| “The time is now
near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to
be, Freemen, or Slaves; whether they are to have any property they can
call their own; whether their Houses, and Farms, are to be pillaged and
destroyed, and they consigned to a State of Wretchedness from which no
human efforts will probably deliver them. The fate of unborn Millions
will now depend, under God, on the Courage and Conduct of this army—Our
cruel and unrelenting Enemy leaves us no choice but a brave resistance,
or the most abject submission; this is all we can expect—We have
therefore to resolve to conquer or die: Our own Country’s Honor, all
call upon us for a vigorous and manly exertion, and if we now
shamefully fail, we shall become infamous to the whole world. Let us
therefore rely upon the goodness of the Cause, and the aid of the
supreme Being, in whose hands Victory is, to animate and encourage us
to great and noble Actions—The Eyes of all our Countrymen are now upon
us, and we shall have their blessings, and praises, if happily we are
the instruments of saving them from the Tyranny meditated against them.
Let us therefore animate and encourage each other, and shew the whole
world, that a Freeman contending for Liberty on his own ground is
superior to any slavish mercenary on earth.” George Washington, General order, July 2, 1776. |
| "He who attempts
to get another man into his absolute power does thereby put himself
into a state of war with him... For I have reason to conclude that he
who would get me into his power without my consent would use me as he
pleased when he had got me there, and destroy me too when he had a
fancy to it; for nobody can desire to have me in his absolute power
unless it be to compel me by force to that which is against freedom,
that is make me a slave." John Locke, Second Treatise on Civil Government. |
| “[A] State which
dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in
its hands even for beneficial purposes, will find that with small men
no great thing can really be accomplished; and that the perfection of
machinery to which it has sacrificed everything, will in the end avail
it nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order that the
machine might work more smoothly, it has preferred to banish.” John Stuart Mill’s last paragraph in his essay On Liberty. |
| "Those who profess
to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops
without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and
lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters.
This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it
may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle! Power
concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will.
Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the
exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them;
and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or
blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the
endurance of those whom they oppress." Frederick Douglass, August 4, 1857. |
| "The state is a human institution,
not a superhuman being. He who says 'state' means coercion and
compulsion. He who says: There should be a law concerning this matter,
means: The armed men of the government should force people to do what
they do not want to do, or not to do what they like. He who says: This
law should be better enforced, means: The police should force people to
obey this law. He who says: the state is God, deifies arms and prisons.
The worship of the state is the worship of force. There is no more
dangerous menace to civilization than a government of incompetent,
corrupt, or vile men. The worst evils which mankind ever had to endure
were inflicted by bad governments." Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War, by Ludwig von Mises. |
| "There are always
a few, better endowed than others, who feel the weight of the yoke and
cannot restrain themselves from attempting to shake it off: these are
the men who never become tamed under subjection and who always, like
Ulysses on land and sea constantly seeking the smoke of his chimney,
cannot prevent themselves from peering about for their natural
privileges and from remembering their ancestors and their former ways. "These are in fact the men who, possessed of clear minds and far-sighted spirit, are not satisfied, like the brutish mass, to see only what is at their feet, but rather look about them, behind and before, and even recall the things of the past in order to judge those of the future, and compare both with their present condition. These are the ones who, having good minds of their own, have further trained them by study and learning. Even if liberty had entirely perished from the earth, such men would invent it. For them slavery has no satisfactions, no matter how well disguised." Etienne de La Boetie, in "Discourse on Voluntary Servitude", 1548. |
| "A bland American civil servant can
be as much of a beast as a ferocious concentration camp guard if he
does not think about what his actions are doing. Single-minded
Inspector Javert is a monster, even though he focused only on his duty.
Half the cruelties of human history have been inflicted by
conscientious servants of the state. The mildest of bureaucrats can be
a brute if he does not raise his eyes from his task and consider the
human beings on whom he is having an impact." Jordan v. Gardner, 986 F.2d 1521, 1544 (9th Cir. 1993). |
| "Liberty has never
come from Government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it.
The history of Liberty is a history of resistance. The history of
Liberty is a history of limitations of Governmental power, not the
increase of it." Woodrow Wilson. |
| "And what country can preserve its
liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this
people preserve the right of resistance? Let them take arms ... The
tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of
patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure." Thomas Jefferson. |
| "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 of the people are armed, and constitute a force
superior to any bands of regular troops that can be, on any pretense,
raised in the United States." Noah Webster. |
| "We are fast approaching the stage of
the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do
anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission;
which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage
of rule by brute force." Ayn Rand, The Nature of Government. |
| "And remember,
where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too
frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control. History has
proven that... All power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely."
Lord Acton. |
| "No foreign
power or combination of foreign powers could by force take a drink from
the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand
years. At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I
answer, if it ever reach us it must spring up from among us, it cannot
come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its
author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all
time or die of suicide." Abraham Lincoln. |
| "Find out just
what the people will submit to and you have found out the exact amount
of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will
continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with
both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those
whom they oppress." Frederick Douglas, 1857. |
| "I apprehend no danger to our country
from a foreign foe ... Our destruction, should it come at all, will be
from another quarter. From the inattention of the people to the
concerns of their government, from their carelessness and negligence, I
must confess that I do apprehend some danger.'' Daniel Webster, June 1, 1837. |
| "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, systematical plan of reducing us to slavery." Thomas Jefferson. |
| "A nation can survive its fools, and
even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy
at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner
openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his
sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls
of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks
in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their
garments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of
all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in
the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body
politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear." Marcus Tullius Cicero, 42 BC. |
| "Human nature is full of riddles; one
of those riddles is: how is it that people who have been crushed by the
sheer weight of slavery and cast to the bottom of the pit can
nevertheless find strength in themselves to rise up and free themselves
first in spirit and then in body while those who soar unhampered over
the peaks of freedom suddenly lose the taste of freedom, lose the will
to defend it, and, hopelessly confused and lost, almost begin to crave
slavery?'" Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. |
| The
liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil Constitution, are
worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them
against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from
our worthy ancestors: they purchased them for us with toil and danger
and expense of treasure and blood, and transmitted them to us with care
and diligence. It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the
present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to
be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out
of them by the artifices of false and designing men. Samuel Adams. |
| "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." Thomas Jefferson. |
| "These are the times that try men's
souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this
crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it
now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell,
is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the
harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too
cheap we esteem too lightly; 'tis dearness only that gives everything
its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its good; and it
would be strange indeed, if so celestial an article as Freedom should
not be highly rated." Thomas Paine, Dec. 23, 1776. |
| "Decency, security, and liberty alike
demand that government officials shall be subjected to the same rules
of conduct that are commands to the citizen. In a government of laws,
existence of the government will be imperilled if it fails to observe
the law scrupulously. Our Government is the potent, the omnipresent
teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its
example. Crime is contagious. If the Government becomes a lawbreaker,
it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto
himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of
the criminal law the end justifies the means... would bring terrible
retribution. Against that pernicious doctrine this Court should
resolutely set its face." Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438, 485 (1928). |
| "If
you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without
bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be 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 small 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." |
| "John Stuart Mill, referring to the
morality of assassination of political usurpers, passed by examination
of the subject of Tyrannicide, as follows: 'I shall content myself with saying that the subject has been at all times one of the open questions of morals; that the act of a private citizen in striking down a criminal, who, by raising himself above the law, has placed himself beyond the reach of legal punishment or control, has been accounted by whole nations, and by some of the best and wisest men, not a crime, but an act of exalted virtue; and that, right or wrong, it is not in the nature of assassination, but of civil war.' "Mill, On Liberty and Considerations on Representative Government, p. 14, n. 1." Jordan v. DeGeorge, 341 U.S. 223, 241, 71 S.Ct. 703, 713 (1951): case regarding meaning of "moral turpitude" and dissent noted the above in a footnote. |
| "It is not the critic who counts; not
the man who points out how the strong man stumbled or where the doer of
deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is
actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and
blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again,
who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends
himself in a worthy cause, who, at the best, knows in the end the
triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at
least fails while daring greatly, so that his place will never be with
those timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat." |
| "If you love wealth better than
liberty, the tranquillity of servitude better than the animating
contest of freedom, go home in peace. We ask not your counsels or
your arms. Crouch down and lick the hands of those who feed
you. May your chains set lightly upon you. May posterity
forget that ye were our countrymen." |
| “Tyranny is the exercise of Power
beyond Right, which no Body can have a Right to. And this is making use
of the Power any one has in his hands; not for the good of those, who
are under it, but for his own private separate Advantage. ... For
where-ever the Power that is put in any hands for the Government of the
People, and the Preservation of their Properties, is applied to other
ends, and made use of to impoverish, harass, or subdue them to the
Arbitrary and Irregular Commands of those that have it: There it
presently becomes Tyranny, whether those that thus use it are one or
many.” John Locke Two Treatise of Government (1698) Book II, Chapter XVIII, § 199. |
| “The militia is the natural defence
of a free country against sudden foreign invasions, domestic
insurrections, and domestic usurpations of power by rulers. ... The
right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered,
as the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a
strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of
rulers; and will generally, even if these are successful in the first
instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over
them.” Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (Fifth Edition, 1897). Volume 2 § 1897 at 646. |
| "They rattle their
chains to boast of their freedom." Dresden James. |
| "In Germany they
came first 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 trade unionists, and I didn’t
speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for
Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant. Then
they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up." Protestant minister Martin Neimoller. |
| War is an ugly thing but not the
ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and
patriotic feelings which thinks that nothing is worth war is much
worse. A man 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 has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the
exertions of better men than himself. John Stuart Mill. |
| "Those who are
willing to sacrifice their freedoms for a measure of security, deserve
neither." * * *
"History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling money and its issuance." |
| "Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to
God." |
| "The natural progress of things is
for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." |
| "I know of no safe depository of the
ultimate powers of society but the people themselves; and if we think
them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome
discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform
them." Thomas Jefferson. |
| "I
don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts." "Be thankful we're not getting all the government we're paying for." "The trouble with practical jokes is that very often they get elected." "If you ever injected truth into politics you have no politics." "Next to guinea pigs, taxes have been the most prolific animal." Will Rogers. |
| "Where the Spirit of the Lord is,
there is liberty." |
| "After having thus successively taken
each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at
will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community.
It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated
rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and
the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the
crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and
guided; men seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly
restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents
existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates,
extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to
nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which
the government is the shepherd." Alexis de Tocqueville. |
| "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." William O. Douglas, Supreme Court Justice. |
| Sometimes
the law defends plunder and participates in it. Thus the beneficiaries
are spared the shame and danger that their acts would otherwise
involve... But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite
simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them and
gives it to the other persons to whom it doesn't 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. Then abolish that
law without delay ... No legal plunder; this is the principle of
justice, peace, order, stability, harmony and logic. Frederic Bastiat. |
| "You can fight and
beat revolutions as you can fight and beat nations. You can kill a man,
but you can’t kill a rebel. For the proper rebel has an ideal of
living, while your ideal is to kill him so that you may preserve
yourself. And the reason why no revolution has ever been beaten
is that rebels die for something worth dying for, the future, but their
enemies only die to preserve the past, and the makers of history are
always stronger than the makers of empires." |
| "This case involves a cancer in our
body politic. It is a measure of the disease which aflicts us. Army
surveillance, like Army regimentation, is at war with the principles of
the First Amendment. Those who already walk submissively will say there
is no cause for alarm. But submissiveness is not our heritage. The
First Amendment was designed to allow rebellion to remain as our
heritage. The Constitution was designed to keep government off the
backs of the people. The Bill of Rights was added to keep the precincts
of belief and expression, of the press, of political and social
activities free from surveillance. The Bill of Rights was designed to
keep agents of government and official eavesdroppers away from
assemblies of people. The aim was to allow men to be free and
independent and to assert their rights against government. There can be
no influence more paralyzing of that objective than Army surveillance.
When an intelligence officer looks over every nonconformist's shoulder
in the library, or walks invisibly by his side in a picket line, or
infiltrates his club, the America once extolled as the voice of liberty
heard around the world no longer is cast in the image which Jefferson
and Madison designed, but more in the Russian image..." Laird v. Tatum, 408 U.S. 1, 28, 92 S.Ct. 2318, 2333 (1972)(Dissent by Douglas). |
| "I often wonder whether we do not
rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts.
These are false hopes, believe me, these are false hopes. 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. While it lies there, it needs no constitution, no
law, no court to save it." Judge Learned Hand. |
| "God grants liberty only to those who
love it, and are always ready to guard and defend it." |
| "Those who won our independence were
not cowards. They did not fear political change. They did not exalt
order at the cost of liberty." Whitney v. California, 274 U.S. 357, 377, 47 S.Ct. 641, 648-49 (1927). |
| "If we run into such debts as that we
must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our
comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our
creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come
to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, and give the earnings of
fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; And the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they do now, on oatmeal and potatoes, have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains around the necks of our fellow sufferers; And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for a second, that second for a third, and so on 'til the bulk of the society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering... And the forehorse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression." Thomas Jefferson. |
| "Government is not reason, it is not
eloquence, it is force! Like fire, it is a troublesome servant and a
fearful master." |
| “It is in vain, sir to extenuate the
matter. Gentlemen may cry, peace, peace - but there is no
peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from
the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms!
Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? “What is it the gentlemen wish? What would they have? 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!” |
| "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." Patrick Henry, speech against the federal Constitution, June 5, 1788. |
| "The accumulation
of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same
hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary,
self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very
definition of tyranny." James Madison, Federalist Papers No. 47. |