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More quotes about Freedom - from Free-Market.net  

"It is your moral duty and obligation to disobey an unjust law!"

Accountability - The government is too big and spends too much, and Congress and unelected bureaucrats have become so entrenched to be unresponsive to the public they are supposed to serve. The GOP contract restores accountability to government.

Further, we will instruct the House Budget Committee to report to the floor and we will work to enact additional budget savings, beyond the budget cuts specifically included in the legislation described above, to ensure that the Federal budget deficit will be less than it would have been without the enactment of these bills.

Opportunity - The American Dream is out of the reach of too many families because of burdensome government regulations and harsh tax laws. The GOP contract restores the American dream.

Responsibility - Bigger government and more federal programs usurp personal responsibility from families and individuals. The GOP contract restores a proper balance between government and personal responsibility.

FIRST, require all laws that apply to the rest of the country also apply equally to the Congress;

SECOND, select a major, independent auditing firm to conduct a comprehensive audit of Congress for waste, fraud or abuse;

THIRD, THE CITIZEN LEGISLATURE ACT, a first-ever vote on term limits to replace career politicians with citizen legislators.

FORTH, THE COMMON SENSE LEGAL REFORM ACT, "Loser pays" laws, reasonable limits on punitive damages and reform of product liability laws to stem the endless tide of litigation.

FIFTH, THE FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY ACT, a balanced budget/tax limitation amendment and a legislative line-item veto to restore fiscal responsibility to an out-of-control Congress, requiring them to live under the same budget constraints as families and businesses.

SIXTH, THE NATIONAL SECURITY RESTORATION ACT, No U.S. troops under U.N. command and restoration of the essential parts of our national security funding to strengthen our national defense and maintain our credibility around the world.

SEVENTH, require a three-fifths majority vote to pass a tax increase;

Wealth may be an excellent thing, for it means power, it means leisure, it means liberty .

"I have just read your lousy review buried in the back pages. You sound like a frustrated old man who never made a success, an eight-ulcer man on a four-ulcer job, and all four ulcers working. I have never met you, but if I do you'll need a new nose and plenty of beefsteak and perhaps a supporter below. Westbrook Pegler, a guttersnipe, is a gentleman compared to you. You can take that as more of an insult than as a reflection on your ancestry."

"If you would rule the world quietly, you must keep it amused." I notice too, that the ground on which eminent public servants urge the claims of popular education is fear: `This country is filling up with thousands and millions of voters, and you must educate them to keep them from our throats.'

"It was a Roman who said it was sweet to die for one's country. The Greeks never said it was sweet to die for anything. They had no vital lies."

"My country, right or wrong," is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, "My mother, drunk or sober."

"The strongest reason for the People to retain the Right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government."

‘‘...once the individual and his rights become subservient to the state's collectively imposed goals, society takes the first step down the slippery slope that leads towards the secret police, the Gestapo, the Gulag, and the concentration camp.’’

"This is living!" "I gotta be me!" "Ain't we got fun!" It's all there in the Declaration of Independence. We are the only nation in the world based on happiness. Search as you will the Maga Charta, the "Communist Manifesto", the Ten Commandments, the Analects of Confucius, Plato's "Republic", the New Testament or the UN Charter, and find me any happiness at all.

"To disarm the people [is] the best and most effectual way to enslave them."

...a leading textbook publisher recently corrected the misinformation about the Second Amendment [that it gives people the right to bear arms] previously included in its publications. And the newly written textbooks will soon be used in 11 state school systems. During this next year, we will be communicating with every major textbook publisher...we will expand this campaign to include reference works, government publications and other materials.

...but if circumstances should at any time oblige the government to form an army of any magnitude, that army can never be formidable to the liberties of the people, while there is a large body of citizens, little if at all inferior to them in discipline and use of arms, who stand ready to defend their rights.

...democracy is based upon so childish a complex of fallacies that they must be protected by a rigid system of taboos, else even half-wits would argue it to pieces.

...freedom of men under government is to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society...as freedom of nature is to be under no other restraint but the law of Nature.

...I did "not" go to see the Earth Day demonstration in the Mall. Instead, I spent the day calling up environmentally minded friends and asking them, "If the outdoors are so swell, how come the homeless aren't more fond of it?" I wanted to be the one person to say a discouraging word on Earth Day – a lone voice, not crying in the wilderness, but chortling in the rec room.

...if circumstances should at any time oblige the government to form an army of any magnitude, that army can never be formidable to the liberties of the people, while there is a large body of citizens little if at all inferior to them in discipline and the use of arms, who stand ready to defend their own rights and those of their fellow citizens.

...if the Perennially Indignant think pollution is the fault only of Reaganites wallowing in capitalist greed, then they should go take a deep breath in Smolensk or a long drink from the river Volga.

...Laywers are what make people free...

...many an American Congressman comes to Washington from a district attorney's office: you may be sure that he is seldom promoted because he has been jealous of the liberties of the citizen.

...our strategy must be to antagonize them into striking the first blow, the classic 'Pearl Harbor' maneuver in game theory, a great advantage in Weltpolitick. (Prof) Robert A. Heinlein (1907 - 1988) "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress", 1966

...remember that all tax revenue is the result of holding a gun to somebody's head.

...the jury in all criminal cases, shall be the judges of the law and the facts.

...the only purpose for which power can be rightfully excercised 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 warrent...

...the rise of fascism and nazism was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period but a necessary outcome of those tendencies.

...there are more instances of the abridgement of freedoms of the people by gradual and silent encroachment of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.

...there is no point in our ancestors speaking to us unless we know how to listen.

...this government, swollen and arrogent with pelf, goes butting into our business...It checks the amount of tropical oils in our snack foods, tells us what kind of gasoline we can buy for our cars and how fast we can drive them, bosses us around about retirement, education, and what's on TV; counts our noses and asks fresh questions about who's still living at home and how many bathrooms we have; decides whether the door to our office or shop should have steps or a wheelchair ramp; decrees the sex and complexion of the people we hire there; lectures us on safe sex; dictates what we can sniff, smoke, and swallow; and waylays young men, ships them to distant places, and tells them to shoot people they don't even know.

...to disarm the people (is) the best and most effective way to enslave them..

...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; nor does it follow from this, that all promiscuously must go into actual service on every occasion. The mind that aims at a select militia, must be influenced by a truly antirepublican principle...

...we are certainly more likely to make inroads against those attitudes and make progress toward actual equality if we learn to view one another as human beings, not as blacks, African-Americans, WASPs, Jews, Native Americans, Asians, or Latinos.

...with barely time to hose the Dukakis sludge out of my tape recorder and scrape the talk of Democratic-party unity off the bottom of my loafers – I flew to that other oleo-high colonic, the Republican convention, and event with the intellectual content of a Guns n' Roses lyric attended by every ofey insurance broker in America who owns a pair of white shoes...

...world war will make whole reactionary peoples disappear from the face of the earth. This, too, is progress. Obviously, this cannot be fulfilled without crushing some delicate national flower.

..but the Bible is such a book of lies and contradictions there is no knowing which part to believe or whether any...

"If guns cause crime, then matches cause arson."

1. Tax increases are always good, always necessary, and always only on the rich.
2. Tax cuts are always bad, always harmful, and always only for the rich.
...if there were a rule three, it would be "see rules 1 & 2".

13% of US burglaries take place while the owner is at home. 50% of burglaries in Japan and England happen while the owner is at home. Burglars in the US spend over twice as long on the average casing homes. Burglars in the US asked say this is because they are afraid of being shot.

1935 will go down in history! For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration! Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient and the world will follow our lead into the future!     

40% of the "poor" in the US own their own homes. 80% possess telephones and color TVs. The majority have cars. The average "poor" person in the US has twice as much living space as the average (not "poor") person of Japan. 22,000 "poor" households in the US have a heated swimming pool or Jacuzzi.

45 homeless people die every minute.      – Mitch Snyder
For that to be true, some 23 million homeless people would die in America each year.

A Bill of Rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on Earth... and what no just government should refuse.

A body of men holding themselves accountable to nobody ought not to be trusted by anybody.

A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.

A child of five could understand this. Fetch me a child of five.

A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody has read.

A committee is a life form with six or more legs and no brain.

A competent and self-confident person is not capable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity.

A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking.

A constitution that is made for all nations is made for none.

A despot easily forgives his subjects for not loving him, provided they do not love each other.

A free people [claim] their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.

A generation which ignores history has no past – and no future.

A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.

A government is the only know vessel that leaks from the top.

A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.

A Great Explosion is coming. Productive class Americans are sick of being menaced by laws their parents naively thought were being created to protect them. They're sick of being looted by officials with five and six-digit salaries. Sick of being decimated by one senseless war after another, arranged, conveniently, for almost every generation. Sick of being wooed and cast aside in two- and four- and six-year cycles by public figures they wouldn't trust alone with their children. Doubtless the American productive class have made foolish choices in the past. Doubtless they'll make them again in the future. But in the end, the American productive class will triumph, precisely because they ARE productive, while their enemies are not.

A is for Amy who fell down the stairs,
B is for Basil assaulted by bears.
C is for Clair who wasted away,
D is for Desmond thrown out of the sleigh.
E is for Ernest who choked on a peach,
F is for Fanny, sucked dry by a leech.
G is for George, smothered under a rug,
H is for Hector, done in by a thug.
I is for Ida who drowned in the lake,
J is for James who took lye, by mistake.
K is for Kate who was struck with an axe,
L is for Leo who swallowed some tacks.
M is for Maud who was swept out to sea,
N is for Nevil who died of enui.
O is for Olive, run through with an awl,
P is for Prue, trampled flat in a brawl
Q is for Quinton who sank in a mire,
R is for Rhoda, consumed by a fire.
S is for Susan who parished of fits,
T is for Titas who flew into bits.
U is for Una who slipped down a drain,
V is for Victor, squashed under a train.
W is for Winie, embedded in ice,
X is for Xercies, devoured by mice.
Y is for Yoric whose head was bashed in,
Z is for Zilla who drank too much gin.

A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.

A just security to property is not afforded by that government under which arbitrary taxes invade the domestic sanctuaries of the rich, and grind the face of the poor.

A liberal is a person whose interests aren't at stake at the moment.

A man may be a fool and not know it – but not if he is married.

A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.

A man who seeks truth and loves it must be reckoned precious to any human society.

A man's only as old as the woman he feels.

A man's women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with something akin to pity. His most gaudy sayings and doings seldom deceive them; they see the actual man within, and know him for a shallow and pathetic fellow. In this fact, perhaps, lies one of the best proofs of feminine intelligence, or, as the common phase makes it, feminine intuition.

A metaphysician is one who, when you remark that twice two makes four, demands to know what you mean by twice, what by two, what by makes, and what by four. For asking such questions metaphysicians are supported in oriental luxury in the universities, and respected as educated and intelligent men.

A militia, when properly formed, are in fact the people themselves...and include all men capable of bearing arms.

A neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality.

A neurotic, according to Freud, is a man dominated by unconscious memories, fixated on the past, and incapable of overcoming it; the regular condition of human communities.

A new age of magic interpretation of the world is coming, of interpretation in terms of the will and not of the intelligence. There is no such thing as truth either in the moral or the scientific sense.

A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.

A paranoid is a man who knows a little of what's going on.

A politician's words reveal less about what he thinks about his subject than what he thinks about his audience.

A radical is one of whom people say "He goes too far." A conservative, on the other hand, is one who "doesn't go far enough." Then there is the reactionary, "one who doesn't go at all." All these terms are more or less objectionable, wherefore we have coined the term "progressive." I should say that a progressive is one who insists upon recognizing new facts as they present themselves-one who adjusts legislation to these new facts.

A right delayed is a right denied.

A right is not what someone gives you; it's what no one can take from you.

A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.

A select militia defined as only the privileged class entitled to keep and bear arms was considered an anathema to a free society, in the same way that Americans denounced select spokesmen approved by the government as the only class entitled to the freedom of the press.

A serious problem in America is the gap between academe and the mass media, which is our culture. Professors of humanities, with all their leftist fantasies, have little direct knowledge of American life and no impact whatever on public policy.

A society is not "free" merely because the freedoms the people are doing away with are those they voted at the last election to do without.

A sportsman is a man who, every now and then, simply has to go out and kill something.

A state that denies its citizens their basic rights becomes a danger to its neighbors as well: internal arbitrary rule will be reflected in arbitrary external relations. The suppression of public opinion, the abolition of public competition for power and its public exercise opens the way for the state power to arm itself in any way it sees fit...A state that does not hesitate to lie to its own people will not hesitate to lie to other states.

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 the constant companion of your walks.

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

A well regulated militia, being necessary for the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own interests 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 felicity.

A woman tries to get all she can out of a man, and a man tries to get all he can into a woman.

Above all he was amazed to hear me talk of a mercenary standing army in the midst of peace, and among a free people. He said, if we were governed by our own consent in the persons of our representatives, he could not imagine of whom we were afraid, or against whom we were to fight; and would hear my opinion, whether a private man's house might not be better defended by himself, his children, and family, than by half a dozen rascals picked up at a venture in the streets, for small wages, who might get an hundred times more by cutting their throats.

Abracadabra, thus we learn The more you create, the less you earn. The less you earn, the more you're given The less you lead, the more you're driven, The more destroyed, the more they feed, The more you pay, the more they need The more you earn, the less you keep. And now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to take If the tax-collector hasn't got it before I wake.

Absolute, arbitrary power over the lives, liberty and property of freemen exists nowhere in a republic, not even in the largest majority.

Acceptance without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western religion, Rejection without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western science.

According to Arkansas law, Section 4761, Pope's Digest: "No person shall be permitted under any pretext whatever, to come nearer than fifty feet of any door or window of any polling room, from the opening of the polls until the completion of the count and the certification of the returns."

According to documents and interviews, two major tobacco companies gave $65,000 to the Democratic National Committee in May. However, the money wasn't placed in any of the committee's federal campaign accounts here in Washington. Instead, according to records and people familiar with the matter, the money went to state Democratic Party accounts around the country, which receive far less media scrutiny because their financial reports are filed in state capitals.

According to the USGAO report to COngress on the 1990 farm bill, "The government established a wool and mohair price-support program in 1954 ...to encourage domestic wool production in the interst of natural security." Really, it says that. I guess back in the fifties there was this military school of thought that held that in the event of a Soviet attack we could confuse and disorient the enemy by throwing blankets over their heads...

Advertising is 85 percent confusion and 15 percent commission.

Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless.

Advertising may be described as the science of arresting human intelligence long enough to get money from it.

After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military. – William Burroughs A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns.

Agreements to "outlaw" atomic weapons? Swell! Remember the Kellogg Pact? It "outlawed" war.

Aided by a little sophistry on the words "general welfare," [they claim] a right to do not only the acts to effect that which are specifically enumerated and permitted, but whatsoever they shall think or pretend will be for the general welfare.

All drugs of any interest to any moderately intelligent person in America are now illegal.

All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

All I ever did was supply a demand that was pretty popular.

All I know is I'm not a Marxist.

All men are created unequal.

All military type firearms are to be handed in immediately ... The SS, SA and Stahlhelm give every respectable German man the opportunity of campaigning with them. Therefore anyone who does not belong to one of the above named organizations and who unjustifiably nevertheless keeps his weapon ... must be regarded as an enemy of the national government.

All national institutions of churches, whetehr Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

All politics takes place on a slippery slope. The most important four words in politics are "up to a point."

All reformers, however strict their social conscience, live in houses just as big as they can pay for.

All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the the cleverness of the few.

All [of the American's] foreign wars have been fought with foes either too weak to resist them or too heavily engaged elsewhere to make more than a half-hearted attempt. The combats with Mexico and Spain were not wars; they were simply lynchings.

Although one does not like to be reminded, it is not so many years since the socialist policy of [Nazi Germany] was generally held up to be imitated, just as in more recent Sweden has been the model country to which progressive eyes were directed.

America is not anything if it consists of each of us. It is something only if it consists of all of us.

America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.

America is the mockery of the world.

Americans are overreaching; overreaching is the most admirable and the most American of the many American excesses.

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

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.

An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.

An elective despotism was not the government we fought for, but one which should not only be founded on true free principles, but in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among general bodies of magistracy, as that no one could transcend their legal limits without being effectually checked and restrained by the others.

An entrepeneur contributes the great value of his organizational ability, foresight, and management skill. Because value is not "solely" the product of labor, these abilities are extremely valuable. Profits are his just reward for risking capital in an uncertain and changing world.

An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.

An infallible method of conciliating a tiger is to allow oneself to be devoured.

An unconstitutional act is not law; it confers no rights; it imposes no duties; affords no protection; it creates no office; it is in legal contemplation, as inoperative as though it had never been passed.

Anarchism is the only philosophy which brings to man the consciousness of himself; which maintains that God, the State, and society are non-existent, that their promises are null and void, since they can be fulfilled only through man's subordination. Anarchism is therefore the teacher of the unity of life; not merely in nature, but in man.

And having looked to government for bread, on the very first scarcity they will turn and bite the hand that fed them. To avoid that evil, government will redouble the causes of it; and then it will become inveterate and incurable.

And so a lot of people say there's too much personal freedom. When freedom's being abused, you have to move to limit it. That's what we did in the announcement I made last weekend on the public housing projects, about how we're going to have weapon sweeps and more things like that...

And that the 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 to preserve independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election [choice] between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude.

And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms... The tree of liberty must be watered periodically with the blood of tyrants and patriots alike. It is its natural manure.

And while I am talking to you mothers and fathers, I give you one more assurance. I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.

Animals have these advantages over man: they have no theologians to instruct them, their funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts lawsuits over their wills.

Another year, another Clinton budget. This one's little different from past plans: It, too, contains tax hikes, especially on those with capital gains ...The data are clear: When levied punitively on the rich and the middle class, tax increases discourage those who are most productive in society from producing.

Any company executive who overcharges the gvoernment more than $5,000,000 will be fined $50 or have to go to traffic school three nights a week.

Any system of religion that has anything in it that shocks the mind of a child, cannot be true.

Anybody can win, unless there happens to be a second entry.

Anybody who wants a tanslation of that, come up after I'm finished...

Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine.

Apparently, on New Texas, killing a politician was not "malum in se", and was "mallum prohibitorum" only to the extent that what happened to the politician was in excess of what he deserved. - H. Beam Piper, "Lone Star Planet" opa "A Planet For Texans"

Apply yourself, without delay, to the study of the law of nature.

Approximately 80% of our air pollution stems from hydrocarbons released by vegetation, so let's not go overboard in setting and enforcing tough emission standards from man-made sources.

Are you more likely to tolerate drivel than you were four years ago? I think the answer is yes. Four years of Reagan has deadened the senses against a barrage of uninterrupted nonsense.

Armaments do not, generally speaking, cause wars. This notion, the logical crux of all arguments in favor of disarmament, turns the causal relationship upside down. Actually, it is wars, or conflicts threatening war, that cause armaments, not the reverse.

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.

Arms in the hands of citizens [may] be used at individual discretion.. ...in private self-defense...

Arms like laws discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe and preserve order in the world as well as property.

As an American, you owe it to yourself to visit the nation's capital, because this is your city, where your government spends trillions of your dollars on dynamic programs such as National Intestinal Blockage Month, adminstered by your government workers in buildings that you can't go into because you don't have a pass. But you can fisit many inspirational tourist sites including... the Tomb of the Unknown Internal Revenue Service Employee Who Is Supposed to Answer the Taxpayer Assistance Hotline.

"As civil rulers, not having their duty to the people duly before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as the military forces which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow citizens, the people are confirmed by the article in their right to keep and bear arms".

As far as unwed mothers on welfare are concerned, it seems to me they must be capable of some other form of labor.

As for Clinton's attitude toward the Haitians, why he's glad to invade their country. He's perfectly willing to shoot Haitians. But let them drive cabs in New York city? Oh no.

As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air – however slight – lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.

As society has become less intolerant of drugs, people have become less willing to report drug use, even in anonymous surveys.

As the age of television progresses the Reagans will be the rule, not the exception. To be perfect for television is all a President has to be these days.

As to Jesus of Nazareth...I think the system of Morals and his Religion, as he left them to us, the best the World ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting Changes, and I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some doubts as to his divinity.

As to such laws being self-defeating, the awowed purpose of such laws as the Sullivan Act is to keep weapons out of the hands of potential criminals. You are surely aware that the sullivan act and similar acts have never accomplished anything of the sort? That gangsterism flourished under this act? Criminals are never materially handicapped by such rules; the only effect is to disarm the peaceful citizen and put him fully at the mercy of the lawless. Such rules look very pretty on paper; in practice they are as foolish and footless as the attempt of the mice to bell the cat.

As to the species of exercise, I advise the gun...it gives boldness, enterprise, and independence to the mind...Let your gun therefore be the constant companion of your walks. Never think of taking a book with you...

As to you, sir, treacherous to private friendship (for so you have been to me, and that in the day of danger) and a hypocrite in public life, the world will be puzzled to decide whether you are an apostate or an imposter, whether you have abandoned good principles or whether you ever had any.

As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.

As, for the safety of soceity, we commit honest maniacs to Bedlam, so judges should be withdrawn from their bench, whose erroneous biases are leading us to dissolution.

Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you will cease to be so.

At least I have the decency to die at 13.

At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child – miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic, and useless. Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling brats.

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.

Automobiles are free of egotism, passion, prejudice and stupid ideas about where to have dinner. They are, literally, selfless. A world designed for automobiles instead of people would have wider streets, larger dining rooms, fewer stairs to climb and no smelly, dangerous subway stations.

Avoid worriers. They are haters of liberty and loathers of individuals. They wish to politicize everything. Imagine Bill Clinton conducting your love life for you. And watch out, he may be trying to.

Banning gun shows to reduce violent crime will work about as well as banning auto shows to reduce drunken driving.

Banning guns addresses a fundamental right of all Americans to feel safe.

Banning guns is an idea whose time has come.

Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.

BBSes bring the power of freedom of the press to the average citizen. The only way to keep this power available to the average citizen is an aggressive stance against government meddling in them. The best way to do this is to do our best to make sure the government follows its own rules.

Be not so bigoted to any custom as to worship it at the expense of Truth.

Be silent, wretch, and there not here allow'd That worst of tyrants, a usurping crowd.

Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at tax collectors and miss.

Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to prosecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.

Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom of Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any body of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States.

Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom of europe. 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 bands of regular troops. - Noah Webster

Before the development of DDT, 200,000,000 people were stricken by Malaria each year, and 2,000,000 died. In Sri Lanka in 1948, there were 2,800,000 cases per year. DDT reduced this to 17 cases per year by 1963. In 1968, after US environmentalists convinced Sri Lankan officials to stop spraying DDT, there were 1,000,000 cases, 2,500,000 in 1969.

Behind every successful man is a woman, behind her is his wife.

Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation... Notwithstanding the military establishments in the several kingdoms of Europe, which are carried as far as the public resources will bear, the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.

Best of all, ther were hardly any beautiful women at the [Housing Now!] rally. I saw a journalist friend of mine in the Mall, and he and I purused this line of inquiry as assiduously as our happy private lives allow. Practically every female at the march was a bowser. "We're not being sexist here," my friend insisted. "It's not that looks matter per se. It's just that beautiful women are always on the cutting edge of social trends. Remember how many beautiful women were in the anti-war movement twenty years ago? In the yoga classes fifteen years ago? At the discos ten years ago? On Wall Street five years ago? Where the beautiful women are is where the country is headed," said my friend. "And this," he looked around him, "isn't it."

Between a republic and a democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos.

Beware Altruism. It is based on self-deception, which is the root of all evil.

Beware of little expenses; a small leak will sink a great ship.

Bill Clinton played the Social Security card in the November election. That is as cynical as anything the Republicans ever did...they lost the election both politically and ethically...

Blackstone[primary source for the Founders of the US] was firmly convinced that the subjects needed to be armed to defend themselves and to avoid dependence on professional armies, but he also expanded the role of an armed citizenry beyond the individual's own preservation to the preservation of the entire constitutional structure. He dubbed the right of the people to be armed an `auxiliary' right of the subject that served `to protect and maintain inviolate the three great and primary rights, of personal security, personal liberty, and private property'.

Both sides betrayed us on the Communications Decency Act: The Liberals claim that they are for Free Speech; yet Senator Exon, a Democrat, introduced the amendment, and Bill Clinton signed it. The Republicans claim to be for reduced regulatory burden, and getting the government off of our backs; yet the CDA could not have passed without Gingrich and Dole's support.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

Businessmen are frightened when they get a call from the IRS or EPA. By the end of my term, I want them to be frightened when they get a call from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

But if anti-self-defense advocates feel prohibiting or confiscating upward of 70 million handguns is justified to save 13 young children's lives, why does saving 381 annually not justify banning swimming pools, or at least prohibiting their proliferation? Is it possible that anti-self-defense fanatics are motivated more by hatred of guns and their owners than by saving lives?

But while they prate of economic laws, men and women are starving. We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.

By abolishing all private Property communism makes me even more dependent on theirs, on the generality or totality of society...a state of affairs which paralyzes my freedom to act and exerts sovereign authority over me.

By enabling us to make productive use of a particular raw materials, technology determines what constitutes a physical resource.

By making real the threat of civil damages against gun dealers who engage in reckless conduct, we are starting to provide a powerful incentive for dealers to...reevaluate the cost of doing business.

By providing us with new products that change the way in which we live, technology determines what constitutes a need, and hence the nature of consumer demand.

California Congresswoman Maxine Waters (Dem), when an Assemblywoman in California, said on the floor of the Assembly that although it probably wouldn't happen in her lifetime, she wanted a "ban on all guns."

California State Senator Diane Watson (Dem) said in her office she wanted to "get rid of all guns."

Can any of you seriously say the Bill of Rights could get through Congress today? It wouldn't even get out of committee.

Capital as such is not evil; it is its wrong use that is evil. Capital in some form or other will always be needed.

Capital punishment is our society's recognition of the sanctity of human life.

Capitalism is ... a social order favorable to alertness, inventiveness, discovery, and creativity. This means a social order based upon education, research, the freedom to create, and the right to enjoy the fruits of one's own creativity.

Capitalism is an art form, an Apollonian fabrication to rival nature. It is hypocritical for feminists and intellectuals to enjoy the pleasures and conveniences of capitalism while sneering at it...Everyone born into capitalism has incurred a debt to it. Give Caesar his due.

Capitalism undoubtedly has certain boils and blotches upon it, but has it as many as government? Has it as many as marriage? Has it as many as religion? I doubt it. It is the only basic institution of modern man that shows any genuine health and vigor.

Certainly 'Do as thou wilt is the whole of the law' is correct when looked at properly – in fact, it is a law of nature, not an injunction nor a permission. But it is necessary to remember that it applies to everyone – including lynch mobs. The Universe is what it is, and it never forgives mistakes – not even ignorant ones.

Chastity always takes its toll. In some it produces pimples; in others, sex laws.

Chastity: the most unnatural of the sexual perversions.

Child: My gravy got in my jello! Parent: Eat it, it all ends up in the same place anyway. Child: Yeah, but I don't have a tongue in my stomach!

Childbearing is glorified in part because women die from it.

Christ died for our sins. Dare we make his martyrdom meaningless by not committing them?

City of Las Vegas v. Moberg, 82 N.M. 626, 485 P.2d 737, at 738 (NM App. 1971): "It is our opinion that an ordinance may not deny the people the constitutionally guaranteed right to bear arms, and to that extent the ordinance under consideration is void."

City officials in Kennesaw,Ga. passed a law in 1982 requiring every household to own a firearm, Householders with criminal records or religious belief were exempted, and no real effort was made to enforce the law. An early report claimed that the residential burglary rate had fallen 89 percent in the first seven months after the law took effect. There were no murders in Kennesaw during that period.

Civilization is hooped together, brought under a rule, under the semblance of peace by manifold illusion.

Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.

Clinton poses as our national therapist – sympathizing with our every anxiety and offering pseudosolutions to all of them – even while studiously ignoring genuine problems of the federal government, led by his inattention to Medicare and Social Security. Clinton is evasive because he has enormous confidence in his command of language. He thinks he can seduce almost anyone with words. As a result, he constantly disguises disagreeable realities and overstates modest accomplishments. Even his most casual claims need to be tested for truth and relevance...His blab is not his bond.

Clinton's an unusually good liar. Unusually good. Do you realize that?

Clinton, the man who smoked but didn't inhale, lives and breathes yes and no. He talks right and governs (when he can) left. He talks tough and governs soft. He is, in short, the perfect president for our time. And if he cuts a few ethical corners too, so what?

Close down congress, fire everyone who works for Congress, close down the military, close down foreign aid, close down everything else, and by the year 2012 entitlements and the interest on the debt alone will still be greater than the entire income of the Federal government.

Collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrranical minority such powers as the spanish inquisition never dreamt of.

College isn't the place to go for ideas.

Communism is inequality...Communism is exploitation of the strong by the weak.

Communism is like one big phone company.

Communism is not love. Communism is a hammer which we use to crush the enemy.

Communism is the opiate of the intellectuals [with] no cure except as a guillotine might be called a cure for dandruff.

Communist countries have not abolished profits, they have merely transferred all profits to the state, which typically uses them to build a huge military apparatus at the expense of consumer production.

Communist regimes were not some unfortunate aberration, some historical deviation from a socialist ideal. They were the ultimate expression, unconstrained by democratic and electoral pressures, of what socialism is all about.... In short, the state [is] everything and the individual nothing.

Communists are people who fancied that they had an unhappy childhood.

Communists, Nazis, and more than a few democratically elected leaders of the free world have told us in plain language that their loathsome acts were justified by felicific calculus – the most good for the greatest number.

Congress have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birthright of an American... The unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state government, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people.

CONGRESS shall never disarm any citizen unless such as are or have been in Actual Rebellion.

Congressmen should make no law which will not have its full operation on themselves and their friends, as well as the great mass of society.

Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.

"Conservatives are accustomed to being called fascists and well prepared to defend themselves on that ground. Liberals are used to being called socialists. Those labels can be switched, however, and remain valid and instructive. It also catches them completely unprepared."

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

Constitutional rights may not be infringed simply because the majority of the people choose that they be.

Conventions no longer even determine who's going to run for president. Unvoted-in primaries at weird times of the year in states you've never even heard of take care of that.

Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.

Corruption, the most infallible symptom of constitutional liberty.

Courtroom - A place where Jesus Christ and Judas Iscariot would be equals, with the betting odds favoring Judas.

Crack is ruining America's inner cities. Crack is killing policement, overburdening courts, and filling jails beyond their capacity. Crack is devastating thousands of families. Crack is putting the lives and well-being of our children at risk.

Crime is naught but misdirected energy.

Crimes are those acts by which one man harms the person or property of another. Vices are are simply the errors which a man makes in his search after his own happiness.

Criminal lawyers...or is that redundant?

Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.

Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.

Delusions are often functional. A mother's opinions about her child's beauty, intelligence, goodness, et cetera ad nauseum, keep her from drowning them at birth.

Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word; equality. But notice the difference: While democracy seeks equality in Liberty, socialism seeks equality in constraint and servitude.

Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number.

Democracy is based on the assumption that a million men are wiser than one man. How's that again? I missed something. Autocracy is based on the assumption that one man is wiser than a million men. Let's play that over again too. Who decides?

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.

Democracy, n.: A government of the masses. Authority derived through mass meeting or any other form of direct expression. Results in mobocracy. Attitude toward property is communistic... negating property rights. Attitude toward law is that the will of the majority shall regulate, whether it is based upon deliberation or governed by passion, prejudice, and impulse, without restraint or regard to consequences. Result is demagogism, license, agitation, discontent, anarchy.

Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably made for better things.

Discrimination charges were recently filed against the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) by Black special agents belonging to the agency. The class-action lawsuit was filed by lawyers of 15 agents on behalf of the 180 other Black agents in the bureau which oversees gun, alcohol and tobacco laws. The charges filed allege that the agency discriminates in hiring, promotions, performance evaluations, discipline, assignments, awards, training and other personnel practices.

Do you agree with Sonny, or Cher?

Does it follow that I reject all authority? Perish the thought. In the matter of boots, I defer to the authority of the bootmaker.

Dogs could not be used in the streets in the manner many Jews were treated. One circumstance among others put an end to the ill-usage of the Jews. About the year 1787 Daniel Mendoza, a Jew, became a celebrated boxer and set up a school to teach the art of boxing as a science. The art soon spread among young Jews and they became generally expert at it. The consequence was in a very few years seen and felt too. It was no longer safe to insult a Jew unless he was an old man and alone.

Don't do drugs because if you do drugs you'll go to prison, and drugs are really expensive in prison.

Don't join the book burners. Don't think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed.

Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error of judgment.

Drug prohibition advocates like former "drug czar" Bill Bennent claim that drug use can be stamped out if only America has the guts to become a police state.

Early to bed and early to rise is a bad rule for anyone who wishes to become acquainted with our most prominent and influential people.

Ecology is rather like sex-every new generation likes to think they were the first to discover it.

Economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life which can be separated from teh rest; it is the control of the means for all our ends. And whoever has control of the means must also determine which ends are to be served, which values are to be rated higher and which lower – in short, what men should believe and strive for.

Economists state their GNP growth projections to the nearest tenth of a percentage point to prove they have a sense of humor.

Education is a method whereby one acquires a higher grade of prejudices.

Elizabeth Taylor is pre-feminist woman. This is the source of her continuing greatness and relevance. She wields the sexual power that feminism cannot explain and has tried to destroy. Through stars like Taylor, we sense the World-disordering impact of legendary women like Delilah, Salome, and Helen of Troy. Feminism has tried to dismiss the femme fatale as a misogynist libel, a hoary cliché. But the femme fatale expresses women's ancient and eternal control of the sexual realm. The specter of the femme fatale stalks all men's relations with women.

Entrenched belief is never altered by the facts.

Environmentalists don't give a damn about the environment. All they are concerned with is getting more bike paths and Volvos.

Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.

Equality, rightly understood as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences; wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism.

Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.

Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there.

Even nowadays a man can't step up and kill a woman without feeling just a bit unchivalrous...

Everthing human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow.

Every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early and the human race come to an end.

Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.

Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.

Every free man has a right to the use of the press, so he has to the use of his arms.

Every genuine boy is a rebel and an anarch. If he were allowed to develop according to his own instincts, his own inclinations, society would undergo such a radical transformation as to make the adult revolutionary cower and cringe.

Every gun that is fired, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive. Has any act of selfishness ever equalled the carnage perpetrated by disciples of altruism?

Every secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity.

Every State has a natural right in cases not within the compact (casus non faederis) to nullify of their own authority all assumptions of power by others within their limits. Without this right, they would be under the dominion, absolute and unlimited, of whosoever might exercise this right of judgment for them.

Everyone is born with genius, but most people only keep it a few minutes.

Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.

Everything the government touches turns to crap; It's called the Reverse Midas Touch.

Experience should teach us to be the most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficial. 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.

Experience witnesseth that ecclesiastical establishments, instead of maintaining the purity and efficacy of religion, have had a contrary operation. During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable...A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or never had) the capacity for clear and realistic thought. He is not a mere ass: he is actually ill.

Faith.....Belief without evidence inwhat is told by one sho speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.

False is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand real advantages for one imaginary or trifling inconvenience; that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it; that has no remedy for evils, except destruction. The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature.

Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.

Farm policy, although it's complex, can be explained. What it can't be is believed. No cheating spouse, no teen with a wrecked family car, no mayor of Washington, D.C., videotaped in flagrante delicto has ever come up with anything as farfetched as U.S. farm policy.

Farming looks easy when your plow is a pencil and you're a thousand miles from a cornfield.

Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.

FDA employees are serious about feat. We pay these people to panic about an iota of rodent hair in our chili, even when the recipe calls for it.

Fear is the foundation of most governments.

Feminists say 60 percent of the country's wealth is in the hands of women. They're letting men hold the other 40 percent because their handbags are full.

Few are ready to recognize that the rise of fascism and naziism was not a reaction against the socialist trend of the preceeding period but a necessary outcome of those tendencies. This is a truth which most people were unwilling to see even when the similarities of many of the repellent features of the internal regimes in comunitst Russia and National Socialist Germany were widely recognized.

Few productive class Americans understand (yet) that they stagger under taxes five times greater than those endured by a medieval European serf. What they do understand is that the harder they work the less they have left – and the less they have to look forward to.

Firearms stand next in importance to the Constitution itself. They are the American people's liberty teeth and keystone under independence. From the hour the Pilgrims landed, to the present day, events, occurrences and tendencies prove that to ensure peace, security and happiness, the rifle and pistol are equally indispensable. The very atmosphere of firearms everywhere restrains evil interference - they deserve a place of honor with all that's good.

First, the constitution ought to secure a genuine and guard against a select militia, by providing that the militia shall always be kept well organized, armed, and disciplined, and include, according to the past and general usage of the states, all men capable of bearing arms; and that all regulations tending to render this general militia useless and defenseless, by establishing select corps of militia, or distinct bodies of military men, not having permanent interests and attachments in the community to be avoided.

Football combines the two worst things about America: it is violence punctuated by committee meetings.

For a pure Marxist society to long endure, voluntary exchange between individuals must be abolished.

For America to truly arrive as an integrated society, we have to begin behaving as though we are all Americans; that we have a culture ourselves, and that all of the various cultures that compose our great nation should work toward blending into a harmonious society.

For the people in government, rather than the people who pester it, Washington is an early-rising, hard-working city. It is a popular delusion that the government wastes vast amounts of money through inefficiency and sloth. Enormous effort and elaborate planning are required to waste this much money.

Former Soviet Foreign Minister Aleksandr Bessmertnykh told a conference at Princeton University that programs such as the Strategic Defense Initiative accelerated the decline of the Soviet Union.

France had Sullifan-type laws. When the Nazis came, the invaders had only to consult the registration lists at the local gendarmerie in order to round up all the weapons in a district. Whether the authorities be invaders or merely local tyrants, the effect of such laws is to place the individual at the mercy of the state, unable to resist.

Free trade is not a principle, it is an expedient.

Freedom can exist only in the society of knowledge. Without learning, men are incapable of knowing their rights...

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction-we didn't pass it on to our children in our bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same...We the people must unite, those who have been elected to positions of public trust must show leadership and political courage. My friends the time has come for a second American Revolution.

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.

Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.

Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs have in Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be empowered. It's not entitlement. An entitleement is what people on welfare get, and how free are they? It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights – the `right' to education, the `'right' to health care, the `right' to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery – hay and a barn for human cattle. There's only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.

Freedom is not something that anyone can be given; freedom is something people take and people are as free as they want to be.

Freedom is not synonymous with an easy life.... There are many difficult things about freedom: It does not give you safety, it creates moral dilemmas for you; it requires self-discipline; it imposes great responsibilities; but such is the nature of Man and in such consists his glory and salvation.

Freedom is the by-product of economic surplus.

Freedom of the press is one of the great bulwarks of liberty, and can never be restrained but by despotic governments.

Freedom, morality, and the human dignity of the individual consists precisely in this; that he does good not because he is forced to do so, but because he freely conceives it, wants it, and loves it.

Frequent punishments are always a sign of weakness or laziness on the part of a government.

From a psychological point of view, 'sins' are indispensable in any society organized by priests; they are the actual levers of power, the priest lives on sins; he needs the commission of sins.

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.

From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend reading it.

George [Bush] ran one of the great room-temparature political campaigns of all time, saying, basically, "American's had a great eight years." Maybe a vague president and an incompetent and somewhat corrupt administration is what the nation "needs."

Germans who wish to use firearms should join the SS or the SA - ordinary citizens don't need guns, as their having guns doesn't serve the State.

Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.

Give a small boy a hammer and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.

Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.

Give women the vote, and in five years there will be a crushing tax on bachelors.

Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.

Gloria: Did you know handguns killed 1,500 people last yar? Archie Bunker: Well, little goil, wouldja rather they was pushed out of windows?

Go into the street and give one man a lecture on morality and another a dollar and see which will respect you most.

God is a Republican, and Santa Claus is a Democrat.

God is an elderly...stern fellow, patriarchal rather than paternal and a great believer in rules and regulations. He holds men strictly accountable for their actions. He has little apparent concern for the material well-being of the disadvantaged...God is difficult. God is unsentimental...

God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos: He will set them above their betters.

God made an idiot for practice, then he made a school board.

God wanted to have a holiday, so He asked St. Peter for suggestions on where to go. "Why not go to Jupiter?" asked St. Peter. "No, too much gravity, too much stomping around," said God. "Well, how about Mercury?" "No, it's too hot there." "Okay," said St. Peter, "What about Earth?" "No," said God, "They're such horrible gossips. When I was there 2000 years ago, I had an affair with a Jewish woman, and they're still talking about it."

Good government is that which delivers the citizen from the risk of being done out of his life and property too arbitrarily and violently - one that relieves him sufficiently from the barbaric business of guarding them to enable him to engage in gentler, more dignified and more agreeable undertakings...

Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.

Government is a health hazard. Governments have killed many more people than cigarettes or unbuckled seat belts ever have.

Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.

Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.

Government is an evil; it is only the thoughtlessness and vices of men that make it a necessary evil. When all men are good and wise, government will of itself decay.

Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient. The objections which have been brought against a standing army, and they are many and weighty, and deserve to prevail, may also at last be brought against a standing government.

Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a trouble-some servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.

Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.

Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.

Great Socialist statesmen aren't made, they're still-born.

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.

Green politics at its worst amounts to a sort of Zen fascism; less extreme, it denounces growth and seeks to stop the world so that we can all get off.

Greenpeace fund-raisers on the subject of global warming are not much different than tribal wizards on the subject of lunar eclipses. "Oh no, the Night Wolf is eating the Moon Virgin. Give me some silver and I'll make him spit her out."

Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. When you give up that force, you are ruined.

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 inevitably ruined.

Guns were 3 times as likely to be used defensively as aggressively and they thwarted crime far more often than they abetted it.

Haggis, n.: Haggis is a kind of stuff black pudding eaten by the Scots and considered by them to be not only a delicacy but fit for human consumption. The minced heart, liver and lungs of a sheep, calf or other animal's inner organs are mixed with oatmeal, sealed and boiled in maw in the sheep's intestinal stomach-bag and ... Excuse me a minute ...

Half the American people never read a newspaper. Half never vote for the President. One hopes they are the same half.

Handguns should be outlawed. Our organization will probably take this stand in time but we are not anxious to rouse the opposition before we get the other legislation passed.

Hardly a pure science, history is closer to animal husbandry than it is to mathematics, in that it involves selective breeding. The principal difference between the husbandryman and the historian is that the former breeds sheep or cows or such, and the latter breeds (assumed)facts. The husbandryman uses his skills to enrich the future; the historian uses his to enrich the past. Both are usually up to their ankles in bullshit.

Have we the means of resisting disciplined armies, when our only defense, the militia, is put in the hands of Congress?

Having discovered the possibility that other creatures could be used for sexual intercourse, early man was likely to have made many such attempts ... though it is doubtful that he was so sexually carnivorous as the Christian and Jewish Adam, who, rabbinical interpreters of the Old Testament tell us, had intercourse with every creature before God finally hit upon the idea of woman and created Eve.

he Democrats seem to basically be nicer people, but they have demonstrated time and again that they have the management skills of celery. They're the kind of people who'd stop to help you change a flat, but would somehow manage to set your car on fire. I'd be reluctant to trust them with a Cuisinart, let alone the economy.

He is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.

He may look like an idiot and talk like an idiot but don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot.

He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.

He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.

He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.

He who makes an attempt to enslave me therefore puts himself into a state of war with me.

Here in America, we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionaries and rebels – men and women who dared to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.

History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid.

History does not record at anytime a religion that has a rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help. But, like dandruff, most people do have a religion and seem to spend considerable time and pleasure fiddling with it.

History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom.

History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all alternatives.

Homicide Rate is 49% higher in the (gun) restrictive states (10.1 per 100,000) than in the states with less restrictive CCW laws (6.8 per 100,000).

Homosexuality is not "normal." On the contrary, it is a challenge to the norm; therein rests its eternally revolutionary character. Note I do not call it a challenge to the *idea* of the norm...Nature exists, whether academics like it or not. And in nature, procreation is the single, relentless rule. That is the norm. Our sexual bodies were designed for reproduction. Penis fits vagina: no fancy linguistic game-playing can change that basic fact. However, my libertarian view, here as in regard to abortion, is that we have not only the right, but the obligation to defy nature's tyranny. The highest human identity consists precisely in such assertions of freedom against material limitation.

Honest statesmanship is the employment of individual meanness for the public good.

How can you expect to govern a country that has two hundred and forty-six kinds of cheese?

Human beings were invented by water as a means of transporting itself from place to place.

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.

Humility is no substitue for a good personality.

I am a journalist and, under the modern journalist's code of Olympian objectivity (and total purity of motive), I am absolved of responsibility. We journalists don't have to step on roaches. All we have to do is turn on the kitchen light and watch the critters scurry.

I am a stereotypical liberal. Before I undertook this study, I was a pro-control academic who believed instinctively that people should not have guns. Gradually, I came to see that the best available evidence did not support the case that is usually made for gun control: that guns automatically lead to violence. In fact, victims are less likely to get injured or lose property if they have a gun.

I am against government by crony.

I am as strong a gun control advocate as can be found among the criminologists in this country...What troubles me is the article by Gary Kleck and Mark Gertz. The reason I am troubled is that they have provided an almost clear-cut case of methodologically sound research in support of something I have theoretically opposed for years, namely, the use of a gun in defense against a criminal perpetrator...I have to admit my admiration for the care and caution expressed in this article and this research...

I am for Socialism, disarmament, and ultimately for abolishing the state itself as an instrument of violence and compulsion. I seek social ownership of property... Communism is the goal.

I am honored today to begin my first term as the Governor of Baltimore-that is Maryland.

I am not nor have I ever been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races...I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, not to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together in terms of social and political equality.

I am running because I believe this nation needs someone in the White House who can break the old patterns, someone who can unlock the stranglehold that the political class has on American life.

I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people, except for a few public officials.

I believe in Liberty...the first thing and the last thing. Wo long as it prevails the show is thrilling and stupendous; the moment it fails the show is a dull and dirty farce.

I believe that professional wrestling is clean and everything else in the world is fixed.

I believe the states can best govern our home concerns and the federal government our foreign ones.

I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurptions

I can never pass by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York without thinking of it not as a gallery of living portraits but as a cemetery of tax-deductible wealth.

I can remember the antediluvian age of dope hysteria, when the occasional bebop musician's ownership of a Mary Jane cigarette threatened to turn every middle-class American teenager into a sex-crazed car thief.

I can retain neither respect nor affection for a Government which has been moving from wrong to wrong in order to defend its immorality.

I conclude that the CDA is unconstitutional and that the First Amendment denies Congress the power to regulate protected speech on the Internet.

I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.

I dislike arguments of any kind. They are always vulgar, and often convincing.

I do have an axe to grind...I want to be the little subversive person in television.

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.

I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature.

I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure-that is all that agnosticism means.

I do not want to live under a philanthropy. I do not want to be taken care of by the government...We do not want a benevolent government. We want a free and a just government.

I do want to say I think Clinton is a liar. There's no question about that in my mind. And he would say anything or do anything.

I don't care if it's duplicitous[a lie], as long as it gets done.

I don't make jokes, I just watch the government and report the facts.

I don't understand all this hand-wringing. ... I don't understand why everybody is going around like Chicken Little: 'Oh, the sky is falling!' We have problems in Medicare because everybody's living.

I don't want to achieve immortality by being inducted into baseball's Hall of Fame. I want to achieve immortality by not dying.

I don't want to go for confiscation, but that is where we are going.

I exclaimed, "What are you doing?" and escaped from Mr. Clinton’s reach by walking away from him. I was extremely upset and confused and I did not know what to do. I tried to distract Mr. Clinton by asking him about his wife and her activities, and I sat down at the end of the sofa nearest the door. Mr. Clinton then walked over to the sofa, lowered his trousers and underwear, exposed his penis (which was erect) and told me to "kiss it".

I have almost reached the regrettable concludion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Klu Klux Klanner, but the white moderate.

I have had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn't it.

I have known more men destroyed by the desire to have wife and child and to keep them in comfort than I have seen destroyed by drink and harlots.

I have learned a great deal from Marxism, as I do not hesitate to admit. The difference between them and myself is that I have really put into practice what these peddlers and pen-pushers have timidly begun.... I had only to develop logically what Social Democracy repeatedly failed in because of its attempt to realize its evolution within the framework of democracy. National Socialism is what Marxism might have been if it could have broken its absurd and artificial ties with a democratic order.

I have often thought that if a rational Fascist dictatorship were to exist, then it would choose the American system.

I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition (Christianity) one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology.

I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either.

I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated.

I heartily accept the motto, "That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted upon more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe – "That government is best which governs not at all"; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.

I know all those people. I have friendly, social, and criminal relations with the whole lot of them.

I know that I am leaving the winning side for the losing side, but it is better to die on the losing side than to live under Communism.

I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.

I like to think of my behavior in the sixties as a "learning experience." Then again, I like to think of anything stupid I've done as a "learning experience." It makes me feel less stupid.

I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend, to the death, your right to say it.

I must say that I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a book.

I once shook hands with Pat Boone and my whole right side sobered up.

I pass the test that says a man who isn't a socialist at 20 has no heart, and a man who is a socialist at 40 has no head.

I place economy among the first and important virtues, and public debt as the greatest of dangers. To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt...If we can prevent the government from wasting the labours of the people under the pretense of caring for them, they will be happy.

I place economy among the most important vitues, and public debt as the greatest of dangers to be feared. To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. If we run into such debts, we must be taxed in our meat and drink, in our necessities and in our comforts, in our labor and in our amusements. If we can prevent the government from wasting the labor of the people, under the pretense of caring for them, they will be happy.

I regret to say that we of the F.B.I. are powerless to act in cases of oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate commerce.

I reject the grim notion of the Washington Politicians that America must learn to make do with less – that the American people have spent too much and now the American people must pay, that the wagon is heavy and crowded and now is the time to start throwing people off. And I reject the equally grim notion that the American people must constantly pay in taxes for the mistakes the politicians make in Washington – such as a deficit, which despite years of bluster and two of the largest tax hikes in history – continues to grow.

I say... to the opinion of those who consider the grant of the treaty-making power as boundless: If it is, then we have no Constitution. If it has bounds, they can be no others than the definitions of the powers which that instrument gives.

I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.

I see,... and with the deepest affliction, the rapid strides with which the federal branch of our government is advancing towards the usurpation of all the rights reserved to the States and the consolidation in itself of all powers, foreign and domestic; and that, too, by constructions which, if legitimate, leave no limits to their power... It is but too evident that the three ruling branches of [the Federal government] are in combination to strip their colleagues, the State authorities, of the powers reserved by them, and to exercise themselves all functions foreign and domestic.

I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.

I showed my appreciation of my native land in the usual Irish way by getting out of it as soon as I possibly could.

I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means – except by getting off his back.

I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.

I think every good Christian ought to kick Falwell right in the ass.

I used to think that I was poor. Then they told me I wasn't poor, I was needy. Then they told me it was self-defeating to think of myself as needy, I was deprived. Then they told me deprived was a bad image, I was underpriveledged. Then they told me underpriveledged was overused, I was disadvantaged. I still don't have a dime. But I sure have a great vocabulary.

I want people to be able to get what they need to live: enough food, a place to live, and an education for their children. Government does not provide these as well as private charities and businesses.

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.

I wasn't kissing her. I was whispering in her mouth.

I wish...to see maintained that wholesome distribution of powers established by the Constitution for the limitation of both [the State and General governments], and never to see all offices transferred to Washington where, further withdrawn from the eyes of the people, they may more secretly be bought and sold as at market.

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.

I would say of the Great Society programs of the Johnson years, all of the federal programs that have concentrated on low-income areas, what I tried to do...what has been done by other leaders coming after me, in general the failures have been abject and almost unanimous.

I wouldn't mind dying – it's that business of having to stay dead that scares the shit out of me.

I'm going to Iowa for an award. Then I'm appearing at Carnegie Hall, it's sold out. Then I'm sailing to France to be honored by the French government – I'd give it all up for one erection.

I'm in favor or legalizing drugs. According to my value system, if people want to kill themselves, they have every right to do so. Most of the harm that comes from drugs is because they are illegal.

I'm not going to have some reporters pawing through our papers. We are the president.

I'm personally all for taxing guns to pay for health care coverage.

"I'm very suspicious of the President's language about the American economy being so solid when I look and see the falling wages and falling salaries and the economic insecurity and anxiety." – Harvard Professor Cornell West, Commenting on Clinton's claim that his economic plan is aiding black voters, "NBC Nightly News," 7/10/96

I've gone into hundreds of (fortune-tellers' parlors), and have been told thousands of things, but nobody ever told me I was a policewoman getting ready to arrest her.

Idealism is the despot of thought, just as politics is the despot of will.

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.

Ideology, politics and journalism, which luxuriate in failure, are impotent in the face of hope and joy.

If "everyone knows" such-and-such, then it ain't so...

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free...it expects what never was and never will be.

If a politician found he had cannibals in his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.

If a ruler transgresses the peoples' rights, the people are no longer subordinate to him.

If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact the definition of a peaceful revolution, if any such thing is possible.

If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's life, she will choose to save the infant's life without even considering if there are men on base.

If Bill Clinton can get above 60% in the polls, he can start dating again...

If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be – A Christian.

If Clinton wins the 1996 election and Democrats reign in the House and Senate, what are the chances of a balanced budget, an expansion of NAFTA and cuts in federal jobs and regulations? Approximately nil.

If drugs are criminal, only criminals will have drugs.

If elected President, I will balance the budget in five years.

If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an outright ban, picking up every one of them: "Mr. and Mrs. America, turn 'em all in," I would have done it. I *could not* do that. The votes weren't here.

If I were a Brazilian without land or money or the means to feed my children, I would be burning the rain forest too.

If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.

If it can't be expressed in figures, it is not science; it is opinion.

If Jimmy Carter had been re-elected in 1980, if Walter Mondale had won the presidency in 1984, if Michael Dukakis had been elected in 1988, the Berlin Wall would still be standing. And all we marvel at in the world today would be a wishful dream.

If law school is so hard to get through...how come there are so many lawyers?

If Los Angeles is not the one authentic rectum of civilization, then I am no anatomist. Any time you want to go out again and burn it down, count me in.

If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives us is a lantern on the sterb, which shines only on the waves behind us!

"If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern ...[no] controls on government would be necessary...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."

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 moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently deisgned by nature, whom she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breath, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.

If no member requires a healing, then a fake healing -must-be-held-...

If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he next comes to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination.

If once [the people] become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, Judges and Governors, shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions.

If people are free only to make careful, reasonable, fully considered choices that they will never regret, they are not free at all.

If the American people really tire of democracy and want to make a trial of Fascism, I shall be the last person to object. But if that is their mood, then they had better proceed toward their aim by changing the Constitution and not by forgetting it.

If the average man is made in God's image, then a man such as Beethoven or Aristotle is plainly superior to God, and so God may be jealous of him, and eager to see his superiority perish with his bodily frame. All animal breeders know how difficult it is to maintain a fine strain. The universe seems to be in a conspiracy to encourage the endless reproduction of peasants and Socialists, but a subtle and mysterious opposition stands eternally against the reproduction of philosophers.

If the federal government had been around when the Creator was putting His hand to this state, Indiana wouldn't be here. It'd still be waiting for an environmental impact statement.

If the function of this Court is to be essentially no different from that of a legislature, if the considerations governing constitutional construction are to be substantially those that underlie legislation, then indeed judges should not have life tenure and they should be made directly responsible to the electorate.

If the legislature clearly misinterprets a Constitutional provision, the frequent repetition of the wrong will not create a right.

If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail

If the price I must pay for my freedom is to acknowledge that the government was granted the power to infringe on them, then I am not free.

If the rain forest disappears, we'll have to get our air in little bottles from the Evian company, and biodiversity will vanish, and pretty soon we'll have only about one kind of animal...The indigenous peoples will all become exdigenous and move to L.A.; and this will be tough on them because it's hard to use a car phone when you've got a big wooden disk in your lower lip. Furthermore, we'll never discover all the marvelous properties of the various herbal treasures that are found in the rain forest, such as Ben & Jerry's Rainforest Crunch.

If the Soviet Union let another political party come into existence, they would still be a one-party state, because everybody would join the other party.

If there is one profoundly reactionary sector in Latin America, it is the leftist intellectuals. They are a people without memory. I have never heard one of them admit he made a mistake. Marxism has become an intellectual vice. It is the superstition of the entire century.

If there's anything a public servant hates to do, it's something for the public.

If they were armed, they would be a resource against great oppressions...If the laws of the Union were oppressive, they could not carry them into effect, if the people were possessed of proper means of defense.

If those in government are heedless of reason, the people must patiently submit to Bondage, or stand upon their own Defence; which if they are enabled to do, they shall never be put upon it, but their Swords may grow rusty in their hands; for that Nation is surest to live in Peace, that is most capable of making War; and a Man that hath a Sword by his side, shall have least occasion to make use of it.

If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.

If we are safe today, it is because America has stood with us. If we are to remain safe tomorrow, it will be because America remains powerful and self-confident. When, therefore, the Americans face difficulties, we need to say to them more clearly: "We are with you...."

If we decide to take this level of business creating ability nationwide, we'll all be plucking chickens for a living.

If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.

If we have learned anything in the past quarter century, it is that we cannot Federalize Virtue.

If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquillity 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.

If you are young and you drink a great deal it will spoil your health, slow your mind, make you fat – in other words, turn you into an adult.

If you attack stupidity you attack an entrenched interest with friends in government and every walk of public life, and you will make small progress against it.

If you can cut the people off from their history, then they can be easily persuaded.

If you do not regard feminism with an uplifting sense of the gloriousness of woman's industrial destiny, or in the way, in short, that it is prescribed, by the rules of the political publicist, that you should, that will be interpreted by your opponents as an attack on woman.

If you don't like yourself, you -can't- like other people.

If you elect me governor, I promise not to abandon you in a run for president in 1992.

If you live in rock and roll, as I do, you see the reality of sex, of male lust and women being aroused by male lust. It attracts women. It doesn't repel them.

If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free.

If your life at night is good, you think you have everything.

Ignorance, forgetfulness, or contempt of the rights of man are the only causes of public misfortunes and of the corruption of governments.

Imagine if all of life were determined by majority rule. Every meal would be a pizza. Every pair of pants, even those in a Brooks Brothers suit, would be stone-washed denim. Celebrity diet and exercise books would be the only thing on the shelves at the library. And – since women are a majority of the population – we'd all be married to Mel Gibson.

Immorality: The morality of those who are having a better time.

Implicit faith belongs to fools; and truth is comprehended by examining principles.

In 1950, the average family of four paid 2% of its earnings in Federal Taxes. Today it pays 24%.

In a field of Nixonians, [Steve Forbes] will offer some Reaganite hope. A centerpiece will be the flat tax - to spur growth, and to clean out the Beltway lobbies that plumb the tax code for advantage.

In a generation, those who are now children will have lost their taste for alcohol.

In a mature society, "civil servant" is the semantic equivilent of "civil -master-".

In a polity, each citizen is to possess his own arms, which are not supplied or owned by the state.

In America sex is an obsession, in other parts of the world it is a fact.

In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.

In comparative terms, there's no poverty in America by a long shot. Heritage Foundation political scientist Robert Rector has worked up figures showing that when the official U.S. measure of poverty was developed in 1963, a poor American family had an income twenty-nine times greater than the average per capita income in the rest of the world. An individual American could make more money than 93 percent of the other people on the planet and still be considered poor.

In Europe, when tobacco was first introduced, it was immediately banned. In Turkey, if you got caught with tobacco, you had your nose slit. China and Russia imposed the death penalty for possession of tobacco.

In every government on earth is some trace of human weakness, some germ of corruption and degeneracy, which cunning will discover, and wickedness insensibly open, cultivate, and improve. Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves therefore are its only safe depositories. And to render even them safe their minds must be improved to a certain degree.

In general, the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one class of the citizens to give to the other.

In July 1988 I attended the specious, entropic, criminally trivial, boring, stupid Democratic National Convention

In our brief national history we have shot four of our presidents, worried five of them to death, impeached one and hounded another out of office. And when all else fails, we hold an election and assassinate their character.

In our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either.

In political economy, I think Smith's Wealth of Nations the best book extant; in the science of government, Montesquieu's Spirit of Laws is generally recommended.

In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.

In reality, the animal rights movement has elevated ignorance about the natural world almost to the level of a philosophical principle.

In recent years it has been suggested that the Second Amendment protects the "collective" right of states to maintain militias, while it does not protect the right of "the people" to keep and bear arms... The phrase "the people" meant the same thing in the Second Amendment as it did in the First, Fourth, Ninth and Tenth Amendments – that is, each and every free person.

In recent years...the old apprehensions of the unforseen consequences of socialism have once more been strongly voiced from the most unexpected quarters. Observer after observer, in spite of the contrary expectation with which he approached the subject, has been impressed with the extraordinary similarity in many respects of the conditions under "fascism" and "communism".

In South Carolina, Bill Clinton is as popular as AIDS.

In the end we beat them with Levi 501 jeans. Seventy-two years of Communist indoctrination and propaganda was drowned out by a three-ounce Sony Walkman. A huge totalitarian system...has been brought to its knees because nobody wants to wear Bulgarian shoes...Now they're lunch, and we're number one on the planet.

In the fight between you and the world, back the world.

In the other direction I suggest to them, immerse yourself in the Founding Fathers. These people thought a long time about the nature of being human, about the problems of power, about how to organize a free society so it could sustain freedom. And if you can combine the two, you can begin to create an opportunity for every American to participate in ways that will prove to be quite remarkable.

In the words of the Father of his Country, we declare that..."the constitution which at any time exists, till changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole people, is sacredly obligatory upon all." Rhode Island Declaration of Rights Article I, Section I

In those parts of the world where learning and science have prevailed, miracles have ceased; but in those parts of it as are barbarous and ignorant, miracles are still in vogue.

Incentives to fail. [Description of what the welfare system provides]

Inflation is as violent as a mugger, as frightening as an armed robber and as deadly as a hit man.

Inflation is taxation without legislation. Comment on President Carter's plan to raise taxes to reduce inflation, 1979

Information is the oxygen of the modern age. It seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across the electrified borders.

Injustice fights with two weapons, force and fraud..A common form of injustice is chicanery, that is, an over-subtle, in fact a fraudulent construction of the law.

Instead of being better, Stalinism is worse than fascism, more ruthless, barbarous, unjust, immoral, anti-democratic, unredeemed by any hope or scruple...it is better described as superfascist.

Instead of being better, Stalinism is worse than fascism, more ruthless, barbarous, unjust, immoral, anti-democratic, unredeemed by any hope or scruple ...it is better described as superfascist...and...Stalinism /is/ socialism, in the sense of being an inevitable although unforseen political accompaniment of the nationalization and collectivization which he had relied upon as part of this plan for erecting a classless society.

Interest rates, inflation, and unemployment fell faster under Reagan than they did immediately before or after his presidency.

Ireland has the honor of being the only country which never persecuted the Jews – because whe never let any in.

Iron rusts from disuse, stagnant water loses its purity, and in cold weather becomes frozen, even so does inaction sap the vigors of the mind.

Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!

Is marijuana addictive? Yes, in the sense that most of the really pleasant things in life are worth endlessly repeating.

Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced an inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth.

It ain't those parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it's the parts that I do understand.

It can never be too often repeated that the time for fixing every essential right on a legal basis is while our rulers are honest and ourselves united. From the conclusion of [their] war [for independence, a nation begins] going down hill. It will not then be necessary to resort every moment to the people for support. They will be forgotten, therefore, and their rights disregarded. They will forget themselves but in the sole faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting to effect a due respect for their rights. The shackles, therefore, which shall not be knocked off at the conclusion of [that] war will remain on [them] long, will be made heavier and heavier, till [their] rights shall revive or expire in a convulsion.

It can never be too often repeated, that the time for fixing every essential right on a legal basis is while our rulers are honest, and ourselves united.

It could probably be shown be facts and figures that there is no distinctively native American criminal class – except Congress.

It doesn't matter what's true; it only matters what people believe is true...you are what the media define you to be. [Greenpeace] became a myth generating machine.

It goes without saying that only a planned economy can make intelligent use of all a people's strength.

It has been said that politics is the second oldest profession. I have learned that it bears a striking resemblance to the first.

It has been said that though god cannot alter the past, historians can.

It has been the acknowledged right of every Marxist scholar to read into Marx the particular meaning that he himself prefers and to treat all others with indignation.

It has ever been the scheme of government to keep the people ignorant of their rights.

It is a general popular error to suppose the loudest complainers for the public to be the most anxious for its welfare.

It is a lucky thing for the American moralist that our country has always existed in a kind of time-vacuum: We have no public memory of anything that happened before last Tuesday. No one in Washington today recalls what happened during the years alcohol was forbidden to the people by a Congress that thought it had a divine mission to stamp out Demon Rum – launching, in the process, the greatest crime wave in the country;s history, causing thousands of deaths from bad alcohol, and creating a general (and persisting) contempt among the citizenry for the laws of the United States.

It is agreed that the end of government is the good and ease of the people in the secure enjoyment of their rights without oppression. But it must be remembered that the rich are people as well as the poor, that they have rights as well as others, that they have as clear and sacred a right to their large property as others have to theirs which is smaller, that oppression to them is as possible and as wicked as to others.

It is almost impossible systematically to constitue a natural moral law. Nature has no principles. She furnishes us with no reason to believe that human life is to be respected. Nature, in her indifference, makes no disctinction between good and evil.

It is asserted by most respectable writers upon our government,that a well-regulated militia, composed of the yeomanry of the country, have ever been considered as the bulwark of a free people. Tyrants have never placed any confidence on a militia composed of freemen

It is because the people are civilized, that they are with safety armed.

It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle a question without debating it.

It is capitalist America that produced the modern independent woman. Never in history have women had more freedom of choice in regard to dress, behavior, career, and sexual orietation.

It is certainly safe, in view of the movement to the right of intellectuals and political thinkers, to pronounce the brain death of socialism.

It is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks. It is legal and lawful to own a shotgun or a rifle. We believe in obeying the law.

It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.

It is easier to be a "humanitarian" than to render your own country its proper due; it is easier to be a "patriot" than to make your community a better place to live in; it is easier to be a "civic leader" than to treat your own family with loving understanding; for the smaller the focus of attention, the harder the task.

It is easier to fight for one's principles than live up to them.

It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.

It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods. If such a board actually exists it operates precisely like the board of a corporation that is losing money.

It is inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.

It is increasingly clear that the original federal raid on the compound never should have occurred, because the ATF's application to search the premises was far below legal standards.

It is my belief that there are "absolutes" in our Bill of Rights, and that they were put there on purpose by men who knew what words meant, and meant their prohibitions to be "absolute."

It is now apparent that the drug authorities can punish American citizens by seizing their cars or boats not after indictment, much less conviction, but after nothing more than one allegation by a police officer. What has happened to the Constitutionally guaranteed presumption of innocence?

It is now proved beyond doubt that smoking is one of leading causes of statistics.

It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics and chemistry.

It is observable that, though many have disregarded life and condemned liberty yet there are few men who do not agree that property is a valuable acquisition ...those who ridicule the ideas of right and justice...among men, will put a high value upon money. Property is admitted to have an existence even in the savage state of nature...And if property is necessary for the support of savage life, it is by no means less so in civil society. The utopian schemes of levelling, and a community of goods, are as visionary and impracticable as those which vest all property in the Crown are arbitrary, despotic, and in our government, unconstitutional.

It is of the essence of the demand for equality before the law that people should be treated alike in spite of the fact that they are different.

It is often argued that religion is valuable because it makes men good, but even if this were true it would not be a proof that religion is true. That would be an extension of pragmatism beyond endurance. Santa Claus makes children good in precisely the same way, and yet no one would argue seriously that the fact proves his existence. The defense of religion is full of such logical imbecilities.

It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or of the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely.

It is our aim to ban the manufacture and sale of handguns to private individuals ... the coalition's emphasis is to keep handguns out of private possession – where they do the most harm.

It is possible to stop most drug addiction within the United States within a very short time. Simply make all drugs available and sell them at cost. Label each drug with a precise description of what effect – good and bad – the drug will have on the taker.

It is rarely remembered that socialism in its beginnings was frankly authoritarian. The French writers who laid the foundations of modern socialism had no doubt their ideas could be put into proactice only by a strong dicatorial government.

It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.

It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law...that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts.

It is the invariable habit of bureaucracies, at all times and everywhere, to assume...that every citizen is a criminal. Their one apparent purpose, pursued with a relentless and furious diligence, is to convert the assumption into a fact. They hunt endlessly for proofs, and, when proofs are lacking, for mere suspicions. The moment they become aware of a definite citizen, John Doe, seeking what is his right under the law, they begin searching feverishly for an excuse for withholding it from him.

It is the Soviet Union that runs against the tide of history....[It is] the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people.

It is to secure our rights that we resort to government at all.

It is undoubtedly true that all citizens capable of bearing arms constitute the reserved military force or reserve militia of the United States as well as of the States.

It is undoubtedly true that all citizens capable of bearing arms constitute the reserved military force or reserve militia of the United States as well as of the States.

It is [a politician's] business to get and hold his job at all costs. If he can hold it by lying, he will hold it by lying; if lying peters out, he will try to hold it by embracing new truths. His ear is ever close to the ground.

It must be inordinately taxing to be such a boob.

It sometimes strikes me that the whole of science is a piece of impudence; that nature can afford to ignore our impertinent interference. If our monkey mischief should ever reach the point of blowing up the earth by decomposing an atom, and even annihilated the sun himself, I cannot really suppose that the universe would turn a hair.

It stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there is service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master.

It was at a particular moment in the history of my own rages that I saw the Western world conditioned by the images of Marx, Darwin and Freud; and Marx, Darwin and Freud are the three most crashing bores of the Western world. The simplistic popularization of their ideas has thrust our world into a mental straitjacket from which we can only escape by the most anarchic violence.

It was pleasant to me to get a letter from you the other day. Perhaps I should have found it pleasanter if I had been able to decipher it. I don't think that I mastered anything beyond the date (which I knew) and the signature (which I guessed at). There's a singular and a perpetual charm in a letter of yours; it never grows old, it never loses its novelty...Other letters are read and thrown away and forgotten, but yours are kept forever – unread. One of them will last a reasonable man a lifetime.

It would be nice if the Food and Drug Administration stopped issuing warnings about toxic substances and just gave me the names of one or two things still safe to eat.

It [Capitalism] has been the first to show what man's activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.

It [government] cannot provide values to persons who have none, or who have lost those they had. It cannot provide inner peace. It can provide outlets for moral energies, but it cannot create those energies.

It's amazing how much "Mature Wisdom" sounds like being too tired.

It's like a baby - a huge appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility on the other.

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 sense of duty.

It's not enough with OSHA that you have a safety program. It's not enough that you're trying. Now they're increasingly looking not just to get the bad guys, but ot scare the shit out of everybody.

It's possible to love a human being if you don't know them too well.

Jews (code 5 of the First Regulations of the German Citizenship Law of 14 November 1935, Reichsgesetzblatt 1, p. 1333) are prohibited from acquiring, possessing, and carrying firearms and ammunition, as well as truncheons of stabbing weapons. Those now possessing weapons and ammunition are at once to turn them over to the local police authority.

Journalists are like whores; as high as their ideals may be, they still have to resort to tricks to make money.

Judges, as a class, display, in the matter of arranging alimony, that reckless generosity which is found only in men who are giving away someone else's cash.

Justice.....A commodity which in a more or less adulterated condition the State sells to the citizen as a reward for his allegiance, taxes and personal service.

Kiss it!

Laws are made for men of ordinary understanding and should, therefore, be construed by the ordinary rules of common sense. Their meaning is not to be sought for in metaphysical subtleties which may make anything mean everything or nothing at pleasure.

Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.

Lawyer: One skilled in the circumvention of the law.

Lawyers are ... operators of the toll bridge which anyone in search of justice must cross.

Lawyers are the only person in whom ignorance of the law is not punished.

Leisure is the mother of Philosophy.

Let the potentates of the Potomac be warned. We are growing weary of your ways – so kindly get out of ours.

Let us be aware that while they preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples of the earth-they are the focus of evil in the modern world.

Let us revise our views and work from the premise that all laws should be for the welfare of society as a whole and not directed at the punishment of sins.

Liar: one who tells an unpleasant truth.

Liberal: A power worshipper without power.

Liberal: Unlike you conservatives, we can't support capital punishment.
Conservative: Just think of it as "postnatal abortion."

Liberalism reigned supreme and without question; the Liberal could believe, in fact, that no other position was conceivable...the Peace Loving Nations, joined together in San Francisco in a perpetual bond, would preserve peace, protect the weak, and guarantee the rule of democracy – the future seemed assured. It was a beautiful picture and questions about its conformity to the facts of life were not welcome.

Libertarians, for example [of a group to be attacked by the government] – even though their basic philosophy seems completely in tune with the Constitution – are routinely characterized as kooks who want to let vicious criminals run in the streets– machine guns in hand.

Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights. These limits can only be determined by law.

Liberty doesn't work as well in practice as it does in speeches.

Liberty has never come from government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of government. The history of liberty is the history of resistance.

Liberty is not the daughter of order; it is its mother.

Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it.

Liberty means responsibility; that is why most men dread it.

Liberty not only means that the individual has both the opportunity and the burden of choice; it also means that he must bear the consequences of his actions.... Liberty and responsibility are inseparable.

Life does not cease to be funny when people die and more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.

Life, liberty and property do not exist because men made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.

Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.

Lighthouses are more helpful than churches.

Locate the blind spot in the culture-the place where the culture isn't looking because it dare not – because if it were to look there, its previous values would dissolve.

Long before Einstein told us that matter is energy, Machiavelli and Hobbes and other modern political philosophers defined man as a lump of matter whose most politically relevant attribute is a form of energy called "self-interestedness." This was not a portrait of man "warts and all." It was all wart.

Lots of white people think black people are stupid. They are stupid themselves for thinking so, but regulation will not make them smarter.

Love is the most subtle form of self-interest.

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

Love, the stongest and deepest element in all life, the harbinger of hope, of joy, of ecstasy; love, the defier of all laws, of all conventions; love, the freest, the most powerful moulder of human destiny; how can such an all-compelling force be synonymous with that poor little State and Church-begotten weed, marriage?

Madonna is the true feminist. She exposes the puritanism and suffocating ideology of American feminism, which is stuck in an adolescent whining mode. Madonna has taught young women to be fully female and sexual while still excerising control over their li ves.

Mahomet made the people believe that he would call a hill to him, and from the top of it offer up his prayers for the observers of his law. The people assembled. Mahomet called the hill to come to him, again and again; and when the hill stood still he was never a whit abashed, but said, "If the hill will not come to Mahomet, Mahomet will go to the hill."

Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.

Many a man in love with a dimple makes the mistake of marrying the whole girl.

Many Americans who supported the initial thrust of civil rights, as represented by the Brown v. Board of Education decision and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, later felt betrayed as the original concept of equal individual opportunity evolved toward the concept of equal group results.

Many other countries have made the mistake of mandating costly employment benefits, and they have mandated their citizens right out of jobs.

Many people find smoking objectionable. I myself find many-even more-things objectionable. I do not like aftershave lotion, adults who roller-skate, children who speak French, or anyone who is unduly tanned. I do not, however, go around enacting legislation and putting up signs.

Many reporters, when they go to work in the nation's capital, begin to think of themselves as participants in the political process instead of glorified stenographers. Washington journalists are seduced by their proximity to power...

Marijuana is . . . self-punishing. It makes you acutely sensitive, and in this world, what worse punishment could there be?

Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice. Rape, originally defined as abduction, became marriage by capture. Marriage meant the taking was to extend in time, to be not only use of but possession of, or ownership.

Marxism /is/ a religion. To the believer it presents, first, a system of ultimate ends that embody the meaning of life and are absolute standards by which to judge events and actions; and secondly, a guide to those ends which implies a plan of salvation and the indication of evil from which mankind, or a chosen section of mankind, is to be saved.

Marxism has lead to Fascism and National Socialism[Nazism], because, in all essentials, it is Fascism and National Socialism.

Marxism is essentially a product of the bourgeois mind.

May we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.

Maybe a nation that consumes as much booze and dope as we do and has our kind of divorce statistics should pipe down about "character issues." Either that or just go ahead and determine the presidency with three-legged races and pie-eating contests. It would make better TV.

Maybe it's understandable what a history of failures America's foreign policy has been. We are, after all, a country full of people who came to America to get away from foreigners. Any prolonged examination of the U.S. government reveals foreign policy to be America's miniature schnauzer-a noisy but small and useless part of the national household.

Maybe this world is another planet's hell.

Mayor Vincent J. `Buddy' Cianci on the ACLU's suit to have a city nativity scene removed: "They're just jealous because they don't have three wise men and a virgin in the whole organization."

Medicare spending, under the GOP Congressional plan that Clinton vetoed because "it cut too much":, had Medicare spending rising about 60% over 7 years, from $175 billion in 1995 to $290 billion in 2002. On a per-person basis, Medicare spending would rise in the plan from $4700 to over $7000.

Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.

Men are superior to women. For one thing, they can urinate from a speeding car.

Merely external emancipation has made of the modern woman an artificial being ...Now, woman is confronted with the necessity of emancipating herself from emancipation, if she really desires to be free.

Might doesn't make right, it just makes rules

Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.

Minerva save us from the cloying syrup of coercive compassion!

Minimze your therbligs until it becomes automatic; this doubles your effective lifetime...

Mistratment of Jews in Germany may be considered virtually eliminated.

Modern liberalism, for most liberals is not a consciously understood set of rational beliefs, but a bundle of unexamined prejudices and conjoined sentiments. The basic ideas and beliefs seem more satisfactory when they are not made fully explicit, when they merely lurk rather obscurely in the background, coloring the rhetoric and adding a certain emotive glow.

Moral indignation is in most cases 02% moral, 48% indignation and 50% envy.

Morality is always the product of terror; its chains and strait-waistcoats are fashioned by those who dare not trust others, because they dare not trust themselves, to walk in liberty.

Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99% of them are wrong.

Moscow spent tens of billions of dollars it could ill afford responding to SDI, according to Roald Z. Sagdayev, who headed the Soviet Space Research Institute in the 1980s. This program became priority No.1 after Reagan's announcement of the Star Wars in 1983. He believes the spending weakened the Soviet Union and may have contributed to its demise.

Most economic fallacies derive ... from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.

Most men are individuals no longer so far as their business, its activities, or its moralities are concerned. They are not units but fractions.

Most men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.

Most of the energy of political work is devoted to correcting the effects of mismanagement of government.

Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can't mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus has.

Most rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read.

Mothers born on relief have their babies on relief. Nothingness, truly, seems to be the condition of these New York people...They are nomads going from one rooming house to another, looking for a toilet that functions.

My ancestors were Puritans from England. They arrived here in 1648 in hopes of finding greater restrictions than were permissible under English law at that time.

My choice early in life was either to be a piano-player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth there's hardly any difference.

"My experience as a street cop suggests that most merchants should not have guns. But I feel even stronger about the average person having them...most homeowners...simply have no need to own guns."

My fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation which outlaws Russia forever. The bombing begins in five minutes.

My God! how little do my country men know what precious blessings they are in possession of, and which no other people on earth enjoy.

My great objection to this government is, that it does not leave us the means of defending our rights, or waging war against tyrants.

My thinking tends to be libertarian. That is, I oppose intrusions of the state into the private realm-as in abortion, sodomy, prostitution, pornography, drug use, or suicide, all of which I would strongly defend as matters of free choice in a representative democracy.

Mythology, n.: The body of a primitive people's beliefs concerning its origin, early history, heroes, deities and so forth, as distinguished from the true accounts which it invents later.

Name me, if you can, a better feeling than the one you get when you've half a bottle of Chivas in the bag with a gram of coke up your nose and a teenage lovely pulling off her tube top in the next seat over while you're doing a hundred miles an hour in a suburban side street.

Natural laws have no pity.

Nature abhors a moron.

Necessity is the plea of every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.

Necessity is the plea of every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.

Never could any increase of comfort or security be a sufficient good to be bought at the price of liberty.

Never frighten a little man. He'll kill you.

Never fry bacon naked...

Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.

New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.

Newsmen believe that news is a tacitly acknowledged fourth branch of the federal system. This is why most news about government sounds as if it were federally mandated – serious, bulky, and blandly worthwhile, like a high fiber diet set in type.

Next to a circus there ain't nothing that packs up and tears out any quicker than the Christmas spirit.

Niggerization is the result of oppression-and it doesn't just apply to the black people. Old people, poor people, and students can also get niggerized.

No doubt an American or English 'Fascist' system would greatly differ from the Italian or German models...Yet all this does not mean that, judged on our present standards, our Fascist system would in the end prove so very different or much less intolerable than its prototypes.

No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the sources of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.

No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.

No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this earth!

No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him.

No man's life, liberty, or property are safe when the legislature is in session.

No one recovers from the disease of being born; a deadly wound if there ever was one.

No pain equals that of an unjury inflicted under the pretense of a just punishment.

No people do so much harm as those who go about doing good.

No woman needs intercourse; few women escape it.

No, we're not looking at how to control criminals ... we're talking about banning the AK-47 and semi-automatic guns.

Nobody can give more power than he has himself...no man can by agreement pass over to another that which he hath not in himself ...

Nobody should be owning a gun which does not have a sporting purpose.

Not only our future economic soundness but the very soundness of our democratic institutions depends on the determination of our government to give employment to idle men.

Not only smugglers and dealers, but users often commit crimes to pay for a habit...heroin, cocaine and other substances would cost much less if they were legal.

Not paying taxes is against the law. If you don't pay taxes, you'll be fined. If you don't pay the fine, you'll be jailed. If you try to escape from jail, you'll be shot. Thus I – in my role as citizen and voter – am going to shoot you – in your role as taxpayer and ripe suck – if you don't pay your fair share of the national tab. Therefore, every time the government spends money on anything, you have to ask yourself, "Would I kill my kindly, gray-haired mother for this?"

Not to be able to bear poverty is a shameful thing, but not to know how to chase it away by work is a more shameful thing yet.

Nothing can be more contemptable than to suppose Public Records to be true.

Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested from a crutch.

Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.

Nothing is so well calculated to produce a death-like torpor in the country as an extended system of taxation and a great national debt.

Nothing so needs reforming as other peoples' habits.

Notice how you haven't seen any homeless around? They've started locking them up. They were all run off last week. They started hassling us three or four days before the convention. We got kicked out of the bus station. Police won't even let us back in to get our stuff out of the lockers. There's usually 75 to 100 of us in the park over there, sleeping every night. We tried to sleep there like usual, and they turned the sprinklers on at 3:00 AM.

Now and then an innocent man is sent to the legislature.

Now delete the words "crack is" and insert the words "niggers are." Isn't this the secret message of the drug-free America campaign?

Now what sort of man or woman or monster would stroke a centipede I have ever seen? "And here is my good big centipede!" If such a man exists, I say kill him without more ado. He is a traitor to the human race.

Obscenity is what happens to shock some elderly and ignorant magistrate.

Ocean, n.: A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man

Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst.

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.

Of course, the Marxian definition of value is ridiculous. All the work one cares to add will not turn a mud pie into an apple tart; it remains a mud pie, value zero. By corrolary, unsillful work can easily subtract value; an untalented cook can turn a whilesome dough and fresh green apples, valuable already, into an inedible mess value zero. Conversely, a great chef can fashion of those same materials a confection of gerater value than a commonplace apple tart, with no more effort than an ordinary cook uses to prepare an ordinary sweet.

Of learned men, the clergy show the lowest development of professional ethics. Any pastor is free to steal customers from the divines of rival sects, and to denounce the divines themselves as theological quacks.

Of liberty I would say that, in the whole plenitude of its extent, it is unobstructed action according to our will. But rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law,' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual.

Of the delights of this world man cares most for sexual intercourse, yet he has left it out of his heaven.

Of the four wars in my lifetime, none came about because the U.S. was too strong.

Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held.

Often partisanship and ideology prevent a dispassionate assessment of the Reagan years. The political left has adopted the convention of arguing that the beneficial economic changes in the 1980s – the conquering of inflation, the surge in employment, and the sustained economic expansion – had little to do with Reagan's policies, whereas any negative change – the explosion in the budget deficit, the savings and loan crisis, and so forth– was a direct consequence of the failed theology of Reaganomics.

On 8 of the 10 key economic variables examined, the American economy performed better during the Reagan years than during the pre- and post-Reagan years.

On every question of construction [of the Constitution] let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or intended against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed.

On the original Earth Day in 1970 – when the world was going to end from overcrowding instead of overheating – the best-selling author of "The Population Bomb", Dr. Paul Ehrlich...predicted that America would have water rationaling by 1974 and food rationing by 1980, that hepatitis and dysentery rates in the U.S. would increase by 500 percent due to population density and that the oceans could be as dead as Lake Erie by 1979.

"When aggressors possess guns, this has many effects on the outcome of violent incidents, some tending to make harmful outcomes more likely, some making them less likely. Gun possession probably facilitates some attacks by less powerful agressors against more powerful victims, and may elicit aggression in at least some circumstances, whereas gun use probably increases the probability of death if a wound is inflicted. On the other hand, possession of guns has the overall effect of reducing the likelyhood of attack, probably because it often makes the attack unnecessary, and of reducing the probability of an injury being inflicted, perhaps due to the difficulty of aiming guns accurately. The aggregate level analysis of violent crime rates indicated that the net impact of all the various individual effects of gun possession, among prospective victims and aggressors combined, was not significantly different from zero. Consequently, the assumption that general gun availability positively affects the frequency or average seriousness of violent crimes is not supported. The policy implication is that there appears to be nothing to be gained from reducing the general gun ownership level. ..."

On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament!], `Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

Once the law starts asking questions, there's no stopping them.

One death is a tragedy. A million deaths are a statistic.

One has to be a lowbrow, a bit of a murderer, to be a politician, ready and willing to see people sacrificed, slaughtered, for the sake of an idea, whether a good one or a bad one.

One important reason we have a Defense Department is that when we give it money, it spends it, which creates jobs, whereas if we left the money in the hands of civilians, we don't know what they'd do with it. Probably put it in open trenches and set it on fire.

One man's Theology is another man's bellylaugh.

One of the annoying things about believing in free will and individual responsibility is the difficulty of finding somebody to blame your problems on. And when you do find somebody, it's remarkable how often his picture turns up on your driver's license.

One of the many reasons for the bewildering and tragic character of human existence is the fact that social organization is at once necessary and fatal. Men are forever creating such organizations for their own convenience and forever finding themselves the victims of their home-made monsters.

Only 25% of criminal gun owners acquire their guns through retail purchase. The rest go through hand-to-hand, private transfers. Banning certain types of guns or limiting the number of guns available to dealers or the number of dealers are all non-selective approaches to reducing the over-all availability of guns. What is now clear is that such approaches will select against law-abiding citizens who might need to use their guns in self-defense rather than criminals who usually don't get their guns through dealers anyway. People who use guns in crime probably use stolen guns. Easily 1M guns are stolen each year, plenty to account for the not more than 800K used in crimes each year.

Only 37% of all Index crimes are reported to the police, & the police clear only 21% of those. Thus, only 7.7% of all Index crimes result in arrest. About half of all felony arrests are dismissed. This means that only about 3.8% of all crimes are prosecuted. Virtually all of these result in a conviction.

Only slowly did I come to the precise capitalist insight: creativity is more productive than rote labor; therefore, the primary form of capital is mind.

Only the police should have handguns.

Only when the human spirit is allowed to invent and create, only when individuals are given a personal stake in deciding economic policies and benefitting from their success...can societies remain economically alive, dynamic, progressive, and free.

Opinions are like assholes – everyone's got one, but nobody wants to look at the other guy's.

Oppressive governments and tyrannical dictators have -never- taken away your freedom of choice with the claim that you may choose something healthy, right, or wise. They always destroy your liberty on the issues important to you based on the claim that you may choose something unhealthy, wrong, or foolish.

Organized Christianity has probably done more to retard the ideals that were its founder's than any other agency in the world.

Our authority has been handed over to the federal power. We expect our economic solutions, our habitats, yes, even our entertainment, to derive from that remote abstract power. We are like wards in an orphan asylum. The shaping of the style of our lives is removed from us-we pay for huge military adventures and social experiments so separated from our direct control that we do not even know where to begin to criticize...So our condition is spiritless. We wait for agstract impersonal powers to save us, we despise the abstractness of those powers, we loathe ourselves for our own apathy.

Our best protection against bigger government in Washington is better government in the states.

Our Constitution is in actual operation; everything appears to promise that it will last; but in this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.

Our democracy, our culture, our whole way of life is a spectacular triumph of the blah. Why not have a political convention without politics to nominate a leader who's out in front of nobody?...Maybe our national mindlessness is the very thing that keeps us from turning into one of those smelly European countries full of pseudo-reds and crypto-fascists and greens who dress like forest elves.

Our government gets more than thugs in a protection racket demand, even more than discarded first wives of famous rich men receive in divorce court.

Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear – kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor With the cry of grave national emergency...Always there has been some terrible evil to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant sums demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.

Our government is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction; to wit: by consolidation first and then corruption, its necessary consequence. The engine of consolidation will be the Federal judiciary; the two other branches the corrupting and corrupted instruments.

Our legislators are not sufficiently appraised of the rightful limits of their power; that their true office is to declare and enforce our natural rights and duties, and to take none of them from us.

Our major universities are now stuck with an army of pedestrian, toadying careerists, Fifties types who wave around Sixties banners to conceal their record of ruthless, beaverlike tunneling to the top.

Our membership has become very anti-government in recent years. There are over 132,000 pages of government regulations on the books. How is a small business owner with two or three employees supposed to keep up with all that?

Our movement took a grip on cowardly Marxism and from it extracted the meaning of socialism. It also took from the cowardly middle-class parties their nationalism. Throwing both into the cauldron of our way of life there emerged, as clear as a crystal, the synthesis-German National Socialism.

Our movement took a grip on cowardly Marxism and from it extracted the meaning of socialism. It also took from the cowardly middle-class parties their nationalism. Throwing both into the cauldron of our way of life there emerged, as clear as a crystal, the synthesis – - German National Socialism.

Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden pathway always throw stones on those who are showing a new road.

Our [softball] team usually puts the other woman at second base, where the maximum possible number of males can get there on short notice to help out in case of emergency. As far as I can tell, our second basewoman is a pretty good baseball player, better than I am, anyway, but there's no way to know for sure because if the ball gets anywhere near her, a male comes barging over from, say, right field, to deal with it. She's been on the team for three seasons now, but the males still don't trust her. They know, deep in their souls, that if she had to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's life, she probably would elect to save the infant's life, without ever considering whether there were men on base.

Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.

Overall, the average Democrat spent $38,700 more to run his office than the average Republican. Of the top 50 biggest office spenders, 33 were Democrats, while of the 50 most frugal office spenders, 38 were Republican.

Overpopulation is an invention of the borgeoise...birth control is not the solution...the solution is enhanced production.

Part of the public horror of sexual irregularity so-called is due to the fact that everyone knows himself essentially guilty.

Past civilizations without number have foundered on the rocks of equal justice.

Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.

Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.

Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging than the drug itself.

People come to Washington believing it's the center of power.It was only much later that I learned that Washington is a steering wheel that's not even connected to the engine.

People fear witches, and burn women.

People sometimes inquire what form of government is most suitable for an artist to live under. To this question there is only one answer. The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all.

People think they have taken quite an extraordinarily bold step forward when they have rid themselves of belief in hereditary monarchy and swear by the democratic republic. In reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy.

People who have given us their complete confidence believe that they have a right to ours. The inference is false; a gift confers no rights.

People who object to weapons aren't abolishing violence, they're begging for rule by brute force, where the biggest, strongest animals among men were always automatically 'right.' Guns ended that, and social democracy is a hollow farce without an armed populace to make it work.

People will accept your ideas much more readily if you tell them Benjamin Franklin said it first.

Perhaps one of the most important accomplishments of my administration has been minding my own business.

Philosophers have only interpreted the...Free Market; The point is to "change" it by taking part in it.

Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself.

Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line. What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views on others. It is a heritage of communism, but they don't seem to see this.

Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build bridges even where there are no rivers.

Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

Politics is the reflex of the business and industrial world.

Politics ought to be the part-time profession of every citizen who would protect the rights and privileges of free people and who would preserve what is good and fruitful in our national heritage.

Politics: Strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.

Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name!

Pornography is human imagination in tense theatrical action; its violations are a protest against the violations of our freedom by nature.

Poverty and suffering are not due to the unequal distribution of goods and resources, but to the unequal distribution of capitalism.

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.

Power-worship blurs political judgement because it leads, almost unavoidabl;y, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will alway seem invincible.

Pray: To ask the laws of the universe be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner who confesses his unworthiness.

President Bush is betraying the oppressed victims in China by extending special trade status.

President Bush is wrong to turn away the Haitian refugees; I will let them come to the United States

President Clinton crows that he has 'already cut the deficit nearly in half in three years.' The federal budget deficit has dropped. But taking credit for it is just one more Clinton whopper. The drop in the deficit...has nothing to do with Clinton's fiscal policy. On the spending side, he has cut defense, and only defense to make room for unfettered growth in pet social programs and entitlements. No net savings there. And Clinton's 1993 tax hikes didn't reap the bounty that the White House projected. So how can Clinton claim credit for the deficit's fall? Nerve, luck, smoke and mirrors.

Private property is the foundation of liberty.

Private property was the original source of freedom. It is still its main bullwark.

Prohibition only drives drunkenness behind closed doors and into dark places and does not cure or even diminish it.

Prohibition rasies prices which leads to extraordinary profits, which are an irresistible temptation to police and customs agents and others.

Prohibition will work great injury to the cause of temperance, it is a species of intemperance itself.

Prohibition will work great injury to the cause of temperance...for it goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded.

Proof that cats are smarter than dogs: You cannot get eight cats to pull a sled through snow.

Propaganda must not serve the truth, especially as it might bring out something favorable for the opponent.

Public employment contributes neither to advantage nor happiness. It is but honorable exile from one's family and affairs.

Public employment contributes neither to advantage nor happiness. It is but honorable exile from one's family and affairs.

Public schools...are staffed by quacks and hagridden by fanatics.

Publisher Malcolm(Steve) Forbes, Jr.'s entry into the Republican presidential field is a welcome event. He has a coherent set of conservative ideas, focused on replacing the income tax with a flat tax with no deductions of any kind... he will add to the quality of the upcoming candidate debates.

Punishment for the sake of retribution is not permissible under the Eighth Amendment.

Puns are little "plays on words" that a certain breed of person loves to spring on you and then look at you in a certain self-satisfied way to indicate that he thinks that you must think that he is by far the cleverest person on Earth now that Benjamin Franklin is dead, when in fact what you are thinking is that if this person ever ends up in a lifeboat, the other passengers will hurl him overboard by the end of the first day even if they have plenty of food and water.

Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.

Question: "Art? What would "you" know about art?" KAZ Vorpal: I know art rhymes with fart. I know rhyming is poetry. That makes me an artist.

Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted.

Reagan was a flesh and blood version of any other mute national emblem, say the Statue of Liberty. Everyone knows what she represents, but no one would dream of asking her opinion.

Real median family income grew by $4,000 during the Reagan period after experiencing no growth in the pre-Reagan years; it experienced a loss of almost $1,500 in the post-Reagan years.

Real poverty is less a state of income than a state of mind.

Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think.

Remember when models were good looking? Remember when models looked like...women? I have an idea; why doesn't the fashion industry tell us when "men" are good looking, and let the heterosexuals pick the girls?

Remember when you were a kid and the boys didn't like the girls? Only sissies liked girls? What I'm trying to tell you is that nothing's changed. You think boys grow out of not liking girls, but we don't grow out of it. We just grow horny. That's the problem. We mix up liking pussy for liking girls. Believe me, one couldn't have less to do with the other.

Republicans believe every day is 4th of July, but Democrats believe every day is April 15.

Revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication – after that it is only an account of something which that person says was a revelation made to him; and though he may find himself obliged to believe it, it can not be incumbent on me to believe it in the same manner; for it was not a revelation made to ME, and I have only his word for it that it was made to him.

Roaming the world as a foreign correspondent for more than a decade, I was able to observe how a variety of vastly different nations organized themselves economically. The inescapable conclusion was that no politician anywhere on the planet has ever actually created a rupee's worth of prosperity.

Robbery Rate is 58% higher in the (gun) restrictive states (289.7 per 100,000) than in the less restrictive states (183.1 per 100,000).

Ronald Reagan won the Cold War without firing a shot.

Ronald Shafer writes in his WALL STREET JOURNAL Washington Wire column on Friday(6-21-96): "Treasury Secretary Rubin in a speech Thursday on the American record in international affairs inadvertently boasted of 'the defeat of capitalism.'"

Russian Communism is the illegitimate child of Karl Marx and Catherine the Great.

Santa Claus is another matter. He's cute. He's nonthreatening. He's always cheerful. And he loves animals. He may know who's been naughty and who's been nice, but he never does anything about it. He gives everyone everything they want without thought of a quid pro quo...he's famously generous to the poor. Santa Claus is preferable to God in every way but one: There is no such thing as Santa Claus.

Schuber v. DeBard, 398 N.S. 2d 1339, at 1341 (Ind. App 1980) (motion to transfer denied 8-28-1980): "We think it clear that our constitution provides our citizenry the right to bear arms for their self-defense."

Secrecy is the beginning of Tyranny.

Secret: The Republican plans -increase- medicare at almost exactly twice inflation, exactly like Clinton originally demanded.

Seduction is often difficult to distinguish from rape. In seduction, the rapist often bothers to buy a bottle of wine.

See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.

Self government does not guarentee the maximization of human freedom. The majority of the people may, indeed often do, by the full exercise of their political privileges, opt to curtail freedom.

Self-determination, the autonomy of the individual, asserts itself in the right to race his automobile, to handle his power tools, to buy a gun, to communicate to mass audiences his opinion, no matter how ignorant, how aggressive, it may be.

Self-repect-The secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.

Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.

Sept 1992, on a survey questionnaire given to members of the U.S. counter-terrorist unit Navy SEAL Team Six by their commanders, was the following question: 'Would you fire on U.S. Citizens while in the process of confiscating their guns?'

Seriousness is stupidity sent to college.

Sex is one of the nine reasons for reincarnation ... the other eight are unimportant.

She hates testicles, thus limiting the men she can admire to Democratic candidates for president.

She hates testicles, thus limiting the men she can admire to Democratic candidates for president.

Should the German people lay down their arms, the Soviets . . . would occupy all eastern and south-eastern Europe together with the greater part of the Reich. Over all this territory, which with the Soviet Union included, would be of enormous extent, an iron curtain would at once descend.

Since a politician never believes what he says, he is surprised when others believe him.

Slavic riffraff...as well as the Czechs, and Croats, were retrograde races whose only function in the world history of the future was to be cannon fodder

So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.

So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.

So this is a very confusing situation, and what makes it even worse is, our standards keep changing. Take Playboy magazine. Back in the 1950s, when I started reading it strictly for the articles, Playboy was considered just about the raciest thing around, even though all it ever showed was women's breasts. Granted, any given one of these breasts would have provided adequate shelter for a family of four, but the overall effect was no more explicit than many publications we think nothing of today, such as Sports Illustrated's Annual Nipples Poking Through Swimsuits Issue.

So when can we quit passing laws and raising taxes? When can we say of our political system, "Stick a fork in it, it's done"? When will our officers, officials and magistrates realize that their jobs are finished and return, like Cincinnatus, to the plow or, as it were, to the law practice or the car dealership? The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop.

So-called Western Civilization, as practised in half of Europe, some of Asia and a few parts of North America, is better than anything else available. Western civilization not only provides a bit of life, a pinch of liberty and the occasional pursuance of happiness, it's also the only thing that's ever tried to. Our civilization is the first in history to show even the slightest concern for average, undistinguished, none-too-commendable people like us.

Social progress does not have to be bought at the price of individual freedom.

Social Security is a government program with a constituency made up of the old, the near old and those who hope or fear to grow old. After 215 years of trying, we have finally discovered a special interest that includes 100 percent of the population. Now we can vote ourselves rich.

Socialism is certain to prove, in the beginning at least, the road NOT to freedom, but to dictatorship and counter-dictatorships, to civil war of the fiercest kind. Socialism achieved and maintained by democratic means seems definitely to belong to the world of utopias.

Socialism proposes no adequate substitute for the motive of enlightened selfishness that to-day is at the basis of all human labor and effort, enterprise and new activity.

Socialists make the mistake of confusing individual worth with success. They believe you cannot allow people to succeed in case those who fail feel worthless.

Socialize the individual's surplus and you socialize his spirit and creativeness; you cannot paint the Mona Lisa by assigning one dab of paint to a thousand painters.

Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.

Society is merely everybody else, and you don't owe everybody anything.

Soicalism is certain to prove...the road not to freedom, but to dictatorship and counter-dictatorships, to civil war of the fiercest kind.

Solvency is maintained by means of a national debt, on the principle, "If you will not lend me the money, how can I pay you?"

Some productive class Americans blame it all on poor minorities, forgetting that we're a nation of minorities, most of whom arrived here without a penny. Sooner or later they'll learn not to blame the welfare mother with her pitiable child support check, but the $60,000-a-year official whose non-productive ways keep everybody destitute.

Someday our grandchidren will look up at us and say, "Where were you, Grandma, and what were you doing when you first realized that President Reagan was, er, not playing with a full deck?"

Somehow Liberals have been unable to acquire from birth what Conservatives seem to be endowed with at birth: namely, a healthy skepticism of the powers of government to do good.

Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.

Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hall-mark of true science.

State education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly alike one another; ... in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body.

State v. Nickerson, 126 Mt. 157, 247 P.2d 188, at 192 (1952): "The law ... accords to the defendant the right to keep and bear arms and to use same in defense of his own home, his person and property."

Status quo, you know, that is Latin for "the mess we're in."

Steve Forbes is a leading indicator of where the conservatives who are running the Congress today are heading, even if they aren't saying so and even if they don't know it themselves. A lot of younger conservatives, especially the House members who are the torchbearers of the Republican revolution, lined up early with Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas, mostly because other people did, too. Their endorsements are with him. Their hearts are with Steve Forbes.

Steve Forbes' decision to become a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination comes as a breath of fresh air to a party desperately in need of a champion for economic growth...He has the ability to address economic issues that too many Republicans find to be dry and uninteresting and turn them into inspiring political causes that appeal to the basic entrepreneurial instincts of the American people.

Steve Forbes' entry into the Republican race for president deserves a warm welcome from anyone who cares about prosperity. At last, the crowded field contains someone who's making growth the centerpiece of his campaign. [He is] the only candidate willing to fight head-on the absurd rules and procedures that the Washington establishment uses to makes significant tax reduction next to impossible.

Stripped of ethical rationalizations and philosophical pretensions, a crime is anything that a group in power chooses to prohibit.

Supporting the Equal Rights Amendment is like trying to kill a fly with a sledge hammer. You don't kill the fly, but you end up breaking the furniture.. We cannot reduce women to equality. Equality is a step down for most women.

Suppose two-thirds of the members of the national House of Representatives were dumped into the Washington garbage incinerator tomorrow, what would we lose to offset our gain of their salaries and the salaries of their parasites?

Sweden, in a new Great Depression from its democratic socialist economy, has announced large spending cuts and social-welfare reform in this year's budget, as well as the reductions in the value-added tax on food from 21% to 12%.

Take our politicians: they're a bunch of yo-yos. The Presidency is now a cross between a popularity contest and a high school debate, with an encyclopedia of cliches the first prize.

Taxation without representation is tyranny.

Taxes are not levied for the benefit of the taxed.

Taylor v. McNeal, 523 S.W.2d 148, at 150 (Mo. App 1975) "The pistols in question are not contraband...every citizen has the right to keep and bear arms in defense of his home, person, and property..."

Technology determines our supply of existing physical resources by determining both the efficiency with which we use resources and our ability to find, obtain, distribute, and store them.

Ted Kennedy's attempts to redistribute wealth are pure socialism, bordering on fascism.

Term limits aren't enough. We need jail

Termites produce more than twice as much carbon dioxide pollution as humans generate by burning fossile fuels, including industry, and 60% world methane emission is produced by cattle, and 30% by termites.

Texas is the place where there are the most cows and the least milk and the most rivers and the least water in them, and where you can look the farthest and see the least.

That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.

That all persons vested with the Legislative or Executive powers of Government are the Trustees of the Public, and, as such, accountable for their conduct: ...the doctrine of non-resistance against arbitrary power and oppression is absurd, slavish and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.

That doctrine [of peace at any price] has done more mischief than any I can well recall that have been afloat in this country. It has occasioned more wars than any of the most ruthless conquerors. It has disturbed and nearly destroyed that political equilibrium so necessary to the liberties and the welfare of the world.

That erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner.

That frequent recurrence to fundamental principles...are absolutely necessary to preserve the blessings of liberty, and keep government free; the people... have a right, in a legal way, to exact a due and constant regard to them, from their Legislators and magistrates, in making and executing laws... Vermont Declaration of Rights, Article 18th.

That God cannot lie, is no advantage to your argument, because it is no proof that priests can not, or that the Bible does not.

That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves.

That Jews assumed a right exclusively to the benefits of God will be a lasting witness against them & the same will it be against Christians.

That the powers of government may be resumed by the people whensoever it shall become necessary to their happiness...That the people have a right to keep and bear arms; that a well regulated militia, including the body of people capable of bearing arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defense of a free state.

That the said Constitution shall never be 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...

That the sole object and only legitimate end of government is to protect the citizen in the enjoyment of life, liberty, and property, and when the government assumes other functions it is usurpation and oppression. Alabana, Declaration of Rights, Articls I. Section 35.

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it...

The ACLU's record, far from showing a momentary wavering from impartiality, is replete with attemps to reform American society according to the wisdom of liberalism. The truth of the matters is that the ACLU has always been a highly politicized organization.

The advance planning and sense stimuli employed to capture a $10 million cigarette or soap market are nothing compared to the brainwashing and propoganda blitzes used to ensure control of the largest cash market in the world: the Executive Branch of the United States Government.

The Aggravated Assault Rate is 15% higher in the (gun) restrictive states (455.9 per 100,000) than in the less restrictive states (398.3 per 100,000).

The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else.

The animals that depend on instinct have an inherent knowledge of the laws of economics and of how to apply them; Man, with his powers of reason, has reduced economics to the level of a farce which is at once funnier and more tragic than Tobacco Road.

The answer is not more government – it's more opportunity. And the path to greater opportunity for all our people will be found by controlling federal spending and letting the people who do the work, pay the taxes and pull the wagon keep more of what they earn.

The arbitrary rule of a just and enlightened prince is always bad. His virtues are the most dangerous and the surest form of seduction: they lull a people imperceptibly into the habit of loving, respecting, and serving his successor, whoever that successor may be, no matter how wicked or stupid.

The argument that the West was somehow to blame for world poverty was itself a Western invention. Like decolonization, it was a product of guilt, the prime dissolvent of order and justice.

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.

The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.

The battle for the mind of Ronald Reagan was like the trench warfare of World War I: never have so many fought so hard for such barren terrain.

The believing mind is externally impervious to evidence. The most that can be accomplished with it is to induce it to substitute one delusion for another. It rejects all overt evidence as wicked...

The best way to keep children at home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant and let the air out of the tires.

The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed.

The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed.

The Bible is a book that has been read more and examined less than any book that ever existed.

The blame for [the national debt] lies with the Congress and the President, with the Democrats and Rep[ublicans alike, most of whom have been unwilling to make the hard choices or to explain to the American people that there is no such thing as a free lunch.

The bourgeoisie [capitalists], by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian nations into civilization.

The bourgeoisie(capitalism), during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground – what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?

The bourgeoisie[capitalism] has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.

The bourgeoisie[capitalists] cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.

The Brady Bill is the minimum step Congress should take...we need much stricter gun control, and eventually should bar the ownership of handguns, except in a few cases.

The broad masses of a population are more amenable to the appeal of rhetoric than to any other force.

The brotherhood of man is no mere poet's dream; it is a most depressing and humiliating reality.

The brotherhood of men doen not imply their equality. Families have their fools and their men of genius, their black sheep and their saints, their worldly successes and their worldly failures. A man should treat his brothers lovingly and with justice, according to the deserts of each. But the deserts of every brother are not the same.

The budget should be balanced, the treasury refilled, public debt reduced, the arrogance of officialdom tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands curtailed, lest Rome become bankrupt.

The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way.

The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.

The Communist revolution, conducted in the name of doing away with classes, has resulted in the most complete authority of any single new class. Everything else is a sham and illusion.

The complete collapse of the belief in the attainability of freedom and equality through Marxism has forced Russia to travel the same road toward a totalitarian, purely negative, non-economic society of unfreedom and inequality which Germany has been following. Not that communism and fascism are the same. Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion, and it has proved as mucha n illusion in Stalinist Russia as in pre-Hitler Germany.

The conclusion is thus inescapable that the history, concept, and wording of the second amendment to the Constitution of the United States, as well as its interpretation by every major commentator and court in the first half-century after its ratification, indicates that what is protected is an individual right of a private citizen to own and carry firearms in a peaceful manner.

The consequences arising from the continual accumulation of public debts in other countries ought to admonish us to be careful to prevent their growth in our own.

The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of the people.

The Constitution on which our Union rests [should] be administered... according to the safe and honest meaning contemplated by the plain understanding of the people of the United States at the time of its adoption – a meaning to be found in the explanations of those who advocated, not those who opposed it, and who opposed it merely lest the construction should be applied which they denounced as possible.

The constitution shall never be construed....to prevent the people of the united states who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms. -

The Constitution... meant that its coordinate branches should be checks on each other. But the opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional and what not, not only for themselves in their own sphere of action but for the Legislature and Executive also in their spheres, would make the Judiciary a despotic branch.

The danger (where there is any) from armed citizens, is only to the government, not to the society; as long as they have nothing to revenge in the government (which they cannot have while it is in their own hands) there are many advantages in their being accustomed to the use of arms and no possible disadvantage.

The day that this country ceases to be free for irreligion, it will cease to be free for religion.

The Democrat Clinton, whose 'handlers' shape him like a wad of warm putty to suit the public yearning of the day, is, unlike Dole, pure product. He exists to be elected, and re- elected, and then elected again and again ....

The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.

The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity. Nowhere in the Gospels do we find a precept for Creeds, Confessions, Oaths, Doctrines, and whole carloads of other foolish trumpery that we find in Christianity.

The dream of socialism is to substitute itself for the ancient faiths. It seeks to do so by appealing to the sentiments of envy and hatred which it creates in the hearts of the multitudes. To the crowd, no longer satisfied with political and civic equality, it proposes equality of condition.

The economic egalitarianism of the liberal ideology implies ... the reduction of Westerners to hunger and poverty.

The extraordinary thing is that the same socialism that was not only early recognised as the gravest threat to freedom, but openly began as a reaction against the liberalism of the French Revolution, gained acceptance under the flag of liberty.

The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake.

The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of the gun.

The federal government of the United States of America takes away between a fifth and a quarter of all our money every year. That is eight times the Islamic zakat, the almsgiving required of believers by the Koran; it is double the tithe of the medieval church and twice the royal tribute that the prophet Samuel warned the Israelites against when they wanted him to annount a ruler...

The federal government was created by the people and the states, not the other way around.

The First Amendment forbids any law "abridging the freedom of speech". It doesn't say, "except for commercials on children's television" or "unless somebody says `cunt' in a rap song or `chick' on a college campus."

The first requisite of a good citizen in this republic of ours is that he shall be able and willing to pull his weight.

The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.

The free market, in contrast[to socialism], rests upon voluntary trade. If workers choose to contract for employment in factories rather than work their own farms or produce handicrafts, it is because they prefer the wages and conditions in the factories.

The freedom and happiness of man... are the sole objects of all legitimate government.

The Fuller O'Brien asbestos company was forced to discontinue the manufacture of the standard O-Ring putty used in the space shuttle. The replacement putty lacked the resiliency of the O'Brien putty, and shrank when it should have expanded during launch, causing the explosion which destroyed the Space Shuttle Challenger.

The function of muscle is to pull and not to push, except in the case of the genitals and the tongue.

The fundamental idea of modern capitalism is not the right of the individual to possess and enjoy what he has earned, but the thesis that the extercise of this right redounds to the general good.

The game women play is men.

The generation to which we belong are is now learning from experience what happens when men retreat from freedom to a coercive organization of their affairs. Though they promise themselves a more abundant life, they must in practice renounce it; as the organized direction increases, the variety of ends must give way to uniformity. That is the nemesis of the planned society and teh authoritarian principle in human affairs.

The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make us wonder at the possibility that there may be something to them which we are missing.

The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately defeat him.

The government is huge, stupid, greedy and makes nosy, officious and dangerous intrusions into the smallest corners of life – this much we can stand. But the real problem is that government is boring. We could cure or mitigate the other wills Washington visits on us if we could only bring ourselves to pay attention to Washington itself.

The government is the group with the biggest guns.

The government of the United States Is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian Religion.

The government of the United States, under Lyndon Johnson, proposes to concern itself over the quality of American life. And this is something very new in the political theory of free nations. The quality of life has heretofore depended on the quality of the human beings who gave tone to that life, and they were its priests and its poets, not its bureaucrats.

The 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.

The great and chief end of man's uniting into commonwealth and putting themselves under government is the preservation of their property, to which in the state of nature there are many things wanting

The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government mismanagement rather than by any inherent instability of the private economy.

The great end of all human industry is the attainment of happiness. For this were arts invented, sciences cultivated, laws ordained, and societies modelled, by the most profound wisdom of patriots and legislators. Even the lonely savage, who lies exposed to the inclemency of the elements and the fury of wild beasts, forgets not, for a moment, this grand object of his being.

The great masses of the people will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one.

The great object is that every man be armed. Everyone who is able may have a gun.

The great object is that every man be armed. Everyone who is able may have a gun.

The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.

The greatest horrors of life are not due to the ambition of the Napoleons or the vengeance of the Agamemmnons, but to the doctrinaire philosophers... The cold-blooded calcuations of Karl Marx led to the judicial and business-like operations of the Checka.

The guarantee of equal protection cannot mean one thing when applied to one individual and something else when applied to a person of another color. If both are not accorded the same protection, then it is not equal.

The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.

The high office of president has been used to foment a plot to destroy the American's freedom, and before I leave office I must inform the citizen of his plight.

The highwayman takes solely upon himself the responsibility, danger, and crime of his own act. He does not pretend that he has any rightful claim to your money, or that he intends to use it for your own benefit ... Furthermore, having taken your money, he leaves you, as you wish him to do. ... He does not keep "protecting" you, by commanding you to bow down and serve him; by requiring you to do this, and forbidding you to do that.

The history of woman is the history of the worst form of tyranny the world has every known; the tyranny of the weak over the strong. It is the only tyranny that lasts.

The iconoclast proves enough when he proves by his blasphemy that this or that idol is defectively convincing - that at least one visitor to the shrine is left full of doubts. The liberation of the human mind has been best furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt, after all, was safe - that the god in the sanctuary was a fraud. One horse-laugh is worth ten-thousand syllogisms.

The idea is quite unfounded that on entering into society we give up any natural rights.

The idea of a good society is something you do not need a religion and eternal punishment to buttress; you need a religion if you are terrified of death.

The ideal for which the family stands is liberty. It is the only check on the state that is bound to renew itself as eternally as the state, and more naturally than the state...Hitler's way of defending the independence of the family is to make every family dependent upon him and his semi-socialist state

The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty-of the indefinite expansion of possibility.

The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty-of the indefinite expansion of possibility.

The important point is that all coercive action of government must be unambiguously determined by a permanent legal framework whiche enables the individual to plan with a degree of confidence and which reduces human uncertainty [and economic insecurity] as much as possible.

The individual may stand upon his constitutional rights as a citizen. He is entitled to carry on his private business in his own way. His power to contract is unlimited. He owes no duty to the State or to his neighbors to divulge his business, or to open his doors to an investigation...He owes no duty to the State, since he receives nothing therefrom, beyond protection of his life and property. His rights are such as existed by the law of the land long antecedent to the organization of the State, and can only be taken from him by due process of law, and in accordance with the Constitution...He owes nothing to the public so long as he does not trespass upon their rights.

The inspiration of the Bible depends on the ignorance of the person who reads it.

The issue of banning DDT is unquestionably a genocidal one...The balance is overwhlemingly in favor of DDT...I refer you to the monumental bibliography of 3,404 references compiled by the division of Biology and Agriculture.

The issue of race could benefit from a period of benign neglect.

The Jews are a frightened people. Twenty centuries of Christian love have broken down their nerves.

The kiss originated when the first male reptile licked the first female reptile, implying in a subtle, complimentary way that she was as succulent as the small reptile he had for dinner the night before.

The labor theory of value is nonsense in both theory and practice. It ignores the many factors which create economic value, is based upon unproved assertions, and leads to economic chaos and political slaverty.

The Labour Party believes in turning workers against owners; we believe in turning workers into owners.

The Layman's constitutional view is that what he likes is constitutional and that which he doesn't like is unconstitutional.

The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket, nor breaks my leg.

The liberals can understand everything but people who don't understand them.

The little I know of it has not served to raise my opinion of what is vulgarly called the "monied Interest;" I mean, that blood-sucker, that muckworm, that calls itself "the friend of government."

The loftier the pretentions of the [government's] power, the more meddlesome, inhuman, and oppressive it will be.

The main issue, is whether or not man should give away freedom, private initiative, and individual responsibility and surrender to the guardianship of a gigantic apparatus of compulsion and coercion, the socialist state.

THe methods by which a trade union can alone act, oare necessarily destructive; its organization is necessarily tyrranical.

The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God...anarchy and tyranny commence.

The moralist and the revolutionary are constantly undermining one another. Marx exploded a hundred tons of dynamite beneath the moralist position, and we are still living in the echo of that tremendous crash. But already, somewhere or other, the sappers are at work and fresh dynamite is being tamped in place to blow Marx at the moon. Then Marx, or somebody like him, will come back with yet more dynamite, and so the process continues, to an end we cannot foresee.

The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.

The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the government.

The more the state "plans" the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.

The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by doing so

The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall.

The most serious problems of freedom of expression in our society today exist on our campuses.

The Murderous Right Wing Hate Groups – Libertarians, and their oath of genocide; "To publicly affirm what we believe– and to ensure that our party never strays from our principles– we ask our members to proudly sign this statement: `I do not believe in or advocate the initiation of force as a means of achieving political or social goals.'"

The national guard fulfills the militia mentioned in the 2nd amendment. Citizens no longer need to protect the states or themselves.

The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and governments to gain ground.

The neo-hippie-dips, the sentimentality-crazed iguana anthropomorphizers, the Chicken Littles, the three-bong-hit William Blakes – thank God these people don't actually go outdoors much, or the environment would be even worse than it is already.

The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, by promising to save humanity. It ended, again like the Salvation Army, by running flop-houses and disturbing the peace.

The obligation of subjects to the sovereign is understood to last as long, and no longer, than the power lasteth by which he is able to protect them.

The obstacles to usurpation and the facilities of resistance increase, unless the citizens understand their rights and are disposed to defend them.

The office of the government is not to confer happiness, but to give men the opportunity to work out happiness for themselves.

The old parties are husks, with no real soul within either, divided on artificial lines, boss-ridden and privilege-controlled, each a jumble of incongruous elements, and neither daring to speak out wisely and fearlessly on what should be said on the vital issues of the day.

The only orthodox object of the institution of government is to secure the greatest degree of happiness possible to the general mass of those associated under it.

The only people who seem to have nothing to do with the education of the children are the parent.

The only thing a rifle scope is good for is assassination.

The only thing the Democrats have to offer– is fear itself.

The only vice that cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy.

The only way to make government tolerant, and hence genuinely free, is to keep it weak.

The optimist thinks that this is the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist knows it.

The ordinary man is an anarchist. He wants to do as he likes. He may want his neighbour to be governed, but he himself doesn't want to be governed. He is mortally afraid of government officials and policemen.

The other day, someone told me the difference between a democracy and a people's democracy. It's the same difference between a jacket and a straitjacket.

The Papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof.

The peaceable part of mankind will be overrun by the vile and abandoned while they neglect the means of self-defense...[but] arms like laws discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe...Horrid mischief would ensue were the good deprived the use of them.

The people are not to be disarmed of their weapons. They are left in full posession of them...The government will depend on the assistance of the people in the day of distress.

The people in power will not disappear voluntarily, giving flowers to the cops just isn't going to work. This thinking is fostered by the establishment; they like nothing better than love and nonviolence. The only way I like to see cops given flowers is in a flower pot from a high window.

The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.

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.

The people who would surrender their liberties for a little short term peace, deserve neither peace nor liberty.

The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature, and will never be free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.

The policy of the American government is to leave their citizens free, neither restraining nor aiding them in their pursuits.

The political arena leaves one no alternative, one must either be a dunce or a rogue.

The politician attempts to remedy the evil by increasing the very thing that caused the evil in the first place: legal plunder.

The politicians were talking themselves red, white, and blue in the face.

The possession of arms is the distinction between a freeman and a slave. He, who has nothing, and who himself belongs to another, must be defended by him, whose property he is and needs no arms. But he, who thinks he is his own master, and has what he can call his own, ought to have arms to defend himself, and what he possesses; else he live precariously and at discretion. And though for a while, those, who have the sword in their power, abstain from doing him injury, yet by degrees he will be awed

The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.

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 principallly on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce...The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects in which the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives and liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.

The powers of the sword are in the hands of the yeomanry of America from sixteen to sixty. The milita of these free common-wealths, entitled and accustomed to their arms, when compared with any possible army, must be remendous and irresistable.

The President has kept all of the promises he intended to keep.

The president talks of targeted tax cuts to do such things as help people pay for college, modest increases in federal training funds, a mostly token job creation program, some extra aid to the unemployed to pay their health insurance premiums. The problem the president seeks to solve is structural – not enough income in the middle and lower reaches of the economy. But these are not structural solutions. Mr. Clinton, with limited funds at his disposal and a limited supply of political capital as well, offers mainly Hamburger Helper.

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.

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?

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?

The principal foundations of all states are good laws and good arms; and there cannot be good laws where there are not good arms.

The principle feature of American liberalism is sanctimoniousness. By loudly denouncing all bad things-war and hunger and date rape-liberals testify to their own terrific goodness. More important, they promote themselves to membership in a self-selecting elite of those who care deeply about such things...It's a kind of natural aristocracy, and the wonderful thing about this aristocracy is that you don't have to be brave, smart, strong or even lucky to join it, you just have to be liberal.

The principles on which we engaged, of which the charter of our independence is the record, were sanctioned by the laws of our being, and we but obeyed them in pursuing undeviatingly the course they called for. It issued finally in that inestimable state of freedom which alone can ensure to man the enjoyment of his equal rights.

The progress of freedom depends more upon the maintenance of peace, the spread of commerce, and the diffusion of education, than upon the labours of cabinets and foreign offices.

The prohibition law, written for weaklings and derelicts, has divided the nation, like Gaul, into three parts-wets, drys, and hypocrites.

The prostitute is not, as feminists claim, the victim of men but rather their conqueror, an outlaw who controls the sexual channel between nature and culture.

The rate at which a society's technology advances is determined by the relative level of its ability to process information.

The real community of man, in the midst of all the self-contradictory simulacra of community, is the community of those who seek the truth.

The Republican medicare rate increases will kill the elderly and poor.

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...

The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom.

The Right to Keep and Bear arms has been supported in U.S. vs. Miller, and no less than 21 other lower court decisions over the last 150 years in the United States, none of which have ever been successfully challenged in a higher court.

The rights enumerated in this Bill of Rights shall not be construed to limit other rights of the people not therein expressed.

The rights of conscience, of bearing arms, of changing government, are declared to be inherent in the people.

The Second Amendment has a profound influence on the entire gun control debate That's because of an erroneous interpretation that the Second Amendment grants every American the "right to bear arms." And thus any gun control legislation would interfere with that supposed right. But the truth is the Second Amendment only grants the right to bear arms to Americans serving in a militia

The Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms therefore, is a right of the individual citizen to privately possess and carry in a peaceful manner firearms and similar arms. Such an `individual rights' interpretation is in full accord with the history of the right to keep and bear arms, as previously discussed.

The second amendment states that "the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed," period. There is no mention of magazine size, rate of fire, or to what extent these arms may resemble assault rifles. All rifles were assault rifles in those days. Furthermore, if the gun laws that Massachusetts has now had been in force in 1776, we'd all be Canadians, and you know what kind of weather Canada has.

The secret of dealing successfully with a child is not to be its parent.

The signification attributed to the term, Militia, appear from the debates in the Convention, the history and legislation of Colonies and States, and the writings of approved commentators. These show plainly enough that the Militia comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense... And further, that ordinarily when called for service these men were expected to appear bearing arms supplied by themselves and of a kind in common use at the time.

The single most exciting thing you encounter in government is competence, because it's so rare.

The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.

The spirit of resistence is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive.

The state cannot diminish rights of the people.

The State is the altar of political freedom and, like the religious altar, it is maintained for the purpose of human sacrifice.

The state of Colorado hereby claims sovreignty undere the 10th Amendment... over all other powers not otherwise enumerated and granted to the federal government by the United States Constitutionm, including at least sovreignty over its people and its natural resources...the federal government, as our agent, is hereby instructed to cease and desist, effective immediately, mandates that are behond the scope of its authority under the 10th Amendment..

The state of Nature has a law of Nature to govern it, which obliges every one, and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions...

The story of Jesus Christ appearing after he was dead is the story of an apparition, such as timid imaginations can always create in vision, and credulity believe. Stories of this kind had been told of the assassination of Julius Caesar...

The study of theology, as it stands in the Christian churches, is the study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on no principles; it proceeds by no authority; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing; and it admits of no conclusion.

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 deprived of the use of them;...the weak will come prey to the strong

The suppression of unnecessary offices, of useless establishments and expenses, enabled us to discontinue our internal taxes.

The supreme tragedy is still not seen that in Germany it was largely people of good will...who prepared the way for, if they did not actually create, the forces which now stand for everything they detest.

The surest protection against temptation is cowardice.

The system just doesn't work, the nation's strict drug laws cause more problems than the drugs themselves.

The tank, the B-52, the fighter-bomber, the state controlled police and the military are the weapons of dictatorship. The rifle is the weapon of democracy If guns are outlawed, only the government will have guns. Only the police, the secret police, the military, the hired servants of our rulers. Only the government-and a few outlaws. I intend to be among the outlaws.

The terrible thing is that one cannot be a Communist and not let oneself in for the shameful act of recantation. One cannot be a Communist and preserve an iota of one's personal integrity.

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.

The total Violent Crime Rate is 26% higher in the states which restrict guns (798.3 per 100,000 pop.)than the less restrictive states (631.6 per 100,000).

The trade of governing has always been monopolized by the most ignorant and the most rascally individuals of mankind.

The trauma of the Sixties persuaded me that my generation's egalitarianism was a sentimental error...I now see the hierarchical as both beautiful and necessary. Efficiency liberates; egalitarianism tangles, delays, blocks, deadens.

The trouble with born-again Christians is that they are an even bigger pain the second time around.

The truth of a proposition never has anything to do with its credibility. And vice-versa.

The unaccountability of government has gone to the point where the very use of the law is the instrument of illegality.

The United States Constitution has proved itself the most marvelously elastic compilation of rules of government ever written.

The United States ranks 13th on the Human Freedom Index. Twelve other countries are freer than the United States.

The way the big-government-knows-best folks determine whether you care about something is how much government money you put into it. If you don't give it more money, then that means you don't care...

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

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.

The whore is despised by the hypocritical world because she has made a realistic assessment of her assets and does not have to rely on fraud to make a living. In an area of human relations where fraud is regular practice between the sexes, her honesty is regarded with a mocking wonder.

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 loose.

The young always have the same problem – how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.

The [S&L Bailout] will end up costing every man, woman, and child in America $2,000 [$500 billion total]. Except it won't. Because not every man, woman, and child in America pays taxes. Babies don't pay taxes. Old farts don't pay taxes. Rich shitpokes with high-hat tax lawyers don't pay taxes, and neither do those high-hat lawyers if they're any good. Welfare chiselers don't pay taxes, nor do drug addicts, drug dealers, and people whom drug dealers have shot dead in the street. Corporations are famous for not paying taxes. Churches don't have to pay taxes. And no taxes are paid by unemployed, layabout brothers-in-law, bum cousins, noodle-brained sisters who give all their money to EST and crazy uncles who are forever losing their shirts in business ventures such as "CHAT-EAU – the catnip flavored blush wine for your cat." That leaves you and me. We're about the only people in America who pay our taxes, So when all's said and done, this savings and loan bailout is going to cost us $250 billion apiece.

The...proposed [Constitution of Spain] has one feature which I like much: that which provides that when the three coordinate branches differ in their construction of the Constitution, the opinion of two branches shall overrule the third. Our Constitution has not sufficiently solved this difficulty.

Then there are the creepy born-again Jesus types. We should go after these the way the conservative Romans did, with lions.

Then there was LSD, which was supposed to make you think you could fly. I remember it made you think you couldn't stand up, and mostly it was right.

Thenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served tocorrupt and brutalize mankind.

There are just two rules of governance in a free society: Mind your own business. Keep your hands to yourself.

There are many reasons, besides genes and discrimination, why groups differ in their economic performances and rewards. Groups differ by large amounts demographically, culturally, and geographically – and all these differences have profound effects on incomes and occupations.

There are no better terms available to describe [the] difference between the approach of the natural and the social sciences than to call the former "objective" and the latter "subjective."...While for the natural scientist the contrast between objective facts and subjective opinions is a simple one, the distinction cannot as readily be applied to the object of the social sciences. The reason for this is that the object, the "facts" of the social sciences are also opinions-not opinions of the student of the social phenomena, of course, but opinions of those whose actions produce the object of the social scientist.

There are now over 22,000 gun laws in the US, yet violent crime is increasing, not decreasing.

There are three kinds of despots. There is the despot who tyrannises over the body. There is the despot who tyrannises over the soul. There is the despot who tyrannises over the soul and body alike. The first is called the Prince. The second is called the Pope. The third is called the People.

There are twenty-seven specific complaints against the British Crown set forth in the Declaration of Independence. To modern ears they still sound reasonable...in large part, because so many of them can be leveled against the federal government of the United States.

There are two kinds of liberalism. A liberalism which is always, subterraneously authoritative and paternalistic, on the side of one's good conscience. And then there is a liberalism which is more ethical than political; one would have to find another name for this. Something like a profound suspension of judgment.

There are two things which cannot be attacked in front: ignorance and narrow-mindedness. They can only be shaken by the simple development of the contrary qualities. They will not bear discussion.

There is an old picture of a people travelling by sleigh through deep woods – pursued by wolves. Every now and then they grab one of their members and toss him to the wolves. That's conscription.

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.

There is much to be said in favor of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.

There is no danger I apprehend so much as the consolidation of our government by the noiseless and therefore unalarming instrumentality of the Supreme Court...Consolidation is the present principle of distinction between republicans and the pseudo-republicans.

There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.

There is no reason for anyone in this country – anyone except a police officer or a military person – to buy, to own, to have, to use a handgun ...The only way to control handgun use in this country is to prohibit the guns. And the only way to do that is to change the Constitution.

There is no reference to abortion in the Constitution, not so much as an "I'll pull out in time, honey, honest." The Tenth Amendment tells us that "the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." This means the power to drive the nation crazy over a gob of meiotic cells that wouldn't fill a coke spoon and, on the other hand, the power to murder innocent babies that haven't even been born yet are – just as the amendment says – "reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

There is no such thing as objective reporting...I have become even more crafty about finding the voices to say the things I think are true. That's my subversive mission.

There is no underestimating the intelligence of the American public.

There is nothing more agreeable in this life than to make peace with the establishment - and nothing more corrupting.

There is nothing more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people should be free

There is nothing so likely to produce peace as to be well prepared to meet the enemy.

There is one rule for politicians all over the world: Don't say in Power what you say in opposition; if you do, you only have to carry out what the other fellows have found impossible.

There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please.

There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanical religion, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.

There is simply no other choice than this: either abstain from interference in the free play of the market, or to delegate the entire management of production and distribution to the government. Either capitalism or socialism: there exists no middle way.

There is, in fact, only one intelligible idea in the whole More Abundant Life [FDR's New Deal] rumble-bumble, and that is the idea that whatever A earns really belongs to B. A is any honest and industrious man or woman; B is any drone or jackass.

There was a [drug] deal that went bad outside my store, and he ran into my store and the other guy had him on the floor ready to stab him. I said, 'Drop the knife and get out of my store.' I saved his life...I approve of gun ownership by responsible people.

There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.

There's no such thing as a race and barely such a thing as an ethnic group. If we were dogs, we'd be the same breed...Trouble doesn't come from Slopes, Kikes, Niggers, Spics or White Capitalist Pigs; it comes from the heart.

There's not a room in the White House called the Truth room, where you unlock the door and the truth is sitting there.

There's nothing wrong with America that a good erection wouldn't cure.

There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.

There's something about Marxism that brings out warts-the only kind of growth this economic system encourages.

There's something about me that makes a lot of people want to throw up.

These are shameful affairs, our political party conclaves...

These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations. - UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 29(3).

They are socialists. Oh, they may not technically believe in government ownership, they just believe in government control.

They call it the Halls of Justice because the only place you get justice is in the halls.

They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau, what an alluring utopia! What a noble cause to fight for!

They have not made the name that I have not been called. ...but the guardians of Political Correctness do not frighten me.

They have rights who dare maintain them

They have the usual socialist disease; they have run out of other people's money.

They that would give up essential liberty for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

They [gun laws] disarm those only 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 homicide, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.

They [gun laws] ought to be designated as laws not preventive but fearful of crimes, produced by the tumultuous impression of a few isolated facts, and not by thoughtful consideration of the inconveniences and advantages of a universal decree.

They [preachers] dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight and scowl on the fatal harbinger announcing the subversions of the duperies on which they live.

They [the Marxists] maintain that only a dictatorship – their dictatorship, of course – can create the will of the people, while our answer to this is: No dictatorship can have any other aim but that of self-perpetuation, and it can beget only slavery in the people tolerating it; freedom can be created only by freedom, that is, by a universal rebellion on the part of the people and free organization of the toiling masses from the bottom up.

This (Clinton) White House doesn't know what it's doing. Thank God the Russians aren't coming.

This atrocious doctrine of allegiance to party plays directly into the hands of politicians of the baser sort – and doubtless for that it was borrowed – or stolen – from the monarchial system.

This is a circus. It is a national disgrace.... It is a high-tech lynching for uppity-blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that, unless you kow-tow to an old order, this is what will happen to you, you will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate, rather than hung from a tree.

This is not all we will have in future Congresses, but this is a crack in the door. There are too many handguns in the hands of citizens. The right to keep and bear arms has nothing to do with the Brady Bill.

This is not just sexual harassment if it’s true. It’s sexual assault... That is a very serious charge if true and it is a very big problem for the president.

This is the stupidest day I've ever had.

This member of the Government was at first considered as the most harmless and helpless of all its organs. But it has proved that the power of declaring what the law is, ad libitum, by sapping and mining slyly and without alarm the foundations of the Constitution, can do what open force would not dare to attempt.

This socialism will develop in all its phases until it reaches its own extremes and absurdities. Then once again a cry of denial will break from the titanic chest of the revolutionary minority and again a mortal struggle will begin, in which socialism will play the role of contemporary conservatism and will be overwhelmed in the subsequent revolution, as yet unknown to us.

Thomas Jefferson, the greatest of all American philosophers...believed that in any dispute between a citizen and an official the citizen ought to have the benefit of every doubt.

Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others.

Those who made and endorsed our Constitution knew man's nature, and it is to their ideas, rather than to the temptations of utopia, that we must ask that our judges adhere.

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.

Through the cacophonous chorus of the postwar planners runs one harmonious theme: the individual must surrender more and more of his rights to the state which will in return guarantee whim what is euphemistically called security.

Thus the State "turns every contingency into a resource"for accumulating power in itself, always at the expense of social power; and with this it develops a habit of acquiescence in the people. New generations appear, each temperamentally adjusted – or as I believe our American glossary now has it, "conditioned" – to new increments of State power, and they tend to take the process of continuous accumulation as quite in order. All the State's institutional voices unite in confirming this tendency; they unite in exhibiting the progressive conversion of social power into State power as something not only quite in order, but even as wholesome and necessary for the public good.

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace.

To consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions [is] a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men and not more so. They have with others the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps. Their maxim is boni judicis est ampliare jurisdictionem [good justice is broad jurisdiction], and their power the more dangerous as they are in office for life and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots. It has more wisely made all the departments co-equal and co-sovereign within themselves.

To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them.

To its committed members (the Democratic Party) was still the party of heart, humanity, and justice, but to those removed a few paces it looked like Captain Hook's crew– ambulance-chasing lawyers, rapacious public policy grants persons, civil rights gamesmen, ditzy-brained movie stars, fat-assed civil servant desk squatters, recovering alcoholics, recovering wife-beaters, recovering child-buggers, and so forth and so on, a grotesque line-up of ill-mannered self-pitying, caterwauling freeloaders banging their tin cups on the pavement demanding handouts.

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...

To revolt is a natural tendency of life. Even a worm turns against the foot that crushes it. In general, the vitality and relative dignity of an animal can be measured by the intensity of its instinct to revolt.

To say that subjects in general are not proper judges when their governors oppress them and play the tyrant, and when they defend their rights...is as great a treason as ever a man uttered. Tis treason not against one single man, but against the state-against the whole body politic...And this impious principle lays the foundation for justifying all the tyranny and oppression that ever any prince was guilty of. The people know for what end they set up and maintain their governors, and they are the proper judges when governors execute their trust as they ought to do it.

To secure these [inalienable] rights [to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness], governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed... Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

To silence criticism is to silence freedom.

To stay young requires the unceasing cultivation of the ability to unlearn old falsehoods.

To sum up:
1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute.
2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it.
3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.

To tax the larger incomes at a higher percentage than the smaller, is to lay a tax on industry and economy; to impose a penalty on people for having worked harder and saved more than their neighbors.

To them socialism meant an attempt to "terminate the [French]revolution" by a deliberate reorganization of society on hierarchical lines, and the imposition of a coercive "spiritual power". Where freedom was concerned, the founders of socialism made no bones about their intentions.

True free-market capitalism, capitalism free of state intervention, prohibitions, sobsidies, and protectionism, means economical prosperity and freedom for all. Indeed, the free market is the only system which enables consumers rather than bureaucrats to determine what is produced and at what price.

Trust the people. This is the one irrefutable lesson of the entire postwar period contradicting the notion that rigid government controls are essential to economic development.

Tyranny is always better organized than Freedom.

UltraLiberalism today translates into a whimpering isolationism in foreign policy, a mulish obstructionism in domestic policy, and a pusillanimous pussyfooting on the critical issue of law and order.

Under a governmen which imprisons unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.

Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule– and both commonly succeed, and are right... The United States has never developed an aristocracy really disinterested or an intelligentsia really intelligent. Its history is simply a record of vacillations between two gangs of frauds.

Under our form of government, the legislature is not supreme...like other departments of government, it can only exercise such powers as have been delegated to it, and when it steps beyond that boundary, its acts, like those of the most humble magistrate in the state who transcends his jurisdiction, are utterly void. - Billings v. Hall 7 CA 1

Under the law of nature, all men are born free, every one comes into the world with a right to his own person, which includes the liberty of moving and using it at his own will. This is what is called personal liberty, and is given him by the Author of nature, because necessary for his own sustenance.

Unionism seldom, if ever, uses such power as it has to insure better work; almost always it devotes a large part of that power to safeguarding bad work.

Unless men are free to be vicious they cannot be virtuous.

Unlike other communications media, information on a BBS does not get read by anyone before its instantaneous publication. Therefore, the FBI has much less of a possibility of intimidating the owner of a BBS into not publishing certain information...[They] use this 'danger' for justification to monitor the activities on these systems. In reality, however, BBSs transfer much less 'illegal information' than the phone system."

Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it.

Until 1954, the Pledge of Allegiance was "one nation, indivisible". It was only then changed to "one nation, under God, indivisible", by Congress.

Until the mischief be grown general, and the ill designs of the rulers become visible, the people who are more disposed to suffer than right themselves by resistance, are not apt to stir. But if they universally have a persuasion grounded upon manifest evidence that designs are carrying on against their liberties, who is to be blamed for it?

USC Title 10 (311 Militia: Composition and Classes) states, A: The Militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or have made declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States, and of female citizens of the United States who are commissioned officers of the National Guard.

Usually, writers will do anything to avoid writing. For instance, the previous sentence was written at one o'clock this afternnon. It is now a quarter to four. I have spent the past two hours and forty-five minutes sorting my neckties by width, looking up the word "paisly" in three dictionaries, attempting to find the town of that name on "The New York Times Atlas of the World" map of Scotland, sorting my reference books by width, trying to get the bookcase to stop wobbling by stuffing a matchbook cover under its corner, dialing the telephone number on the matchbook cover to see if I should take computer courses at night, looking at the computer ads in the newspaper and deciding to buy a computer because writing seems to be so difficult on my old Remington, reading an interesting article on sorghum farming in Uruguay that was in the newspaper next to the computer ads, cutting that and other interesting articles out of the newspaper, sorting – by width – all the interesting articles I've cut out of newspapers recently, fastening them neatly together with paper clips and making a very attractive paper clip necklace and bracelet set, which I will present to my girlfriend as soon as she comes home from the three-hour low-impact aerobic workout that I made her go to so I could have some time alone to write.

Violent crime rates are highest overall in states with laws severely limiting or prohibiting the carrying of concealed firearms for self-defense.

Voters don't decide issues, they decide who will decide issues.

Wars are not caused by the buildup of weapons. They are caused when an aggressor believes he can achieve his objectives at an acceptable price.

We are at the point in time and terror where nothing short of a strong uniform policy of domestic disarmament will alleviate the danger which is crystal clear and perilously present. Let us take the guns away from the people. Exemptions should be limited to the military, the police, and those licensed for good and sufficient reasons. And I would look forward to the day when it would not be necessary for the policeman to carry a sidearm.

We are charting a new direction...away from the failed approach of centralized power in Washington, and back to the founders' design of a true federal system of shared powers.

We are for aiding our allies by sharing some of our material blessings with those nations which share in our fundamental beliefs, but we are against doling out money government to government, creating bureaucracy, if not socialism, all over the world. We set out to help 19 countries. We are helping 107. We spent $146 billion. With that money, we bought a 2-million-dollar yacht for Haile Selassie. We bought dress suits for Greek undertakers, extra wives for Kenya government officials. We bought a thousand TV sets for a place where they have no electricity.

We are going to push health care legislation through no matter what the people want.

We are like the greatest marathon runner in the world, but we're trying to compete with two 50-pound cinder blocks chained to our legs. It's time to remove the dead weight of Washington, and let the American economy run free.

We are now a two-wheelbarrow family, that accounts for the delay. Don't brush it off. Are you a two sheelbarrow family? How many two-wheelbarrow families do you know? I mean to say: two-Caddilac families are common; there are at least twenty in our neighborhood, not counting Texans. But /we/ are the only two-wheelbarrow family I know of.

We ask that the government undertake the obligation above all of providing citizens with adequate opportunity for employment and earning a living. The activities of the individual must not be allowed to clash with the interests of the community, but must take place within its confines and be for the good of all. Therefore, we demand: ...an end to the power of the financial interests. We demand profit sharing in big business. We demand a broad extension of care for the aged. We demand...the greatest possible consideration of small business in the purchases of national, state, and municipal governments. In order to make possible to every capable and industrious [citizen] the attainment of higher education and thus the achievement of a post of leadership, the government must provide an all-around enlargement of our entire system of public education...We demand the education at government expense of gifted children of poor parents...The government must undertake the improvement of public health - by protecting mother and child, by prohibiting child labor...by the greatest possible support for all clubs concerned with the physical education of youth. We combat the...materialistic spirit within and without us, and are convinced that a permanent recovery of our people can only proceed from within on the foundation of the common good before the individual good.

We can look forward to four more years of wonderful, inspirational speeches full of wit, poetry, music, love and affection, plus more goddamn nonsense.

We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.

We can't make a perfect world. We can do more for the poor by replacing inefficient government programs with effective voluntary assistance.

We cannot be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans.

We don't have a trillion-dollar debt because we haven't taxed enough; we have a trillion-dollar debt because we spend too much.

We don't have to put people out of work to control inflation. The goal of the next decade should be to fight inflation and unemployment through supply-side incentives to put more goods on the shelves. That's the way to cut prices and boost employment.

We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business?

We enter parliament in order to supply ourselves, in the arsenal of democracy, with its own weapons...If democracy is so stupid as to give us free tickets and salaries for this bear's work, that is its affair...We do not come as friends, nor even as neutrals. We come as enemies. As the wolf bursts into the flock, so we come.

We find it intolerable that one constitutional right should have to be surrendered in order to assert another.

We find many things to which the prohibition of them constitutes the only temptation.

We have been misled as much because we have refused to believe that the enemy was sincere in the profession of some beliefs which we shared as because we believed in the sincerity of his other claims. Have not the parties of the Left as well as those of the Rigth been deceived by believing that the National Socialist[Nazi] party was in the service of the capitalists and opposed to all forms of socialism?

We have no one to blame for the Kennedys but ourselves. We took the Kennedys to heart of our own accord. And it is my opinion that we did it not because we respected them or thought what they proposed was good, but because they were pretty. We, the electorate, were smitten by this handsome, vivacious family... We wanted to hug their golden tousled heads to our dumpy breasts.

We have reason to believe that man first walked upright to free his hands for masturbation.

We have rights, as individuals, to give as much of our own money as we please to charity; but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of public money.

We have so many people who can't see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion that the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one!

We have to start with a ban on the manufacturing & import of handguns. From there we register the guns which are currently owned, and follow that with additional bans and acquisitions of handguns and rifles with no sporting purpose.

We learn from history that we do not learn from history

We look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want . . . everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear . . . anywhere in the world.

We must hold medicare growth to twice inflation in order to save it.

We must make this an insecure an uninhabitable place for capitalists and their projects. This is the best contribution we can make towards protecting the earth.

We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.

We must use the Congressional Budget Office statistics to balance the budget, or else we are cheating by using a rosy scenario.

We need a new kind of feminism, one that stresses personal responsibility and is open to art and sex in all their dark, unconsoling mysteries. The feminist of the fin de siècle will be bawdy, streetwise, and on-the-spot confrontational, in the prankish Sixties way.

We need our highest judicial body to stop this childish bickering and get back to debating the kinds of weighty constitutional issues that have absorbed the court in recent years, such as whether a city can legally force an exotic dancer to cover her entire nipple, or just the part that pokes out.

We should have a great many fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves.

We should teach general ethics to both men and women, but sexual relationships themselves must not be policed. Sex, like the city streets, would be risk-free only in totalitarian regimes.

We tried to provide more for the poor and produced more poor instead. We tried to remove the barriers to escape poverty, and inadvertently built a trap.

We understood that it [SDI, "Star Wars"] was a new stage, a new turn in the armaments race... [If SDI were not stopped] we would have to start our own program, which would be tremendously expensive and unnecessary. And this [would bring] further exhaustion of the country. –

We urge passage of federal legislation – and meanwhile, in its absence, the partial remedy of state law – to prohibit, with few and narrowly drawn exceptions, the private ownership and possession of handguns, much the way existing laws prohibit machine guns, grenades and cannons.

We used to think that you could just spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and increasing spending. I tell you, in all candor, that that option no longer exists; and that insofar as it ever did exist, it only worked by injecting bigger doses of inflation into the economy followed by higher levels of unemployment as the next step.

We who live in free market societies believe that growth, prosperity and ultimately human fulfillment, are created from the bottom up, not the government down.

We're going to have to take one step at a time, and the first step is necessarily-given the political realities-going to be very modest...So then we'll have to start working again to strengthen the law, and then again to strengthen the next law, and maybe again and again...Our ultimate goal-total control of handguns in the US-is going to take time....the final problem is to make the possession of "all" handguns and "all" handgun ammunition except for the military, policemen, licensed security guards, licensed sporting clubs, and licensed gun collectors – totally illegal.

We're here to tell the NRA their nightmare is true! ... We're going to hammer guns on the anvil of relentless legislative strategy. We're going to beat guns into submission!

We've got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we'll be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.

We've got to ride the global-warming issue. Even if the theory is wrong, we'll be doing the right thing...

We...we did, if, the, the, I, I, the stories are just as they have been said.

Welfare's purpose should be to eliminate, as far as possible, the need for its own existence.

Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want of bread.

West Germans are tall, pert and orthodontically corrected, with hands, teeth and hair as clean as their clothes and clothes as sharp as their looks. Except for the fact that they all speak English pretty well, they're indistinguishable from Americans.

What an augmentation of the field for jobbing, speculating, plundering, office-building and office-hunting would be produced by an assumption of all the State powers into the hands of the General Government!

What difference does it make to the dead...whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?

What do you get when you play country music backwards? You get your girl back, your dog back, your pickup back, and you stop drinking.

What do you mean 'wait fifteen days'? This is America!

What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it his heaven.

What has destroyed liberty and the rights of man in every government which has ever existed under the sun? The generalizing and concentrating all cares and powers into one body, no matter whether of the autocrats of Russia or France, or of the aristocrats of a Venetian Senate.

What I did that was new was to prove: ...that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariate

What is a Communist? One who has yearnings For equal division of unequal earnings.

What is this oozing behemoth, this fibrous tumor, this monster of power and expense hatched from the simple human desire for civic order? How did an allegedly free people spawn a vast, rampant cuttlefish of dominion with its tentacles in every orifice of the body politic?

What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.

What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.

What stops a man who can laugh from speaking the truth?

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.

Whatever happened to the idea that we owe respect to men and women of all colors and creeds?

Whatever it is that the government does, sensible Americans would prefer that the government do it to somebody else. This is the idea behind foreign policy.

Whatever their other contributions to society, lawyers could be an important source of protein.

When a judge goes beyond [his proper function] and reads entirely new values into the Constitution, values the framers and ratifiers did not put there, he deprives the people of their liberty. That liberty, which the Constitution clearly envisions, is the liberty of the people to set their own social agenda through the process of democracy.

When a man says he approves of something in principle, it means he has no intention of putting it into practice.

When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.

When all government, domestic and foreign, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the center of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated.

When an opponent declares, "I will not come over to your side," I calmly say, "Your child belongs to us already...What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community."

When angry, count ten, before you speak; if very angry, an hundred.

When any court violates the clean and unambiguous language of the constitution a fraud is perpetrated and no one is bound to obey it.

When firearms go, all goes - we need them every hour -

When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When people fear the government, there is tyranny. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep arms and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.

When I took up my little sling and aimed at Communism, I also hit something else. What I hit was the forces of that great socialist revolution, which, in the name of liberalism, spasmodically, incompletely, somewhat formlessly, but always in the name of direction, has been inching its ice cap over the nation for two decades.

When liberty is taken away by force it can be restored by force. When it is relinquished voluntarily it can never be recovered.

When Marxist dictators shoot their way into power in Central America, the San Francisco Democrats don't blame the guerrillas and their Soviet allies, they blame United States policies of one hundred years ago, but then they always blame America first.

When one makes a Revolution, one cannot mark time; one must always go forward-or go back. He who now talks about the "freedom of the press" goes backward, and halts our headlong course towards Socialism.

When the freedom they wished for most was the freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free, and was never free again.

When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.

When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by contquest or treaty, and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that he people may require a leader.

When there are two conflicting versions of the story, the wise course is to believe the one in which people appear at their worst.

When they came for the 5th Amendment, I kept silent because I am not a criminal.
When they came for the 4th Amendment, I kept silent because I am not a drug user.
When they came for the 2nd Amendment, I kept silent because I do not own a gun.
When they took the 1st Amendment, I was kept silent.

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?

When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal and exhausting condition until death do they part.

When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary.

When we lose the right to be different, we lose the privilege to be free.

When we take people's money under threat of punishment, aren't we obligated to be careful about where it goes?

When you count the number of nations liberated from Soviet tyranny– when you total up the population freed from the Marxist yoke– when you add up all the puppet despots whose support from Moscow has now been yanked away, ours is the greatest victory in the history of freedom.

When you go into court you are putting your fate into the hands of 12 people who weren't smart enough to get out of jury duty.

When you hear a man speak of his love for his country, it is a sign he expects to get paid for it.

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God 1 entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

Whenever is found what is called a paternal government, there is found state education. It has been discovered that the best way to ensure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery.

Whenever the people are well informed they can be trusted with their own government...whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights...A little rebellion...is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.

Whenever there are in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on...The small landowners are the most precious part of a state.

Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and tortuous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistant that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.

Where freedom was concerned, the founders of socialism made no bones about their intentions. Freedom of thought they regarded as the root-evil of nineteenth-century society, and the first of modern planners, Saint-Simon, even predicted that those who did not obey his proposed planning boards would be "treated as cattle".

Where is the difference between having our arms in our possession and under our own direction, and having them under the management of Congress? If our defense be the real object of having these arms, in whose hands can they be trusted with more propriety, or equal safety to us, as in our own hands?

Where rights secured by the Constitution are involved, there can be no rule making or legislation which would abrogate them.

Where the meaning of the Constitution is clear and unambiguous, there can be no resort to construction to attribute to the founders a purpose or intent not manifest in its letter.

Where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation.

While "progressives" in England and elsewhere were still deluding themselves that communism and fascism represented opposite poles, more and more people began to ask themselves whether these new tyrranies were outcomes of the same tendencies.

While Congress was snoozing, the American taxpayers were losing.

While the collateral consequences of drugs such as cocaine are indisputably severe, they are not unlike those which flow from the misuse of other, legal substances.

While we are under the tyranny of Priests...it will ever be their interest, to invalidate the law of nature and reason, in order to establish systems incompatible therewith.

Who are the militia? are they not ourselves...Congress have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birth-right of an American...The unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people

Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? Congress has no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birth-right of an American. The Unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people.

Who ever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freedom of speech; a thing terrible to public traitors.

Who is supported by Big Money? The Republicans receive 44% of their contributions from individuals giving less than $200... The Democrats receive only 21% from individuals giving less than $200.

Why assume so glibly that the God who presumably created the universe is still running it? It is certainly perfectly conceivable that He may have finished it and then turned it over to lesser gods to operate. In the same way many human institutions are turned over to grossly inferior men. This is true, for example, of most universities, and of all great newspapers.

Why did the media find Iran Contra and the S&L bailout unworthy of further investigation only after it became clear that Clinton was involved in both scandals?

Why is it that there are so many more horses' asses than there are horses?

Why should my freedom be judged by another's conscience?

Without either the first or second amendment, we would have no liberty; the first allows us to find out what's happening, the second allows us to do something about it! The second will be taken away first, followed by the first and then the rest of our freedoms.

Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation's heart, the excision of its memory.

Women are an enslaved population-the crop we harvest is children, the fields we work are houses. Women are forced into committing sexual acts with men that violate integrity because the universal religion-contempt for women-has as its first commandment that women exist purely as sexual fodder for men.

Women are like elephants to me – I like to look at 'em, but I wouldn't want to own one.

World government is not just utopian idealism so much as it is a manifestation of arrogance [by those] who believe an internationalist elite should control the whole world and everybody in it.

Yes, I'm for an outright ban (on handguns).

Yes, there will be sex after death; we just won't be able to feel it.

Yield to tempation; it may never pass your way again.

You and I as individuals can, by borrowing, live beyond our means, but only for a limited period of time. Why should we think that collectively, as a nation, we are not bound by that same limitation?

You and I as individuals can, by borrowing, live beyond our means, but only for a limited period of time. Why should we think that collectively, as a nation, we are not bound by that same limitation?

You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having both at once.

You cannot make a man worth a given amount by making it illegal for anyone to offer him anything less. You merely deprive him of the right to earn the amount that his abilities and situation would permit him to earn, while you deprive the community even of the moderate services that he is capable of rendering. In brief, for a low wage, you substitute unemployment. You do harm all around, with no comparable compensation.

You do 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 harms it would cause if improperly administered.

You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.

You have two cows: Communist: Takes your cows, they starve to death and so do you. Socialist: Says it owns them and tells you what to do with them. Fascist: Says you own them, but tells you what to do with them. Liberal: Takes one and gives 28% of its milk to the poor(the rest is for expenses), says you still own the other, but tells you what to do with it. Rockefeller Agrees that one cow should be taken to feed the poor, but Republican: that less milk should be kept for expenses, says the other cow is yours, and lets you make requests as to what you may do with it. Conservative: Says you own both cows as long as you use both to make milk. Libertarian: Lets you do what you want with your cows...you sell one, buy a bull, and make more cows... Clinton: Pretends to own a cow, and has the government take one of your cows to pay for its loss. His dog knew, but was hit by a car and then found in the middle of a park.

You know the one thing that's wrong with this country? Everyone gets a chance to have their fair say.

You know, if government were a product, selling it would be illegal. Government is a health hazard. Governments have killed many more people than cigarettes or unbuckled seat belts ever have. Government contains impure ingredients – as anybody who's ever looked at Congress can tell you. On the basis of Bill Clinton's...campaign promises, I think we can say government practices deceptive advertising. And the merest glance at the federal budget is enough to convict the government of perjury, extortion, and fraud.

You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion...Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.

You say our country's never been invaded? You're right, little buddy. Because I'd like to see the needle-dicked foreigners who'd have the guts to try. We drink napalm to get our hearts started in the morning. A rape and a mugging is our way of saying 'Cheerio.' Hell can't hold our sock-hops. We walk taller, talk louder, spit further, fuck longer and buy more things than you know the names of. I'd rather be a junkie in a New York City jail than a king, queen and jack of all you Europeans. We eat little countries like this for breakfast and shit them out before lunch.

You spend a billion here and a billion there. Sooner or later it adds up to real money.

Your daughter is old enough to do what she pleases...she likes to fuck, loves to fuck...she was born to fuck, and...if you do not wish to be fucked yourself, the best thing for you to do is to let her do what she wants.

[A militia is] the effective part of the people at large.

[How] to check these unconstitutional invasions of...rights by the Federal judiciary? Not by impeachment in the first instance, but by a strong protestation of both houses of Congress that such and such doctrines advanced by the Supreme Court are contrary to the Constitution; and if afterwards they relapse into the same heresies, impeach and set the whole adrift. For what was the government divided into three branches, but that each should watch over the others and oppose their usurpations?

[Pete] DuPont said that farmers should go pound sand with the rest of us. When somebody's muffler shop goes bankrupt, the government doesn't pay him $100,000 to not install mufflers.

"Most codes extend their definitions of treason to acts not really against one's country. They do not distinguish between acts against the government, and acts against the oppressions of the government. The latter are virtues, yet have furnished more victims to the executioner than the former, because real treasons are rare; oppressions frequent. The unsuccessful strugglers against tyranny have been the chief martyrs of treason laws in all countries." 
—Thomas Jefferson: Report on Spanish Convention, 1792. 

"Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day."
— Thomas Jefferson to Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours, 1816. ME 14:491 

"A government by representatives elected by the people at short periods was our object, and our maxim at that day was, 'where annual election ends, tyranny begins;' nor have our departures from it been sanctioned by the happiness of their effects."
— Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Adams, 1800. ME 10:153 

"It [appears] that however certain forms of government are better calculated than others to protect individuals in the free exercise of their natural rights, and are at the same time themselves better guarded against degeneracy, yet experience [has] shown that, even under the best forms, those entrusted with power have, in time and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny."
— Thomas Jefferson: Diffusion of Knowledge Bill, 1779. FE 2:220, Papers 2:526 

"The executive in our governments is not the sole, it is scarcely the principal object of my jealousy. The tyranny of the Legislatures is the most formidable dread at present and will be for many years. That of the executive will come in its turn; but it will be at a remote period."
— Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1789. ME 7:312 

"The government which steps out of the ranks of the ordinary articles of consumption to select and lay under disproportionate burdens a particular one because it is a comfort, pleasing to the taste or necessary to the health and will therefore be bought, is in that particular a tyranny. Taxes on consumption like those on capital or income, to be just, must be uniform."
— Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Smith, 1823. ME 15:432 

"Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day; but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate, systematic plan of reducing [a people] to slavery."
— Thomas Jefferson: Rights of British America, 1774. (*) ME 1:193, Papers 1:125 

"The time to guard against corruption and tyranny is before they shall have gotten hold of us. It is better to keep the wolf out of the fold, than to trust to drawing his teeth and talons after he shall have entered."
— Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Virginia Q.XIII, 1782. ME 2:165 

"A single government... of the most extensive corruption, indifferent and incapable of a wholesome care over so wide a spread of surface... will not be borne, and you will have to choose between reformation and revolution. If I know the spirit of this country, the one or the other is inevitable. Before the canker is become inveterate, before its venom has reached so much of the body politic as to get beyond control, remedy should be applied."
— Thomas Jefferson to William T. Barry, 1822. ME 15:389 

"Distinct States, amalgamated into one as to their foreign concerns, but single and independent as to their internal administration, regularly organized with a legislature and governor resting on the choice of the people and enlightened by a free press, can never be so fascinated by the arts of one man as to submit voluntarily to his usurpation. Nor can they be constrained to it by any force he can possess. While that may paralyze the single State in which it happens to be encamped, [the] others, spread over a country of two thousand miles diameter, rise up on every side, ready organized for deliberation by a constitutional legislature and for action by their governor, constitutionally the commander of the militia of the State, that is to say, of every man in it able to bear arms."
— Thomas Jefferson to A. L. C. Destutt de Tracy, 1811. ME 13:19 

"It astonishes me to find... [that so many] of our countrymen... should be contented to live under a system which leaves to their governors the power of taking from them the trial by jury in civil cases, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of commerce, the habeas corpus laws, and of yoking them with a standing army. This is a degeneracy in the principles of liberty... which I [would not have expected for at least] four centuries."
— Thomas Jefferson to William Stephens Smith, 1788. (*) FE 5:3 

"I consider all the ill as established which may be established. I have a right to nothing which another has a right to take away."
— Thomas Jefferson to Uriah Forrest, 1787. ME 6:388, Papers 12:477 

"I hope, therefore, a bill of rights will be formed to guard the people against the federal government as they are already guarded against their State governments, in most instances."
— Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1788. ME 7:98 

"Man [is] a rational animal, endowed by nature with rights and with an innate sense of justice."
— Thomas Jefferson to William Johnson, 1823. ME 15:441 

"A free people [claim] their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate."
— Thomas Jefferson: Rights of British America, 1774. ME 1:209, Papers 1:134 

"Under the law of nature, all men are born free, every one comes into the world with a right to his own person, which includes the liberty of moving and using it at his own will. This is what is called personal liberty, and is given him by the Author of nature, because necessary for his own sustenance."
— Thomas Jefferson: Legal Argument, 1770. FE 1:376 

"It is a principle that the right to a thing gives a right to the means without which it could not be used, that is to say, that the means follow their end."
— Thomas Jefferson: Report on Navigation of the Mississippi, 1792. ME 3:180 

"The right to use a thing comprehends a right to the means necessary to its use, and without which it would be useless."
— Thomas Jefferson to William Carmichael, 1790. ME 8:72 

"Aristocrats... fear the people, and wish to transfer all power to the higher classes of society."
— Thomas Jefferson to William Short, 1825. ME 16:96