Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.
To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of people always possess arms.
Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.
Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.
Our contest is not only whether we ourselves shall be free, but whether there shall be left to mankind an asylum on earth for civil and religious liberty.
Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.
I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.
You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.
Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.
It is easy to take liberty for granted, when you have never had it taken from you.
You can only be free if I am free.
The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of people.
Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.
Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.
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 other persons to whom it does not 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.
America... goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all.
I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.
Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.
All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.
The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.
Errors of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.
I own that I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive.
You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered.
The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.
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