 God grant that not only the love of liberty but a thorough knowledge of the rights of man may pervade all the nations of the earth, so that a philosopher may set his foot anywhere on its surface and say: This is my country.
Benjamin Franklin
http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Ben_Franklin.html
The Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself.
Benjamin Franklin
http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Ben_Franklin.html
...a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles ...is absolutely necessary to preserve the blessings of liberty and keep a government free.
Benjamin Franklin
http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Ben_Franklin.html
Where liberty dwells, there is my country.
Benjamin Franklin
http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Ben_Franklin.html
Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others?
Thomas Jefferson
http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Jefferson.html
Our wish is that . . . [there may be] maintained that state of property, equal or unequal, which results to every man from his own industry or that of this fathers.
Thomas Jefferson
...the minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, and to violate would be oppression.
Thomas Jefferson
A free people [claim] their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.
Thomas Jefferson
http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Jefferson.html
"Live Free or Die, Death is not the Worst of Evils."
General John Stark
1809 toast to an anniversary reunion of the Battle of Bennington
For thousands of years men have been writing the real Bible, and it is being being written from day to day, and it will never be finished while man has life.
Robert Ingersoll
I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Protestant church, not by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.
Thomas Paine
Appreciation is a wonderful thing: it makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.
Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire
http://www.arches.uga.edu/~jpetrie/Voltaire.html
I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it.
Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire
http://www.quotationspage.com
It is a popular error to imagine the loudest complainers for the public to be the most anxious for its welfare.
Edmund Burke
http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Burke.html
[The marketplace] obliges men, whether they will or not, in pursuing their own selfish interests, to connect the general good with their own individual success.
Edmund Burke
http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Burke.html
Law and arbitrary power are at eternal enmity.
Edmund Burke
http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Burke.html
Whatever each man can separately do, without trespassing on others, he has a right to do for himself . . . all men have equal rights; but not to equal things.
Edmund Burke
http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Burke.html
No nation was ever ruined by trade.
Benjamin Franklin
Essays
Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.
Gotthold Lessing
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.
John Locke
Essay on the Human Understanding
Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.
Jonathan Swift
Critical Essay upon the Faculties of the Mind
Admonish your friends privately, but praise them openly.
Publilius Syrus
Maxims
'Tis true that I know much, but I would like to know everything.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.
Will Rogers
http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Rogers.html
Never blame a legislative body for not doing something. When they do nothing, that don't hurt anybody. When they do something is when they become dangerous.
Will Rogers
http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Rogers.html
The trouble with practical jokes is that very often they get elected.
Will Rogers
http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Rogers.html
I don't want to complain, but every time they build a tax structure, the first thing they nail is me.
Will Rogers
http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Rogers.html
This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when a baby gets hold of a hammer.
Will Rogers
http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Rogers.html
Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last possible improvement in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man? 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.
Henry David Thoreau
Civil Disobedience
Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.
Henry David Thoreau
Civil Disobedience
But a government in which the majority rule in all cases can not be based on justice . . . Can there not be a government in which the majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience?
Henry David Thoreau
http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Thoreau.html
When you put your faith in big government, you end up an apologist for mass murder.
Karl Hess
http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Karl_Hess.html
In a laissez-faire society, there could exist no public institution with the power to forcefully protect people from themselves. From other people (criminals), yes. From one's own self, no.
Karl Hess
http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Karl_Hess.html
The radical and revolutionary view of the future of nationhood is, logically, that it has no future, only a past—often an exciting one, and usually a historically useful one at some stage. But lines drawn on paper, on the ground or in the stratosphere are clearly insufficient to the future of mankind.
Karl Hess
http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Karl_Hess.html
...danger confronts us...the prevalence of a popular disposition to expect from the operation of the Government especial and direct individual advantages.
Grover Cleveland
http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Grover_Cleveland.html
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire
That which moves not forward, goes backward.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/goethe2.html
To be pleased with one's limits is a wretched state.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/goethe2.html
Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice...moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.
Karl Hess
Speech for Barry Goldwater
I can find no warrant for such an appropriation [federal aid to drought-stricken Texas farmers] in the Constitution, and I do not believe that the power and duty of the General Government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit...The friendliness and charity of our countrymen can always be relied upon to relieve their fellow-citizens in misfortune...Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character, while it prevents the indulgence among our people of that kindly sentiment and conduct which strengthen the bond of a common brotherhood.
Grover Cleveland
http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Grover_Cleveland.html
Our citizens have the right to protection from the incompetency of public employees...
Grover Cleveland
http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Grover_Cleveland.html
The Declaration of Independence is so lucid we're afraid of it today. It scares the hell out of every modern bureaucrat, because it tells them there comes a time when we must stop taking orders.
Karl Hess
http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Karl_Hess.html
...the state...has not given me anything that it did not first extort from me.
Karl Hess
http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Karl_Hess.html
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, criminal, grasping, and unintelligent.
H. L. Mencken
http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Mencken.html
[Government's] great contribution to human wisdom...is the discovery that the taxpayer has more than one pocket.
H. L. Mencken
http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Mencken.html
The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.
H. L. Mencken
http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Mencken.html
Yet this government never of itself furthered any enterprise but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way.
Henry David Thoreau
Civil Disobedience
...no nation ever lost its liberty, but by the force of foreign invaders, or the domestic treachery of its own magistrates...
Cato's Letters
http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Cato.html
If slavery were the real issue, then slavery among flesh-and-blood human beings alive today would arouse far more outcry than past slavery among people who are long dead. The difference is that past slavery can be cashed in for political benefits today.
Thomas Sowell
Those who trade essential liberty for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Benjamin Franklin
|
