Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grandchildren are once more slaves.
Laws that forbid the carrying of arms . . . disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes . . . Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.
A right is not what someone gives you; it's what no one can take from you.
The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty.
The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.
Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent.
If we don't believe in free expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.
Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err.
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
Educate and inform the whole mass of the people... They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.
Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none.
Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.
Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.
It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.
It is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad.
Of all the enemies of public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.
As a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.
You can't separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom.
For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.
I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people except for a few public officials.
The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it.
Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.
To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude.
We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt.
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