“I don’t care if you want to hunt, I don’t care if you think it’s your right. I say ‘Sorry.’ it’s 1999. We have had enough as a nation. You are not allowed to own a gun, and if you do own a gun I think you should go to prison.”
– Rosie O’Donnell, 1999
"If the government can’t be trusted to obey “shall make no law,” ”shall not be infringed,” or “shall not be violated,” when it’s spelled out plainly, why can it be trusted to obey other limitations on its power?" -
“[F]reedom isn't free. It shouldn't be a bragging point that "Oh, I don't get involved in politics," as if that makes you somehow cleaner. No, that makes you derelict of duty in a republic. Liars and panderers in government would have a much harder time of it if so many people didn't insist on their right to remain ignorant and blindly agreeable.” ― Bill Maher
“If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.”
― Samuel Adams
"Bailing out people who made ill-advised mortgages makes no more sense that bailing out people who lost their life savings in Las Vegas casinos."
― Thomas Sowell
"The fatal attraction of government is that it allows busybodies to impose decisions on others without paying any price themselves. That enables them to act as if there were no price, even when there are ruinous prices - paid by others."
― Thomas Sowell
"The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think. The problem is that Johnny doesn't know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling."
― Thomas Sowell
"It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication and a government bureaucracy to administer it."
― Thomas Sowell, Knowledge And Decisions
"Socialism is a wonderful idea. It is only as a reality that it has been disastrous. Among people of every race, color, and creed, all around the world, socialism has led to hunger in countries that used to have surplus food to export.... Nevertheless, for many of those who deal primarily in ideas, socialism remains an attractive idea -- in fact, seductive. Its every failure is explained away as due to the inadequacies of particular leaders. "
― Thomas Sowell
"Can you cite one speck of hard evidence of the benefits of "diversity" that we have heard gushed about for years? Evidence of its harm can be seen — written in blood — from Iraq to India, from Serbia to Sudan, from Fiji to the Philippines. It is scary how easily so many people can be brainwashed by sheer repetition of a word."
― Thomas Sowell
"Competition does a much more effective job than government at protecting consumers."
― Thomas Sowell, Compassion Versus Guilt, and Other Essays: And Other Essays
"What is history but the story of how politicians have squandered the blood and treasure of the human race?"
― Thomas Sowell
"Whenever someone refers to me as someone "who happens to be black," I wonder if they realize that both my parents are black. If I had turned out to be Scandinavian or Chinese, people would have wondered what was going on."
― Thomas Sowell
"Rhetoric is no substitute for reality."
― Thomas Sowell
"One of the consequences of such notions as ‘entitlements’ is that people who have contributed nothing to society feel that society owes them something, apparently just for being nice enough to grace us with their presence."
― Thomas Sowell
"Virtually no idea is too ridiculous to be accepted, even by very intelligent and highly educated people, if it provides a way for them to feel special and important. Some confuse that feeling with idealism."
― Thomas Sowell
"Unfortunately, the real minimum wage is always zero, regardless of the laws, and that is the wage that many workers receive in the wake of the creation or escalation of a government-mandated minimum wage, because they lose their jobs or fail to find jobs when they enter the labor force. Making it illegal to pay less than a given amount does not make a worker’s productivity worth that amount—and, if it is not, that worker is unlikely to be employed."
― Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy
"If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism."
― Thomas Sowell, Knowledge And Decisions
"Hilary Clinton said you know, it takes a village to raise a child and somebody said it takes a village idiot to believe that … it is part of the whole thing of third parties wanting to make decisions for which they pay no price for when they’re wrong."
― Thomas Sowell
"Mystical references to 'society' and its programs to 'help' may warm the hearts of the gullible but what it really means is putting more power in the hands of bureaucrats."
― Thomas Sowell
"Where recyling takes place only in response to political pressures and exhortations, it need not meet the test of being incrementally worth its incremental costs. Accordingly, studies of government-imposed recycling programs in the United States have shown that what they salvage is usually worth less than the cost of salvaging it."
― Thomas Sowell, Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One
"If you have been voting for politicians who promise to give you goodies at someone else's expense, then you have no right to complain when they take your money and give it to someone else, including themselves."
― Thomas Sowell
"No government of the left has done as much for the poor as capitalism has. Even when it comes to the redistribution of income, the left talks the talk but the free market walks the walk.
What do the poor most need? They need to stop being poor. And how can that be done, on a mass scale, except by an economy that creates vastly more wealth? Yet the political left has long had a remarkable lack of interest in how wealth is created. As far as they are concerned, wealth exists somehow and the only interesting question is how to redistribute it."
― Thomas Sowell, Controversial Essays
"Weighing benefits against costs is the way most people make decisions — and the way most businesses make decisions, if they want to stay in business. Only in government is any benefit, however small, considered to be worth any cost, however large."
― Thomas Sowell
"One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them."
― Thomas Sowell
"As an entrepreneur in India put it: 'Indians have learned from painful experience that the state does not work on behalf of the people. More often than not, it works on behalf of itself."
― Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy
"The question is not what anybody deserves. The question is who is to take on the God-like role of deciding what everybody else deserves. You can talk about "social justice" all you want. But what death taxes boil down to is letting politicians take money from widows and orphans to pay for goodies that they will hand out to others, in order to buy votes to get reelected. That is not social justice or any other kind of justice."
― Thomas Sowell, Controversial Essays
"The welfare state is the oldest con game in the world. First you take people's money away quietly and then you give some of it back to them flamboyantly."
― Thomas Sowell
"What is called an educated person is often someone who has had a dangerously superficial exposure to a wide spectrum of subjects."
― Thomas Sowell, Ever Wonder Why? and Other Controversial Essays
"The really painful surprise is that so many people based their hopes on his words, rather than on the record of his deeds. What that means is that, even if we somehow manage to survive this man’s reckless economic policies at home and his potentially fatal foreign policy actions and inactions, the gullibility and fecklessness of those voters who put him in the White House will still be there to be exploited by the next master of glib demagoguery and emotional images, who can lead us into another vortex of dangers, from which there is no guarantee that we will emerge as a free people or even as a viable society."
― Thomas Sowell, Dismantling America
"No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems—of which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two. Whatever is number three is far behind."
― Thomas Sowell, Dismantling America
"People are all born ignorant but they are not born stupid. Much of the stupidity we see today is induced by our educational system, from the elementary schools to the universities. In a high-tech age that has seen the creation of artificial intelligence by computers, we are also seeing the creation of artificial stupidity by people who call themselves educators."
― Thomas Sowell, Dismantling America
"The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed - where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once."
-- Judge Alex Kozinski, U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals
"A glaring example of the cognitive dissonance on the left is the fact that while they believe in the inherent goodness of mankind, they don't believe anyone can be trusted with a firearm unless the magic pixie dust of government authority gets sprinkled upon them."
-- Moshe Ben-David
"The world is filled with violence. Because criminals carry guns, we decent law-abiding citizens should also have guns. Otherwise they will win and the decent people will lose."
- James Earl Jones
“Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed?” said Dr. Ferris. “We want them broken. You’d better get it straight that it’s not a bunch of boy scouts you’re up against – then you’ll know that this is not the age for beautiful gestures. We’re after power and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick, and you’d better get wise to it. There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted – and you create a nation of law-breakers – and then you cash in on guilt. Now, that’s the system, Mr. Rearden, that’s the game, and once you understand it, you’ll be much easier to deal with.”—Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged.
"There are hundreds of millions of gun owners in this country, and not one of them will have an accident today. The only misuse of guns comes in environments where there are drugs, alcohol, bad parents, and undisciplined children. Period."
- Ted Nugent
"To my mind it is wholly irresponsible to go into the world incapable of preventing violence, injury, crime, and death. How feeble is the mindset to accept defenselessness. How unnatural. How cheap. How cowardly. How pathetic."
- Ted Nugent
"A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity."
- Sigmund Freud
"An armed society is a polite society."
- Robert Heinlein
"There are no dangerous weapons. There are only dangerous men."
- Robert A. Heinlein
"Among other evils which being unarmed brings you, it causes you to be despised."
- Charlton Heston
"Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance and the gospel of envy." - Winston Churchill
"In a truly civil society peopled primarily by enlightened, sober individuals, the carriage of arms might be deemed gratuitous, but it is nonetheless harmless. In a society that measures up to anything less than that, the option to carry arms is a necessity."
-- Geek with a .45
"We would just go out and line up a bunch of cans and shoot with rifles, handguns and at times, submachine guns... When I was a kid it was a controlled atmosphere, we weren't shooting at humans... we were shooting at cans and bottles mostly. I will most certainly take my kids out for target practice."
- Johnny Depp
"But if someone has a gun and is trying to kill you ... it would be reasonable to shoot back with your own gun."
- Dalai Lama
"A woman who demands further gun control legislation is like a chicken who roots for Colonel Sanders."
- Larry Elder
"The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him."
- G. K. Chesterton
" ... the right to defend one's home and one's person when attacked has been guaranteed through the ages by common law."
- Martin Luther King
"That rifle on the wall of the labourer's cottage or working class flat is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there."
- George Orwell
"It's better to have a gun and not need it than to need a gun and not have it."
- Christian Slater
"A sword never kills anybody; it is a tool in the killer's hand."
- Lucius Annaeus Seneca
"I will teach my children weapons and warfare, so they might teach their children science and law, so they might teach their children art and literature."
- Unknown Greek
"Freedom is the sure possession of those alone who have the courage to defend it."
- Pericles
"The Nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools."
- Thucydides
"Though defensive violence will always be 'a sad necessity' in the eyes of men of principle, it would be still more unfortunate if wrongdoers should dominate just men."
- St. Augustine
"A free people ought to be armed."
- George Washington
"Firearms are second only to the Constitution in importance; they are the peoples' liberty's teeth."
- George Washington
"A free people ought not only to be armed and disciplined, but they should have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own government."
- George Washington
"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
- Benjamin Franklin
"The strongest reason for people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government."
- Thomas Jefferson
"No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms."
- Thomas Jefferson
"The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes.... Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man."
- Thomas Jefferson (quoting 18th century criminologist Cesare Beccaria)
"A strong body makes the mind strong. As to the species of exercises, I advise the gun. While this gives moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise and independence to the mind. Games played with the ball, and others of that nature, are too violent for the body and stamp no character on the mind. Let your gun therefore be your constant companion of your walks."
- Thomas Jefferson
"The Constitution of most of our states (and of the United States) assert that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed."
- Thomas Jefferson
<<[This one is a personal favorite. Lord knows, I've had to pound on this everytime one of the liberal constitutional revisionists starts speaking.]>>
"On every occasion [of Constitutional interpretation] let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying [to force] what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, [instead let us] conform to the probable one in which it was passed."
- Thomas Jefferson
"Arms in the hands of citizens may be used at individual discretion in private self defense."
- John Adams
"To disarm the people is the most effectual way to enslave them."
- George Mason
"I ask sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people except for a few politicians."
- George Mason (father of the Bill of Rights and The Virginia Declaration of Rights)
"Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed, as they are in almost every country in Europe."
- Noah Webster
"Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority ... the Constitution was made to guard against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters."
- Noah Webster
"The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops."
- Noah Webster
"A government resting on the minority is an aristocracy, not a Republic, and could not be safe with a numerical and physical force against it, without a standing army, an enslaved press and a disarmed populace."
- James Madison
"Americans have the right and advantage of being armed, unlike the people of other countries, whose leaders are afraid to trust them with arms."
- James Madison
"The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the best and most natural defense of a free country."
- James Madison
“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” ― Thomas Jefferson
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
- William Pitt
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would 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 satiated; 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
"To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them."
- Richard Henry Lee
"A militia, when properly formed, are in fact the people themselves ... and include all men capable of bearing arms."
- Richard Henry Lee
"Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are ruined.... The great object is that every man be armed. Everyone who is able might have a gun."
- Patrick Henry
"This may be considered as the true palladium of liberty.... The right of self defense is the first law of nature: in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. Wherever standing armies are kept up, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any color or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction."
- St. George Tucker
"... arms ... discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property.... Horrid mischief would ensue were (the law-abiding) deprived the use of them."
- Thomas Paine
"The Constitution shall never be construed to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms."
- Samual Adams
"The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers; and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them."
- Joseph Story
"What, Sir, is the use of a militia? It is to prevent the establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty .... Whenever Governments mean to invade the rights and liberties of the people, they always attempt to destroy the militia, in order to raise an army upon their ruins."
- Rep. Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts
" ... for it is a truth, which the experience of all ages has attested, that the people are commonly most in danger when the means of insuring their rights are in the possession of those of whom they entertain the least suspicion."
- Alexander Hamilton
"A patriot without religion in my estimation is as great a paradox as an honest Man without the fear of God. Is it possible that he whom no moral obligations bind, can have any real Good Will towards Men? Can he be a patriot who, by an openly vicious conduct, is undermining the very bonds of Society? ... The Scriptures tell us "righteousness exalteth a Nation."
- Abigail Adams
"We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."
- John Adams
"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered...I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies... The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs." -- Thomas Jefferson
"The thing that separates the American Christian from every other person on earth is the fact that he would rather die on his feet, than live on his knees!"
- George Washington
"God grants liberty only to those who love it, and are always ready to guard and defend it."
- Daniel Webster
"Though defensive violence will always be 'a sad necessity' in the eyes of men of principle, it would be still more unfortunate if wrongdoers should dominate just men."
- St. Augustine
"Without doubt one is allowed to resist against the unjust aggressor to one's life, one's goods or one's physical integrity; sometimes, even 'til the aggressor’s death.... In fact, this act is aimed at preserving one’s life or one’s goods and to make the aggressor powerless. Thus, it is a good act, which is the right of the victim."
- Thomas Aquinas
"When the law disallows both the means and moral authority to defend one's self and property, crime and violence fill the void between common sense and the hoped for utopia."
- JD Filkins
"Keeping and bearing arms is not only a fundamental right; it is a fundamental duty upon which all liberty and sovereignty is based."
- Donald L. Cline
"A shoot-out is better than a massacre!"
- David M. Bennett
"It is a lesson of history that it is ethically, morally, and philosophically impossible to have too many personal weapons, whether they be edged, impact or projectile."
- David W. Loeffler
"Those gun control activists advocating exchanging a liberty for safety should recall that the safest place on earth is solitary confinement at Leavenworth." - Rand T. Lennox
"Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God." -- Benjamin Franklin
"The gun control extremist has at least two things in common with the Islamic extremist. He has a willingness to die for his fundamental beliefs. And he has the sanctimony to demand that others go with him."
- Dr. Mike Adams
"Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters."
- Daniel Webster
"You cannot invade the mainland United States. There would be a rifle behind each blade of grass."
- Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto
"The philosophy of gun control: Teenagers are roaring through town at 90MPH, where the speed limit is 25. Your solution is to lower the speed limit to 20."
- Sam Cohen (inventor of the neutron bomb)
"The tragic history of civilian disarmament cries a warning against any systematic attempts to render innocent citizens ill-equipped to defend themselves from tyrant terrorists, despots or oppressive majorities,"
- Daniel Schmutter
"If the constitutional right to keep and bear arms is to mean anything, it must, as a general matter, permit a person to possess, carry and sometimes conceal arms to maintain the security of his private residence or privately operated business."
- David Prosser (Wisconsin Supreme Court justice)
"If you've got to resist, you're chances of being hurt are less the more lethal your weapon. If that were my wife, would I want her to have a .38 Special in her hand? Yeah."
- Dr. Arthur Kellerman (famous gun grabber) (this is just one example of the unashamed hypocricy of those who think they're somehow our betters)
"If gun laws in fact worked, the sponsors of this type of legislation should have no difficulty drawing upon long lists of examples of crime rates reduced by such legislation. That they cannot do so after a century and a half of trying -- that they must sweep under the rug the southern attempts at gun control in the 1870-1910 period, the northeastern attempts in the 1920-1939 period, the attempts at both Federal and State levels in 1965-1976 -- establishes the repeated, complete and inevitable failure of gun laws to control serious crime."
- Senator Orrin Hatch
"Certainly one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of citizens to keep and bear arms. ... the right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary government, and one more safeguard against a tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible."
- Sen. Hubert Humphrey
"Today, we need a nation of Minutemen, citizens who are not only prepared to take arms, but citizens who regard the preservation of freedom as the basic purpose of their daily life and who are willing to consciously work and sacrifice for that freedom."
- John F. Kennedy
"By calling attention to 'a well regulated militia,' 'the security of the nation,' and the right of each citizen 'to keep and bear arms,' our founding fathers recognized the essentially civilian nature of our economy... The Second Amendment still remains an important declaration of our basic civilian-military relationships in which every citizen must be ready to participate in the defense of his country. For that reason I believe the Second Amendment will always be important."
- John F. Kennedy
"Just as the First and Fourth Amendment secure individual rights of speech and security respectively, the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. This view of the text comports with the all but unanimous understanding of the Founding Fathers."
- Attorney General John Ashcroft
"I want to point out again that evil is never satisfied with mere toleration. Evil demands first toleration, then ratification, then celebration, then co-participation. That’s the progression."
-- Ann Barnhardt
"There's no question that weapons in the hands of the public have prevented acts of terror or stopped them."
- Israeli Police Inspector General Shlomo Aharonisky
"The great body of our citizens shoot less as times goes on. We should encourage rifle practice among schoolboys, and indeed among all classes, as well as in the military services by every means in our power. Thus, and not otherwise, may we be able to assist in preserving peace in the world... The first step – in the direction of preparation to avert war if possible, and to be fit for war if it should come – is to teach men to shoot!"
– President Theodore Roosevelt
"The ruling class doesn't care about public safety. Having made it very difficult for States and localities to police themselves, having left ordinary citizens with no choice but to protect themselves as best they can, they now try to take our guns away. In fact they blame us and our guns for crime. This is so wrong that it cannot be an honest mistake."
- Sen. Malcolm Wallop
"One of the arguments that had been made against gun control was that an armed citizenry was the final bulwark against tyranny. My response had been that untrained, lightly-armed non-soldiers couldn't prevail against a modern army. I had concluded that the qualitative difference in firepower was such that all of the previous rules of guerilla war no longer applied. Both Vietnam and Afghanistan demonstrated that wasn't true. Repelling an armed invasion is not something that American citizens are likely to face, but the possibility of a despotic government coming to power is not wholly unthinkable. One of the sequellae of Vietnam was the rise of the Khmer Rouge and slaughter of perhaps a million Cambodian citizens. Those citizens, like the Jews in Germany or the Armenians in Turkey, were unarmed and thus utterly and completely defenseless against police and paramilitary. An armed minority was able to kill and terrorize unarmed victims with total impunity."
– Paul Hagar
"Make good scouts of yourselves, become good rifle shots so that if it becomes necessary that you defend your families and your country that you can do it."
- Lord Baden-Powell, Scouting For Boys
"Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act of depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest."
- Mahatma Gandhi
"Just because a majority of the Supreme Court declares something to be 'constitutional' does not make it so." -- Rand Paul
"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and passed on ... or we will spend our sunset years telling our children's children what it was like in the United States when men were free."
– Ronald Reagan
"I am concerned for the security of our great Nation; not so much because of any threat from without, but because of the insidious forces working from within."
– General Douglas MacArthur
"Big Brother in the form of an increasingly powerful government and in an increasingly powerful private sector will pile the records high with reasons why privacy should give way to national security, to law and order, to efficiency of operation, to scientific advancement and the like."
Justice William O. Douglas
Source: Points of Rebellion, 1969
"A system of licensing and registration is the perfect device to deny gun ownership to the bourgeoisie."
– Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
"Gun control is like trying to reduce drunk driving by making it tougher for sober people to own cars."
- Unknown
"America's abundance was created not by public sacrifices to 'the common good,' but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America's industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance -- and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way." -- Ayn Rand
If the provisions of the Constitution can be set aside by an Act of Congress, where is the course of usurpation to end? The present assault upon capital is but the beginning. It will be but the stepping-stone to others, larger and more sweeping, till our political contests will become a war of the poor against the rich; a war growing in intensity and bitterness." --
Justice Stephen J. Field,(1816-1899) US Supreme Court Justice
Source: United States Supreme Court opinion,
Pollock v. Farmers Loan & Trust Co. (1898)
"Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a law breaker, it breeds contempt for the law."
Justice Louis D. Brandeis
Source: Olmstead v. United States, 1928
“As to the position that "the people always mean well," that they always mean to say and do what they believe to be right and just - it may be popular, but it can not be true. The word people applies to all the individual inhabitants of a country. . . . That portion of them who individually mean well never was, nor until the millennium will be, considerable. Pure democracy, like pure rum, easily produces intoxication and with it a thousand pranks and fooleries. I do not expect mankind will, before the millennium, be what they ought to be and therefore, in my opinion, every political theory which does not regard them as being what they are, will prove abortive. Yet I wish to see all unjust and unnecessary discriminations everywhere abolished, and that the time may come when all our inhabitants of every color and discrimination shall be free and equal partakers of our political liberties.” -- John Jay First Chief Justice of SCOTUS. Author of 5 of the Federalist Papers.
"No people will tamely surrender their Liberties, nor can any be easily subdued, when knowledge is diffused and Virtue is preserved. On the Contrary, when People are universally ignorant, and debauched in their Manners, they will sink under their own weight without the Aid of foreign Invaders."
Samuel Adams, letter to James Warren, November 4, 1775
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
It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong. -- Thomas Sowell
“I have never understood why it is "greed" to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else's money.”
― Thomas Sowell, Barbarians inside the Gates and Other Controversial Essays
John Adams
"Arms in the hands of citizens may be used at individual discretion in private self defense."
"We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."
Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.
All good government is and must be republican. But at the same time, you can or will agree with me, that there is not in lexicography a more fraudulent word... Are we not, my friend, in danger of rendering the word republican unpopular in this country by an indiscreet, indeterminate, and equivocal use of it? [...] Whenever I use the word republic with approbation, I mean a government in which the people have collectively, or by representation, an essential share in the sovereignty... the republican forms in Poland and Venice are much worse, and those of Holland and Bern very little better, than the monarchical form in France before the late revolution.
All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arise not from defects in their Constitution or Confederation, nor from want of honor or virtue, so much as downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation.
There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.
John Quincy Adams
But the indissoluble link of union between the people of the several States of this confederated nation is, after all, not in the RIGHT, but in the HEART. If the day should ever come (may Heaven avert it !) when the affections of the people of these States shall be alienated from each other, when the fraternal spirit shall give way to cold indifference, or collision of interests shall fester into hatred, the bonds of political association - will not long hold together parties no longer attracted by the magnetism of conciliated interests and kindly sympathies ; and far better will it be for the people of the disunited States to part in friendship with each other than to be held together by constraint. Then will be the time for reverting to the precedents which occurred at the formation and adoption of the Constitution, to form again a more perfect Union, by dissolving that which could no longer bind, and to leave the separated parts to be reunited by the law of political gravitation to the center.
[Lincoln would have had Mr. Adams jailed for publishing such thoughts.]
The laws of man may bind him in chains or may put him to death, but they never can make him wise, virtuous, or happy.
The highest glory of the American Revolution was this; it connected, in one indissoluble bond the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity.
Posterity -- you will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it.
Samuel Adams
“I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.”
If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or your arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.
The said constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms.
And that the said Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press, or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms; or to raise standing armies, unless necessary for the defense of the United States, or of some one or more of them; or to prevent the people from petitioning, in a peaceable and orderly manner, the federal legislature, for a redress of grievances; or to subject the people to unreasonable searches and seizures of their persons, papers or possessions.
No people will tamely surrender their Liberties, nor can any be easily subdued, when knowledge is diffused and Virtue is preserved. On the Contrary, when People are universally ignorant, and debauched in their Manners, they will sink under their own weight without the Aid of foreign Invaders.
Shame on the men who can court exemption from present trouble and expense at the price of their own posterity's liberty!
How strangely will the Tools of a Tyrant pervert the plain Meaning of Words!
A general dissolution of the principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy.... While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but 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.
The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil Constitution, are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors: they purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood, and transmitted them to us with care and diligence. It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men.
If ever a time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in Government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin.
Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: first, a right to life; secondly, to liberty; thirdly to property; together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can.
It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds.
It is a very great mistake to imagine that the object of loyalty is the authority and interest of one individual man, however dignified by the applause or enriched by the success of popular actions.
Were the talents and virtues which heaven has bestowed on men given merely to make them more obedient drudges, to be sacrificed to the follies and ambition of a few? Or, were not the noble gifts so equally dispensed with a divine purpose and law, that they should as nearly as possible be equally exerted, and the blessings of Providence be equally enjoyed by all?
He therefore is the truest friend to the liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue, and who, so far as his power and influence extend, will not suffer a man to be chosen into any office of power and trust who is not a wise and virtuous man...The sum of all is, if we would most truly enjoy this gift of Heaven, let us become a virtuous people.
All might be free if they valued freedom, and defended it as they should.
If men, through fear, fraud, or mistake, should in terms renounce or give up any natural right, the eternal law of reason and the grand end of society would absolutely vacate such renunciation. The right to freedom being the gift of Almighty God, it is not in the power of man to alienate this gift and voluntarily become a slave.
Driven from every other corner of the earth, freedom of thought and the right of private judgment in matters of conscience, direct their course to this happy country as their last asylum.
Let us contemplate our forefathers, and posterity, and resolve to maintain the rights bequeathed to us from the former, for the sake of the latter. The necessity of the times, more than ever, calls for our utmost circumspection, deliberation, fortitude and perseverance. Let us remember that "if we suffer tamely a lawless attack upon our liberty, we encourage it, and involve others in our doom," it is a very serious consideration ... that millions yet unborn may be the miserable sharers of the event.
If our Trade be taxed, why not our Lands, or Produce in short, everything we possess? They tax us without having legal representation.
Freedom is not a gift bestowed upon us by other men, but a right that belongs to us by the laws of God and nature.
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
... as all history informs us, there has been in every State & Kingdom a constant kind of warfare between the governing & governed: the one striving to obtain more for its support, and the other to pay less. And this has alone occasioned great convulsions, actual civil wars, ending either in dethroning of the Princes, or enslaving of the people. Generally indeed the ruling power carries its point, the revenues of princes constantly increasing, and we see that they are never satisfied, but always in want of more. The more the people are discontented with the oppression of taxes; the greater need the prince has of money to distribute among his partisans and pay the troops that are to suppress all resistance, and enable him to plunder at pleasure. There is scarce a king in a hundred who would not, if he could, follow the example of Pharaoh, get first all the peoples money, then all their lands, and then make them and their children servants for ever ...
When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.
Make yourselves sheep and the wolves will eat you.
It is the first responsibility of every citizen to question authority.
John Jay
John Jay was the first Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and authored Federalist Papers #2, #3, #4, #5 and #64. The first four concerned the dangers of foreign influence in U.S. politics and 64 concerned the powers of the Senate.
“As to the position that "the people always mean well," that they always mean to say and do what they believe to be right and just - it may be popular, but it can not be true. The word people applies to all the individual inhabitants of a country. . . . That portion of them who individually mean well never was, nor until the millennium will be, considerable. Pure democracy, like pure rum, easily produces intoxication and with it a thousand pranks and fooleries. I do not expect mankind will, before the millennium, be what they ought to be and therefore, in my opinion, every political theory which does not regard them as being what they are, will prove abortive. Yet I wish to see all unjust and unnecessary discriminations everywhere abolished, and that the time may come when all our inhabitants of every color and discrimination shall be free and equal partakers of our political liberties.”
“"Providence has given to our people the choice of their rulers. And it is the duty as well as the privilege and interest, of a Christian nation to select and prefer Christians for their rulers."
John Jay to Jedidiah Morse February 28, 1797
"The jury has the right to judge both the law as well as the fact in controversy."
John Jay Georgia v. Brailsford, 1794
“Providence has given to our people the choice of their rulers, and it is the duty, as well as the privilege and interest of our Christian nation to select and prefer Christians for their rulers.”
John Jay, Source: October 12, 1816. The Correspondence and Public Papers of John Jay
“Whether our religion permits Christians to vote for infidel rulers is a question which merits more consideration than it seems yet to have generally received either from the clergy or the laity. It appears to me that what the prophet said to Jehoshaphat about his attachment to Ahab ["Shouldest thou help the ungodly and love them that hate the Lord?" 2 Chronicles 19:2] affords a salutary lesson.”
John Jay [The Correspondence and Public Papers of John Jay, 1794-1826, Henry P. Johnston, editor (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1893), Vol. IV, p.365]
James Madison often referred to as the Father of the Constitution of the United States
With respect to the words general welfare, I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators.
[A]ll power is originally vested in, and consequently derived from, the people. That government is instituted and ought to be exercised for the benefit of the people; which consists in the enjoyment of life and liberty and the right of acquiring property, and generally of pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety. That the people have an indubitable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to reform or change their government whenever it be found adverse or inadequate to the purpose of its institution.
The internal effects of a mutable policy are [...] calamitous. It poisons the blessings of liberty itself. It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man who knows what the law is today can guess what it will be tomorrow.
Each State, in ratifying the Constitution, is considered as a sovereign body, independent of all others, and only to be bound by its own voluntary act. In this relation, then, the new Constitution will, if established, be a FEDERAL, and not a NATIONAL constitution. [Which means that Lincoln was wrong, and that we are living under an illegitimate system of government as it is being exercised today.]
The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation and foreign commerce.
It is very certain that [the commerce clause] grew out of the abuse of the power by the importing States in taxing the non-importing, and was intended as a negative and preventive provision against injustice among the States themselves, rather than as a power to be used for the positive purposes of the General Government.
The highest number to which a standing army can be carried in any country does not exceed one hundredth part of the souls, or one twenty-fifth part of the number able to bear arms. This portion would not yield, in the United States, an army of more than twenty-five or thirty thousand men. To these would be opposed a militia amounting to near half a million citizens with arms in their hands , officered by men chosen from among themselves, fighting for their common liberties and united and conducted by governments possessing their affections and confidence. It may well be doubted whether a militia thus circumstanced could ever be conquered by such a proportion of regular troops. ... Besides the advantage of being armed, ... the existence of subordinate governments ... forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of. ... [The governments of Europe] are afraid to trust the people with arms. ... Let us not insult the free and gallant citizens of America with the suspicion that they would be less able to defend the rights of which they would be in actual possession than the debased subjects of arbitrary power would be to rescue theirs from the hands of their oppressors.
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Thomas Paine author of Common Sense, the most well known publication in support of American Independence
Arms discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property... Horrid mischief would ensue were the law-abiding deprived of the use of them.
Every science has for its basis a system of principles as fixed and unalterable as those by which the universe is regulated and governed. Man cannot make principles; he can only discover them.
Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.
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"American conservatives who want to blame pet villains like the public-employee unions for the insolvency wave in the U.S. are missing the forest for the trees. Those unions are doing nothing but rational minimaxing within a system where the incentives are broken at a much deeper level. And it’s no coincidence that the same problems are becoming acute simultaneously nearly worldwide, because the underlying problem transcends all details of any individual democracy’s history or particular political arrangements. Between 1880 and 1943, beginning with Bismarck and ending with Roosevelt’s New Deal, the modern West abandoned the classical-liberal model of a minimal, night-watchman state. But the redistributionist monster that replaced it was unsustainable, and it’s now running out of other peoples’ money. We are living in the beginning of its end."
