"This country was founded by religious nuts with guns..."
~P.J. O'Rourke
"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
"In the end, more than freedom, they wanted security. They wanted a comfortable life, and they lost it all - security, comfort and freedom. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again."
~Edward Gibbon
"Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end."
~Lord Acton
"I believe in the United States of America as a Government of the people, by the people, for the people; whose just powers are derived from the consent of the governed; a democracy in a republic; a sovereign Nation of many sovereign States; a perfect union, one and inseparable; established upon those principles of freedom, equality, justice, and humanity for which American patriots sacrificed their lives and fortunes. I therefore believe it is my duty to my country to love it; to support its Constitution; to obey its laws; to respect its flag; and to defend it against all enemies."
~William Tyler Page, 1918 -- The American's Creed
"The conscience of this nation is the Constitution."
~Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas
"The whole of the Bill (of Rights) is a declaration of the right of the people at large or considered as individuals. It establishes some rights of the individual as unalienable and which consequently, no majority has a right to deprive them of."
~Albert Gallatin of the New York Historical Society, October 7, 1789
‘….a government of laws, not of men.’
~John Adams
"The government was set to protect man from criminals -- and the Constitution was written to protect man from the government. The Bill of Rights was not directed against private citizens, but against the government -- as an explicit declaration that individual rights supersede any public or social power."
~Ayn Rand
~Ayn Rand
"History is clear that the first ten amendments to the Constitution were adopted to secure certain common law rights of the people, against invasion by the Federal Government."
~Bell v. Hood, 71 F. Supp., 813, 816 (1947)
"No one can read our Constitution without concluding that the people who wrote it wanted their government severely limited; the words 'no' and 'not' employed in restraint of government power occur 24 times in the first seven articles of the Constitution and 22 more times in the Bill of Rights."
~Edmund A. Opitz
"Where rights secured by the Constitution are involved, there can be no rule-making or legislation which would abrogate them."
~U.S. Supreme Court in Miranda v. Arizona 380 U.S. 436 (1966)
"Constitutional rights may not be infringed simply because the majority of the people choose that they be."
~U.S. Supreme Court in Westbrook v. Mihaly 2 C3d 756
~Bell v. Hood, 71 F. Supp., 813, 816 (1947)
"No one can read our Constitution without concluding that the people who wrote it wanted their government severely limited; the words 'no' and 'not' employed in restraint of government power occur 24 times in the first seven articles of the Constitution and 22 more times in the Bill of Rights."
~Edmund A. Opitz
"Where rights secured by the Constitution are involved, there can be no rule-making or legislation which would abrogate them."
~U.S. Supreme Court in Miranda v. Arizona 380 U.S. 436 (1966)
"Constitutional rights may not be infringed simply because the majority of the people choose that they be."
~U.S. Supreme Court in Westbrook v. Mihaly 2 C3d 756
The Bill of Rights is a born rebel. It reeks with sedition. In every clause it shakes its fist at constituted authority...it is the one guarantee of human freedom to the American people.
~ Frank Cobb - (Editor, New York World - 1920)
"The Constitution and the Bill of Rights we designed to get the government off the backs of the people -- all the people. Those great documents guarantee to us all the rights to personal and spiritual self-fulfillment. But that guarantee is not self-executing. As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such a twilight that we all must be most aware of the change in the air -- however slight -- lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness."
~Supreme Court Justice William Douglas
~Supreme Court Justice William Douglas
"The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government -- lest it come to dominate our lives and interests."
~Patrick Henry
"Arguing that the words of the Constitution have no fixed meaning is tantamount to arguing that we have no Constitution; a Constitution serves no purpose if the branches of government it is supposed to limit can define their own powers."
~W. James Antle III
"The U.S. Constitution is less than a quarter the length of the owner's manual for a 1998 Toyota Camry, and yet it has managed to keep 300 million of the world's most unruly, passionate and energetic people safe, prosperous and free."
~P.J. O’Rourke
"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote."
~Benjamin Franklin
"The Founders knew that a democracy would lead to some kind of tyranny. The term democracy appears in none of our Founding documents. Their vision for us was a Republic and limited government."
~Walter Williams
‘A constitutional republic is a state where the head of state and other officials are elected as representatives of the people, and must govern according to existing constitutional law that limits the government's power over citizens.
In a constitutional republic, executive, legislative, and judicial powers are separated into distinct branches and the will of the majority of the population is tempered by protections for individual rights so that no individual or group has absolute power.
The fact that a constitution exists that limits the government's power makes the state constitutional. That the head(s) of state and other officials are chosen by election, rather than inheriting their positions, and that their decisions are subject to judicial review makes a state republican.’
~Wikipedia
A democracy is mob rule where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.
~Thomas Jefferson
"Fifty-one percent of a nation can establish a totalitarian regime, suppress minorities and still remain democratic."
~Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
"The strength of the Constitution, lies in the will of the people to defend it."
~Thomas Edison
"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. 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 be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men."
~Samuel Adams, 1780
~Samuel Adams, 1780
"The Constitution needs allegiance and loyalty and renewal and understanding with each generation, or else it's not going to last."
~Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy
"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 believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.
~James Madison, speech, Virginia Convention, 1788
The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power.
~Daniel Webster
~Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy
"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 believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.
~James Madison, speech, Virginia Convention, 1788
The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power.
~Daniel Webster
"The more corrupt the state, the more it legislates."
~Tacitus
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 handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States - where men were free.
-Ronald Reagan
-Ronald Reagan
"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they have resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they suppress."
~Frederick Douglas
"The politicians don't just want your money. They want your soul. They want you to be worn down by taxes until you are dependent and helpless."
~James Dale Davidson, National Taxpayers Union
~Frederick Douglas
"The politicians don't just want your money. They want your soul. They want you to be worn down by taxes until you are dependent and helpless."
~James Dale Davidson, National Taxpayers Union
"A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away."
~Barry Goldwater (1964)
Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children brought up easy, let it slip away again, and their grandchildren are once more slaves.
~David Herbert Lawrence
~David Herbert Lawrence
"The trouble with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money." ~Margaret Thatcher
'In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person's becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American...There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag.. We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language... and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.'
~Theodore Roosevelt 1907
~Theodore Roosevelt 1907
"Not too long ago two friends of mine were talking to a Cuban refugee...
...a businessman who had escaped from Castro, and in the midst of the story one of my friends turned to the other and said, 'We don't know how lucky we are.' And the Cuban stopped and said 'How lucky you are! I had someplace to escape to'
And in that sentence he told us the entire story. If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth."
~Ronald Reagan
And in that sentence he told us the entire story. If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth."
~Ronald Reagan