More Great Quotes

"To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical."
Thomas Jefferson

"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction."
Ronald Reagan

"The strength of the Constitution lies entirely in the determination of each citizen to defend it. Only if every single citizen feels duty bound to do his share in this defense are constitutional rights secure."
Albert Einstein

"Those who say that life is worth living at any cost have already written an epitaph of infamy, for there is no cause and no person that they will not betray to stay alive."
Sidney Hook

"Who can protest an injustice but does not is an accomplice to the act."
The Talmud

"To preserve liberty it is essential that the whole body of people always possess arms and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them."
Richard Henry Lee

"Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."
Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438 (1928)

"In Germany, they first came for the communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist. Then, they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics. I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak up."
Reverend Martin Neimoller, German Lutheran pastor arrested by the Gestapo in 1937

"For the saddest epitaph which can be carved in memory of a vanished freedom is that it was lost because its possessors failed to stretch forth a saving hand while there was still time."
Supreme Court Justice George Sutherland

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
Sir Edmund Burke, attributed

"Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force. Like fire, a dangerous servant, and a fearful master."
George Washington

"The worst thing that can happen to a good cause is, not to be skillfully attacked, but to be ineptly defended."
Frederic Bastiat

"Countries are well cultivated, not as they are fertile, but as they are free."
Montesquieu

"... America is great because America is good. When America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great."
Alexis de Tocqueville

"Sound money and free banking are not impossible; they are merely illegal. Freedom of money and freedom of banking ... are the principles that must guide our steps."
Hans F. Sennholz

"The task must be to banish from mankind's thought the idea that anybody has the right to use force against righteousness, against justice, against mutual agreements."
Alexander Solzhenitsyn

"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."
Edmund Burke

"If you want to kill any idea in the world today, get a committee working on it."
Charles F. Kettering

"The ultimate effect of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools."
Herbert Spencer (1820 - 1903)

"It is one thing to show a men that he is in error, and another to put him in possession of truth."
John Locke (1632 - 1704)

"In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself."
James Madison

"Logical consequences are the scarecrows of fools and the beacons of wise men."
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825 - 1895)

"The Constitution is the origin and measure of legislative authority. It says to legislators, thus far ye shall go and no farther. Not a particle of it should be shaken; not a pebble of it should be removed ..."
Justice William Paterson (1745 - 1806)

"We have had so many years of prosperity, we have passed through so many difficulties and dangers without the loss of liberty - that we begin to think that we hold it by divine right from heaven itself ... It is harder to preserve than to obtain liberty."
John C. Calhoun

"The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike. Subjectivism about [moral] values is eternally incompatible with democracy. We and our rulers are of one kind only so long as we are subject to one law. But if there is no Law of Nature, the ethos of any society is the creation of its rulers, educators and conditioners; and every creator stands above and outside his own creation."
C. S. Lewis, Christian Reflections (1943)

"Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat."
Theodore Roosevelt, speech before the Hamilton Club, Chicago, [April 10, 1899]

"The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government."
Thomas Jefferson, to the Republican Citizens of Washington County, Maryland [March 31, 1809]

"Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it."
Ronald Reagan, remarks to the White House Conference on Small Business, August 15, 1986

"The theory is that election to Congress is tantamount to being dispatched to Washington on a looting raid for the enrichment of your state or district, and no other ethic need inhibit the feeding frenzy."
George Will, "Oread Review"

"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
William Pitt, speech to the House of Commons, [Nov. 18, 1783]

"Patriotism means unqualified and unwavering love for the nation, which implies not uncritical eagerness to serve, not support for unjust claims, but frank assessment of its vices and sins, and penitence for them."
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, "From Under the Rubble"

"If we open a quarrel between past and present, we shall find that we have lost the future."
Winston Churchill, Speech in the House of Commons

"Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And... moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."
Barry Goldwater, Acceptance Speech at the Republican Convention; 1964

"This idea that government was beholden to the people, that it had no other source of power is still the newest, most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves."
Ronald Reagan's Speech at the 1964 National Convention: A Time for Choosing

"One man with courage makes a majority"
Andrew Jackson

"Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it; and this I know, my lords, that where laws end, tyranny begins."
William Pitt, Earl of Chatham; Case of Wilkes Speech

"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 not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned: This is the sum of good government."
Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address; March 4, 1801

"Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys."
P.J. O'Rourke

"Americans have the right and advantage of being armed--unlike citizens of other countries whose governments are afraid to trust the people with arms."
James Madison

"If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animated contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsel 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, Great Quotations

"The right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which... historically has proven to be always possible."
United States Senator Hubert Humphrey

"Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed."
Noah Webster, author, An American Dictionary of the English Language

"The laws that forbid the carrying of arms... serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man."
Ceasare Beccaria, 18th century criminologist

"In countries under arbitrary government, the people oppressed and dispirited neither possess arms nor know how to use them. Tyrants never feel secure until they have disarmed the people."
Unknown author, from the Connecticut Courant, 1788

"Those who beat their swords into plowshares will plow for those who don't."
(Bumper sticker)

"If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory is sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves."
Winston Churchill

"As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there's a twilight where everything remains seemingly unchanged, and it is in such twilight that we must be aware of change in the air, however slight, lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness."
Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas

"What luck for rulers, that men do not think."
Adolph Hitler

"The art of leadership ...consists in consolidating the attention of the people against a single adversary and taking care that nothing will split up that attention....The leader of genius must have the ability to make different opponents appear as if they belonged to one category."
Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf, vol. 1, ch. 3 (1925))

"Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race. All through history, mankind has been bullied by scum. Those who lord it over their fellows and toss commands in every direction and would boss the grass in the meadow about which way to bend in the wind are the most depraved kind of prostitutes. They will submit to any indignity, perform any vile act, do anything to achieve power. The worst off-sloughings of the planet are the ingredients of sovereignty. Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy the whores are us."
P.J. O'Rourke, Parliament of Whores

"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
John F. Kennedy, 1962

"If a man hasn't discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live."
Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Whenever the legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any farther obedience, and are left to the common refuge which God hath provided for all men against force and violence."
John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 1698

"The history of liberty is a history of resistance."
Woodrow Wilson

"Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never - in nothing, great or small, large or petty - never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense."
Sir Winston Churchill, 1941, Address at Harrow School

"When a legislature undertakes to proscribe the exercise of a citizen's constitutional rights it acts lawlessly and the citizen can take matters into his own hands and proceed on the basis that such a law is no law at all."
Justice William O. Douglas

"Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it."
Albert Einstein, Quoted in Saturday Review obituary, 1955

"We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."
Benjamin Franklin, 1776, After signing the Declaration of Independence

"No real social change has ever been brought about without a revolution. Revolution is but thought carried into action."
Emma Goldman, Anarchism, 1917

"The Framers of the Bill of Rights did not purport to "create" rights. Rather, they designed the Bill of Rights to prohibit our Government from infringing rights and liberties presumed to be preexisting."
Justice William J. Brennan, 1982

"The people of the various provinces are strictly forbidden to have in their possession any swords, bows, spears, firearms, or other types of arms. The possession of these elements makes difficult the collection of taxes and dues, and tends to permit uprising. Therefore, the heads of provinces, official agents, and deputies are ordered to collect all the weapons mentioned above and turn them over to the government."
Shogun Toyotomi Hideyoshi, August 29, 1558

"The peaceable part of mankind will be continually overrun by the vile and abandoned while they neglect the means of self-defense. The supposed quietude of a good man allures the ruffian; while on the other hand, arms like laws discourage and keep the invader and the plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property. The balance of power is the scale of peace. The same balance would be preserved were all the world destitute of arms, for all would be alike; but since some will not, others dare not lay them aside.... Horrid mischief would ensue were one half the world deprived of the use of them; ...the weak will become prey of the strong."
Thomas Paine

"Our country is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation [of power] first, and then corruption, its necessary consequence."
Thomas Jefferson

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed persons can change the world. Indeed it's the only thing that ever has..."
Margaret Mead

"We could have pursued no other course without dishonor. And as sad as the results have been, if it had all to be done over again, we should be compelled to act in precisely the same manner."
General Robert E. Lee, C.S.A.

"If ever this vast country is brought under a single government, it will be one of the most extensive corruption, indifferent and incapable of a wholesome care over so wide a spread of surface. This will not be borne, and you will have to choose between reform and revolution. If I know the spirit of this country, the one or the other is inevitable."
Thomas Jefferson

"The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything."
Joseph Stalin

"We trained hard...but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams, we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization."
Petronius Arbiter, 210 B.C.

"There is not a truth existing which I fear, or would wish unknown to the whole world."
Thomas Jefferson

"Peace proposals unaccompanied by a sworn covenant indicate a plot."
Sun Tzu [The Art of War]

"We have awakened a sleeping giant and instilled in it a terrible resolve."
Admiral Isoroku Yamamato, December 7, 1941

"It is not the evil itself which is horrifying about our times -- it is the way we not only tolerate evil, but have made a cult of positively worshipping weakness, depravity, rottenness and evil itself."
George Lincoln Rockwell

"I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical."
Thomas Jefferson

"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."
Aldous Huxley, Proper Studies

"It is not the critic who counts, not the one who points out how the strong man stumbled or how the doer of deeds might have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred with sweat and dust and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who, if he wins, knows the triumph of high achievement; and who, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat."
"The Man in the Arena"

"To ignore the evidence, and hope that it cannot be true, is more an evidence of mental illness."
William Blase

"Only two things are infinite; the universe and human stupidity, and I am not sure about the former."
Albert Einstein

"A God who let us prove his existence would be an idol."
Dietrich Bonhoeffer

"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use."
Kierkegaard

"A nation of well-informed men, who have been taught to know and prize the rights that God has given them cannot be enslaved. It is in the region of ignorance that tyranny begins!"
Benjemin Franklin

"Who owns the youth owns the future!"
Adolf Hitler

"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning."
Rich Cook

"There is seldom an instance of a man guilty of betraying his country, who had not before lost the feeling of moral obligations in his private connections...."
Samuel Adams

"There is no such thing, at this date of the world's history, as an independent press. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone. The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth; to lie outright; to pervert; to vilify; to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell the country for his daily bread. You know it and I know it and what folly is this toasting an independent press. We are the tools and vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."
John Swinton, former Chief of Staff at the New York Times, New York Press Club, 1953

The Captain
Captain, what do you think, I asked, of the part your soldiers play?
The Captain answered, I do not think. I do not think, I obey!
Do you think you should shoot a patriot down and help a tyrant slay?
The Captain answered, I do not think. I do not think, I obey!
Do you think your conscience was meant to die and your brains to rot away?
The Captain answered, I do not think. I do not think, I obey!
Then if this is your soldiers code, I cried, your mean unmanly crew,
And for all of your equipment, guns and braid, I'm more of a man than you.
For whatever my lot on earth may be and whether I swim or sink,
I can say with pride -I do not obey. I do not obey - I think!
Author unknown