Intriguing Quotes
- Love your country, but never trust its government.
- — Robert A. Heinlein
- Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like
fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master.
- — George Washington, speech of January 7, 1790
- Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government
of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of
others?
- — Thomas Jefferson, in his 1801 inaugural address
- Rightful liberty is unobstructed action, according to our will,
within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others.
- — Thomas Jefferson to Isaac H. Tiffany, 1819
- 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, and this is necessary to close the circle of our
felicities.
- — Thomas Jefferson, in his 1801 inaugural address
- They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
- — Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania,
1759.
- Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect
liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficient... The
greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of
zeal, well meaning but without understanding.
- — Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis
- Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Tolerance in the
face of tyranny is no virtue.
- — Barry Goldwater
- 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, Letter to James Madison, January 30,
1787
- This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who
inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government,
they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their
revolutionary right to dismember it or overthrow it.
- — Abraham Lincoln, 4 April 1861
- No one is bound to obey an unconstitutional law and no courts are
bound to enforce it.
- — 16 Am. Jur. Sec. 177 late 2d, Sec 256
- The state calls its own violence ‘law’, but that of the
individual ‘crime’.
- — Max Stirner
- 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
- The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain
occasions, that I wish it always to be kept alive. It will often be
exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I
like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the
Atmosphere.
- — Thomas Jefferson, letter to Abigail Adams, 1787
- & what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are
not warned from time to time that his people preserve the spirit of
resistance? Let them take arms...The tree of liberty must be refreshed
from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
- — Thomas Jefferson, letter to Col. William S. Smith,
1787
- Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one
who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but
downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably
ruined.
- — Patrick Henry, speech of June 5 1788
- A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing
which he cares about more than he does about his personal safety, is a
miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and
kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
- — John Stuart Mill, writing on the U.S. Civil War in
1862
- You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a
reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating
the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the great struggle
for independence.
- — Attributed to Charles Austin Beard (1874-1948)
- Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent
revolution inevitable.
- — John F. Kennedy
- The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they
can bribe the people with their own money.
- — Alexis de Tocqueville
- 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
- What, then is law [government]? It is the collective organization
of the individual right to lawful defense.
- — Frederic Bastiat, The Law
- Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it. Sometimes
the law places the whole apparatus of judges, police, prisons and
gendarmes at the service of the plunderers, and treats the victim
— when he defends himself — as a criminal.
- — Frederic Bastiat, The Law
- Live free or die; death is not the worst of evils.
- — General George Stark.
- If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that
would ... [be] the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is
possible.
- — Henry David Thoreu
- The power to tax involves the power to destroy;...the power to
destroy may defeat and render useless the power to create....
- — Chief Justice John Marshall, 1819
- The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over
any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent
harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a
sufficient warrant.
- — John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859
- You [should] not examine legislation in the light of the benefits
it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs
it would do and the harm it would cause if improperly
administered.
- — Lyndon Johnson, former President of the U.S.
- The difference between death and taxes is death doesn’t get
worse every time Congress meets.
- — Will Rogers
- The end move in politics is always to pick up a gun.
- — R. Buckminster Fuller
- Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims
may be the most oppressive. 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
satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us
without end, for they do so with the approval of their
consciences.
- — C. S. Lewis
- It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our
liberties. We hold this prudent jealousy to be the first duty of
citizens and one of the noblest characteristics of the late Revolution.
The freemen of America did not wait till usurped power had strengthened
itself by exercise and entangled the question in precedents. They saw
all the consequences in the principle, and they avoided the
consequences by denying the principle. We revere this lesson too much
... to forget it.
- — James Madison.
- A ‘‘decay in the social contract’‘ is
detectable; there is a growing feeling, particularly among
middle-income taxpayers, that they are not getting back, from society
and government, their money’s worth for taxes paid. The tendency
is for taxpayers to try to take more control of their finances ...
- — IRS Strategic Plan, (May 1984)
- 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 or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such
incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can
guess what it will be to-morrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action;
but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?
- — James Madison, Federalist Papers 62
- I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the
Constitution which grant[s] a right to Congress of expending, on
objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.
- — James Madison, 1794
- ... every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has
any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his
Hands, we may say, are properly his. .... The great and chief end
therefore, of Mens uniting into Commonwealths, and putting themselves
under Government, is the Preservation of their Property.
- — John Locke, A Treatise Concerning Civil Government
- The people cannot delegate to government the power to do anything
which would be unlawful for them to do themselves.
- — John Locke, A Treatise Concerning Civil Government
- The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered
considerably by the Prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of
respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws
which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous
increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this.
- — Albert Einstein, My First Impression of the U.S.A.,
1921
- Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as cooperation with
good.
- — Mohandas Ghandi
- The real point of audits is to instill fear, not to extract
revenue; the IRS aims at winning through intimidation and (thereby)
getting maximum voluntary compliance.
- — Paul Strassel, former IRS Headquarters Agent, Wall St.
Journal 1980
- Don’t ever think you know what’s right for the other
person. He might start thinking he knows what’s right for
you.
- — Paul Williams, ‘Das Energi’
- The IRS has become morally corrupted by the enormous power which we
in Congress have unwisely entrusted to it. Too often it acts like a
Gestapo preying upon defenseless citizens.
- — Senator Edward V. Long
- All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusions is called a
philosopher.
- — Ambrose Bierce
- Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum — I think that I think,
therefore I think that I am.
- — Ambrose Bierce
- A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his
punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.
- — Oscar Wilde
- We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the
stars.
- — Oscar Wilde
- A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely
rearranging their prejudices.
- — William James
- A paranoid is a man who knows a little of what’s going
on.
- — William Burroughs
- Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise
enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule
others.
- — Edward Abbey
- Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend
to be.
- — Kurt Vonnegut
- By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which
is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by
experience, which is the bitterest.
- — Confucius
- It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick
society.
- — Krishnamurti
- We monsters are necessary to nature also.
- — Marquise De Sade
- I believe in compulsory cannibalism. If people were forced to eat
what they killed, there would be no more wars.
- — Abbie Hoffman
- None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe
they are free.
- — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
- I wouldn’t recommend sex, drugs or insanity for everyone, but
they’ve always worked for me.
- — Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.
- What luck for rulers, that men do not think.
- — Adolf Hitler
- Life becomes fully understandable only the moment we realise that
we are all mad.
- — Mark Twain
- Always acknowledge a fault. This will throw those in authority off
their guard and give you an opportunity to commit more.
- — Mark Twain
- He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become
a monster. And if you gaze for long into the abyss, the abyss gazes
also into you.
- — Friedrich Nietzsche
- Will, pure will, without the troubles and complexities of intellect
— how happy! how free!
- — Friedrich Nietzsche
- For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into
act?
- — Dante Alighieri
- For pure will, unassuaged of purpose, delivered from the lust of
result, is every way perfect.
- — Aleister Crowley
- Do what Thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
- — Aleister Crowley
- Love is the Law, Love under Will
- — Aleister Crowley
- Every man and every woman is a Star
- — Aleister Crowley
- Fortunately we have learnt to combine these ideas, not in the
mutual toleration of sub-contraries, but in the affirmation of
contraries, that transcending of the laws of intellect which is madness
in the ordinary man, genius in the Overman who hath arrived to strike
off more fetters from our understanding.
- — Aleister Crowley
- If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love
you; but if you really make them think they’ll hate you.
- — Anonymous
- All I ask of life is a constant and exaggerated sense of my own
importance.
- — Anonymous
- Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs
with a philosophical eye, than the ease with which the many are
governed by the few.
- — David Hume
- I love mankind; it’s people I can’t stand.
- — Charles Schultz
- It is not certain that everything is certain, neither is it certain
that everything is uncertain.
- — Hans Kung
- The man who does not do his own thinking is a slave, and is a
traitor to himself and to his fellow men.
- — Robert Ingersoll
- If voting could change anything, it would be illegal.
- — Graffiti
- A law is not a law without coercion behind it.
- — James Garfield
- The more corrupt the republic, the more numerous the laws.
- — Tacitus
- The ideal government of all reflective men, from Aristotle onward,
is one which lets the individual alone — one which barely escapes
being no government at all.
- — H. L. Mencken
- All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the
superior man: it’s one permanent object is to oppress him and
cripple him.... One of its primary functions is to regiment men by
force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one
another as possible, to search out and combat originality among
them.
- — H. L. Mencken
- The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able
to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing
superstitions and taboos.
- — H. L. Mencken
- The United States is in no way founded upon the Christian
religion.
- — George Washington & John Adams, in a diplomatic message
to Malta.
- This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no
religion in it.
- — John Adams, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson.
- In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to
liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses
in return for protection to his own.
- — Thomas Jefferson, 1814
- The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the
Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed
with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of
Jupiter.
- — Thomas Jefferson, 1823
- I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature.
- — Thomas Jefferson
- Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if
there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of
blindfolded fear.... Do not be frightened from this inquiry from any
fear of its consequences. If it ends in the belief that there is no
God, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and
pleasantness you feel in its exercise...
- — Thomas Jefferson, in a 1787 letter to his nephew
- Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not
believe simply because it has been handed down for many generations. Do
not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by
many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is written in Holy
Scriptures. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of
Teachers, elders or wise men. Believe only after careful observation
and analysis, when you find that it agrees with reason and is conducive
to the good and benefit of one and all. Then accept it and live up to
it.
- — The Buddha, from the Kalama Sutta
- The Bible is not my book, and Christianity is not my religion. I
could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of
Christian dogma.
- — Abraham Lincoln
- ...The Bill of Rights is a literal and absolute document. The First
Amendment doesn’t say you have a right to speak out unless the
government has a ‘compelling interest’ in censoring the
Internet. The Second Amendment doesn’t say you have the right to
keep and bear arms until some madman plants a bomb. The Fourth
Amendment doesn’t say you have the right to be secure from search
and seizure unless some FBI agent thinks you fit the profile of a
terrorist. The government has no right to interfere with any of these
freedoms under any circumstances.
- — Harry Browne, 1996 USA presidential candidate, Libertarian
Party
- The direct use of physical force is so poor a solution to the
problem of limited resources that it is commonly employed only by small
children and great nations.
- — David Friedman
- It would be thought a hard government that should tax its people
one tenth part.
- — Benjamin Franklin
- The price of liberty is, always has been, and always will be blood.
The person who is not willing to die for his liberty has already lost
it to the first scoundrel who is willing to risk dying to violate that
person’s liberty. Are you free?
- — Andrew Ford
- See, when the GOVERNMENT spends money, it creates jobs; whereas
when the money is left in the hands of TAXPAYERS, God only knows what
they do with it. Bake it into pies, probably. Anything to avoid
creating jobs.
- — Dave Barry
- The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two
opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the
ability to function.
- — F. Scott Fitzgerald
- If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others
of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an
idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps
it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the
possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of
it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less,
because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea
from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who
lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That
ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the
moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition,
seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when
she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening
their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move,
and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive
appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of
property.
- — Thomas Jefferson