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