Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable."

~ Eric Hoffer  

"Security is mostly a superstition.
It does not exist in nature,
nor do the children of men as a whole experience it.
Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure.
Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing."

~ Helen Keller  

"Every collectivist revolution rides in on a Trojan horse of 'emergency'.
It was the tactic of Lenin, Hitler, and Mussolini. In the collectivist
sweep over a dozen minor countries of Europe, it was the cry of men
striving to get on horseback. And 'emergency' became the justification
of the subsequent steps. This technique of creating emergency is the
greatest achievement that demagoguery attains."

~ Herbert Hoover  

"The essential characteristic of socialism
is the denial of individual property rights..."

~ Ayn Rand  

"The supposed quietude of a good man allures the ruffian;
while on the other hand, arms like laws, discourage
and keep the invader and the plunderer in awe,
and preserve order in the world as well as property.
The same balance would be preserved were all the world
destitute of arms, for all would be alike;
but since some will not, others dare not lay them aside...
Horrid mischief would ensue were one half the world
deprived of the use of them..."

~ Thomas Paine  

"Good government generally begins in the family,
and if the moral character of a people once degenerate,
their political character must soon follow."

~ Elias Boudinot  

"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  

"A nation of well informed men
who have been taught to know and prize the rights
which God has given them cannot be enslaved.
It is in the region of ignorance that tyranny begins."

~ Benjamin Franklin  

"The people of the U.S. owe their Independence & their liberty, to the wisdom of descrying in the minute tax of 3 pence on tea, the magnitude of the evil comprised in the precedent. Let them exert the same wisdom, in watching against every evil lurking under plausible disguises, and growing up from small beginnings."

~ James Madison  

"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 ..."

~ John C. Calhoun  

"We now live in a nation where doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the press destroys information, religion destroys morals, and our banks destroy the economy."

~ Chris Hedges  

"Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear -­
kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervour ­-
with the cry of grave national emergency.
Always, there has been some terrible evil at home,
or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up
if we did not blindly rally behind it by
furnishing the exorbitant sums demanded.
Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened,
seem never to have been quite real."

~ General Douglas MacArthur  

"If you see a man approaching you
with the obvious intent of doing you good,
you should run for your life."

~ Henry David Thoreau