Quotations From Framers of the Constitution ... and Others ***FYI***

www.gmu.edu ^ | Walter Williams

[ATOMIC_PUNK]

Quotations From Framers of the Constitution
... and Others

Government	Right to Keep and Bear Arms
They Were Not Alone	Those who would repeal that right
More Founders Wisdom	What the Founders Said About Slavery

• In a famous incident in 1854, President Franklin Pierce was pilloried for vetoing an extremely popular bill intended to help mentally ill. The act was championed by the renowned 19th century social reformer Dorothea Dix. In the face of heavy criticism, Pierce countered: "I cannot find any authority in the Constitution for the public charity." To approve such spending, argued Pierce, "would be contrary to the letter and the spirit of the Constitution and subversive to the whole theory upon which the Union of these States is founded."

• "Study the Constitution. Let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislatures, and enforced in courts of justice."
  -- Abraham Lincoln

• "The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it."
  --John Stuart Mill

• "Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place."
  -- Frederic Bastiat

• "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship."
  -- Professor Alexander Tytler over 200 years ago
  

• "If Congress can determine what constitutes the general welfare and can appropriate money for its advancement, where is the limitation to carrying into execution whatever can be effected by money?"
  -- South Carolina Senator William Draden 1828

• "When men get in the habit of helping themselves to the property of others, they cannot easily be cured of it."
  -- The New York Times, in a 1909 editorial opposing the very first income tax

• "For me to go into politics would be like sending a virgin into a house of ill-repute."
  -- H.L. Mencken

• "The State is great fiction by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else."
  -- Frederic Bastiat

• "Imagine, if you will, that I am an idiot.
  Then, imagine that I am also a Congressman.
  But, alas, I repeat myself."
  -- Mark Twain

• "To be GOVERNED is to be kept in sight, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality."
  --French socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, trans. John Beverley Robinson (London: Freedom Press, 1923), p.294

• "Classifications and distinctions based on race or color have no moral or legal validity in our society. They are contrary to our constitution and laws."
  -- Thurgood Marshall, 1947

• "It is not the function of our Government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the Government from falling into error."
  -- Robert Houghwout Jackson, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and Chief Judge at the War-Crimes Tribunal in Nuremberg

• "I would have government defend the life and property of all citizens equally; protect all unwilling exchange; suppress and penalize all fraud, all misrepresentation, all violence, all predatory practices; invoke a common justice under law; and keep the records incidental to these functions. Even this is a bigger assignment than governments, generally, have proven capable of. Let governments do these things and do them well. Leave all else to men in free and creative effort."
  -- Leonard E. Read, Freedom Daily, page 35, March 2001

• "Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; ... The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."
  -- Frederick Douglass, U.S Marshal, son of a slave, 1857

• "The moment a person forms a theory his imagination sees in every object only the traits which favor that theory."
  -- Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to Charles Thompson, September 20, 1787 in The Works of Thomas Jefferson, edited Paul L. Ford, Volume 5, Page 352, New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1904

[Physicist]

-- Professor Alexander Tytler over 200 years ago

I seem to remember a similar quote by de Tocqueville.

Nice collection of quotes, BTW.

[ATOMIC_PUNK]

These quotes are from Walter Williams website one man i do beleive could be one of the greatest THINKERS of our time

[Willie Green]

Walter could probably add one or two more to his collection:

"We are infinitely better off without treaties of commerce with any nation."

--Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1815.

"The prohibiting duties we lay on all articles of foreign manufacture which prudence requires us to establish at home, with the patriotic determination of every good citizen to use no foreign article which can be made within ourselves without regard to difference of price, secures us against a relapse into foreign dependency."

--Thomas Jefferson to Jean Baptiste Say, 1815.

[The_Expatriate]

"Study the Constitution. Let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislatures, and enforced in courts of justice."
-- Abraham Lincoln

Oh, the irony! I suspect it is not coincidental that Lincoln in this quote sets out roles for the church, the legislature, and the judiciary, but makes no mention of the executive branch.

[Starwind]

"I believe someone can be honest and lie about any number of things" – Dan Rather

(for a little perspective on how far we've come in 225 years)

[voicereason]

Just thought I'd add a few more.......

LIBERTY

What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?
- Thomas Jefferson

 

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
- Thomas Jefferson

 

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

 

Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.
- Lord Acton

 

The object and practice of liberty lies in the limitation of governmental power.
- Douglass MacArthur

 

When the same man, or set of men, holds the sword and the purse, there is an end of liberty.
- George Mason

 

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
- George Bernard Shaw

 

Liberty has never come from government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of government. The history of liberty is the history of resistance.
- Woodrow Wilson

 

Government

Governments will always misuse the machinery of the law as far as the state of public opinion permits.
- Emile Capouya

 

A monarch's neck should always have a noose around it -- it keeps him upright.
- Robert Heinlein

 

It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.
- Thomas Jefferson

 

I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive.
- Thomas Jefferson

 

The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic.
- H.L. Mencken

 

We suffer most when the White House busts with ideas.
- H.L. Mencken

 

The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it's good-by to the Bill of Rights.
- H.L. Mencken

 

The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop.
- P.J. O'Rourke

 

There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals. When there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.
- Ayn Rand

 

For in a Republic, who is "the country?" Is it the Government which is for the moment in the saddle? Why, the Government is merely a servant- merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them.
- Mark Twain

 

Liberty has never come from government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of government. The history of liberty is the history of resistance.
- Woodrow Wilson

 

Tyrants and Tyranny

Any excuse will serve a tyrant.
- Aesop

 

Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.
- Edmund Burke

 

It has been discovered that the best way to insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery.
- Benjamin Disraeli

 

There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him.
- Robert Heinlein

 

The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.
- Thomas Jefferson

 

A tyrant...is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.
- Plato

 

Truth

The most important truths are likely to be those which...society at that time least wants to hear.
- W. H. Auden

 

A lie would have no sense unless the truth were felt dangerous.
- Alfred Adler

 

It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.
- Thomas Jefferson

 

The history of the race, and each individual's experience, are thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told well is immortal.
- Mark Twain