Famous Quotes

"The sacred rights of property are to be guarded at every point. I call them sacred, because, if they are unprotected, all other rights become worthless or visionary. What is personal liberty, if it does not draw after it the right to enjoy the fruits of our own industry? What is political liberty, if it imparts only perpetual poverty to us and all our posterity? What is the privilege of a vote, if the majority of the hour may sweep away the earnings of our whole lives, to gratify the rapacity of the indolent, the cunning, or the profligate, who are borne into power upon the tide of a temporary popularity?"

Judge Joseph Story, 1852

No person shall be...deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation."

Article 5, The Bill of Rights

"Law is often the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual."

Thomas Jefferson to I. Tiffany, 1819

"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. ...the idea is quite unfounded that on entering into society we give up any natural rights."

Thomas Jefferson - from a letter to Francis W. Gilmor, July 7, 1786

"It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law so much as for the right."

Henry David Thoreau (1849)

"A nation of well informed men who have been taught to know and prize the rights which God has given them cannot be enslaved. It is in the region of ignorance that tyranny begins."

Benjamin Franklin

"We must pity the poor wretched, timid soul who is too faint-hearted to resist his oppressors. He sings the song of the dammed: "I can't fight back; I have too much to lose; I own too much property; I have worked too hard to get what I have; They will put me out of business if I resist; I might go to jail; I have my family to think about." Such poor miserable creatures have misplaced values and are hiding their cowardice behind pretended family responsibility - blindly refusing to see that the most glorious legacy that one can bequeath to posterity is liberty; and that the only true security is liberty."

- Cooley

"..it does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds.."

Samuel Adams

"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."

Winston Churchill

"You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence."

A. Beard, American Historian, 1874-1948

"The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government --lest it come to dominate our lives and interests."

Patrick Henry

"Ours is a sick profession. [A profession marked by] incompetence, lack of training, misconduct, and bad manners. Ineptness, bungling, malpractice, and bad ethics can be observed in court houses all over this country every day."

Justice Warren Burger

"What is a truth on one plane is truth on all" - esoteric maxim

"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root."

Henry David Thoreau

"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country."

— Thomas Jefferson (1812 )

"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."

Abraham Lincoln (1865)

"But we're not a democracy. It’s a terrible misunderstanding and a slander to the idea of democracy to call us that.  In reality, we're a plutocracy: a government by the wealthy."

— Ramsey Clark (former U.S. Attorney General interview in The Sun magazine, August, 2001 )

"Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the President or any other public official save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country."

- Theodore Roosevelt

"The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the U.S. since the days of Andrew Jackson"

Franklin D. Roosevelt

"Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day."

- Theodore Roosevelt, April 19, 1906

"We can have a democratic society or we can have the concentration of great wealth in the hands of the few. We cannot have both."

— Louis Brandeis, Supreme Court Justice from 1916-1939

"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 further obedience..."

— John Locke (1690) "2nd Treatise on Government"

Chapter 19, paragraph 222

"The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes."

— Benjamin Disraeli ( First Jewish Prime Minister of England)1844

"Poor people have access to the courts in the same sense that the Christians had access to the lions."

Judge Earl Johnson, Jr.

"We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark. The real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light."

- Plato

"We are a republic. Real liberty is never found in despotism or in the extremes of democracy."

 - Alexander Hamilton.

"Away with the whims of governmental administrators, their socialized projects, their centralization, their tariffs, their government schools, their state religions, their free credit, their bank monopolies, their regulations, their restrictions, their equalization by taxation, and their pious moralizations! And now that the legislators and do-gooders have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: MAY THEY REJECT ALL SYSTEMS, and try liberty; for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works."

- "THE LAW" by Fredrick Bastiat

Should we wander from [the essential principles of our government] in moments of error or alarm, let us hasten to retrace our steps and to regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty, and prosperity.-

Thomas Jefferson (1801)

All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed; Second, it is violently opposed; and Third, it is accepted as self-evident.

- Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)

Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.

- Bertrand Russell

[QUOTES ON WAR]

War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.

– George Orwell

"We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount... The world has achieved brilliance without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living."

- General Omar N. Bradley

"Naturally the common people don't want war: Neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

- Hermann Goering, President of the Reichstag, Nazi Party, and Luftwaffe

"We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it. And we must not allow ourselves to be drawn into a trial of the causes of the war for our position is that no grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy."

— U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, U.S. representative to the International Conference on Military Trials, Aug. 12, 1945.

"Beware the leader who bangs the drums in war to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, they will offer up all their rights unto the leader and gladly so.  How do I know ? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar."

To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.

- Nuremburg War Tribunal regarding wars of aggression

"Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes. And armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. "In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended. Its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force of the people. "The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war… and in the degeneracy of manners and morals, engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."

- James Madison, April 20, 1795