Political Quotes That Provoke Thought...

"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." --Thomas Jefferson

"I believe there are more instances of the freedoms of the people being abridged through gradual and silent encroachments by those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpation." --James Madison, during the Virginia Convention on Ratification of the U.S. Constitution, June 16, 1788

"They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." --Dr. Benjamin Franklin

"The object and practice of liberty lies in the limitation of governmental power." --Douglass MacArthur

"The state is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe air after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest." --Henry David Thoreau

"Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it." --George Bernard Shaw

"Blandishments will not fascinate us, nor the threats of a 'halter' intimidate. For, under God, we are determined that wheresoever, whensoever, or howsoever we shall be called to make our exit, we will die free men." --Josiah Quincy, Observations on the Boston Port Bill, 1774

"Whoever lays a hand on me to govern me is a usurper and a tyrant, and I declare him my enemy." --Anonymous

"For in a Republic, who is "the country?" Is it the Government which is for the moment in the saddle? Why, the Government is merely a servant--merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them." --Mark Twain

"In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant." --General Charles de Gaulle

"The right to be let alone is the underlying principle of the Constitution's Bill of Rights." --Erwin N. Griswold

"We, the people, are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts; not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow men who pervert the Constitution." --Abraham Lincoln

"I say that the Second Amendment is, in order of importance, the first amendment. It is America's First Freedom, the one right that protects all the others. Among freedom of speech, of the press, of religion, of assembly, of redress of grievances, it is the first among equals. It alone offers the absolute capacity to live without fear. The right to keep and bear arms is the one right that allows 'rights' to exist at all." --Charleton Heston, from a speech to the National Press Club, September 11, 1997

"Cause the registration of all firearms on some pretext, with the view of confiscating them and leaving the population defenseless." --Vladimir Ilich Lenin

"The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is as a last resort to protect themselves against tyranny in government." --Thomas Jefferson

"This year will go down in history. For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration! Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future." --Adolf Hitler, 1935

"A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government." --Edward Abbey

"All women should be allowed to own a gun simply by virtue of being female. .... In all cases it should be understood that an armed woman not only has a right to defend herself, but a responsibility to come to the aid of other women as well. The feminists want sisterhood? Sister, you've got it." --Florence King

"This country was founded by religious nuts with guns." --P.J. O'Rourke

"Taking my guns away because I might shoot someone is like cutting my tongue out because I might yell, 'fire!' in a crowded theater." --Anonymous

"The framers gave us the Second Amendment not so we could go deer or duck hunting, but to give us a modicum of protection against tyranny." --Walter Williams

"The main political problem is how to prevent the police power from becoming tyrannical. This is the meaning of all the struggles for liberty." --Ludwig von Mises

"Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too." --Voltaire

"It is error alone which needs support of government. Truth can stand by itself." --Thomas Jefferson

"An open mind, in questions that are not ultimate, is useful. But an open mind about ultimate foundations either of theoretical or practical reason is idiocy. If a man's mind is open on these things, let his mouth at least be shut." --C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

"I hope I shall possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain...the character of an honest man." --George Washington

"I believe it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than to be ignorant." --H.L. Mencken

"The liar´s punishment is not in the least that he is not believed but that he cannot believe anyone else." --George Bernard Shaw

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

"Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher." --Thomas Paine

"Worthless persons appointed to have supreme control of weighty affairs do a lot of damage." --Aristotle, The Politics

"It is the invariable habit of bureaucracies, at all times and everywhere, to assume...that every citizen is a criminal. Their one apparent purpose, pursued with a relentless and furious diligence, is to convert the assumption into a fact. They hunt endlessly for proofs, and, when proofs are lacking, for mere suspicions. The moment they become aware of a definite citizen, John Doe, seeking what is his right under the law, they begin searching feverishly for an excuse for withholding it from him." --H.L. Mencken

"It is not by the consolidation, or concentration, of powers, but by their distribution that good government is effected." --Thomas Jefferson

"No matter how disastrously some policy has turned out, anyone who criticizes it can expect to hear: 'But what would you replace it with?' When you put out a fire, what do you replace it with?" --Thomas Sowell

"The greatest danger to liberty today comes from those men who are most needed and most powerful in modern government: the efficient, expert administrators exclusively concerned with what they regard as the public good." --Friedrich von Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, 1960

"It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satisfied; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." --C.S. Lewis

"People constantly speak of 'the government' doing this or that, as they might speak of God doing it. But the government is really nothing but a group of men, and usually they are very inferior men. They may have some better man working for them, but they themselves are seldom worthy of any respect." --H.L. Mencken

"The power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbor and perhaps my employer has over me is far less than that which the smallest functionary who wields the coercive power of the state, and on whose discretion it depends whether and how I am to be allowed to live or to work." --Friedrich von Hayek

"There is something very unnatural and odious in a government a thousand leagues off. A whole government of our own choice, managed by persons whom we love, revere, and confide in has charms in it for which men will fight." --John Adams, Letter to Abigail Adams, 1776

"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." --H. L. Mencken

"A Democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can exist only until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a Democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritial faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependence; from dependency back again into bondage." --Fraser Tyler, English historian, while the U.S. was a British colony

"Economic independence is the foundation of the only sort of freedom worth a damn." --H.L. Mencken

"Where self-interest is suppressed, it is replaced by a burdensome system of bureaucratic control that dries up the wellsprings of initiative and creativity." --Pope John Paul II, Centesimus Annus

"Encourage government extravagance, destroy its credit, produce fear with rising prices, inflation and general discontent." --Vladimir Ilich Lenin

"I still believe there is not a man in this country that can't make a living for himself and his family. But he can't make a living for them and his government, too. Not the way this government is living. What the government has got to do is live as cheaply as the people do." --Will Rogers

"Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion." --Murray N. Rothbard

"The abandonment of the gold standard made it possible for the welfare statists to use the banking system as a means to an unlimited expansion of credit...In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value...Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the 'hidden' confiscation of wealth...[Gold] stands as a protector of property rights." --Alan Greenspan, 1966

"The point to remember is that what the government gives, it must first take away." --John S. Coleman

"Economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, anincentive, a payment, a value; political power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, and destruction. The businessman's tool is values; the bureaucrat's tool is fear." --Ayn Rand

"The income tax has made liars out of more Americans than golf." --Will Rogers

"Most economic fallacies derive...from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another." --Milton Friedman, Economic Freedom and Representative Democracy, 1973

"The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax." --Albert Einstein

"It is the highest impertinence and presumption, therefore, in kings and ministers, to pretend to watch over economy of private people, and to restrain their expense...They are themselves always and without exception the greatest spendthrifts in the society. Let them look well after their own expense, and they may safely trust private people with theirs." --Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776

“If we were directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we would soon want for bread.” --Thomas Jefferson

"The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can´t find them, make them." --George Bernard Shaw

"No nation has ever taxed itself into prosperity." --Rush Limbaugh

"...the Planning Commission must say 'no' to development...Austin, Texas, is showing us about land use..." --Judge Armstrong, Kentucky County

"While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but when once they lose their virtue they will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader...If virtue and knowledge are diffused among the people, they will never be enslaved. This will be their great security." --Samuel Adams

"Before any man can be considered as a member of Civil Society, he must be considered a subject of the Governor of the Universe." --James Madison

"...for the individual, long-run personal satisfaction is to be found only in morally correct behavior; this truth is one that the intelligence and traditions of our Western society have long taught." --John D. Millet

"There has never been a free society or nation without God. But history is cluttered with the wreckage of nations that became indifferent to God, and died." --Whitakker Chambers

"If we ever forget that we are One Nation Under God, then we will be a nation gone under." --Ronald Reagan

"Schools are overrun with drugs, violence, guns, rape, murder, and now even mass murder. It seems America´s schools have everything...except prayer...The Constitution never, ever intended to ban school prayer and never intended to separate God and the American people." --Rep. James Traficant

"In my view, the Christian religion is the most important and one of the first things in which all children, under a free government ought to be instructed...No truth is more evident to my mind than that the Christian religion must be the basis of any government intended to secure the rights and privileges of a free people." --Noah Webster

"I sought for the greatness and genius of America in her commodious harbors and her ample rivers, and it was not there; in her fertile land and boundless prairies, and it was not there. Not until I went to the churches of America and heard her pulpits aflame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because she is good, and if America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great." --Alexis de Toqueville, Democracy in America, 1826

"Political freedom, as the Western world has known it, is only a political reading of the Bible. Religion and freedom are indivisible. Without freedom the soul dies. Without the soul there is no justification for freedom...Hence every sincere break with Communism is a religious experience." --Whitakker Chambers

"The rights of the colonists as Christians...may be best understood by reading and carefully studying the institutes of the great Lawgiver and Head of the Christian Church, which are to be found clearly written and promulgated in the New Testament." --Samuel Adams

"When people hear I’m involved with both psychology and Christianity, they generally assume I’m working on a synthesis to bring the two closer together, to patch up whatever few remaining differences there might be...But it is much truer to say that psychology and religion are competing faiths. If you seriously hold to one set of values, you will logically have to reject the other." --William Kilpatrick, Psychological Seduction

"Listen to me, America. This is not the dawning of a new era; this is the beginning of the Dark Ages. If there is not a return to righteousness, we are watching the death of a nation. We are going the wrong way. Turn around and go back to the God of our fathers!" --Reverend John Hagee

"Blessed is the Nation whose god is The Lord." --Psalms 33:12

"It is part of the failure of the West to understand that it is at grips with an enemy [Communism] having no moral viewpoint in common with itself, that two irreconcilable viewpoints and standards of judgment, two irreconcilable moralities, proceeding from two irreconcilable readings of man’s fate and future are involved, and, hence, their conflict is irrepressible." --Whitakker Chambers

"Who so neglects learning in his youth, loses the past and is dead for the future." --Euripides

"Literacy is not, as it is considered in our public schools, a PORTION of education. It IS education. It is at once the ability AND the inclination of the mind to find knowledge, to pursue understanding, and out of knowledge and understanding, not out of received attitudes and values of emotional responses, however 'worthy,' to make judgments." --Richard Mitchell

"Complacent ignorance is the most lethal sickness of the soul." --Plato

"The most dangerous place you can send your child is to public school. It's time for Americans to stand up and demand that this change, and change now!" --Reverend John Hagee

"The greatest achievement of the human spirit is to live up to one´s opportunities, and to make the most of one´s resources." --Vauvenargues

"It is against the grain of modern public education to teach children. What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail, and learning to be self-critical?" --Alan Perlis

"...a professor must have theories, as a dog must have fleas." --H.L. Mencken

"Education is too important to be left in the hands of the Federal Government. There is only one group of Americans that I trust to make educational choices--we call them Parents!" --Senator Phil Gramm

"[State-run] education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed." --Joseph Stalin

"Behind the honeyed but patently absurd pleas for equality is a ruthless drive for placing 'the new elite' at the top of a new hierarchy of power." --Murray N. Rothbard

"The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, by promising to save humanity. It ended, again like The Salvation Army, by running flop-houses and disturbing the peace." --H.L. Mencken

"Our tenet ever was...that Congress had not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but were restrained to those specifically enumerated; and that, as it was never meant that they should provide for that welfare but by the exercise of the enumerated powers, so it could not have been meant they should raise money for purposes which the enumeration did not place under their action." --Thomas Jefferson

"The more that is given the less people will work for themselves, and the less they work the more their poverty will increase." --Leo Tolstoy, Help for the Starving, Part II; January, 1892

"It is easy to be conspicuously 'compassionate' if others are being forced to pay the cost." --Murray N. Rothbard

"We tried to provide more for the poor and produced more poor instead. We tried to remove the barriers to escape poverty, and inadvertently built a trap." --Charles Murray

"The real culprits are those who created a system that makes it dangerous to work and safe to loaf." --Thomas Sowell

"The necessary consequence of an egalitarian program is the decidedly inegalitarian creation of a ruthless power elite." --Murray N. Rothbard

"But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime." --Frederic Bastiat, The Law

"Is it really so surprising that a nation that has spent the last 30 years telling itself that right and wrong are relative concepts should be producing children who can´t tell the difference?" --Mona Charen

"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." --Krishnamurti

"Spiritual independence is being pressured on all sides by the dictatorship of self-satisfied vulgarity, of the latest fads, and of group interests." --Alexander Solzhenitsyn, From Under the Rubble

"When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary." --Thomas Paine, The Liberty Tree, 1775

"What makes Western civilization worth saving is the freedom of the mind; now under heavy attack from the primitives...who have persisted among us. If we have not the courage to defend that faith, it won't matter much whether we are saved or not." --Elmer Davis, But We Were Born Free, 1954

"The artist today,...besides lacking merit...is simply a spoiled child. How many honors, how much money are lavished on people with no understanding and no training?" --Charles Baudelaire, Salon de 1859

"Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one." --A.J. Liebling

"They [liberal newsmen] were people who believed a number of things. Foremost among them was the belief that peace could be preserved, World War III could be averted only by conciliating the Soviet Union. For this no price was too high to pay, including the price of willful historical self-delusion...Hence like most people who have substituted the habit of delusion for reality, they became hysterical whenever the root of their delusion was touched, and reacted with a violence that completely belied the openness of mind which they prescribed for others." --Whitakker Chambers

"Dan Rather's membership in the 'cultural elite' proves that America really is a classless society." --Florence King

"I think most newspapermen, by definition, have to be liberal; if they're not liberal, by my definition of it, then they can hardly be good newspapermen." --Walter Cronkite, "The Establishment vs. The People"

"Television: chewing gum for the eyes." --Frank Lloyd Wright

"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death." --Patrick Henry

"These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of every man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; 'tis dearness only that gives everything its value". --Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776

"In the beginning of a change the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot." --Mark Twain

"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself." --John Stuart Mill

"We will always remember. We will always be proud. We will always be prepared, so we may always be free." --President Ronald W. Reagan, June 6, 1984; Normandy, France

"Those who died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the victims not so much of Anglo-American technology as of a paralyzed [Japanese] system of government made possible by an evil ideology which had expelled not only absolute moral values but reason itself." --Paul Johnson, Modern Times

"Americans, indeed all free men, remember that in the final choice, a soldier's pack is not so heavy a burden as a prisoner's chains." --Dwight D. Eisenhower, First Inaugural Address, January 20, 1953