Politically
Incorrect
QUOTATIONS
Heretofore Buried Under the Rug.
This would be the best of
all possible worlds, if there were no
religion in it. -- John Adams, in a
letter to Thomas Jefferson.
>
>
In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is
always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection
to his own. -- Thomas Jefferson,
1814
>
> The day will come when
the mystical generation of Jesus by the Supreme Being as his father, in
the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of
Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. -- Thomas Jefferson,
1823
>
> I do not find in
orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature. -- Thomas
Jefferson
>
> Question with
boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more
approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.... Do not be
frightened from this inquiry from any fear of its consequences. If it ends in
the belief that there is no God, you will find incitements to virtue in the
comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise...-- Thomas Jefferson,
in a 1787 letter to his
nephew
>
> The Bible is not my
book, and Christianity is not my religion. I could never give assent to the
long, complicated statements of Christian dogma. -- Abraham
Lincoln
>
"Rightful liberty is unobstructed action, according to our
will, within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others."
-- Thomas
Jefferson
>
> Sometimes it is
said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then,
be trusted with the government of
others? -- Thomas Jefferson, in his 1801 inaugural
address
>
> A wise and frugal
government, which shall restrain men from
injuring one another, which shall
leave them otherwise free to regulate their own
pursuits of industry and
improvement, and shall not take from the mouth
of labor the bread it has
earned. This is the sum of good government, and all
that is necessary to
close the circle of our felicities.-- Thomas Jefferson, in his 1801 inaugural
address
>
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a
little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-- Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania,
1759.
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>
"Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice;
moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."
>-- Barry Goldwater
(actually written by Karl Hess)
>
"I hold it, that a little
rebellion, now and then, is a good
thing, and as necessary in the political
world as storms in the physical."
--- Thomas Jefferson, Letter to James
Madison, January 30, 1787
>
"This country, with its
institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow
weary of the existing government, they
can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their
revolutionary
right to dismember it or overthrow it."
-- Abraham Lincoln, 4 April
1861
>
No one is bound to obey an unconstitutional law
and no courts are bound to enforce it. -- 16 Am. Jur. Sec. 177 late 2d, Sec
256
>
"The state calls its own violence `law', but
that of the individual crime'"
-- Max
Stirner
>
> "Today, we
need a nation of Minutemen, citizens who are not only prepared to take arms,
but citizens who regard the
preservation of freedom as the basic purpose of their daily life
and
who are willing to
consciously work and sacrifice for that freedom." -- John F.
Kennedy
>
"Government is not reason, it is not
eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and
a fearful master. Never for a moment should it
be left to irresponsible action."
--- George Washington, in a speech of
January 7, 1790
>
> The
spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I
wish it always to be kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but
better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and
then.
-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to Abigail
Adams, 1787
>
[W]hat country can preserve its liberties,
if its rulers are not warned from time to time that [the] people preserve the
spirit of resistance? Let them take arms...The tree of liberty must be refreshed
from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
>Thomas
Jefferson, letter to Col. William S. Smith, 1787
>
"Guard with
jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one 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 of June 5
1788
>
> A man
who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares about
more
than he does about his personal
safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free,
unless made and kept so by the
exertions of better men than himself.
---John Stuart Mill, writing on the U.S. Civil
War in 1862
>
> 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
great struggle for independence.
-- Attributed to Charles Austin Beard
(1874-1948)
>
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make
violent revolution inevitable."
--- John F.
Kennedy
>
The American Republic will endure, until
politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money.
- --
Alexis de Tocqueville
>
Good intentions will always be
pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say
that the Constitution was made to guard the
people against the dangers of good intentions.
There are men in all ages who mean to govern
well, but they mean to govern. They promise
to be good masters, but
they mean to be masters.-
-- Daniel
Webster
>
> What, then is law
[government]? It is the collective
organization of the individual
right to lawful defense."
-- Frederic Bastiat, "The
Law"
>
Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates
in it. Sometimes the law places the whole apparatus
of judges, police, prisons
and gendarmes at the service of the plunderers, and treats the
victim -- when he
defends himself -- as a criminal.
-- Frederic Bastiat, "The
Law"
>
Live free or die; death is not the worst of
evils.
-- General George Stark.
>
If a thousand men were
not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would ... [be] the definition
of
a peaceable revolution, if any such is
possible.
-- Henry David
Thoreau
>
> The only purpose for
which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized
community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either
physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.
-- John Stuart Mill, "On Liberty",
1859
>
The difference between death and taxes is death doesn't
get worse every time Congress meets
-- Will
Rogers
>
The end move in politics is always to pick up a
gun.
-- R. Buckminster Fuller
>
Of all tyrannies, a
tyranny exercised for the good of its
victims may be the most oppressive. It
may be better to live under robber barons
than under omnipotent moral
busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may
sometimes sleep, his cupidity may
at some point be satiated; but those who
torment us for our own good will
torment us without end, for they do so
with the approval of their
consciences.
-- C. S. Lewis
>
It is proper to take alarm at
the first experiment on our
liberties. We hold this prudent jealousy to be
the first duty of citizens and one
of the noblest characteristics of the late
Revolution. The freemen of
America did not wait till usurped power had
strengthened itself by exercise and
entangled the question in precedents.
They saw all the consequences in
the principle, and they avoided the
consequences by denying the principle.
We revere this lesson too much .... to
forget it -- James Madison.
>
A ``decay in the social contract'' is
detectable; there is a growing
feeling, particularly among middle-income
taxpayers, that they are not
getting back, from society and government, their
money's worth for taxes
paid. The tendency is for taxpayers to try to take
more control of their
finances... -- IRS Strategic Plan, (May
1984)
>
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; if they
be
repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such
incessant
changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess
what it will be
to-morrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can
that be a
rule, which is little known, and less fixed?
-- James Madison, Federalist Papers
62
>
> I cannot undertake to lay
my finger on that article of the Constitution which grant[s]
a right to Congress of expending, on objects
of benevolence, the money of their constituents.
-- James Madison,
1794
>
..every Man has a Property in his own Person. This , no
Body has any Right to but himself.
The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his
Hands, we may say, are properly his. ....
The great and chief end therefore, of Mens
uniting into Commonwealths, and putting themselves under
Government, is the Preservation of
their Property.
-- John Locke, "A Treatise Concerning Civil
Government"
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The people cannot delegate to government the
power to do anything
which would be unlawful for them to do
themselves.
-- John
Locke, "A Treatise Concerning Civil Government"
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Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as cooperation with
good.
-- Mohandas Gandhi
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The real point of audits is
to instill fear, not to extract
revenue; the IRS aims at winning through
intimidation and (thereby) getting
maximum voluntary compliance
-- Paul
Strassel, former IRS Headquarters Agent Wall St. Journal,
1980
>
Don't ever think you know what's right for the other
person. He
might start thinking he knows what's right for you.
-- Paul
Williams, `Das Energi'
>
"...The Bill of Rights is a literal
and absolute document. The
First Amendment doesn't say you have a right to
speak out unless the government has a 'compelling interest' in censoring the
Internet. The Second Amendment doesn't say you have the right to keep and
bear arms until some madman
plants a bomb. The Fourth Amendment doesn't say
you have the right to be secure from search and seizure unless some FBI agent
thinks you fit the profile of a terrorist. The government has no right to
interfere with
any of these freedoms under any
circumstances."
-- Harry Browne, 1996 USA presidential candidate,
Libertarian Party
It would be thought a hard government that
should tax its people one tenth part. -- Benjamin
Franklin
>
The price of liberty is, always has been, and
always will be blood. The person who is not willing to die for his liberty has
already lost it to the first scoundrel who is willing to risk dying to
violate that
person's liberty. Are you free? -- Andrew
Ford
>
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep
the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be
led to safety) by menacing it with an
endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
-- H.L. Mencken
>
All
governments are more or less combinations against the
people. .And as rulers
have no more virtue than the ruled. . . the power of
government can only be
kept within its constituted bounds by the display
of a power equal to itself,
the collected sentiment of the people.
-- Benjamin Franklin Bache, in a
Phildelphia Aurora editorial,
1794
>
> Never could an increase
of comfort or security be a sufficient good to be bought at the price of
liberty.
-- Hillaire Belloc
>
Freedom,
morality, and the human dignity of the individual
consists precisely in this:
that he does good not because he is forced to do so,
but because he freely
conceives it, wants it, and loves it.
-- Mikhail
Bakunin
>
Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen
drape over
their will to power. -- Aldous Huxley
>
Morality is
always the product of terror; its chains and
strait-waistcoats are fashioned
by those who dare not trust others,
because they dare not trust themselves,
to walk in liberty.
-- Aldous Huxley
>
Government is actually
the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one,
and even those that are most tolerable are
arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent. -- H. L.
Mencken
>
A right is not what someone gives you; it's what no one
can take from you.
>Ramsey Clark
>
The politician
attempts to remedy the evil by increasing the
very thing that caused the evil
in the first place: legal plunder.
-- Frederick
Bastiat
>
Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of
stolen goods.
-- H.L. Mencken
>
Under democracy one
party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove
that
the other party is unfit to rule--and
both commonlysucceed, and are right...
The United States has never developed an
aristocracy really disinterested or an intelligentsia
really intelligent. Its history is
simply a record of vacillations between two gangs of frauds.
--- H. L.
Mencken
>
The Constitution is not neutral.
It was designed to
take the government off the backs of the
people.
-- Justice William O. Douglas
>
Society in
every state is a blessing, but government even in its
best state is but a
necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable
one; for when we suffer, or
are exposed to the same miseries *by a
government*, which we might expect in
a country *without government*, our calamities
is heightened by reflecting
that we furnish the means by which we suffer."
--Thomas
Paine
>
He that would make his own liberty secure must guard
even his
enemy from oppression: for if he violates this duty, he establishes
a
precedent that will reach unto himself. -- Thomas Paine
>
When all
government ...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,
1821
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> Freedom begins between
the ears. -- Edward
Abbey
>
> Fantastic
doctrines (like Christianity or Islam or Marxism) require unanimity of belief.
One dissenter casts doubt on the creed
of millions. Thus the fear and the hate; thus
the
torture chamber, the iron stake,
the gallows, the labor camp, the psychiatric ward.
-- Edward
Abbey
>
All forms of government are pernicious,
including good government.
-- Edward Abbey
>
As war and
government prove, insanity is the most contagious of diseases. -- Edward
Abbey
>
Government: If you refuse to pay unjust
taxes, your property will beconfiscated. If you attempt to defend your property,
you will be arrested. If you resist arrest, you will be clubbed. If you defend
yourself against clubbing, you will be shot dead. These procedures are known as
the Rule of Law. -- Edward Abbey
>
>
"America is at that
awkward stage. It's too late to work within
the system, but too early to
shoot the bastards." -- Claire Wolfe
(NO. THE TIME HAS COME).
>
Political Correctness is a form of bigotry
behind which cowards hide.
---James von
Brunn
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