Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"Today, when a concerted effort is made to obliterate this point,
it cannot be repeated too often that the Constitution
is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals --
that it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals,
only the conduct of the government --
that it is not a charter _for_ government power,
but a charter of the citizen's protection _against_ the government."

~ Ayn Rand  

"When a legislature decides to steal some of our rights and plans to use police force to accomplish it, what's the real difference between them and the thief? Darn little! They hide behind the excuse that they're legislating democratically. The fact they do it by a majority vote has no moral significance whatsoever. Numerical might does not constitute right, no more than a lynch mob can justify its act because a majority participated."

~ H. L. Richardson  

"The moment men obtain perfect freedom, that moment they erect a stage for the manifestation of their faults. The strong characters begin to go wrong by excess of energy; the weak by remissness of action."

~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe  

"Forced to choose, the poor, like the rich,
love money more than political liberty;
and the only political freedom capable of enduring
is one that is so pruned as to keep the rich
from denuding the poor by ability or subtlety
and the poor from robbing the rich by violence or votes."

~ Will Durant  

"An election is a moral horror,
as bad as a battle except for blood;
a mud bath for every soul concerned in it."

~ George Bernard Shaw  

"Comrades, I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how. But what is extraordinarily important is this: who will count the votes, and how."

~ Josef Stalin  

"Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man? There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly. I please myself with imagining a State at least which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose if a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow-men. A State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious State, which also I have imagined, but not yet anywhere seen."

~ Henry David Thoreau  

"Give the American people a good cause,
and there's nothing they can't lick."

~ John Wayne  

"The electors see their representative not only
as a legislator for the state but also as the
natural protector of local interests in the legislature;
indeed, they almost seem to think that he has a power of attorney
to represent each constituent, and they trust him to be as eager
in their private interests as in those of the country."

~ Alexis de Tocqueville  

"I believe that if the people of this nation fully understood what
Congress has done to them over the last 49 years, they would move on
Washington; they would not wait for an election... It adds up to a
preconceived plan to destroy the economic and social independence of the
United States!"

~ George W. Malone  

"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 act of voting is one opportunity for us to remember
that our whole way of life is predicated
on the capacity of ordinary people to judge carefully and well."

~ Alan Keyes  

"But I go on this great republican principle, that the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom. Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks -- no form of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea. If there be sufficient virtue and intelligence in the community, it will be exercised in the selection of these men. So that we do not depend on their virtue, or put confidence in our rulers, but in the people who are to choose them."

~ James Madison