Famous Quotations / Quotes
Famous Quotes about Liberty
 
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To my mind it is wholly irresponsible to go into the world incapable of preventing violence, injury, crime, and death. How feeble is the mindset to accept defenselessness. How unnatural. How cheap. How cowardly. How pathetic.
-- Ted Nugent		 
I think that our American people will welcome a Russian military force for peace-keeping purposes.
-- Sam Nunn		 
'The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.' The right of the whole people, old and young, men, women and boys, and not militia only, to keep and bear arms of every description, and not such merely as are used by the milita, shall not be infringed, curtailed, or broken in upon, in the smallest degree; and all this for the important end to be attained: the rearing up and qualifying a well-regulated militia, so vitally necessary to the security of a free State. Our opinion is that any law, State or Federal, is repugnant to the Constitution, and void, which contravenes this right.
-- Nunn vs. State		 
The primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labor of authors, but "[t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." To this end, copyright assures authors the right to their original expression, but encourages others to build freely upon the ideas and information conveyed by a work. This result is neither unfair nor unfortunate. It is the means by which copyright advances the progress of science and art.
-- Sandra Day O'Connor		 
The prima facie evidence provision in this case ignores all of the contextual factors that are necessary to decide whether a particular cross burning is intended to intimidate. The First Amendment does not permit such a shortcut.
-- Sandra Day O'Connor		 
Your depth of commitment, your quality of service, the product of your devotion -- these are the things that count in life.
-- Scott O'Grady		 
All businesses require capital, management and labor, and business executives, wanting to grow and maintain profitable enterprises, have a strong incentive to keep costs, including labor, as low as possible.
-- Kevin O'Leary		 
Those who think it is permissible to tell white lies soon grow color-blind.
-- Austin O'Malley		 
When we have begun to take charge of our lives, to own ourselves, there is no longer any need to ask permission of someone.
-- George O'Neil		 
Most of us tend to think of “speech” and “press” in the relatively traditional modes of the spoken and printed word… We should bear in mind that – whatever the Framers of the Bill of Rights may have expected – the First Amendment has adapted over the years to telephones, motion pictures, radio and television broadcasting, fax, cable, and is now just beginning to take measure of digital communication.
-- Robert M. O'Neil		 
Censorship of anything, at any time, in any place, on whatever pretense, has always been and will always be the last resort of the boob and the bigot.
-- Eugene O'Neill		 
If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free.
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race. All through history, mankind has been bullied by scum. Those who lord it over their fellows and toss commands in every direction and would boss the grass in the meadow about which way to bend in the wind are the most depraved kind of prostitutes. They will submit to any indignity, perform any vile act, do anything to achieve power. The worst off-sloughings of the planet are the ingredients of sovereignty. Every  government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy the whores are us.
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
Government does not cause affluence. Citizens of totalitarian countries have plenty of government and nothing of anything else.
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
Bill [Clinton] hates them [refugees] and fears them, especially the Cubans. Bill knows the Cubans are crazy. Only crazy people would flee from a country with free medical care, guaranteed employment for life, and first-rate gun control. The president and his sanctimonious twit of a wife have worked for decades to build a society like this, and here people are taking their lives in their hands to get away from it. ... Let's face facts about our disgusting political opponents. We've been nice to the liberals for too long. They're thugs. The liberal dream is to control people, to oppress and exploit them for some "higher" goal. And how are the liberals ever going to be able to control people brave enough to sail to Florida in a rum carton? ... A civilized society should no more tolerate the presence of a liberal than the presence of a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Indeed, it may be argued that liberalism is worse than the KKK, insofar as Klansman only hate some people while liberals hate them all.
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
Government does not cause affluence. Citizens of totalitarian countries have plenty of government and nothing of anything else.
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
You know, if government were a product, selling it would be illegal. Government is a health hazard. Governments have killed many more people than cigarettes or unbuckled seat belts ever have.
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free.
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
There’s a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any over-large concentration of like-minded individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause.
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
Politics doesn't work. Look at the parts of America where government has had the most power, where government has spent the most money. Look at the housing projects we've got the poor people in.
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop.
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
A little government and a little luck are necessary in life, but only a fool trusts either of them.
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
A nation with a goofy foreign policy needs a very serious policy of defense.
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
The Tenth Commandment sends a message to socialists, to egalitarians, to people obsessed with fairness, to American presidential candidates in the year 2000 -- to everyone who believes that wealth should be redistributed. And that message is clear and concise: Go to Hell.
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
The term consumerism has been current since the middle 1960s, about the same length of time as the Department of Transportation itself. Literally interpreted, the word means 'an ideology based on the opposite of being productive.' This ideology has caused enormous changes in the American economy. At one time complaining was a cottage industry. The typical maker of complaints gave them to (or traded them with) friends and family members. Sometimes the complaints were sent to newspapers or included in prayers. Friends, family, the press and God then ignored the complaints. In the sixties, however, various consumer advocates began to help complainers find a market for their wares. There is only one organization that is required to take everyone -- and their complaints -- seriously. So the government became the foremost grumble customer. And it is, of course, the government's bureaucratic agencies who have to do the buying.
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
The three branches of government number considerably more than three and are not, in any sense, 'branches' since that would imply that there is something they are all attached to besides self-aggrandizement and our pocketbooks. ... Government is not a machine with parts; it's an organism. When does an intestine quit being an intestine and start becoming an asshole?
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
Whatever it is the government does, sensible Americans would prefer that the government do it to somebody else.
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
If you say a modern celebrity is an adulterer, a pervert, and a drug addict, all it means is that you've read his autobiography.
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
Government isn't a good way to solve problems ... [G]overnment is concerned mostly with self-perpetuation and is subject to fantastic ideas about its own capabilities. ... [G]overnment is wasteful of the nation's resources, immune to common sense and subject to pressure from every half-organized bouquet of assholes. ... [G]overnment is distrustful of and disrespectful toward average Americans while being easily gulled by Americans with money, influence or fame.
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
Now majority rule is a precious, sacred thing worth dying for. But, like other precious, sacred things…it’s not only worth dying for, it can make you wish you were dead. Imagine if all life were determined by majority rule. Every meal would be a pizza.
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
Think of what big governments have gotten up to in this century : not one, but two world wars, the gulag, the holocaust, aerial bombing of civilian population centers, the Berlin Wall, nuclear explosions, the post office. A wicked individual might want these, but he wouldn't have the cash and connections to get them. A villainous corporation could afford them but has to market the products. The Vietnam draft would be a tough sell for even the most fiendish businessmen. "Get shot! Get killed! Get diseases from foreign women who despise you in their hearts!
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
Whatever it is that government does, sensible Americans would prefer that the government do it to somebody else. This is the idea behind foreign policy.
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
The main reason to be opposed to political control of smoking is to keep power --even the smallest and silliest kind of power -- out of the hands of ... members of a dangerous class --the class that knows what´s good for us better than we do.
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
You can't get rid of poverty by giving people money.
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
Feeling good about government is like looking on the bright side of any catastrophe. When you quit looking on the bright side, the catastrophe is still there.
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
When a government controls both the economic power of individuals and the coercive power of the state ... this violates a fundamental rule of happy living: Never let the people with all the money and the people with all the guns be the same people.
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
If you are young and you drink a great deal it will spoil your health, slow your mind, make you fat -- in other words, turn you into an adult.
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs have in Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be empowered. It's not entitlement. An entitlement is what people on welfare get, and how free are they? It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights -- the "right" to education, the "right" to health care, the "right" to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are rations of slavery -- hay and a barn for human cattle. There's only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things bought and sold are legislators.
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please.  And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
Declaration of Orders We Will NOT Obey. Recognizing that we each swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and affirming that we are guardians of the Republic, of the principles in our Declaration of Independence, and of the rights of our people, we affirm and declare the following:\\\\ 1. We will NOT obey orders to disarm the American people.\\ 2. We will NOT obey orders to conduct warrantless searches of the American people.\\ 3. We will NOT obey orders to detain American citizens as "unlawful enemy combatants" or to subject them to military tribunal.\\ 4. We will NOT obey orders to impose martial law or a “state of emergency” on a state.\\ 5. We will NOT obey orders to invade and subjugate any state that asserts its sovereignty.\\ 6. We will NOT obey any order to blockade American cities, thus turning them into giant concentration camps.\\ 7. We will NOT obey any order to force American citizens into any form of detention camps under any pretext.\\ 8. We will NOT obey orders to assist or support the use of any foreign troops on U.S. soil against the American people to "keep the peace" or to "maintain control."\\ 9. We will NOT obey any orders to confiscate the property of the American people, including food and other essential supplies.\\ 10. We will NOT obey any orders which infringe on the right of the people to free speech, to peaceably assemble, and to petition their government for a redress of grievances.
-- Oath Keepers		 
Of course, there's been a real debate about where to invest and where to cut, and I'm committed to working with members of both parties to cut our deficits and debt. But we can't simply cut our way to prosperity.
-- Barack Hussein Obama		 
Yes, you’ve worked hard, but you’ve also been lucky. That’s a pet peeve of mine: People who have been successful and don’t realize they’ve been lucky. That God may have blessed them; it wasn’t nothing you did.
-- Barack Hussein Obama		 
[J]ust because you have an individual right does not mean that the state or local government can't constrain the exercise of that right...
-- Barack Hussein Obama		 
[P]art of people’s concern is just the sense that around the world the old order isn’t holding and we’re not quite yet to where we need to be in terms of a new order that’s based on a different set of principles, that’s based on a sense of common humanity, that’s based on economies that work for all people.
-- Barack Hussein Obama		 
The problem is that the way [President] Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt from $5 trillion dollars for the first 42 presidents -- number 43 added $4 trillion dollars by his lonesome -- so that we now have over $9 trillion dollars of debt that we are going to have to pay back. [That's] $30,000 for every man, woman and child. That's irresponsible. It's unpatriotic.
-- Barack Hussein Obama		 
When Michelle and I decided that I would run for President, it was because of a shared belief in the power of community and connection, a commitment to the idea that we are our brothers' keepers.
-- Barack Hussein Obama		 
The fact that we are here today to debate raising America's debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. government can't pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our government's reckless fiscal policies. ... Increasing America's debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that 'the buck stops here.' Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.
-- Barack Hussein Obama		 
Consistent with section 202(d) of the National Emergencies Act, 50 U.S.C. 1622(d), I am continuing for 1 year the national emergency previously declared on September 14, 2001, in Proclamation 7463, with respect to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the continuing and immediate threat of further attacks on the United States. Because the terrorist threat continues, the national emergency declared on September 14, 2001, and the powers and authorities adopted to deal with that emergency must continue in effect beyond September 14, 2010.
-- Barack Hussein Obama		 
I think that there's a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right.
-- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez		 
We never experienced, really, a time of true economic prosperity in the United States.
-- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez		 
Show me the prison, Show me the jail,\\ Show me the prisoner whose life has gone stale.\\ And I'll show you a young man with so many reasons why\\ And there, but for fortune, go you or I.
-- Phil Ochs		 
Should we believe self-serving, ever-growing drug enforcement/drug treatment bureaucrats, whose pay and advancement depends on finding more and more people to arrest and "treat"? More Americans die in just one day in prisons, penitentiaries, jails and stockades than have ever died from marijuana throughout history. Who are they protecting? From what?
-- Dr. Fred Oerther		 
No external force will ever succeed in making you 'want what you do not want and believe what you do not believe'. A man may take my life, but not my faith.
-- Gerhard Oestreich		 
I have been reading a German book. We must draft a decree at once... Communal physical exercises. ... This is very important. The health of the nation depends on it.
-- The Emperor of Azania		 
Under the Equal Protection clause, not to mention the First Amendment itself, government may not grant the use of a forum to people whose views it finds acceptable, but deny use to those wishing to express less favored or more controversial views.
-- Supreme Court Of The United States		 
We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganized. Presumably the plans for our employment were being changed. I was to learn later in life that, perhaps because we are so good at organizing, we tend as a nation to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization.
-- Charlton Ogburn, Jr.		 
As hard as modern man strives to be free he is a slave chained to the past.
-- Suso Ohno		 
A theory that a conspiracy has been working consciously for many centuries is not very plausible unless one attributes to them a religious unity. That is tantamount to regarding them as Satanists engaged in the worship and service of supernatural evil. The directors of the conspiracy must see or otherwise directly perceive manifestations which convince them of the existence and power of Lucifer. And since subtle conspirators must be very shrewd men, not likely to be deceived by auto-suggestion, hypnosis, or drugs, we should have to conclude that they probably are in contact with a force of pure evil.
-- Revilo P. Oliver		 
The paternalist project for our civil courts runs something as follows. After the revolution -- which perhaps has already taken place—the average citizen will enjoy a vast array of wonderful new rights to sue other people. You will be empowered to haul your neighbors and fellow citizens to court if you feel they have fallen short of good faith and fair play. You will be entitled to sue them for unlimited damages, punitive as well as compensatory, even over behavior that had previously been thought not subject to liability at all. Everyone will be under a vague but stringent obligation to look out for your safety and welfare, enforceable by legal action. You will enjoy a cornucopia of contention opportunities, a smorgasbord of suing options, a Lotus-land of litigability.
-- Walter Olsen		 
Sometimes, when leading families or merchants organized a government for their city, they not only provided for some power sharing through voting but took pains to reduce the probability that the government's chief executive could assume autocratic power. For a time in Genoa, for example, the chief administrator of the government had to be an outsider -- and thus someone with no membership in any of the powerful families in the city. Moreover, he was constrained to a fixed term of office, forced to leave the city after the end of his term, and forbidden from marrying into any of the local families. In Venice, after a doge who attempted to make himself autocrat was beheaded for his offense, subsequent doges were followed in official processions by a sword-bearing symbolic executioner as a reminder of the punishment intended for any leader who attempted to assume dictatorial power.
-- Mancur Olson		 
The modern press itself is a new phenomenon. Its typical unit is the great agency of mass communication. These agencies can facilitate thought and discussion. They can stifle it…. They can play up or down the news and its significance, foster and feed emotions, create complacent fictions and blind spots, misuse the great words and uphold empty slogans.
-- Commission On Freedom Of The Press		 
Protection against government is now not enough to guarantee that a man who has something to say shall have a chance to say it. The owners and managers of the press determine which person, which facts, which version of the facts, and which ideas shall reach the public.
-- Commission On Freedom Of The Press		 
If we can revolutionize opinion about social organization so that we can rid ourselves of arbitrary political interventions in economic and social life, we won’t need a world police force; if we can’t change opinion in this area in favor of a strictly limited government, a world police force would either be helpless to prevent war or would be the worst tyranny history has known.
-- Reverend Edmund Opitz		 
No one can read our Constitution without concluding that the people who wrote it wanted their government severely limited; the words 'no' and 'not' employed in restraint of government power occur 24 times in the first seven articles of the Constitution and 22 more times in the Bill of Rights.
-- Rev. Edmund A. Opitz		 
There is a place for government in the affairs of men, and our Declaration of Independence tells us precisely what that place is. The role of government is to protect individuals in their God-given individual rights. Freedom is the natural birthright of man, but all that government can do in behalf of freedom is to let the individual alone, and it should secure him in his rights by making others let him alone.
-- Rev. Edmund A. Opitz		 
They can only set free men free ... And there is no need of that: Free men set themselves free.
-- James Oppenheim		 
As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost and science can never regress.
-- J. Robert Oppenheimer		 
There must be no barriers for freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors.
-- J. Robert Oppenheimer		 
In all criminal cases whatever, the jury shall have the right to determine the law, and the facts under the direction of the Court as to the law, and the right of new trials as in civil cases.
-- Oregon Constitution		 
This is the gravest danger that today threatens civilization: State intervention, the absorption of all spontaneous social effort by the State; that is to say, of spontaneous historical action, which in the long-run sustains, nourishes and impels human destinies.
-- José Ortega y Gasset		 
Civilization is nothing else but the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort.
-- José Ortega y Gasset		 
I am I plus my circumstances.
-- José Ortega y Gasset		 
Order is not pressure which is imposed on society from without but an equilibrium which is set up from within.
-- José Ortega y Gasset		 
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
-- George Orwell		 
At any given moment, there is a sort of all pervading orthodoxy, a general tacit agreement not to discuss large and uncomfortable facts.
-- George Orwell		 
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
-- George Orwell		 
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
-- George Orwell		 
The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.
-- George Orwell		 
Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidarity to pure wind.
-- George Orwell		 
Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
-- George Orwell		 
Men sleep peacefully in their beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
-- George Orwell (False)		 
If large numbers of people believe in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech even if the law forbids it. But if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.
-- George Orwell		 
The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.
-- George Orwell		 
That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer's cottage is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.
-- George Orwell		 
Freedom is Slavery
-- George Orwell		 
The ordinary man is passive. Within a narrow circle, home life, and perhaps the trade unions or local politics, he feels himself master of his fate. But otherwise he simply lies down and lets things happen to him.
-- George Orwell		 
It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself—anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face ... was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime ...
-- George Orwell		 
All animals are created equal but some animals are more equal than others.
-- George Orwell		 
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
-- George Orwell		 
The Party is not interested in the overt act. The thought is all we care about.
-- George Orwell		 
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- George Orwell		 
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.
-- George Orwell		 
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification.
-- George Orwell		 
To see what is in front of one's nose requires a constant struggle.
-- George Orwell		 
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.
-- George Orwell		 
At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to state this or that or the other, but it is “not done”… Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.
-- George Orwell		 
If large numbers of people believe in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech even if the law forbids it. But if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.
-- George Orwell		 
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever.
-- George Orwell		 
Loss of liberty is inimical to all forms of literature... The fact is that certain themes cannot be celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them. No one ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition.
-- George Orwell		 
Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.
-- George Orwell		 
The truth is that, to many people calling themselves Socialists, revolution does not mean a movement of the masses with which they hope to associate themselves; it means a set of reforms which 'we', the clever ones, are going to impose upon 'them', the Lower Orders.
-- George Orwell		 
Every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered...History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.
-- George Orwell		 
The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.
-- George Orwell		 
Always eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or bed—no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters in your skull.
-- George Orwell		 
The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.
-- George Orwell		 
Censorship is the commonest social blasphemy because it is mostly concealed, built into us by indolence, self-interest and cowardice.
-- John Osborne		 
Being Politically Correct means always having to say you're sorry.
-- Charles Osgood		 
There can be no prescription old enough to supersede the Law of Nature and the grant of God Almighty, who has given to all men a natural right to be free, and they have it ordinarily in their power to make themselves so, if they please.
-- James Otis		 
Taxation without representation is tyranny.
-- James Otis		 
If it would be wrong for the government to adopt an official religion, then, for the same reasons, it would be wrong for the government to adopt official education policies. The moral case for freedom of religion stands or falls with that for freedom of education. A society that champions freedom of religion but at the same time countenances state regulation of education has a great deal of explaining to do.
-- James R. Otteson		 
Petty laws breed great crimes.
-- Ouida		 
In existing criminology there are concepts: a criminal man, a criminal profession, a criminal society, a criminal sect, and a criminal tribe, but there is no concept of a criminal state, or a criminal government, or criminal legislation. Consequently, the biggest crimes actually escape being called crimes.
-- P. D. Ouspensky		 
The number of laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm.
-- P. D. Ouspensky		 
Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these.
-- Ovid		 
It is annoying to be honest to no purpose.
-- Ovid		 
Video meliora, proboque; Deteriora sequor. (I see the better way, and approve it; I follow the worse.)
-- Ovid		 
Can anybody point me to that one time in history where the side that was demanding censorship, segregation, propaganda, radical education, papers to move freely in society, plus government forces going door to door to demand compliance were the good guys?
-- Candace Owens		 
Dost thou not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?
-- Count Axel Oxenstierna		 
The most common characteristic of all police states is intimidation by surveillance. Citizens know they are being watched and overheard. Their mail is being examined. Their homes can be invaded.
-- Vance Packard		 
It is capitalist America that produced the modern independent woman. Never in history have women had more freedom of choice in regard to dress, behavior, career, and sexual orientation.
-- Camille Paglia		 
Alcohol didn’t cause the high crime rates of the ‘20s and ‘30s, Prohibition did. And drugs do not cause today’s alarming crime rates, but drug prohibition does.... Trying to wage war on 23 million Americans who are obviously very committed to certain recreational activities is not going to be any more successful than Prohibition was.
-- Judge James Paine		 
I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any Church that I know of. My own mind is my own Church.
-- Thomas Paine		 
These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed, if so celestial an article as Freedom should not be highly rated.
-- Thomas Paine		 
This new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe. Hither have they fled, not from the tender embraces of the mother, but from the cruelty of the monster; and it is so far true of England, that the same tyranny which drove the first emigrants from home, pursues their descendants still.
-- Thomas Paine		 
He who dares not offend cannot be honest.
-- Thomas Paine		 
Men who look upon themselves born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent; selected from the rest of mankind their minds are early poisoned by importance; and the world they act in differs so materially from the world at large, that they have but little opportunity of knowing its true interests, and when they succeed to the government are frequently the most ignorant and unfit of any throughout the dominions.
-- Thomas Paine		 
Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.
-- Thomas Paine		 
I have always strenuously supported the right of every man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies another this right makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it.
-- Thomas Paine		 
When I contemplate the natural dignity of man; when I feel ... for the honor and happiness of its character, I become irritated at the attempt to govern mankind by force and fraud, as if they were all knaves and fools, and can scarcely avoid disgust at those who are thus imposed upon.
-- Thomas Paine		 
It has been thought a considerable advance towards establishing the principles of Freedom, to say, that government is a compact between those who govern and those that are governed: but this cannot be true, because it is putting the effect before the cause; for as man must have existed before governments existed, there necessarily was a time when governments did not exist, and consequently there could originally exist no governors to form such a compact with. The fact therefore must be, that the individuals themselves, each in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a compact with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist.
-- Thomas Paine		 
But if objects for gratitude and admiration are our desire, do they not present themselves every hour to our eyes?
-- Thomas Paine		 
Truth never envelops itself in mystery, and the mystery in which it is at any time enveloped is the work of its antagonist, and never of itself.
-- Thomas Paine		 
Any system of religion that has anything in it that shocks the mind of a child cannot be a true system.
-- Thomas Paine		 
When men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon.
-- Thomas Paine		 
Reason and Ignorance, the opposites of each other, influence the great bulk of mankind. If either of these can be rendered sufficiently extensive in a country, the machinery of Government goes easily on. Reason obeys itself; and Ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it.
-- Thomas Paine		 
All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.
-- Thomas Paine		 
If there must be trouble let it be in my day, that my child may have peace.
-- Thomas Paine		 
Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.
-- Thomas Paine		 
Practical religion consists in doing good: and the only way of serving God is that of endeavoring to make His creation happy. All preaching that has not this for its object is nonsense and hypocrisy.
-- Thomas Paine		 
Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer.
-- Thomas Paine		 
When men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon.
-- Thomas Paine		 
A constitution is not the act of a government, but of a people constituting a government; and government without a constitution is power without a right. All power exercised over a nation, must have some beginning. It must be either delegated, or assumed. There are not other sources. All delegated power is trust, and all assumed power is usurpation. Time does not alter the nature and quality of either.
-- Thomas Paine		 
The strength and power of despotism consists wholly in the fear of resistance.
-- Thomas Paine		 
For all men being originally equals, no one by birth could have a right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others for ever.
-- Thomas Paine		 
Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst.
-- Thomas Paine		 
Government ought to be as much open to improvement as anything which appertains to man, instead of which it has been monopolized from age to age, by the most ignorant and vicious of the human race. Need we any other proof of their wretched management, than the excess of debts and taxes with which every nation groans, and the quarrels into which they have precipitated the world?
-- Thomas Paine		 
Of more worth is one honest man to society and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.
-- Thomas Paine		 
Character is much easier kept than recovered.
-- Thomas Paine		 
The most formidable weapons against errors of every kind is reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall.
-- Thomas Paine		 
The supposed quietude of a good man allures the ruffian; while on the other hand, arms like laws, discourage and keep the invader and the plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property. The same balance would be preserved were all the world destitute of arms, for all would be alike; but since some will not, others dare not lay them aside... Horrid mischief would ensue were one half the world deprived of the use of them...
-- Thomas Paine		 
As to religion, I hold it to be the indispensable duty of all government to protect all conscientious professors thereof, and I know of no other business which government hath to do therewith.
-- Thomas Paine		 
Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher. Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one ...
-- Thomas Paine		 
Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.
-- Thomas Paine		 
Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.
-- Thomas Paine		 
An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates his duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.
-- Thomas Paine		 
Though the flame of liberty may sometimes cease to shine, the coal can never expire.
-- Thomas Paine		 
Freedom had been hunted round the globe; reason was considered as rebellion; and the slavery of fear had made men afraid to think. But such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing.
-- Thomas Paine		 
The American constitutions were to liberty, what a grammar is to language: they define its parts of speech and practically construct them into syntax.
-- Thomas Paine		 
Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness.
-- Thomas Paine		 
What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed, if so celestial an article as Freedom should not be highly rated.
-- Thomas Paine		 
The peaceable part of mankind will be continually overrun by the vile and abandoned while they neglect the means of self-defense. The supposed quietude of a good man allures the ruffian; while on the other hand, arms, like laws discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe and preserve order in the world as well as property. The balance of power is the scale of peace. The same balance would be preserved were all the world destitute of arms, for all would be alike; but since some will not, others dare not lay them aside... Horrid mischief would ensue were (the good) deprived of the use of them ... the weak will become a prey to the strong.
-- Thomas Paine		 
Time makes more converts than reason.
-- Thomas Paine		 
Arms, like laws, discourage and keep the invader and the plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property.
-- Thomas Paine		 
The trade of governing has always been monopolized by the most ignorant and the most rascally individuals of mankind.
-- Thomas Paine		 
Age after age has passed away, for no other purpose than to behold their wretchedness.
-- Thomas Paine		 
A constitution defines and limits the powers of the government it creates. It therefore follows, as a natural and also a logical result, that the governmental exercise of any power not authorized by the constitution is an assumed power, and therefore illegal.
-- Thomas Paine		 
From the east to the west blow the trumpet to arms!\\ Through the land let the sound of it flee;\\ Let the far and the near all unite, with a cheer,\\ In defense of our Liberty Tree.
-- Thomas Paine		 
Beware the greedy hand of government, thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry.
-- Thomas Paine		 
A constitution is not the act of a government, but of a people constituting a government; and government without a constitution is power without a right. All power exercised over a nation, must have some beginning. It must be either delegated, or assumed. There are not other sources. All delegated power is trust, and all assumed power is usurpation. Time does not alter the nature and quality of either.
-- Thomas Paine		 
Reason obeys itself; and ignorance does whatever is dictated to it.
-- Thomas Paine		 
There never did, there never will, and there never can exist a parliament, or any description of men, or any generation of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controlling posterity to the `end of time,’ or of commanding for ever how the world shall be governed, or who shall govern it. ... Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generations which preceded it.
-- Thomas Paine		 
Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom. But the tumult soon subsides.
-- Thomas Paine		 
There are two distinct classes of men in the nation, those who pay taxes, and those who receive and live upon the taxes.
-- Thomas Paine		 
But if you say, you can still pass the violations over, then I ask, hath your house been burnt? Hath your property been destroyed before your face? Are your wife and children destitute of a bed to lie on, or bread to live on? Have you lost a parent or a child by their hands, and yourself the ruined and wretched survivor? If you have not, then you are not a judge of those who have. But if you have, and can still shake hands with the murderers, then you are unworthy of the name of husband, father, friend, or lover, and whatever may be your rank or title in life, you have the heart of a coward and the spirit of a sycophant.
-- Thomas Paine		 
It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.
-- Thomas Paine		 
When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary.
-- Thomas Paine		 
He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.
-- Thomas Paine		 
The danger to which the success of revolutions is most exposed, is that of attempting them before the principles on which they proceed, and the advantages to result from them, are sufficiently seen and understood.
-- Thomas Paine		 
L'individualisme est une doctrine qui, au lieu de subordonner l'individu à la collectivité, pose en principe que l'individu a sa fin en lui-même; qu'en fait et en droit il possède une valeur propre et une existence autonome, et que l'idéal social est le plus complet affranchissement de l'individu. L'individualisme ainsi compris est la même chose que ce qu'on appelle encore la philosophie sociale libertaire.
-- Georges Palante		 
Natural liberty is the right of common upon a waste; civil liberty is the safe, exclusive, unmolested enjoyment of a cultivated enclosure.
-- William Paley		 
Television, I would say, isn't an advertising medium. It's a selling medium.
-- William S. Paley		 
Socialism is workable only in Heaven where it isn’t needed, and in Hell where they've got it.
-- Cecil Palmer		 
[L]et me point out that libertarians defend a tradition of liberty that is the fruit of thousands of years of human history.
-- Tom G. Palmer		 
If an individual is born with the obligation to obey, who is born with the right to command?
-- Tom G. Palmer		 
Fascist ethics begin ... with the acknowledgment that it is not the individual who confers a meaning upon society, but it is, instead, the existence of a human society which determines the human character of the individual. According to Fascism, a true, a great spiritual life cannot take place unless the State has risen to a position of pre-eminence in the world of man. The curtailment of liberty thus becomes justified at once, and this need of rising the State to its rightful position.
-- Mario Palmieri		 
Fascist ethics begin ... with the acknowledgment that it is not the individual who confers a meaning upon society, but it is, instead, the existence of a human society which determines the human character of the individual. According to Fascism, a true, a great spiritual life cannot take place unless the State has risen to a position of pre-eminence in the world of man. The curtailment of liberty thus becomes justified at once, and this need of rising the State to its rightful position.
-- Mario Palmieri		 
The more we sweat in peace the less we bleed in war.
-- Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit		 
Capital punishment is when Washington comes up with a new tax.
-- Van Panopoulos		 
Nothing enrages me more than when people criticize my criticism of school by telling me that schools are not just places to learn math and spelling, they are places where children learn a vaguely defined thing called socialization. I know. I think schools generally do an effective and terribly damaging job of teaching children to be infantile, dependent, intellectually dishonest, passive and disrespectful to their own developmental capacities.
-- Seymour Papert		 
Thoughts are free and are subject to no rule. On them rests the freedom of man, and they tower above the light of nature.
-- Philippus Aureolus Paracelsus		 
When you sit down to negotiate on what you already have, you lose.
-- Marie J. Parente		 
The worst forms of tyranny, or certainly the most successful ones, are not those we rail against but those that so insinuate themselves into the imagery of our consciousness, and the fabric of our lives, as not to be perceived as tyranny.
-- Michael Parenti		 
If Big Brother (of Orwell's 1984) comes to America, he will not be a fearsome, foreboding figure with a heart-chilling, omnipresent glare as in 1984. He will come with a smile on his face, a quip on his lips, a wave to the crowd, and a press that (a) dutifully reports the suppressive measures he is taking to save the nation from internal chaos and foreign threat; and (b) gingerly questions whether he will be able to succeed.
-- Michael Parenti		 
The enormous gap between what U.S. leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology.
-- Michael Parenti		 
The end and aim of all education is the development of character.
-- Francis W. Parker		 
This leftist political strategy to win office and power relies on something very powerful: the desire to increase the number of Americans who are dependent on getting money that is taken from other citizens.  Sadly, this strategy has worked for half a century! And now it works because Americans who are trapped in this nightmare do not want their government money taken away from them!
-- Star Parker		 
Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.
-- C. Northcote Parkinson		 
With the monetary system we have now, the careful saving of a lifetime can be wiped out in an eyeblink.
-- Larry Parks		 
If a juror accepts as the law that which the judge states, then the juror has accepted the exercise of absolute authority of a government employee and has surrendered a power and right that once was the citizen's safeguard of liberty.
-- Justice Theophilus Parsons		 
If a juror accepts as the law that which the judge states, then the juror has accepted the exercise of absolute authority of a government employee and has surrendered a power and right that once was the citizen's safeguard of liberty.
-- Justice Theophilus Parsons		 
But, sir, the people themselves have it in their power effectually to resist usurpation, without being driven to an appeal of arms. An act of usurpation is not obligatory; it is not law; and any man may be justified in his resistance. Let him be considered as a criminal by the general government, yet only his fellow-citizens can convict him; they are his jury, and if they pronounce him innocent, not all the powers of Congress can hurt him; and innocent they certainly will pronounce him, if the supposed law he resisted was an act of usurpation.
-- Theophilus Parsons		 
The captain of a ship is not chosen from those of the passengers who comes from the best family.
-- Blaise Pascal		 
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
-- Blaise Pascal		 
Justice without force is impotent, force without justice is tyranny. Unable to make what is just strong, we have made what is strong just.
-- Blaise Pascal		 
All err the more dangerously because each follows a truth. Their mistake lies not in following a falsehood but in not following another truth.
-- Blaise Pascal		 
The strength of a man's virtue should not be measured by his special exertions, but by his habitual acts.
-- Blaise Pascal		 
It is not our task to secure the triumph of truth, but merely to fight on its behalf.
-- Blaise Pascal		 
The last thing one knows in constructing a work is what to put first.
-- Blaise Pascal		 
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		 
Never trust governments absolutely and always do what you can to prevent them from doing too much harm.
-- John Arthur Passmore		 
The writer is the Faust of modern society, the only surviving individualist in a mass age. To his orthodox contemporaries he seems a semi-madman.
-- Boris Pasternak		 
When government accepts responsibility for people, then people no longer take responsibility for themselves.
-- George Pataki		 
A tax supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state.
-- Isabel Paterson		 
Do you think nobody would willingly entrust his children to you or pay you for teaching them? Why do you have to extort your fees and collect your pupils by compulsion?
-- Isabel Paterson		 
Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends.
-- Isabel Paterson		 
... in all countries where personal freedom is valued, however much each individual may rely on legal redress, the right of each to carry arms -- and these the best and the sharpest -- for his own protection in case of extremity, is a right of nature indelible and irrepressible, and the more it is sought to be repressed the more it will recur.
-- James Paterson		 
What is a Constitution? It is the form of government, delineated by the mighty hand of the people, in which certain first principles of fundamental law are established. The Constitution is certain and fixed; it contains the permanent will of the people, and is the supreme law of the land; it is paramount to the power of the Legislature, and can be revoked or altered only by the authority that made it.
-- William Paterson		 
The bank hath benefit of interest on all moneys which it creates out of nothing.
-- William Paterson		 
I have never yet had anyone who could, through the use of logic and reason, justify the Federal Government borrowing the use of its own money. I believe the time will come when people will demand that this be changed. I believe the time will come in this country when they will actually blame you and me and everyone else connected with the Congress for sitting idly by and permitting such an idiotic system to continue.
-- Wright Patman		 
We have what is known as the Federal Reserve Bank System. That system is not owned by the Government. Many people think that it is because it says “Federal Reserve.” It belongs to private banks, private corporations. So we have farmed out to the Federal Reserve Banking System that which is owned exclusively, wholly, one hundred percent to the private banks—we have farmed out to them the privilege of issuing the Government’s money!
-- Wright Patman		 
The dollar represents a one dollar debt to the Federal Reserve System. The Federal Reserve Banks create money out of thin air to buy Government Bonds from the U.S. Treasury...and has created out of nothing a ... debt which the American people are obliged to pay with interest.
-- Wright Patman		 
[I]t is absolutely wrong for the Government to issue interest-bearing obligations. It is not only wrong: it is extravagant. It is not only extravagant, it is wasteful. It is absolutely unnecessary.
-- Wright Patman		 
You ask yourself not if this or that is expedient, but if it is right.
-- Alan Paton		 
All of us can think of a book... that we hope none of our children or any other children have taken off the shelf. But if I have the right to remove that book from the shelf -- that book I abhor -- then you also have exactly the same right and so does everyone else. And then we have no books left on the shelf for any of us.
-- Katherine Patterson		 
According to Gestapo records…they had little need to engage in direct spying on the citizens since the citizens themselves were more than willing to do their spying for them.
-- Kort E. Patterson		 
Some informants spied on their neighbors because they actually believed the propaganda… Some denounced their enemies in order to settle personal grudges. Some were driven by their own fears to attempt to deflect attention away from themselves…Some were motivated by the sense of power turning in their neighbors gave them.
-- Kort E. Patterson		 
I don't measure a man's success by how high he climbs but how high he bounces when he hits bottom.
-- General George S. Patton, Jr.		 
It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.
-- General George S. Patton, Jr.		 
It is certain that the two World Wars in which I have participated would not have occurred had we been prepared. It is my belief that adequate preparation on our part would have prevented or materially shortened all our other wars beginning with that of 1812. Yet, after each of our wars, there has always been a great hue and cry to the effect that there will be no more wars, that disarmament is the sure road to health, happiness, and peace; and that by removing the fire department, we will remove fires. These ideas spring from wishful thinking and from the erroneous belief that wars result from logical processes. There is no logic in wars. They are produced by madmen. No man can say when future madmen will reappear. I do not say that there will be no more wars; I devoutly hope that there will not, but I do say that the chances of avoiding future wars will be greatly enhanced if we are ready.
-- General George S. Patton, Jr.		 
Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what you want them to achieve, and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.
-- General George S. Patton, Jr.		 
No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.
-- General George S. Patton, Jr.		 
Take calculated risks. That is quite different from being rash.
-- General George S. Patton, Jr.		 
For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another. For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
-- St. Paul		 
Christ has set us free to live a free life. So take your stand! Never again let anyone put a harness of slavery on you.
-- St. Paul		 
For when they shall say, 'Peace and Safety', then sudden destruction comes upon them, as travail upon a women with child; and they shall not escape.
-- St. Paul		 
Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.
-- St. Paul		 
Individuality is to be preserved and respected everywhere, as the root of everything good.
-- Jean Paul		 
Those in society who are in charge of schools must never forget that the parents have been appointed by God himself as the first and principal educators of their children and that their right is completely inalienable.
-- Pope John Paul II		 
Why is patriotism thought to be blind loyalty to the government and the politicians who run it, rather than loyalty to the principles of liberty and support for the people? Real patriotism is a willingness to challenge the government when it’s wrong.
-- Dr. Ron Paul		 
Under the constitution, there was never meant to be a federal police force. Even an FBI limited only to investigations was not accepted until this century. Yet today, fueled by the federal government’s misdirected war on drugs, radical environmentalism, and the aggressive behavior of the nanny state, we have witnessed the massive buildup of a virtual army of armed regulators prowling the States where they have no legal authority. The sacrifice of individual responsibility and the concept of local government by the majority of American citizens has permitted the army of bureaucrats to thrive.
-- Dr. Ron Paul		 
You can't save free markets by socialism, I don't know where this idea ever came from. You save free markets by promoting free markets and sound money and balanced budgets. The whole reason why nobody wants to address the real problem is, we're spending a trillion dollars a year overseas running an empire, and it's coming to an end. This country is bankrupt, and we won't admit it. Eventually though, the dollar will go bust, and we will bring our troops home, and we will live within our means, but we ought to do it sensibly, rather than waiting for the collapse of the dollar, and this is what we're doing, we're on the verge of destroying our dollar. And then, you think we have problems now, problems then will be a lot worse, it'd look like the Weimar Republic, or a third world nation. And a lot of people know that, and they're scared to death, but we don't need to be making the problem worse by just propping up everything with more government programs, more inflation, and more helicopters, it won't work.
-- Dr. Ron Paul		 
When we finally decide that drug prohibition has been no more successful than alcohol prohibition, the drug dealers will disappear.
-- Dr. Ron Paul		 
What we need to do in this country is make sure the majority of the American people really want their freedoms back again, We have to have people once again believe in liberty, foreign policy that defends America, but is not the policeman of the world. We don’t have the right nor the facilities to throw our weight around and tell the rest of the world how to live.
-- Dr. Ron Paul		 
The greatest threat facing America today is the disastrous fiscal policies of our own government, marked by shameless deficit spending and Federal Reserve currency devaluation. It is this one-two punch -- Congress spending more than it can tax or borrow, and the Fed printing money to make up the difference -- that threatens to impoverish us by further destroying the value of our dollars.
-- Dr. Ron Paul		 
We have depended on government for so much for so long that we as people have become less vigilant of our liberties. As long as the government provides largesse for the majority, the special interest lobbyists will succeed in continuing the redistribution of welfare programs that occupies most of Congress's legislative time.
-- Dr. Ron Paul		 
When the federal government spends more each year than it collects in tax revenues, it has three choices: It can raise taxes, print money, or borrow money. While these actions may benefit politicians, all three options are bad for average Americans. Deficits mean future tax increases, pure and simple. Deficit spending should be viewed as a tax on future generations, and politicians who create deficits should be exposed as tax hikers.
-- Dr. Ron Paul		 
The obligations of our representatives in Washington are to protect our liberty, not coddle the world, precipitating no-win wars, while bringing bankruptcy and economic turmoil to our people.
-- Dr. Ron Paul		 
The moral and constitutional obligations of our representatives in Washington are to protect our liberty, not coddle the world, precipitating no-win wars, while bringing bankruptcy and economic turmoil to our people.
-- Dr. Ron Paul		 
American voters should understand that Congress will always find a way to spend every last dollar sent to Washington. Remember, politicians get votes by promising everything to everyone, always at the expense of some other invisible taxpayers. …The federal government cannot maintain a budget surplus any more than an alcoholic can leave a fresh bottle of whiskey untouched in the cupboard.
-- Dr. Ron Paul		 

-- Dr. Ron Paul		 
You have to remember, rights don’t come in groups we shouldn’t have ‘gay rights’; rights come as individuals, and we wouldn’t have this major debate going on. It would be behavior that would count, not what person belongs to what group.
-- Dr. Ron Paul		 
We have a lot of goodness in this country. And we should promote it, but never through the barrel of a gun. We should do it by setting good standards, motivating people and have them want to emulate us. But you can't enforce our goodness, like the neocons preach, with an armed force. It doesn't work.
-- Dr. Ron Paul		 
It's a mistake to think that poor people get the benefit from the welfare system. It's a total fraud. Most welfare go to the rich of this country: the military-industrial complex, the bankers, the foreign dictators, it's totally out of control. [...] This idea that the government has services or goods that they can pass on is a complete farce. Governments have nothing. They can't create anything, they never have. All they can do is steal from one group and give it to another at the destruction of the principles of freedom, and we ought to challenge that concept.
-- Dr. Ron Paul		 
Our federal government, which was intended to operate as a very limited constitutional republic, has instead become a virtually socialist leviathan that redistributes trillions of dollars. We can hardly be surprised when countless special interests fight for the money. The only true solution to the campaign money problem is a return to a proper constitutional government that does not control the economy. Big government and big campaign money go hand-in-hand.
-- Dr. Ron Paul		 
Times of tragedy and war naturally bring out strong emotions... Sometimes people are only too anxious to sacrifice their constitutional liberties during a crisis, hoping to gain some measure of security. Yet nothing would please terrorists more than if we willingly gave up our cherished liberties because of their actions.
-- Dr. Ron Paul		 
Welfarism and excessive spending and deficits and socialism divide us, because everybody has to go to Washington. Those who have the biggest clout, those who are the best lobbyists, those who go and they grab. And whether it's the medical industrial complex, or the banking industry, or the military industrial complex, that's who ends up controlling our government... For so long, conservatives and constitutionalists have lost the argument, they lost the moral high ground. Because those who want to give things away, not talking about where they steal it from, but they want to give things and take care of people, they get the moral high ground and they come by as being compassionate. And we who believe in liberty, we lack compassion. But the truth is, there's only one compassionate system known to man, and that is freedom and personal responsibility, then there's enough wealth, and then we will all have personal responsibility to use this compassion that we have, first to take care of our families and friends and neighbors, and there would be so much wealth that we could spread this wealth around the world.
-- Dr. Ron Paul		 
I am absolutely convinced, you never have to give up any of your freedoms in order to be secure.
-- Dr. Ron Paul		 
Capitalism should not be condemned, since we haven’t had capitalism. A system of capitalism presumes sound money, not fiat money manipulated by a central bank. Capitalism cherishes voluntary contracts and interest rates that are determined by savings, not credit creation by a central bank. It’s not capitalism when the system is plagued with incomprehensible rules regarding mergers, acquisitions, and stock sales, along with wage controls, price controls, protectionism, corporate subsidies, international management of trade, complex and punishing corporate taxes, privileged government contracts to the military-industrial complex, and a foreign policy controlled by corporate interests and overseas investments. Add to this centralized federal mismanagement of farming, education, medicine, insurance, banking and welfare. This is not capitalism!
-- Dr. Ron Paul		 
You don't have a right to the fruits of somebody else's labor. You don't have a right to a house, you don't have a right to a job, you don't have a right to medical care. You have a right to your life, you have your right to your liberty, you have a right to keep what your earn. And that's what produces prosperity. So you want equal justice. And this is not hard for me to argue, because if you really are compassionate and you care about people, the freer the society the more prosperous it is, and more likely that you are going to have medical care... When you turn it over to central economic planning, they're bound to make mistakes. The bureaucrats and the special interests and the Halliburtons are going to make the money. Whether it's war, or Katrina, these noncompetitive contracts, the bureaucrats make a lot of money and you end up with inefficiency.
-- Dr. Ron Paul		 
Setting a good example is a far better way to spread ideals than through force of arms.
-- Dr. Ron Paul		 
Strictly speaking, it probably is not “necessary” for the federal government to tax anyone directly; it could simply print the money it needs. However, that would be too bold a stroke, for it would then be obvious to all what kind of counterfeiting operation the government is running. The present system combining taxation and inflation is akin to watering the milk; too much water and the people catch on.
-- Dr. Ron Paul		 
[W]e have to realize that the real problem is that the American people have been too submissive. We have been too submissive. It has been going on for a long time. ... [T]he bill that I have introduced ... is very simple. It is one paragraph long. It removes the immunity from anybody in the Federal government that does anything that you or I can't do. If you can't grope another person and if you can't X-ray people and endanger them with possible X-rays, [and] you can't take nude photographs of individuals, why do we allow the government to do it? We would go to jail. He would be immediately arrested, if an individual citizen went up and did these things, and yet we just sit there and calmly say, 'oh, they are making us safe.' And besides, the argument from the executive branch is that when you buy a ticket, you have sacrificed your rights and it is the duty of the government to make us safe. That isn't the case. You never have to sacrifice your rights. The duty of the government is to protect our rights, not to use them and do what they have been doing to us.
-- Dr. Ron Paul		 
The theory of the IRS is rather repugnant to me because the assumption is made that I, the government, owns 100% of your income and I permit you to keep 5%, 10% or 20%. You're vulnerable, you've sold out. The government can take 80% if they want, which they did at one time.
-- Dr. Ron Paul		 
When one person can initiate war, by its definition, a republic no longer exists.
-- Dr. Ron Paul		 
They that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition. For the love of money is the root of all evil.
-- Paul the Apostle		 
Assuming that either the left wing or the right wing gained control of the country, it would probably fly around in circles.
-- Pat Paulsen		 
All the problems we face in the United States today can be traced to an unenlightened immigration policy on the part of the American Indian.
-- Pat Paulsen		 
The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies.
-- Cesare Pavese		 
To know the world one must construct it.
-- Cesare Pavese		 
We can't spend more than we have. ... This is no longer a matter of right versus left, liberal versus conservative, we can prove our conclusion on this by basic mathematics. The United States Federal Government from all sources, for all purposes, takes in $2.2 trillion a year. Keep that number in mind. $2.2 trillion a year. We have total unfunded liabilities of $65 trillion, $2.2 trillion in revenue, $65 trillion in total unfunded liabilities. That is more than 30 to 1 leverage. If the United States Federal Government were a bank regulated by itself, they would shut themselves down. We live in a nation where not long ago our United States Secretary of State [Hillary Clinton] was on rhetorical bended knee in communist China pleading with the Chinese to continue to buy our debt, because if they don’t buy our debt and other foreign sovereign wealth funds don’t buy our debt our beloved United States of America can’t pay its bills. The United States of America my friends is not a beggar nation.
-- Gov. Tim Pawlenty		 
....it is always easier to tell people what to do than to find out what is happening...
-- Martin Pawley		 
Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam, be it ever so humble, there's no place like home.
-- J. H. Payne		 
What sets worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions and repulsions; life is plurality, death is uniformity.
-- Octavio Paz		 
[Transcription of some of the signs in Washington during the peace march January 18, 2003]
-- Peace March Signs		 
The trouble with most of us is that we would rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism.
-- Norman Vincent Peale		 
We live in a world that has popularized Black people showing the same hate towards white people that people like Martin Luther King Jr. died fighting to overcome. It’s sad. Sad as hell.
-- CJ Pearson		 
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.
-- Lester B. Pearson		 
Life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived.
-- M. Scott Peck		 
Did I say "republic?" By God, yes, I said "republic!" Long live the glorious republic of the United States of America. Damn democracy. It is a fraudulent term used, often by ignorant persons but no less often by intellectual fakers, to describe an infamous mixture of socialism, graft, confiscation of property and denial of personal rights to individuals whose virtuous principles make them offensive.
-- Westbrook Pegler		 
He who does not bellow out the truth when he knows the truth makes himself the accomplice of liars and forgers.
-- Charles Peguy		 
Contrary to the Marxists, the Nazis did not advocate public ownership of the means of production. They did demand that the government oversee and run the nation's economy. The issue of legal ownership, they explained, is secondary; what counts is the issue of control. Private citizens, therefore, may continue to hold titles to property -- so long as the state reserves to itself the unqualified right to regulate the use of their property.
-- Leonard Peikoff		 
Contrary to the Marxists, the Nazis did not advocate public ownership of the means of production. They did demand that the government oversee and run the nation’s economy. The issue of legal ownership, they explained, is secondary; what counts is the issue of control. Private citizens, therefore, may continue to hold titles to property—so long as the state reserves to itself the unqualified right to regulate the use of their property.
-- Leonard Peikoff		 
You demonize...we call it the wrap-up smear, you smear somebody with falsehoods and all the rest, and then you merchandise it and then you write it and say, "See, it's reported in the press that this, this, and this..." so they have that validation that the press reported the smear and then it's called a wrap-up-smear and the merchandise is the press' report on the smear we made. It's a tactic, and it's self-evident.
-- Nancy Pelosi		 
Let the people think they govern and they will be governed.
-- William Penn		 
Justice is the insurance we have in our lives, and obedience is the premium we pay for it.
-- William Penn		 
To do evil that good may come of it is for bunglers in politics as well as morals.
-- William Penn		 
Those people who will not be governed by God will be ruled by tyrants.
-- William Penn		 
A good end cannot sanctify evil means; nor must we ever do evil, that good may come of it.
-- William Penn		 
The loyalists in the beginning of the late war objected to associating, arming and fighting, in defense of our liberties, because these measures were not constitutional. A free people should always be left... with every possible power to promote their own happiness.
-- Pennsylvania Gazette		 
The provision in the Constitution granting the right to all persons to bear arms is a limitation upon the power of the Legislature to enact any law to the contrary. The exercise of a right guaranteed by the Constitution cannot be made subject to the will of the sheriff.
-- People vs. Zerillo		 
Any society that needs disclaimers has too many lawyers.
-- Erik Pepke		 
One has the right to be wrong in a democracy.
-- Claude Pepper		 
Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you.
-- Pericles		 
Instead of looking on discussion as a stumbling block in the way of action, we think it an indispensable preliminary to any wise action at all.
-- Pericles		 
I believe that America is the greatest country in history and for good reasons, but America has been changing and not for the better. Our free society has been falling prey to a more repressive system with methods for the increased control of people. The return of groups and individuals to the controlling ideology of Imperialism and Marxism using the structures of Corporatism, Socialism and Democracy. The result is that this nation's foundational principles based on the ideology of Liberty are now in danger of extinction.
-- Darren Perkins		 
Our dependency makes slaves out of us, especially if this dependency is a dependency of our self esteem. If you need encouragement, pats on the back from everybody, then you make everybody your judge.
-- Fritz Perls		 
Is any man free except the one who can pass his life as he pleases? [Lat., An quisquam est alius liber, nisi ducere vitam Cui licet, ut voluit?]
-- Persius		 
Therefore, rid yourselves of all malice and all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander of every kind.
-- St. Peter		 
While [false teachers] promise them liberty, they themselves are the servants of corruption: for of whom a man is overcome, of the same is he brought in bondage.
-- St. Peter		 
Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status.
-- Laurence J. Peter		 
A free press is one that prints a dictator’s speech but doesn’t have to.
-- Laurence J. Peter		 
Democracy is a process by which the people are free to choose the man who will get the blame.
-- Laurence J. Peter		 
A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to.
-- Laurence J. Peter		 
Bureaucrats write memoranda both because they appear to be busy when they are writing and because the memos, once written, immediately become proof that they were busy.
-- Charles Peters		 
If a window of opportunity appears, don't pull down the shade.
-- Tom Peters		 
The American people are bound to the people of the Soviet Union in the great alliance of the United Nations. We are determined that nothing shall stop us from sharing with you all that we have.
-- Howard C. Peterson		 
We are good citizens, and we cannot protect ourselves because you allow the criminals to run wild. ... I'd like you to come and live in the inner city for a week and see the importance of having a weapon. ... Go after the criminals and not the good people.
-- Jesse Lee Peterson		 
One should not associate with controversy; one should always reach for the highest ratings; one should never forget that there is safety in numbers; one should always remember that comedy, adventure, and escapism provide the best atmosphere for selling.
-- Peter G. Peterson		 
... the key question is: can we define 'income' in a fair and reasonably straightforward manner? Unfortunately we have not yet succeeded in doing so.
-- Shirley Peterson		 
Eight decades of amendments... to (the) code have produced a virtually impenetrable maze... The rules are unintelligible to most citizens... The rules are equally mysterious to many government employees who are charged with administering and enforcing the law.
-- Shirley Peterson		 
If oppression and wrong should gain the ascendancy, and injustice stalk abroad in the land, and all else fail him; nevertheless his humblest roof, and all things that are sheltered beneath it, would find, somehow, someway, a final refuge and protection in the Supreme Court of the United States.
-- Edward J. Phelps		 
A large body of people, sufficient to make a nation, have come to the conclusion that they will have a government of a certain form. Who denies them the right? Standing with the principles of '76 behind us, who can deny them the right? ... I maintain on the principles of '76 that Abraham Lincoln has no right to a soldier in Fort Sumter. ... You can never make such a war popular. ... The North never will endorse such a war.
-- Wendell Phillips		 
Whether in chains or in laurels, liberty knows nothing but victories.
-- Wendell Phillips		 
No free people can lose their liberties while they are jealous of liberty. But the liberties of the freest people are in danger when they set up symbols of liberty as fetishes, worshipping the symbol instead of the principle it represents.
-- Wendell Phillips		 
The labor movement means just this: it is the last noble protest of the American people against the power of incorporated wealth.
-- Wendell Phillips		 
No matter whose lips that would speak, they must be free and ungagged. The community which dares not protect its humblest and most hated member in the free utterance of his opinions, no matter how false or hateful, is only a gang of slaves. If there is anything in the universe that can’t stand discussion, let it crack.
-- Wendell Phillips		 
Eternal vigilence is the price of liberty.
-- Wendell Phillips		 
Let us always remember that he does not really believe his own opinion, who dares not give free scope to his opponent.
-- Wendell Phillips		 
Liberty knows nothing but victories. Soldiers call Bunker Hill a defeat; but liberty dates from it though Warren lay dead on the field.
-- Wendell Phillips		 
Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
-- Wendell Phillips		 
Money, it has been said, is the cause of good things to a good man, of evil things to a bad man.
-- Philo of Alexandria		 
A free spirit takes liberties even with liberty itself.
-- Francis Picabia		 
Art is an instrument in the war against the enemy.
-- Pablo Picasso		 
All the progress we have made in philosophy… is the result of that methodical skepticism which is the element of human freedom.
-- Charles S. Pierce		 
Every child in America who enters school at the age of five is mentally ill, because he comes to school with an allegiance toward our elected officials, toward our founding fathers, toward our institutions, toward the preservation of this form of government that we have. Patriotism, nationalism, and sovereignty, all that proves that children are sick because a truly well individual is one who has rejected all of those things, and is truly the international child of the future.
-- Dr. Chester Pierce		 
I cannot find any authority in the Constitution for public charity, ... [it] 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.
-- Franklin Pierce		 
The dangers of a concentration of all power in the general government of a confederacy so vast as ours are too obvious to be disregarded.
-- Franklin Pierce		 
The constitutionality and propriety of the Federal Government assuming to enter into a novel and vast field of legislation, namely, that of providing for the care and support of all those … who by any form of calamity become fit objects of public philanthropy. ... I cannot find any authority in the Constitution for making the Federal Government the great almoner of public charity throughout the United States. To do so would, in my judgment, be contrary to the letter and spirit of the Constitution and subversive of the whole theory upon which the Union of these States is founded.
-- Franklin Pierce		 
Socialism is after all, the Viagra of politics...
-- Michael Pierce		 
Congress has doubled the IRS budget over the past 10 years -- making that agency one of the fastest growing non-entitlement programs. It has increased its employment by 20 percent. The IRS’s powers to investigate and examine taxpayers transcend those of any other law enforcement agency. Virtually all of the constitutional rights regarding search and seizure, due process, and jury trial simply do not apply to the IRS.
-- Daniel Pilla		 
Today, of course, the redistributive powers of Congress are everywhere -- except in the Constitution. The result is the feeding frenzy that is modern Washington, the Hobbesian war of all against all as each tries to get his share and more of the common pot the tax system fills. ... It is unseemly and wrong. More than that, it is unconstitutional, whatever the slim and cowed majority on the New Deal Court may have said.
-- Roger Pilon		 
The growth of federal power and programs over this century -- involving the regulation of business, the expansion of "civil rights," the production of environmental goods, and much else -- has taken place in large measure through the power of Congress to regulate "commerce among the states." That power has been read so broadly by the modern Court that Congress today can regulate anything that even "affects" commerce, which in principle is everything. As a result, save for the restraints imposed by the Bill of Rights, the commerce power is now essentially plenary, which is hardly what the Framers intended when they enumerated Congress’s powers. Indeed, if they had meant for Congress to be able to do anything it wanted under the commerce power, the enumeration of Congress’s other powers -- to say nothing of the defense of the doctrine of enumerated powers throughout the Federalist Papers -- would have been pointless. The purpose of the commerce clause quite simply, was to enable Congress to ensure the free flow of commerce among the states. Under the Articles of Confederation, state legislatures had enacted tariffs and other protectionist measures that impeded interstate commerce. To break the logjam, Congress was empowered to make commerce among the states "regular." In fact, the need to do so was one of the principal reasons behind the call for a new constitution.
-- Roger Pilon		 
Indeed, it was the enumeration of powers, not the enumeration of rights in the Bill of Rights, that was meant by the Framers to be the principal limitation on government power.
-- Roger Pilon		 
Over the 20th century, the federal government has assumed a vast and unprecedented set of powers. Not only has the exercise of those powers upset the balance between federal and state governments; run roughshod over individuals, families, and firms; and reduced economic opportunity for all; but most of what the federal government does today -- to put the point as plainly and candidly as possible -- is illegitimate because done without explicit constitutional authority. The time has come to start returning power to the states and the people, to relimit federal power in our fundamental law, to restore constitutional government.
-- Roger Pilon		 
Unfortunately, over the course of this century Congress has largely ignored the constitutional limits on its power. And the courts, especially after Franklin Roosevelt threatened to pack the Supreme Court with six additional members, have only abetted the resulting growth of government by fashioning constitutional doctrines that have no basis whatever in the Constitution. As a consequence, many of the programs Congress oversees today are without constitutional foundation, having resulted from acts that Congress had no authority.
-- Roger Pilon		 
[T]he vast regulatory structure the federal government has erected in the name of the commerce power cannot be ended overnight, in many cases, but the pretense that such programs are constitutional can be ended, even as the programs themselves are phased out over time.
-- Roger Pilon		 
Under our Constitution, the federal government has delegated, enumerated and thus limited powers. Power is delegated by the founding generation or through subsequent amendment (that makes it legitimate); enumerated in the constitution (that makes it legal); and limited by that enumeration. As the 10th Amendment says, if a power hasn’t been delegated, the federal government doesn’t have it. For 150 years, that design held for the most part. When faced with a welfare bill in 1794, for example, James Madison, the principal author of the Constitution, rose in the House to say that he could find no constitutional authority for the bill. A century later, when Congress passed a similar measure, President Cleveland vetoed it as beyond Congress’ authority. That all changed during the New Deal as both congress and the president sought to expand federal power. When the Supreme court objected, rather than amend the Constitution, Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to pack the court with six additional members. The scheme failed, but the threat worked. Thereafter, the court started reading the Constitution’s General Welfare and Commerce Clauses so broadly that the doctrine of enumerated powers was essentially destroyed—and with it limited government.
-- Roger Pilon		 
The legislature of the United States shall pass no law on the subject of religion nor touching or abridging the liberty of the press.
-- Charles Pinckney		 
Sept. 9, 2004, will be remembered as a paradigm-shifting day in media history. That was the day the 'blogosphere' took down CBS News.
-- James Pinkerton		 
Honesty demands that we boldly pursue ideas tested by time, defended by reason, validated by experience, and confirmed by revelation. We will only find truth when we place our confidence in it and not in ourselves. We will only learn when we love truth enough to measure all ideas with a measuring rod outside of those things being measured and are willing to discard those ideas we find to be "intolerable," inferior, and useless.
-- Everett Piper		 
History has taught us time and again that political power always raises its angry fist when timeless principles are lost. We know that without the scale of "self-evident truths" grounded in the "laws of nature and nature's God," every culture eventually finds itself subject to the rule of the gang or the tyranny of the individual. Recognizing this, scholars of all ages have confidently given their hearts and minds to the words, "You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.
-- Everett Piper		 
Only the incompetent wait until the last extremity to use force, and by then, it is usually too late to use anything, even prayer.
-- H. Beam Piper		 
The poorest man may in his cottage, bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail, its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storm may enter; the rain may enter; but the King of England may not enter; all his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement.
-- William Pitt		 
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
-- William Pitt		 
Unlimited Power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it.
-- William Pitt, Sr.		 
Henceforth it will be the task of this Sacred Congregation not only to examine carefully the books denounced to it, to prohibit them if necessary, and to grant permission for reading forbidden books, but also to supervise, ex officio, books that are being published, and to pass sentence on such as deserve to be prohibited.
-- Pope Pius X		 
One Galileo in two thousand years is enough.
-- Pope Pius XII		 
Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.
-- Plato		 
Excess generally causes reaction, and produces a change in the opposite direction, whether it be in the seasons, or in individuals, or in governments.
-- Plato		 
Do not expect justice where might is right.
-- Plato		 
We see many instances of cities going down like sinking ships to their destruction. There have been such wrecks in the past and there surely will be others in the future, caused by the wickedness of captains and crews alike. For these are guilty men, whose sin is supreme ignorance of what matters most.
-- Plato		 
A tyrant…is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.
-- Plato		 
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.
-- Plato		 
Democracy leads to anarchy, which is mob rule.
-- Plato		 
The people have always some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness… This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs, when he first appears he is a protector.
-- Plato		 
Freedom in a democracy is the glory of the state, and, therefore, in a democracy only will the freeman of nature deign to dwell.
-- Plato		 
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
-- Plato		 
Democracy…is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike.
-- Plato		 
Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something.
-- Plato		 
Strange times are these in which we live when old and young are taught in falsehood's school. And the one man who dares to tell the truth is called at once a lunatic and fool.
-- Plato		 
The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs, is to be ruled by evil men.
-- Plato		 
Your silence gives consent.
-- Plato		 
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.
-- Plato		 
When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing more to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.
-- Plato		 
The worst of all deceptions is self-deception.
-- Plato		 
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.
-- Plato		 
Kings … will … take possession of the children, who will be unaffected by the habits of their parents; these they will train in their own habits and laws.
-- Plato		 
Not by age but by capacity is wisdom acquired.
-- Titus Maccius Plautus		 
Patience is the best remedy for every trouble.
-- Titus Maccius Plautus		 
No man is wise enough by himself.
-- Titus Maccius Plautus		 
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
-- Pledge of Allegiance		 
Perseverance is more prevailing than violence; and many things which cannot be overcome when they are together, yield themselves up when taken little by little.
-- Plutarch		 
The first destroyer of the liberties of a people is he who first gave them bounties and largess.
-- Plutarch		 
An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.
-- Plutarch		 
The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits.
-- Plutarch		 
What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.
-- Plutarch		 
The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.
-- Plutarch		 
[T]he next time you read or hear about a murder victim, a rape victim or an assault victim, I want you to preface it with the word 'unarmed' so that murder victims become 'unarmed murder victims'; this is especially true in rape. How many times have you read, 'An unidentified woman, heavily armed with a semi-automatic weapon was raped by a man wielding a knife.' No answer is necessary, right?
-- The Liberty Pole		 
Great popular support and enthusiasm for the United Nations policies should be built up, well organized and fully articulate. But it is necessary to do more than that. The opposition must be rendered so impotent that it will be unable to gather any significant support in the Senate against the United Nations Charter and the treaties which will follow.
-- Political Affairs		 
The freedom to make and admit mistakes is at the core of the scientific process. If we are asked to forswear error, or worse, to say that error means fraud, then we cannot function as scientists.
-- Robert Pollack		 
When libertarian moral theory is combined with economic theory a compelling conception of the good society emerges.
-- Lansing Pollock		 
We get lost in a fog of abstractions and easily forget that man is a bloodhound sniffing out the real.
-- Robert C. Pollock		 
[A] public policy of simply discouraging people from owning or using firearms is not, in and of itself, a constitutionally permissible objective, any more than discouraging people from religious observance would be permissible to some oh-so-progressive government that considered religion as hopelessly declassé as progressives nowadays consider the right to keep and bear arms .... And any statute or regulation that burdens the right to keep and bear arms on the ground that guns are a public health hazard should enjoy the same frosty reception in court that would be given a statute or regulation that burdened the free exercise of religion as a mental hazard.
-- Daniel D. Polsby		 
[There can be no] rational administration of government when good men are held in the same esteem as bad ones.
-- Polybius		 
The object of this clause [the right of the people to keep and bear arms] is to secure a well-armed militia.... But a militia would be useless unless the citizens were enabled to exercise themselves in the use of warlike weapons. To preserve this privilege, and to secure to the people the ability to oppose themselves in military force against the usurpations of government, as well as against enemies from without, that government is forbidden by any law or proceeding to invade or destroy the right to keep and bear arms.
-- John Norton Pomeroy		 
We turn sacred cows into hamburger.
-- Lowell Ponte		 
Give me again my hollow tree A crust of bread, and liberty!
-- Alexander Pope		 
Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread.
-- Alexander Pope		 
Party is the madness of many for the gain of a few.
-- Alexander Pope		 
A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.
-- Alexander Pope		 
There is an almost universal tendency, perhaps an inborn tendency, to suspect the good faith of a man who holds opinions that differ from our own opinions… It obviously endangers the freedom and the objectivity of our discussion if we attack a person instead of attacking an opinion or, more precisely, a theory.
-- Sir Karl Popper		 
We must plan for freedom, and not only for security, if for no other reason than only freedom can make security more secure.
-- Sir Karl Popper		 
Throughout the history of the United States, war has been the primary impetus behind the growth and development of the central state. It has been the lever by which presidents and other national officials have bolstered the power of the state in the face of tenacious popular resistance.
-- Bruce D. Porter		 
MacKinnon's treatment of the central issue of pornography as she herself poses it -- the harm that pornography does to women -- is shockingly causal. Much of her evidence is anecdotal, and in a nation of 260 Million people, anecdotes are a weak form of evidence.
-- Judge Richard Posner		 
I do not know what has caused MacKinnon to become, and, more surprisingly, to remain, so obsessed with pornography, and so zealous for censorship. But let us not sacrifice our civil liberties on the altar of her obsession.
-- Judge Richard Posner		 
Now that eighteen-year-olds have the right to vote, it is obvious that they must be allowed the freedom to form their political views on the basis of uncensored speech before they turn eighteen, so that their minds are not a blank when they first exercise the franchise. And since an eighteen-year-old’s right to vote is a right personal to him rather than a right to be exercised on his behalf by his parents, the right of parents to enlist the aid of the state to shield their children from ideas of which the parents disapprove cannot be plenary either. People are unlikely to become well-functioning, independent-minded adults and responsible citizens if they are raised in an intellectual bubble.
-- Richard Posner		 
It is the censor's business to make a judgment about the propriety of the content or message of the proposed expressive activity. The regulation here does not authorize any judgment about the content of any speeches. ... A park is a limited space, and to allow unregulated access to all comers could easily reduce rather than enlarge the park's utility as a forum for speech. Just imagine two rallies held at the same time in the same park area using public-address systems that drowned out each other's speakers.
-- Richard Posner		 
Violent video games played in public places are a tiny fraction of the media violence to which modern American children are exposed. Tiny -- and judging from the record of this case not very violent compared to what is available to children on television and in movie theaters today.
-- Richard Posner		 
Police may have no right to privacy in carrying out official duties in public. But the civilians they interact with do.
-- Judge Richard Allen Posner		 
If you permit the audio recordings, they'll be a lot more eavesdropping. ... There's going to be a lot of this snooping around by reporters and bloggers. ... Yes, it's a bad thing. There is such a thing as privacy.
-- Judge Richard Allen Posner		 
Make no mistake about it: the labeling of someone’s language as ‘sexist’ involves a political judgment and implies the desirability of a particular sociological doctrine. One may be in favor of that doctrine (as I believe I am) but it is quite another matter to force writers by edicts and censorship into accepting it.
-- Neil Postman		 
The American notion of freedom transcended the political realm and in fact extended to every major category of human relationships, including those between employer and employee, clergyman and layman, husband and wife, parent and child, public official and citizen. Americans believed that, as of July 4, 1776, all men were created equal, and that any impairment of a man’s equality was destructive of his liberty also.
-- David M. Potter		 
It is clear in our criminal justice system that the jury has the power to nullify -- that is, the power to acquit or to convict on reduced charges despite overwhelming evidence against the defendant. ... In a criminal trial, the court cannot direct a verdict of guilty, no matter how strong the evidence. In addition, if the jury acquits, double jeopardy bars the prosecution from appealing the verdict or seeking retrial. Similarly, if the jury convicts the defendant of a less serious offense than the one charged, the prosecution cannot again try the defendant on the more serious charge. This result occurs regardless of whether the jury consciously rejects the law, embraces a merciful attitude, or is simply confused concerning the law or facts. Thus, nullification -- with or without authority, intended or not -- is part of our system.
-- Anne Bowen Poulin		 
The power of nullification plays an important role in the criminal justice system. ... Because an accused criminal is restricted in the defenses he or she can raise, the law recognizes only certain defenses and justification, and correspondingly, limited evidence. The jury’s power to nullify provides an accommodation between the rigidity of the law and the need to hear and respond to positions that do not fit legal pigeonholes, such as claims of spousal abuse before the battered-spouse syndrome received acceptance. Jury nullification permits the jury to respond to a position that does not have the status of a legally recognized defense. The power to nullify guarantees that the jury is free to speak as the conscience of the community.
-- Anne Bowen Poulin		 
Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand.
-- Ezra Pound		 
The phase of the usury system which we are trying to analyze is more or less Patterson's perception that the Bank of England could have benefit of all the interest on all the money that it creates out of nothing. ... Now the American citizen can, of course, appeal to his constitution, which states that Congress shall have power to coin money or regulate the value thereof and of foreign coin. Such appeal is perhaps quixotic.
-- Ezra Pound		 
I think an alliance with Stalin's Russia is rotten.
-- Ezra Pound		 
Wars in old times were made to get slaves. The modern implement of imposing slavery is debt.
-- Ezra Pound		 
Sovereignty inheres in the right to issue money. And the American sovereignty belongs by right to the people, and their representatives in Congress have the right to issue money and to determine the value thereof. And 120 million, 120 million suckers have lamentably failed to insist on the observation of this quite decided law. ... Now the point at which embezzlement of the nation's funds on the part of her officers becomes treason can probably be decided only by jurists, and not by hand-picked judges who support illegality.
-- Ezra Pound		 
Liberty is not a right but a duty.
-- Ezra Pound		 
That text is known to them that have the patience to read it, possibly one one-hundredth of one percent of the denizens. They forget it, all save a few Western states. I think somebody in Dakota once read it. The Constitution.
-- Ezra Pound		 
Jury lawlessness is the greatest corrective of law in its actual administration.
-- Roscoe Pound		 
The wages of sin are death, but by the time taxes are taken out, it's just sort of a tired feeling.
-- Paula Poundstone		 
Those who believe themselves to be masters of all they survey are mistaken. There is no such thing as absolute power and the delusion that one is in possession of such power constitutes absolute corruption. This delusion leads, resolutely, to the downfall of its adherents.
-- Daniel Pouzzner		 
The purpose of the Bill of Rights was to limit what the federal government could do. Any interpretation of a provision of the Bill of Rights as a grant of federal power is ipso facto wrong.
-- L. A. Powe, Jr.		 
Over the years, the United States has sent many of its fine young men and women into great peril to fight for freedom beyond our borders. The only amount of land we have ever asked for in return is enough to bury those that did not return.
-- General Colin Powell (False)		 
So our record of living our values and letting our values be an inspiration to others I think is clear. And I don't think I have anything to be ashamed of or apologize for with respect to what America has done for the world. We have gone forth from our shores repeatedly over the last hundred years and we've done this as recently as the last year in Afghanistan and put wonderful young men and women at risk, many of whom have lost their lives, and we have asked for nothing except enough ground to bury them in, and otherwise we have returned home ... to live our own lives in peace.
-- General Colin Powell		 
One of the fondest expressions around is that we can't be the world's policeman. But guess who gets called when somebody needs a cop.
-- General Colin Powell		 
I will not surrender responsibility for my life and my actions.
-- John Enoch Powell		 
The guarantee of equal protection cannot mean one thing when applied to one individual and something else when applied to a person of another color. If both are not accorded the same protection, then it is not equal.
-- Lewis F. Powell		 
Let therefore every man, that, appealing to his own heart, feels the least spark of virtue or freedom there, think that it is an honor which he owes himself, and a duty which he owes his country, to bear arms.
-- Thomas Pownhall		 
To the students and faculty of our high school: I am your new principal, and honored to be so. There is no greater calling than to teach young people. I would like to apprise you of some important changes coming to our school. I am making these changes because I am convinced that most of the ideas that have dominated public education in America have worked against you, against your teachers and against our country. First, this school will no longer honor race or ethnicity. I could not care less if your racial makeup is black, brown, red, yellow or white. I could not care less if your origins are African, Latin American, Asian or European, or if your ancestors arrived here on the Mayflower or on slave ships. The only identity I care about, the only one this school will recognize, is your individual identity -- your character, your scholarship, your humanity. And the only national identity this school will care about is American. This is an American public school, and American public schools were created to make better Americans. If you wish to affirm an ethnic, racial or religious identity through school, you will have to go elsewhere. We will end all ethnicity-, race- and non-American nationality-based celebrations. They undermine the motto of America, one of its three central values -- e pluribus unum, "from many, one." And this school will be guided by America's values. This includes all after-school clubs. I will not authorize clubs that divide students based on any identities. This includes race, language, religion, sexual orientation or whatever else may become in vogue in a society divided by political correctness. Your clubs will be based on interests and passions, not blood, ethnic, racial or other physically defined ties. Those clubs just cultivate narcissism -- an unhealthy preoccupation with the self -- while the purpose of education is to get you to think beyond yourself. So we will have clubs that transport you to the wonders and glories of art, music, astronomy, languages you do not already speak, carpentry and more. If the only extracurricular activities you can imagine being interesting in are those based on ethnic, racial or sexual identity, that means that little outside of yourself really interests you. Second, I am uninterested in whether English is your native language. My only interest in terms of language is that you leave this school speaking and writing English as fluently as possible. The English language has united America's citizens for over 200 years, and it will unite us at this school. It is one of the indispensable reasons this country of immigrants has always come to be one country. And if you leave this school without excellent English language skills, I would be remiss in my duty to ensure that you will be prepared to successfully compete in the American job market. We will learn other languages here -- it is deplorable that most Americans only speak English -- but if you want classes taught in your native language rather than in English, this is not your school. Third, because I regard learning as a sacred endeavor, everything in this school will reflect learning's elevated status. This means, among other things, that you and your teachers will dress accordingly. Many people in our society dress more formally for Hollywood events than for church or school. These people have their priorities backward. Therefore, there will be a formal dress code at this school. Fourth, no obscene language will be tolerated anywhere on this school's property -- whether in class, in the hallways or at athletic events. If you can't speak without using the f-word, you can't speak. By obscene language I mean the words banned by the Federal Communications Commission, plus epithets such as [the 'N' word], even when used by one black student to address another black, or 'bitch,' even when addressed by a girl to a girlfriend. It is my intent that by the time you leave this school, you will be among the few your age to instinctively distinguish between the elevated and the degraded, the holy and the obscene. Fifth, we will end all self-esteem programs. In this school, self-esteem will be attained in only one way -- the way people attained it until decided otherwise a generation ago -- by earning it. One immediate consequence is that there will be one valedictorian, not eight. Sixth, and last, I am reorienting the school toward academics and away from politics and propaganda. No more time will be devoted to scaring you about smoking and caffeine, or terrifying you about sexual harassment or global warming. No more semesters will be devoted to condom wearing and teaching you to regard sexual relations as only or primarily a health issue. There will be no more attempts to convince you that you are a victim because you are not white, or not male, or not heterosexual or not Christian. We will have failed if any one of you graduates this school and does not consider him or herself inordinately lucky -- to be alive and to be an American. Now, please stand and join me in the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of our country. As many of you do not know the words, your teachers will hand them out to you.
-- Dennis Prager		 
Our job this day is to become part of the answer to the world's immense and protracted suffering rather than continuing our ancient task of being part of the difficulty.
-- Hugh Prather		 
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away.
-- Elvis Presley		 
Given the opportunity, the IRS will take the easy way out and grab whatever it can... the IRS does not really care about you and what your future... may be.
-- Santo Presti		 
Fear is the key element for the IRS in achieving its mission. Without fear, the IRS would have a difficult time maintaining our so-called system of voluntary compliance ...
-- Santo Presti		 
You are not what you think you are; What you think – you are.
-- Red Pritchard		 
Socialism needs two legs on which to stand; a right and a left.  While appearing to be in complete opposition to one another,  they both march in the same direction.
-- Paul Proctor		 
Jena by this time was a center of antitobacco activism -- mainly through the labors of Karl Astel, director of the new institute [Institute for Tobacco Hazards Research] and president, since the summer of 1939, of the University of Jena. Astel was head of the Thuringia's office of Racial Affairs and a notorious antisemite and racial hygienist (he had joined the Nazi party and the SS in July of 1930) ... Astel was also a militant antismoker and teetolater who once characterized opposition to tobacco as a 'national socialist duty.' On May 1, 1941, he banned smoking in all buildings and classrooms of the University of Jena, and the following spring, as head of Thuringia's Public Health Office, he announced a smoking ban in all regional schools and health offices. Tobacco in his view had to be fought 'cigar by cigar, cigarette by cigarette, and pack by pack' -- hence his notoriety for snatching cigarettes from the mouth of students who dared to violate his Jena University tobacco ban.
-- Robert N. Proctor		 
One topic that has only recently begun to attract attention is the Nazi anti-tobacco movement. Germany had the world's strongest antismoking movement in the 1930s and early 1940s, supported by Nazi medical and military leaders worried that tobacco might prove a hazard to the race. Many Nazi leaders were vocal opponents of smoking. Anti-tobacco activists pointed out that whereas Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt were all fond of tobacco, the three major fascist leaders of Europe -- Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco -- were all non-smokers.
-- Robert N. Proctor		 
Riding a bike is 113 times more dangerous than hunting with all those “gun nuts”! The NSC [National Safety Council] reports that out of 100,000 bicyclists 905 had injuries requiring hospital treatment. Out of the same number of fisherman, 141 required treatment and out of 100,000 golfers 104 were injured. Please compare that to the 8 hunters out of 100,000 who were injured in 1991 (last year for data).
-- The Proponent		 
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.
-- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon		 
Laws: We know what they are, and what they are worth!  They are spider webs for the rich and mighty, steel chains for the poor and weak, fishing nets in the hands of the government.
-- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon		 
We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can make for us or spare us.
-- Marcel Proust		 
Even the smallest candle burns brighter in the dark.
-- Proverb		 
Tell me who your friends are, and I will tell you who you are.
-- Proverb		 
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
-- Proverb		 
Observation, and not old age, brings wisdom.
-- Proverb		 
The wise learn from the experience of others, most from their own experience, and fools not at all.
-- Proverb		 
A person with one watch knows what time it is; a person with two watches is never sure.
-- Proverb		 
An honest answer is the sign of true friendship.
-- Proverb		 
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.
-- Proverb		 
The wise do freely, early and in good time, what fools do later out of necessity.
-- Proverb		 
Seize opportunity by the beard, for it is bald behind.
-- Bulgarian Proverb		 
Outside noisy, inside empty.
-- Chinese Proverb		 
The believer is happy, the doubter is wise.
-- Hungarian Proverb		 
Where the tongue slips, it speaks the truth.
-- Irish Proverb		 
You can’t wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.
-- Navajo Proverb		 
It is better to live one day as a lion, than one hundred years as a sheep
-- Roman Proverb		 
The simple believeth every word: but the prudent man looketh well to his going.
-- Proverbs		 
The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender.
-- Proverbs		 
An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself.
-- Joseph Pulitzer		 
Our republic and its press will rise and fall together.
-- Joseph Pulitzer		 
A deranged psychopath is no match for a well-focused psychotic.
-- The Punisher		 
Our anti-crisis policy is directed to internal demand support, social security of citizens and creation of new jobs. Like many other countries, we are reducing taxes on production, investing money in the economy. We are optimising state expenses.
-- Vladimir Putin		 
We must seek support in the moral values that have ensured the progress of our civilization. Honesty and hard work, responsibility and faith in our strength are bound to bring us success. There should be no place for despondency. The crisis can and must be fought by uniting our intellectual, spiritual and material resources.
-- Vladimir Putin		 
I think that the 21st-century economy is an economy of people, not of factories. The intellectual aspect in the global economic development has grown immensely. That’s why we plan to concentrate on creating additional opportunities for our people to realise their potential.
-- Vladimir Putin		 
Let us be frank: provoking military-political instability and other regional conflicts is also a convenient way of deflecting people’s attention from mounting social and economic problems. Regrettably, further attempts of this kind cannot be ruled out.
-- Vladimir Putin		 
Unfortunately, more and more often we hear that increasing military spending will help solve today’s social and economic problems. The logic here is quite simple. Additional allocations for military needs create new jobs. For reference: The growth of military spending: USA—$529 billion in 2006, $555 billion in 2007, and $583 billion in 2008. Experts expect $606 billion in 2009. Great Britain—£27 billion in 2006, £31 billion in 2007, £34 billion in 2008, and £35.2 billion planned for 2009. Germany—€23 billion in 2006, €24 billion in 2007, and €25 billion in 2008. China—$38 billion in 2006, $44 billion in 2007, $58 billion in 2008, and a 17% increase in 2009 (around $66 billion). Georgia (according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute)—$49 million in 2002, $80 million in 2004, $362 million in 2006, $592 million in 2007, and $1.104 billion in 2008. At a glance, it seems to be merely a method to fight the crisis and unemployment. Perhaps, in the short run, such a measure may yield some results. But in reality, instead of solving the problem, militarisation pushes it to a deeper level. It draws away from the economy immense financial and material resources, which could have been used much more efficiently elsewhere.
-- Vladimir Putin		 
One must not allow oneself to skid down to isolationism and unbridled economic egoism. ... The second possible mistake would be excessive interference into the economic life of the country. And the absolute faith into the all-mightiness of the state.
-- Vladimir Putin		 
During the time of the Soviet Union the role of the state in economy was made absolute, which eventually lead to the total non-competitiveness of the economy. That lesson cost us very dearly. I am sure nobody would want history to repeat itself. We should also be aware that for during the last months, we have been witnessing the washout of the entrepreneurship spirit. That includes the principle of the personal responsibility – of a businessman, an investor or a share-holder – for his or her own decisions. There are no grounds to suggest that by putting the responsibility over to the state, one can achieve better results. Another thing – handling crisis must not turn into financial populism, into rejecting a responsible macro-economic policy. Unreasonable expansion of the budget deficit, accumulation of the national debt – are as destructive as an adventurous stock market game.
-- Vladimir Putin		 
There is no inherent misdirection in holding unorthodox views. Indeed, the autonomous individual, free from compulsive conformance and unquestioned assumptions, is likely to be unorthodox... They stimulate the climate of controversy without which political democracy becomes an empty formalism.
-- Snell Putney		 
If a government were trying to squeeze as much money as possible out of a population, what would it do?\\ 1. The use of indirect rather than direct taxes, so that the tax is hidden in the price of goods. \\ 2. Inflation, by which the state reduces the value of everyone else's currency. \\ 3. Borrowing, so as to postpone the necessary taxation. \\ 4. Gift and luxury taxes, where the tax accompanies the receipt or purchase of something special, lessening the annoyance of the tax.\\ 5. “Temporary” taxes, which somehow never get repealed when the emergency passes.\\ 6. Taxes that exploit social conflict, by placing higher taxes on unpopular groups.\\ 7. The threat of social collapse or withholding monopoly government services if taxes are reduced.\\ 8. Collection of the total tax burden in relatively small increments over time, rather than in a yearly lump sum.\\ 9. Taxes whose exact incidence cannot be predicted in advance, thus keeping the taxpayer unaware of just how much he is paying.\\ 10. Extraordinary budget complexity to hide the budget process from public understanding. 11. The use of generalized expenditure categories to make it difficult for outsiders to assess the individual components of the budget.\\
-- Amilcare Puviani		 
A lawyer with a briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns.
-- Mario Puzo		 
The weapon of the dictator is not so much propaganda as censorship.
-- Terence H. Qualter		 
To understand a man, you must know his memories. The same is true of a nation.
-- Anthony Quayle		 
I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy. But that will change.
-- Dan Quayle		 
The powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences.
-- Carroll Quigley		 
In 1891, [Cecile] Rhodes organized a secret society with members in a "Circle of Initiates" and an outer circle known as the "Association of Helpers" later organized as the Round Table organization. In 1909-1913, they organized semi-secret groups known as Round Table Groups in the chief British dependencies and the United States. In 1919, they founded the Royal Institute of International Affairs. Similar Institutes of International Affairs were established in the chief British dominions and the United States where it is known as the Council on Foreign Relations. After 1925, the Institute of Pacific Relations was set up in twelve Pacific area countries. They were constantly harping on the lessons to be learned from the failure of the American Revolution and the success of the Canadian federation of 1867 and hoped to federate the various parts of the empire and then confederate the whole with the United Kingdom.\\ ...\\ There does exist and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates to some extent in the way the Radical Right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so. I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960s, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. I have objected, both in the past and recently, to a few of its policies but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known."
-- Carroll Quigley		 
The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is the American Branch of a society which originated in England... (and) ...believes national boundaries should be obliterated and one-world rule established. I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years, and was permitted in the early 1960's to examine its papers and secret records. … I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known.
-- Carroll Quigley (False)		 
The powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent meetings and conferences. The apex of the systems was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world's central banks which were themselves private corporations. Each central bank...sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world.
-- Carroll Quigley		 
I am now quite sure that 'Tragedy and Hope' was suppressed although I do not know why or by whom.
-- Carroll Quigley		 
For the first time in its history, Western Civilization is in danger of being destroyed internally by a corrupt, criminal ruling cabal which is centered around the Rockefeller interests, which include elements from the Morgan, Brown, Rothschild, Du Pont, Harriman, Kuhn-Loeb, and other groupings as well. This junta took control of the political, financial, and cultural life of America in the first two decades of the twentieth century.
-- Carroll Quigley (False)		 
Under God we are determined that, wheresoever, whensoever, or howsoever, we shall be called upon to make our exit, we will die freemen.
-- Josiah Quincy, Jr.		 
Blandishments will not fascinate us, nor will threats of a "halter" intimidate. For, under God, we are determined that wheresoever, whensoever, or howsoever we shall be called to make our exit, we will die free men.
-- Josiah Quincy, Jr.		 
Lawyers [are] operators of the toll bridge across which anyone in search of justice has to pass.
-- Jane Bryant Quinn		 
Those who wish to appear wise among fools, among the wise seem foolish.
-- Marcus Fabius Quintilianus		 
Sanity may be madness but the maddest of all is to see life as it is and not as it should be.
-- Don Quixote		 
Those who swallow down usury cannot arise except as one whom Satan has prostrated by his touch does rise. That is because they say, trading is only like usury; and Allah has allowed trading and forbidden usury. To whomsoever then the admonition has come from his Lord, then he desists, he shall have what is already passed, and his affairs are in the hands of Allah; and whoever returns to it - these are the inmates of the fire; they shall abide in it..."
-- Qur'an		 
Most new insights come only after a superabundant accumulation of facts have removed the blindness which prevented us from seeing what later comes to be regarded as obvious.
-- Isidor Issac Rabi		 
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.
-- Byron C. Radaker		 
To have freedom is only to have that which is absolutely necessary to enable us to be what we ought to be, and to possess what we ought to possess.
-- Ibn Rahel		 
[It is a basic principle of a tyrant] to unarm his people of weapons, money, and all means whereby they resist his power.
-- Sir Walter Raleigh		 
A man must first govern himself ere he is fit to govern a family; and his family ere he be fit to bear the government of the commonwealth.
-- Sir Walter Raleigh		 
Heresy hunters are intolerant not only of unorthodox ideas; worse than that, they are intolerant of ideas -- of any ideas which are really alive and not empty cocoons.
-- Philip Lee Ralph		 
Under fascism, citizens retain the responsibilities of owning property, without freedom to act and without any of the advantages of ownership. Under socialism, government officials acquire all the advantages of ownership, without any of the responsibilities, since they do not hold title to the property, but merely the right to use it -- at least until the next purge. In either case, the government officials hold the economic, political and legal power of life or death over the citizens.
-- Ayn Rand		 
The secret dread of modern intellectuals, liberals and conservatives alike, the unadmitted terror at the root of their anxiety, which all of their current irrationalities are intended to stave off and to disguise, is the unstated knowledge that Soviet Russia [was] the full, actual, literal, consistent embodiment of the morality of altruism, that Stalin did not corrupt a noble ideal, that this is the only way altruism has to be or can ever be practiced.
-- Ayn Rand		 
...there is no such entity as 'the public' - since the public is merely a number of individuals - the idea that 'the public interest' supersedes private interests and rights can have but one meaning: that the interests and rights of some individuals take precedence over the interests and rights of others.
-- Ayn Rand		 
[S]tatism is a system of institutionalized violence and perpetual civil war. It leaves men no choice but to fight to seize political power -- to rob or be robbed, to kill or be killed. ... Statism survives by looting; a free country survives by production.
-- Ayn Rand		 
The essential characteristic of socialism is the denial of individual property rights...
-- Ayn Rand		 
The secret dread of modern intellectuals, liberals and conservatives alike, the unadmitted terror at the root of their anxiety, which all of their current irrationalities are intended to stave off and to disguise, is the unstated knowledge that Soviet Russia is the full, actual, literal, consistent embodiment of the morality of altruism, that Stalin did not corrupt a noble ideal, that this is the only way altruism has to be or can ever be practiced.  If service and self-sacrifice are a moral ideal, and if the "selfishness" of human nature prevents men from leaping into sacrificial furnaces, there is no reason -- no reason that a mystic moralist could name -- why a dictator should not push them in at the point of bayonets -- for their own good, or the good of humanity, or the good of posterity, or the good of the latest bureaucrat's five-year plan.  There is no reason that they can name to oppose any atrocity.  The value of a man's life?  His right to exist?  His right to pursue his own happiness?  These are concepts that belong to individualism and capitalism -- to the antithesis of the altruist morality.
-- Ayn Rand		 
There is nothing to take a man's freedom away from him, save other men. To be free, a man must be free of his brothers.
-- Ayn Rand		 
Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.
-- Ayn Rand		 
When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears nor all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper which should have been gold, are a token of honor—your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money.
-- Ayn Rand		 
America's abundance was created not by public sacrifices to "the common good," but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America's industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance -- and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way.
-- Ayn Rand		 
Creation comes before distribution or there will be nothing to distribute. The need of the creator comes before the need of any possible beneficiary.
-- Ayn Rand		 
Do you think that we want those laws to be observed? We want them broken. There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power the government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, 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		 
When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion -- when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing -- when you see money flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors -- when you see that men get richer by graft and pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you -- when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice -- you may know that your society is doomed.
-- Ayn Rand		 
Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men’s protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked: "Account Overdrawn.
-- Ayn Rand		 
When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, 'Who is destroying the world?' You are.
-- Ayn Rand		 
I swear by my life, and love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
-- Ayn Rand		 
Today, when a concerted effort is made to obliterate this point, it cannot be repeated too often that the Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals -- that it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government -- that it is not a charter _for_ government power, but a charter of the citizen's protection _against_ the government.
-- Ayn Rand		 
The meaning ascribed in popular usage to the word 'selfishness' is not merely wrong: it represents a devastating intellectual 'package-deal,' which is responsible, more than any other single factor, for the arrested moral development of mankind.
-- Ayn Rand		 
The secret dread of modern intellectuals, liberals and conservatives alike, the unadmitted terror at the root of their anxiety, which all of their current irrationalities are intended to stave off and to disguise, is the unstated knowledge that Soviet Russia is the full, actual, literal, consistent embodiment of the morality of altruism, that Stalin did not corrupt a noble ideal, that this is the only way altruism has to be or can ever be practiced.  If service and self-sacrifice are a moral ideal, and if the "selfishness" of human nature prevents men from leaping into sacrificial furnaces, there is no reason -- no reason that a mystic moralist could name -- why a dictator should not push them in at the point of bayonets -- for their own good, or the good of humanity, or the good of posterity, or the good of the latest bureaucrat's five-year plan.  There is no reason that they can name to oppose any atrocity.  The value of a man's life?  His right to exist?  His right to pursue his own happiness?  These are concepts that belong to individualism and capitalism -- to the antithesis of the altruist morality.
-- Ayn Rand		 
Needless to say, under either system [socialism or fascism], the inequalities of income and standard of living are greater than anything possible under a free economy -- and a man’s position is determined, not by his productive ability and achievement, but by political pull and force. Under both systems, sacrifice is invoked as a magic, omnipotent solution in any crisis -- and “the public good” is the altar on which victims are immolated.
-- Ayn Rand		 
Collectivism holds that the individual has no rights, that his life and work belong to the group (to "society," to the tribe, the state, the nation) and that the group may sacrifice him at its own whim to its own interests.  The only way to implement a doctrine of that kind is by means of brute force -- and statism has always been the political corollary of collectivism.
-- Ayn Rand		 
Individualism regards man -- every man -- as an independent, sovereign entity who possesses an inalienable right to his own life, a right derived from his nature as a rational being.  Individualism holds that a civilized society, or any form of association, cooperation or peaceful co-existence among men, can be achieved only on the basis of the recognition of individual rights -- and that a group, as such, has no rights other than the individual rights of its members.
-- Ayn Rand		 
A society that robs an individual of the product of his effort, or enslaves him, or attempts to limit the freedom of his mind, or compels him to act against his own rational judgment ... is not, strictly speaking, a society, but a mob held together by institutionalized gang-rule.
-- Ayn Rand		 
There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, 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. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted and you create a nation of law-breakers -- and then you cash in on guilt. Now that’s the system.
-- Ayn Rand		 
Let anyone who believes that a high standard of living is the achievement of labor unions and government controls ask himself the following question: If one had a “time machine” and transported the united labor chieftains of America, plus three million government bureaucrats, back to the tenth century—would they be able to provide the medieval serf with electric light, refrigerators, automobiles, and television sets?
-- Ayn Rand		 
Collectivism is a doctrine that holds that the individual has no rights, and the ultimate standard of value is the group to which 'he belongs.' Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage—the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors. Racism claims that the content of a man’s mind (not his cognitive apparatus, but its content) is inherited; that a man’s convictions, values and character are determined before he is born, by physical factors beyond his control. This is the caveman’s version of the doctrine of innate ideas -- or of inherited knowledge -- which has been thoroughly refuted by philosophy and science. Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes. It is a barnyard or stock-farm version of collectivism, appropriate to a mentality that differentiates between various breeds of animals, but not between animals and men. Like every form of determinism, racism invalidates the specific attribute which distinguishes man from all other living species: his rational faculty. Racism negates two aspects of man’s life: reason and choice, or mind and morality, replacing them with chemical predestination.
-- Ayn Rand		 
Let me explain this.  There are, fundamentally, only two causes of the progress of the nineteenth century -- the same two causes which you will find at the root of any happy, benevolent, progressive era in human history.  One cause is psychological, the other existential -- or: one pertains to man's consciousness, the other to the physical conditions of his existence.  The first is reason, the second is freedom.  And when I say "freedom," I do not mean poetic sloppiness, such as "freedom from want" or "freedom from fear" or "freedom from the necessity of earning a living."  I mean "freedom from compulsion -- freedom from rule by physical force."  Which means: political freedom.
-- Ayn Rand		 
Whoever claims the right to redistribute the wealth produced by others is claiming the right to treat human beings as chattel.
-- Ayn Rand		 
When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion - when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you - when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - you may know that your society is doomed.
-- Ayn Rand		 
Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns—or dollars. Take your choice -- there is no other -- and your time is running out.
-- Ayn Rand		 
It is a policeman’s duty to protect men from criminals -- criminals being those who seize wealth by force. It is a policeman’s duty to retrieve stolen property and return it to its owners. But when robbery becomes the purpose of the law, and the policeman’s duty becomes, not the protection, but the plunder of property -- then it is an outlaw who has to become a policeman.
-- Ayn Rand		 
Make no mistake about it -- and tell it to your Republican friends: capitalism and altruism cannot coexist in the same man or in the same society.  Tell it to anyone who attempts to justify capitalism on the ground of the "public good" or the "general welfare" or "service to society" or the benefit it brings to the poor.  All these things are true, but they are the by-products, the secondary consequences of capitalism -- not its goal, purpose or moral justification.  The moral justification of capitalism is man's right to exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself; it is the recognition that man -- every man -- is an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others, not a sacrificial animal serving anyone's need.
-- Ayn Rand		 
The difference between [socialism and fascism] is superficial and purely formal, but it is significant psychologically: it brings the authoritarian nature of a planned economy crudely into the open. The main characteristic of socialism (and of communism) is public ownership of the means of production, and, therefore, the abolition of private property. The right to property is the right of use and disposal. Under fascism, men retain the semblance or pretense of private property, but the government holds total power over its use and disposal.
-- Ayn Rand		 
It is futile to fight against, if one does not know what one is fighting for.
-- Ayn Rand		 
In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.
-- Ayn Rand		 
It is a matter of record that in the German Election of 1933, the Communist Party was ordered by its leaders to vote for the Nazis - with the explanation that they could later fight the Nazis for power, but first they had to help destroy their common enemy: capitalism and its parliamentary form of government.
-- Ayn Rand		 
The secret dread of modern intellectuals, liberals and conservatives alike, the unadmitted terror at the root of their anxiety, which all of their current irrationalities are intended to stave off and to disguise, is the unstated knowledge that Soviet Russia [was] the full, actual, literal, consistent embodiment of the morality of altruism, that Stalin did not corrupt a noble ideal, [but that his use of brutality was] the only way altruism has to be or can ever be practiced.
-- Ayn Rand		 
Let me explain this.  There are, fundamentally, only two causes of the progress of the nineteenth century -- the same two causes which you will find at the root of any happy, benevolent, progressive era in human history.  One cause is psychological, the other existential -- or: one pertains to man's consciousness, the other to the physical conditions of his existence.  The first is reason, the second is freedom.  And when I say "freedom," I do not mean poetic sloppiness, such as "freedom from want" or "freedom from fear" or "freedom from the necessity of earning a living."  I mean "freedom from compulsion -- freedom from rule by physical force."  Which means: political freedom.
-- Ayn Rand		 
Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgement and nothing can help you escape it -- that no substitute can do your thinking, as no pinch-hitter can live your life.
-- Ayn Rand		 
Make no mistake about it -- and tell it to your Republican friends: capitalism and altruism cannot coexist in the same man or in the same society. Tell it to anyone who attempts to justify capitalism on the ground of the "public good" or the "general welfare" or "service to society" or the benefit it brings to the poor.  All these things are true, but they are the by-products, the secondary consequences of capitalism -- not its goal, purpose or moral justification.  The moral justification of capitalism is man's right to exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself; it is the recognition that man -- every man -- is an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others, not a sacrificial animal serving anyone's need.
-- Ayn Rand		 
The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence. A proper government is only a policeman, acting as an agent of man's self-defense, and, as such, may only resort to force only against those who start the use of force.
-- Ayn Rand		 
The difference between a welfare state and a totalitarian state is a matter of time.
-- Ayn Rand		 
Do not lose your knowledge that man's proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind, and a step that travels unlimited roads.
-- Ayn Rand		 
Government control of the economy, no matter in whose behalf, has been the source of all the evils in our industrial society -– and the solution is laissez-faire capitalism, i.e., the abolition of any and all forms of intervention in production and trade, the separation of State and Economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of Church and State.
-- Ayn Rand		 
The power of morality is the greatest of all intellectual powers -– and mankind’s tragedy lies in the fact that the vicious moral code men have accepted destroys them by means of the best within them.
-- Ayn Rand		 
We [entrepreneurs] required that you leave us free to function -- free to think and work as we choose ... -- free to earn our own profits and make our own fortunes ... Such was the price we asked, which you chose to reject as too high.
-- Ayn Rand		 
The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow.
-- Ayn Rand		 
There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, 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		 
We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.
-- Ayn Rand		 
There are only two means by which men can deal with one another: guns or logic. Force or persuasion. Those who know that they cannot win by means of logic, have always resorted to guns.
-- Ayn Rand		 
Do you wish to know when that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by Compulsion -- when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing -- when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors -- when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you -- when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming self-sacrifice -- you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.
-- Ayn Rand		 
Inflation is not caused by the actions of private citizens, but by the government: by an artificial expansion of the money supply required to support deficit spending. No private embezzlers or bank robbers in history have ever plundered people’s savings on a scale comparable to the plunder perpetrated by the fiscal policies of statist governments.
-- Ayn Rand		 
It was not the tycoons of big business, it was not the working classes, it was the intellectuals who reversed the trend toward political freedom and revived the doctrines of the absolute State, of totalitarian government rule, of the government's right to control the lives of the citizens in any manner it pleases.  This time, it was not in the name of the "divine right of kings," but in the name of the divine right of the masses.  The basic principle was the same: the right to enforce at the point of a gun the moral doctrines of whoever happens to seize control of the machinery of government.
-- Ayn Rand		 
If an uncompromising stand is to be smeared as 'extremism,' then that smear is directed at any devotion to values, any loyalty  to principles, any profound conviction, any consistency, any steadfastness, any passion, any dedication to an unbreached, inviolate truth -- any man of integrity.
-- Ayn Rand		 
I refuse to apologize for my ability -- I refuse to apologize for my success -- I refuse to apologize for my money. If this is evil, make the most of it.
-- Ayn Rand		 
The three values which men held for centuries and which have now collapsed are: mysticism, collectivism, altruism. Mysticism -- as a cultural power -- died at the time of the Renaissance. Collectivism -- as a political ideal -- died in World War II. As to altruism -- it has never been alive. It is the poison of death in the blood of Western civilization, and men survived it only to the extent to which they neither believed nor practiced it. ...
-- Ayn Rand		 
Every government interference in the economy consists of giving an unearned benefit, extorted by force, to some men at the expense of others.
-- Ayn Rand		 
Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive.
-- Ayn Rand		 
The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights, cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities.
-- Ayn Rand		 
The man who produces while others dispose of his product, is a slave.
-- Ayn Rand		 
It’s the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money -- and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it. Let me give you a tip on a clue to men’s characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it. Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter.
-- Ayn Rand		 
There can be no compromise on basic principles. There can be no compromise on moral issues. There can be no compromise on matters of knowledge, of truth, of rational conviction.
-- Ayn Rand		 
...and we must consider," Austen Heller was saying unemotionally, "that since--unfortunately--we are forced to live together, the most important thing for us to remember is that the only way in which we can have any law at all is to have as little of it as possible. I see no ethical standard to which to measure the whole unethical conception of a State, except in the amount of time, of thought, of money, of effort and of obedience, which a society extorts from its every member. Its value and its civilization are in inverse ratio to that extortion. There is no conceivable law by which a man can be forced to work on any terms except those he chooses to set. There is no conceivable law to prevent him from setting them--just as there is none to force his employer to accept them. The freedom to agree or disagree is the foundation of our kind of society--and the freedom to strike is a part of it. I am mentioning this as a reminder to a certain Petronius from Hell’s Kitchen, an exquisite bastard who has been rather noisy lately about telling us that this strike represents a destruction of law and order.
-- Ayn Rand		 
So long as [men] hold the tribal notion that the individual is sacrificial fodder for the collective, that some men have the right to rule others by force, and that some (any) alleged 'good' can justify it -- there can be no peace within a nation and no peace among nations.
-- Ayn Rand		 
Economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value; political power exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction. The businessman's tool is values; the bureucrat's  tool is fear.
-- Ayn Rand		 
Any group or “collective,” large or small, is only a number of individuals. A group can have no rights other than the rights of its individual members. In a free society, the “rights” of any group are derived from the rights of its members through their voluntary individual choice and contractual agreement, and are merely the application of these individual rights to a specific undertaking... A group, as such, has no rights.
-- Ayn Rand		 
The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.
-- Ayn Rand		 
Volumes can be and have been written about the issue of freedom versus dictatorship, but, in essence, it comes down to a single question: do you consider it moral to treat men as sacrificial animals and to rule them by physical force?
-- Ayn Rand		 
My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.
-- Ayn Rand		 
The goal of the “liberals”—as it emerges from the record of the past decades—was to smuggle the country into welfare statism by means of single, concrete, specific measures, enlarging the power of the government a step at a time. Never permitting their direction to be summed up into principles, never permitting their direction to be identified or the basic issue to be named. Thus, statism was to come, not by vote or by violence, but by slow rot—by a long process of evasion and epistemological corruption, leading to a fait accompli. (The goal of the “conservative” was only to retard that process.)
-- Ayn Rand		 
One can ignore reality, but one cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.
-- Ayn Rand		 
Don't forget that pure democracy is a form of collectivism -- it readily sacrifices individual rights to majority wishes. Since it involves no constitutional bill of rights, or at least, no working and effective one, the majority-of-the-moment can and does vote away the rights of the minority-of-the-moment, even of a single individual.  This has been called 'mob rule,' the 'tyranny of the majority' and many other pejorative names.  It is one of the greatest threats to liberty, the reason why America's founding fathers wrote so much so disparagingly of pure democracy.
-- Bert Rand		 
Anyone who confuses liberty lovers with nazis or other fascists is waaaayy too stupid (or evil) to deserve respect.
-- Bert Rand		 
Take a look at how the multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical companies have totally snookered the politically-correct media and liberal establishments into fighting a 'War on Smoking' for them. After all, absolutely none of their anxiety drugs can quell anxiety or panic attacks anywhere near as cheaply, quickly or thoroughly as a cigarette can.
-- Bert Rand		 
Any person or any so-called 'political spectrum' that equates live-and-let-livers with control freaks is even more evil than the worst control freaks themselves.
-- Bert Rand		 
A people who mean to continue free must be prepared to meet danger in person; not rely upon the fallacious protection of mercenary armies.
-- Edmund Randolph		 
The general object was to produce a cure for the evils under which the United States labored; that in tracing these evils to their origins, every man had found it in the turbulence and follies of democracy.
-- Edmund Randolph		 
The surest way to prevent war is not to fear it.
-- John Randolph		 
We all know our duty better than we discharge it.
-- John Randolph		 
You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.
-- Jeannette Rankin		 
The United Nations is the greatest fraud in all History. Its purpose is to destroy the United States.
-- John E. Rankin		 
We have plenty of freedom in this country but not a great deal of independence.
-- John W. Raper		 
Socialism is: \\ The taking of money (taxes) from some people who work for it and giving it to others who don't work for it. On a grand scale. \\ The vast expansion of freebies doled out by central government. In order to create and sustain dependence. \\ The government protection of favored persons and corporations, permitting them and aiding them to expand their fortunes without limit, regardless of what crimes they commit in the process. (Monsanto would be a fine example.) \\ The squeezing out of those who would compete with the favored persons and corporations. \\ The dictatorship by and for the very wealthy, pretending to be the servant of the masses. \\ The lie that the dictatorship is being run by the masses. \\ The gradual lowering of the standard of living for the overwhelming number of people. \\ The propaganda claiming socialism is the path to a better world for all. \\ \\ In other words, socialism is a protection racket and a long con and a heartless system of elite control, posing as the greatest good. It is just another form of top-down tyranny---as old as the hills.
-- Jon Rappoport		 
From the moment the first leader of the first clan in human history took charge, he busied himself with this question: 'What can I say and do that will make my people react the way I want them to.' He was the first Pavlov. He was the first psychologist, the first propagandist, the first mind-control boss. His was the first little empire. Since then, only the means and methods have changed.
-- Jon Rappoport		 
War, what is it good for? With the same "socialist" elites backing both sides, it's good for business. It's good for creating chaos and destruction. It's good for launching new global organizations, in the aftermath; organizations that exert a level of control and reach that didn't exist before. It's good for launching organizations like the United Nations and the European Union and the World Trade Organization---dedicated to Globalism, which in turn is dedicated to planned civilization, in which the individual is demeaned and the group is All. Freedom is demeaned; and dominance by the few over the many is hailed as peace in our time.
-- Jon Rappoport		 
Under the surface of this global civilization, a great and secret war is taking place. The two opponents hold different conceptions of Reality. On one side, those who claim that humans operate purely on the basis of stimulus-response, like machines; on the other side, those who believe there is a gigantic thing called freedom. Phase One of the war is already over. The stimulus-response people have won. In Phase Two, people are waking up to the far-reaching and devastating consequences of the Pavlovian program.
-- Jon Rappoport		 
There is an irreducible thing. It's called freedom. It is native to every individual. Sometimes it rears its head in the middle of the night, and the dreamer awakes. And he asks himself: what is my freedom for? And then he begins a voyage that no device can record, measure, or analyze. If he pursues it long enough, it takes him out of the labyrinth.
-- Jon Rappoport		 
Think about the agendas behind universal vaccination, climate change, universal psychiatric treatment, GMO food, and other 'science-based' frauds. They all imply a false collectivist model, in which individuals give up their power in exchange for 'doing good' and becoming members of the largest group in the world: 'disabled' people with needs that must be addressed and satisfied. Instead of supporting the liberation of the individual, the controllers want to squash it. Why? Because they fear individual power. It is forever the unpredictable wild card. They want a society in which every thought an individual thinks connects him to a greater whole---and if that sounds attractive, understand that this Whole is a fiction, intentionally faked to resemble a genuine oceanic feeling.
-- Jon Rappoport		 
The Council on Foreign Relations is “the establishment.” Not only does it have influence and power in key decision-making positions at the highest levels of government to apply pressure from above, but it also announces and uses individuals and groups to bring pressure from below, to justify the high level decisions for converting the U.S. from a sovereign Constitutional Republic into a servile member state of a one-world dictatorship.
-- John Rarick		 
A liberal society stands on the proposition that we should all take seriously the idea that we might be wrong. This means we must place no one, including ourselves, beyond the reach of criticism (no final say); it means that we must allow people to err, even where the error offends and upsets, as it often will.
-- Jonathan Rauch		 
The prohibition is general. No clause in the Constitution could by any rule of construction be conceived to give congress a power to disarm the people. Such a flagitious attempt could only be made under some general pretense by a state legislature. But if in any blind pursuit of inordinate power, either should attempt it, this amendment may be appealed to as a restraint on both.
-- William Rawle		 
The only thing that permits us to acquiesce in an erroneous theory is the lack of a better one, analogously, an injustice is tolerable only when it is necessary to avoid an even greater injustice.
-- John Rawls		 
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word 'Nazi' is a German abbreviation for 'National Socialist' (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was 'The National Socialist German Workers' Party' (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei).
-- Dr. John Joseph Ray		 
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism.
-- Dr. John Joseph Ray		 
It is incorrect to think of liberty as synonymous with unrestrained action. Liberty does not and cannot include any action, regardless of sponsorship, which lessens the liberty of a single human being. To argue contrarily is to claim that liberty can be composed of liberty negations, patently absurd. Unrestraint carried to the point of impairing the liberty of others is the exercise of license, not liberty. To minimize the exercise of license is to maximize the area of liberty. Ideally, government would restrain license, not indulge in it; make it difficult, not easy; disgraceful, not popular. A government that does otherwise is licentious, not liberal.
-- Leonard E. Read		 
What, actually, is the difference between communism and fascism?  Both are forms of statism, authoritarianism.  The only difference between Stalin’s communism and Mussolini’s fascism is an insignificant detail in organizational structure.
-- Leonard E. Read		 
What, actually, is the difference between communism and fascism? Both are forms of statism, authoritarianism. The only difference between Stalin’s communism and Mussolini’s fascism is an insignificant detail in organizational structure.
-- Leonard E. Read		 
Oh, joy to the world! the hour is come,\\ When the nations to freedom awake,\\ When the royalists stand agape and dumb,\\ And monarchs with terror shake!\\ Over the walls of majesty\\ "Upharsin is writ in words of fire,\\ And the eyes of the bondsman, wherever they be\\ Are lit with wild desire.\\ Soon shall the thrones that blot the world,\\ Like the Orleans, into the dust be hurl'd,\\ And the word roll on like a hurricane's breath,\\ Till the farthest slave hears what it saith--\\ Arise, arise, be free!
-- Thomas Buchanan Read		 
What a state of society is this in which freethinker is a term of abuse, and in which doubt is regarded as sin?
-- William Winwood Reade		 
It was the Republican Party that demolished the shining city on the hill my father built. It was the Republican Party that was 100 percent responsible for the end of the Reagan Revolution...[T]he Republican Party abandoned the trail leading to that shining city on the hill to become itself a quasi-Left-wing organization which looks at the Democrats’ welfare programs and says ‘me too’.
-- Michael Reagan		 
Our natural, inalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation from government, and freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp as it is at this moment.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
There is no limit to what you can accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
Government is the people's business and every man, woman and child becomes a shareholder with the first penny of tax paid.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
Man is not free unless government is limited.... As government expands, liberty contracts.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
I hope we have once again reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There’s a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: as government expands, liberty contracts.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
Our coins bear the words 'In God We Trust'. We take the oath of office asking His help in keeping that oath. And we proclaim that we are a nation under God when we pledge allegiance to the flag. But we can't mention His name in a public school or even sing religious hymns that are nondenominational. Christmas can be celebrated in the school room with pine trees, tinsel and reindeers, but there must be no mention of the man whose birthday is being celebrated. One wonders how a teacher would answer if a student asked why it was called Christmas.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
Ours was the first revolution in the history of mankind that truly reversed the course of government, and with three little words: 'We the people.' 'We the people' tell the government what to do, it doesn't tell us. 'We the people' are the driver, the government is the car. And we decide where it should go, and by what route, and how fast. Almost all the world's constitutions are documents in which governments tell the people what their privileges are. Our Constitution is a document in which 'We the people' tell the government what it is allowed to do. 'We the people' are free. This belief has been the underlying basis for everything I've tried to do these past eight years.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
We developed at the local school district level probably the best public school system in the world. Or it was until the Federal government added Federal interference to Federal financial aid and eroded educational quality in the process.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
If history teaches us anything, it teaches that simple-minded appeasement or wishful thinking about our adversaries is folly.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
The NRA believes America's laws were made to be obeyed and that our Constitutional liberties are just as important today as 200 years ago. And by the way, the Constitution does not say Government shall decree the right to keep and bear arms. The Constitution says 'The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.'
-- Ronald Reagan		 
We need true tax reform that will at least make a start toward restoring for our children the American Dream that wealth is denied to no one, that each individual has the right to fly as high as his strength and ability will take him. . . . But we cannot have such reform while our tax policy is engineered by people who view the tax as a means of achieving changes in our social structure.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
Are you willing to spend time studying the issues, making yourself aware, and then conveying that information to family and friends? Will you resist the temptation to get a government handout for your community?
-- Ronald Reagan		 
Freedom is the recognition that no single person, no single authority or government has a monopoly on the truth, but that every individual life is infinitely precious, that every one of us put in this world has been put there for a reason and has something to offer. It´s so hard for government planners, no matter how sophisticated, to ever substitute for millions of individuals working night and day to make their dreams come true. The fact is, bureaucracies are a problem around the world.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
The taxpayer; that's someone who works for the federal government, but doesn´t have to take a civil service examination.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
An informed patriotism is what we want.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism. I think conservatism is really a misnomer just as liberalism is a misnomer for the liberals -- if we were back in the days of the Revolution, so-called conservatives today would be the Liberals and the liberals would be the Tories. The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom and this is a pretty general description also of what libertarianism is.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
Let the Fourth of July always be a reminder that here in this land, for the first time, it was decided that man is born with certain God-given rights; that government is only a convenience created and managed by the people, with no powers of its own except those voluntarily granted to it by the people. We sometimes forget that great truth, and we never should. Happy Fourth of July.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
We who live in free market societies believe that growth, prosperity and ultimately human fulfillment, are created from the bottom up, not the government down. Only when the human spirit is allowed to invent and create, only when individuals are given a personal stake in deciding economic policies and benefitting from their success -- only then can societies remain economically alive, dynamic, progressive, and free. Trust the people. This is the one irrefutable lesson of the entire postwar period contradicting the notion that rigid government controls are essential to economic development.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
How do you tell a Communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
I just wanted to speak to you about something from the Internal Revenue Code. It is the last sentence of section 509A of the code and it reads: 'For purposes of paragraph 3, an organization described in paragraph 2 shall be deemed to include an organization described in section 501C-4, 5, or 6, which would be described in paragraph 2 if it were an organization described in section 501C-3.' And that's just one sentence out of those fifty-seven feet of books.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
Public servants say, always with the best of intentions, 'What greater service we could render if only we had a little more money and a little more power.' But the truth is that outside of its legitimate function, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this earth!
-- Ronald Reagan		 
The years ahead will be great ones for our country, for the cause of freedom and the spread of civilization. The West will not contain Communism, it will transcend Communism. We will not bother to denounce it, we'll dismiss it as a sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
It is the Soviet Union that runs against the tide of history.... [It is] the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism- Leninism on the ash heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
Common sense told us that to preserve the peace, we'd have to become strong again after years of weakness and confusion. So, we rebuilt our defenses, and this New Year we toasted the new peacefulness around the globe. Not only have the superpowers actually begun to reduce their stockpiles of nuclear weapons...but the regional conflicts that rack the globe are also beginning to cease.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
In an ironic sense, Karl Marx was right. We are witnessing today a great revolutionary crisis -- a crisis where the demands of the economic order are colliding directly with those of the political order. But the crisis is happening not in the free, non-Marxist West, but in the home of Marxism-Leninism, the Soviet Union.... [Communism will be] left on the ash heap of history.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
As we celebrate Thanksgiving ... we should ask what we can do as individuals to demonstrate our gratitude to God for all He has done. Such reflection can only add to the significance of this precious day of remembrance. Let us recommit ourselves to that devotion to God and family that has played such an important role in making this a great Nation, and which will be needed as a source of strength if we are to remain a great people.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
Only when the human spirit is allowed to invent and create, only when individuals are given a personal stake in deciding economic policies and benefiting from their success -- only then can societies remain economically alive, dynamic, prosperous, progressive and free.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
Government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
Are you entitled to the fruits of your labor or does government have some presumptive right to spend and spend and spend?
-- Ronald Reagan		 
The best minds are not in government. If any were, business would hire them away.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
There are many well-meaning people today who work at placing an economic floor beneath all of us so that no one shall exist below a certain level or standard of living, and certainly we don't quarrel with this. But look more closely and you may find that all too often these well-meaning people are building a ceiling above which no one shall be permitted to climb and between the two are pressing us all into conformity, into a mold of standardized mediocrity.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
Our federal tax system is, in short, utterly impossible, utterly unjust and completely counterproductive, [it] reeks with injustice and is fundamentally un-American... it has earned a rebellion and it's time we rebelled.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down. Up to man's age-old dream -- the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order -- or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. Regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would sacrifice freedom for security have embarked on this downward path. Plutarch warned, 'The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits.'
-- Ronald Reagan		 
Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
Freedom is the right to question and change the established way of doing things. It is the continuous revolution of the marketplace. It is the understanding that allows us to recognize shortcomings and seek solutions.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
When you start talking about government as 'we' instead of 'they,' you have been in office too long.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
There are some who've forgotten why we have a military. It's not to promote war; it's to be prepared for peace.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
Have we the courage and the will to face up to the immorality and discrimination of the progressive tax, and demand a return to traditional proportionate taxation? ... Today in our country the tax collector's share is 37 cents of every dollar earned. Freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
Welfare's purpose should be to eliminate, as far as possible, the need for its own existence.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
Republicans believe the best way to assure prosperity is to generate more jobs. The Democrats believe in more welfare.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
Government does not tax to get the money it needs; government always finds a need for the money it gets.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
Extreme taxation, excessive controls, oppressive government competition with business, frustrated minorities and forgotten Americans are not the products of free enterprise. They are the residue of centralized bureaucracy, of government by a self-anointed elite.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!
-- Ronald Reagan		 
Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
One definition of an economist is somebody who sees something happen in practice and wonders if it will work in theory.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
Nations crumble from within when the citizenry asks of government those things which the citizenry might better provide for itself. ... [I] hope we have once again reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There's a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
I think the best possible social program is a job.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
No arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
It would seem that not only is religion lacking in the schools -- so is common sense. I wonder what a teacher is supposed to say if a kid asks about those four words on a dime -- 'In God We Trust.' Or maybe that's why they aren't being taught how to read these days.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
For too long, the world was paralyzed by the argument that terrorism could not be stopped until the grievances of terrorists were addressed. The complicated and heartrending issues that perplex mankind are no excuse for violent, inhumane attacks, nor do they excuse not taking aggressive action against those who deliberately slaughter innocent people.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
Tyranny, like fog in the well known poem, often creeps in silently 'on little cat feet.'
-- Ronald Reagan		 
The federal government has taken too much tax money from the people, too much authority from the states, and too much liberty with the Constitution.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
History teaches that wars begin when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it.  If it keeps moving, regulate it.  And if it stops moving, subsidize it.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
It is not my intention to do away with government. It is, rather, to make it work -- work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back. Government can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity, not stifle it. It is no coincidence that our present troubles parallel and are proportionate to the intervention and intrusion in our lives that result from unnecessary and excessive growth of government. ... We shall reflect the compassion that is so much a part of your makeup. How can we love our country and not love our countrymen, and loving them, not reach out a hand when they fall, heal them when they are sick, and provide opportunities to make them self-sufficient so they will be equal in fact and not just in theory? ... We are a nation under God, and I believe God intended for us to be free. It would be fitting and good, I think, if on each Inauguration Day in future years it should be declared a day of prayer.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.... We've been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. Well, if no one among us is capable of government himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else? All of us together, in and out of government, must bear the burden. The solutions we seek must be equitable, with no one group singled out to pay a higher price.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
In an atmosphere of liberty, artists and patrons are free to think the unthinkable and create the audacious; they are free to make both horrendous mistakes and glorious celebrations.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
There are no such things as limits to growth, because there are no limits on the human capacity for intelligence, imagination and wonder.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
I just wanted to speak to you about something from the Internal Revenue Code. It is the last sentence of section 509A of the code and it reads: 'For purposes of paragraph 3, an organization described in paragraph 2 shall be deemed to include an organization described in section 501C-4, 5, or 6, which would be described in paragraph 2 if it were an organization described in section 501C-3.' And that's just one sentence out of those fifty-seven feet of books.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
We've got to teach history based not on what's in fashion but what's important. If we forget what we did, we won't know who we are. I'm warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
I was pleased last year to proclaim 1983 the Year of the Bible. But, you know, a group called the A.C.L.U. severely criticized me for doing that. Well, I wear their indictment like a badge of honor.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
Former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart noted (in his dissent of Abington Township, 1963) ‘if religious exercises are held to be impermissible activity in schools, religion is placed at an artificial and state-created disadvantage. Permission for such exercises for those who want them is necessary if the schools are truly to be neutral in the matter of religion. And a refusal to permit them is seen not as the realization of state neutrality, but rather as the establishment of a religion of secularism.'
-- Ronald Reagan		 
We even had to pass a special law in the Congress just a few weeks ago to allow student prayer groups the same access to school rooms after classes that a Young Marxist Society … would already enjoy.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
Well-meaning Americans in the name of freedom have taken freedom away. For the sake of religious tolerance, they’ve forbidden religious practice.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
As we struggle to teach our children … we dare not forget that our civilization was built by men and women who placed their faith in a loving God. If Congress can begin each day with a moment of prayer … so then can our sons and daughters.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
The classical Liberal, during the Revolutionary time, was a man who wanted less power for the king and more power for the people. He wanted people to have more say in the running of their lives and he wanted protection for the God-given rights of the people. He did not believe those rights were dispensations granted by the king to the people, he believed that he was born with them. Well, that today is the Conservative.
-- Ronald Reagan		 
If what we read today can result in a subpoena or a search warrant tomorrow, fear replaces freedom. We presented three witnesses who said there would, in fact, be a chilling effect if the Tattered Cover was forced to turn over the information.
-- Dan Recht		 
Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear.
-- Ambrose Redmoon		 
[S]ince 1933 those in control of the Government, realizing that the power to tax is the power to destroy, have appeared before the Committee on Ways and Means with the proposal to tax firearms. While they narrowed it down to machine guns on the ground that it would prevent bandits from using firearms of a certain size, yet the thought was there of getting control of the private firearms of this country. I know that our chairman of the Ways and Means Committee and others on that committee were on the alert, sensed the danger, and accordingly went no further than partial taxation and regulation, but I think every member of the committee saw the purpose and the motive of the proposed tax.
-- Daniel A. Reed		 
It constantly amazes me that defenders of the free market are expected to offer certainty and perfection while government has only to make promises and express good intentions. Many times, for instance, I’ve heard people say, "A free market in education is a bad idea because some child somewhere might fall through the cracks," even though in today’s government school, millions of children are falling through the cracks every day.
-- Dr. Lawrence W. Reed		 
When the socialist economies of Eastern Europe disintegrated, the cause was evident to nearly everyone: the stifling directives of central planning had all but obliterated individual initiative and accountability. The cure was just as obvious: a healthy dose of entrepreneurship and private enterprise.
-- Dr. Lawrence W. Reed		 
After the 16th Amendment was ratified, an income tax was imposed starting in 1913 with rates ranging from 1 percent to 7 percent with the top rate applying only to incomes in excess of $500,000. By 1916 that top rate had risen to 15 percent, on income in excess of $2,000,000. The top rate exceeded 90 percent at its peak in the early 1950s. The first 1040 form -- instructions and all -- took up only four pages. Today there are some 4,000 pages of tax forms and instructions. American workers and business are forced to spend more than 5.4 billion man-hours every year figuring out their taxes. Since those hours could be put to a more productive use, and almost surely would be in the absence of today’s incomprehensible tax code, the result is a large dead-weight output loss of some $200 billion each year. ... The IRS now has more enforcement personnel than the EPA, BATF, OSHA, FDA, and DEA combined. With its 115,000-man workforce, it has the power to search the property and financial documents of American citizens without a search warrant and to seize property from American citizens without a trial. It routinely does both. Economist James L. Payne has written a most revealing analysis of the IRS, a 1993 book entitled Costly Returns. He arrives at a stunning conclusion, the total cost to collect our federal taxes, including the effects on the economy as a whole adds up to an amazing 65 percent of all the tax dollars received annually. The U.S. tax system, says Payne, has produced hundreds of thousands of victims of erroneous IRS penalties, liens, levies, and tax advice. In answering taxpayer questions, for example, the IRS telephone information service has in previous years given about one-third of all callers -- as many as 8.5 million Americans -- the wrong answers to their questions. A 1987 General Accounting Office study found that 47 percent of a random sample of IRS correspondence -- including demands for payments -- contained errors. Incredibly a GAO audit of the IRS in 1993 found widespread evidence of financial malfeasance and gross negligence at the agency. The IRS could not account for 64 percent of its congressional appropriation!
-- Dr. Lawrence W. Reed		 
Federal regulations alone are estimated to cost Americans more than $600 billion yearly. We pay government in lives shortened or lost because of delays in new drug approvals. Because of a raft of restrictive barriers to enterprise, we pay for government in terms of businesses stymied or never started and jobs never created. A government education monopoly that often fails to educate exacts a terrible price by stunting careers and squandering immense human potential. One cost of government that can’t be reckoned in dollars and cents -- a diminution of the individual’s basic freedom to act and speak on his own -- has been deemed important enough to spark a revolution from time to time.
-- Dr. Lawrence W. Reed		 
The nation relies upon public discussion as one of the indispensable means to attain correct solutions to problems of social welfare. Curtailment of free speech limits this open discussion. Our whole history teaches that adjustment of social relations through reason is possible when free speech is maintained.
-- Stanley Forman Reed		 
One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in this world are to be cured by legislation.
-- Thomas B. Reed		 
The value of paper money is precisely the value of a politician's promise, as high or low as you put that; the value of gold is protected by the inability of politicians to manufacture it.
-- Sir William Rees-Mogg		 
It is both illogical and inconsistent for a government to say people have a right to life and a right to self-defense but no right to own the tools necessary to defend their lives. It is illogical for a government that says its police have no obligation to provide individual protection to deny people the means to protect themselves. It is immoral for a government that repeatedly releases predators to prey on people to tell those victims they cannot have a weapon for self-defense. It’s stupid for a government that can’t control criminals, drugs or illegal immigrants to claim it can take guns away from criminals only if honest folks will give up theirs. Gun-control proposals are also an insult. Gun control by definition affects only honest people. When a politician tells you he wants to forbid you from owning a firearm or force you to get a license, he is telling you he doesn’t trust you. That’s an insult. The government trusted me with a M-48 tank and assorted small arms when it claimed to have need of my services. It trusts common Americans with all kinds of arms when it wants them to go kill foreigners somewhere—usually for the financial benefit of some corporations. But when the men and women take off their uniforms and return to their homes and assume responsibility for their own and their families’ safety, suddenly the politicians don’t trust them to own a gun. This is pure elitism. . . . Gun control is not about guns or crime. It is about an elite that fears and despises the common people.
-- Charley Reese		 
Washington, of course, aside from being one of the most mismanaged, crime-ridden cities on the planet, is a place where 535 federal legislators and about 38,000 lobbyists work at confiscating and redistributing the incomes of the American people.
-- Charley Reese		 
Congress is extraordinarily reluctant to inject itself into foreign policy. It has dumped entirely its constitutional duty for money onto a central bank, and for trade, onto the executive branch. It seems to never know what the CIA and other intelligence agencies are doing. Like the Romans, they no longer talk of the republic or liberty. And like the Romans, the American people, or most of them anyway, don’t seem to care. ... Like the Romans, we no longer have a citizen army but professional legions, and whether they wear jackboots or not, some federal officers seem to regard Americans with about the same compassion as the Praetorian Guard had for the plebes. As in Rome, the air is full of suspicion, intrigues and conspiracies, real or imagined, and the air reeks of greed and opportunism. As those on the Tiber, the rulers on the Potomac have grown suspicious of the people, don’t trust them and, in some cases fear them. And, as in Rome, they grovel in luxury while taking 40 cents on the dollar out of the sweat of working people to pay for corn and circuses to keep the mob satisfied.
-- Charley Reese		 
Powers once assumed are never relinquished, just as bureaucracies, once created, never die.
-- Charley Reese		 
Some lawyers and judges may have forgotten it, but the purpose of the court system is to produce justice, not slavish obedience to the law.
-- Charley Reese		 
If Americans wish to preserve a country they will recognize, then the first step is to recognize the enemy. Public education is the enemy. The entertainment industry is the enemy. The corporate culture is the enemy. The advertising industry is the enemy. And most of the politicians in both parties are the enemy. An enemy is defined as anybody, or any organization, which is attacking the traditional beliefs of Americans.
-- Charley Reese		 
American tyranny has come gradually, like a slowly rising river. Each of us does not realize the danger until the water comes in our door. Until then, it is merely someone else's problem and a problem that we fool ourselves into thinking won't reach us.
-- Charley Reese		 
[N]o American should retreat an inch on the right of jurors to acquit if they perceive the law or its administration to be unjust.
-- Charley Reese		 
If you look at Washington, you see permanently camped on the banks of the Potomac spread around in concentric circles an army representing thousands of selfish interests. The sole purpose of their presence is to plunder, by hook or crook, the public treasury for the benefit of their particular people or corporations.
-- Charley Reese		 
Unless they can pass the same test that immigrants must pass to become citizens, people shouldn't be allowed to vote. The idea that there is some public benefit in ignoramuses and morons pulling levers next to names on a ballot is one of the evil myths of post-modern America. The purpose of voting, in our country, is to select men and women with the competence and integrity to operate the mechanics of government fixed by our Constitution. For this process to have any public benefit requires that the choices be made on an intelligent, knowledgeable and reasoned basis.
-- Charley Reese		 
If we could manage our own finances the way the Congress does the nation’s, we’d all be living in high cotton and eating high on the hog.
-- Charley Reese		 
The Constitution requires that Congress treat similarly situated persons similarly, not that it engages in gestures of superficial equality.
-- William H. Rehnquist		 
We start with first principles. The Constitution creates a Federal Government of enumerated powers.
-- William H. Rehnquist		 
The dirty little secret is that both houses of Congress are irrelevant. ... America's domestic policy is now being run by Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve, and America's foreign policy is now being run by the International Monetary Fund [IMF]. ...when the president decides to go to war, he no longer needs a declaration of war from Congress.
-- Robert Reich		 
Restraint of government is the true liberty and freedom of the people.
-- John P. Reid		 
For the average family, all these taxes now eat 38 percent of gross income, a higher rate of taxation than ever before in the peacetime history of the United States. By comparison, the typical two-income family in the mid-1950s paid 28 percent of their income for taxes. We’re now at the absurd point where the typical family works until noon of every working day to satisfy the taxman, paying more in taxes than they spend for food, clothing and housing combined.
-- Ralph Reiland		 
It ain’t over on April 15! If you stop, for example, for a $10 pizza on Thursday night to celebrate being done with the IRS for another year, the taxman will be right there to grab a slice or two. On top of paying the sales tax, you’ll also be picking up a major chunk of what the government charges the pizza shop owner for local property taxes, unemployment insurance taxes, federal payroll taxes, federal and state and local income taxes, and worker’s compensation taxes. Altogether, according to a study by the Americans for Tax Reform, that comes to $3.80 on a $10 pizza for the omnipresent taxman. If you pick up a Bud six-pack to go with the pizza, there’s another 43 cents of each beer dollar that goes straight to the taxman for excise taxes, income taxes, property taxes, etc. For something stronger, say Jack Daniels, the taxman’s share is $7.20, on average, out of every $10. Go lighter and just drink Pepsi and it’s 35 percent of what you pay that goes for taxes at all levels. Add some Marlboros and its 75 percent of the retail price that’s funneled directly into the state’s coffers. Get home and hit the light switch and another $26 out of every $100 on the electric bill goes for government rather than electricity. If you’re flying the next day, the taxman is up early and waiting at the aiport, pocketing $40 on every $100 airline ticket. And he’s there in the hotel lobby when you land, snatching $43 on every $100 of the hotel bill. Go out to dinner and it’s another $28 of every $100 of the tab that ends up with the government rather than with the restaurant, the farmers, truckers and everyone else who worked together to produce the meal.
-- Ralph Reiland		 
At the start of this nation’s unique experiment with individual sovereignty and limited government, “Taxation without representation is tyranny” was the watchword of the American Revolution. For our Founding Fathers, a level of taxation of only a few cents on a dollar, siphoned off to a faraway and arrogant bureaucracy, was enough to ignite a revolution enough to grab the trusty musket off the wall. Today, in contrast, if we dare to startle the more panicky among us by buying a good rabbit gun, the government’s there at the cash register to check our papers and seize $46 on every $100.
-- Ralph Reiland		 
At each and every stop, in items large and small, the greedy hand of government has its sticky fingers in every pocket. With bread, a recent study by Price Waterhouse shows that 30 different taxes imposed on the production and sale of a loaf of bread account for 27 percent of the average retail price. Buy some new tires and it’s $36 on every $100 that goes to the taxman. On the price of a new car, an Americans for Tax Reform study shows that the total taxes reach 45 percent of the showroom sticker price. Add some gas and 54 percent of what you pay for a fill-up goes for 43 different federal, state and local taxes rather than to the oil producer and retailer.
-- Ralph Reiland		 
The idea that men are created free and equal is both true and misleading: men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other.
-- David Reisman		 
Aside from the collective gain that comes from that free interchange of ideas, there is a direct personal value for the individual concerned. Each of us should have the right to speak his thoughts and to hear the thoughts of others…
-- Charles Rembar		 
To be able to think freely, a man must be certain that no consequence will follow whatever he writes.
-- Ernest Renan		 
The only man who is really free is the one who can turn down an invitation to dinner without giving any excuse.
-- Jules Renard		 
In all men is evil sleeping; the good man is he who will not awaken it, in himself or in other men.
-- Mary Renault		 
Waiting periods are only a step. Registration is only a step. The prohibition of private firearms is the goal.
-- Janet Reno		 
Gun registration is not enough.
-- Janet Reno		 
The conclusion is thus inescapable that the history, concept, and wording of the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, as well as its interpretation by every major commentator and court in the first half-century after its ratification, indicates that what is protected is an individual right of a private citizen to own and carry firearms in a peaceful manner.
-- Report of the Subcommittee on the Constitution of the Committee on the Judiciary		 
Anyone who decries a State flag belittles himself before all civilized citizens, and commits an unlawful act. But one who decries the red flag ... thereby excludes himself from the community of all honest people.
-- Resolution of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party		 
A government is the only vessel known to leak from the top.
-- James Reston		 
The rising power of the United States in world affairs ... requires, not a more compliant press, but a relentless barrage of facts and criticism ... Our job in this age, as I see it, is not to serve as cheerleaders for our side ... but to help the largest possible number of people to see the realities.
-- James Reston		 
A human group transforms itself into a crowd when it suddenly responds to a suggestion rather than to reasoning, to an image rather than to an idea, to an affirmation rather than to proof, to the repetition of a phrase rather than to arguments, to prestige rather than to competence.
-- Jean-Francois Revel		 
Democracy tends to ignore, even deny, threats to its existence because it loathes doing what is needed to counter them. It awakens only when the danger becomes deadly, imminent, evident. By then, either there is too little time left for it to save itself, or the price of survival has become crushingly high.
-- Jean-Francois Revel		 
A human group transforms itself into a crowd when it suddenly responds to a suggestion rather than to reasoning, to an image rather than to an idea, to an affirmation rather than to proof, to the repetition of a phrase rather than to arguments, to prestige rather than to competence.
-- Jean-Francois Revel		 
To totalitarianism, an opponent is by definition subversive; democracy treats subversives as mere opponents for fear of betraying its principles.
-- Jean-Francois Revel		 
As the interned American citizens of Japanese descent learned, the Bill of Rights provided them with little protection when it was needed.
-- Glenn Harlan Reynolds		 
[T]he people as ultimate sovereigns, retain the ultimate power -- and even the duty -- to overthrow any government that fails to respect their authority.
-- Glenn Harlan Reynolds		 
A 'well regulated militia' was thus one that was well-trained and equipped, not one that was 'well-regulated' in the modern sense of being subjected to numerous government prohibitions and restrictions.
-- Glenn Harlan Reynolds		 
The purpose of the right to bear arms is twofold; to allow individuals to protect themselves and their families, and to ensure a body of armed citizenry from which a militia could be drawn, whether that militia’s role was to protect the nation, or to protect the people from a tyrannical government.
-- Glenn Harlan Reynolds		 
In the early and mid-1970’s, public advice was to cooperate with robbers and rapists in order to minimize personal injury. Appeasement, in other words. While this may be good advice in some circumstances, as general behavior it makes crime more rewarding. A nation of sheep is nice for wolves.
-- Morgan Reynolds		 
The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
-- Rhode Island Constitution		 
The constitution which at any time exists, till changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole people, is sacredly obligatory upon all.
-- Rhode Island Declaration of Rights Article I, Section I		 
We must find new lands from which we can easily obtain raw materials and at the same time exploit the cheap slave labor that is available from the natives of the colonies. The colonies would also provide a dumping ground for the surplus goods produced in our factories.
-- Cecil Rhodes		 
Why should we not form a secret society with but one object, the furtherance of the British Empire and the bringing of the whole world under British rule, for the recovery of the United States, for making the Anglo-Saxon race but one Empire?
-- Cecil Rhodes		 
Africa is still lying ready for us. It is our duty to take it.
-- Cecil Rhodes		 
We need a common enemy to unite us.
-- Condoleezza Rice		 
Separation of powers is a problem for foreign policy.
-- Condoleezza Rice		 
But, clearly, the prime minister has laid down some ground rules which any functioning democratic state would insist upon, having to do with, you know, arms belonging to the state, not to -- not in private hands. The current circumstances come out of what I think is a very important and indeed appropriate action that the Iraqi government has taken.
-- Condoleezza Rice		 
Lying is done with words and also with silence.
-- Adrienne Rich		 
I've never had a problem with drugs.  I've had problems with the police.
-- Keith Richards		 
When a legislature decides to steal some of our rights and plans to use police force to accomplish it, what's the real difference between them and the thief? Darn little! They hide behind the excuse that they're legislating democratically. The fact they do it by a majority vote has no moral significance whatsoever. Numerical might does not constitute right, no more than a lynch mob can justify its act because a majority participated.
-- H. L. Richardson		 
For the human mind is seldom at stay: If you do not grow better, you will most undoubtedly grow worse.
-- Samuel Richardson		 
If you give me six lines written by the most honest man, I will find something in them to hang him.
-- Cardinal Richelieu		 
Among other grand achievements, F. A. Hayek had a remarkable career pointing out the flaws in collectivism.  One of his keenest insights was that, paradoxically, any collectivist system necessarily depends on one individual (or small group) to make key social and economic decisions. In contrast, a system based on individualism takes advantage of the aggregate, or 'collective,' information of the whole society; through his actions each participant contributes his own particular, if incomplete, knowledge—information that could never be tapped by the individual at the head of a collectivist state.
-- Sheldon Richman		 
Apologists for activist government never tire of telling us that the benevolent state is our protector and that without it we'd be at the mercy of monsters. It is about time that we understood that the U.S. government does more to endanger the American people than any imagined monsters around the world…by pursuing its Grand Foreign Policy of meddling anywhere and everywhere.
-- Sheldon Richman		 
Some conservatives are surprised to find people on the Left supporting the war in Afghanistan. It's not surprising at all…It is hard for the government to prosecute a war and not expand…Conservatives may think they can support war and oppose the expansion of the state, but that is like trying to square the circle. What makes them think they can contain the expansion?
-- Sheldon Richman		 
Today, the people who would use guns to violate rights have little trouble getting them, while those who would use them to defend their rights have increasing trouble getting them. ... Gun control is in effect a subsidy for criminals.
-- Sheldon Richman		 
It is embarrassing to have to remind people of this in the United States of America. In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson singled out three natural rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The last phrase, appearing instead of "property," has prompted much discussion. I cannot say what Jefferson was thinking. But here's a plausible theory: Property is already implicit in liberty. If you are free, you can use your belongings as you see fit. But by specifying the pursuit of happiness Jefferson might have been pointing out that the blessing of liberty need not be justified through selfless service to others. One's life and happiness on earth are justification enough.
-- Sheldon Richman		 
Perhaps the deterioration of American education is illustrated by the high correlation between the number of years a person has attended school and his inability to understand the words "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." It is more likely, though, that those who interpret the Second Amendment to preclude an individual right to own guns are driven by their political agenda. Whichever the case, they do themselves no credit when they tell us that a simple, elegant sentence means the opposite of what it clearly says.
-- Sheldon Richman		 
If you own your life, then you have the right to defend yourself against anyone who would deprive you of it. ... And, if you have the right of self-defense, it follows that you have the right to act ... to obtain means appropriate to that defense. That brings us to firearms, particularly the handgun, which so many people would outlaw. The handgun has been called the equalizer ..., and for good reason. It affords smaller, weaker people the chance to defend themselves against bigger, stronger people who threaten them. Handguns offer the otherwise defenseless a convenient, practical, inexpensive method of safeguarding themselves and their families. Banishing handguns -- even if the big and strong were also denied them -- would leave the small and the weak defenseless.
-- Sheldon Richman		 
The media, far from being a conspiracy to dull the political sense of the people, could be viewed as a conspiracy to disguise the extent of political indifference.
-- David Riesman		 
Economic necessity cannot justify a disregard of cardinal constitutional guarantee.
-- Riley v. Carter		 
The man who lives under the servitude of laws takes, without being aware of it, the soul of a slave.
-- Georges Ripert		 
Confronted with such a tight regulation, can man pretend to be free because the tyranny he is subjected to derives from the law? Of course, the legal power is not called "tyranny" since it appears to be established by the general will in the common interest, and since, in any event, occurrences of arbitrary power are infrequent. But a master's equity does not mean that his subjects are not slaves. ... And when their servitude lasts and their thoughts follow their behavior, the state becomes totalitarian and subjection is complete. Since it is legal servitude, the regime is still said to be democratic. Such is the hypocrisy of political language.
-- Georges Ripert		 
We continue to claim that nobody is supposed to ignore the law. But we must give some credit to those who know it.
-- Georges Ripert		 
The history of war is the history of powerful individuals willing to sacrifice thousands upon thousands of other people’s lives for personal gains.
-- Michael Rivero		 
Most people prefer to believe that their leaders are just and fair, even in the face of evidence to the contrary, because once a citizen acknowledges that the government under which he lives is lying and corrupt, the citizen has to choose what he or she will do about it. To take action in the face of corrupt government entails risks of harm to life and loved ones. To choose to do nothing is to surrender one's self-image of standing for principles. Most people do not have the courage to face that choice. Hence, most propaganda is not designed to fool the critical thinker but only to give moral cowards an excuse not to think at all.
-- Michael Rivero		 
Most people prefer to believe their leaders are just and fair even in the face of evidence to the contrary, because once a citizen acknowledges that the government under which they live is lying and corrupt, the citizen has to choose what he or she will do about it. To take action in the face of a corrupt government entails risks of harm to life and loved ones. To choose to do nothing is to surrender one’s self-image of standing for principles. Most people do not have the courage to face that choice. Hence, most propaganda is not designed to fool the critical thinker but only to give moral cowards an excuse not to think at all.
-- Michael Rivero		 
One of the greatest problems that we as a free people face today is that for the past 100 years trial judges in the U.S. have routinely misinformed jurors that they were bound to accept the judge’s opinion of what the law is; which law to apply; and whether or not they had to find a defendant guilty. In so doing these judges have welded shut this all important safety valve, which our Founders so wisely provided our society -- and the result has been an explosive one.
-- Mike Robbins		 
Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business.
-- Tom Robbins		 
Politics is for people who have a passion for changing life but lack a passion for living it.
-- Tom Robbins		 
Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of liberty.
-- Henry Martyn Robert		 
The tax that was supposed to soak the rich has instead soaked America. The beneficiary of the income tax has not been the poor, but big government. The income tax has given us a government bureaucracy that outnumbers the manufacturing work force. It has created welfare dependencies that have entrapped millions of Americans in an underclass that is forced to live a sordid existence of trading votes for government handouts.
-- Paul Craig Roberts		 
If liberals can seize our guns because they are dangerous, we have no chance of holding on to our cars and our homes. The total number of accidental fatalities (the majority of which are hunting accidents) of all types of firearms is infinitesimal compared to the number of fatalities from car and home accidents. More children die from playing with cigarette lighters than from playing with loaded guns.
-- Paul Craig Roberts		 
I don’t know why liberals want to disarm the law-abiding population, but I do know that not a single argument proffered stands the light of facts. Armed citizens deter far more crimes than the police, and far more lives are saved by the intended victim being armed than are lost in firearm accidents.
-- Paul Craig Roberts		 
In U.S. politics, 'compassion' means giving money and privileges to well organized interest groups at everyone else's expense.
-- Paul Craig Roberts		 
BATF is a bureaucracy that has outlived its mission. Prohibitionist ended a half century ago. Eliot Ness is no longer needed to chase down gangsters and their untaxed profits from bootlegging. Today no one smuggles tobacco. Treasury agents no longer have anything to do but harass innocent gun owners. The committee [Senate Judiciary Committee] concluded that BATF was a rogue operation that trampled all over the Second, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments. Following the congressional hearings, the Treasury Department was so embarrassed by the documented abuses that it drew up plans to abolish the agency. However, it was unable to do so, because neither the customs Bureau nor the Secret Service would accept the transfer of discredited BATF agents into their organization.
-- Paul Craig Roberts		 
According to the Tax Foundation, the average American worker works 127 days of the year just to pay his taxes. That means that government owns 36 percent of the average American’s output—which is more than feudal serfs owed the robber barons. That 36 percent is more than the average American spends on food, clothing and housing. In other words, if it were not for taxes, the average American’s living standard would at least double.
-- Paul Craig Roberts		 
I spent three years getting my law degree at Yale Law School. From the moment I enrolled, I was assigned huge, leather-bound editions of legal cases to study and discuss. I read what lawyers and judges, professors and historians said about the Constitution. But never once was I assigned the task of reading the Constitution itself...Over the last decade, however, I have become a student of the Constitution, searching each line for its meaning and intent. Studying the Constitution is like studying the Bible. It is amazing how much more you will learn when you quit studying about it and pick it up to read it for yourself.
-- Pat Robertson		 
In 1883, a small group of Socialists met in London, announcing their intentions of converting the British economic system from capitalism to socialism. This group chose the name 'Fabian Society.' One of the leading members of the Fabian Society, author George Bernard Shaw, perhaps summed it up best when he said, quote: '... Socialism means equality of income or nothing... under socialism you would not be allowed to be poor. You would be forcibly fed, clothed, lodged, taught, and employed whether you like it or not. If it were discovered that you had not character enough to be worth all this trouble, you might possibly be executed in a kindly manner; but whilst you were permitted to live you would have to live well.'
-- Edgar Wallace Robinson		 
If the people will lead, eventually the leaders will follow.
-- Florence Robinson		 
Poltical campaigns are designedly made into emotional orgies which endeavor to distract attention from the real issues involved, and they actually paralyze what slight powers of cerebration (thinking) man can normally muster.
-- James Harvey Robinson		 
The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.
-- Joan Robinson		 
For liberalism, the individual is the end, and society the means. For fascism, society is the end, individuals the means, and its whole life consists in using individuals as instruments for its social ends.
-- Alfredo Rocco		 
Bilderberger Meeting: The world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government... (more)
-- David Rockefeller		 
This present window of opportunity, during which a truly peaceful and interdependent world order might be built, will not be open for too long. We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the New World Order.
-- David Rockefeller (False)		 
Everything is in place - after 500 years - to build a true 'new world' in the Western Hemisphere... And what happens if we don't pass NAFTA? I truly don't think that 'criminal' would be too strong a word for rejecting NAFTA.
-- David Rockefeller		 
My congratulations on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the October Revolution.
-- David Rockefeller		 
This present window of opportunity which during a truly peaceful and interdependent world order might be built will not be open for too long. Already there are powerful forces at work that threaten to destroy all of our hopes and efforts.
-- David Rockefeller		 
I believe in the dignity of labor, whether with head or hand; that the world owes no man a living but that it owes every man an opportunity to make a living.
-- John D. Rockefeller, Jr.		 
I believe that every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity, an obligation; every possession, a duty.
-- John D. Rockefeller, Jr.		 
The combination is here to stay. Individualism has gone, never to return.
-- John D. Rockefeller, Sr.		 
In our dreams, people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present education conventions of intellectual and character education fade from their minds, and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk.      We shall not try to make these people, or any of their children, into philosophers, or men of science. We have not to raise up from them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for great artists, painters, musicians nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen -- of whom we have an ample supply.      The task is simple. We will organize children and teach them in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.
-- John D. Rockefeller, Sr.		 
If something is wrong for you or me, it is also wrong for the cop, the soldier, the mayor, the governor, the general, the Fed chairman, the president. Theft does not become acceptable when they call it taxation, counterfeiting when they call it monetary policy, kidnapping when they call it the draft, mass murder when they call it foreign policy. We understand that it is never acceptable to wield violence nor the threat of violence against the innocent, whether by the mugger or the politician.
-- Lew Rockwell		 
Even though they are a relatively recent policy development, civil rights laws are considered necessary to insure rights for blacks. But they are, in fact, among the most draconian forms of intervention into the free market. They attack the essence of private property, the ability to exercise control over it. Such laws have resulted in lessened economic freedom, lowered prosperity, heightened social tension, and more trouble for the groups the laws are supposed to help. ... A Korean grocer may want to employ only Korean clerks, a magazine for black professionals only black editors and writers, and a German restaurant only German cooks and waiters. An employer may think that Iraqi-Americans have been unfairly treated and want to favor them. A women’s health club may want only women customer’s and a men’s bar may want only men. There is nothing wrong with any of these behaviors, although civil rights laws seek to end them. In addition to violating the free labor contract, civil rights laws guarantee everyone the right of “access” to “public accommodations” like restaurants, movie theaters, and shops. In fact, what the civil rights laws call public is really private. These businesses are established by private entrepreneurs with private money. The owners should no more be required to serve everyone who comes into their place than they are required to invite everyone to their home for dinner. A large downtown restaurant is as private as a small house in the country. The real difference between private and public is one of ownership, not function or location.
-- Lew Rockwell		 
American money was never more sound, or banking more free, than 200 years ago. Since then, it’s been a long steady decline from the gold standard and competitive banking to our Fed-run system of inflated paper currency, deposit insurance, and perpetually shaky banks on the dole.
-- Lew Rockwell		 
Repeal the entire Banking Act of 1933, and Austrian School economists will cheer, especially if the current system were replaced by a 100%-reserve competitive banking with no central bank. That banking reform would give us a sound money system, meaning no more business cycle, bailouts, or inflation.
-- Lew Rockwell		 
Anything other than free enterprise always means a society of compulsion and lower living standards, and any form of socialism strictly enforced means dictatorship and the total state.  That this statement is still widely disputed only illustrates the degree to which malignant fantasy can capture the imagination of intellectuals.
-- Lew Rockwell		 
The only reason for a government service is precisely to provide financial support for an operation that is otherwise unsustainable, or else there would be no point in the government’s involvement at all.
-- Lew Rockwell		 
If you think you're too small to make a difference, you haven't been in bed with a mosquito.
-- Anita Roddick		 
You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it.
-- Dr. Adrian Rogers		 
I believe that the testing of the student's achievements in order to see if he meets some criterion held by the teacher, is directly contrary to the implications of therapy for significant learning.
-- Carl Rogers		 
The issues can be stated very briefly: Who will be controlled? Who will exercise control? What type of control will be exercised? Most important of all, toward what end or purpose, or in the pursuit of what value, will control be exercised?
-- Carl Rogers		 
Your mothers get mighty shocked at you girls nowadays, but in her day, her mother was just on the verge of sending her to reform school.
-- Will Rogers		 
We are always yapping about the 'Good Old Days' and how we look back and enjoy it, but I tell you there is a lot of hooey to it.   There is a whole lot of all our past lives that wasn't so hot.
-- Will Rogers		 
I see where they are going to be more strict with these robbers; when they catch 'em from now on, they're going to publish their names.
-- Will Rogers		 
It will take America fifteen years of steady taking care of our own business and letting everybody else's alone, to get us back to where everybody speaks to us again.
-- Will Rogers		 
Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there.
-- Will Rogers		 
An economist is a man that can tell you...what can happen under any given condition, and his guess is liable to be as good as anybody else's too.
-- Will Rogers		 
I bet after seeing us, George Washington would sue us for calling him 'father'.
-- Will Rogers		 
On account of us being a democracy and run by the people, we are the only people in the world that has to keep a government four years no matter what it does.
-- Will Rogers		 
All one has to do to get one's stuff in the Congressional Record is to find a stenographer that can stay awake long enough to take it down. Then you mark in the 'Applause' and 'Laughter' parts yourself.
-- Will Rogers		 
Those tax-exempt bonds were put in so that a town or a state or a government could sell more bonds than it ought to.
-- Will Rogers		 
The United States investigates everything -- usually after it's dead.
-- Will Rogers		 
We are sure living in a peculiar time. You get more for not working than you will for working, and more for not raising a hog than for raising it.
-- Will Rogers		 
This stuff they are talking here in Congress costs the people of the United States $44 a page. That's beside what it costs to ship it to the asylums where it's read.
-- Will Rogers		 
Hurray! Congress is to adjourn! Only four more days of Congressional burglary on the Treasury!
-- Will Rogers		 
I guess truth can hurt you worse in an election than about anything that can happen to you.
-- Will Rogers		 
If we have Senators and Congressmen there that can't protect themselves against the evil temptations of lobbyists, we don't need to change our lobbies, we need to change our representatives.
-- Will Rogers		 
A Country can get more real joy out of just Hollering for their Freedom than they can if they get it.
-- Will Rogers		 
There's no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you.
-- Will Rogers		 
I bet you, if I had met Trotsky, and had had a chat with him, I would have found him a very interesting and human fellow, for I have never yet met a man I didn't like.
-- Will Rogers		 
America has a very unique record. We never lost a war or won a conference...
-- Will Rogers		 
Ammunition beats persuasion when you are looking for freedom.
-- Will Rogers		 
There is two types of Larceny, Petty and Grand. They are supposed to be the same in the eyes of the law, but judges always put a little extra on you for Petty, which is kind of a fine for stupidness.
-- Will Rogers		 
Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there.
-- Will Rogers		 
Of course nothing is ever done about a [presidential] commission report, except, they say, once a man at the state prison for the criminally insane actually read one once clear through. Then he did something about it. He made a bonfire that lasted a week.
-- Will Rogers		 
Ohio claims they are due a president as they haven't had one since Taft. Look at the United States, they have not had one since Lincoln.
-- Will Rogers		 
We are the only nation in the world that waits till we get into a war before we start getting ready for it.
-- Will Rogers		 
If we ever pass out as a great nation we ought to put on our tombstone, 'America died from a delusion that she has moral leadership'.
-- Will Rogers		 
It sure did kick up some excitement in the Senate when one Senator called the other Senators 'sons of Wild jackasses.' Well, if you thought it made the Senators hot, you wait till you see what happens when the jackasses hear how they have been slandered.
-- Will Rogers		 
The short memories of the American voters is what keeps our politicians in office.
-- Will Rogers		 
I'm not a member of any organized political party. I'm a Democrat.
-- Will Rogers		 
Ancient Rome declined because it had a Senate, now what's going to happen to us with both a House and a Senate?
-- Will Rogers		 
A foreigner coming here and reading the Congressional Record would say that the President of the United States was elected solely for the purpose of giving Senators somebody to call a horse thief.
-- Will Rogers		 
Elections are a good deal like marriages, there's no accounting for anyone's taste. Every time we see a bridegroom we wonder why she ever picked him, and it's the same with Public Officials.
-- Will Rogers		 
Tomorrow is Labor Day, I suppose set by Act of Congress. Everything we do nowadays is either by, or against, Acts of Congress. How Congress knew anything about Labor is beyond us.
-- Will Rogers		 
Never blame a legislative body for not doing something. When they do nothing, that don't hurt anybody. When they do something is when they become dangerous.
-- Will Rogers		 
Liberty doesn't work as well in practice as it does in speeches.
-- Will Rogers		 
That's what a Congressman or a Senator is for -- to see that too much money don't accumulate in the national Treasury.
-- Will Rogers		 
Nothing makes a man, or a body of men, as mad as the truth. If there is no truth in it, they laugh it off.
-- Will Rogers		 
This thing about getting rid of a man in the Cabinet is all right, but there is one bad feature to it that few people realize. That is, that unfortunately every one of them is replaced by someone else. If it wasn't for that, this resignation business would be great.
-- Will Rogers		 
The difference between death and taxes is death doesn't get worse every time Congress meets.
-- Will Rogers		 
There is good news from Washington today. The Congress is deadlocked and can't act.
-- Will Rogers		 
Diplomats are just as essential in starting a war as soldiers are in finishing it.
-- Will Rogers		 
You shake a slogan at an American and it's just like showing a hungry dog a bone.
-- Will Rogers		 
If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.
-- Will Rogers		 
The minute you read something that you can't understand, you can almost be sure it was drawn up by a lawyer.
-- Will Rogers		 
Will somebody please tell me what they do with all the Vice-Presidents a bank has? Why the United States is the biggest business institution in the world, and they got only one Vice-President and nobody has ever found anything for him to do.
-- Will Rogers		 
You see, in Washington they have these bodies, Senate and the House of Representatives. That is for the convenience of the visitors. If there is nothing funny happening in one, there is sure to be in the other, and in case one body passes a good bill, why, the other can see it in time and kill it.
-- Will Rogers		 
I doubt if a charging elephant, or a rhino, is as determined or hard to check as a socially ambitious mother.
-- Will Rogers		 
Diplomacy is the art of saying nice doggy until you can find a rock.
-- Will Rogers		 
Don't let yesterday use up too much of today.
-- Will Rogers		 
You can have all the advanced war methods you want, but, after all, nobody has ever invented a war that you don't have to have somebody in the guise of soldiers to stop the bullets.
-- Will Rogers		 
On account of being a democracy and run by the people, we are the only nation in the world that has to keep a government four years, no matter what it does.
-- Will Rogers		 
Income taxes have made more liars out of the American people than golf.
-- Will Rogers		 
How is the government going to get the extra taxes? Out of the rich -- or just out of the poor, as usual?
-- Will Rogers		 
Instead of giving money to found colleges to promote learning, why don't they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as good as the Prohibition one did, why, in five years we would have the smartest race of people on earth!
-- Will Rogers		 
If we took Congress seriously, we would be worrying all the time.
-- Will Rogers		 
Farmers, get out your sense of humor! Congress meets to relieve you again next week.
-- Will Rogers		 
I don't make jokes -- I just watch the government and report the facts.
-- Will Rogers		 
Things in our country run in spite of the government, not by the aid of it.
-- Will Rogers		 
The more you read and observe about this Politics thing, you got to admit that each party is worse than the other. The one that's out always looks the best.
-- Will Rogers		 
One of these days they are going to remove so much of the 'hooey' and the thousands of things the schools have become clogged up with, and we will find that we can educate our broods for about one-tenth of the price and learn 'em something that they might accidentally use after they escape.
-- Will Rogers		 
Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.
-- Will Rogers		 
Fairness does not require the redistribution of wealth; it requires the creation of wealth, geared to an economy that can provide employment for everyone able and willing to work.
-- Felix Rohatyn		 
Since I am an immature and wicked man, war and unrest appeal to me more than good bourgeois order. Brutality is respected, the people need wholesome fear. They want to fear someone. They want someone to frighten them and make them shudderingly submissive.
-- Ernst Rohm		 
The relative openness or closedness of a mind cuts across specific content; that is, it is not restricted to any one particular ideology, or religion, or philosophy, or scientific viewpoint.
-- Milton Rokeach		 
O liberty! O liberty! What crimes are committed in thy name!
-- Madame Jeanne-Marie Roland		 
The test for whether one is living in a police state is that those who are charged with enforcing the law are allowed to break the laws with impunity.
-- Jon Roland		 
We make money the old fashioned way. We print it.
-- Art Rolnick		 
I am convinced that we can do to guns what we've done to drugs: create a multi-billion dollar underground market over which we have absolutely no control.
-- George L. Roman		 
Felix qui nihil debet. (Happy is he who owes nothing.)
-- Roman Proverb		 
Give me control over a man's economic actions, and hence over his means of survival, and except for a few occasional heroes, I'll promise to deliver to you men who think and write and behave as I want them to.
-- Benjamin A. Rooge		 
Anyone who knows history, particularly the history of Europe, will, I think, recognize that the domination of education or of government by any one particular religious faith is never a happy arrangement for the people.
-- Eleanor Roosevelt		 
We do not move forward by curtailing people’s liberty because we are afraid of what they may do or say.
-- Eleanor Roosevelt		 
Those of us who believe in the right of any human being to belong to whatever church he sees fit, and to worship God in his own way, cannot be accused of prejudice when we do not want to see public education connected with religious control of the schools, which are paid for by taxpayers' money.
-- Eleanor Roosevelt		 
Smearing good people like Lauchlin Currie [former administrative assistant to President Roosevelt], Alger Hiss and others is, I think, unforgiveable... Anyone knowing Mr. Currie or Mr. Hiss, who are the two people whom I happen to know fairly well, would not need any denial on their part to know they are not Communists. Their records prove it.
-- Eleanor Roosevelt		 
Spiritual leadership should remain spiritual leadership and the temporal power should not become too important in any church.
-- Eleanor Roosevelt		 
The things you refuse to meet today always come back at you later on, usually under circumstances which make the decision twice as difficult as it originally was.
-- Eleanor Roosevelt		 
It is not that you set the individual apart from society but that you recognize in any society that the individual must have rights that are guarded.
-- Eleanor Roosevelt		 
Are we going to take the hands of the federal government completely off any effort to adjust the growing of national crops, and go right straight back to the old principle that every farmer is a lord of his own farm and can do anything he wants, raise anything, any old time, in any quantity, and sell any time he wants?
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt		 
The creed of our democracy is that liberty is acquired and kept by men and women who are strong and self-reliant, and possessed of such wisdom as God gives mankind -- men and women who are just, and understanding, and generous to others -- men and women who are capable of disciplining themselves. For they are the rulers and they must rule themselves.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt		 
If the fires of freedom and civil liberties burn low in other lands, they must be made brighter in our own. If in other lands the press and books and literature of all kinds are censored, we must redouble our efforts here to keep them free. If in other lands the eternal truths of the past are threatened by intolerance, we must provide a safe place for their perception.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt		 
True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt		 
It is a good thing to demand liberty for ourselves and for those who agree with us, but it is a better thing and a rarer thing to give liberty to others who do not agree with us.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt		 
A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car, but if he has a university education he may steal the whole railroad.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt		 
[The commerce clause was written] in the horse-and-buggy age ... since that time … we have developed an entirely different philosophy. ... We are interdependent, we are tied in together. And the hope has been that we could, through a period of years, interpret the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution in the light of these new things that have come to the country. It has been our hope that under the interstate commerce clause we could recognize by legislation and by judicial decision that a harmful practice in one section of the country could be prevented on the theory that it was doing harm to another section of the country. That was why the Congress for a good many years, and most lawyers, have had the thought that in drafting legislation we could depend on an interpretation that would enlarge the constitutional meaning of interstate commerce to include not only those matters of direct interstate commerce, but also those matters which indirectly affect interstate commerce.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt		 
Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt		 
We, and all others who believe in freedom as deeply as we do, would rather die on our feet than live on our knees.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt		 
In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happened, you can bet it was planned that way.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt		 
I do not believe in communism any more than you do, but there is nothing wrong with the communists in this country. Several of the best friends I have are Communists.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt		 
We all know that books will burn -- yet we have the greater knowledge that books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory...
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt		 
I tell the American people solemnly that the United States will never survive as a happy and fertile oasis of liberty surrounded by a cruel desert of dictatorship.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt		 
The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the U.S. since the days of Andrew Jackson. History depicts Andrew Jackson as the last truly honorable and incorruptible American president.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt		 
The saving grace of America lies in the fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans are possessed of two great qualities -- a sense of humor and a sense of proportion.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt		 
The only sure bulwark of continuing liberty is a government strong enough to protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and well enough informed to maintain its sovereign control over the government.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt		 
I hope your committee will not permit doubts as to constitutionality, however reasonable, to block the suggested legislation.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt		 
Freedom to learn is the first necessity of guaranteeing that man himself shall be self-reliant enough to be free.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt		 
Knowledge -- that is, education in its true sense -- is our best protection against unreasoning prejudice and panic-making fear, whether engendered by special interest, illiberal minorities, or panic-stricken leaders.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt		 
The truth is found when men are free to pursue it.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt		 
I am much interested and deeply impressed by what he has accomplished and by his evidenced honest purpose of restoring Italy and seeking to prevent general European trouble.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt		 
All government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt		 
No people is wholly civilized where a distinction is drawn between stealing an office and stealing a purse.
-- Theodore Roosevelt		 
All constitutions, those of the States no less than that of the nation, are designed, and must be interpreted and administered so as to fit human rights.
-- Theodore Roosevelt		 
'Liar' is just as ugly a word as 'thief,' because it implies the presence of just as ugly a sin in one case as in the other. If a man lies under oath or procures the lie of another under oath, if he perjures himself or suborns perjury, he is guilty under the statute law.
-- Theodore Roosevelt		 
To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.
-- Theodore Roosevelt		 
The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living and the get-rich-quick theory of life.
-- Theodore Roosevelt		 
Free speech exercised both individually and through a free press, is a necessity in any country where people are themselves free.
-- Theodore Roosevelt		 
Wide differences of opinion in matters of religious, political and social belief must exist if conscience and intellect alike are not to be stunted.
-- Theodore Roosevelt		 
In life, as in a football game, the principle to follow is: Hit the line hard.
-- Theodore Roosevelt		 
To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.
-- Theodore Roosevelt		 
In strict confidence … I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one.
-- Theodore Roosevelt		 
Freedom is not a gift which can be enjoyed save by those shown themselves worthy of it.
-- Theodore Roosevelt		 
No man who is corrupt, no man who condones corruption in others, can possibly do his duty by the community.
-- Theodore Roosevelt		 
No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expediency.
-- Theodore Roosevelt		 
No triumph of peace can equal the armed triumph of war.
-- Theodore Roosevelt		 
To divide along the lines of section or caste or creed is un-American.
-- Theodore Roosevelt		 
All privileges based on wealth, and all emnity to honest men merely because they are wealthy, are un-American.
-- Theodore Roosevelt		 
Any man who tries to incite class hatred, sectional hate, hate of creeds, any kind of hatred in our community, though he may affect to do so in the interest of the class he is addressing, is in the long run with absolute certainty that class’s own worst enemy.
-- Theodore Roosevelt		 
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. ... Every man who parrots the cry of “stand by the President” without adding the proviso “so far as he serves the Republic” takes an attitude as essentially unmanly as that of any Stuart royalist who championed the doctrine that the King could do no wrong. No self-respecting and intelligent free man could take such an attitude.
-- Theodore Roosevelt		 
Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.
-- Theodore Roosevelt		 
If an American is to amount to anything he must rely upon himself, and not upon the State; he must take pride in his own work, instead of sitting idle to envy the luck of others. He must face life with resolute courage, win victory if he can, and accept defeat if he must, without seeking to place on his fellow man a responsibility which is not theirs.
-- Theodore Roosevelt		 
To educate a man in mind, and not in morals, is to educate a menace to society.
-- Theodore Roosevelt		 
When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer 'present' or 'not guilty.'
-- Theodore Roosevelt		 
We cannot afford to differ on the question of honesty if we expect our republic permanently to endure. Honesty is not so much a credit as an absolute prerequisite to efficient service to the public. Unless a man is honest, we have no right to keep him in public life; it matters not how brilliant his capacity.
-- Theodore Roosevelt		 
To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.
-- Theodore Roosevelt		 
There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism.
-- Theodore Roosevelt		 
To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.
-- Theodore Roosevelt		 
The one absolute certain way to bring this nation to ruin ... would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.
-- Theodore Roosevelt		 
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
-- Theodore Roosevelt		 
Nannyism is fascism on training wheels.
-- R. L. Root		 
Lottery tickets are the only consumer products actively promoted and sold by the state. The state does not sell toothpaste, or even promote brushing your teeth. But it tells people they should gamble. The main marketing concern is how to attract new players, who otherwise wouldn't gamble.
-- I. Nelson Rose		 
No man suffers injustice without learning, vaguely but surely, what justice is.
-- Isaac Rosenfeld		 
But it became clear as time went on that in Mr. Bush’s mind the New World Order was founded on a convergence of goals and interests between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, so strong and permanent that they would work as a team through the U.N. Security Council.
-- A. M. Rosenthal		 
During the last dozen years the tales of suppression of free assemblage, free press, and free speech, by local authorities or the State operating under martial law have been so numerous as to have become an old story. They are attacked at the instigation of an economically and socially powerful class, itself enjoying to the full the advantages of free communications, but bent on denying them to the class it holds within its power...
-- Edward Alsworth Ross		 
Although it had its share of strenuous Christians... the gathering at Philadelphia was largely made up of men in whom the old fires were under control or had even flickered out. Most were nominally members of one of the traditional churches in their part of the country.. and most were men who could take their religion or leave it alone. Although no one in this sober gathering would have dreamed of invoking the Goddess of Reason, neither would anyone have dared to proclaim his opinions had the support of the God of Abraham and Paul. The Convention of 1787 was highly rationalist and even secular in spirit.
-- Clinton Rossiter		 
The Americans of 1776 were among the first men in modern society to defend rather than to seek an open society and constitutional liberty.... Perhaps the most remarkable characteristic of this political theory sits in its deep-seated conservatism. However radical the principles of the Revolution may have seemed to the rest of the world, in the minds of the colonists they were thoroughly preservative and respectful of the past.
-- Clinton Lawrence Rossiter III		 
Based on strikingly irrational beliefs and emotions, modern liberals relentlessly undermine the most important principles on which our freedoms were founded. Like spoiled, angry children, they rebel against the normal responsibilities of adulthood and demand that a parental government meet their needs from cradle to grave.
-- Lyle H. Rossiter, Jr.		 
A social scientist who understands human nature will not dismiss the vital roles of free choice, voluntary cooperation and moral integrity -- as liberals do. A political leader who understands human nature will not ignore individual differences in talent, drive, personal appeal and work ethic, and then try to impose economic and social equality on the population -- as liberals do. And a legislator who understands human nature will not create an environment of rules which over-regulates and overtaxes the nation’s citizens, corrupts their character and reduces them to wards of the state -- as liberals do.
-- Lyle H. Rossiter, Jr.		 
The roots of liberalism – and its associated madness – can be clearly identified by understanding how children develop from infancy to adulthood and how distorted development produces the irrational beliefs of the liberal mind. When the modern liberal mind whines about imaginary victims, rages against imaginary villains and seeks above all else to run the lives of persons competent to run their own lives, the neurosis of the liberal mind becomes painfully obvious.
-- Lyle H. Rossiter, Jr.		 
There can be no truly moral choice unless that choice is made in freedom; similarly, there can be no really firmly grounded and consistent defense of freedom unless that defense is rooted in moral principle. In concentrating on the ends of choice, the conservative, by neglecting the conditions of choice, loses that very morality of conduct with which he is so concerned. And the libertarian, by concentrating only on the means, or conditions, of choice and ignoring the ends, throws away an essential moral defense of his own position.
-- Murray N. Rothbard		 
It is curious that people tend to regard government as a quasi-divine, selfless, Santa Claus organization. Government was constructed neither for ability nor for the exercise of loving care; government was built for the use of force and for necessarily demagogic appeals for votes. If individuals do not know their own interests in many cases, they are free to turn to private experts for guidance. It is absurd to say that they will be served better by a coercive, demagogic apparatus.
-- Murray N. Rothbard		 
We must, therefore, emphasize that 'we' are not the government; the government is not 'us.' The government does not in any accurate sense 'represent' the majority of the people.  But, even if it did, even if 70 percent of the people decided to murder the remaining 30 percent, this would still be murder and would not be voluntary suicide on the part of the slaughtered minority.  No organicist metaphor, no irrelevant bromide that 'we are all part of one another,' must be permitted to obscure this basic fact.
-- Murray N. Rothbard		 
It is also important for the State to inculcate in its subjects an aversion to any outcropping of what is now called 'a conspiracy theory of history.' For a search for 'conspiracies,' as misguided as the results often are, means a search for motives, and an attribution of individual responsibility for the historical misdeeds of ruling elites. If, however, any tyranny or venality, or aggressive war imposed by the State was brought about not by particular State rulers but by mysterious and arcane 'social forces,' or by the imperfect state of the world -- or if, in some way, everyone was guilty -- then there is no point in anyone's becoming indignant or rising up against such misdeeds. Furthermore, a discrediting of 'conspiracy theories' will make the subjects more likely to believe the 'general welfare' reasons that are invariably put forth by the modern State for engaging in aggressive actions.
-- Murray N. Rothbard		 
It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a 'dismal science.' But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.
-- Murray N. Rothbard		 
It is not the business of the law to make anyone good or reverent or moral or clean or upright.
-- Murray N. Rothbard		 
The great non sequitur committed by defenders of the State, including classical Aristotelian and Thomist philosophers, is to leap from the necessity of society to the necessity of the State.
-- Murray N. Rothbard		 
Since the State necessarily lives by the compulsory confiscation of private capital, and since its expansion necessarily involves ever-greater incursions on private individuals and private enterprise, we must assert that the state is profoundly and inherently anti-capitalist.
-- Murray N. Rothbard		 
It's ours to right the great wrong done,\\ Ten thousand years ago -- \\ The State, conceived in blood and hate, \\ Remains our only foe! \\ Oh, join us, brothers, join us, sisters,\\ Victory is nigh!\\ Come meet your fate, destroy the State,\\ And raise black banners high!
-- Murray N. Rothbard		 
Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes the laws.
-- Mayer Amschel Rothschild		 
Fortunately, political freedom and economic progress are natural partners.  Despite capitalism's lingering reputation as the source of all the world's evils, the fact remains that every single democracy is a capitalist country.  Half a century of economic experimentation proved beyond doubt that tyranny cannot yield prosperity. ... Socialism collapsed because it is a policy of unrestrained intervention.  It tries to fix what is 'wrong' with the spontaneous, self-organizaing phenomenon called capitalism.  But, of course, a natural process cannot be 'fixed.' ... Socialism is an ideology. Capitalism is a natural phenomenon.
-- Michael Rothschild		 
Either the application for renewal of the charter (for the First Bank of the United States) is granted, or the United States will find itself involved in a most disastrous war.
-- Baron Nathan Mayer Rothschild		 
I care not what puppet is placed on the throne of England to rule the Empire, ...The man that controls Britain's money supply controls the British Empire. And I control the money supply.
-- Baron Nathan Mayer Rothschild		 
Nature never deceives us; it is always we who deceive ourselves.
-- Jean-Jacques Rousseau		 
I prefer liberty with danger to peace with slavery.
-- Jean-Jacques Rousseau		 
The strongest is never strong enough to be always the master, unless he transforms his strength into right, and obedience into duty.
-- Jean-Jacques Rousseau		 
Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
-- Jean-Jacques Rousseau		 
There is no subjugation so perfect as that which keeps the appearance of freedom for in that way one captures volition itself.
-- Jean-Jacques Rousseau		 
The most absolute authority is that which penetrates into a man’s innermost being and concerns itself no less with his will than with his actions.
-- Jean-Jacques Rousseau		 
There is no subjugation so perfect as that which keeps the appearance of freedom for in that way one captures volition itself.
-- Jean-Jacques Rousseau		 
The problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before.
-- Jean-Jacques Rousseau		 
Liberty is not to be found in any form of government; she is in the heart of the free man; he bears her with him everywhere.
-- Jean-Jacques Rousseau		 
Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
-- Jean-Jacques Rousseau		 
The surest way to ruin a promising career in economics, whether professional or academic, is to venture into the 'cranks and crackpots' world of suggestions for reform of the financial system.
-- Michael Rowbotham		 
This assumption about religion being necessary for morality is recognized and used as a justification for religion. When atheists provide arguments showing that religious beliefs are incorrect and illogical, a frequent response is that religion is still good because it's needed for morality. The question of truth is dismissed as less important than the question of usefulness. If morality is a good thing, then atheist arguments fall on deaf ears. And more, the act of willfully ignoring evidence or argument is performed with a sense of moral pride. This position rests on the myth that morality requires religion, and that you have to accept religion despite any flaws or abandon morality. This justification of religion is just one more consequence of the myth.
-- Joseph Rowlands		 
Liberty is not a cruise ship full of pampered passengers. Liberty is a man-of-war, and we are all crew.
-- Kenneth W. Royce		 
In March, 1982, Kennesaw, Georgia, passed a mandatory gun ownership ordinance which requires all heads of households to own a firearm—handgun, rifle or shotgun. In 1982, our crime against persons, which include murder, rape, armed robbery, aggravated assault and residential burglary, decreased 74%. In 1983 these same crimes decreased [an additional] 46%. ... I would also like you to be aware that our population has increased in excess of 20% since 1982. We have had no accidents nor incidents involving our citizens with regards to firearms. ... It is a pleasure to see our senior citizens strolling the streets at night without fear of becoming a victim of violent crime.
-- Robert L. Ruble		 
The blame for [the national debt] lies with the Congress and the President, with Democrats and Republicans alike, most all of whom have been unwilling to make the hard choices or to explain to the American people that there is no such thing as a free lunch.
-- Warren Rudman		 
Ruff's Third Law of Economic Dynamics: "An economy in motion tends to stay in motion, and an economy at rest tends to stay at rest. A free market is constantly in motion. A centrally planned market slows until it eventually dies completely.
-- Mike Ruff		 
I never could believe that Providence had sent a few men into the world, ready booted and spurred to ride, and millions ready saddled and bridled to be ridden.
-- Richard Rumbold		 
Political scientists almost everywhere have promoted the expansion of government power. They have functioned as the clergy of oppression.
-- Rudolph J. Rummel		 
Nobody can be trusted with unlimited power. The more power a regime has, the more likely people will be killed. This is a major reason for promoting freedom.
-- Rudolph J. Rummel		 
The more power a government has, the more it can act arbitrarily according to the whims and desires of the elite and murder its foreign and domestic subjects. The more constrained the power of governments, the more power is diffused, checked and balanced, the less it will aggress on others and commit democide. ... In total, during the first eighty-eight years of this century, almost 170 million men, women, and children have been shot, beaten, tortured, knifed, burned, starved, frozen, crushed, or worked to death; buried alive, drowned, hung, bombed, or killed in any other of the myriad ways governments have inflicted death on unarmed, helpless citizens and foreigners. The dead could conceivably be nearly 360 million people. It is as though our species has been devastated by a modern Black Plague. And indeed it has, but a plague of Power, not of germs.
-- Rudolph J. Rummel		 
The way to virtually eliminate genocide and mass murder appears to be through restricting and checking power. This means to foster democratic freedom.
-- Rudolph J. Rummel		 
What will follow will not be a repeat of any other conflict. It will be of a force and scope and scale that has been beyond what has been seen before.
-- Donald Rumsfeld		 
Freedom can exist only in the society of knowledge. Without learning, men are incapable of knowing their rights
-- Dr. Benjamin Rush		 
Liberty without virtue would be no blessing to us.
-- Dr. Benjamin Rush		 
The only foundation for... a republic is to be laid in Religion. Without this there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object and life of all republican governments.
-- Dr. Benjamin Rush		 
Controversy is only dreaded by the advocates of error.
-- Dr. Benjamin Rush		 
Let our pupil be taught that he does not belong to himself, but that he is public property. Let him be taught to love his family, but let him be taught, at the same time, that he must forsake, and even forget them, when the welfare of his country requires it.
-- Dr. Benjamin Rush		 
Freedom of speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself. What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.
-- Salman Rushdie		 
Free societies…are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom’s existence.
-- Salman Rushdie		 
The worst, most insidious effect of censorship is that, in the end, it can deaden the imagination of the people. Where there is no debate, it is hard to go on remembering, every day, that there is a suppressed side to every argument.
-- Salman Rushdie		 
To make your children capable of honesty is the beginning of education.
-- John Ruskin		 
One evening, when I was yet in my nurse’s arms, I wanted to touch the tea urn, which was boiling merrily... My nurse would have taken me away from the urn, but my mother said 'Let him touch it.' So I touched it -- and that was my first lesson in the meaning of liberty.
-- John Ruskin		 
Let us reform our schools, and we shall find little reform needed in our prisons.
-- John Ruskin		 
Without seeking, truth cannot be known at all. It can neither be declared from pulpits, nor set down in articles, nor in any wise prepared and sold in packages ready for use. Truth must be ground for every man by itself out of it such, with such help as he can get, indeed, but not without stern labor of his own.
-- John Ruskin		 
Large fortunes are all founded either on the occupation of land, or lending or the taxation of labor.
-- John Ruskin		 
Wise laws and just restraints are to a noble nation not chains, but chains of mail, -- strength and defense, though something of an incumbrance.
-- John Ruskin		 
The highest reward for man’s toil is not what he gets for it, but what he becomes by it.
-- John Ruskin		 
There is no wealth but life.
-- John Ruskin		 
That treacherous phantom which men call Liberty.
-- John Ruskin		 
Dogma demands authority, rather than intelligent thought, as the source of opinion; it requires persecution of heretics and hostility to unbelievers; it asks of its disciples that they should inhibit natural kindness in favour of systematic hatred.
-- Bertrand Russell		 
Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.
-- Bertrand Russell		 
It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.
-- Bertrand Russell		 
The argument against the persecution of opinion does not depend upon what the excuse for persecution may be. The argument is that we none of us know all truth, that the discovery of new truth is promoted by free discussion and rendered very difficult by suppression.
-- Bertrand Russell		 
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.
-- Bertrand Russell		 
Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
-- Bertrand Russell		 
In all affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.
-- Bertrand Russell		 
What a man believes upon grossly insufficient evidence is an index into his desires -- desires of which he himself is often unconscious. If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way.
-- Bertrand Russell		 
I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is Mass Psychology. ...It's importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda ...Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated.
-- Bertrand Russell		 
To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.
-- Bertrand Russell		 
The essence of the liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held: instead of being viewed dogmatically, they are held tentatively, with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment.
-- Bertrand Russell		 
Heretical views arise when the truth is uncertain, and it is only when the truth is uncertain that censorship is invoked.
-- Bertrand Russell		 
It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions make it impossible to earn a living.
-- Bertrand Russell		 
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
-- Bertrand Russell		 
Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure.
-- Bertrand Russell		 
There is no nonsense so errant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action.
-- Bertrand Russell		 
Man has existed for about a million years. He has possessed writing for about 6,000 years, agriculture somewhat longer, but perhaps not much longer. Science, as a dominant factor in determining the belief of educated men, has existed for about 300 years; as a source of economic technique, for about 150 years. In this brief period it has proved itself an incredibly powerful revolutionary force. When we consider how recently it has risen to power, we find ourselves forced to believe that we are at the very beginning of its work in transforming human life.
-- Bertrand Russell		 
These men - ..., the politicians, ... - use their position, their knowledge, and their power of disseminating misinformation to arouse and stimulate the latent instinct for bloodshed. When they have succeeded, they say they are reluctantly forced to war by the pressure of public opinion.
-- Bertrand Russell		 
What's the difference between a bright, inquisitive five-year-old, and a dull, stupid nineteen-year-old? Fourteen years of the British educational system.
-- Bertrand Russell		 
When the state intervenes to insure the indoctrination of some doctrine, it does so because there is no conclusive evidence in favor of that doctrine.
-- Bertrand Russell		 
Freedom in general may be defined as the absence of obstacles to the realization of desires.
-- Bertrand Russell		 
Envy is the basis of Democracy.
-- Bertrand Russell		 
If we were all given by magic the power to read each other's thoughts, I suppose the first effect would be to dissolve all friendships.
-- Bertrand Russell		 
We may define a Puritan as a man who holds that certain kinds of acts, even if they have no visible bad effects upon others than the agent, are inherently sinful, and, being sinful, ought to be prevented by whatever means is most effectual - the criminal law if possible, and, if not that, then public opinion backed by economic pressure.
-- Bertrand Russell		 
The laws in question can, therefore, only be justified by the theory of vindictive punishment, which holds that certain sins, though they may not injure anyone except the sinner, are so heinous as to make it our duty to inflict pain upon the delinquent. This point of view, under the influence of Benthamism, lost its hold during the nineteenth century. But in recent years, with the general decay of Liberalism, it has regained lost ground, and has begun to threaten a new tyranny as oppressive as any in the Middle Ages.
-- Bertrand Russell		 
The practical objection to Puritanism, as to every form of fanaticism, is that it singles out certain evils as so much worse than others that they must be suppressed at all costs. The fanatic fails to recognise that the suppression of a real evil, if carried out too drastically, produces other evils which are even greater.
-- Bertrand Russell		 
Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power. Consequently those who live under the dominion of Puritanism become exceedingly desirous of power. Now love of power does far more harm than love of drink or any of the other vices against which Puritans protest. Of course, in virtuous people love of power camouflages itself as love of doing good, but this makes very little difference to its social effects. It merely means that we punish our victims for being wicked, instead of for being our enemies. In either case, tyranny and war result. Moral indignation is one of the most harmful forces in the modern world, the more so as it can always be diverted to sinister uses by those who control propaganda.
-- Bertrand Russell		 
The earth becomes more crowded, and our dependence upon our neighbours becomes more intimate. In these circumstances life cannot remain tolerable unless we learn to let each other alone in all matters that are not of immediate and obvious concern to the community. We must learn to respect each other's privacy, and not to impose our moral standards upon each other. The Puritan imagines that his moral standard is the moral standard; he does not realize that other ages and other countries, and even other groups in his own country, have moral standards different from his, to which they have as good a right as he has to his. Unfortunately, the love of power which is the natural outcome of Puritan self-denial makes the Puritan more executive than other people, and makes it difficult for others to resist him. Let us hope that a broader education and a wider knowledge of mankind may gradually weaken the ardour of our too virtuous masters.
-- Bertrand Russell		 
I pray that no child of mine would ever descend into such a place as a library. They are indeed most dangerous places and unfortunate is she or he who is lured into such a hellhole of enjoyment, stimulus, facts, passion and fun.
-- Willy Russell		 
With lies you may get ahead in the world - but you can never go back.
-- Russian proverb		 
Teachers are directed to instruct their pupils... and to awaken in them a sense of their responsibility toward the community of the nation.
-- Bernhard Rust		 
It is in the American interest to put an end to Nationhood. That is the goal in global government. America must get out of the United Nations or our sovereign Republic will not survive.
-- Walt Rustow		 
You just can't beat the person who never gives up.
-- Babe Ruth		 
It was not by accident or coincidence that the rights to freedom in speech and press were coupled in a single guaranty with the rights of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition for redress of grievances. All these, though not identical, are inseparable. They are cognate rights, and therefore are united in the first Article’s assurance.
-- Judge Wiley B. Rutledge		 
Individual rights must take a back-seat to the collective.
-- Harvey Ruvin		 
[T]he Swiss people are the best practitioners of the ideals of non-aggression. The Swiss national government posts are parttime positions. Most decisions are made at the canton (state) level. Swiss per capita income is the highest in the world, showing that non-aggression pays. How did the Swiss come to adopt a relatively non-aggressive constitution in an aggressive world? In the mid-1800s, they imitated our constitution and stuck with it!
-- Dr. Mary J. Ruwart		 
Using aggression to stop drug abuse kills more people than the drugs themselves! If we honored our neighbor’s choice, the people now enforcing the minimum wage and licensing laws would be available to go after the real criminals. In 1987, drug offenders made up 36% of the federal prison population. As the War on Drugs escalates, more of our law enforcement dollar will be spent on drug-related crimes and less on rapists, murderers, and thieves. Is this the best way to deal with the drug problem? ... People who drink an alcoholic beverage in the privacy of their own homes are not using first-strike force, theft, or fraud against anyone else. Nor is a person smoking a joint or snorting cocaine, under the same conditions, guilty of anything more sinister than trying to feel good. We see no contradiction in arresting the cocaine user while we enjoy our favorite cocktail. Are we once again sanctioning aggression-through-government in an attempt to control the lives of others? In the early 1900s, many people supported aggression through-government to stop the consumption of alcoholic beverages. As we all know, Prohibition was tried, but it just didn’t work. People still drank, but they had to settle for home-brews, which were not always safe. Some people even died from drinking them. Since business people could no longer sell alcohol, organized crime did. Turf battles killed innocent bystanders, and law enforcement officials found they could make more money taking bribes than jailing the bootleggers. Aggression was ineffective—and expensive, both in terms of dollars and lives. When Prohibition was repealed, people bought their alcohol from professional brewers instead of criminals. As a result, they stopped dying from bathtub gin. The turf fighting subsided, since there was no turf to fight about. The murder and assault rate that had skyrocketed during Prohibition fell steadily after its repeal.
-- Dr. Mary J. Ruwart		 


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The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
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