Favorite Freeper Quotes and One-Liners

Some of my favorites:

"We, the People are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts - not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow men who pervert the Constitution."

"What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence? It is not... the guns of our war steamers, or the strength of our gallant and disciplined army... our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in our bosoms." --Abraham Lincoln, 1858

Alan Bock, `Orange County Register': "The median family of four ... paid $4,722 in federal taxes last year. That's enough to pay for a new curtain for the secretary of commerce's office, to bribe a farmer not to plant 38 acres with corn ... seven weeks of salary for a Customs man assigned to save us from the terror of high-quality, low priced foreign TV sets, or the subsidy on 6,000 bushels of wheat to prop up the Soviet regime. Surely civilization would collapse without such essential services."

Albert Einstein, "My First Impression of the U.S.A.", 1921: "The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the Prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this."

Albert Gallatin of the New York Historical Society, 7 October 1789: "The whole of the Bill [of Rights] is a declaration of the right of the people at large or considered as individuals... It establishes some rights of the individual as unalienable and which consequently, no majority has a right to deprive them of."

Alexis de Tocqueville: "The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money."

Andrew Ford (UseNet): "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 (UseNet): "Without either the first or second amendment, we would have no liberty; the first allows us to find out what's happening, the second allows us to do something about it! The second will be taken away first, followed by the first and then the rest of our freedoms."

Benjamin Franklin, 1759 (Franklin B. Historical Review of Pennsylvania. 1759): "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Bill McIntire, Spokesman for the National Rifle Association, on Norfolk, Va. council's vote to cancel four gun shows, 1992: "Banning gun shows to reduce violent crime will work about as well as banning auto shows to reduce drunken driving."

"Guns cause crime, like flies cause garbage." --Author unknown.

Byron C. Radaker, Chairman and C.E.O., Congoleum Corp.: "Our government has found that the most effective way to control a person is not by the ballot or the bullet, but rather by the 'bucket'. Today, in a country that fought a revolution to rid itself of a repressive government and excessive taxes, government takes 40 percent of everything we earn in the form of taxes."

California citizen attempting to purchase a firearm for self-defense during rioting in Los Angeles, week of 30 April 1992: "What do you mean 'wait fifteen days'? This is America!"

Calvin Coolidge: "Nothing is easier than spending public money. It does not appear to belong to anybody. The temptation is overwhelming to bestow it on somebody."

Charles Evans Hughes, Justice of the supreme Court (1907): "... the Constitution is what the judges say it is."

Daniel Webster: "God grants liberty only to those who love it, and are always ready to guard and defend it."

Daniel Webster: "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."

David Veal (Usenet): "For every action there is an equal, and opposite, government program"

Edmund Burke (1729-1797): "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."

Edmund Burke, 1784: "The people never give up their liberty but under some delusion." [Contrast the above with U.S. Senator Joseph Biden's statement: "Banning guns is an idea whose time has come" as reported on 18 November, 1993, by the Associated Press.]

Edward Abbey: "The tank, the B-52, the fighter-bomber, the state controlled police and the military are the weapons of dictatorship. The rifle is the weapon of democracy... If guns are outlawed, only the government will have guns. Only the police, the secret police, the military, the hired servants of our rulers. Only the government - and a few outlaws. I intend to be among the outlaws."

"See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime." --Frederic Bastiat

Gandhi: "You may think your actions are meaningless and that they won't help, but that is no excuse, you must still act."

George Bush, Made to Robert Sherman of American Atheist Press at the Chicago airport, August 27 1988. The exchange appeared in the Boulder Daily Camera on Monday February 27, 1989. It can also be found in "Free Enquiry" magazine, Fall 1988 issue, Volume 8, Number 4, page 16.: "I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God."

George Washington, Farewell Address: "Occupants of public offices love power and are prone to abuse it."

George Washington: "The very atmosphere of firearms anywhere and everywhere restrains evil interference -- they deserve a place of honor with all that's good ..."

H.L. Mencken: "Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats."

Harlon Carter: "Those who will not fight for their rights deserve to lose them."

Henry Ford: "Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason why so few engage in it."

James A. Kidney, `U.S. News & World Report': "Despite growing unease among the public and legal experts, judges ... are reaching into areas once considered the exclusive preserve of legislators, public administrators and the family."

James Earl Jones: "The world is filled with violence. Because criminals carry guns, we decent law-abiding citizens should also have guns. Otherwise they will win and the decent people will loose."

James Madison: "Resistance to tyranny is service to God."

John Adams, A Defense of the Constitutions of the Government of the USA, 471 (1787-88): "Arms in the hands of citizens [may] be used at individual discretion... in private self-defense..." [Contrast the above with Attorney General Janet Reno's statement: "Gun registration is not enough. I've always proposed state licensing... with some federal standards." as reported by the Associated Press and by ABC on 10 December, 1993.]

John F. Kennedy at Columbia University, (10 days before his assassination): "The high office of President has been used to foment a plot to destroy the American's freedom, and before I leave office I must inform the citizen of his plight."

Leroy Pyle on Assault Rifles: "You didn't hear Elliot Ness whining about Al Capone's machine gun."

Mark Twain: "What if you were an idiot, and what if you were a member of Congress? But I repeat myself."

"Those unaware are unaware of being unaware."

Mohandas Gandhi: "Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as cooperation with good."

Robert Heinlein, in a 1949 letter concerning "Red Planet": "...I am opposed to all attempts to license or restrict the arming of individuals...I consider such laws a violation of civil liberty, subversive of democratic political institutions, and self-defeating in their purpose."

Ronald Reagan: "It's time we rebelled."

Ronald Reagan: "When I am President, my number one priority will be to get big government off the back of the American people."

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

Senator Edward V. Long: "The IRS has become morally corrupted by the enormous power which we in Congress have unwisely entrusted to it. Too often it acts like a Gestapo preying upon defenseless citizens."

Dem Sen. Howard Metzenbaum (sponsor) during the floor debate of the Brady Bill, 1993 "I don't care about crime, I just want to get the guns." "No, we're not looking at how to control criminals ... we're talking about banning the AK-47 and semi-automatic guns." "I'm not interested in getting a bill that deals with airport security... all I want to do is get at plastic guns."

Senator Sam Ervin: "... judicial verbicide is calculated to convert the Constitution into a worthless scrap of paper and to replace our government of laws with a judicial oligarchy."

Tacitus, 56-120 A.D.: "The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."

Thomas Jefferson [A quote from Thomas Jefferson in a letter to William S. Smith in 1787. Taken from Jefferson, On Democracy 20, S. Padover ed., 1939]: "And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time that this 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"

Tom Anderson: "I wonder why some of the so-called guardians of freedom are so anxious to register guns and so reluctant to register Communists."

Winston Churchill: "If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a small chance of survival. There may even be a worse case: you may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves."

"We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans..." - President Clinton (USA TODAY, 11 March 1993, page 2A)

Don't think of it as `gun control', think of it as `victim disarmament'. If we make enough laws, we can all be criminals.

"Liberals, it has been said, are generous with other peoples' money, except when it comes to questions of national survival when they prefer to be generous with other people's freedom and security." --William F. Buckley

"The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his." --General George S. Patton

"It appears that the murder rate inside prisons is ten times higher than that outside prisons. It must be due to all those Kalashnikov rifles that are issued to prisoners upon their incarceration." --Jeff Cooper in Guns & Ammo magazine, August, 1989.

"...and he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one." --Luke 22:36

Charles A. Beard: "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 struggle for independence."

"Despite the high cost of living, it remains popular."

The only "good" Indians I ever saw were dead. General William T. Sherman, Ft. Union, Arkansas 1869.

Actually, no. Gen. Phil Sheridan.

Molon Labe! - Spartan General-King Leonidas to Xerxes, the Persian Emperor who came with 600,000 of the fiercest fighting troops in the world to conquer and invade little Greece, then the center and birthplace of civilization as we know it. When Xerxes offered to spare the lives of Leonidas, his 300 personal bodyguards and a handful of Thebans and others who volunteered to defend their country, if they would lay down their arms, Leonidas shouted these two words back.

Translation: "Come and get them!"

Now, look at this post of mine: It is put in "News/Activism." It is ACTIVISM, is that clear to you? We are formulating a strategy for having as much input as FReeperly possible in the new Senate

My new favorite phrase, I claimed it and neither one of you can have it!!

From one of the Mondale/Coleman debate threads:

"I want to punch Mondale in the face."

I don't know who said it but I just made myself laugh again typing it!

My father was from Virginia and had a way with colorful Southern colloquialisms.

One time when I was a teenager, I was moving some stuff around the house when he was trying to watch TV in the next room. After a while, he got exasperated by my racket and hollered, "Boy, you make more noise than two skeletons humping on a tin roof!"

I know that's not a deep, philosophical or sophisticated bon mot, but I think it is the funniest, most strangely poetic thing I've ever heard anyone say.

and Mickey Mouse is another $%^OTI*$ rat


"In that instrument [the U.S. Constitution] we have laid
down the law [via the 13th Amendment], now and forever, 
that there shall be no slavery or involuntary servitude in 
this republic, except for crime."
Frederick Douglass (1817 - 1895)


"Sheep are happier of themselves, than under the care of wolves."
Thomas Jefferson (1743 - 1826)


"The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as
to obtain the largest amount of feathers with the least 
possible amount of hissing."
J.B. Colbert (1619-1683)


"I place economy among the first and most important 
virtues, and public debt as the greatest of dangers 
to be feared. To preserve our independence, we must 
not let our rulers load on us with perpetual debt. 
If we run into such debts, we must be taxed in our 
meat and drink, in our necessities and in our comforts, 
in our labor and in our amusements. If we can prevent 
the government from wasting the labor of the people, 
under the pretense of caring for them, they will be happy."
Thomas Jefferson (1743 - 1826)


"I esteem myself a good, persistent hater of injustice 
and oppression, but my resentment ceases when they cease, 
and I have no heart to visit upon children the sins of 
their fathers."
Frederick Douglass (1817 - 1895)


"Public virtue cannot exist without private virtue."
John Adams


"It is harder to preserve than to obtain liberty." 
John C. Calhoun, Speech in the Senate; January, 1848 


"In matters of style, swim with the current; in 
matters of principle, stand like a rock."
Thomas Jefferson (1743 - 1826)


"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, Speech in the Virginia Convention; June 16, 1788


"People... get in the long run the government they desire
and deserve, and if they suffer from bad government, it 
is because they are too inert, or too incapable, or too 
timid, or perhaps too corrupt to secure anything better. 
Government and the success of government in the last 
analysis depend on the character of the people themselves."
Henry Cabot Lodge


"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state 
of civilization, it expects what never was and never will 
be."
Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Colonel Charles Yancey


"Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, 
exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy 
yet that did not commit suicide."
John Adams


"It is the duty of the possessors of power so to use 
it as to deserve and insure respect and reverence."
Frederick Douglass (1817 - 1895)


"I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of 
the society but the people themselves; and if we think 
them not enlightened enough to exercise their control 
with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it 
from them, but to inform their discretion by education. 
This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power."
Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Charles Jarvis, Sept. 28, 1820


"Government is a trust, and the officers of the government 
are trustees; and both the trust and trustees are created 
for the benefit of the people." 
Henry Clay, Speech at Ashland, Kentucky [1829]


"When more of the people's sustenance is exacted through 
the form of taxation than is necessary to meet the just  
obligations of government and expenses of its economical 
administration, such exaction becomes ruthless extortion 
and a violation of the fundamental principles of a free 
government." 
Grover Cleveland, Second Annual Message; December, 1886


"He who does not improve himself by the motives and 
opportunities afforded by this world gives the best 
evidence that he would not improve in any other world."
Frederick Douglass (1817 - 1895)


"We have forgotten the gracious hand which has preserved 
us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened 
us, and have vainly imagined in the deceitfulness of our 
hearts that all these blessings were produced by some 
superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with
unbroken success, we have become too self sufficient to 
feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving Grace, too 
proud to pray to the God that made us."
Abraham Lincoln


"The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing 
of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the 
equal sharing of miseries." 
Winston Churchill


"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 
and bread it has earned. This is the sum of good 
government." 
Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address; March 4, 1801


"Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not 
mean to stand by the president or any other public 
official, save exactly to the degree in which he himself 
stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him 
insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is 
unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by 
inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by 
the country. In either event, it is unpatriotic not to 
tell the truth, whether about the president or anyone 
else..." 
Theodore Roosevelt


"Modern liberalism, for most liberals is not a 
consciously understood set of rational beliefs, but a
bundle of unexamined prejudices and conjoined sentiments. 
The basic ideas and beliefs seem more satisfactory when 
they are not made fully explicit, when they merely lurk 
rather obscurely in the background, coloring the rhetoric 
and adding a certain emotive glow." 
James Burnham, Suicide of the West


"There can be no fifty-fifty Americanism in this country. 
There is room here for only 100 per cent Americanism, only 
for those who are Americans and nothing else." 
Theodore Roosevelt, Republican Convention; Saratoga


"The government of the United States, under Lyndon 
Johnson, proposes to concern itself over the quality of 
American life. And this is something very new in the 
political theory of free nations. The quality of life has 
heretofore depended on the quality of the human beings who 
gave tone to that life, and they were its priests and its 
poets, not its bureaucrats." 
William Buckley, Jr.; 8/7/65


"Government, obviously, cannot fill a child's emotional 
needs. Nor can it fill his spiritual and moral needs. 
Government is not a father or mother. Government has never 
raised a child, and never will." 
William Bennett, Speech at Notre Dame [October, 1990]


"I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy 
the juridicial safeguards of individual freedom as the 
striving after this mirage of social justice." 
Fredrich von Hayek, Economic Freedom and Representative 
Government; 1973


"Every thinking man, when he thinks, realizes that the 
teachings of the Bible are so interwoven and entwined 
with our whole civic and social life that it would be 
literally --I do not mean figuratively, but literally -- 
impossible for us to figure what that loss would be if 
these teachings were removed. We would lose almost all 
the standards by which we now judge both public and 
private morals, all the standards towards which we, with 
more or less of resolution, strive to raise ourselves."
Theodore Roosevelt in a message entitled, "The Influence of
the Bible", 1901

I like PJ's "Circumcision Principle" as regards the budget.

You can lop 10% off the top of anything.

Al Gore couldn't get elected dog catcher in a town filled with cats !

bump

My favorite line I've ever read on this forum was posted by Phantom Lord after his wife asked him if he was on FR again:

No honey, I'm just looking at pornography.

Rush Limbaugh's "35 Undeniable Truths of Life" (second edition)

1. There is a distinct singular American culture - rugged individualism and self-reliance - which made America great.
2. The vast majority of the rich in this country did not inherit their wealth; they earned it. They are the country's achievers, producers, and job creators.
3. No nation has ever taxed itself into prosperity.
4. Evidence refutes liberalism.
5. There is no such thing as a New Democrat.
6. The Earth's eco-system is not fragile.
7. Character matters; leadership descends from character.
8. The most beautiful thing about a tree is what you do with it after you cut it down.
9. Ronald Reagan was the greatest president of the twentieth century.
10. The 1980's was not a decade of greed but a decade of prosperity; it was the longest period of peacetime growth in American history.
11. Abstinence prevents sexually transmitted disease and pregnancy – every time it's tried.
12. Condoms only work during the school year.
13. Poverty is not the root cause of crime.
14. There's a simple way to solve the crime problem: obey the law; punish those who do not.
15. If you commit a crime, you are guilty.
16. Women should not be allowed on juries where the accused is a stud.
17. The way to improve our schools is not more money, but the reintroduction of moral and spiritual values, as well as the four "R's": reading, 'riting, 'rithmatic, and Rush.
18. There is no such thing as war atrocities. War itself is an atrocity.
19. My first 35 Undeniable Truths are still undeniably true.
20. There is a God.
21. There is something wrong when critics say the problem with America is too much religion.
22. Morality is not defined by individual choice.
23. The only way liberals win national elections is by pretending they're not liberals.
24. Feminism was established as to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream of society.
25. Follow the money. When somebody says, " It's not the money," it's always the money.
26. Liberals attempt through judicial activism what they cannot win at the ballot box.
27. Using federal dollars as a measure, our cities have not been neglected, but poisoned with welfare dependency funds.
28. Progress is not striving for economic justice or fairness, but economic growth.
29. Liberals measure compassion by how many people are given welfare. Conservatives measure compassion by how many people no longer need it.
30. Compassion is no substitute for justice.
31. The culture war is between the winners and those who think they're losers who want to become winners.
32. The losers think the only way they can become winners is by banding together all the losers and then empowering a leader of the losers to make things right for them.
33. The Los Angeles riots were not caused by the Rodney King verdict. The Los Angeles riots were caused by rioters.
34. You could afford your house without your government - if it weren't for your government.
35. Words mean things.

And my all time personel FReeper favorite:
"Who peed in your corn flakes?"

Election Night, 2002--Carville: "There's only three candidates who can get the Senate for us now---the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost."

My latest favorite was by one Mrs. Trent Lott on Wed. morning as Trent prepared to leave the house: Well big dog, you've been chasing this car for two years - what are you going to do now that you've caught it?

Even if you're on the right track you'll get run over if you just sit there...(can't remember who said this one)

Jim Talent has won the Senate seat in the state of Missouri!

"When you're born dumb, you stay that way a long time"

ping!

I never really got an answer to Am I Logged In???

Hey dude... Are you logged on?