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2007 August 24
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"All the property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation
of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his
natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all
Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the
Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore
by other laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick
shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society
on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages. He can
have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his
Club towards the Support of it." |
"Who ordained that a few should have the land of Britain
as a perquisite; who made ten thousand people owners of the soil
and the rest of us trespassers in the land of our birth?" |
"The meek shall inherit the earth,
but not its mineral rights." |
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2007 August 23
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"The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects
from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the
reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal
principles to be applied by the courts. One's right to life, liberty,
and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and
assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote;
they depend on the outcome of no elections." |
"Government has no other end than the preservation of property." |
"Private property was the original source of freedom.
It still is its main bulwark." |
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2007 August 22
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"Life, liberty, and property
do not exist because men have made laws.
On the contrary, it was the fact that
life, liberty, and property existed beforehand
that caused men to make laws in the first place." |
"True liberty cannot exist apart from the full rights of property, for property is the only crystallized form of free faculties... The whole meaning of socialism is a systematic glorification of force... No literary phrases about social organisms are potent enough to evaporate the individual, who is the prime, indispensable, irreducible element." |
"Property is a central economic institution of any society, and private property is the central institution of a free society." |
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2007 August 21
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"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." |
"If the personal freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution
inhibit the government's ability to govern the people,
we should look to limit those guarantees." |
"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." |
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2007 August 20
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"But as the plan of the [Constitutional] convention
aims only at a partial union or consolidation,
the State governments would clearly retain all the rights of sovereignty
which they before had, and which were not, by that act,
EXCLUSIVELY delegated to the United States." |
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