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xBullx -> Rellevant Quotes to the present US climate... (6/28/2009 10:51:01 AM)
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I was going through a list of quotes that I thought were very applicable to where we find ourselves today.
If anyone knows of other inspiring words from our human history, please do share.
I'll start....
...America needs fewer laws, not more prisons. – James Bovard
...They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. – Benjamin Franklin
...Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. – John Adams (1814)
...Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys. – P.J. O'Rourke
...There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him. – Robert Heinlein
...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 (1801)
...None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. – Goethe
...[On ancient Athens]: 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
...If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that, too. – Somerset Maugham
...Can our form of government, our system of justice, survive if one can be denied a freedom because he might abuse it? – Harlon Carter
...The government was set to protect man from criminals – and the Constitution was written to protect man from the government. – Ayn Rand
...Those who expect to reap the benefits of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it. – Thomas Paine
...Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt. – Herbert Hoover
...If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free. – P.J. O'Rourke (1993)
...I was guilty of judging capitalism by its operations and socialism by its hopes and aspirations; capitalism by its works and socialism by its literature. – Sidney Hook
...More laws, less justice. – Marcus Tullius Ciceroca (42 BC)
...God grants liberty only to those who love it, and are always ready to guard and defend it. – Daniel Webster (1834)
...The era of resisting big government is never over. – Paul Gigot (1998)
...Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it. – George Bernard Shaw
...The strength of the Constitution, lies in the will of the people to defend it. – Thomas Edison
...Collectivism doesn't work because it's based on a faulty economic premise. There is no such thing as a person's "fair share" of wealth. The gross national product is not a pizza that must be carefully divided because if I get too many slices, you have to eat the box. The economy is expandable and, in any practical sense, limitless. – P. J. O'Rourke
...Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. – Ludwig von Mises
...If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all. – Noam Chomsky
...America's abundance was not created 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. – Ayn Rand
...One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors. – Plato
...When you subsidize poverty and failure, you get more of both. – James Dale Davidson, National Taxpayers Union
...I think the terror most people are concerned with is the IRS. – Malcolm Forbes, when asked if he was afraid of terrorism
...If we were directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we would soon want for bread. – Thomas Jefferson
...Alcohol didn't cause the high crime rates of the '20s and '30s, Prohibition did. And drugs do not cause today's alarming crime rates, but drug prohibition does. – US District Judge James C. Paine, addressing the Federal Bar Association in Miami, November, 1991
...Government does not grow by seizing our freedoms, but by assuming our responsibilities. – Michael Cloud
...You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves. – Abraham Lincoln
...A little government involvement is just as dangerous as a lot – because the first leads inevitably to the second. – Harry Browne
...When they kept you out it was because you were black; when they let you in, it is because you are black. That's progress? – Marilyn French
...What is a Communist? One who has yearnings – for equal division of unequal earnings. – Ebenezer Elliot
...Everyone wants to live at the expense of the State. They forget that the State lives at the expense of everyone. – Frédéric Bastiat
...People fear witches, and burn women. – Justice Louis Brandeis
...Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging than the drug itself. – Jimmy Carter
...America was born of revolt, flourished on dissent, became great through experimentation. – Henry Steele Commager
...We are living in a sick society filled with people who would not directly steal from their neighbor but who are willing to demand that the government do it for them. – William L. Comer
...You can only be free if I am free. – Clarence Darrow
...When we lose the right to be different, we lose the privilege to be free. – Charles Evans Hughes
...I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them. – Thomas Jefferson
...It's no accident that capitalism has brought with it progress, not merely in production but also in knowledge. Egoism and competition are, alas, stronger forces than public spirit and sense of duty. – Albert Einstein
...He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetuate it. – Martin Luther King, Jr.
...Low-income workers as a group are the major victims of minimum wage legislation. – Keith B. Leffler
...Public educators, like Soviet farmers, lack any incentive to produce results, innovate, to be efficient, to make the kinds of difficult changes that private firms operating in a competitive market must make to survive. – Carolyn Lochhead
...If you can cut the people off from their history, then they can be easily persuaded. – Karl Marx
...When they took the 4th Amendment, I was quiet because I didn't deal drugs.
When they took the 6th Amendment, I was quiet because I am innocent.
When they took the 2nd Amendment, I was quiet because I don't own a gun.
Now they have taken the 1st Amendment, and I can only be quiet. – Lyle Myhr
...Now that I look back, I realize that a life predicated on being obedient is a very comfortable life indeed. Living in such a way reduces to a minimum one's own need to think. – Adolf Eichmann, Memoirs written after his 1960 capture by Israel.
...We are going to tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect. – Franklin D. Roosevelt
...Public works are not accomplished by the miraculous power of a magic wand. They are paid for by funds taken away from the citizens. – Ludwig von Mises
...The average family pays more in taxes than it spends on food, clothing, and shelter combined. – Congressman Dick Armey, Why a Flat Tax?
...A union of government and religion tends to destroy government and degrade religion. – Hugo Black
...I fear for our nation. Nearly half of our people receive some kind of government subsidy. We have grown weak from too much affluence and too little adversity. I fear that soon we will not be able to defend our country from our sure and certain enemies. We have debased our currency to the point that even the most loyal citizen no longer trusts it. – A Roman Senator in A.D. 63
...Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal. – Martin Luther King Jr.
...The government's only proper job is to protect individual rights against violence by force or fraud … to protect men from foreign invaders … to settle disputes among men according to objective laws … The greatness of the Founding Fathers was how well they understood this issue and how close some of them came to understanding it perfectly. – Ayn Rand
...We the people are the rightful master of both congress and the courts – not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution. – Abraham Lincoln
***I think I'll pass it on to the rest of you on that note.
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