Interesting Quotes

A native in America, especially of New England, who cannot read and write is as rare a Phenomenon as a Comet."

1765

Posterity - you will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it.

If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains set lightly upon you; and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen."

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 -- to declare that the Government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal -- would bring terrible retributions.

Dissenting opinion Olmstead v. U.S., 277 U.S. 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 can be sure and not too costly, you may come to a moment when you have to fight with all the odds against you, and only a precarious chance to survive. There may even be a worse case - You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, and it will be better to perish than to live in slavery.

1937

Cursed be all learning that is contrary to the cross of Christ

The more crap you put up with, the more crap you're going to get.

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.

1857

If all Americans want is security, they can go to prison. They'll have enough to eat, a bed and a roof over their heads. But if an American wants to preserve his dignity and his equality as a human being, he must not bow his neck to any dictatorial government.

Dec.9, 1949

They that can give up an essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

1759

A government that is evil has no room for good people except in its prisons.

Treason doth never prosper. What's the reason? Why, when it prospers, none dare call it treason.

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

March 23, 1775

Men had better be without education than be educated by their rulers.

I have sworn upon the altar of Almighty God, eternal enmity toward every form of tyranny over the mind of Man.

He who fears criticism is hopeless. Only those who do things are criticized. To hesitate for fear of criticism is cowardly. If our cause is right be not afraid of criticism, advocate it, expound it. and, if need be, fight for it. Critics always have been and always will be, but to the strong minded they are a help rather than a hindrance. Take your part in life's stage and play your part to the end.

I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves, and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise that control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion.

It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom -- for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.

Declaration of Arbroath, Scotland, 6 April 1320

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 a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.

Necessity is the excuse for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of the tyrant and the creed of the slave.

1763

We can afford to differ on the currency, the tariff, and foreign policy; but we cannot afford to differ on the question of honesty if we expect our republic permanently to endure...

Honesty is not so much a credit as an absolute prerequisite to efficient service to the public. Unless a man is honest, we have no right to keep him in public life; it matters not how brilliant his capacity...

The weakling and the coward cannot be saved by honesty alone; but without honesty, the brave and able man is merely a civic wild beast who should be hunted down by every lover of righteousness.

No man who is corrupt, no man who condones corruption in others, can possibly do his duty by the community...

Liar' is just as ugly a word as 'thief', because it implies the presence of just as ugly sin in one case as in the other. If a man lies under oath or procures the lie of another under oath, if he perjures himself or suborns perjury, he is guilty under the statute law.

Under the higher law, under the great law of morality and righteousness, he is precisely as guilty if, instead of lying in court, he lies in a newspaper or on the stump; and in all probability, the evil effects of his conduct are infinitely more widespread and more pernicious."

Roosevelt as New York Governor, May 12, 1900

Rushdoony quoting Hodge:

"I am as sure as I am of Christ's reign that a comprehensive and centralized system of national education, separated from religion, as is now commonly proposed, will prove the most appalling enginery for the propagation of anti-Christian and atheistic unbelief, and of anti-social nihilistic ethics, individual, social and political, which this sin-rent world has ever seen."

by Archibald Alexander Hodge, Princeton theologian and orthodox Calvinist, Popular Lectures on Theological Themes, p.283, Philadelphia:Presbyterian Board of Publications, l887.

Rushdoony commenting on Hodge:

"But, more than that, Hodge saw as basic to the whole concept of statist education and its hostility to religion a dangerous principle in operation, that of the supremacy of the lowest common denominator."

The Messianic Character of American Education, by Rousas J. Rushdoony, 1963 p. 335.

The constitution protects us from our own best intentions. It divides power among the sovereigns and among the branches of government precisely so that we may resist the temptation to concentrate power in one location as an expedient solution to the problems of the day."

Scalia in Majority opinion for Supreme Court decision on Brady Law

How we burned in the prison camps later thinking: What would things have been like if every (soviet) police operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive?

"...if during periods of mass arrests people had not simply sat there in their lairs (apartments), paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? ...the organs (police) would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers...and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed (Communist government) machine would have ground to a halt."

Nobel Prize winner, spent 11 years in communist concentration camps

... And why limit the government's benevolent providence to the protection of the individual's body only? Is not the harm a man can inflict on his mind and soul even more disastrous than any bodily evils? Why not prevent him from reading bad books and seeing bad plays, from looking at bad paintings and statues and from hearing bad music? The mischief done by bad ideologies, surely, is much more pernicious, both for the individual and for the whole society, than that done by narcotic drugs.

These fears are not merely imaginary specters terrifying secluded doctrinaires. It is a fact that no paternal government, whether ancient or modern, ever shrank from regimenting its subjects' minds, beliefs, and opinions. If one abolishes man's freedom to determine his own consumption, one takes all freedoms away. The naive advocates of government interference with consumption delude themselves when they neglect what they disdainfully call the philosophical aspect of the problem. They unwittingly support the cause of censorship, inquisition, intolerance, and the persecution of dissenters.

Wherever the exercise of self-restraint begins, it has the inestimable value of forcing the recognition that we live within an order of limits. Our rights are not a poisonous brew destined to subvert any sense of difference between good and evil. We may not be able to define to our satisfaction where the line is to be drawn, but we can discern clearly its outer limits. The unambiguous recognition of such boundaries is an indispensable element in preserving the awareness of a moral order beyond our construction. Without that awareness, we would eventually cease to regard respect for an order of mutual rights as itself something right."

Professor of politics at Catholic University

To the states or any one of them, or any city of the States, Resist much, obey little, Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved, Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever afterward resumes its liberty.

From "To the States": Leaves of Grass, 1881

New Hampshire Politics

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