Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.
- George Washington

Firearms are second only to the Constitution in importance; they are the Peoples' Liberty's Teeth."
- George Washington

A government that is large enough to supply everything you need is large enough to take everything you have.
- Thomas Jefferson

Still one thing more, fellow citizens, a wise and frugal government which shall restrain men from injuring one another, 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.
- Thomas Jefferson, 1st Inaugural Address

"Fear can only prevail when victims are ignorant of the facts ".
- Thomas Jefferson

I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.
- Thomas Jefferson

Think what you do when you run into debt; you give to another power over your liberty.
- Benjamin Franklin

Those who give up essential liberties for temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
- Benjamin Franklin

Man will ultimately be governed by Godor by tyrants.
- Ben Franklin

We are more heavily taxed by our idleness, pride and folly than we are taxed by government.
- Benjamin Franklin

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

Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies subject to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future and crimes from society.
- Benjamin Franklin

The government turns every contingency into an excuse for enhancing power in itself.
- John Adams

I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.
- James Madison

Democracy is the most vile form of government... democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention: have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property: and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.
- James Madison

I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.
- James Madison

The Constitution preserves the advantage of being armed which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation where the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.
- James Madison

The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries
- James Madison

If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquillity of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home and leave us in peace. We seek not your council, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; and may posterity forget that ye were our country men.
- Samuel Adams

He who is void of virtuous attachments in private life is, or very soon will be, void of all regard for his country. There is seldom an instance of a man guilty of betraying his country, who had not before lost the feeling of moral obligations in his private connections.
- Samuel Adams

Abortion is advocated only by persons who have themselves been born.
- Ronald Reagan

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.
- Ronald Reagan

How do you tell a communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin.
- Ronald Reagan

The government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.
- Ronald Reagan

The highest level of prosperity occurs when there is a free-market economy and a minimum of government regulations.
- Adam Smith, "The Wealth of Nations"

"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

"If the price I must pay for my freedom is to acknowledge that the government was granted the power to infringe on them, then I am not free."
- Pol Anderson

One of the main purposes for the control and power of the Establishment media is to keep the masses deceived and ignorant about their rights and oppressions of their rights.
- Charles Weisman

"Our task of creating a Socialist America can only succeed when those who would resist us have been totally disarmed."
- Sarah Brady

"As civil rulers, not having their duty to the people duly before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as the military forces which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow citizens, the people are confirmed by the next article [the Second Amendment] in their right to keep and bear their private arms." - Trence Coxe in "Remarks on the First Part of the Amendments to the Federal Constitution", under the pseudonym" A Pennsylvanian" in the
Philadelphia Federal Gazette, 18 June 1789

"Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing upthe ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning, they want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand... It never did... and it never will... 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."
- Frederick Douglas (1857)

"The American's Creed I believe in the United States of America as a government of the people, by the people, for the people, whose just powers are derived from the consent of the governed; a democracy in a Republic; a sovereign Nation and many sovereign States; a perfect Union, one and inseparable; established upon those principles of freedom, equality, justice, and humanity for which American patriots sacrificed their lives and fortunes. I therefore believe it is my duty to my country to love it ,to support its Constitution, to obey its laws, to respect its Flag, and to defend it against all enemies."
- William Tyler Page

The emblem of equal rights. It means free hands, free lips, self-government, and the sovereignty of the individual.
- Robert Ingersoll

Our flag is our national ensign, pure and simple, behold it! Listen to it! Every star has a tongue, every stripe is articulate.
- Robert C. Winthrop (1809-1894), Senator from Massachusetts

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

"I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion: and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me, God."
- Congressional Oath Of Office

I yield to no one in my earnest hope that the time will come when an 'affirmative action' program is unnecessary and is ...only a relic of the past....Then persons will be regarded as persons, and discrimination of the type we address today will be an ugly feature of history that is instructive but is behind us....In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race....And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently.
- Harry A. Blackmun

Republics are created by the virtue, public spirit, and intelligence of the citizens. They fall, when the wise are banished from the public councils, because they dare to be honest, and the profligate are rewarded, because they flatter the people, in order to betray them.
- Justice Joseph Story (1779-1845) US Supreme Court Justice 1833

The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of people.
- William O. Douglas

The makers of our constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness... They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred, as against the government, the right to be let alone, the most comprehensive of the rights and the right most valued by civilized men.
- Justice Louis D. Brandeis (1856-1941) US Supreme Court Justice

Democracy substitutes self-restraint for external restraint. It is more difficult to maintain than to achieve.
- Louis D. Brandeis

[Justices do not have the right to declare] "a law unconstitutional simply becasue they considered a law unwise." [The court] "is not to decide whether the view taken by the legislature is a wise view, but whether a body of men could reasonable hold such a view."
- Lousis D. Brandeis

When a legislature undertakes to proscribe the exercise of a citizen's constitutional rights it acts lawlessly and the citizen can take matters into his own hands and proceed on the basis that such a law is no law at all.
- William O. Douglas

The right to defy an unconstitutional statute is basic in our scheme. Even when an ordinance requires a permit to make a speech, to deliver a sermon, to picket, to parade, or to assemble, it need not be honored when it's invalid on its face.
- Justice Potter Stewart