The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations A classic since 1953 with over 20,000 quotes from over 3,000 authors.
Famous Last Words Apt Observations, Pleas, Curses, Benedictions, Sour Notes, Bons Mots, and Insights from People on the Brink of Departure
Stretch Your Wings Famous Black Quotations for the Young
American Quotations An exhaustive collection of profound quotes from the founding fathers, presidents, statesmen, scientists, constitutions, court decisions
The Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations
Last Words of Saints and Sinners 700 Final Quotes from the Famous, the Infamous, and the Inspiring Figures of History
America's God and Country: Encyclopedia of Quotations Contains over 2,100 profound quotations from founding fathers, presidents, constitutions, court decisions and more
The Law This 1850 classic is an absolute must read for anyone interested in law, justice, truth, or liberty. A most compelling and revolutionary look at The Law.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations A Collection of Passages, Phrases, and Proverbs Traced to Their Sources in Ancient and Modern Literature (17th Edition)
The Stupidest Things Ever Said by Politicians Rise up, America -- and laugh out loud at the greatest gaffes that no spin doctor could possibly fix!
The 776 Even Stupider Things Ever Said Another great collection of stupidity
Quotable Quotes Wit and Wisdom for All Occasions from America's Most Popular Magazine
The Most Brilliant Thoughts of All Time You don't have to be a genius to sound like one. Here's a collection of the most profound and provocative wit and wisdom in the English language in two lines or less.
2,715 One-Line Quotations for Speakers, Writers & Raconteurs Invaluable sampler of witticisms, epigrams, sayings, bon mots, platitudes and insights chosen for their brevity and pithiness.
Phillips' Book of Great Thoughts Funny Sayings A stupendous collection of quotes, quips, epigrams, witticisms, and humorous comments for personal enjoyment and ready reference.
Quick Quips and Quotes; 532 Things I Wish I Had Said Quick Quips and Quotes is the Ultimate Collection of one liners.
Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes The ultimate anthology of anecdotes, now revised with over 700 new entries.
Quotations for Public Speakers A Historical, Literary, and Political Anthology
Liberty - The American Revolution This compelling series traces the events leading up to the war and America's fight for freedom.
Founding Fathers The story of how these disparate characters fomented rebellion in the colonies, formed the Continental Congress, fought the Revolutionary War, and wrote the Constitution
Libertarianism: A Primer David Boaz, director of the Cato Institute, has written a simple introduction to Libertarianism inteneded to appeal to disgruntled Democrats and Republicans everywhere.
The Libertarian Reader Classic and Contemporary Writings from Lao-Tzu to Milton Friedman
Thomas Paine: Collected Writings All the classics: Common Sense / The Crisis / Rights of Man / The Age of Reason / Pamphlets, Articles, and Letters |
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| 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 | There never was yet a people who must not have somebody or something to represent the dignity of the state. | |
| 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 Quincy Adams | All the public business in Congress now connects itself with intrigues, and there is great danger that the whole government will degenerate into a struggle of cabals. | |
| Samuel Adams | He therefore is the truest friend to the liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue, and who, so far as his power and influence extend, will not suffer a man to be chosen into any office of power and trust who is not a wise and virtuous man...The sum of all is, if we would most truly enjoy this gift of Heaven, let us become a virtuous people. | |
| Samuel Adams | The said constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms. | |
| Samuel Adams | And that the said Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press, or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms; or to raise standing armies, unless necessary for the defense of the United States, or of some one or more of them; or to prevent the people from petitioning, in a peaceable and orderly manner, the federal legislature, for a redress of grievances; or to subject the people to unreasonable searches and seizures of their persons, papers or possessions. | |
| Donald Alexander | We now have so many regulations that everyone is guilty of some violation. | |
| Roger Allen | Congress is continually appointing fact-finding committees, when what we really need are some fact-facing committees. | |
| Fisher Ames | We are not to consider ourselves, while here, as at church or school, to listen to the harangues of speculative piety; we are here to talk of the political interests committed to our charge. | |
| Amos v. Mosley | If the legislature clearly misinterprets a Constitutional provision, the frequent repetition of the wrong will not create a right. | |
| Anacharsis | The forum [is] an established place for men to cheat one another, and behave covetously. | |
| Walter Bagehot | A democratic despotism is like a theocracy: it assumes its own correctness. | |
| F. Lee Bailey | Can any of you seriously say the Bill of Rights could get through Congress today? It wouldn't even get out
of committee. | |
| Mayor Marion Barry | What right does Congress have to go around making laws just because they deem it necessary? | |
| Gerald Barzan | Taxation with representation ain't so hot either. | |
| Billings v. Hall | Under our form of government, the legislature is not supreme ... like other departments of government, it can only exercise such powers as have been delegated to it, and when it steps beyond that boundary, its acts, like those of the most humble magistrate in the state who transcends his jurisdiction, are utterly void. | |
| Dr. Jim Boren | Bureaucracy is the epoxy that greases the wheels of progress. | |
| Dr. Jim Boren | Every bureaucrat has a constitutional right to fuzzify, profundify and drivelate. It's a part of our freedom of speech...If people can understand what is being said in Washington, they might want to take over their own government again. | |
| Dr. Jim Boren | When in charge, ponder... When in trouble, delegate... When in doubt, mumble. | |
| Justice Louis D. Brandeis | At the foundation of our civil liberties lies the principle that denies to government officials an exceptional position before the law and which subjects them to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen. | |
| James Burgh | All lawful authority, legislative, and executive, originates from the people. | |
| Edmund Burke | Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion. | |
| 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. | |
| Sen. Robert C. Byrd | Is it any wonder, why the approval ratings of the Congress go up every time we go into recess? | |
| 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 ... | |
| Oscar Callaway | I regret to say it, but we are gradually turning over the business of Congress, turning over all our constitutional rights, turning over our powers delegated by the people to a lot of editors, theorists, and college professors who are not capable of conducting our affairs and to whom we should not abdicate. | |
| Gilbert Keith Chesterton | Any one of the strange laws we suffer is a compromise between a fad and a vested interest. | |
| Stephen Chippendale | The federal criminal code currently includes more than 3,000 offenses and hardly a congressional session goes by without an attempt to add new sections. | |
| Joseph H. Choate | The Act of Congress which we are impugning before you is communistic in its purposes and tendencies, and is defended here upon principles as communistic, socialistic - what shall I call them - populistic as ever have been
addressed to any political assembly in the world. | |
| Rev. Nicholas Collin | While the people have property, arms in their hands, and only a spark of noble spirit, the most corrupt Congress must be mad to form any project of tyranny. | |
| Calvin Coolidge | It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones. | |
| Calvin Coolidge | Nothing is easier than spending public money. It does not appear to belong to anybody. The temptation is overwhelming to bestow it on somebody. | |
| 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 | The militia of these free commonwealths, entitled and accustomed to their arms, when compared with any possible army, must be tremendous and irresistible. Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? Is it feared, then, that we shall turn our arms each man against his own bosom. Congress have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birth-right of an American ... the unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people. | |
| Tench Coxe | Congress have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birth-right of an American ... the unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people. | |
| Edward H. Crane | Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution, of course, lays out the delegated, enumerated, and therefore limited powers of Congress. Only through a deliberate misreading of the general welfare and commerce clauses of the Constitution has the federal government been allowed to overreach its authority and extend its tendrils into every corner of civil society. | |
| Davy Crockett | We must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living. I will not attempt to prove that Congress has no power to appropriate this money as an act of charity. Every member upon this floor knows it. We have the right as individuals to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of congress we have no right to appropriate a dollar of the public money. | |
| Davy Crockett | We have rights, as individuals, to give as much of our own money as we please to charity; but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of public money. | |
| Davy Crockett | There ain't no ticks like poly-ticks. Bloodsuckers all. | |
| Walter Cronkite | It is a seldom proffered argument as to the advantages of a free press that it has a major function in keeping the government itself informed as to what the government is doing. | |
| John C. Danforth | I have never seen more senators express discontent with their jobs. ... I think the major cause is that, deep down in our hearts, we have been accomplices to doing something terrible and unforgivable to this wonderful country. Deep down in our hearts, we know that we have bankrupted America and that we have given our children a legacy of bankruptcy. ... We have defrauded our country to get ourselves elected. | |
| William Richardson Davie | So low and hopeless are the finances of the United States, that, the year before last Congress was obliged to borrow money even, to pay the interest of the principal which we had borrowed before. This wretched resource of turning interest into principal, is the most humiliating and disgraceful measure that a nation could take, and approximates with rapidity to absolute ruin: Yet it is the inevitable and certain consequence of such a system as the existing Confederation. | |
| Alexis de Tocqueville | The electors see their representative not only as a legislator for the state but also as the natural protector of local interests in the legislature; indeed, they almost seem to think that he has a power of attorney to represent each constituent, and they trust him to be as eager in their private interests as in those of the country. | |
| Alexis de Tocqueville | There is hardly a congressman prepared to go home until he has at least one speech printed and sent to his constituents, and he won't let anybody interrupt his harangue until he has made all his useful suggestions about the 24 states of the Union, and especially the district he represents. | |
| Demosthenes | There is one safeguard known generally to the wise, which is an advantage and security to all, but especially to democracies as against despots. What is it? Distrust. | |
| Justice William O. Douglas | It is our attitude toward free thought and free expression that will determine our fate. There must be no limit on the range of temperate discussion, no limits on thought. No subject must be taboo. No censor must preside at our assemblies. | |
| William O. Douglas | The First and Fourteenth Amendments say that Congress and the States shall make “no law” which abridges freedom of speech or of the press. In order to sanction a system of censorship I would have to say that “no law” does not mean what it says, that “no law” is qualified to mean “some” laws. I cannot take this step. | |
| William Drayton | If Congress can determine what constitutes the general welfare and can appropriate money for its advancement, where is the limitation to carrying into execution whatever can be effected by money? | |
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