Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"For a government to declare a vice to be a crime, and to punish it as such, is an attempt to falsify the very nature of things. It is as absurd as it would be to declare truth to be a falsehood, or falsehood a truth."

~ Lysander Spooner  

"For a punishment to be just
it should consist of only such gradations of intensity
as suffice to deter men from committing crimes."

~ Cesare Beccaria  

"The function of the prosecutor under the federal Constitution
is not to tack as many skins of victims as possible against the wall.
His function is to vindicate the rights of the people as expressed
in the laws and give those accused of crime a fair trial."

~ Justice William O. Douglas  

"There is no zeal blinder than that which is inspired
with a love of justice against offenders."

~ Henry Fielding  

"The laws of man may bind him in chains or may put him to death,
but they never can make him wise, virtuous, or happy."

~ John Quincy Adams  

"Every crime is born of necessity.  If you want less crime, you must change the conditions.  Poverty makes crime.  Want, rags, crusts, misfortune - all these awake the wild beast in man, and finally he takes, and takes contrary to law, and becomes a criminal.  And what do you do with him?  You punish him.  Why not punish a man for having consumption?  The time will come when you will see that that is just as logical.  What do you do with the criminal?  You send him to the penitentiary.  Is he made better?  Worse.  The first thing you do is to try to trample out his manhood, by putting an indignity upon him.  You mark him.  You put him in stripes.  At night you put him in darkness.  His feeling for revenge grows.  You make a wild beast of him, and he comes out of that place branded in body and soul, and then you won't let him reform if he wants to."

~ Robert G. Ingersoll  

"In our country, the lie
has become not just a moral category
but a pillar of the State."

~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn  

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences."

~ C. S. Lewis  

"It is indeed probable that more harm and misery
have been caused by men determined to use coercion
to stamp out a moral evil than by men intent on doing evil."

~ Friedrich August von Hayek  

"You can't say you love your country and hate your government."

~ Bill Clinton  

"They would be the shepherds over us, their sheep. Certainly such an arrangement presupposes that they are naturally superior to the rest of us. And certainly we are fully justified in demanding from the legislators and organizers proof of this natural superiority."

~ Frederic Bastiat  

"Politics, as a practise, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds."

~ Henry Brooks Adams  

"In the eyes of government we are just one race here. It is American."

~ Justice Antonin Scalia  

"Government cannot make us equal; it can only recognize, respect, and protect us as equal before the law. That [affirmative action] programs may have been motivated, in part, by good intentions cannot provide refuge from the principle that under our Constitution, the government may not make distinctions on the basis of race."

~ Justice Clarence Thomas  

"There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism."

~ Theodore Roosevelt