Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!"

~ Benjamin Franklin  

"Without general elections, without unrestrained freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution…in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element."

~ Rosa Luxemburg  

"The short memories of the American voters
is what keeps our politicians in office."

~ Will Rogers  

"If the legislature clearly misinterprets a Constitutional provision,
the frequent repetition of the wrong will not create a right."

~ Amos v. Mosley  

"Complaints are every where heard from our most considerate and virtuous citizens, equally the friends of public and private faith, and of public and personal liberty, that our governments are too unstable; that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties; and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice, and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority."

~ James Madison  

"The Framers of the Bill of Rights did not purport to "create" rights. Rather they designed the Bill of Rights to prohibit our Government from infringing rights and liberties presumed to be preexisting."

~ Justice William J. Brennan  

"The possession of unlimited power will make a despot of almost any man.
There is a possible Nero in the gentlest human creature that walks."

~ Thomas Bailey Aldrich  

"The only shape in which equality is
really connected with justice is this --
justice presupposes general rules.
If these general rules are to be maintained at all,
it is obvious that they must be applied equally
to every case which satisfies their terms."

~ James Fitzjames Stephens  

"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."

~ Justice Louis D. Brandeis  

"In truth, in the case of individuals, their actual voting is not to be taken as proof of consent, even for the time being. On the contrary, it is to be considered that, without his consent having ever been asked, a man finds himself environed by a government that he cannot resist; a government that forces him to pay money, render service, and forego the exercise of many of his natural rights, under peril of weighty punishments. He sees, too, that other men practise this tyranny over him by the use of the ballot. He sees further that, if he will but use the ballot himself, he has some chance of relieving himself from this tyranny of others, by subjecting them to his own. In short, he finds himself, without his consent, so situated that, if he use the ballot, he may become a master; if he does not use it, he must become a slave. And he has no other alternative than these two. In self-defence, he attempts the former.

His case is analogous to that of a man who has been forced into battle, where he must either kill others, or be killed himself. Because, to save his own life in battle, a man attempts to take the lives of his opponents, it is not to be inferred that the battle is one of his own choosing. Neither in contests with the ballot -- which is a mere substitute for a bullet -- because, as his only chance of self-preservation, a man uses a ballot, is it to be inferred that the contest is one into which he voluntarily entered; that he voluntarily set up all his own natural rights, as a stake against those of others, to be lost or won by the mere power of numbers. On the contrary, it is to be considered that, in an exigency, into which he had been forced by others, and in which no other means of self-defence offered, he, as a matter of necessity, used the only one that was left to him."

~ Lysander Spooner  

"Vote: The instrument and symbol of a free man's power
to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country."

~ Ambrose Bierce  

"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  

"The great thing about democracy
is that it gives every voter a chance
to do something stupid."

~ Art Spander