"The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those that speak it." ~George Orwell
"The known propensity of a democracy is to licentiousness which the ambitious call, and ignorant believe to be liberty." ~Fisher Ames, speech in the Massachusetts Ratifying Convention, 1788
"The more rules and regulations, the more thieves and robbers there will be." ~Lao-Tzu
"I will not glory, even in my orthodoxy, for even that can be a snare if I make a god of it... Let us rejoice in Him in all His fulness and in Him alone." ~Martyn Lloyd-Jones
"We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. ~C.S. Lewis
"A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word “darkness” on the walls of his cell." ~C.S. Lewis
"Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late." ~Thomas Sowell
"One of the highly developed talents of President Barack Obama is the ability to say things that are demonstrably false, and make them sound not only plausible but inspiring." ~Thomas Sowell
"The killing of millions of innocents does not begin with the killing of one innocent. It begins with the idea that in the larger scheme of things it is permissible to kill one innocent person." ~Mike Adams
"We cannot survive as a free nation when some men decide that others are not fit to live and should be abandoned to abortion or infanticide." ~Ronald Reagan
"It's the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense and can't see things as they are." ~G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown in The Oracle of the Dog
"A little science estranges man from God. A lot of science brings him back." ~Francis Bacon
"The only way you can get to know the truth of God is to stop trying to find out and by being born again." ~Oswald Chambers
"You can know about God by research; but until the researcher is ravished by what he sees, he doesn't know God for who he really is." ~John Piper
"If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand." ~Milton Friedman
"I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!" ~Barry Goldwater
"Political correctness does not legislate tolerance; it only organizes hatred." ~Jacques Barzun
"In the real world of American democracy, social and economic divisions are between the Cans and the Can-Nots, the Dos and the Do-Nots, the Wills and the Will-Nots. The vast majority of wealthy Americans, as a matter of empirical fact, are first generation wealthy and have created whatthey possess. In the process of creating wealth for themselves, they have created wealth for hundreds and sometimes thousands and sometimes hundreds of thousands of others. But to describe the wealthy as wealth earners and wealth creators - that is, to describe them accurately - is to explode the whole religious fantasy that gives meaning to radical lives, inspires the radicals’ war, and has been the source of the most repressive regimes and the greatest social disasters in the history of mankind." ~David Horowitz
“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
"Nations crumble from within when the citizenry asks of government those things which the citizenry might better provide for itself. … [I] hope we have once again reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There’s a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts." ~Ronald Reagan
"Brave men are vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle. But these modern cowards are all crustaceans; their hardness is all on the cover and their softness is inside." ~G.K. Chesterton
"There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American. The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else." ~Teddy Roosevelt
"The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money." ~Alexis de Tocqueville
"Multiculturalism was conceived by the Western Elites not to celebrate all cultures but to deny their own: it is, thus, the real suicide bomb." ~Mark Steyn
"A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul." ~George Bernard Shaw
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human liberty; it is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves." ~William Pitt
"When people begin to say that the material circumstances have alone created the moral circumstances, then they have prevented all possibility of serious change." ~G.K. Chesterton
"Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again." ~Will and Ariel Durant
Founding Fathers
"The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale." ~Thomas Jefferson,letter to John Taylor, 1816
"Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom of Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops that can be, on any pretence, raised in the United States." ~Noah Webster
"A free people ought not only to be armed and disciplined, but they should have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own government." ~George Washington
"A sacred respect for the constitutional law is the vital principle, the sustaining energy of a free government." --Alexander Hamilton
"I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I travelled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer." ~Benjamin Franklin
"Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right, from the frame of their nature, to knowledge, as their great Creator, who does nothing in vain, has given them understandings, and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge; I mean, of the characters and conduct of their rulers." ~John Adams, Dissertation on Canon and Feudal Law, 1765
"Let the American youth never forget, that they possess a noble inheritance, bought by the toils, and sufferings, and blood of their ancestors; and capacity, if wisely improved, and faithfully guarded, of transmitting to their latest posterity all the substantial blessings of life, the peaceful enjoyment of liberty, property, religion, and independence." ~Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution, 1833
"Repeal that [welfare] law, and you will soon see a change in their manners. St. Monday and St. Tuesday, will soon cease to be holidays. Six days shalt thou labor, though one of the old commandments long treated as out of date, will again be looked upon as a respectable precept; industry will increase, and with it plenty among the lower people; their circumstances will mend, and more will be done for their happiness by inuring them to provide for themselves, than could be done by dividing all your estates among them." ~Benjamin Franklin, letter to Collinson, 1753
"The almost general mediocrity of fortune that prevails in America obliging its people to follow some business for subsistence, those vices, that arise usually from idleness, are in a great measure prevented. Industry and constant employment are great preservatives of the morals and virtue of a nation. Hence bad examples to youth are more rare in America, which must be a comfortable consideration to parents. To this may be truly added, that serious religion, under its various denominations, is not only tolerated, but respected and practiced." ~Benjamin Franklin, Information to Those Who Would Remove to America, 1782
"The belief in a God All Powerful wise and good, is so essential to the moral order of the world and to the happiness of man, that arguments which enforce it cannot be drawn from too many sources nor adapted with too much solicitude to the different characters and capacities impressed with it." ~James Madison
"At the establishment of our constitutions, the judiciary bodies were supposed to be the most helpless and harmless members of the government. Experience, however, soon showed in what way they were to become the most dangerous; that the insufficiency of the means provided for their removal gave them a freehold and irresponsibility in office; that their decisions, seeming to concern individual suitors only, pass silent and unheeded by the public at large; that these decisions, nevertheless, become law by precedent, sapping, by little and little, the foundations of the constitution, and working its change by construction, before any one has perceived that that invisible and helpless worm has been busily employed in consuming its substance. In truth, man is not made to be trusted for life, if secured against all liability to account." ~Thomas Jefferson, letter to Monsieur A. Coray, 1823
"The safety of a republic depends essentially on the energy of a common national sentiment; on a uniformity of principles and habits; on the exemption of the citizens from foreign bias and prejudice; and on that love of country which will almost invariably be found to be closely connected with birth, education, and family. The opinion advanced in the Notes on Virginia is undoubtedly correct, that foreigners will generally be apt to bring with them attachments to the persons they have left behind; to the country of their nativity; and to its particular customs and manners. They will also entertain opinions on government congenial with those under which they have lived; or if they should be led hither from a preference to ours, how extremely unlikely is it that they will bring with them that temperate love of liberty, so essential to real republicanism?" ~Alexander Hamilton, From the New York Evening Post: an Examination of the President's Message, Continued, No. VIII, 1802
"How strangely will the Tools of a Tyrant pervert the plain Meaning of Words!" ~Samuel Adams, 1776
"Each State, in ratifying the Constitution, is considered as a sovereign body, independent of all others, and only to be bound by its own voluntary act. In this relation, then, the new Constitution will, if established be a FEDERAL, and not a NATIONAL constitution." ~James Madison
"Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are a gift from God? That they are not to be violated but by his wrath?" ~Thomas Jefferson, 1781
"What, sir, is the use of militia? It is to prevent the establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty... Whenever Government means to invade the rights and liberties of the people, they always attempt to destroy the militia, in order to raise an army upon their ruins." ~Elbridge Gerry
"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." ~Thomas Jefferson
"If ever time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in Government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin." ~Samuel Adams
"The government of the United States is a definite government, confined to specified objects. It is not like state governments, whose powers are more general. Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government." ~James Madison
"If ye love wealth better than liberty,the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or your arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen." ~Samuel Adams
"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." ~John Adams
"Providence has given to our people the choice of their rulers, and it is the duty, as well as the privilege and interest of our Christian nation to select and prefer Christians for their rulers." ~First U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice, John Jay
"No power on earth has a right to take our property from us without our consent." ~First U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice, John Jay
"If the federal government is allowed to hold a monopoly on determining the extent of its own powers, we have no right to be surprised when it keeps discovering new ones." -Thomas Jefferson
"There are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations."
-James Madison, speech to the Virginia Ratifying Convention, June 16, 1788
"The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. If 'Thou shalt not covet' and 'Thou shalt not steal' were not commandments of Heaven, they must be made inviolable precepts in every society before it can be civilized or made free." -John Adams, A Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, 1787
"Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but only those specifically enumerated." -Thomas Jefferson
"Americans have the right and advantage of being armed - unlike the citizens of other countries whose governments are afraid to trust the people with arms." ~James Madison
"There is a rank due to the United States, among nations, which will be withheld, if not absolutely lost, by the reputation of weakness. If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it; if we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity, it must be known that we are at all times ready for war." ~George Washington, Fifth Annual Message, 1793
"The Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation. If I were an atheist, and believed blind eternal fate, I should still believe that fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations." ~John Adams
