Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"Here is the Golden Rule of sound citizenship, the first and greatest lesson in the study of politics: You get the same order of criminality from any State to which you give power to exercise it; and whatever power you give the State to do things FOR you carries with it the equivalent power to do things TO you."

~ Albert Jay Nock  

"There is no greater fallacy than the belief that aims and purposes are one thing, while methods and tactics are another... All human experience teaches that methods and means cannot be separated from the ultimate aim."

~ Emma Goldman  

"Remember, there's a big difference between kneeling down and bending over."

~ Frank Zappa  

"It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes."

~ Andrew Jackson  

"There is one safeguard known generally to the wise, which is an advantage and security to all, but especially to democracies as against despots. What is it? Distrust."

~ Demosthenes  

"The Federal Government is the creature of the States. It is not a party to the Constitution, but the result of it -- the creation of that agreement which was made by the States as parties. It is a mere agent, entrusted with limited powers for certain specific objects; which powers and objects are enumerated in the Constitution. Shall the agent be permitted to judge the extent of its own powers, without reference to his constituent? To a certain extent, he is compelled to do this, in the very act of exercising them, but always in subordination to the authority by whom his powers were conferred. If this were not so, the result would be, that the agent would possess every power which the agent could confer, notwithstanding the plainest and most express terms of the grant. This would be against all principle and all reason. If such a rule would prevail in regard to government, a written constitution would be the idlest thing imaginable. It would afford no barrier against the usurpations of the government, and no security for the rights and liberties of the people. If then the Federal Government has no authority to judge, in the last resort, of the extent of its own powers, with what propriety can it be said that a single department of that government may do so? Nay. It is said that this department may not only judge for itself, but for the other departments also. This is an absurdity as pernicious as it is gross and palpable. If the judiciary may determine the powers of the Federal Government, it may pronounce them either less or more than they really are."

~ Abel Upshur  

"...the Patriot Act followed 9-11 as smoothly as the suspension of the Weimar constitution followed the Reichstag fire."

~ Srdja Trifkovic  

"After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd."

~ Alexis de Tocqueville  

"There is as far as I know, no example in history, of any state voluntarily ceding power from the centre to its constituent parts."

~ Charles Handy  

"The more corrupt the state,
the more numerous the laws."

~ Cornelius Tacitus  

"Under any conditions, anywhere, whatever you are doing,
there is some ordinance under which you can be booked."

~ Robert D. Specht  

"An elective despotism was not the government we fought for, but one which should not only be founded on true free principles, but in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among general bodies of magistracy, as that no one could transcend their legal limits without being effectually checked and restrained by the others."

~ Thomas Jefferson  

"We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans..."

~ Bill Clinton  

"It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones."

~ Calvin Coolidge  

"Nothing can destroy a government more quickly than its failure to observe its own laws, or worse, its disregard of the charter of its own existence."

~ Justice Tom C. Clark