"Democracy is a form of worship. It is the worship of jackals by jackasses."
-- H.L. Mencken
In a famous incident in 1854, President Franklin
Pierce was pilloried for vetoing an extremely popular bill intended
to help mentally ill. The act was championed by the renowned 19th century
social reformer Dorothea Dix. In the face of heavy criticism, Pierce countered:
"I cannot find any authority in the Constitution for the public charity."
To approve such spending, argued Pierce, "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."
"Study the Constitution. Let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed
in legislatures, and enforced in courts of justice." -- Abraham Lincoln
"The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our
own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of
theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it." --John Stuart Mill
"Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws.
On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed
beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place." -- Frederic Bastiat
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can
only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse
from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for
the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with
the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always
followed by a dictatorship." -- Professor Alexander Tytler
over 200 years ago
"If Congress can determine what constitutes the general welfare and
can appropriate money for its advancement, where is the limitation to carrying
into execution whatever can be effected by money?" -- South Carolina Senator William
Draden 1828
"When men get in the habit of helping themselves to the property of
others, they cannot easily be cured of it." -- The New York Times,
in a 1909 editorial opposing the very first income tax
"For me to go into politics would be like sending a virgin into a house
of ill-repute." -- H.L. Mencken
"The State is great fiction by which everyone seeks to live at the
expense of everyone else." -- Frederic Bastiat
"Imagine, if you will, that I am an idiot.
Then, imagine that I am also a Congressman.
But, alas, I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
"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." --French socialist Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon, General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century,
trans. John Beverley Robinson (London: Freedom Press, 1923), p.294
"Classifications and distinctions based on race or color have no moral
or legal validity in our society. They are contrary to our constitution and
laws." -- Thurgood Marshall, 1947
"It is not the function of our Government to keep the citizen from
falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the Government
from falling into error." -- Robert Houghwout Jackson,
Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and Chief Judge at the War-Crimes
Tribunal in Nuremberg
"I would have government defend the life and property of all citizens
equally; protect all willing exchange; suppress and penalize all fraud, all
misrepresentation, all violence, all predatory practices; invoke a common
justice under law; and keep the records incidental to these functions. Even
this is a bigger assignment than governments, generally, have proven capable
of. Let governments do these things and do them well. Leave all else to men
in free and creative effort." -- Leonard E. Read, Freedom Daily, page 35, March 2001
"The moment a person forms a theory his imagination sees in every object
only the traits which favor that theory." -- Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to Charles Thompson, September
20, 1787 in The Works of Thomas Jefferson, edited Paul L. Ford, Volume
5, Page 352, New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1904
"Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts
it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each
man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common
but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality
in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude." -- Alexis de Tocqueville
"Of all tyrannies a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be
the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under
omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep,
his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our
own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their
own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time
likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable
insult. To be 'cured' against one's will and cured of states which we may
not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached
the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles,
and domestic animals. But to be punished, however severely, because we have
deserved it, because we 'ought to have known better,' is to be treated as
a human person made in God's image." -- C.S. Lewis