Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"Because law enforcement resources
have been concentrated
on the street drug trade
in minority communities,
drug arrests of minorities
increased at 10 times
the rate of increase for whites."

~ Los Angeles Times  

"Every friend of freedom must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence."

~ Milton Friedman  

"I hate this 'crime doesn't pay' stuff. Crime in the U.S. is perhaps one of the biggest businesses in the world today."

~ Paul Kirk  

"The German woman does not smoke!"

~ Nazi slogan  

"Zealotry of either kind -- the puritan's need to regiment others or
the victim's passion for blaming everyone except himself -- tends to
produce a depressing civic stupidity. Each trait has about it the
immobility of addiction. Victims become addicted to being victims:
they derive identity, innocence and a kind of devious power from sheer,
defaulting helplessness. On the other side, the candlesnuffers of
behavioral and political correctness enact their paradox, accomplishing
intolerance in the name of tolerance, regimentation in the name of
betterment."

~ Lance Morrow  

"If the words 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' don't include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn't worth the hemp it was written on."

~ Terence McKenna  

"I say that you cannot administer
a wicked law impartially.
You can only destroy.
You can only punish.
I warn you that a wicked law,
like cholera, destroys everyone
it touches -- its upholders
as well as its defiers."

~ Jerome Lawrence  

"You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

~ John Ehrlichman

"[A]fter 20 years on the bench, I have concluded that Federal drug laws are a disaster. It is time to get the Government out of drug enforcement. ... If the possession or distribution of drugs were no longer a Federal crime, other levels of government would face the choice of enforcement or ... decriminalizing. ... The variety, complexity and importance of these questions make it exceedingly clear that the Federal Government has no business being involved in any of them. What might be a hopeful solution in New York, could be a disaster in Idaho, and only State legislatures and city governments, not Congress, can pass laws tailored to local needs. ... It [Congress] should repeal all Federal laws that prohibit or regulate their distribution ..."

~ Judge Whitman Knapp  

"Drug offenses ... may be regarded as the prototypes of non-victim
crimes today. The private nature of the sale and use of these drugs has
led the police to resort to methods of detection and surveillance that
intrude upon our privacy, including illegal search, eavesdropping, and
entrapment.

Indeed, the successful prosecution of such cases often requires police
infringement of the constitutional protections that safeguard the
privacy of individuals."

~ John Kaplan  

[T]he drug prohibition laws have led to wholesale destruction of civil liberties. The War on Drugs has now become a War on the Constitution, and the American people have become, in the eyes of their government, a society of suspects.

~ David B. Kopel  

"The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking; he can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn fool, and he might possibly be a damned soul; but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog."

~ Gilbert Keith Chesterton  

"All I ask is equal freedom.
When it is denied, as it always is,
I take it anyhow."

~ H. L. Mencken  

"The error seems not sufficiently eradicated, that the operations of the mind, as well as the acts of the body, are subject to the coercion of the laws. But our rulers can have authority over such natural rights only as we have submitted to them. The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to our God. The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. ... Was the government to prescribe to us our medicine and diet, our bodies would be in such keeping as our souls are now. Thus in France the emetic was once forbidden as a medicine, and the potatoe as an article of food."

~ Thomas Jefferson  

"Whenever the offence inspires
less horror than the punishment,
the rigour of penal law is obliged
to give way to the common feelings
of mankind."

~ Edward Gibbon