Quotes for Liberty
A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall no take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.
-- Thomas Jefferson (1801)
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner. Freedom is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.
-- Ben Franklin
Liberals believe government should take people's earnings to give to poor people. Conservatives disagree. They think government should confiscate people's earnings and give them to farmers and insolvent banks. The compelling issue to both conservatives and liberals is not whether it is legitimate for government to confiscate one's property to give to another, the debate is over the disposition of the pillage.
-- Walter Williams, syndicated columnist & professor of economics at George Mason University
The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.
-- Frederic Bastiat
The power to tax involves the power to destroy.
-- Supreme Court Justice John Marshall, McCulloch v. Maryland (1819)
Our foreign dealings are an open book -- generally a checkbook.
-- Will Rogers
Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but only those specifically enumerated.
-- Thomas Jefferson
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.
-- Edmund A. Opitz
Those who profess to favor freedom, yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.
-- Frederick Douglass
Ninety-eight percent of the adults in this country are decent, hardworking, honest Americans. It's the other lousy two percent that get all the publicity. But then, we elected them.
-- Lily Tomlin
If ye love wealth greater than Liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains set lightly upon you; and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.
-- Samuel Adams
Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.
--Barry Goldwater (1964)
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
--William Pitt (1783)
If you are not free to choose wrongly and irresponsibly, you are not free at all.
--Jacob Hornberger (1995)