Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"We are good citizens, and we cannot protect ourselves because you allow the criminals to run wild. ... I'd like you to come and live in the inner city for a week and see the importance of having a weapon. ... Go after the criminals and not the good people."

~ Jesse Lee Peterson  

"Laws do not curb the lawless. After all, that's why we call them 'lawless.'"

~ Joel Miller  

"Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil."

~ Thomas Mann  

"Prohibition will work great injury to the cause of temperance. It is a species of intemperance within itself, for it goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. A Prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded."

~ Abraham Lincoln

"Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to bid restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work."

~ John Milton  

"The number of laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm."

~ P. D. Ouspensky  

"I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement."

~ Calvin Coolidge  

"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  

"Life and liberty can be as much endangered from illegal methods used to convict those thought to be criminals as from the actual criminals themselves."

~ Earl Warren  

"Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws."

~ Plato  

"When any court violates the clean and unambiguous language of the constitution, a fraud is perpetrated and no one is bound to obey it."

~ State v. Sutton  

"The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the Constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first."

~ Thomas Jefferson  

"It is the essence of the institutions of liberty that it be recognized that guilt is personal and cannot be attributed to the holding of opinions or to mere intent in the absence of overt acts."

~ Justice Charles Evans Hughes  

"All truth is safe, and nothing else is safe; and he who keeps back the truth or withholds it from men, from motives of expediency, is either a coward, or a criminal, or both."

~ Max Muller  

"An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates his duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself."

~ Thomas Paine