Weekend Quotes

• Any system that takes responsibility away from people, dehumanizes them.

• Bad law is more likely to be supplemented than repealed.

• A proliferation of new laws creates a proliferation of new loopholes.

• What the government gives, it must first take away. – John S. Coleman

• What the government is good at is collecting taxes, taking away your freedoms and killing people. It's not good at much else. – Tom Clancy on Kudlow and Cramer 9/2/03

Quotes for the Day 10/30/19

Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. ~ John Adams (1814)


Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but only those specifically enumerated. ... Whensoever the General Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force. ~ Thomas Jefferson


The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it. ~ John Hay (1872)

Quotes of the Day, 4/16/19

Americans have the mistaken viewpoint that Lady Liberty is only a peacetime luxury who is ill-equipped to fight the nasties. Therefore, they reason, we need an equally nasty Big Brother. Americans have forgotten that Lady Liberty is one ferocious mother when protecting her children. – Mary Ruwart


The prospect of a government that treats all its citizens as criminal suspects is more terrifying than any terrorist. And even more frightening is a citizenry that can accept the surrender of its freedoms as the price of "freedom". – Joe Sobran


… so long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men. – Voltairine de Cleyre

Quotes for Tuesday, 2/26/19

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


For those looking for security, be forewarned that there's nothing more insecure than a political promise. 
~ Harry Browne


A people incapable of protecting themselves will lose their rights as a free people, becoming either servile dependents of the state or of the criminal predators who are their de facto masters. 
~ Robert Cottrol, George Washington University law professor


The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best. 
~ Thomas Sowell

Quote of the Day

Everyone carries a part of society on his shoulders; no one is relieved of his share of responsibility by others. And no one can find a safe way out for himself if society is sweeping towards destruction. Therefore, everyone, in his own interests, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle. None can stand aside with unconcern; the interests of everyone hangs on the results. Whether he chooses or not, every man is drawn into the greatest historical struggle, the decisive battle into which our epoch has plunged us.

~Ludwig von Mises

Ludwig von Mises  (1881 - 1973)

Quotes of the Day

The limitation of tyrants is the endurance of those they oppose. 
~Frederick Douglass


The only thing that saves us from bureaucracy is its inefficiency. 
~ Eugene McCarthy


The ideal Government of all reflective men, from Aristotle onward, is one which lets the individual alone – one which barely escapes being no government at all. 
~ H. L. Mencken

Quotes of the Day

Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of Liberty. 

~ Thomas Jefferson

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. 

~ Goethe

When the government’s boot is on your throat, whether it is a left boot or a right boot 

is of no consequence. 

~ Gary Lloyd

Quotes of the Day, 10/3/18

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficial … the greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.
~ Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, 1928

Virtually all reasonable laws are obeyed, not because they are the law, but because reasonable people would do that anyway. If you obey a law simply because it is the law, that's a pretty likely sign that it shouldn't be a law.
~ Unknown

The U.S. Constitution may be flawed, but it's a whole lot better than what we have now.
~ Unknown

Quotes of the Day

The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant. – John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)


If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all. – Noam Chomsky


I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself. – Aldous Huxley

Quotes of the Day

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


Taking somebody's money without permission is stealing, unless you work for the IRS; then it's taxation. Killing people en masse is homicidal mania, unless you work for the Army; then it's National Defense. Spying on your neighbors is invasion of privacy, unless you work for the FBI; then it's National Security. Running a whorehouse makes you a pimp and poisoning people makes you a murderer, unless you work for the CIA; then it's counter-intelligence. – Robert Anton Wilson


Government, in it's last analysis, is organized force. – Woodrow Wilson

Quotes of the Day

Armed people are free. No state can control those who have the machinery and the will to resist, no mob can take their liberty and property. People who object to weapons aren't abolishing violence, they're begging for rule by brute force, when the biggest, strongest animals among men were always automatically "right." Guns ended that, and a social democracy is a hollow farce without an armed populace to make it work. – L. Neil Smith (from The Probability Broach)

Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom of Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any body of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States. – Noah Webster

I am convinced that we can do to guns what we've done to drugs: create a multi-billion dollar underground market over which we have absolutely no control. – George L. Roman

Quotes of the Day

If you are not free to choose wrongly and irresponsibly, you are not free at all. ~ Jacob Hornberger


If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that, too. ~ Somerset Maugham


It is sobering to reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence. ~ Charles A. Beard

Quotes of the Day

"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the opposite direction."

~~ Albert Einstein

"Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of humanity."

~~ Henry David Thoreau

"The bill of rights grants NOTHING to you and me. What it does is state that the government has no power to restrict or interfere with a particular right. The Bill of Rights are limitations on the government, not a laundry list of what Americans are allowed to do."

~~ Robb Allen, Sharp As A Marble

Quote of the Day

Liberty is the only thing you cannot have unless you are willing to 

give it to others. 

~ William Allen White

February 10, 1868 – January 29, 1944

Quotes of the Day - March 20, 2018

When we lose the right to be different, we lose the privilege to be free. 

~ Charles Evans Hughes

Historically, much of the motivation for public schooling has been to stifle variety and institute social control. 

~ Jack Hugh

When they took the 4th Amendment, I was quiet because I didn't deal drugs. 
When they took the 6th Amendment, I was quiet because I am innocent.
When they took the 2nd Amendment, I was quiet because I don't own a gun.
Now they have taken the 1st Amendment, and I can only be quiet. 

~ Lyle Myhr

Quotes of the Day - March 15, 2018

The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a bit longer. 

~ Henry Kissinger


The usual road to slavery is that first they take away your guns, then they take away your property, then last of all they tell you to shut up and say you are enjoying it. 

~ James A. Donald


Every friend of freedom must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence. 

~ Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize-winning economist

Quote of the Day

One evening, when I was yet in my nurse's arms, I wanted to touch the tea urn, which was boiling merrily … My nurse would have taken me away from the urn, but my mother said "Let him touch it." So I touched it – and that was my first lesson in the meaning of liberty. 

~ John Ruskin (1819-1900), The Story of Arachne, 1870 

Quotes of the Day 3/7/17

In any free society, the conflict between social conformity and individual liberty is permanent, unresolvable, and necessary.

~ Kathleen Norris


There is no "slippery slope" toward loss of liberty, only a long staircase where each step down must first be tolerated by the American people and their leaders.

~ Alan K. Simpson, U.S. Senator, New York Times, 9/26/82


You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.

~ John Morley (1838-1923), Critical Miscellanies

Quotes of the Day

It is not the function of our Government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error.

~ Robert H. Jackson (1892-1954), U.S. Supreme Court Justice, American Communications Assn v. Douds, 1950 


We are reluctant to admit that we owe our liberties to men of a type that today we hate and fear – unruly men, disturbers of the peace, men who resent and denounce what Whitman called "the insolence of elected persons" – in word, free men …

~ Gerald W. Johnson (1890-1980), American Freedom and the Press, 1958


The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere.

~ Thomas Jefferson (1743-1846), U.S. President, Letter to Abigail Adams, 22 February 1787

Quote of the Day

It is not the business of government to make men virtuous or religious, or to preserve the fool from the consequences of his own folly. Government should be repressive no further than is necessary to secure liberty by protecting the equal rights of each from aggression on the part of others, and the moment governmental prohibitions extend beyond this line they are in danger of defeating the very ends they are intended to serve.

 ~ Henry George