the original source of this quote compilation is http://www.adjutant.com/other/quotes.htm
"To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and
abhors is sinful and tyrannical."
Thomas Jefferson
"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction."
Ronald Reagan
"The strength of the Constitution lies entirely in the determination of each citizen
to defend it. Only if every single citizen feels duty bound to do his share in this
defense are constitutional rights secure."
Albert Einstein
"Those who say that life is worth living at any cost have already written an epitaph
of infamy, for there is no cause and no person that they will not betray to stay
alive."
Sidney Hook
"Who can protest an injustice but does not is an accomplice to the act."
The Talmud
"If you are thinking a year ahead, sow a seed. If you are thinking ten years ahead,
plant a tree. If you are thinking one hundred years ahead, educate the people."
Chinese Proverb
"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."
Richard Henry Lee
"Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the
government's purposes are beneficent. 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."
Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438 (1928)
"In Germany, they first came for the communists, and I didn't speak up because I
wasn't a communist. Then, they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a
Jew...Then they came for the Catholics. I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then
they came for me, and there was no one left to speak up."
Reverend Martin Neimoller, German Lutheran pastor arrested by the Gestapo in 1937
"For the saddest epitaph which can be carved in memory of a vanished freedom is that
it was lost because its possessors failed to stretch forth a saving hand while there was
still time."
Supreme Court Justice George Sutherland
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do
nothing."
Sir Edmund Burke, attributed
"When a strong man, fully armed, guards his own house, his possessions are
safe."
Luke 11:21 (NIV)
"Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force. Like fire, a dangerous
servant, and a fearful master."
George Washington
"The worst thing that can happen to a good cause is, not to be skillfully attacked,
but to be ineptly defended."
Frederic Bastiat
"Countries are well cultivated, not as they are fertile, but as they are free."
Montesquieu
"... America is great because America is good. When America ceases to be good,
America will cease to be great."
Alexis de Tocqueville
"Sound money and free banking are not impossible; they are merely illegal. Freedom of
money and freedom of banking ... are the principles that must guide our steps."
Hans F. Sennholz
"The task must be to banish from mankind's thought the idea that anybody has the
right to use force against righteousness, against justice, against mutual
agreements."
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an
unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."
Edmund Burke
"If you want to kill any idea in the world today, get a committee working on
it."
Charles F. Kettering
"The ultimate effect of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world
with fools."
Herbert Spencer (1820 - 1903)
"It is one thing to show a men that he is in error, and another to put him in
possession of truth."
John Locke (1632 - 1704)
"In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, 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."
James Madison
"Logical consequences are the scarecrows of fools and the beacons of wise men."
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825 - 1895)
"The Constitution is the origin and measure of legislative authority. It says to
legislators, thus far ye shall go and no farther. Not a particle of it should be shaken;
not a pebble of it should be removed ..."
Justice William Paterson (1745 - 1806)
"We have had so many years of prosperity, we have passed through so many difficulties
and dangers without the loss of liberty - that we begin to think that we hold it by divine
right from heaven itself ... It is harder to preserve than to obtain liberty."
John C. Calhoun
"The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches
rulers and ruled alike. Subjectivism about [moral] values is eternally incompatible with
democracy. We and our rulers are of one kind only so long as we are subject to one law.
But if there is no Law of Nature, the ethos of any society is the creation of its rulers,
educators and conditioners; and every creator stands above and outside his own
creation."
C. S. Lewis, Christian Reflections (1943)
"Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though
checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor
suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor
defeat."
Theodore Roosevelt, speech before the Hamilton Club, Chicago, [April 10, 1899]
"The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and
only legitimate object of good government."
Thomas Jefferson, to the Republican Citizens of Washington County, Maryland [March 31,
1809]
"[G]overnment'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."
Ronald Reagan, remarks to the White House Conference on Small Business, August 15, 1986
"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."
George Will, "Oread Review"
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of
tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
William Pitt, speech to the House of Commons, [Nov. 18, 1783]
"Patriotism means unqualified and unwavering love for the nation, which implies not
uncritical eagerness to serve, not support for unjust claims, but frank assessment of its
vices and sins, and penitence for them."
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, "From Under the Rubble"
"If we open a quarrel between past and present, we shall find that we have lost the
future."
Winston Churchill, Speech in the House of Commons
"Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And... moderation in the pursuit of
justice is no virtue."
Barry Goldwater, Acceptance Speech at the Republican Convention; 1964
"This idea that government was beholden to the people, that it had no other source of
power is still the newest, most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to
man. This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for
self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little
intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can
plan them ourselves."
Ronald Reagan's Speech at the 1964 National Convention: A Time for Choosing
"One man with courage makes a majority"
Andrew Jackson
"Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it; and this I
know, my lords, that where laws end, tyranny begins."
William Pitt, Earl of Chatham; Case of Wilkes Speech
"A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another,
which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and
improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned: This is
the sum of good government."
Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address; March 4, 1801
"It never troubles the wolf how many the sheep may be."
Sir Francis Bacon.
"Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage
boys."
P.J. O'Rourke
"Americans have the right and advantage of being armed--unlike citizens of other
countries whose governments are afraid to trust the people with arms."
James Madison
"If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the
animated contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsel 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 coutrymen."
Samuel Adams, Great Quotations
"... The necessary result, then, of the unequal fiscal action of the government is to
divide the community into two great classes, one consisting of those who, in reality, pay
taxes and, of course, bear exclusively the burden of supporting the government; and the
other, of those who are then recipients of their proceeds through disbursements, and who
are, in fact, supported by the government; or in fewer words, divide it into tax-payers
and tax-consumers."
John C. Calhoun - 1833
"A Covenant not to defend myself from force, by force, is always void. For... no man
can transfer or lay down his Right to save himself from Death."
Thomas Hobbes, 17th century English political philosopher
"The right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary
government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which... historically has proven to be
always possible."
United States Senator Hubert Humphrey
"Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost
every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the
sword; because the whole body of the people are armed."
Noah Webster, author, An American Dictionary of the English Language
"The laws that forbid the carrying of arms... serve rather to encourage than to
prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an
armed man."
Ceasare Beccaria, 18th century criminologist
"In countries under arbitrary government, the people oppressed and dispirited neither
possess arms nor know how to use them. Tyrants never feel secure until they have disarmed
the people."
Unknown author, from the Connecticut Courant, 1788
"The measures adopted to restore public order are: First of all, the elimination of
the so-called subversive elements. [...] They were elements of disorder and subversion. On
the morrow of each conflict I gave the categorical order to confiscate the largest
possible number of weapons of every sort and kind. This confiscation, which continues with
the utmost energy, has given satisfactory results."
Prime Minister Benito Mussolini, 1923
"Those who beat their swords into plowshares will plow for those who don't."
(Bumper sticker)
"If our lives are endangered by plots or violence or armed robbers or enemies, any
and every method of protecting ourselves is morally right."
Cicero, Roman orator, 1st century B.C.
"You may be whatever you resolve to be."
Thomas Stonewall Jackson
"Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God."
Thomas Jefferson
"All that the South has ever desired was that the Union as established by our
forefathers should be preserved and that the government as originally organized should be
administered in purity and truth."
Gen. Robert E. Lee
"The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent
virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries."
Winston Churchill
"If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you
will not fight when your victory is sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment
when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of
survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of
victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves."
Winston Churchill
"As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances,
there's a twilight where everything remains seemingly unchanged, and it is in such
twilight that we must be aware of change in the air, however slight, lest we become
unwitting victims of the darkness."
Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas
"What luck for rulers, that men do not think."
Adolph Hitler
"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."
Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf, vol. 1, ch. 3 (1925))
"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."
P.J. O'Rourke, Parliament of Whores
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution
inevitable."
John F. Kennedy, 1962
"If a man hasn't discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to
live."
Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Whenever the legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the
people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a
state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any farther obedience, and
are left to the common refuge which God hath provided for all men against force and
violence."
John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 1698
"The history of liberty is a history of resistance."
Woodrow Wilson
"Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never - in nothing, great or
small, large or petty - never give in except to convictions of honor and good
sense."
Sir Winston Churchill, 1941, Address at Harrow School
"When a legislature undertakes to proscribe the exercise of a citizen's
constitutional rights it acts lawlessly and the citizen can take matters into his own
hands and proceed on the basis that such a law is no law at all."
Justice William O. Douglas
"Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it."
Albert Einstein, Quoted in Saturday Review obituary, 1955
"We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."
Benjamin Franklin, 1776, After signing the Declaration of Independence
"No real social change has ever been brought about without a
revolution. Revolution is but thought carried into action."
Emma Goldman, Anarchism, 1917
"The Framers of the Bill of Rights did not purport to "create" rights.
Rather, they designed the Bill of Rights to prohibit our Government from infringing rights
and liberties presumed to be preexisting."
Justice William J. Brennan, 1982
"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."
Shogun Toyotomi Hideyoshi, August 29, 1558
"The peaceable part of mankind will be continually overrun by the vile and
abandoned while they neglect the means of self-defence. 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 the world deprived of the use
of them; ...the weak will become prey of the strong."
Thomas Paine
"Our country is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass
to destruction, to wit: by consolidation [of power] first, and then corruption, its
necessary consequence."
Thomas Jefferson
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed persons can change the
world. Indeed it's the only thing that ever has..."
Margaret Mead
"We could have pursued no other course without dishonour. And as sad as the results
have been, if it had all to be done over again, we should be compelled to act in precisely
the same manner."
General Robert E. Lee, C.S.A.
"Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free."
Author unknown
"Truth seldom is pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter."
"A loss of courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices
in the West in our days..."
"Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the
intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society. Of
course, there are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on
public life."
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Commencement address at Harvard University, June 8, 1978
"If ever this vast country is brought under a single government, it will be one of
the most extensive corruption, indifferent and incapable of a wholesome care over so wide
a spread of surface. This will not be borne, and you will have to choose between reform
and revolution. If I know the spirit of this country, the one or the other is
inevitable."
Thomas Jefferson
"The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide
everything."
Joseph Stalin
"We trained hard...but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into
teams, we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new
situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of
progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization."
Petronius Arbiter, 210 B.C.
"There is not a truth existing which I fear, or would wish unknown to the whole
world."
Thomas Jefferson
"Peace proposals unaccompanied by a sworn covenant indicate a plot."
Sun Tzu [The Art of War]
"We have awakened a sleeping giant and instilled in it a terrible resolve."
Admiral Isoroku Yamamato, December 7, 1941
"It is not the evil itself which is horrifying about our times -- it is the way we
not only tolerate evil, but have made a cult of positively worshipping weakness,
depravity, rottenness and evil itself."
George Lincoln Rockwell
"I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary
in the political world as storms in the physical."
Thomas Jefferson
"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."
Aldous Huxley, Proper Studies
"It is not the critic who counts, not the one who points out how the strong man
stumbled or how the doer of deeds might have done them better. The credit belongs to the
man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred with sweat and dust and blood; who
strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great
enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who, if he wins,
knows the triumph of high achievement; and who, if he fails, at least fails while daring
greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither
victory nor defeat."
"The Man in the Arena"
"To ignore the evidence, and hope that it cannot be true, is more an evidence of
mental illness."
William Blase
"Only two things are infinite; the universe and human stupidity, and I am not sure
about the former."
Albert Einstein
"A God who let us prove his existence would be an idol."
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought
which they seldom use."
Kierkegaard
"A nation of well-informed men, who have been taught to know and prize the rights
that God has given them cannot be enslaved. It is in the region of ignorance that tyranny
begins!"
Benjemin Franklin
"Who owns the youth owns the future!"
Adolf Hitler
"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger
and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better
idiots. So far, the Universe is winning."
Rich Cook
"There is seldom an instance of a man guilty of betraying his country, who had not
before lost the feeling of moral obligations in his private connections...."
Samuel Adams
"There is no such thing, at this date of the world's history, as an independent
press. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write your honest
opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am
paid weekly for keeping my honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of
you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish
as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I
allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my
occupation would be gone. The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth; to lie
outright; to pervert; to vilify; to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell the country
for his daily bread. You know it and I know it and what folly is this toasting an
independent press. We are the tools and vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. We are
the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and
our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."
John Swinton, former Chief of Staff at the New York Times, New York Press Club, 1953
The Captain
Captain, what do you think, I asked, of the part your soldiers play?
The Captain answered, I do not think. I do not think, I obey!
Do you think you should shoot a patriot down and help a tyrant slay?
The Captain answered, I do not think. I do not think, I obey!
Do you think your conscience was meant to die and your brains to rot away?
The Captain answered, I do not think. I do not think, I obey!
Then if this is your soldiers code, I cried, your mean unmanly crew,
And for all of your equipment, guns and braid, I'm more of a man than you.
For whatever my lot on earth may be and whether I swim or sink,
I can say with pride -I do not obey. I do not obey - I think!
Author unknown