Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

~ P. J. O'Rourke  

"The trade of governing has always been monopolized
by the most ignorant and the most rascally individuals of mankind."

~ Thomas Paine  

~ Will Rogers  

"All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree."

~ James Madison  

"The purpose of the Bill of Rights was to limit what the federal government could do. Any interpretation of a provision of the Bill of Rights as a grant of federal power is ipso facto wrong."

~ L. A. Powe, Jr.  

"To be GOVERNED is to be kept in sight, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so ...

To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality."

~ Pierre-Joseph Proudhon  

"The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it."

~ H. L. Mencken  

"If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one, subject to particular exceptions."

~ James Madison  

"When you get into politics, you find that all your worst nightmares about it turn out to be true, and the people who are attracted to large concentrations of power are precisely the ones who should be kept as far away from it as possible."

~ Ken Livingstone  

"In framing a government, which is to be administered by men over men,
the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government
to control the governed, and in the next place, oblige it to control
itself."

~ James Madison  

"No one can read our Constitution without concluding that the
people who wrote it wanted their government severely limited;
the words 'no' and 'not' employed in restraint of government
power occur 24 times in the first seven articles of the
Constitution and 22 more times in the Bill of Rights."

~ Rev. Edmund A. Opitz  

"I have no reason to suppose, that he, who would take away my liberty, would not, when he had me in his power, take away every thing else."

~ John Locke  

"Tis a Mistake to think this Fault [tyranny] is proper only to Monarchies; other Forms of Government are liable to it, as well as that. For where-ever the Power that is put in any hands for the Government of the People, and the Preservation of their Properties, is applied to other ends, and made use of to impoverish, harass, or subdue them to the Arbitrary and Irregular Commands of those that have it: There it presently becomes Tyranny, whether those that thus use it are one or many."

~ John Locke