the people as the best means of preserving our liberties. | |
| James Monroe | It is only when the people become ignorant and corrupt, when they degenerate into a populace, that they are incapable of exercising their sovereignty. Usurpation is then an easy attainment, and an usurper soon found. The people themselves become the willing instruments of their own debasement and ruin. | |
| James Monroe | Of the liberty of conscience in matters of religious faith, of speech and of the press; of the trial by jury of the vicinage in civil and criminal cases; of the benefit of the writ of habeas corpus; of the right to keep and bear arms.... If these rights are well defined, and secured against encroachment, it is impossible that government should ever degenerate into tyranny. | |
| Richard M. Nixon | The Constitution supposes what the history of all governments demonstrates, that the executive is the branch of power most interested in war and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care, vested the question of war in the legislature. [If a president is successful in bypassing the Congress] it is evident that the people are cheated out of the best ingredients in the government, the safeguards of peace which is the greatest of their blessings. | |
| Richard M. Nixon | Sure there are dishonest men in local government. But there are dishonest men in national government too. | |
| Richard M. Nixon | If you think the United States has stood still, who built the largest shopping center in the world? | |
| Richard M. Nixon | It is necessary for me to establish a winner image. Therefore, I have to beat somebody. | |
| Albert Jay Nock | Many now believe that with the rise of the totalitarian State the world has entered upon a new era of barbarism. It has not. The totalitarian State is only the State; the kind of thing it does is only what the State has always done with unfailing regularity, if it had the power to do it, wherever and whenever its own aggrandizement made that kind of thing expedient. Give any State like power hereafter, and put it in like circumstances, and it will do precisely the same kind of thing. The State will unfailingly aggrandize itself, if only it has the power, first at the expense of its own citizens, and then at the expense of anyone else in sight. It has always done so, and always will. | |
| Albert Jay Nock | Here is the Golden Rule of sound citizenship, the first and greatest lesson in the study of politics: You get the same order of criminality from any State to which you give power to exercise it; and whatever power you give the State to do things FOR you carries with it the equivalent power to do things TO you. | |
| Albert Jay Nock | [T]he State's criminality is nothing new and nothing to be wondered at. It began when the first predatory group of men clustered together and formed the State, and it will continue as long as the State exists in the world, because the State is fundamentally an anti-social institution, fundamentally criminal. The idea that the State originated to serve any kind of social purpose is completely unhistorical. It originated in conquest and confiscation -- that is to say, in crime. It originated for the purpose of maintaining the division of society into an owning-and-exploiting class and a propertyless dependent class -- that is, for a criminal purpose. No State known to history originated in any other manner, or for any other purpose. Like all predatory or parasitic institutions, its first instinct is that of self-preservation. All its enterprises are directed first towards preserving its own life, and, second, towards increasing its own power and enlarging the scope of its own activity. For the sake of this it will, and regularly does, commit any crime which circumstances make expedient. | |
| Lyn Nofziger | These things I believe: That government should butt out. \\
That government should butt out.\\
That freedom is our most precious commodity and\\
if we are not eternally vigilant, government will take it all away.\\
That individual freedom demands individual responsibility.\\
That government is not a necessary good but an unavoidable evil.\\
That the executive branch has grown too strong,
the judicial branch too arrogant
and the legislative branch too stupid.\\
That political parties have become close to meaningless.\\
That government should work to insure the rights of the individual,
not plot to take them away.\\
That government should provide for the national defense\\
and work to insure domestic tranquillity.\\
That foreign trade should be fair rather than free.\\
That America should be wary of foreign entanglements.\\
That the tree of liberty needs to be watered from time to time\\
with the blood of patriots and tyrants.\\
That guns do more than protect us from criminals;\\
more importantly, they protect us from the ongoing threat of government.\\
That states are the bulwark of our freedom.\\
That states should have the right to secede from the Union.\\
That once a year we should hang someone in government\\
as an example to his fellows."\\ | |
| P. J. O'Rourke | The Tenth Commandment sends a message to socialists, to egalitarians, to people obsessed with fairness, to American presidential candidates in the year 2000 -- to everyone who believes that wealth should be redistributed. And that message is clear and concise: Go to Hell. | |
| Barack Hussein Obama | [J]ust because you have an individual right does not mean that the state or local government can't constrain the exercise of that right... | |
| Barack Hussein Obama | The problem is that the way [President] Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt from $5 trillion dollars for the first 42 presidents -- number 43 added $4 trillion dollars by his lonesome -- so that we now have over $9 trillion dollars of debt that we are going to have to pay back. [That's] $30,000 for every man, woman and child. That's irresponsible. It's unpatriotic. | |
| Barack Hussein Obama | Consistent with section 202(d) of the National
Emergencies Act, 50 U.S.C. 1622(d), I am continuing for
1 year the national emergency previously declared on
September 14, 2001, in Proclamation 7463, with respect
to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the
continuing and immediate threat of further attacks on
the United States.
Because the terrorist threat continues, the national
emergency declared on September 14, 2001, and the
powers and authorities adopted to deal with that
emergency must continue in effect beyond September 14, 2010. | |
| Dr. Ron Paul | The obligations of our representatives in Washington are to protect our liberty, not coddle the world, precipitating no-win wars, while bringing bankruptcy and economic turmoil to our people. | |
| Peace March Signs | [Transcription of some of the signs in Washington during the peace march January 18, 2003] | |
| Franklin Pierce | The dangers of a concentration of all power in the general government of a confederacy so vast as ours are too obvious to be disregarded. | |
| Plato | The people have always some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness… This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs, when he first appears he is a protector. | |
| Plato | When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing more to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader. | |
| Bruce D. Porter | Throughout the history of the United States, war has been the primary impetus behind the growth and development of the central state. It has been the lever by which presidents and other national officials have bolstered the power of the state in the face of tenacious popular resistance. | |
| General Colin Powell | Over the years, the United States has sent many of its fine young men and women into great peril to fight for freedom beyond our borders. The only amount of land we have ever asked for in return is enough to bury those that did not return. | |
| General Colin Powell | So our record of living our values and letting our values be an inspiration to others I think is clear.
And I don't think I have anything to be ashamed of or apologize for with respect to what America has done for the world.
We have gone forth from our shores repeatedly over the last hundred years and we've done this as recently as the last year in Afghanistan and put wonderful young men and women at risk, many of whom have lost their lives, and we have asked for nothing except enough ground to bury them in, and otherwise we have returned home ... to live our own lives in peace. | |
| Dan Quayle | I believe we are on
an irreversible trend toward
more freedom and democracy.
But that will change. | |
| Ronald Reagan | Our natural, inalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation from government, and freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp as it is at this moment. | |
| Ronald Reagan | There is no limit to what you can accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit. | |
| Ronald Reagan | Man is not free unless government is limited.... As government expands, liberty contracts. | |
| Ronald Reagan | I hope we have once again reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There’s a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: as government expands, liberty contracts. | |
| Ronald Reagan | Our coins bear the words 'In God We Trust'. We take the oath of office asking His help in keeping that oath. And we proclaim that we are a nation under God when we pledge allegiance to the flag. But we can't mention His name in a public school or even sing religious hymns that are nondenominational. Christmas can be celebrated in the school room with pine trees, tinsel and reindeers, but there must be no mention of the man whose birthday is being celebrated. One wonders how a teacher would answer if a student asked why it was called Christmas. | |
| Ronald Reagan | Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. | |
| Ronald Reagan | Ours was the first revolution in the history of mankind that truly reversed the course of government, and with three little words: 'We the people.' 'We the people' tell the government what to do, it doesn't tell us. 'We the people' are the driver, the government is the car. And we decide where it should go, and by what route, and how fast. 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. 'We the people' are free. This belief has been the underlying basis for everything I've tried to do these past eight years. | |
| Ronald Reagan | We developed at the local school district level probably the best public school system in the world. Or it was until the Federal government added Federal interference to Federal financial aid and eroded educational quality in the process. | |
| Ronald Reagan | We need true tax reform that will at least make a start toward restoring for our children the American Dream that wealth is denied to no one, that each individual has the right to fly as high as his strength and ability will take him. . . . But we cannot have such reform while our tax policy is engineered by people who view the tax as a means of achieving changes in our social structure. | |
| Ronald Reagan | Freedom is the recognition that no single person, no single authority or government has a monopoly on the truth, but that every individual life is infinitely precious, that every one of us put in this world has been put there for a reason and has something to offer. It´s so hard for government planners, no matter how sophisticated, to ever substitute for millions of individuals working night and day to make their dreams come true. The fact is, bureaucracies are a problem around the world. | |
| Ronald Reagan | The taxpayer; that's someone who works for the federal government, but doesn´t have to take a civil service examination. | |
| Ronald Reagan | Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other. | |
| Ronald Reagan | How do you tell a Communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin. | |
| Ronald Reagan | No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this earth! | |
| Ronald Reagan | The years ahead will be great ones for our country, for the cause of freedom and the spread of civilization. The West will not contain Communism, it will transcend Communism. We will not bother to denounce it, we'll dismiss it as a sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written. | |
| Ronald Reagan | It is the Soviet Union that runs against the tide of history.... [It is] the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism- Leninism on the ash heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people. | |
| Ronald Reagan | Common sense told us that to preserve the peace, we'd have to become strong again after years of weakness and confusion. So, we rebuilt our defenses, and this New Year we toasted the new peacefulness around the globe. Not only have the superpowers actually begun to reduce their stockpiles of nuclear weapons...but the regional conflicts that rack the globe are also beginning to cease. | |
| Ronald Reagan | In an ironic sense, Karl Marx was right. We are witnessing today a great revolutionary crisis -- a crisis where the demands of the economic order are colliding directly with those of the political order. But the crisis is happening not in the free, non-Marxist West, but in the home of Marxism-Leninism, the Soviet Union.... [Communism will be] left on the ash heap of history. | |
| Ronald Reagan | Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. | |
| Ronald Reagan | As we celebrate Thanksgiving ... we should ask what we can do as individuals to demonstrate our gratitude to God for all He has done. Such reflection can only add to the significance of this precious day of remembrance. Let us recommit ourselves to that devotion to God and family that has played such an important role in making this a great Nation, and which will be needed as a source of strength if we are to remain a great people. | |
| Ronald Reagan | Are you entitled to the fruits of your labor or does government have some presumptive right to spend and spend and spend? | |
| Ronald Reagan | You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down. Up to man's age-old dream -- the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order -- or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. Regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would sacrifice freedom for security have embarked on this downward path. Plutarch warned, 'The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits.' | |
| Ronald Reagan | Freedom is the right to question and change the established way of doing things. It is the continuous revolution of the marketplace. It is the understanding that allows us to recognize shortcomings and seek solutions. | |
| Ronald Reagan | When you start talking about government as 'we' instead of 'they,' you have been in office too long. | |
| Ronald Reagan | There are some who've forgotten why we have a military. It's not to promote war; it's to be prepared for peace. | |
| Ronald Reagan | Have we the courage and the will to face up to the immorality and discrimination of the progressive tax, and demand a return to traditional proportionate taxation? ... Today in our country the tax collector's share is 37 cents of every dollar earned. Freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp. | |
| Ronald Reagan | Welfare's purpose should be to eliminate, as far as possible, the need for its own existence. | |
| Ronald Reagan | Government does not tax to get the money it needs; government always finds a need for the money it gets. | |
| Ronald Reagan | Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book. | |
| Ronald Reagan | Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall! | |
| Ronald Reagan | One definition of an economist is somebody who sees something happen in practice and wonders if it will work in theory. | |
| Ronald Reagan | Nations crumble from within when the citizenry asks of government those things which the citizenry might better provide for itself. ... [I] hope we have once again reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There's a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts. | |
| Ronald Reagan | I think the best possible social program is a job. | |
| Ronald Reagan | It would seem that not only is religion lacking in the schools -- so is common sense. I wonder what a teacher is supposed to say if a kid asks about those four words on a dime -- 'In God We Trust.' Or maybe that's why they aren't being taught how to read these days. | |
| Ronald Reagan | For too long, the world was paralyzed by the argument that terrorism could not be stopped until the grievances of terrorists were addressed. The complicated and heartrending issues that perplex mankind are no excuse for violent, inhumane attacks, nor do they excuse not taking aggressive action against those who deliberately slaughter innocent people. | |
| Ronald Reagan | Tyranny, like fog in the well known poem, often creeps in silently 'on little cat feet.' | |
| Ronald Reagan | The federal government has taken too much tax money from the people, too much authority from the states, and too much liberty with the Constitution. | |
| Ronald Reagan | History teaches that wars begin when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap. | |
| Ronald Reagan | 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 | It is not my intention to do away with government. It is, rather, to make it work -- work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back. Government can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity, not stifle it. It is no coincidence that our present troubles parallel and are proportionate to the intervention and intrusion in our lives that result from unnecessary and excessive growth of government. ... We shall reflect the compassion that is so much a part of your makeup. How can we love our country and not love our countrymen, and loving them, not reach out a hand when they fall, heal them when they are sick, and provide opportunities to make them self-sufficient so they will be equal in fact and not just in theory? ... We are a nation under God, and I believe God intended for us to be free. It would be fitting and good, I think, if on each Inauguration Day in future years it should be declared a day of prayer. | |
| Ronald Reagan | In an atmosphere of liberty, artists and patrons are free to think the unthinkable and create the audacious; they are free to make both horrendous mistakes and glorious celebrations. | |
| Ronald Reagan | There are no such things as limits to growth, because there are no limits on the human capacity for intelligence, imagination and wonder. | |
| Ronald Reagan | I just wanted to speak to you about something from the Internal Revenue Code. It is the last sentence of section 509A of the code and it reads: 'For purposes of paragraph 3, an organization described in paragraph 2 shall be deemed to include an organization described in section 501C-4, 5, or 6, which would be described in paragraph 2 if it were an organization described in section 501C-3.' And that's just one sentence out of those fifty-seven feet of books. | |
| Robert Reich | The dirty little secret is that both houses of Congress are irrelevant. ... America's domestic policy is now being run by Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve, and America's foreign policy is now being run by the International Monetary Fund [IMF]. ...when the president decides to go to war, he no longer needs a declaration of war from Congress. | |
| Lew Rockwell | If something is wrong for you or me, it is also wrong for the cop, the soldier, the mayor, the governor, the general, the Fed chairman, the president. Theft does not become acceptable when they call it taxation, counterfeiting when they call it monetary policy, kidnapping when they call it the draft, mass murder when they call it foreign policy. We understand that it is never acceptable to wield violence nor the threat of violence against the innocent, whether by the mugger or the politician. | |
| Will Rogers | Ohio claims they are due a president as they haven't had one since Taft. Look at the United States, they have not had one since Lincoln. | |
| Will Rogers | A foreigner coming here and reading the Congressional Record would say that the President of the United States was elected solely for the purpose of giving Senators somebody to call a horse thief. | |
| Eleanor Roosevelt | It is not that you set the individual apart from society but that you recognize in any society that the individual must have rights that are guarded. | |
| Franklin D. Roosevelt | The creed of our democracy is that liberty is acquired and kept by men and women who are strong and self-reliant, and possessed of such wisdom as God gives mankind -- men and women who are just, and understanding, and generous to others -- men and women who are capable of disciplining themselves. For they are the rulers and they must rule themselves. | |
| Franklin D. Roosevelt | If the fires of freedom and civil liberties burn low in other lands, they must be made brighter in our own. If in other lands the press and books and literature of all kinds are censored, we must redouble our efforts here to keep them free. If in other lands the eternal truths of the past are threatened by intolerance, we must provide a safe place for their perception. | |
| Franklin D. Roosevelt | It is a good thing to demand liberty for ourselves and for those who agree with us, but it is a better thing and a rarer thing to give liberty to others who do not agree with us. | |
| Franklin D. Roosevelt | A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car, but if he has a university education he may steal the whole railroad. | |
| Franklin D. Roosevelt | Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle. | |
| Franklin D. Roosevelt | In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happened, you can bet it was planned that way. | |
| Franklin D. Roosevelt | We all know that books will burn -- yet we have the greater knowledge that books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory... | |
| Franklin D. Roosevelt | The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the U.S. since the days of Andrew Jackson. History depicts Andrew Jackson as the last truly honorable and incorruptible American president. | |
| Franklin D. Roosevelt | The saving grace of America lies in the fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans are possessed of two great qualities -- a sense of humor and a sense of proportion. | |
| Franklin D. Roosevelt | Knowledge -- that is, education in its true sense -- is our best protection against unreasoning prejudice and panic-making fear, whether engendered by special interest, illiberal minorities, or panic-stricken leaders. | |
| Franklin D. Roosevelt | The truth is found when men are free to pursue it. | |
| Franklin D. Roosevelt | I am much interested and deeply impressed by what he has accomplished and by his evidenced honest purpose of restoring Italy and seeking to prevent general European trouble. | |
| Theodore Roosevelt | No people is wholly civilized where a distinction is drawn between stealing an office and stealing a purse. | |
| Theodore Roosevelt | 'Liar' is just as ugly a word as 'thief,' because it implies the presence of just as ugly a sin in one case as in the other. If a man lies under oath or procures the lie of another under oath, if he perjures himself or suborns perjury, he is guilty under the statute law. | |
| Theodore Roosevelt | The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living and the get-rich-quick theory of life. | |
| Theodore Roosevelt | Free speech exercised both individually and through a free press, is a necessity in any country where people are themselves free. | |
| Theodore Roosevelt | Wide differences of opinion in matters of religious, political and social belief must exist if conscience and intellect alike are not to be stunted. | |
| Theodore Roosevelt | In life, as in a football game, the principle to follow is: Hit the line hard. | |
| Theodore Roosevelt | To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. | |
| Theodore Roosevelt | Freedom is not a gift which can be enjoyed save by those shown themselves worthy of it. | |
| Theodore Roosevelt | No man who is corrupt, no man who condones corruption in others, can possibly do his duty by the community. | |
| Theodore Roosevelt | No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expediency. | |
| Theodore Roosevelt | To divide along the lines of section or caste or creed is un-American. | |
| Theodore Roosevelt | All privileges based on wealth, and all emnity to honest men merely because they are wealthy, are un-American. | |
| Theodore Roosevelt | If an American is to amount to anything he must rely upon himself, and not upon the State; he must take pride in his own work, instead of sitting idle to envy the luck of others. He must face life with resolute courage, win victory if he can, and accept defeat if he must, without seeking to place on his fellow man a responsibility which is not theirs. | |
| Theodore Roosevelt | To educate a man in mind, and not in morals, is to educate a menace to society. | |
| Theodore Roosevelt | When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer 'present' or 'not guilty.' | |
| Theodore Roosevelt | We cannot afford to differ on the question of honesty if we expect our republic permanently to endure. Honesty is not so much a credit as an absolute prerequisite to efficient service to the public. Unless a man is honest, we have no right to keep him in public life; it matters not how brilliant his capacity. | |
| Theodore Roosevelt | To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society. | |
| Theodore Roosevelt | There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. | |
| Theodore Roosevelt | To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. | |
| Theodore Roosevelt | The one absolute certain way to bring this nation to ruin ... would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities. | |
| Warren Rudman | The blame for [the national debt] lies with the Congress and the President, with Democrats and Republicans alike, most all of whom have been unwilling to make the hard choices or to explain to the American people that there is no such thing as a free lunch. | |
| Benno C. Schmidt | Privacy is absolutely essential to maintaining a free society. The idea that is at the foundation of the notion of privacy is that the citizen is not the tool or instrument of government – but the reverse… If you have no privacy, it will tend to follow that you have no political freedom… | |
| Benno C. Schmidt | The most serious problems of freedom of expression in our society today exist on our campuses. The assumption seems to be that the purpose of education is to induce correct opinion rather than to search for wisdom and to liberate the mind….Attitudes on campuses often presage tendencies in the larger society. If that is so with respect to freedom of expression, the erosion of principle we have seen throughout our society in recent years may be only the beginning… | |
| Roger Sherman | If the president alone was vested with the power of appointing all officers, and was left to select a council for himself, he would be liable to be deceived by flatterers and pretenders to patriotism. | |
| Roger Sherman | The Executive should be able to repel and not to commence war. | |
| Roger Sherman | The Executive should be able to repel and not to commence war. | |
| Joseph Sobran | All in all, the framers would probably agree that it's better to impeach too often than too seldom. If presidents can't be virtuous, they should at least be nervous. | |
| Thomas Sowell | Neither your life nor my life, nor the future of this country, will be affected in the slightest by whether Linda Tripp is naughty or nice. But if any president is able to commit crimes with impunity by using the vast powers and perquisites of his office to cover up, then we will have a danger of corruption and abuse of power that can only grow with the passing years and generations. | |
| Thomas Sowell | One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain. | |
| George Stephanopolous | The President has kept all of the promises he intended to keep. | |
| William Howard Taft | Constitutions are checks upon the hasty action of the majority. They are the self-imposed restraints of a whole people upon a majority of them to secure sober action and a respect for the rights of the minority. | |
| William Howard Taft | Next to the right of liberty, the right of property is the most important individual right guaranteed by the Constitution and the one which, united with that of personal liberty, has contributed more to the growth of civilization than any other institution established by the human race. | |
| Norman Thomas | Dissent... is a right essential to any concept of the dignity and freedom of the individual; it is essential to the search for truth in a world wherein no authority is infallible. | |
| Treaty of Tripoli, 1796 | As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense
founded on the Christian Religion, as it has in itself no character of
enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen, and as the
said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any
Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from
religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony
existing between the two countries. | |
| Laurence Tribe | It bothers me that the executive branch is taking the amazing position that just on the president's say-so, any American citizen can be picked up, not just in Afghanistan, but at O'Hare Airport or on the streets of any city in this country, and locked up without access to a lawyer or court just because the government says he's connected somehow with the Taliban or Al Qaeda. That's not the American way. It's not the constitutional way. | |
| Harry S. Truman | Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear. | |
| Harry S. Truman | Secrecy and a free, democratic government don’t mix. | |
| Harry S. Truman | I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it. | |
| Harry S. Truman | I never would have agreed to the formulation of the Central Intelligence Agency back in forty-seven, if I had known it would become the American Gestapo. | |
| Harry S. Truman | When you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship. | |
| Harry S. Truman | When even one American -- who has done nothing wrong -- is forced by fear to shut his mind and close his mouth, then all Americans are in peril. | |
| Harry S. Truman | If you cannot convince them, confuse them. | |
| Harry S. Truman | Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship. | |
| Harry S. Truman | It's not the hand that signs the laws that holds the destiny of America. It's the hand that casts the ballot. | |
| Harry S. Truman | You can't get rich in politics unless you're a crook. | |
| Harry S. Truman | I never give them hell. I just tell the truth and they think it's hell. | |
| Harry S. Truman | There is no more fundamental axiom of American freedom than the familiar statement: In a free country we punish men for the crimes they commit but never for the opinions they have. | |
| Jonathan Turley | Our system is changing and [Congress] is the one branch that must act if we are to reverse those changes. We are seeing the emergence of a different model of government, a model long-ago rejected by the framers. ... A dominant presidency has occurred with very little congressional opposition. Indeed, when President Obama pledged to circumvent Congress, he received rapturous applause from the very body that he was proposing to make practically irrelevant. Now many members are contesting the right of this institution to even be heard in federal court. ... This body is moving from self-loathing to self-destruction in a system that is in crisis. The president's pledge to effectively govern alone is alarming, and what is most alarming is his ability to fulfill that pledge. When a president can govern alone, he can become a government unto himself, which is precisely the danger the framers sought to avoid. | |
| Sun Tzu | When the leader is morally weak and his discipline not strict, when his instructions and guidance are not enlightened, when there are no consistent rules, neighboring rulers will take advantage of this. | |
| Unknown | Letter to the President of the United States from an American Indian: 'Be careful with your immigration laws. We were careless with ours.' | |
| Leon Uris | Terrorism is the war of the poor. War is the terrorism of the rich. | |
| Voltaire | The ideal form of government is democracy tempered with assassination. | |
| George Washington | All see, and most admire, the glare which hovers round the external trappings of elevated office. To me there is nothing in it, beyond the lustre which may be reflected from its connection with a power of promoting human felicity. | |
| George Washington | Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder. | |
| George Washington | Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence, (I conjure you to believe me fellow citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake; since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of Republican Government. | |
| George Washington | The executive branch of this government never has, nor will suffer, while I preside, any improper conduct of its officers to escape with impunity. | |
| George Washington | Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth. | |
| George Washington | The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion. | |
| George Washington | If we are wise, let us prepare for the worst. | |
| George Washington | There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily. | |
| George Washington | The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations, is in extending our commercial relations to have as little political connection as possible... Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalships, interest, humor, or caprice?... It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world. | |
| George Washington | Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible. | |
| George Washington | To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace. | |
| George Washington | No pecuniary consideration is more urgent, than the regular redemption and discharge of the public debt: on none can delay be more injurious, or an economy of time more valuable. | |
| George Washington | Government is not reason, it is not eloquence. It is force, and like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. | |
| George Washington | While, then, every part of our country thus feels an immediate and particular interest in Union, all the parts combined cannot fail to find in the united mass of means and efforts greater strength, greater resource, proportionably greater security from external danger, a less frequent interruption of their peace by foreign nations... Hence, likewise, they will avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments, which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to Republican Liberty. In this sense it is, that your Union ought to be considered as a main prop of your liberty, and that the love of the one ought to endear to you the preservation of the other. | |
| George Washington | In time of peace, prepare for war. | |
| George Washington | Firearms stand next in importance to the Constitution itself. They are the American people's liberty teeth and keystone under independence. The church, the plow, the prairie wagon, and citizen's firearms are indelibly related. From the hour the Pilgrims landed, to the present day, events, occurrences, and tendencies prove that to insure peace, security and happiness, the rifle and the pistol are equally indispensable. Every corner of this land knows firearms, and more than 99 99/100 percent of them by their silence indicate they are in safe and sane hands. The very atmosphere of firearms anywhere and everywhere restrains evil interference; they deserve a place with all that's good. When firearms go, all goes; we need them every hour. | |
| George Washington | Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens,) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake; since history and experience prove, that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of Republican Government. But that jealousy, to be useful, must be impartial; else it becomes the instrument of the very influence to be avoided, instead of a defence against it. Excessive partiality for one foreign nation, and excessive dislike of another, cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one side, and serve to veil and even second the arts of influence on the other. Real patriots, who may resist the intrigues of the favorite, are liable to become suspected and odious; while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people, to surrender their interests. | |
| George Washington | The time is now near at hand which must probably determine whether Americans are to be freemen or slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their houses and farms are to be pillaged and destroyed, and themselves consigned to a state of wretchedness from which no human efforts will deliver them. The fate of unborn millions will now depend on God, on the courage and conduct of this army. Our cruel and unrelenting enemy leaves us only the choice of brave resistance, or the most abject submission. We have, therefore, to resolve to conquer or die. | |
| George Washington | May the father of all mercies scatter light, and not darkness, upon our paths, and make us in all our several vocations useful here, and in His own due time and way everlastingly happy. | |
| George Washington | 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 | If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter. | |
| George Washington | The foundation of our Empire was not laid in the gloomy age of Ignorance and Superstition, but at an Epoch when the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined, than at any former period. | |
| George Washington | No country upon earth ever had it more in its power to attain these blessings than United America. Wondrously strange, then, and much to be regretted indeed would it be, were we to neglect the means and to depart from the road which Providence has pointed us to so plainly; I cannot believe it will ever come to pass. | |
| George Washington | Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest prop of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked: Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice? And let us with caution indulge in the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle... Observe good faith and justice toward all nations. Cultivate peace and harmony with all. Religion and morality enjoin this conduct; and can it be that good policy does not equally enjoin it? | |
| George Washington | The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create whatever the form of government, a real despotism. A just estimate of that love of power, and proneness to abuse it, which predominates in the human heart is sufficient to satisfy us of the truth of this position. | |
| George Washington | The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the republican model of government, are justly considered deeply, perhaps as finally, staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people. | |
| George Washington | Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of Liberty abused to licentiousness. | |
| George Washington | If men are to be precluded from offering their sentiments on a matter which may involve the most serious and alarming consequences that can invite the consideration of mankind, reason is of no use; the freedom of speech may be taken away, and dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter. | |
| George Washington | There can be no greater error than to expect, or calculate upon real favours from Nation to Nation. 'Tis an illusion which experience must cure, which a just pride ought to discard. | |
| George Washington | May the father of all mercies scatter light, and not darkness, upon our paths, and make us in all our several vocations useful here, and in his own due time and way everlastingly happy. | |
| Daniel Webster | The contest, for ages, has been to rescue Liberty from the grasp of executive power. | |
| Daniel Webster | No power but Congress can declare war; but what is the value of this constitutional provision, if the President of his own authority may make such military movements as must bring on war? ... [T]hese remarks originate purely in a desire to maintain the powers of government as they are established by the Constitution between the different departments, and hope that, whether we have conquests or no conquests, war or no war, peace or no peace, we shall yet preserve, in its integrity and strength, the Constitution of the United States. | |
| Daniel Webster | No power but Congress can declare war, but what is the value of this constitutional provision, if the President of his own authority may make such military movements as must bring on war? | |
| Daniel Webster | Where is it written in the Constitution, in what article or section is it contained, that you may take children from their parents and parents from their children, and compel them to fight the battles of any war in which the folly and wickedness of the government may engage itself? Under what concealment has this power lain hidden, which now for the first time comes forth, with a tremendous and baleful aspect, to trample down and destroy the dearest right of personal liberty? Who will show me any Constitutional injunction which makes it the duty of the American people to surrender everything valuable in life, and even life, itself, whenever the purposes of an ambitious and mischievous government may require it? ... A free government with an uncontrolled power of military conscription is the most ridiculous and abominable contradiction and nonsense that ever entered into the heads of men. | |
| Woodrow Wilson | The government, which was designed for the people, has got into the hands of the bosses and their employers, the special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy. | |
| Woodrow Wilson | We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the world. | |
| Woodrow Wilson | Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of government. The history of liberty is the history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it. | |
| Woodrow Wilson | You are not here merely to make a living.
You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply,
with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement.
You are here to enrich the world,
and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand. | |
| Woodrow Wilson | America is not a mere body of traders; it is a body of free men. Our greatness is built upon our freedom -- is moral, not material. We have a great ardor for gain; but we have a deep passion for the rights of man. | |
| Woodrow Wilson | The world must be made safe for democracy. | |
| Woodrow Wilson | Is there any man, is there any woman, let me say any child here
that does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry? | |
| Woodrow Wilson | I have always in my own thought summed up individual liberty, and business liberty, and every other kind of liberty, in the phrase that is common in the sporting world, 'A free field and no favor.' | |
| Woodrow Wilson | There is such a thing as a nation being so right it does not need to convince others by force that it is right. | |
| Woodrow Wilson | Liberty does not consist in mere declarations of the rights of man. It consists in the translation of those declarations into definite action. | |
| Woodrow Wilson | Liberty cannot live apart from constitutional | |
| Woodrow Wilson | I have always been among those who believe that the greatest freedom of speech was the greatest safety, because if a man is a fool the best thing to do is to encourage him to advertise the fact by speaking. | |
| Woodrow Wilson | If you want to make enemies, try to change something. | |
| Woodrow Wilson | A man who thinks of himself as belonging to a particular national group in America has not yet become an American. And the man who goes among you to trade upon your nationality is no worthy son to live under the Stars and Stripes. | |
| Woodrow Wilson | The wisest thing to do with a fool is to encourage him to hire a hall and discourse to his fellow citizens. Nothing chills nonsense like exposure to air. | |
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