"Rightful liberty is unobstructed action, according to our will, within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others."
-- Thomas Jefferson
"A right is not what someone gives you; it's what no one can take from you."
-- Ramsey Clark
" Live free or die; death is not the worst of evils."
-- General George Stark
"Government: If you refuse to pay unjust taxes, your property will be confiscated. If you attempt to defend your property, you will be arrested. If you resist arrest, you will be clubbed. If you defend yourself against clubbing, you will be shot dead. These procedures are known as the Rule of Law."
-- Edward Abbey
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
-- H.L. Mencken
" If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would ... [be] the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible."
-- Henry David Thoreau
"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards."
-- Claire Wolfe
"The direct use of physical force is so poor a solution to the problem of limited resources that it is commonly employed only by small children and great nations."
-- David Friedman
"...The Bill of Rights is a literal and absolute document. The First Amendment doesn't say you have a right to speak out unless the government has a 'compelling interest' in censoring the Internet. The Second Amendment doesn't say you have the right to keep and bear arms until some madman plants a bomb. The Fourth Amendment doesn't say you have the right to be secure from search and seizure unless some FBI agent thinks you fit the profile of a terrorist. The government has no right to interfere with any of these freedoms under any circumstances."
-- Harry Browne, 1996 USA presidential candidate, Libertarian Party
"The United States is in no way founded upon the Christian religion."
-- George Washington & John Adams, in a diplomatic message to Malta.
"This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it."
-- John Adams, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson.
"In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own."
-- Thomas Jefferson, 1814
"Don't ever think you know what's right for the other person. He might start thinking he knows what's right for you."
-- Paul Williams, `Das Energi'
" 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 Einstein, "My First Impression of the U.S.A.", 1921
" Of all tyrannies, a tyranny 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 our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences."
-- C. S. Lewis
"Today, we need a nation of Minutemen, citizens who are not only prepared to take arms, but citizens who regard the preservation of freedom as the basic purpose of their daily life and who are willing to consciously work and sacrifice for that freedom."
-- John F. Kennedy
"Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others?"
-- Thomas Jefferson, in his 1801 inaugural address
"Freedom is the recognition of necessity"
-- Friedrich Engels.
