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‎"Do not blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who have so enthusiastically acclaimed and adored him and rejoiced in their loss of freedom and danced in his path and gave him triumphal processions. Blame the people who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of the 'new, wonderful, good society' which shall now be Rome, interpreted to mean 'more money, more ease, more security, more living fatly at the expense of the industrious.'" -Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.)
97 posted on 11/07/2012 7:18:28 PM PST by listenhillary (Courts, law enforcement, roads and national defense should be the extent of government)
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To: listenhillary

Wow, some things never change, huh?


104 posted on 11/07/2012 7:20:17 PM PST by butterdezillion
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To: listenhillary
Look HERE for the origin of this quote:
‎"Do not blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who have so enthusiastically acclaimed and adored him and rejoiced in their loss of freedom and danced in his path and gave him triumphal processions. Blame the people who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of the 'new, wonderful, good society' which shall now be Rome, interpreted to mean 'more money, more ease, more security, more living fatly at the expense of the industrious.'" -Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.)

109 posted on 11/07/2012 7:23:51 PM PST by aruanan
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To: listenhillary
Here is more from this address given in 1965. It's pretty awesome considering the present occupant of the White House:

If you, per chance, are among those who would rather be governed by constitutional law than by the whims of men unfettered by restraint, I suggest that the war will have to be fought on a wide front. You can't win with brush fights in special area. You must join and coordinate your efforts with the professions, with business and industry, with agriculture and all facets of American society concerned with the preser- vation of personal liberty. The centralizers can lick the isolated groups, but they could not defeat a sustained drive by the consolidated believers in constitutional government.

As a conservative, you should scrutinize every political candidate, at whatever level, and support the man who believes in our traditional form of government. You should examine every major governmental proposal and express your convictions at the ballot box and by letter, telegram, and in person. You should devote the same degree of thought and attention to your public business as you give to your personal affairs.

If you are a liberal, you should insist upon a Republican form of government. You should oppose every invalid executive order and shout from the housetops against the Supreme Court of the United States every time it arrogates to itself the power to write new law and to rewrite the Federal Constitution. You should remember that the historic method of stamping out liberalism is to undermine constitutional government and substitute the rule of man. You should remember that in Russia and Germany, in Italy and Red China, the liberals were promised more liberality and more freedoms - that the promisors promised fast action by fiat. They said, as our Supreme Court now says, let's do these good things now - let's not wait for the slow processes of the law.

If you are an ADA left-winger, you should insist upon utopia under the law, not by executive order. You should insist upon the right to live in Mr. Gotrock's house on the beach, the right to a free college education for your children, your right as a Protestant to join the Knights of Columbus - but you should never give Big Brother the power to confer those rights by ukase. Why? Because when the President or the Supreme Court usurps the power to give you something to which, under the law, you are not entitled, the President or the Court can, with equal ease, usurp the power to take from you that to which you are entitled.

If you are one of the American minorities and unhappy with your race, you should exert every effort to improve your position; you can aspire to the social organizations of the other races and endeavor to pull down distinction and level off all differences. But, being knowledgeable in history, you should do all these things under constitutional law. You ought never urge the illegal use of the army in your behalf because, when you have lost your popularity as a cause and are no longer needed at the ballot box, the President can use that same army illegally against you. You should remember vividly, how, in other countries, where constitutional government was abolished, minorities were cooked in the gas ovens or deep frozen in Siberia.

And if I were a left-wing newspaperman wedded to socialism, hating wealth and the wealthy, I would do my writing behind America's constitutional guaranty of free speech. I would emulate the feist dog and bark mightily, but from behind the strong fence of constitutional protection. I would remember only too well how freedom of the press and freedom of those who write for the press have been curtailed in those countries where man has risen above the law. Each morning I would remind myself to remind all my left-wing doctor, preacher, teacher, and racist friends that only under a constitutional form of government, where the rights of the individuals are protected, can we live and breathe and preach and write our thoughts; that under centralized power our only free choice will be to write and preach and teach as Big Brother tells us or to go dig salt in the mines.

But what would you do if your aim is for a dictatorship or a communistic takeover? How would you go about weakening the fiber of the country? You would know that, given a fair choice between a representative Republic and a dictatorship, the vast majority of the people in this country would vote against centralization.

No, your road to successful takeover would involve beguiling the people with handouts, creating false sense of security and, step by step, the dishing out of benefits with one hand and the lifting of liberties with the other. You would encourage the issuance of invalid executive orders, all in the name of humanity to please large segments of the voters. You would persuade the judiciary to ignore constitutional restraint and, in the beginning at least, issue invalid decisions in favor of the so-called downtrodden of our population and, of course, contemporarily, you would have the do-gooders demonstrate and create strife and, in every way possible, debunk and belittle the principles upon which the country grew and prospered and became the first nation of the earth. This prescription, faithfully followed, is likely of success under all conditions and, absent intelligent opposition, can be guaranteed.

These are not just theoretical abstractions - that's the way it's been done throughout history, beginning with Greece and Rome, on down through Russia, Hitler's Germany, Mussolini's Italy, and Peron's Argentina.
117 posted on 11/07/2012 7:32:23 PM PST by aruanan
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