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"If every person has the right to defend - even by force - his person, his liberty, and his property, then it follows that a group of men have the right to organize and support a common force to protect these rights constantly."
-The Law, by Frederic Bastiat, Paris, 1850

"They're multipurpose. Not only do they put the clips on, but they take them off."
-Pratt & Whitney spokesperson explaining why the company charged the Air Force nearly $1000 for an ordinary pair of pliers.

"The President has kept all of the promises he intended to keep."
-Clinton aide George Stephanopolous speaking on Larry King Live

"I'm not going to have some reporters pawing through our papers. We are the president."
-Hillary Clinton commenting on the release of subpoenaed documents

"We're going to turn this team around 360 degrees."
-Jason Kidd, upon his drafting to the Dallas Mavericks

"When more and more people are thrown out of work, unemployment results."
-Former U.S. President Calvin Coolidge

"It's like deja vu all over again."
-Yogi Berra

"China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese"
-Former French President Charles De Gaulle

"That lowdown scoundrel deserves to be kicked to death by a jack*ss, and I'm just the one to do it."
-A congressional candidate in Texas

"It is necessary for me to establish a winner image. Therefore, I have to beat somebody."
-Richard M. Nixon

"A billion here, a billion there, sooner or later it adds up to real money."
-Everett Dirksen

"A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on."
-Samuel Goldwyn

"Half this game is ninety percent mental."
-Philadelphia Phillies manager Danny Ozark

"Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind."
-General William Westmoreland

"If you let that sort of thing go on, your bread and butter will be cut right out from under your feet." -Former British foreign minister Ernest Bevi

"A Fatal Tendency of Mankind

"Self-preservation and self-development are common aspirations among all people. And if everyone enjoyed the unrestricted use of his faculties and the free disposition of the fruits of his labor, social progress would be ceaseless, uninterrupted, and unfailing.

"But there is also another tendency that is common among people. When they can, they wish to live and prosper at the expense of others. This is no rash accusation. Nor does it come from a gloomy and uncharitable spirit. The annals of history bear witness to the truth of it: the incessant wars, mass migrations, religious persecutions, universal slavery, dishonesty in commerce, and monopolies. This fatal desire has its origin in the very nature of man -- in that primitive, universal, and insuppressible instinct that impels him to satisfy his desires with the least possible pain."

-- Bastiat, "The Law", June 1850

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship."
Alexander Fraser Tyler, from "The Decline and Fall of the Athenian Republic."

"If a majority are capable of preferring their own private interest, or that of their families, counties, and PARTY, to that of the nation collectively, some provision must be made in the constitution, in favor of justice, to compel all to respect the common right, the public good, the universal law, in preference to all private and partial considerations... And that the desires of the majority of the people are often for injustice and inhumanity against the minority, is demonstrated by every page of history..... To remedy the dangers attendant upon the arbitrary use of power, checks, however multiplied, will scarcely avail without an explicit admission some limitation of the right of the majority to excercise sovereign authority over the individual citizen... In popular governments [democracies], minorities [individuals] constantly run much greater risk of suffering from arbitrary power than in absolute monarchies..."
John Adams, "On Government", (1778)

"To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, 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, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is it's justice; that is it's morality."

P.J. Proudhon, The General Idea of the Revolution in the 19th Century

If a faction consists of less than a majority, relief is supplied by the republican principle, which enables the majority to defeat its sinister views by regular vote. It may clog the administration, it may convulse the society; but it will be unable to execute and mask its violence under the forms of the Constitution. When a majority is included in a faction, the form of popular government, on the other hand, enables it to sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest both the public good and the rights of other citizens. To secure the public good and private rights against the danger of such a faction, and at the same time to preserve the spirit and the form of popular government, is then the great object to which our inquiries are directed. Let me add that it is the great desideratum by which this form of government can be rescued from the opprobrium under which it has so long labored, and be recommended to the esteem and adoption of mankind.

By what means is this object attainable? Evidently by one of two only. Either the existence of the same passion or interest in a majority at the same time must be prevented, or the majority, having such coexistent passion or interest, must be rendered, by their number and local situation, unable to concert and carry into effect schemes of oppression. If the impulse and the opportunity be suffered to coincide, we well know that neither moral nor religious motives can be relied on as an adequate control. They are not found to be such on the injustice and violence of individuals, and lose their efficacy in proportion to the number combined together, that is, in proportion as their efficacy becomes needful.

From this view of the subject it may be concluded that a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.

A republic, by which I mean a government in which the scheme of representation takes place, opens a different prospect, and promises the cure for which we are seeking. Let us examine the points in which it varies from pure democracy, and we shall comprehend both the nature of the cure and the efficacy which it must derive from the Union.

James Madison - Federalist Paper #10, 1787

I am convinced, however, that anarchy is not the principal evil that democracies ages have to fear, but the least. For the principle of equality begets two tendencies: the one leads men straight to independence and may suddenly drive them into anarchy; the other conducts them by a longer, more secret, but more certain road to servitude. Nations readily discern the former tendency and are prepared to resist it; they are led away by the latter, without perceiving its drift; hence it is peculiarly important to point it out.

Vol 2, p.288 in Vintage edition of the Reeve translation of Democracy in America

"It would be a dangerous delusion were a confidence in the men of our choice to silence out fears for the safety of our rights; confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism - free Government is founded on jealousy, and not in confidence; it is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited Constitutions to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power; our Constitution has accordingly fixed the limits to which, and no further, our confidence may go; and let the honest advocate of confidence read the Alien and Sedetion acts and say if the Constitution has not been wise in fixing limits to the government it created, and whether we should be wise in destroying those limits. In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mishief by the chains of the Constitution."
Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson on Taxes:
"We are all doubtless bound to contribute a certain portion of our income to the support of charitable and other useful public institutions. But it is a part of our duty also to apply our contributions in the most effectual way we can to secure this object. The question then is whether this will not be better done by each of us appropriating our whole contribution to the institutions within our reach, under our own eye, and over which we can exercise some useful control? Or would it be better that each should divide the sum he can spare among all the institutions of his State or the United States? Reason and the interest of these institutions themselves, certainly decide in favor of the former practice."

Thomas Jefferson on infringements:
"I consider the Alien and Sedition laws as merely an experiment of the American mind to see how far it will bear an avowed violation of the Constitution."

Thomas Jefferson on adversity:
"The patriot, like the Christian, must learn to bear revilings and persecutions as a part of his duty; and in proportion as the trial is severe, firmness under it becomes more requisite and praiseworthy. It requires, indeed, self-command. But that will be fortified in proportion as the calls for its exercise are repeated."

Thomas Jefferson on rights, duty, and enforcing the Constitution:
"No society can make a perpetual Constitution or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation. They may manage it then, and what proceeds from it, as they please during their usufruct. They are masters, too, of their own persons, and consequently may govern them as they please. But persons and property make the sum of the objects of government. The Constitution and laws of their predecessers extinguished them, in their natural course, with those whose will gave them being. This could preserve that being till it ceased to be itself, and no longer. Every Constitution, then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of nineteen years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force and not of right."

Thomas Jefferson on corporate America:
"I hope we shall take warning from the example of England and crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our Government to trial, and bid defiance to the laws of our country."

Thomas Jefferson on the federal government:
"It is a singular phenomenon that while our State governments are the very best in the world, without exception or comparison, our general government has in the rapid course of nine or ten years become more arbitrary and has swallowed up more of the public liberty than even that of England."

Yet more from Thomas Jefferson:
"Every man and every body of men on earth possess the right of self-government. They receive it with their being from the hand of nature."

Thomas Jefferson:
"In every government on earth is some trace of human weakness, some germ of corruption and degeneracy, which cunning will discover, and wickedness insensibly open, cultivate and improve. Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves, therefore, are its only safe depositories.

Jefferson on Newspapers:
At a very early period in my life I determined never to put a sentence into any newspaper. I have religously adhered to the resolution through my life and have great reason to be contented with it. Were I to undertake to answer the calumnies of the newspapers it would be more than my time and twenty aids could effect. For, while I should be answering one, twenty new ones would be invented. I have thought it better to trust to the justice of my countrymen that they would judge me by what they see of my conduct on the stage where they have placed me.

Jefferson on the Press:
No Government ought to be without censors; and when the press is free, no one ever will. Nature has given to man no other means of sifting out the truth either in religion, law or politics. I think it as honorable to the government neither to know nor notice its sycophants or censors as it would be undignified and criminal to pamper the former and persecute the latter.

An interesting exchange on Email...

Alex Le Heux wrote:
>Let's also take a look at the Dutch performance during their
>occupation. While there certainly were many courageous Dutch people
>who helped refugees (at great personal risk, to say the least), and
>there were many courageous Dutch people who were in the resistance,
>there were also many Dutch people who did not perform so well. Not
>only were a large number of Jewish people turned in by Dutch
>informers, but there were even Dutch SS units.

You have a nerve. You, coming from a country where people are still regularly killed in the name of racism, tell me this?!
Alex
------------

The Same Old Guy replied:

Want the cold, hard facts of life, Bubba?
You didn't put WWII 'behind' you. We did!
Gun-loving Americans conquered your continent and gave you your countries back instead of enslaving you, like every other winner in history has done.

*** Certified Low Blow ***
Some of us discriminate against Jews. Do you know why?
Because we HAVE some!
*** Certified Low Blow ***

We were giving them refuge while Europe was massacring them by the millions. Now you have the balls to say we're not all treating them right all of the time.

Buy a fucking clue!

"When more of the people's sustenance is exacted through the form of taxation than is necessary to meet the just obligations of government, such exaction becomes ruthless extortion and a violation of the fundamental principles of a free government."
Grover Cleveland, Second Annual Message, December 1886

"We built your fort. We will not have it used against us." - John Wayne Allegheny Uprising

Restrictions of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.
- William O. Douglas

The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty. Plainly, the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of liberty.
- Abraham Lincoln

The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people. This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments and affections of the people was the real American Revolution.
- John Adams

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
- John F. Kennedy

Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope...build(ing) a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.
- Robert F. Kennedy

Those who suppress freedom always do so in the name of law and order.
- John V. Lindsay

Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want rain without thunder and lightning.
- Frederick Douglass

All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.
- Havelock Ellis

Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.
- Reinhold Niebuhr

The French Revolution of a hundred and fifty years ago gradually ushered in an age of political equality, but the times have changed, and that by itself is not enough today. The boundaries of democracy have to be widened now so as to include economic equality also. This is the great revolution through which we are all passing.
- Jawaharlal Nehru

If our economy of freedom fails to distribute wealth as ably as it has created it, the road to dictatorship will be open to any man who can persuasively promise security to all.
- Will Durant

Any doctrine that weakens personal responsibility for judgement and for action helps create the attitudes that welcome and support the totalitarian state.
- John Dewey

Any doctrine that weakens personal responsibility for judgement and for action helps create the attitudes that welcome and support the totalitarian state.
- John Dewey

I call that mind free which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, which calls no man master, which does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith, which opens itself to light whencesoever it may come, which receives new truth as an angel from Heaven.
- William Ellery Channing

A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves.
- Bertrand de Jouvenel

All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience.
- William James

A regime, an established order, is rarely overthrown by a revolutionary movement; usually a regime collapses of its own weakness and corruption and then a revolutionary movement enters among the ruins and takes over the powers that have become vacant.
- Walter Lippman

Government is, or ought to be, instituted for the common benefit and security of the people, nation or community; whenever any government shall be found inadequate or contrary to these purposes, a majority of the community hath an indubitable, unalienable, indefeasible right, to reform, alter, or abolish it, in such manner as shall be judged most conducive to the public Weal.
-George Mason

You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.
- G.K. Chesterton

Here in America we a descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels- men and women who dared to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, we may never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.
- Dwight Eisenhower

He who would be free must strike the first blow.
- Frederick Douglass

Those who give the first shock to a state are the first overwhelmed in its ruin; the fruits of public commotion are seldom enjoyed by him who was the first mover; he only beats the water for another's net.
- Michel De Montaigne

There is a kind of revolution of so general a character that it changes the tastes as well as the fortunes of the world.
- La Rochefoucauld

The art of revolutionizing and overturning states is to undermine established customs, by going back to their origin, in order to mark their want of justice.
- Blaise Pascal

Whenever the legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience, and are left to the common refuge which God hath provided for all men against force and violence.
- John Locke

"We have to yet really seriously debate the constitutional issues and whether or not we're willing to give up more freedom in order to have more security"
-- U.S. Secretary of Defense William Cohen, 3 Feb 1999

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
- Ben Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759

[The Clinton Administration]...may find it useful to invoke the commitments made here [in the UN] to Americans as a lever to persuade the gun lobby.
- Unidentified diplomat quoted by the Washington Post, on using UN agreements to circumvent the Second Amendment

The right just doesn't exist.   Clearly, the states no longer need protection from the federal government disarming their "well-regulated" militia.  The Second Amendment no longer speaks to us.  The Second Amendment has no modern day application. The Second Amendment is dead.
- Judge Ron Greenburg, 7th US Circuit Court of Appeals

Our ultimate goal- total control of handguns in the United States- is going to take time...The first problem is to slow down the increasing number of handguns being produced...The second problem is to get handguns registered. And the final problem is to make the possession of handguns and all handgun ammunition- except for the military, policemen, licensed security guards, licensed sporting clubs, and licensed gun collectors- totally illegal.
- Nelson Shields (Sarah Brady's predecessor at Handgun Control, Inc.) to the New Yorker Magazine, July 26, 1976, pp. 53

There is no reason for anyone in this country- anyone except a police officer or military person- to buy, to own, to have, to use a handgun. The only way to control handgun use in this country is to prohibit the guns.
- President Bill Clinton, while signing the Brady Bill, 1993

I am one who believes that as a first step, the United States should move expeditiously to disarm the civilian population, other than police and security officers, of all handguns, pistols, and revolvers...No one should have the right to anonymous ownership or use of a gun.
- Professor Dean Morris, director of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, as stated to the Congress

We're bending the law as far as we can to ban an entirely new class of guns.
- Rahm Emmanuel

[Each member government]...shall ensure the conformity of its laws, regulations, and administrative procedures with it obligations [ to the World Trade Organization.
- Article 16, paragraph 4, of the WTO charter

[The problem is]...small arms are spreading throughout society with little documentation, since they are frequently bought from private individuals.
- UN Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice, Vienna, May 1996

The WTO is dejure [legally] world government.
- William Holder, deputy general counsel to the World Trade Organization

[President Clinton]...ordered the Justice Department to begin studying gun licensing, registration, and collection proposals.
- The Washington Times, December 12, 1993

...The purpose of the 2nd Amendment is to guarantee the existence of state military forces that can serve as a counterweight to a standing federal army.  Thus, it seems fair to say, the scope of any rights enjoyed by the states under the 2nd Amendment would be determined by the goal of preserving an independent military force not under direct federal control.
- Dennis Hennigan, director of HCI's Legal Action Project

...The purpose of government is to rein in the rights of the people.
- President Bill Clinton, during an interview on MTV in 1993

There are some weapons that are just so dangerous that society has a right and the obligation even to take those weapons out of circulation.
- New Jersey Governor Jim Florio, on the state's "assault weapons" ban, 1993

...When we got organized as a country and we wrote a fairly radical Constitution with a radical Bill of Rights, giving a radical amount of individual freedom to Americans, it was assumed that the Americans who had that freedom would use it responsibly....[However, now] there's a lot of irresponsibility. And so a lot of people say there's too much freedom. When personal freedom's being abused, you have to move to limit it.
- President Bill Clinton, as stated on MTV's Enough is Enough, March 22, 1994

The thought that average citizens will somehow be better able to successfully defend themselves more effectively than our nation's trained professionals is absurd.
- Official statement from Handgun Control, Inc.

"It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man who knows that the law is today, can guess what it will be tomorrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?"
--James Madison, Federalist #62

If a Nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.... If we are to guard against ignorance and remain free, it is the responsibility of every American to be informed.
--Thomas Jefferson

The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the force of the Crown. It may be frail; its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storms may enter, the rain may enter,--but the King of England cannot enter; all his forces dare not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement! William Pitt, Earl of Chatham. 1708-1778. (Speech on the Excise Bill)

"You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. Yet in their hearts there is unspoken - unspeakable! - fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts! Words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home, all the more powerful because they are forbidden. These terrify them. A little mouse - a little tiny mouse! - of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic."
Winston Churchill

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely 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 own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
- C.S. Lewis

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
- Justice Louis D. Brandeis